Lucas Davenport Collection

by John Sandford

  “They got some balls,” Elleson said. “There were two hundred cops within three blocks of here. They had to drive right through them to get in and out.”

  “Did we get them on video? Any chance?” Lucas asked. The feds had come up with a grant for surveillance cameras, and they were all over the streets.

  “Depends on which street they were on,” Elleson said. “We’ve got video on the front and the side, but not along the back.”

  “Got to look at it, man: if we could spot the car, that’d give us a big leg up. Can’t hide the car.”

  “I’ll get that going,” Elleson said. “What’s Benson’s family situation?”

  “He’s single, divorced four or five years ago. No kids. Parents live up in St. Cloud, I think. I’ll have our duty guy pull the file . . . We gotta look at the tapes.”

  “I’m sorry about this, man,” Elleson said.

  The elevator dinged and Del stepped out, looked both ways, spotted Lucas and came on down the hall. “Is it true?” Looked at Lucas’s face, and said, “It’s true.”

  THE CONDO was only six blocks from the hotel, and after parking the car, Cohn and Cruz took the back stairs up. Cruz took a peek at the lobby before they walked into it, and then they were inside. Lindy was sitting on the couch reading a copy of Women’s Health magazine, and Lane came out of the back room, a smile on his face, and he asked, “How’d it go?” And then, the smile slipping away, “Where’s Tate?”

  Cohn told him: “They ambushed us.”

  “Oh, no,” Lindy, pale-faced, hand to her mouth.

  “It’s my fault,” Cruz said. “I should have known. We couldn’t do this many . . .”

  “I thought they couldn’t tell the cops,” Lane said to her.

  “That must have gone out the window when the cop was killed in Hudson,” Cruz said.

  Cohn said, “I’m so sick I can’t even spit.” He looked at Cruz. “It’s not your fault, Rosie. I pushed for it, but there’s a smart guy on the other side, and he punked us.” He gave them a blow-by-blow account of the entry and the shooting, lied about McCall getting shot, said the cop shot him twice. “Never had a chance. Tate kicked the door and boom-boom, he goes down and I see the cop and I hit him, then I hit him again, and then this woman’s on the floor and I hit her, and then I’m out of there. I got out clean, but . . .”

  “I’m heading home,” Lane said. He looked around the condo. “Clean this place up . . . get out of here.”

  “I’m with you,” Cruz said. She looked at Brute. “You and Lindy ought to get out of here. You’d be safer as a couple. You can use your Visa card and driver’s license for about two weeks yet, rent a car, head south. You’ve got enough money to last a long time in Belize or Costa Rica.”

  Lane said to him, “That’s what you gotta do, man. You can have Tate’s cut—they’re not looking for me or Cruz, but you’ve got to get out of here, you need the money. With Tate’s cut, you got almost a million and a half.”

  “Not enough,” Cohn said. He ran his hands through his hair and said, “Fuck it, I’m gonna go get a drink.”

  Cruz said, “Brute, don’t do it. The cops . . .”

  Cohn said, “Fuck ’em.”

  “There are a million cops out there. If they spot you . . .”

  “Fuck ’em,” he said again. “I don’t look anything like those pictures. Especially if I’m sitting down. I’m gonna get a drink.” To Lindy: “You coming?”

  “Brute: bad idea, I’m really scared.” She looked scared.

  “I’m going,” he said. “That fuckin’ McCall, man,” and tears ran down his face and he went out the door.

  The door opened behind him and Cruz came out with her purse and said, “If you’re going, I’ll go with you.”

  SHE’D SCOUTED the town thoroughly, and steered him through the nearly empty skyways, for the best part of a half mile, then outside and across a street and into an outdoor mall, with bars and outdoor seating, to a place called Juicy’s. They got a table in a corner back against a building where Cohn couldn’t be seen head-on, and he ordered a cheeseburger and a double martini with four olives, and she got fries and a Diet Pepsi. He sat looking at the tabletop for five minutes, drinking the martini, then said, hollow-eyed, “What do I do, Rosie?”

