John Sandford - Wicked Prey

They walked over separately, keeping in mind that together, they looked like flatfoots. Lucas found the Minneapolis cop standing with a civilian, by the electronic gate on the parking ramp. Lucas said, "You're Doug Swanson."

"Swenson." The cop nodded and said, "My partner's Dan Long. We got a call from your SWAT guy he's on the way." Swenson looked at his watch. "They're still ten or fifteen minutes out."

"What about the apartment?" Lucas asked.

Swenson flicked a finger at the civilian. "This is Carl Bishop, he's the manager. He gave us a key to an apartment down the hall. Dan's up there with the key in the lock, and if anything moves in their apartment, or anybody comes down the hall, he'll go on in, like they just caught him getting home…"

Jenkins: "We oughta get out of sight. If they're out and they come down that entry ramp and see us, it'll be the OK Corral."

They moved inside, to the lobby, and then into the mail room, looking at the backside of three hundred mailboxes. Lucas called Able Peterson and asked, "How long?"

"We're staging, we're getting armored up. I sent Dick McGuire over there with some listening gear. He ought to be coming in the door with a carry-on suitcase. If you could get him into an adjacent apartment'"

Both of the adjacent apartments were occupied, but one of them was occupied by a retired cop who said he'd be happy to see them. About that time, McGuire came through the front door and they sent him up, after warning Dan Long that McGuire was a cop, and on the way.

Two minutes later, McGuire was at work, and two minutes after that, he called Lucas and said, "I can't hear a thing. If there's anybody there, I should be able to hear something. I should be able to hear them breathing-I think the place is empty."

"Gotta go in," Lucas said. "Could be somebody dead' maybe there's something about the walls that's defeating the listening gear."

"Wait four minutes for SWAT, send them right up," Shrake said. Thinking about the warrant. "That gives it at least the appearance of desperation."

Lucas called Peterson again and passed on the word from McGuire, which Peterson had just gotten directly. "Get here," Lucas said.

"We're loading. We're two blocks away. We'll be there in one minute."

The SWAT team came right down the ramp, unloaded, and Lucas briefed them on the situation, and the manager drew a sketch of the interior of the apartment. "No chances," Lucas told Peterson. "Blow the door down, flash-bangs, ready to rock." He got on the phone again, to McGuire: "Clear that apartment."

All but two of the SWAT team members started up and Lucas called the apartment on the other side, got no answer, and then the one across the hall, and outlined the situation: "Some policemen are on the way up, they'll tell you where to go. Stay inside until your doorbell rings…"

The other two SWAT guys, both armed with automatic weapons, were stationed in the garage, watching the only entry. Lucas told Shrake and Jenkins to wait with the manager, in the mail room, where they could watch the lobby unseen through the glass fronts on the mailboxes.

"I'm going up," Lucas said.

"Oughta be up there by now," Jenkins said, looking at his watch. A call from Operations, as he waited for the elevator: "You've got a warrant."

"Great."

He'd just stepped into the hall when he heard the door go down and then the flash-bang, and then the cops were inside: no gunfire, but a half-dozen doors popped open up and down the hallways, and he heard somebody shout, "Police, please go back inside!"

Lucas hustled past a woman with her hair in curlers, and a copy of Vanity Fair in her hands, and said, "Best to go back inside," and she said, "No chance-this is too good," and he went on down the hall.

Peterson was waiting behind the door, which was broken around the knob, but still hung from its hinges. "Nothing. If they were here, they cleaned up."

"Ah…" Lucas said. "But-they might be coming back. We gotta have somebody wait for them. Close the door the best you can, settle down inside. Give me a guy who can watch things from the lobby, and keep those guys down in the garage."

"Oughta wait for the crime-scene crew," Peterson said. "We shouldn't wait inside."

Lucas shook his head: "I don't have time to lay it all out for you, but we decided that they're probably planning to go through with this job, whatever it is. There's reason to think that they're staying. This apartment"-he gestured around the empty rooms-"could mean anything. If they stayed, they've got to be close to pulling the trigger on whatever they're doing. They could be planning to stop here on the way out. As far as they know, it's still good."

Peterson shrugged. "On your head."

"Yup. It is. Have your guys check every inch of this place. We can't afford to miss anything."

"I'll stay in touch," Peterson said. "Been easier if we'd finished it here."

Lucas rode back down with the SWAT guy designated to hang in the mail room, left him there like Third Class Mail, and collected Shrake and Jenkins.

"Dumpster dive," he said, on the way down to the garage.

"Man, I'm wearing some high-end threads," Shrake said. "Why don't you ever get me when I'm wearing jeans?"

"Maybe it'll be the first bag; maybe it'll take one minute," Lucas said.

"Fat chance. We're gonna smell like rotten bananas, rotten tomatoes, or rotten eggs," Shrake said. "It's always one of those."

"Not always," Jenkins said. "Sometimes there are baby diapers, and then you smell like baby shit."

"I don't believe they brought a baby with them," Lucas said. "You can sniff all the bags, and we can skip the baby-shit ones."

"Terrific…"

The bag wasn't first, second, or third, but they thought it might be the fourth, a regular black-plastic garbage bag with a pull-tie, and filled with fast-food remnants and pizza boxes and an unused box of plastic garbage bags. Why would anyone throw away a perfectly good box of trash bags, unless they were cleaning out an apartment, and had no further use for them? They took a closer look, and among other things, found a receipt for a wrench and a shovel and a box of garbage bags from a Home Depot in Hudson, Wisconsin.

"Sonofabitch. That's one block from the motel where the Hudson cop was shot," Lucas said. "I mean, one block. The store's right there."

"So this is them," Shrake said, emptying the last of the trash on the floor. "What else is in here?"

A few things: receipts in paper sacks. A receipt for two golf shirts at Macy's, size extra large, $69 each; a receipt from a sandwich shop on Wabasha Street a couple of blocks south of Macy's; a receipt for a box of bonbons from the St. Andrews Hotel. All paid in cash. A pizza box from Perruzi's, a higher-end Italian place down the street from the convention center. "It's all right here, right downtown, except for the stuff from Hudson," Shrake said.

"I gotta think the job is, too," Lucas said.

"Got some cash pickups at the bars, by the O'Meara armored cars. That's about the biggest cash deal downtown," Shrake said. "The O'Meara warehouse is pretty well protected…"

Jenkins shook his head: "Maybe they finally broke, and took off."

They left the SWAT team in place: "You have to plan to stay until daylight," Lucas told Able Peterson. "They may pull the job, whatever it is, and duck back here."

"Why?" Peterson asked.

"Get their shit together," Lucas said. "Maybe they've got a car stashed in the parking garage."

Peterson was skeptical, but agreed to stay-which was what

Lucas wanted in the first place. Cohn wasn't coming back, but he might be around somewhere, and Lucas wanted the SWAT guys in his hip pocket, not out wandering around St. Paul.