John Sandford - Wicked Prey

Letty stuck out a fist for a bump: "If I ever have one more thing to do with either of them, no matter how small, I'll tell you first," she said. She meant it this time: the Randy problem was gone.

They bumped fists and were done with it.

"Now," Lucas said, "if we could only find that fuckin' Cohn."

"You gotta watch your language a little more," Weather said to Lucas.

"Maybe they're holding up the Republican Party," Letty said.

"You can't hold up a party," Lucas said. "You gotta hold up a thing. There's gotta be one place, there's gotta be some money moving, we're watching all the armored car warehouses, they're all scrambling their routes ' I can't get it."

"Sleep on it," Weather said.

By the time they were all done, it was after midnight.

Weather and Letty went to bed, and Lucas checked again with Shrake, who said that nothing had changed. "I'm going to bag out on my couch for a while," Lucas said. "Maybe you and Jenkins should trade off. We need somebody there to keep an eye on the place until we're sure they're gone; but there's no point in both of you being there."

"What time will you be back?"

Lucas looked at his watch: "I'll set my alarm for three, see you about three-thirty. If you want to send Jenkins home, tell him to come back around seven to relieve me."

"Sounds like a deal," Shrake said. "What about the SWAT?"

"When were they due to quit?"

"Anytime."

"Ah… tell them to hang on until three o'clock. It's all overtime, anyway. But if it ain't happened by three, it probably won't-nobody working after that."

"See you at three-thirty," Shrake said.

Lucas got a pillow and an alarm clock from the bedroom- Weather was cutting in the morning, as she was most mornings, and he didn't want to disturb her in the middle of the night-kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the couch.

As he dozed off, he wondered what he had heard that night, pinging in the back of his head, that worried him so much.

They'd been stuck in the van so long that they were all a little groggy. Toward the end of the wait, Cohn looked at his watch every three minutes and finally said, "Fuck it: let's do it."

Cruz: "Twenty minutes yet. It's all right to be late, but it's not all right to be early."

"I'm going nuts in here," Cohn said.

"Then let's go for a walk," Cruz said. "There's nobody around right now, we can get out of here, down the stairs, take a hike around the block. And we'll feel better."

Lane said, "I could use a walk. I'm tired and I'm scared."

They piled out of the van, walked down the stairs. A nurse was just crossing the street from the hospital and she nodded at them and went into the parking structure. Lane said, "This way," and they followed him down the street, away from the lights of downtown. Around the corner, it was even darker, but they weren't worried, since they were the ones who were supposed to be lurking in the dark '

They turned another corner and suddenly there were lights on the street, and, in the distance, people-not many, but a few, outside the Xcel Center where John McCain had been nominated for the presidency.

"Still a little traffic," Lane said.

"This is why I had Shafer ready to go," Cruz said. "I was going to call the cops, tell them I'd seen him on a roof. Like he was hiding out in one of these old buildings, waiting for McCain to come in. Every cop in town would have been over here."

"Woulda worked," Cohn said. He windmilled his arms for a few steps, looked at his watch again. "Why'd you pick three-fifteen?"

"Because most of the overnight hotel employees get off at three," Cruz said. "There'll be a short-order cook and a busboy in the kitchen, but they stay down there-it's in the basement-because they're cleaning up. The rest of the people ' You figure most people who get off at three might linger a few minutes, but not long. There's nothing to do. So, give them fifteen or twenty minutes to clear out. Then the day cooks and the rest of the kitchen staff start coming in at five o'clock. They never come in early-they're getting up on alarm clocks. Add it all up and the best time to get in will be around three-fifteen or three-thirty. That'll give us an hour without interference."

"Except maybe for a couple of night janitors."

"I explained that."

"I wish I could think of all that shit," Lane said. A moment of silence, and he added, "Little more than an hour from now, we'll know how it all came out."

Cohn laughed and said, "That's what I think when I'm going into the dentist's office. An hour from now, and you'll be walking out."

They ambled along, taking the night air, looking for other streetwalkers while forcing the minutes down the line: spotted some cops outside the X, but in twos, rather than in crowds. "Most of them have been sent home," Cruz said. "That's a bonus. If there was a riot somewhere, and they were all running around, that'd be another uncontrolled factor."

They turned another corner, walked down the street the hospital was on, and turned down toward the parking structure again. Cohn looked at his watch a last time. "If we drove out of the parking garage right now, we'd get to the hotel at three-fifteen," he said. "No point in slow-walking anymore."

Back in the van, Lane took the wheel, Cohn sat in the passenger seat, and Cruz got in the back, popped her travel case, took out a gray pinstriped women's business suit, and changed over, aware that Cohn was paying attention to her ass.

"Thanks for caring," she said, as she buttoned the blouse.

"Hell, it'd be kinda insulting if I didn't," Cohn said.

She pulled on the jacket and snapped on a small red tie, and then an expensive long brown wig, looked at herself in the window, getting it all straight. Lane had had to make a loop away from the Xcel, circling, to get back through town to the parking ramp behind the St. Andrews. He pulled into the ramp, wound up three floors, and stopped behind one of the emergency cars. Cohn got out, popped the trunk on the parked car, and transferred the weapons bags, tool bags, gloves, and masks into the van, and slid the door shut. Lane took them back down the exit and out, and left, past the St. Paul Hotel, around the corner, down the street, and into the front turnout in front of the St. Andrews.

Cruz hopped out, shut the door, and walked inside, moving easily past the front desk, past the closed bar, past the gift shop, past the closed restaurant-and found two men sitting in the restaurant talking quietly, a liquor bottle and two glasses between them. Breath coming a little faster now, heartbeat picking up. She went back to the front desk where two young women smiled at her, and she asked, "Is anything open? Anyplace where I could just get a snack? I'm famished."

One of the women shook her head. "Everything's closed, I'm sorry. You could still get room service." "Okay. Well, thanks."

Outside, Cohn popped the door on the van and she said, "We're good. Two women at the desk, two drunks in the restaurant, right inside the door, in the dark. That's it."

Cohn looked at Lane: "You good?"

Lane nodded and said, "I guess."

They all pulled on latex gloves and Cohn rolled a mask up like a thin watch cap and then pulled a big baseball hat over it.

The hat sat too high on his head, and looked a little goofy, but what the hell, there was a political convention going on, and goofier-looking people with goofier-looking hats were all over the place. Cruz pulled off the wig, put the end of a rolled-up nylon sock around the top of her head, and then pulled the wig back on. Cohn retrieved a silenced 9mm pistol from the weapons bag, and another, smaller, unsilenced weapon that he handed to Cruz. A silenced Uzi remained in the bag, with a big Cleveland drill and a bunch of spare drill bits-Lane's stuff. "All right?" Cohn asked. "All right," Cruz said.