THE FIRST STOP was a shop on Arcade at East Seventh, a hole-in-the-wall with a hand-painted steel sign that said, “Terry’s Sports.” Inside the front window, behind a steel mesh screen, was a pump twelve-gauge shotgun with the butt cut down to a pistol grip.
“Seven-Eleven special,” Jenkins said, as they walked past it.
“I could never figure out why it’s a federal crime to saw the barrel off a shotgun, but it’s okay to cut off the butt,” Lucas said. “Same effect—you can carry it under your jacket.”
“Lawyers,” Jenkins said. “They make laws, they got no idea.”
THEY RATTLED THE DOOR and the owner buzzed them in; the shop smelled of cigarette smoke and gun-cleaning solvent. Terry was a nervous, dried-out man of fifty, the fingers of his right hand stained amber with nicotine. He nodded when they came in, recognized them as cops, and said, “Officers.”
“How much you want for the cop killer in the window?” Jenkins asked, getting the interview off on the right foot.
“Self-defense gun,” Terry said with a placating smile, showing teeth as yellow as his fingers. “Sell them mostly to women.”
“Right,” Lucas said. He took the photos of Justice Shafer and Brutus Cohn out of his pocket, unfolded them, with Cohn’s picture on top. “You seen this guy?”
Terry looked at the picture for a long five seconds, then shook his head. “Can’t say as I have.”
“How about this guy?” Lucas shuffled the papers, and put the Shafer head shot on top.
Terry looked at it for a couple of seconds, then an extra wrinkle appeared among the set on his forehead. “What’d he do?”
“Never mind that,” Jenkins said. “You seen him?”
“I did,” Terry admitted. “About a week ago. He was here maybe twenty minutes. I didn’t think he was gonna buy anything, and he didn’t.”
“Was he looking for anything in particular?” Lucas asked.
“He was looking for some .50-cal rounds in bronze,” Terry said. “I told him I could get it, good lathe-cut stuff. He asked how much, and I said, ‘Eighty bucks for ten rounds,’ and he said that was a little high. Then he looked at a Bushmaster M4, and went on his way. Haven’t seen him since.”
“Didn’t buy any ammo?” Lucas asked.
“Nope. Didn’t buy a thing,” Terry said.
Lucas said, “We’re local guys, and I gotta tell you, you’d be better off dealing with us if you’re not telling the truth. The Secret Service and the ATF are chasing all over looking for this guy. With the convention in town, I don’t have to tell you why. You don’t want to be the one who sold him some ammo and then get caught lying about it.”
“Didn’t sell him anything, with Jesus as my witness,” Terry said, holding up his right hand as though taking an oath. He looked satisfactorily worried.
Lucas nodded. “All right. Gonna have to talk to the ATF though, so you’ll probably be hearing from them. Maybe the Secret Service.”
“How much you want for the cop killer in the window?” Jenkins asked again.
“Six hundred dollars,” Terry said. “Lot of handwork in a self-defense gun. There is a police discount.”
OUT ON THE STREET, Jenkins said, “Ten percent. I’d almost be willing to do it, to get the piece off the streets, but the little cockroach would make another one.”
“First stop, and Justice Shafer is right there,” Lucas said. “That’s a hell of a coincidence.”
“That happened to me one time,” Jenkins said. “One-stop shopping.”
“When did it happen to you?” Lucas asked.
“Well, it didn’t exactly happen to me, but it happened to a guy I knew,” Jenkins said.
“Never happened to me,” Lucas said.
Back in the car, he got on the phone to Dan Jacobs at the security committee. “I don’t want to yank your weenie when everybody else is, but I’ve got some news about your pal Justice Shafer.”
Lucas told him about Terry’s, and Jacobs said, “That’s pretty interesting. The Secret Service and the ATF are doing research on him, down in Oklahoma, and they’re getting worried. Some of these gang guys say Shafer’s never been accepted because he’s sort of a pussy—never proved himself.”
“Uh-oh.”
“I’ll call them with this. They’ll send a guy around to talk to . . . Terry?”
