John Sandford - Wicked Prey

"What if we hit one more guy, and that guy had two million?"

Cohn asked. "Then we could be talking about retirement." Cohn got two shares, everybody else got one. They all did the numbers in their heads: if they got two million on the next score, one share would be worth a million dollars in cash, and Cohn would get two. Cohn continued: "This hotel deal is pretty complicated. I'd say if we could pick off two more of these political guys, maybe we could skip the hotel. Say fuck it, and go home."

"Not going to get two," Cruz said, shaking her head. "The guys are already passing out the money-some of them might not have any left."

"It's only the first day of the convention, I bet they're saving up until the big shots get here, make more of a splash," Cohn said.

Lindy was sitting on the floor next to the pile of cash, and she reached out and picked up a bundle of fifties. "You know what I think? I think we ought to go to New York and spend some of this. Like, right now."

They all looked at her for a moment and then McCall laughed and said, "That's one idea."

Cruz said, "Brute, let's go over the hotel. Let's work that through. We really need to be on it, if we're going to do it. These guys, the moneymen, they were supposed to be the cherry on the sundae; they weren't supposed to be the whole goddamned sundae. I've already got other stuff running on the hotel."

"One more," Cohn said. "Come on, Rosie, work it out for us. One more. Which one's got the most? I swear to God, whatever he's got, he'll be the last one."

Cruz looked at him for a long beat, then said, "It's a her, not a him. Goddamnit, Brute…"

Lucas had sprung five agents, including himself: Jenkins, Shrake, Jim Benson, Dave Tompkins. "Better if we had two guys in each room," he said, "but we just don't have the people. So: everybody has armor, everybody has a shotgun, you don't answer the door. After the knock, you wait: they can't stand there long, because of the masks. They'll walk away ' that's when you pop the door."

Tompkins grinned: "Now I see why you picked all single guys."

"Hey. It's dangerous. No question about it. But we've got to do something."

They were all in place by eight o'clock.

Eleven o'clock. Lucas got up and stretched, yawned, looked at Buddy Snider and Sally Craig, sitting at the breakfast table, playing gin rummy, then looked at his watch. From the hotel windows, he could see across the interstate all the way up to Capitol Hill. There'd been some semi-violent demonstrations during the afternoon, and a few more people had been taken off to jail, but nothing extreme. The downtown area was still loaded with cops, but everything below looked quiet.

Craig, a thin, fiftyish blond woman from Washington, without looking up, said, "You're pacing again."

"Yeah, well. You're playing gin rummy," Lucas said.

"Cards exercise the mind," she said.

Snider said to Lucas, "Maybe you should check your gun again. That was interesting."

"Gun's fine," Lucas said.

He'd been penned up for three hours; the first two hours in utter darkness, until Snider and Craig got back from the convention center, where, he suspected, they'd been passing out cash. Maybe lots of it. When they came through the door a few minutes before eleven o'clock, Craig had had a gorgeous soft deer-hide backpack slung over one shoulder, and it appeared to be empty. Lucas had carefully worked through the room while they were gone, and hadn't found any money. There was a safe in the closet, though, that might have held anything up to a half-million dollars. Since Craig presumably had a safe in her own room, that could be another half-million.

Lucas got on his cell phone and called Shrake: "Nothing here. Nothing at all," Shrake said.

Benson: "Nothing here." Voice dropped. "Whitehead's in the bathroom, she has some kind of a problem. The whole place stinks."

Jenkins: "Haven't heard or seen a thing. Sitting here watching West Coast baseball."

Tompkins: "Schott's gone to bed. Says he's too tired to stay up anymore. I'm lying here watching Star Wars with the sound turned off."

"Which Star Wars?" Lucas asked.

"A New Hope. Channel three-forty."

"That's the first one," Lucas said. "Where Princess Leia hints that she might go for a three-way with Han and Luke."

"Yup. That's the one."

Off the phone, he searched through the TV channels until he found Star Wars. "You mind if I watch this?"

"Better than this card game," Craig said. She tossed her cards on the table and said, "Go gin yourself," sprawled on the bed, and said, "Turn the sound up. They're about to jump down the garbage chute."

The knock on the door came at eleven-fifteen, three raps with a key, like a hotel maid would do it, and Jim Benson rolled to his feet, slipped the vest over his head, and pulled the Glock 9mm from its holster. The shotgun was in the corner, and he stepped over to it. Janet Whitehead, who was lying on the bed, sniffed and said, "Oh my God," and then an envelope slipped under the door, and they could hear, faintly, somebody walking away. Benson, a short, square-shouldered blond with a dimpled chin and chiseled nose, did a quick peek at the peephole and saw nothing. Whitehead picked up the envelope, opened it, glanced at the paper inside and said, "Hey," and before Benson could slow her down, she turned the knob on the door.

The door latch-lock was engaged, as well as the safety chain; the chain allowed the door to open three or four inches. The doorjamb anchor was held in place by three Phillips screws. They were not sufficient. The instant Whitehead turned the knob, the door exploded, and Whitehead hurtled back into Benson, who staggered backward, off-balance, and then McCall was there in the doorway, Cohn behind him, a gun in his hand.

McCall looked with surprise at Benson and opened his mouth to say something but Benson, landing on his butt, while Whitehead bounced away, fired a single shot with his pistol that hit McCall in the stomach. McCall staggered and shot Benson in the chest, in the vest, and Benson fired again, this time hitting McCall in the spine, and McCall dropped as though somebody had cut his puppet strings.

Cohn, still to the left of McCall, stepped farther to his left, the gun already up, and shot Benson in the face. Benson went down, dead, though Cohn didn't know it, and Cohn shot him again, in the head, and then stepped over McCall's body to Whitehead, who was crawling between the two beds, and shot her twice through the heart from the back.

McCall was on the floor, eyes wide, his mouth working, and Cohn, his hands covered with gloves as they had been in all the holdups, shot McCall in the forehead. Nothing more he could do.

Elapsed time, ten seconds? Cohn turned and ran down the hall.

Outside, he slowed, made sure he was out of camera range, peeled off the mask and jacket and gloves and wadded them up into a small ball, which he carried under his arm, and walked a hundred feet to the street and saw Cruz coming in the Toyota, and flagged her and when she stopped, yanked open the door and climbed in. "What happened?"

"Blew up. Fuckin' blew up." Cohn's voice was cold, uninflected, the way it got when there was trouble. "Tate's dead, woman's dead, cop in the room with her, he's dead, they're all fuckin' dead." He said it quietly enough, but she could tell that he was beaten up.

"Tate's dead? You're sure he's dead?" she asked.

"Yeah, he's dead, his brains are all over the hotel room, for Christ's sakes ' Ah, Jesus, Tate, he walked right into the cop's gun.

He kicked the door and the cop was right there and, boom, and he goes down, ah, McCall'"

"So now we're done," Cruz said bitterly. She was watching the speedometer. There was a tendency to drive fast after a hit, and she didn't want to do that. "Now we're done. Jesse's gonna be really screwed up about this, Tate was a good friend."