John Sandford - Wicked Prey

"Can't do the hotel anymore," she said. "We really needed four people. Three was marginal. Now we've only got two, even if Jesse was willing. That won't work; too many people to control. So, we do what we did when there was trouble in the past-we get out. Jesse and I both have cars at the airport. We take the rentals back right now, clean out the apartment, get out of here late tonight, in my car. You and me and Lindy, maybe to Des Moines. Go out to the airport, you rent a car there, take it to Vegas, give the cash to Harry and move it to your investment account. What do you have left in there?"

"Maybe a quarter."

"So you'll have almost two. That'll kick off eighty thousand a year until you die. There are lots of nice places where you can live pretty well on eighty thousand."

"Pretty well-if you want to live like a retiree. You know, watching your dollars. Watching your budget," Cohn said. "Won't be any Social Security or Medicare or any of that' Goddamnit, I need at least four. Five would be better. On two hundred thousand a year, you know, I could live okay."

"Brute, you've got to deal with reality," Cruz said. "You get someplace safe, cool off, maybe I can put together one more big one. A good safe armored car, a credit union."

"Credit union won't do it. Most we ever took out of a credit union was a half," Cohn said.

"With no work and no risk," she said.

"So I need three more million, and my cut on a big credit union is maybe two hundred, so you're saying we ought to do fifteen credit unions?"

She leaned forward: "What I'm saying is, we need to get the hell out of St. Paul. We can worry about money some other time. There are more important things: like staying alive."

"But this hotel'"

"We don't have the personnel'"

They were talking about it, working through the original plan with Cohn on his second double martini, when a crippled man in a wheelchair, a dusty head-bent street kid, and an overweight woman took a table fifteen feet away. The cripple looked at Cohn without recognition, sneered and turned away and waved at a waitress and shouted, "Hey! Hey! Am I invisible or some fuckin' thing?"

Cohn leaned close to Cruz and said, "It's yon bugger-the one who ran over my feet at the airport." The yon bugger came off as an Alabama drawl-the British accent had vanished with four days in St. Paul.

"Ignore him," Cruz said.

"Right." Cohn gulped the last of the second martini and waved at the waitress.

Cruz said, "Better slow down on the martinis, you're gonna be on your ass."

"Ah…" He ordered the third one and said, "When I was living in York, I'd get up every morning and read the Times, the Independent, the Guardian, and the Financial Times. I'd have four cups of coffee, and by the time I was finished with all that, it'd be noon, and a friend would come around, and we'd have a lunchtime martini or two or three. The Brits drink like fish. So I'm in training."

"Was this friend male or female?" Cruz asked. Cohn cocked an eyebrow at her and grinned, and Cruz said, "I hope Lindy doesn't find out. All we need is her throwing a fit."

"I ain't gonna tell her, but I don't think she'd be too upset. Probably guessed," Cohn said. The third martini arrived, and he took a sip. "My woman there ' nice lady. Wish I could've said good-bye. Told her I'd be gone for three weeks and would see her then."

"That's life," Cruz said. She deeply didn't care.

"I'd read the Financial Times every morning," Cohn said. He was now drunk, Cruz realized. "You know what? All this stock market shit that's going on, they're all to blame for it'" He gestured around the patio. "The fuckin' politicians. People say I'm a criminal, look at these bastards. Fuck over ordinary folks, they're sitting here laughing and singing, suckin' up the money and power."

Cruz covered his free hand with hers and said, smiling, "You're not exactly ordinary folks, Brute. You're more like Jesse James."

"No, but my brothers and sisters are," he said. "Ordinary people."

"You don't like your brothers and sisters," she said. "And they don't like you."

"That's not the point'" He gulped down the last of the third drink, and fished out the last olive. "You know what I need…" He interrupted himself: "Look at this."

The cripple had the overweight woman by the neckline of her dress and was snarling something at her. Other patrons were looking away; nobody wanted to get involved in a fight between a woman and a cripple. A waitress eased away, looking for help.

Whitcomb had Briar by the neckline of her dress and snarled, "Fuckin' bitch, you'll do what I tell you or I'll drag your fuckin' ass back…"

Cohn, drunk and angry at life, hissed at Cruz, "The bugger's a pimp. See that? That's one of his girls. Fuckin' nasty little pimp…"

Whitcomb heard the word, or enough of it, and turned and saw the tall dark-haired man staring at him from the corner table, and pushed Briar back and said, loudly, "You got a problem, fuckwad?"

The woman with the dark-haired man said something, an urgent twist to her face, and he said something back, and then the woman got up and walked rapidly toward the exit gate.

The dark-haired man threw money at the table, then stepped over to Whitcomb and said quietly, "If you don't take your hands off this young woman, you little fuckin' greasy pimp, or if you use that language on me again, I'm going to throw you in front of a fuckin' car."

The guy was drunk, Whitcomb realized. He realized it in a stupid, distant way, and the one thing he'd learned for sure as a cripple was that nobody fucked with cripples. Not deliberately. He flicked away Briar's neckline, and she rocked back and said, "Randy, maybe…"

Whitcomb snapped, "Shut the fuck up," and said to Cohn, "Listen, you fuckin' twat'"

Cohn yanked him out of the wheelchair so quickly that he might have been levitated by God.

Cohn knew he was drunk, knew this could be the end, but McCall was dead, and this fuckin' cripple… this pimp…

He snatched Whitcomb out of the chair with one powerful hand on Whitcomb's neck, and the other, as the cripple came up, on his belt. Two women screamed and he knocked a chair over with his leg and a table scraped across the brick patio with a metallic scream, and Cohn was blind now to everything but a hole in the air in front of him, leading out to the street.

He took six long strides to the fence that separated the bar patio from the sidewalk, yanking Whitcomb along, Whitcomb windmilling, another two steps through the patio gate and across the sidewalk to the curb, and then he heaved Whitcomb at the windshield of an oncoming minivan.

Whitcomb was unnaturally light, because of his withered legs, and he hit the hood of the car, flattened over the windshield, screaming, windmilling with his arms, then skidded off the far side and was hit by another car.

Cohn didn't slow down to watch, though he heard the satisfying thump of the second car. He turned back through the patio, walked into the bar, a woman's white face following him. Out of sight of the witnesses, he stripped off his black sport coat to show his white short-sleeved shirt, and quickly swerved out the side exit and down the street.

He could hear people shouting from the patio, but there was no pursuit as he turned the corner. He walked down the block and around, across the street, past a cluster of cops who were looking down at the screaming, talking on shoulder radios. Another half block, and he turned back into the same skyway they'd taken out of the condo.

Didn't feel good: there was still McCall back there, dead.

But he didn't feel as bad as he had, either.

Lucas and Del sat on a bench in the hotel's lobby while the St. Paul cops worked the crime scene. Del said, "I got the notification going. He's got parents and a couple of sisters."