THEIR SECOND STOP was a two-man weapons outlet in a warehouse district in Eagan, south of the Twin Cities core, a concrete-block building filled with hunting knives, compound bows, crossbows, samurai and fantasy swords, a barrel half-full of Louisville Slugger baseball bats, a shelf of lead-weighted fish-whackers, and a rack of used guns; but mostly knives. To one side, a customer in camo cargo pants was methodically pounding a six-inch target with carbon-fiber arrows, on a four-lane archery range.
The two owners, who were brothers, named Jenkins—they agreed with Jenkins that they weren’t related—both checked the photographs, and swore they’d never seen either man. Lucas asked, “What’s the advantage of the crossbow over the compound bow?”
The customer, who was shooting a compound bow, said over his shoulder, “You don’t have to know nothing to shoot a crossbow.”
Jenkins asked one of the Jenkins brothers, “If I were to ask you where I could get a switchblade, you wouldn’t know, would you?”
The Jenkins brother looked puzzled: “Well, sure. Right here. What do you want?” He walked down the counter and tapped the top of a case. Inside, a half-dozen switchblades nestled on red velvet.
Jenkins was taken aback: “Switchblades are legal?”
“Well, sure, in Minnesota,” Jenkins said. “You can order them on the Internet.”
“I didn’t know that,” Jenkins said. “Is there a police discount?”
THE FOURTH AND FIFTH dealers hadn’t seen either Cohn or Shafer, but the sixth one, their last stop of the day, had seen Shafer. The dealer, Bob Harper, worked out of his house. “He said he’d heard of me down in Oklahoma, a boy named Dan Oaks outa Norman. He thought maybe I’d have some premium .50-cal, but I didn’t. Wouldn’t have sold it to him anyway.”
“Why not?” Lucas asked. He wrote “Dan Oaks” and “Norman” in his notebook.
Harper was a thin man gone old, but still hard, with shiny cheekbones and killer eyes, two dry wattles hanging under his chin. “’Cause I’m not stupid. Some skinhead from Oklahoma shows up on my doorstep looking for .50-cal, the week before the Republican convention? I don’t need that kind of publicity.”
IN THE CAR, Lucas called Jacobs again, gave him Harper’s name, and the name of the Oklahoma dealer. “I don’t know what Shafer’s doing, but he sure as hell isn’t hiding out,” Lucas said.
“Okay—hey, thanks for the time, Lucas. This has been a help. Could you keep spreading those photos around? We need to talk to this guy.”
“No problem.”
“ALL DONE?” Jenkins asked. He pushed the button on his new switchblade, and the blade jumped out and snapped into place.
“All done,” Lucas said. “You know, you’re gonna reach in your pocket for your cell phone and you’re gonna hit that button, and blade’s gonna jump out and cut your nuts off.”
“I’ll give it to Shrake,” Jenkins said. “If it cuts his nuts off, maybe he’ll stop dating Shirley.”
“We really ought to do something about that relationship,” Lucas said. “I mean, if he won’t give it up, maybe put a legal notice in the newspaper, so nobody could accuse us of covering it up.”
JENKINS DROPPED him at the office. Carol had gone home, and Lucas looked at all the paper that she’d printed out from New York, on Cohn, looked at Cohn’s picture for a while—this was a different personality than Justice Shafer; this was a serious guy—and then slipped it in a file and walked out to his car.
Great late summer day. He trolled once through St. Paul, looking at all the cops around, saw shoulder patches from Virginia and Illinois. Like a big storm coming in, he thought, everybody watchful and hoping for the best.
He got home, kissed Sam, kissed Letty, kissed Weather, got a banana from the housekeeper, and Weather asked, “Whatever happened to the assassin?”
He told her about his day, and she said, “Well, you’re done with that, anyway. One less thing to worry about.”
4
CRUZ AND COHN SPENT Saturday morning cruising the Lyman High Hat, a boutique hotel on Loring Park in Minneapolis, a place that featured forty-dollar cheeseburgers and fifty-dollar-a-glass house champagne.
