John Sandford - Wicked Prey

"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 crazy, 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.