Wicked Prey

by John Sandford

  "I could float you a cheeseburger loan," Lucas offered.

  She stood up and dusted off the seat of her shorts: "I accept. I'm really starving. Who do you shoot for?"

  "BCA," he said, and she nodded, and Lucas asked, "Too quiet. I'd like to see a little life in the crowd."

  "Too hot," she said. Speaking as an old riot professional: "Basic rule of riots: you don't have riots when it's too hot. People get all pukey. Gotta wait until the evening, when things cool off. The best riots are when you have a long summer day, with a long evening where it cools off a little."

  "I don't know all that technical stuff," Lucas said with a smile.

  They stepped around legs and bikes and clumps of people with signs and got to a street grill-the woman and the kid were convenient cover-and he bought her a cheeseburger and fries and a Coke, and got a Diet Coke for himself, and twiddled his fingers at the baby, and then took the baby while the woman, whose name was Lucy, ate the cheeseburger and they walked back to the tent. The baby had quiet blue eyes, observant and contained, and seemed interested in Lucas's nose.

  A passing stoner, with a sun-bleached ponytail, hazy blue eyes, and a lute in his hand, looked at Lucy, and then Lucas and the baby, and said, "Got that May and December shit going, huh? Good one."

  Lucy said, "Well, the sex is terrific."

  Lucas said, "More like May and August."

  The stoner tapped Lucas on the chest and said, "Good one, man. I mean, you know? Keep it going, you know? Long as you can."

  "It's hard, man, you know, sometimes, with a woman like this," Lucas said. "They want too much, sometimes."

  The stoner bobbed his head: "I know that for sure, man. Life is hard, and then you fuckin', you know' die." Sobered by the thought, he wandered away.

  ***

  "We're gonna build a new egalitarian culture, man," Lucy said to Lucas, as she sat down on her blanket, chewing on the cheeseburger. "To each, according to his needs, from each, according to his ability. Which means that the insurance agents can keep on selling insurance for sixty hours a week and that stoner can keep getting wrecked every day."

  "Just a guy," Lucas said. "A lost soul."

  "I'm getting tired of it," Lucy said. She squinted up through the tree leaves, and the sun sliding down to the west. Equinox coming in three weeks, and then winter. "Think I'm going home to Massachusetts. Get my dad to send me to grad school."

  "Think he'll do it?"

  "My dad will do anything I want him to," she said. "Like you and your daughter."

  Lucas nodded. "Yeah ' What about your husband?"

  "Why wasn't he here to buy me a cheeseburger when I needed it?" she asked. She took a few fries. "Fuck the revolution."

  A group of ten protesters in black began a chant: "No War but the Class War! No War but the Class War!" and people in the park began drifting that way, and a couple of cops idled along with them.

  Lucas and Lucy chatted for a while-Lucy had been living in Iowa, where she and her husband were summer visitors at a drama commune, which gave revolutionary plays to local farm communities, and her husband was working on a screenplay-and then Lucas got up to leave. "Say hi when you see me around," he said.

  "Thanks for the food," she said. "I was starting to hurt."

  ***

  Back in the HomTel, Lindy screeched, in a high-climbing soprano, "Goddamnitttttt' Brutus…"

  Brutus had turned her every way but loose, faceup, facedown, upside down, and when he was all done, he lay sweating and naked and red on the bed, and said, worn out, "You really are the best piece of ass on the North American continent."

  "Not including Europe?" She was sitting on a towel, because she didn't want to leak on the bed. She must be in her mid-thirties, now, Cohn thought, and still had small curved breasts with pink nipples and freckles.

  "I don't know about Europe," Cohn said. "You hear stories about the French women. But hell, they're in France. It's like that song: "She ain't Rose, but Rose ain't here."

  Lindy pouted: "I'm better than anybody in France."

  "Probably," Cohn agreed. "I sorta haven't tested those waters."

  "Better not, either," she said.

  "You fuck anybody while I was gone?" he asked.

  "Well, sure, a couple," she said. "It was two years, Brute. What was I supposed to do, scratch?"

  "I hope to hell you didn't catch anything," he said.

