John Sandford: Wicked Prey

They rode along for a minute or two, as she got off the airport and headed into St. Paul, past the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers. Even in the middle of a big urban area, the river valleys had a wildness that reminded him of home in Alabama. In Britain, even the wild areas had a groomed look.

"Jack, I can't get him off my mind. I'm sorry…"

"Never mind Jack." He was looking out the window. "You almost went home, huh? That'd be ' Zihuatanejo?"

"Never been to Mexico in my life, Brute," she said with a grin. "Give it up."

"With a name like Cruz, you gotta have been in Mexico." Her eyes flicked to him. "Why would you think my name is Cruz?"

He laughed and said, "Okay." But she looked like a Cruz.

She clicked on the radio, dialed around, found a country station. "Instead of worrying about where I'm from, see if you can get the Alabama accent going."

The first song up was Sawyer Brown singing "Some Girls Do," and Cohn sang along with it, all the way to the end, and then shouted, "Jesus Christ, it's good to be back in the States. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and North Ireland can go fuck itself."

Randy Whitcomb, Juliet Briar, and a man whose real name might have been Dick, but who called himself Ranch, lived in a rotting wooden house on the east side of St. Paul, that sat above a large hole in the ground called Swede Hollow; once full of houses full of Swedes, the hole was now a neglected public park.

Whitcomb was a pimp. He'd become a pimp as soon as he could, after his parents had thrown him out of the house twelve years earlier. He liked the idea of being a pimp, and he liked TV shows that featured pimps and pimp-wannabes and his finest dream was to own a Mercedes-Benz R-Class pimpmobile in emerald green. He enjoyed the infliction of pain, as long as he wasn't the object of it.

Briar was his only employee.

She was a heavy young woman in a shapeless gray dress; her hair the sad tatters of a curly perm gone old. She sat half-crouched over the steering wheel of Whitcomb's handicapped van, and alternately chirped brightly about the sights on the street, and sobbed, pressing her knuckles to her teeth, fearing for what was coming. What was coming, she thought, would be a whipping from Whitcomb, with his whipping stick.

He'd broken the stick out of a lilac hedge a block from their house. A sucker, looking for light, the branch had grown long and leggy, an inch thick at the butt, tapering to an eighth of an inch at the tip. Whitcomb had stripped the bark off with a penknife; the switch sat, white and naked, spotted here and there with blood, in the corner of the room next to his La-Z-Boy chair.

He'd beaten her with it three times over the summer, when her performance had sagged below his standards.

He liked the work. He couldn't stand up, so he made her drop on the floor like a dog, on her hands and knees, while he sat on his chair and whipped her with the switch. The thing was limber enough that it didn't break bone-he wouldn't have cared, except that broken bones would have kept her from waiting on him-but it did maul her skin. So she laughed and chirped and pointed and giggled and then sobbed, the fear rising in her throat as they got closer to the house.

They couldn't afford a van equipped for handicapped drivers, and Whitcomb hadn't been trained on one anyway. They did get one with a hydraulic ramp, bought used and cheap through CurbCut, a St. Paul charity. At the house, Briar parked next to a wooden ramp built by Make a House a Home, and Whitcomb dropped the ramp and rolled out of the van, used the remote to retract the ramp and close the van door. He hadn't spoken a word since the airport, but his breath was coming in fast chuffs.

Whitcomb was getting himself excited, though, of course, nothing would come of it. He'd taken the bullet low in the spine, and he'd not have another erection in this life.

Now he spoke: "Inside."

"The light's on," Briar said. She stopped. She was sure she'd turned the lights off as they left. "I turned them off."

She was stalling, Whitcomb thought. "Ranch must be up."

"Ranch is not up."

Stalling. The crazy bitch had got the flight wrong, and now a pharmaceutical salesman was wondering why he couldn't find his sample case, and somebody else was wondering why a green nylon bag was going round and round on a baggage carousel somewhere else. Eventually they'd look in it, and find the sample case, and put two and two together, and the whole goddamn racket could come down around their ears. She was stalling.

"In the house," he said.

"The light'"

He shouted at her now: "Get in the fuckin' house!"

She turned and climbed the ramp, unlocked the door and pushed inside, holding the door for him, and he bumped over the doorjamb and turned toward the living room and accelerated. Moving too fast to turn back. And there were the Pollish twins, Dubuque and Moline, sitting on the couch, big bulky black men with cornrowed hair, drop-crotch jeans, and wife-beater shirts.

Ranch was lying in a corner on a futon, facedown, mouth open, a white stain under his chin, breathing heavily.

Moline had one of Whitcomb's beers in one hand and a piece-of-shit.22 in the other. The twins were managers in the sexual entertainment industry, and were known around the St. Paul railroad tracks as Shit and Shinola, because stupid people found them hard to tell apart. The cops and the smarter street people knew that Dubuque had lost part of his left ear in a leveraged buyout on University Avenue. Moline pointed the gun at Whitcomb's head and said, "Tell me why I shouldn't shoot you in the motherfuckin' head."

"What are you talking about?" Whitcomb asked. "What are you doing in my house?" He rolled across the room to Ranch and jammed the foot-plate on the wheelchair hard into Ranch's ribs: "You alive?"

Ranch groaned, twitched away from the pain. The door slammed in the kitchen. Dubuque jumped and asked, "What was that?"

"Woman runnin' for the cops," Whitcomb said. "She knows who you are. You're fucked."

Moline looked at the front door, then asked, "Why you running Jasmine down my street?"

"Jasmine?" Whitcomb sneered at him. "I ain't seen her in two weeks. She's running with Jorgenson."

"Jorgenson? You pullin' my dick," Moline said.

"Am not," Whitcomb said. "Juliet's all I got left. Jasmine got pissed because I whacked her lazy ass with my stick, and she snuck out of here with her clothes. The next thing I hear, she's working for Jorgenson. If I find her, she's gonna have a new set of lips up her cheek."

Dubuque said to Moline, casually, "He lying to us."

"Juliet knows us, though," Moline said. He was the thinker of the two.

"I'm not lying," Whitcomb said.

Moline stood up, pulled up his shirt, stuck the.22 under his belt and said, "Get the door, bro."

Whitcomb figured he was good: "The next time you motherfuckers come back here…"

Dubuque was at the front door, which led out to the front porch, which Whitcomb never used because of the six steps down to the front lawn.

"We come back here again, they gonna find your brains all over the wall," Moline said, and with two big steps, he'd walked around Whitcomb's chair, and Moline was a large man, and he grabbed the handles on the back and started running before Whitcomb could react, and Dubuque held the door and Whitcomb banged across the front porch and went screaming down the steps, his bones banging around like silverware in a wooden box.

The whole crash actually took a second or two, and he wildly tried to control it, but the wheels were spinning too fast, and there was never any hope, and he pitched forward and skidded face-first down the sidewalk, his legs slack behind him like a couple of extra-long socks.

Moline bent over him. "Next time, we ain't playing no patty-cake."