  “Can’t do the hotel anymore,” she said. “We really needed four people. Three was marginal. Now we’ve only got two, even if Jesse was willing. That won’t work; too many people to control. So, we do what we did when there was trouble in the past—we get out. Jesse and I both have cars at the airport. We take the rentals back right now, clean out the apartment, get out of here late tonight, in my car. You and me and Lindy, maybe to Des Moines. Go out to the airport, you rent a car there, take it to Vegas, give the cash to Harry and move it to your investment account. What do you have left in there?”

  “Maybe a quarter.”

  “So you’ll have almost two. That’ll kick off eighty thousand a year until you die. There are lots of nice places where you can live pretty well on eighty thousand.”

  “Pretty well—if you want to live like a retiree. You know, watching your dollars. Watching your budget,” Cohn said. “Won’t be any Social Security or Medicare or any of that . . . Goddamnit, I need at least four. Five would be better. On two hundred thousand a year, you know, I could live okay.”

  “Brute, you’ve got to deal with reality,” Cruz said. “You get someplace safe, cool off, maybe I can put together one more big one. A good safe armored car, a credit union.”

  “Credit union won’t do it. Most we ever took out of a credit union was a half,” Cohn said.

  “With no work and no risk,” she said.

  “So I need three more million, and my cut on a big credit union is maybe two hundred, so you’re saying we ought to do fifteen credit unions?”

  She leaned forward: “What I’m saying is, we need to get the hell out of St. Paul. We can worry about money some other time. There are more important things: like staying alive.”

  “But this hotel . . .”

  “We don’t have the personnel . . .”

  They were talking about it, working through the original plan with Cohn on his second double martini, when a crippled man in a wheelchair, a dusty head-bent street kid, and an overweight woman took a table fifteen feet away. The cripple looked at Cohn without recognition, sneered and turned away and waved at a waitress and shouted, “Hey! Hey! Am I invisible or some fuckin’ thing?”

  Cohn leaned close to Cruz and said, “It’s yon bugger—the one who ran over my feet at the airport.” The yon bugger came off as an Alabama drawl—the British accent had vanished with four days in St. Paul.

  “Ignore him,” Cruz said.

  “Right.” Cohn gulped the last of the second martini and waved at the waitress.

  Cruz said, “Better slow down on the martinis, you’re gonna be on your ass.”

  “Ah . . .” He ordered the third one and said, “When I was living in York, I’d get up every morning and read the Times, the Independent , the Guardian, and the Financial Times. I’d have four cups of coffee, and by the time I was finished with all that, it’d be noon, and a friend would come around, and we’d have a lunchtime martini or two or three. The Brits drink like fish. So I’m in training.”

  “WAS THIS FRIEND male or female?” Cruz asked. Cohn cocked an eyebrow at her and grinned, and Cruz said, “I hope Lindy doesn’t find out. All we need is her throwing a fit.”

  “I ain’t gonna tell her, but I don’t think she’d be too upset. Probably guessed,” Cohn said. The third martini arrived, and he took a sip. “My woman there . . . nice lady. Wish I could’ve said good-bye. Told her I’d be gone for three weeks and would see her then.”

  “That’s life,” Cruz said. She deeply didn’t care.

  “I’d read the Financial Times every morning,” Cohn said. He was now drunk, Cruz realized. “You know what? All this stock market shit that’s going on, they’re all to blame for it . . .” He gestured around
the patio. “The fuckin’ politicians. People say I’m a criminal, look at these bastards. Fuck over ordinary folks, they’re sitting here laughing and singing, suckin’ up the money and power.”

  Cruz covered his free hand with hers and said, smiling, “You’re not exactly ordinary folks, Brute. You’re more like Jesse James.”

  “No, but my brothers and sisters are,” he said. “Ordinary people.”

  “You don’t like your brothers and sisters,” she said. “And they don’t like you.”

  “That’s not the point . . .” He gulped down the last of the third drink, and fished out the last olive. “You know what I need . . .” He interrupted himself: “Look at this.”

  The cripple had the overweight woman by the neckline of her dress and was snarling something at her. Other patrons were looking away; nobody wanted to get involved in a fight between a woman and a cripple. A waitress eased away, looking for help.

