John Sandford - Wicked Prey

The customer, who was shooting a compound bow, said over his shoulder, "You don't have to know nothing to shoot a crossbow."

Jenkins asked one of the Jenkins brothers, "If I were to ask you where I could get a switchblade, you wouldn't know, would you?"

The Jenkins brother looked puzzled: "Well, sure. Right here. What do you want?" He walked down the counter and tapped the top of a case. Inside, a half-dozen switchblades nestled on red velvet.

Jenkins was taken aback: "Switchblades are legal?"

"Well, sure, in Minnesota," Jenkins said. "You can order them on the Internet."

"I didn't know that," Jenkins said. "Is there a police discount?"

The fourth and fifth dealers hadn't seen either Cohn or Shafer, but the sixth one, their last stop of the day, had seen Shafer. The dealer, Bob Harper, worked out of his house. "He said he'd heard of me down in Oklahoma, a boy named Dan Oaks outa Norman. He thought maybe I'd have some premium.50-cal, but I didn't. Wouldn't have sold it to him anyway."

"Why not?" Lucas asked. He wrote "Dan Oaks" and "Norman" in his notebook.

Harper was a thin man gone old, but still hard, with shiny cheekbones and killer eyes, two dry wattles hanging under his chin. "Cause I'm not stupid. Some skinhead from Oklahoma shows up on my doorstep looking for.50-cal, the week before the Republican convention? I don't need that kind of publicity."

In the car, Lucas called Jacobs again, gave him Harper's name, and the name of the Oklahoma dealer. "I don't know what Shafer's doing, but he sure as hell isn't hiding out," Lucas said.

"Okay-hey, thanks for the time, Lucas. This has been a help. Could you keep spreading those photos around? We need to talk to this guy."

"No problem."

"All done?" Jenkins asked. He pushed the button on his new switchblade, and the blade jumped out and snapped into place.

"All done," Lucas said. "You know, you're gonna reach in your pocket for your cell phone and you're gonna hit that button, and blade's gonna jump out and cut your nuts off."

"I'll give it to Shrake," Jenkins said. "If it cuts.his nuts off, maybe he'll stop dating Shirley."

"We really ought to do something about that relationship," Lucas said. "I mean, if he won't give it up, maybe put a legal notice in the newspaper, so nobody could accuse us of covering it up."

Jenkins dropped him at the office. Carol had gone home, and Lucas looked at all the paper that she'd printed out from New York, on Cohn, looked at Cohn's picture for a while-this was a different personality than Justice Shafer; this was a serious guy-and then slipped it in a file and walked out to his car.

Great late summer day. He trolled once through St. Paul, looking at all the cops around, saw shoulder patches from Virginia and Illinois. Like a big storm coming in, he thought, everybody watchful and hoping for the best.

He got home, kissed Sam, kissed Letty, kissed Weather, got a banana from the housekeeper, and Weather asked, "Whatever happened to the assassin?"

He told her about his day, and she said, "Well, you're done with that, anyway. One less thing to worry about."

Cruz and Cohn spent Saturday morning cruising the Lyman High Hat, a boutique hotel on Loring Park in Minneapolis, a place that featured forty-dollar cheeseburgers and fifty-dollar-a-glass house champagne.

Cohn, in a baby-blue golf shirt and tan slacks, walked through the front doors, past the desk to the restaurant, past the maitre do", took a quick look around, as though checking for friends, and then walked back out to the car. He'd already surveyed the nearby streets, and the park, stopping now and then to look at a printout of a Google satellite view of the area. He'd seen both McCall and Lane, walking separately, McCall in a neat blazer and pressed slacks, with an Obama button, Lane improbably in cargo shorts and a golf shirt, his hard, knobby legs looking as though they'd been carved from hickory.

"Let's see the door again," Cohn said to Cruz, when he got back in the car.

"There's a light and a video camera covering the loading dock; they both record and live-monitor," Cruz said. She was flipping through a notebook with handwritten notes. "The only people who look at the monitors are the desk crew, and they don't have time for it. You won't be breaking in, so even if they see you, they'll think you're staff. You'll wear hats, keep your heads down. You go in, the staff stairway is to your left. No cameras in the stairwell. There are cameras in the hallways, but they're direct-recorders and aren't live anywhere."

"So if we come out of the stairwell with masks…"

"You're good. They'll look at you afterwards, but by then, it's too late."

"Where did you get the uniform?" An idle question: he didn't really care. The talk was his way of nailing down the terrain.

"Macy's. It's a tuxedo jacket and pants with a red dress shirt," she said. "Now, when you're in the hallway, you'll see the cameras hanging down from the ceiling-they're smoked-glass bubbles, about six inches across. You get to the door, then McCall turns his back, takes off his mask, knocks ' If they look through the peephole, they'll see a black guy with the room service uniform. If they open the door on a chain, you kick it and go in, and McCall pulls the mask back on. If they open it, you go in."

"What if we meet somebody in the hallway?" Cohn asked.

"Well, you peek first, see if there's anybody there. We're doing it right during all the big meetings and parties, so there shouldn't be a lot of traffic. There's a big party in the Mississippi Ballroom, so you may get somebody coming up to pee. If you do, well, you take them into the room with you. Holding them would not be a problem: you'll only be inside for five minutes."

They were headed around the block, and Cohn looked back at the hotel. "Two rooms."

"Two rooms." Cruz nodded. "After you take five-oh-five, Lane stays with the people there, freezes them. You and McCall go down to four-thirty-one. We do the lower floor second, so if anything goes wrong, we'll get out that much quicker. And four-thirty-one is closer to the staff stairwell. When you finish four-thirty-one, you call Lane on the cell and you all walk."

They were easing through the tangle of streets between the park and the downtown. Cruz pointed at a parking garage.

"Two blocks, around two corners," Cruz said. "If we have to ditch the car or if somebody gets caught on foot, we'll have one emergency car here, another one on the street down from the park. We'll have to position that one just before we hit. Everything like we've always done it: keys are with the car, magnetic box under the rear left bumper. Each car has a two-gallon plastic gas can in the back, half gas, half oil. If you have to ditch a car, try to burn it."

Cohn nodded: of course there'd be emergency cars. And, of course there'd be gas cans. There always were, on his jobs. He adopted any advantage, or possible advantage. That was why he'd survived, and why he worked with Cruz: they saw eye-to-eye on advantages, and survival.

"I want to see that layout again-we have to know which way to go however we get out, even if we have to throw a chair through a window," Cohn said.

"Yes," she said.

"Feels strange," he said, looking back at the hotel, busy, well dressed people flowing around it. "That much cash, with no protection. You're sure about the money?"

"Ninety percent. That's as good as I can get it. Not as good as with a duck, but pretty damn good," Cruz said. The group had its own slang, and referred to armored cars as "ducks," as in "sitting ducks." She added, "The thing that sold me was, it's so soft."

They stopped at the mouth of a short alley and she pointed down the alley to a loading dock. "That's the door, off to the left. I checked the key last week. If they changed the lock last night, well, you walk away."