John Sandford - Wicked Prey

Briar nodded dumbly, and Letty ran across the yard, folded the switchblade, climbed on her bike, bumped back across the yard, across the street, and headed down the hill. The cop car was a block over, on Seventh, as they passed, so she managed to get down the hill unseen, pedaling furiously, through the backstreets, to the Capitol.

There, she stopped to turn her phone on, and found a dozen calls from home, and two more from Lucas's cell.

Lucas had gotten a fragmentary story from Carey, who'd been called by Weather when Letty hadn't gotten home on time. "I don't want her to think I'm betraying her, but I'm really worried," Carey said. Lucas had tracked down Whitcomb's address in a matter of a few minutes, and had broken off from the apartment surveillance.

Letty had always taken matters into her own hands, whatever the matters might be-she tended to believe that nobody could handle things quite as well as she could. Events had never proven her to be wrong. But messing with Whitcomb and one of Whitcomb's hookers, for whatever reason-and Carey had filled him in on the reason-could be an irretrievable error.

Whitcomb was a psychotic; people who got too close to him suffered because they did not-could not-understand the sheer uncontrolled malevolence of the man. Lucas believed that Whitcomb's condition was far beyond Whitcomb's own control. He'd been broken at some point, perhaps at birth, perhaps as a child, but he was simply wrong, a devil's child. There was really nothing to be done about it, other than to put him in jail forever, or kill him. Lucas thought that one or the other of those things was inevitable, a matter of time.

Now, as he rushed through the night toward Whitcomb's place, banging down onto the interstate, then almost immediately off again at the Sixth Street exit, he saw the flashers on a St. Paul squad running parallel to him, a block over on Seventh, heading up the hill past the university. He ran the red light and turned the corner and accelerated down the block, turned onto Seventh and saw the squad make the turn over toward Whitcomb's and he knew with a cold certainty where the squad was going.

If Whitcomb had done anything to Letty '

Letty had been right about that. If he'd known Whitcomb was stalking her, or anyone else in the family, Whitcomb would have died, one way or another. The problem with a psychotic was, there is no way to deflect them, once they've fixed on a course. You can't talk to them, because they're nuts.

With fear gripping his heart like an icy hand, he went after the squad.

Cohn, Cruz, and Lane spotted two bugout cars near the hotel, one in a skyway-level parking structure, another on the street. They all had keys in their pockets, and additional keys, in magnetic boxes, hung from under the bumpers of both vehicles. When they needed to move, they used the third vehicle, a rented Toyota Sienna minivan. Lane did most of the final scouting, because he was the unknown face, and what he said was what they wanted to hear: "You can't believe some of the stuff they're wearing. One woman, honest to God, she looks like she has a diamond Christmas tree hung on her. She was about a hundred years old, I could have taken it right off her neck."

"If only they're real," Cohn said. They were huddled in the back of the minivan in an underground parking ramp at a medical building near St. John's Hospital. They'd been moving since they abandoned the apartment, but the hospital turned out to be the best place to wait. People came and went at all times of the night, and sometimes sat in their cars, getting away from whatever it was that brought them to the hospital.

"There's gonna be some paste," Cruz told him. "But if you got it, when are you going to wear it? Tonight, the Academy Awards, maybe the number-one inaugural ball. Maybe the first big ball of the season in Palm Beach. A couple of other times, but tonight, for sure."

"Surprised the insurance company lets them wear it," Cohn said. He was looking sleepy, yawning, like he always did before a job. "For a thousand bucks, they could make a replica that nobody could tell but a jeweler."

"If you got robbed, it'd be almost as big an embarrassment to admit that you were wearing fakes, as losing the real thing," Cruz said. "Some of these people-not so much the Republicans as the Democrats, really-have so much money that they really don't care. They've got so much money that if they lost a five-million-dollar stone, they'd say, "So what? There's more where that came from."

"So why didn't we hold up the Democrats?" Lane asked.

"Because I didn't have the inside information on the Democrats," Cruz said. "When the moneymen would be there. And they didn't have a ball like this one, when all the big money was in one spot. They were more scattered around, movie stars in one place, hedge funds in another."

"I didn't know the Democrats had so much money," Lane said.

"An ocean of money," Cohn said. "Both of them, Republicans and Democrats. That's all that counts anymore."

"You think we'll elect a colored guy as president?" Lane asked Cruz.

"I hope so," she said. "I'm tired of all the racist bullshit that goes on. Maybe this will settle it."

"I don't know. I'm not sure that colored people are ready," Lane said.

"What are you talking about, Jesse?" Cruz asked, with some heat. "Tate was a good friend of yours. You hung out even when you didn't have to."

"That was different," Lane said.

"Ah, phooey" Cruz said. "They're all different. Every single black person is different, and when you get right down to it, none of them is what you rednecks made them out to be. You and Brute both probably got some black blood running through you, coming out of where you do."

"Some Indian, for sure," Lane said. "Cherokee."

"Lot of black blood in the Cherokee," Cohn said. "Your real God name is probably Willie Lee Thunder Cloud Crackeriferus Lane. Cracker, for short."

Lane said, "Now we hear from the fuckin' Hebrews."

Cohn laughed and said, "My great-granddaddy did all right by himself. My great-grandma was this good-looking blond southern belle. Her daddy was vice president at a steel mill down there, building guns for the Confederates. Bet her family hated that big-peckered Jew banging her brains loose every night. They had eight children before she gave it up and died in childbirth."

"How do you know he had a big pecker?" Lane asked. "They take a picture of it?"

"Well, if he didn't, where'd I get mine from?" Cohn asked.

"Ahhh, God. Men and their penises. If they didn't have them, we'd have to sew one on, just to give them something to talk about," Cruz said.

"You ever seen one?" Cohn asked casually.

"Brute…" She shook her head.

"I was just wondering, you being queer and all," he said. "If you haven't, I could show you mine. Something terrible could happen tonight. You wouldn't want to die without seeing one."

Made her laugh, which was one of the things Cohn was good at, in the last minutes before a job: taking the weight off. "I can get by without it."

"That's good, because, you know, sometimes I get that rascal out, and he don't want to go back in. I'm too goddamn tired for a big wrestling match."

A while later, Lane said, "We never sat in a car like this, on the run, and still pointing at the job. Other jobs, we would've called it off a long time ago."

Cohn said, "Yeah."

"Would you be sitting here if Lindy hadn't taken off?"

Cohn nodded. "Yeah. Yeah. We gotta get out of this, Jesse. Our days are numbered. The cops got all this stuff now. You read about it on the Internet. You know, they can sometimes get DNA if you even just grab somebody; if you just touch something. You know, they can get DNA off a goddamn beer can. If you spend any time in a place at all, they can get DNA. It's always coming off you-hair and skin cells and blood and semen ' if you sleep between two sheets, they just sure as shit can prove you did.