John Sandford - Wicked Prey

"Tate was a good friend of all of us," Cohn said.

"You're sure he's dead?"

"Yeah, I'm sure."

"If he's not dead, then the cops are going…"

"He's dead," Cohn said. "Ah, Christ'"

Cruz shut up and they drove along and Cohn thought, Maybe I could have saved him.

But he didn't really think so. McCall had been hit hard, right through the center of his body, he was dying on the floor, and Cohn didn't have time to wait for him to die, and no way to get him out of the hotel in a hurry. If Cohn abandoned him, and McCall did somehow survive, well, McCall might have been a little pissed.

Nobody was immune to extortion by the legal system. They would have given McCall a chance to get out, in fifteen, maybe, if he talked about Cohn and the other gang members. He'd done the right thing, but goddamn: it was Tate.

Lucas heard about it from the duty officer at the BCA who called and shouted, "Benson's down. Benson got shot, Benson's dead, he's shot'"

Lucas ran out of the hotel room with Snider and Craig calling after him, "What? What?" and he shouted back, "Keep the door locked," and he ran down the stairs because the elevators were too slow, piled into the car and screamed across town and dumped the Porsche in a cluster of cop cars and a cop flagged him and he held up his ID and shouted back and then he plowed through a flower bed, through the lobby and into an elevator with another cop, a St. Paul uniform he didn't recognize, and he asked, "Is my guy dead?" and the cop nodded and said, "Yeah, fuckin' awful."

Lucas pounded the elevator doors, once, twice, with the heel of his hand, and then they came on out on twelve and two St. Paul detectives were standing in the hall outside an open door. Lucas headed for the door and one of the detectives, whose name was John Elleson, caught him around the waist and said, "Whoa, whoa, Lucas, slow down, slow down."

Lucas tried to push past him, but Elleson held on, jammed him into a wall. Elleson was a small guy, but strong. "I wanna…"

"We think that the shooter's on the loose, one of them, anyway," Elleson said. "You can go in, but stay on the edges. We need to take everything we can get out of there."

Lucas nodded, took a breath, relaxed, and when Elleson let him go, went in past the busted door: Benson was there, with two other bodies. Benson was on his back, his head cranked backward, his forehead shattered, his bulletproof vest skewed around to his left, a pistol near his hand, a shotgun under his legs. A black man lay on the floor at Benson's feet, and a woman lay beside a bed, shot in the back.

Elleson said, "There's a couple in the room next door. They were in bed, heard the shots, the guy says he heard somebody running, so he thought it would be okay to look. They had to turn on the lights and he went to the door and looked, and the hallway was already clear. The shooter knew where he was going. There's no blood in the hallway or on the stairs, so if he was hit, he wasn't bleeding too bad."

"Benson shot the black guy?" Lucas asked.

"We don't know, but I think he probably did. We're gonna have to wait and look at the slugs, to see who shot who-it's too complicated."

"Ah, man…" Lucas put his hands to his temples, backed into the hallway.

"You okay?" Elleson asked.

"Fuck no." He wasn't; he was nauseous.

"We're gonna need a statement from everybody involved. We understand Benson was working as sort of a bodyguard."

"These are the same guys who did the robbery down behind St. John's last night," Lucas said. "The same guys who killed the Hudson cop. They're a murder gang hitting political money guys. I'll get you everything we know-we've got the main guy's picture out there…"

He gave Elleson a summary of what they knew then said, "We think they've got a hideout somewhere around here-they either rented a house or a condo or something. We've papered all the hotels and motels, and nobody's seen them."

"They got some balls," Elleson said. "There were two hundred cops within three blocks of here. They had to drive right through them to get in and out."

"Did we get them on video? Any chance?" Lucas asked. The feds had come up with a grant for surveillance cameras, and they were all over the streets.

"Depends on which street they were on," Elleson said. "We've got video on the front and the side, but not along the back."

"Got to look at it, man: if we could spot the car, that'd give us a big leg up. Can't hide the car."

"I'll get that going," Elleson said. "What's Benson's family situation?"

"He's single, divorced four or five years ago. No kids. Parents live up in St. Cloud, I think. I'll have our duty guy pull the file ' We gotta look at the tapes."

"I'm sorry about this, man," Elleson said.

The elevator dinged and Del stepped out, looked both ways, spotted Lucas and came on down the hall. "Is it true?" Looked at Lucas's face, and said, "It's true."

The condo was only six blocks from the hotel, and after parking the car, Cohn and Cruz took the back stairs up. Cruz took a peek at the lobby before they walked into it, and then they were inside. Lindy was sitting on the couch reading a copy of Women's Health magazine, and Lane came out of the back room, a smile on his face, and he asked, "How'd it go?" And then, the smile slipping away, "Where's Tate?"

Cohn told him: "They ambushed us."

"Oh, no," Lindy, pale-faced, hand to her mouth.

"It's my fault," Cruz said. "I should have known. We couldn't do this many…"

"I thought they couldn't tell the cops," Lane said to her.

"That must have gone out the window when the cop was killed in Hudson," Cruz said.

Cohn said, "I'm so sick I can't even spit." He looked at Cruz. "It's not your fault, Rosie. I pushed for it, but there's a smart guy on the other side, and he punked us." He gave them a blow-by-blow account of the entry and the shooting, lied about McCall getting shot, said the cop shot him twice. "Never had a chance. Tate kicked the door and boom-boom, he goes down and I see the cop and I hit him, then I hit him again, and then this woman's on the floor and I hit her, and then I'm out of there. I got out clean, but'"

"I'm heading home," Lane said. He looked around the condo. "Clean this place up ' get out of here."

"I'm with you," Cruz said. She looked at Brute. "You and Lindy ought to get out of here. You'd be safer as a couple. You can use your Visa card and driver's license for about two weeks yet, rent a car, head south. You've got enough money to last a long time in Belize or Costa Rica."

Lane said to him, "That's what you gotta do, man. You can have Tate's cut-they're not looking for me or Cruz, but you've got to get out of here, you need the money. With Tate's cut, you got almost a million and a half."

"Not enough," Cohn said. He ran his hands through his hair and said, "Fuck it, I'm gonna go get a drink."

Cruz said, "Brute, don't do it. The cops…"

Cohn said, "Fuck 'em."

"There are a million cops out there. If they spot you…"

"Fuck 'em," he said again. "I don't look anything like those pictures. Especially if I'm sitting down. I'm gonna get a drink." To Lindy: "You coming?"

"Brute: bad idea, I'm really scared." She looked scared.

"I'm going," he said. "That fuckin' McCall, man," and tears ran down his face and he went out the door.

The door opened behind him and Cruz came out with her purse and said, "If you're going, I'll go with you."

She'd scouted the town thoroughly, and steered him through the nearly empty skyways, for the best part of a half mile, then outside and across a street and into an outdoor mall, with bars and outdoor seating, to a place called Juicy's. They got a table in a corner back against a building where Cohn couldn't be seen head-on, and he ordered a cheeseburger and a double martini with four olives, and she got fries and a Diet Pepsi. He sat looking at the tabletop for five minutes, drinking the martini, then said, hollow-eyed, "What do I do, Rosie?"