  She slapped his leg: "I didn't. I'm careful. They were married men-I was saving my good stuff for you."

  "They pay you?"

  "They bought me some stuff," she admitted. "Expensive stuff?"

  "Well, Richard, there was this guy Richard Blanding in Birmingham, he paid my rent and bought me a car."

  "That's something," Cohn said.

  "A Pontiac Solstice. Bright yellow. Not exactly a Ferrari."

  Cohn closed his eyes and sighed, and sank into the softness of the memory foam, and let all his bones relax. She started to hum, like she did when she was getting bored. He thought, Fuck her.

  He'd lied to her about being the best piece of ass in North America. Lindy was a good old country girl, but more the Pontiac Solstice of pussy, rather than the Ferrari. Richard Blanding, whoever he was, had known precisely what he was getting.

  ***

  Lindy, for her part, humming, rubbing at the polish on her toenails, thinking that she needed another pedicure, took a long careful look at the naked man beside her. She'd met him when she was sixteen, and he was in his mid-twenties. He'd been a wild one, who liked it all: money, women, gambling, cocaine and reefer and Saturday night fights in the gravel parking lots outside country road-houses, with the frogs croaking from the roadside ditches and the fireflies blinking out over the farm fields.

  He'd grown up with a middle-class family, and if he'd done what they'd wanted him to do, he'd have gone to college and might have had his own construction business now, building out the suburbs of Atlanta or Birmingham. Might even be rich: but he wouldn't have had any fun.

  His fun-the women, gambling, cocaine and reefer-took cash money, and didn't leave much time for actual work. The solution to the problem was obvious: take the money from people who already had it. He did it for a few years, finally got caught and sent to prison, where he got his graduate education and had time to think it all over.

  He'd decided not to go straight, but simply to get better at his job. He had.

  That's when they met, Cohn flush after an armored car holdup, and now here they were, almost twenty years later, in another motel. Cohn's face had developed some harsh lines on both sides of his mouth-smile lines, but frown lines, too-and crow's feet at the corners of his eyes. His hair was still thick and curly, and he had the great teeth. Still thin and tough: but getting older. Gray in his chest hair '

  Getting older, like she was, she thought. Not many more years when she could count on being taken care of because she was nice to somebody '

  ***

  Cohn reached over and stroked her leg: "Can't tell you how much I like seeing you," he said.

  "Me too," she said.

  ***

  Randy Whitcomb had red hair precisely the same shade as Cohn's, but never had Cohn's potential. Whitcomb had been caught up in the early days of gangsta music, riveted to MTV when he should have been in school. Unlike most people, he believed the words. And though he lived in a ticky-tacky St. Paul white-bread suburb where the biggest public facility was a hockey arena, Whitcomb was naturally a gangsta, even with his bony white face and improbable thatch of hair. When he finally got kicked out of high school, he moved to north Minneapolis, a modest but occasionally violent black ghetto, where he picked up the language and sold dope on the street and eventually started running two or three whores that nobody else wanted.

  Those were the big days of the crack wars, when everybody was buying the stores out of baking soda and everybody was cooking up the crack in the kitchen, twelve-year-olds were walking the streets with nines and bad attitudes. The cops were going c
razy, and nobody really paid much attention to a small-time white guy living off marijuana and a short chain of low-rent women.

  But Whitcomb was living the gangsta life, with paisley shirts and wide-wale corduroy pants and green-dyed lizard-skin cowboy boots.

  Then one day he found out that one of his whores was talking to a cop about who was doing what, who was selling what, who might be getting what package from El Paso through UPS or FedEx, or what guy might be coming in from Chicago with a big suitcase, riding in on the "dog ' well, Whitcomb, with one too many gangsta musicals banging in his head, went for the pimp punishment: found her and cut her face up with a church key.

  The thing is, she'd been talking to Davenport.

  Davenport got him in the back of a bar and beat him like a big bass drum.