  WHITCOMB HAD Briar by the neckline of her dress and snarled, “Fuckin’ bitch, you’ll do what I tell you or I’ll drag your fuckin’ ass back . . .”

  COHN, DRUNK and angry at life, hissed at Cruz, “The bugger’s a pimp. See that? That’s one of his girls. Fuckin’ nasty little pimp . . .”

  WHITCOMB HEARD the word, or enough of it, and turned and saw the tall dark-haired man staring at him from the corner table, and pushed Briar back and said, loudly, “You got a problem, fuckwad?”

  The woman with the dark-haired man said something, an urgent twist to her face, and he said something back, and then the woman got up and walked rapidly toward the exit gate.

  The dark-haired man threw money at the table, then stepped over to Whitcomb and said quietly, “If you don’t take your hands off this young woman, you little fuckin’ greasy pimp, or if you use that language on me again, I’m going to throw you in front of a fuckin’ car.”

  The guy was drunk, Whitcomb realized. He realized it in a stupid, distant way, and the one thing he’d learned for sure as a cripple was that nobody fucked with cripples. Not deliberately. He flicked away Briar’s neckline, and she rocked back and said, “Randy, maybe . . .”

  Whitcomb snapped, “Shut the fuck up,” and said to Cohn, “Listen, you fuckin’ twat . . .”

  Cohn yanked him out of the wheelchair so quickly that he might have been levitated by God.

  COHN KNEW he was drunk, knew this could be the end, but McCall was dead, and this fuckin’ cripple . . . this pimp . . .

  He snatched Whitcomb out of the chair with one powerful hand on Whitcomb’s neck, and the other, as the cripple came up, on his belt. Two women screamed and he knocked a chair over with his leg and a table scraped across the brick patio with a metallic scream, and Cohn was blind now to everything but a hole in the air in front of him, leading out to the street.

  He took six long strides to the fence that separated the bar patio from the sidewalk, yanking Whitcomb along, Whitcomb windmilling, another two steps through the patio gate and across the sidewalk to the curb, and then he heaved Whitcomb at the windshield of an oncoming minivan.

  Whitcomb was unnaturally light, because of his withered legs, and he hit the hood of the car, flattened over the windshield, screaming, windmilling with his arms, then skidded off the far side and was hit by another car.

  Cohn didn’t slow down to watch, though he heard the satisfying thump of the second car. He turned back through the patio, walked into the bar, a woman’s white face following him. Out of sight of the witnesses, he stripped off his black sport coat to show his white short-sleeved shirt, and quickly swerved out the side exit and down the street.

  He could hear people shouting from the patio, but there was no pursuit as he turned the corner. He walked down the block and around, across the street, past a cluster of cops who were looking down at the screaming, talking on shoulder radios. Another half block, and he turned back into the same skyway they’d taken out of the condo.

  Didn’t feel good: there was still McCall back there, dead.

  But he didn’t feel as bad as he had, either.

  LUCAS AND DEL sat on a bench in the hotel’s lobby while the St. Paul cops worked the crime scene. Del said, “I got the notification going. He’s got parents and a couple of sisters.”

  “Okay.”

  Neither one of them spoke for a minute, then Del said, “I feel kinda bad that I don’t feel worse. I didn’t much like the guy. He was a stiff.”

  “Still one of us,” Lucas said.

  “You know what I mean,” Del said.

  “Yeah. Freaks me out, though. Three cops killed, this year, and we were involved in all three of them. That Indian dude up north, on Virgil’s case, the guy in Hudson, now Benson.”

  “Yeah. What can you say?”

  “Lot of guys gone down over the years,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah.”

  Another minute, then Lucas looked at his watch.

  “What’re you going to do?” Del asked.

  “First thing, right at the crack of dawn tomorrow, soon as the TV people wake up, I’m gonna have a big-mother press conference,” Lucas said. “I’m gonna paper the country with pictures of Cohn and this chick. Then, we’re gonna find them and kill them.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Del said.

