John Sandford - Wicked Prey

The cop was showing the clerks a badly colored Xerox printout of a photograph of Brutus Cohn. One of the clerks glanced at her and she asked, brightly, "What time is the shuttle to the airport?"

The clerk pointed at a sign, which said that the shuttle left every four hours starting at 7 a.m., and turned back to the cop. The other clerk was saying, "It sorta looks like a guy. But it sorta doesn't, too. Let me see, he's in a corner room, let me see…" And he hunched over a schematic of the hotel and the cop crooked his neck to look at it.

Cruz walked out the door and turned away from Cohn's room, and as soon as she was out of sight, called Cohn on her cell. Cohn's phone rang four times before he answered, and he said, "Yeah?"

"Get out of there. There's a cop in the lobby with a picture of you and he's coming down to your room. Get out, get out'"

"How many?"

"One, here, but he could call in more," she said. "Get out."

Then Cohn was gone and she snapped the phone shut and walked up a flight of stairs to an exposed walkway where she could see the parking lot. A minute or two later, she saw the cop, one hand on his gun, walking down the parking lot toward Cohn's room. She punched the speed dial and Cohn came up: "Yeah?"

"He's walking toward your room. He's alone. He'll be there in one minute," she said. And he was gone again.

Brutus Cohn was buck-ass naked, in bed with Lindy, when Cruz called with the warning. He jumped up, looked around: normally neat, he was with Lindy, now, and she was a walking hurricane. Clothes were strewn all over the room, shoes, papers, everything. "Get dressed," he snapped.

They had a picture of him. They had fingerprints, too, but they'd never taken a DNA sample, because they didn't do DNA samples the last time he was in jail. Now his prints and his DNA were all over the place '

"What's going on?" But she'd been a criminal's girlfriend long enough not to ask too many questions, and she was already pulling up her underpants and the phone rang again and he said, "Yeah?" listened and snapped it shut.

"Take your pants off," he said.

"What?"

"Take your fuckin' pants off. A cop is coming down here, he'll be here in ten seconds and I want you to answer the door."

"Naked?" Now she sounded interested.

"Yeah, goddamned right, naked. Get your goddamned pants off'"

He looked around, picked up an end table by the legs, and smashed it against the floor. The legs broke, but didn't come completely free, and he flipped the table and wrenched one loose. It was half the length of a pool cue, but shaped like a ball bat.

"When he knocks, say, "Just a minute," and then pull the door all the way open and step back. Just let it swing. I'll be right behind it. Goddamnit, wake up…"

Charles Dee ("call me Charles") was about ninety-eight percent sure that the whole thing was the weekly windup by the guys back at the shop: send Dee around with a Xerox of some weird-looking guy with a red beard-the beard looked like it was painted on-to ask who'd seen him. This was a request, they said, from fuckin' Minnesota. Just about ninety-eight percent that somebody was about to hit him with an air horn or some other joke '

The fact was, Hudson was too big a town for him. He wasn't a metro cop, he was a small-town guy. He needed to be on a five-man force somewhere where the people liked you. Where everybody knew your name '

He got down to 120, looked around, sighed, wondered what was behind the door, and knocked. A woman called out, "Just a minute," and he thought, Here it comes '

Lindy pulled open the door, and stood there in all her big-boobed and bikini-shaved glory. Dee had time to take a breath and notice how crispy her pubic hair looked, when a big naked guy reached out from behind the door, grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him inside.

Dee had learned to handle himself in the Hudson bars, the Friday night fights, but he was off-balance and falling into the room and turning and trying to look and he saw the club coming right at his eyes and he never even had the time to yell.

Cohn whipped the club through a tight arc and smashed the cop right across the bridge of the nose and he spun as he fell onto his face. Cohn clubbed him at the base of his skull and the cop went flat and Cohn hit him twice more and then tossed the club in the corner and said, "Get dressed."

"What about him?" Lindy asked, looking at the cop.

"What about him?"

"He saw us," she said.

"He's dead," Cohn said. "Get dressed. Pick up everything. Get the sheets off the bed."

"He's dead?" She was stunned. Her brother was a small-town cop and she didn't like the look of this. Dead?

"He's dead," Cohn said. He was half-dressed. "Come on: move."

She started crying but Cohn kept her moving. They stuffed everything into their suitcases, dressed, Cohn stripped the sheets off the bed, threw all the blankets in them, tied them tight, called Cruz.

"Take a walk on the walkway. See if anybody's looking at us," he told her.

"I'm up there now. I don't see anybody," she said.

"Let's go," Cohn said. He let Lindy lead the way through the door, propped the door open with the chair leg, walked down to the car, threw everything in the trunk, took out the two-gallon plastic jug of gasoline, said, "Start the car," and walked back to the room.

Inside, he gave the jug a shake, threw all the dry towels from the bathroom in a heap, soaked them with a half gallon of gas, threw one of the towels on the shower drain, poured the rest of the gas around the two rooms, including the beds, and backed out in a cloud of fumes.

Two gallons of gas is condensed energy: enough energy to drive a Ford F150 thirty miles or so. The rooms would burn. He picked up the club he'd used to kill Dee, wiped it, just in case, tossed it inside, shook his head: this was bad.

He trailed the last bit of gas onto the concrete walk, tossed the container into the room, dropped a match on the gas and hurried to the car.

The flame just sat on the gas patch for a moment, then crept over the door sill and then with a loud, attention-grabbing Whump! blew through the motel rooms.

They rolled down the parking lot, around the corner on the back, down a street, and headed back to the I-94 entrance ramp, passing the motel, and saw black smoke boiling from the room and a man running toward the motel office.

They ran down onto I-94 and saw even more smoke, and Lindy said, "The whole place must be burning down," and then, "What if he wasn't dead?"

"He was dead," Cohn said, and then they were coming down on the St. Croix River and the bridge to Minnesota and they never heard a fire engine.

Lucas got a phone call, saw it was from Carol, pulled his cell and asked, "What?"

She said, "Something awful happened in Hudson."

The fire was gone by the time Lucas got there. An angry Hudson cop lost his temper when he saw the Porsche nosing into the parking lot, past the warning tape, and did a fat man's arm-swinging red-faced tap dance until Lucas stuck his ID out the car window, and then the cop pointed Lucas into a far parking space and Lucas took it.

The parking lot was full of cop cars, with two fire trucks and two ambulances butted up to the soaking ruin at the corner of the motel. The fire had been intense, and anything wooden was charred, and anything cloth was burned to ash. The body-mound by the door, with the charred and cracking skin on the man's seared back, looked like a dirty roast hog.

Lucas found the police and fire chiefs, the mayor and a city councilman standing by one of the trucks looking at a couple of medical examiner's investigators, who were standing back away from the body. Lucas nodded at the chief, who asked, "Who're you?" and Lucas said, "Davenport, Minnesota BCA. We put out the request on the photos."