  Later Whitcomb had gotten accidentally involved with a guy who was a serial killer-really was an accident, in that street way, where all kinds of people bump into each other-had gotten involved in a shootout, and was left paralyzed from the waist down. That ended his sex life, but hadn't changed his head that much. Davenport had been responsible for the shootout, in Whitcomb's eyes; had been responsible for everything that had gone wrong in his life, including two stretches behind bars '

  He sat in the van and watched the cops and the protesters streaming up and down the hill, another guy in a wheelchair, one of those happy dildos you see around who don't even seem to realize how fucked-up they are, and he tracked Letty through the park, as she talked to a woman at a tent, and then to a tall guy who looked like Davenport, but didn't dress right, and then hooked up with two kids, boys, the kind whom Whitcomb hated, good-looking athletes who probably got good grades and had money and ate peanut butter sandwiches with Mom and Wally and the Beav '

  Briar sat behind the wheel, watching the crowd, until Whitcomb said, "There she goes. They're going someplace. Get going that way ' that way, dummy. Hurry…"

  ***

  Letty left Lucas in the park and went off with John and Jeff, taking the front passenger seat in John's car. John would have to concentrate on his driving-he'd only had his license for a month-and Jeff was safely stuffed in the back. No hands to deal with.

  She was going to have to start thinking about sex pretty soon, she knew, but now was too soon. When she really got back to school, maybe. A friend of hers, a month younger than she was, was already being thoroughly mauled by her boyfriend, bra up, pants down, and though there hadn't yet been any actual intercourse, that wasn't far off. She'd be giving it up during football season, unless something happened to the relationship, Letty thought. The girl was in love and that made it all a lot more complicated.

  Still, the whole thing made her uneasy. She'd get around to it, but' later. Not with John. He was too old, a senior. Jeff was in her grade, and had a shot, when he got rid of the braces. And she was still a little flat-chested. That bothered her a bit, that a boy might go in looking for a mountain and find a molehill.

  Weather had told her not to worry: "I know you can't not worry about it-but, don't worry about it. You're not the big-boobed kind, and believe me, that's better. The boys are going to like you fine. More than fine. You're going to have to fight them off with a baseball bat."

  Letty rode around with John and Jeff for a while, looking at the political freaks, and then John said, "You get any money off your old man?"

  "Yup. A twenty."

  "You gonna treat?"

  ***

  They went to the McDonald's on West Seventh Street, down from the Xcel Center where the convention was being held. The guys got supersized and Letty went for a Quarter Pounder, no cheese, a small fries, and a Diet Coke, and they sat there and talked about the school year coming up, and who was going with whom, and who might like who else, and what they'd heard Harry was doing with Sally, and that Frank had made enough money working two summer jobs to buy a dork-mobile, meaning a Camaro, ten years old, which they made fun of, although John was driving his mother's Camry which nobody mentioned; and they watched the convention people come and go.

  Then Randy Whitcomb rolled through the door in his wheelchair, trailed by Briar. Letty recognized him as soon as he came in, and caught Whitcomb's eyes when they flicked toward her. She said nothing, but looked down at her fries. Whitcomb and Briar got their food and rolled back to the table next to Letty and the boys. Whitcomb cocked his head when they got close, looked at Letty, and smiled and asked, "Don't I know you?"

  She smiled and shook her head. "I don't think so."

  "Lucas Davenport's girl? I think I met you when you were smaller."

  She bobbed her head. "I guess; Lucas Davenport's my dad."

  "I thought so," Whitcomb said. He stuck out his hand and Letty gave it a little shake. "Nice to meet you. My name's Carl Rice, and this is my friend."

  "Nice to meet you," she said.

  The boys wanted to talk to Letty, and Whitcomb's presence annoyed them; Whitcomb was trying to be friendly but gave off the stink of the hustler, the shyster, the guy who leans on young women. But they were polite, so they chatted, and then John said, "We better get home. My mom's gonna need the car."

  "Mom's car, huh?" Whitcomb said, still friendly, but they all felt the hook of the put-down.

  "Yeah…" John was embarrassed, but they got out of there, and in the parking lot, on the way to the car, John said, "He's a fuckin' creep."

  "He's a crippled guy," Jeff said.

  Letty asked, "Could you do me a favor?"