  14

  LUCAS WOKE AT 5 A.M. after three hours of sleep. He came up feeling depressed, a mental cloud hanging overhead; a darkness. He shaved carefully, let a hot shower beat on his shoulders and back, getting in the mood to talk to the press. Thinking it over. And Benson . . . gone. If he’d been in the room, would he have done any better? Why had they opened the door? Benson hadn’t been ready, his vest undone, the shotgun dropped . . .

  Weather, who would have been up in a half hour anyway, had rolled out and was brushing her teeth when he got out of the shower. He toweled off and then wrapped his arms around her and squeezed and said, halfheartedly, “Naked man attacks helpless housewife.”

  She gave him an elbow and grumped, “Back off,” and, “You better get going,” and a moment later, “I still can’t believe it.” She’d known Benson, from another case.

  “I . . . ah, never mind,” Lucas said, and he went and got dressed, a somber suit for a somber day.

  THE PRESS CONFERENCE was set for six, to catch the earliest news programs, especially locally and on the West Coast, where the unknown woman might have come from. That gave him time to eat breakfast before he headed out, time to again work through what he was going to say. Del and Shrake and Jenkins and Neil Mitford, the political operator, and Rose Marie Roux, the state public safety commissioner, would all be there, Rose Marie speaking for the governor, and both Mitford and Roux working the reporters off-camera.

  Lucas ate Egg Beaters and bacon, with coffee, heard the paper hit the front porch and went and got it, glanced at the headlines. The killings had been too late to catch the paper, although they’d be all over the television broadcasts—one cop, one innocent woman, and one masked intruder, all dead in one of the most expensive hotels in the Cities, right in the middle of the convention.

  The press conference, Lucas thought, on the way in, might not be entirely friendly. He took his truck instead of the Porsche, for the reduced flash, and wondered whether he’d screwed up. If they really believed that a murder gang was operating in town, maybe there should have been two cops in each room? And fewer rooms, if necessary? They simply hadn’t had the manpower, with the convention in town—and maybe they hadn’t had the faith that anything would really happen. Maybe he’d been a bit perfunctory in his briefing of Benson and the other guys.

  But they were supposed to be pros—they were supposed to know how to handle a deal like this. They all knew that a cop had been killed in Hudson. Why had Benson unlocked the door? The killers had been able to kick the safety bolt, but wouldn’t have been able to kick the cross lock, if the door hadn’t been opened . . .

  No answers yet: maybe he’d get some from the crime-scene people.

  ROSE MARIE ROUX, his boss, was getting
out of her Buick when he pulled into the BCA parking lot. She waited for him, squinting against the early morning sun, and when he caught up with her, said, “The governor’s going to call Benson’s folks this morning.”

  “All right.”

  “You good?” she asked.

  “Aw . . . you know.”

  She nodded. She’d been a cop before she was a lawyer, and a politician. “Let a little of it out, when you’re talking to the cameras. Get angry. Makes better tape—you’ll get better distribution on the pictures.”

  He half-laughed—snorted—and said, “Pretty fucking pathetic when you have to pull that bullshit.”

  “Modern times,” she said.

  NELLY CASSESFORD from Channel Three was walking up the sidewalk from the Channel Three van, carrying a cable of some sort. She saw Lucas and Rose Marie and slowed down to wait for them.

  “We need to get started right on time, because we’re up to our necks in convention stuff,” she said. She was a slight, dark-haired woman with warm brown eyes. “Lots of trouble last night, lots of tape.”

  “We’re good,” Lucas said. “Did you talk to your guys about getting this out to LA?”

  “Yup. Larry Johnston called them last night. They like that LA connection with the woman, don’t care so much about the convention, so you’ll get some time. Did you talk to everybody?”

  Lucas nodded. “Yeah. I just hope they don’t kiss us off.”

  “They won’t. This is great stuff—manhunt. Woman-hunt. Unknown killers. Good-looking femme fatale. Appeal to the public for help.” She didn’t say, “Dead cops,” which was good.

  THERE WERE four cameras and a cooperative light setup in the BCA conference room. Del, Jenkins, and Shrake, all looking tired and ruffled, were clustered in the back of the room, and Mitford was talking to a St. Paul political reporter. He spotted Lucas and Lucas went that way, and Mitford asked, “You all set?”