Cohn, in a baby-blue golf shirt and tan slacks, walked through the front doors, past the desk to the restaurant, past the maitre d’, took a quick look around, as though checking for friends, and then walked back out to the car. He’d already surveyed the nearby streets, and the park, stopping now and then to look at a printout of a Google satellite view of the area. He’d seen both McCall and Lane, walking separately, McCall in a neat blazer and pressed slacks, with an Obama button, Lane improbably in cargo shorts and a golf shirt, his hard, knobby legs looking as though they’d been carved from hickory.
“Let’s see the door again,” Cohn said to Cruz, when he got back in the car.
“There’s a light and a video camera covering the loading dock; they both record and live-monitor,” Cruz said. She was flipping through a notebook with handwritten notes. “The only people who look at the monitors are the desk crew, and they don’t have time for it. You won’t be breaking in, so even if they see you, they’ll think you’re staff. You’ll wear hats, keep your heads down. You go in, the staff stairway is to your left. No cameras in the stairwell. There are cameras in the hallways, but they’re direct-recorders and aren’t live anywhere.”
“So if we come out of the stairwell with masks . . .”
“You’re good. They’ll look at you afterwards, but by then, it’s too late.”
“Where did you get the uniform?” An idle question: he didn’t really care. The talk was his way of nailing down the terrain.
“Macy’s. It’s a tuxedo jacket and pants with a red dress shirt,” she said. “Now, when you’re in the hallway, you’ll see the cameras hanging down from the ceiling—they’re smoked-glass bubbles, about six inches across. You get to the door, then McCall turns his back, takes off his mask, knocks . . . If they look through the peephole, they’ll see a black guy with the room service uniform. If they open the door on a chain, you kick it and go in, and McCall pulls the mask back on. If they open it, you go in.”
“What if we meet somebody in the hallway?” Cohn asked.
“Well, you peek first, see if there’s anybody there. We’re doing it right during all the big meetings and parties, so there shouldn’t be a lot of traffic. There’s a big party in the Mississippi Ballroom, so you may get somebody coming up to pee. If you do, well, you take them into the room with you. Holding them would not be a problem: you’ll only be inside for five minutes.”
They were headed around the block, and Cohn looked back at the hotel. “Two rooms.”
“Two rooms.” Cruz nodded. “After you take five-oh-five, Lane stays with the people there, freezes them. You and McCall go down to four-thirty-one. We do the lower floor second, so if anything goes wrong, we’ll get out that much quicker. And four-thirty-one is closer to the staff stairwell. When you finish four-thirty-one, you call Lane on the cell and you all walk.”
They were easing through the tangle of streets between the park and the downtown. Cruz pointed at a parking garage.
“Two blocks, around two corners,” Cruz said. “If we have to ditch the car or if somebody gets caught on foot, we’ll have one emergency car here, another one on the street down from the park. We’ll have to position that one just before we hit. Everything like we’ve always done it: keys are with the car, magnetic box under the rear left bumper. Each car has a two-gallon plastic gas can in the back, half gas, half oil. If you have to ditch a car, try to burn it.”
Cohn nodded: of course there’d be emergency cars. And, of course there’d be gas cans. There always were, on his jobs. He adopted any advantage, or possible advantage. That was why he’d survived, and why he worked with Cruz: they saw eye-to-eye on advantages, and survival.
“I want to see that layout again—we have to know which way to go however we get out, even if we have to throw a chair through a window,” Cohn said.
“Yes,” she said.
“Feels strange,” he said, looking back at the hotel, busy, well-dressed people flowing around it. “That much cash, with no protection. You’re sure about the money?”
“Ninety percent. That’s as good as I can get it. Not as good as with a duck, but pretty damn good,” Cruz said. The group had its own slang, and referred to armored cars as “ducks,” as in “sitting ducks.” She added, “The thing that sold me was, it’s so soft.”
They stopped at the mouth of a short alley and she pointed down the alley to a loading dock. “That’s the door, off to the left. I checked the key last week. If they changed the lock last night, well, you walk away.”
Cohn looked at the door for a long five seconds, then said, “Back to Hudson.” He glanced at his watch, leaned back in the passenger seat, laced his fingers across his chest and closed his eyes. “Check the layout one last time. I want to see the emergency car. Then, do it.”
