John Sandford: Wicked Prey

Karen started shaking again, and there was a gust of odor from her direction, and Cruz said, "Did you…"

Karen started crying and nodded and said, "I peed my pants."

"Ah, Jesus," Cruz said. "Get in the chapel. Get in the chapel."

"Don't shoot me…"

Karen was replaced by Ann, who seemed calmer.

"There's no reason to be afraid, as long as you do what we tell you," Cruz explained, with some asperity. "There was no reason for Karen to do that."

"She's scared," Ann said. She had a little accent, which made Cruz think she was from somewhere else, like Armenia or Russia. A peasant, like Cruz's own mother: peasants were tough, and needed watching. "There's nothing to be scared about."

"Then why's there a dead man in there?" Ann asked. A man and his wife, both in formal dress, pushed through the door.

Cruz said quietly, so only Ann could hear, "Good evening. Can we help you?"

Ann smiled at them and said, "Good evening," and Cruz moved back out of sight, and heard the man say, "Hi," and the two of them went on past the desk and down the hall to the elevators. A minute later, they were gone.

"See, that was easy," Cruz said. She looked at her watch. Eighteen minutes. She said to the desk clerk, "Come here. Just to the strong-room door."

The woman followed her back, not too close, and Cruz pushed the door open with a foot and asked, "How are we doing?"

"I'm working in a fuckin' gold mine in here," Lane said. He was sweating over the drill, had rolled the mask away from his face. "I can't believe it. A fuckin' gold mine."

And he hit the next box with the drill.

Lucas woke in the dark, disoriented, his neck twisted a little by the pillow propped against the arm of the couch. His pant legs and shirtsleeves were pulled up, and felt wrinkled and unclean, and his mouth tasted sour. He squinted through the dark at the red numbers of the alarm clock: 2:56. The alarm would go off in four minutes.

Not an easy sleep: he'd been disturbed by a sense of something undone, unrecognized, the running tail of a thought, but he couldn't quite catch it.

He sat up, in the light of a single lamp in the corner of the room, turned off the clock, picked up his shoes and then dropped them again, stretched and tiptoed down the hall through the master bedroom-Weather was breathing deeply, evenly, into her pillow- and into the bathroom. He shut the door, brushed his teeth by the light of a nightlight, splashed cold water in his face, and snuck back through the bedroom to the couch, and put on his shoes.

He stuck his face out the front door: the night was cool, almost cold. He relocked the door, got a light jacket from the front closet, and walked out to the car. The cool air felt good, fresh, and drove the sleep further back. He pulled out onto Mississippi River Boulevard, the lights of Minneapolis winking across the river valley, turned the corner and headed down to Cretin Avenue.

Mentally reviewed the evening before: the deployment of the troops, the search for Cohn, the discovery of the apartment. It was most likely, he thought, that Cohn had gone. At the moment, he could be rolling through Omaha, or Kansas City, or Chicago, on his way to a private plane ride to obscurity.

But why had he lingered as long as he had?

Cretin Avenue was essentially empty. In the mile or so out to I-94, he passed only a half-dozen other cars. The highway itself was busier, but mostly with long-haul trucks, going about their nocturnal businesses. He let the car out a little, and was downtown in a couple of minutes. He parked in a no-parking area out front of the condos, and called Shrake on his cell phone: "I'm out front."

"Be right there," Shrake said.

Shrake pushed open the glass door to let Lucas inside, and asked, "Everything okay with Letty?"

"She's fine-I goddamned near had a heart attack," Lucas said; and again he felt the mental bump.

What the hell. He looked querulously at Shrake, who asked, "What?"

And then he got it.

"Ah ' ah." He looked wildly around the condominium, turned back toward his car, said, "Ah…" and Shrake asked, again, "What?"

Letty had said something like, Maybe they're holding up the Republican Party.

Lucas said to Shrake, urgently, "Come on, come on ' We need some guys…"

"What?"

"They're holding up the Republican party," Lucas said. "The party-the goddamn ball. The dance. All those people on the streets, we saw them all night walking up there, diamonds all over them…"

Shrake was the tiniest bit skeptical: "They're holding up the party?"

"C'mon," Lucas said. "Get in the car. Get on the phone. It's gotta be either the St. Paul or the St. Andrews. Hell, maybe it's both."

Shrake shook his head but got in the car and called the duty man at the BCA and said, "Get onto St. Paul, right now, get some guys over in Rice Park, over behind that TV stand, over by the Ordway anybody you can get. If they got armor, it's better, don't let them be seen from the St. Paul Hotel or the St. Andrews. We think there could be a holdup going on ' The Cohn gang, yeah, get some guys…"

Lucas let him talk and concentrated on the driving: in a straight line, six blocks or eight or ten blocks, something like that. But the streets were all blocked off, and he didn't know exactly where the barricades were. He headed up the hill at speed, running every stoplight they came to, and they were all red, and around the north side of the blockades. Shrake was clutching his phone: "Easy, man, easy, man, Jesus Christ, you're gonna kill us before we get there."

The Porsche held on like it had claws until he pumped to a stop behind the old federal building. "Let's go," he said.

Shrake was on the phone: "Gotta get some guys ' I don't care, we gotta get some guys…"

There were two cops waiting, both from St. Paul. Lucas ran up, said, "I'm Davenport, with the BCA. This is Shrake. It's possible that either the St. Paul Hotel or the St. Andrews is being robbed exactly this minute-or maybe in a little while." He grinned at them. "Or maybe not at all. Shit, I don't know. But I think so. The thing is, if they're in there, we have to stop them. If they're still on the way in, we can't let them see us, because we need them to make their move. And maybe ' we're wasting our time."

A squad car turned the corner and pulled to the curb. Shrake jogged over and talked quietly to the cops inside, and they both got out, unconsciously hitching up their gun belts.

"What're we going to do?" one of the cops asked Lucas.

"Shrake and I will take a peek at the hotels. We want one of you with us, for the uniform, and we want a couple more blocking the back exit. We need at least one guy to run around and take the stairway up into the skyway…"

The cops from the squad had a shotgun and an Mbleaf in the trunk. Lucas put them back in the car: "Get around behind the hotels, fast as you can do it. I want you"-he pointed at the guy with the Mbleaf- "at the top of the stairway in the St. Paul. Don't let anybody through, but be careful with that thing, for Christ's sakes. Don't shoot any little old ladies."

The shotgun he wanted outside the back door.

Another cop car, directed by St. Paul communications, stopped behind Lucas's Porsche and two more cops got out. Lucas kept talking to the first four:

"Talk to your guys, get some backup behind you, but get into place. If they're in there, they could be coming out any minute."

It took longer to get organized than Lucas had hoped, because it was, technically speaking, a cluster-fuck. But with everybody on their way, with more St. Paul cops moving in, he nodded at Shrake and said, "Let's look at it."

The St. Paul Hotel was probably the oldest, and one of the two fanciest, in St. Paul. Lucas, Shrake, and the chosen St. Paul cop, a gray-haired sergeant whose name was Larkin, strolled down the sidewalk that ran past the side of the hotel, looking at the front entrance. The hotel cultivated a garden alongside the circular drive in front, and in the cold light from the street, the flowers looked pale and ghostly.