  They were in the car, buckling up, and John said, "Sure. What?"

  "Drive around the block and come back and park over there. I want to see what car he gets into," she said.

  "Sure. Why?"

  "Because I think he was looking at me today, at the Capitol," Letty said. "It's like he followed me or something."

  "I told you he's a creep," John said.

  They went around the block and parked for fifteen seconds, and then Whitcomb and the woman came out and got into a white van, using a ramp that folded down from the side. They watched as the woman did something with straps to hold Whitcomb's chair in place, and then got into the driver's seat.

  "That's him," Letty said. "That's the guy I saw. Could you guys do me one more favor?"

  "Sure."

  "Get up close enough behind him that you can read the license number. Not too close. Jeff and I can get down, so if his girlfriend looks in the mirror, she'll only see one guy."

  And that's what they did.

  ***

  Whitcomb never knew.

  He said to Briar, "Gonna give her to Ranch. Gonna let Ranch fuck her. Gonna whip her with my stick until she looks like a skinned rabbit."

  Briar said, "I don't know."

  "You're not supposed to know, dummy. I'm supposed to know. So shut the fuck up and drive."

  Chapter 5

  Saturday night, and Rosie Cruz was driving west on I-494 on the Bloomington strip near the Mall of America and Minneapolis-St. Paul International, a digital police radio on the floor of her car, the illegal software picking up police calls from the major dispatching centers in the metro area. The sun was down and the lights were up, and people were ricocheting through the bars and motels along the strip, putting cocaine up their noses and Wild Turkey down their throats, and Rosie said into her cell phone, "The radios are hot, but they're all in St. Paul. There's some kind of cop rehearsal going on. If you're ready-do it."

  "See you back at the motel," Cohn said.

  Cruz dropped off 494, up the ramp and across the highway to the south, down the side streets to the Wayfarer Motel, thinking about Cohn and Lane and McCall going into the High Hat with masks and guns.

  Nothing she could do about it now. They were ninety-five percent good, five percent in trouble; but she wasn't in trouble. If Cohn and McCall and Lane went down, well, there were more where they came from.

  ***

  She parked outside the Wayfarer Motel, walked down the side of the first floor, past all the doors, climbed the concrete st
airs to the second floor, knocked on 214. The door popped open, and Justice Shafer was there in all his flat-eyed, underfed shitkicker glory. He stepped back and asked, "Anything?"

  "Not a thing," she said. "You all sighted in?"

  "Ready to go, if we need it." His tongue touched his dry bottom lip. "I'm running low on cash."

  She nodded and took an envelope from her pocket, ripped the end off, and thrust the naked stack of bills at him, holding on to the envelope. He pulled the bills free-fifties-thumbed them, and nodded. "How's Bill?"

  "Bill's lying low," she said. "There are about a million cops out here." She checked the time on her cell phone. "He's moving around, but he said he'll call you at eight-thirty, or thereabout, if he can get to a clean phone. The last time I talked to him, he was in some roadhouse over in Wisconsin."

  Shafer turned to look at the bedside clock: 8:13. "I'll hang around here."

  Cruz stepped back to the door. "You keep down, Justice. There's a big chance that nothing'll happen and you can go on your way, no harm done. But you gotta stay sober. If this thing does pop, and the anarchists head in toward the Capitol, we're gonna need every man we can get. Gonna need to take out the leadership."

  "I'm ready," Shafer said. He squared his shoulders. "How long should I wait for Bill to call?"

  "I'd wait until nine-after that, I doubt that he will. Like I said, things are getting tense. One of these anarchist guys put out the word that he wants Bill's head. They put a hundred thousand on it."

  "Ah, man, a hundred grand?" Shafer was amazed by the amounts they threw around. He'd never made more than twelve dollars an hour, except when he was holding up gas stations.

  "Stay tight," Cruz said, and she was out the door.

  Shafer was a moron, and he was undoubtedly sitting on the bed staring at the phone, but once down in the parking lot, she sat five minutes and watched the door to his room. She'd made a big point about his policing up his brass at the quarry where he sighted the gun in '