“You know what worries me the most?” Cruz asked. “What worries me is that the guy might not be there—you know, he goes out for a drink or something. Then you’ll have to make some decisions right on the spot. Whether to wait or go, and if you go, whether to come back.”
“You said there’s always somebody with the money,” Cohn said.
“That’s what I was told,” Cruz said. “There’s always somebody with the money, until it’s gone.”
THEY CALLED Lane and McCall, got them started back. At the motel in Hudson, Cohn got a cup of coffee, and then they began working over the drawings of the hotel’s interior. “Don’t want to meet a busboy carrying food up there,” McCall said.
Cruz said, tapping the drawing, “They use the staff elevator, over around the corner, here. That stairway is mostly a fire escape. I walked it up and down, there’s concrete dust on the treads, like it hardly gets used at all.”
“Two weeks ago,” Lane said.
“Nothing’s perfect,” Cruz snapped.
“Just sayin’,” McCall said.
THEY TALKED about the uncertainties. As a unit, they’d always focused on scheduled money deliveries—ATM restockings, armored cars, credit unions in southern auto-factory towns, which carried heavy cash on paydays.
Of them all, they liked the armored cars the best, because they offered a choice of attack points, and if you found the right armored car, at the right spot, you were guaranteed a major payoff and a slow reaction by the cops. None of them had ever gone after individuals, for the simple reason that individuals didn’t carry enough cash. If you’re looking at the possibility of years in prison, then the payoff should be worth the risk, they all agreed.
With the earlier targets, the certainties were large. If the armored car wasn’t at point X, and if the local cop cruiser wasn’t at point Y, then you rescheduled. Credit unions didn’t move, and they always opened at the same time, and closed at the same time. If the factory passed out the checks at 10 A.M., then the first guys wouldn’t sneak out to cash them before 10:05. Therefore, you had the hour between 9 A.M. and 10:05 to hit the place . . .
With this job, they weren’t even certain that the money would be there. Cruz said it would be—ninety percent, anyway—but still: with this job, the uncertainties were larger than usual.
“THE FIRST GUY, John Wilson, he’s a little guy, but he’s got a temper,” Cruz told them. “He could give you some trouble. That’s the way it is. There may be one or two other guys in the room with him. If there isn’t anyone else there, handle it however you want. If there is, you crush him. McCall—use your pistol. Beat him up, get him on the floor, kick his head, kick his balls. Don’t kill him, but hurt him. The thing is, downstre
am, the word is going to start getting out about these guys. If the later targets hear about it, they’ll get worried. We need them scared. We need them backing away from us. Makes everything easier.”
“What if they get security?”
“They won’t. They can’t have anyone else around when they’re passing out the cash. What they’re doing is a crime.”
“But . . .”
“If they do get a guy with a gun, you’ll have to deal with it. But they won’t: that’s the beauty of the whole thing. The cops finding out what they’re doing is worse than getting beat up and robbed. Now, the room. I couldn’t get into all the rooms, but I got into a few. I believe he’ll have a sitting room with a bedroom off to your right as you go in . . .”
CRUZ WAS about to go on, but there was a knock at the door. She froze. There was a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the doorknob.
“They’re not using a key to knock,” she blurted. “It’s not the hotel.”
“Answer the door,” Cohn told Lane. He’d been lying on the bed, now was on his feet.
Lane went to the door, opened it just a crack, said, “Shoot,” and opened it wide. A young blond woman carrying an old-style hard makeup case stepped through, spotted Cohn, cried, “Brutus,” and threw herself at him. He picked her up, her legs wrapped around his waist. Cruz shouted at him, as Lane closed the door, “You fucker. You fucker, Brute. Goddamn you . . .”
“How are you, Lindy?” Lane asked, and to McCall, he said, “It’s Lindy.”
“I’m outa here,” Cruz said.
“Rosie, calm down, okay?” Cohn said, over Lindy’s shoulder.
Lindy said, “Yeah, calm down, Rosie. Jesus Christ.”
“Lindy’s just visiting. I’ll put her on the plane home in a few days,” Cohn said.
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