Wicked Prey

by John Sandford

Ranch was all for it; $250 in crank all gone. He hovered over Briar, his insane face a half inch from hers, howling, no words, a dog howl, and she struggled into her dress, the blood on her back seeping through the thin cotton, and Randy marched them out the back door and down the ramp.

  ***

  Letty was there, bouncing her bike across the yard. They didn't see her immediately, and she climbed off and dropped the bike: Whitcomb, Briar, and Ranch looked like some kind of surrealist parade, something from a masked ball, a man in a wheelchair pumping a stick like a drum major, screaming unintelligibly, followed by Briar, hurt, staggering, bloody, and then Ranch, in his Jockey shorts, holding on to the ramp railing, barely able to walk, still howling like a dog.

  Then Whitcomb saw Letty.

  He hit the brakes, and Briar stumbled, and one of the chair's wheels went off the concrete at the bottom of the ramp. And the chair tilted and Whitcomb screamed at her, and she wrenched it upright.

  Whitcomb jabbed the stick at Letty and screamed, "There she is. There she is. Get her! Get her! Ranch, get her!"

  Letty crossed the yard and hit the button on the switchblade and the blade flicked out. "I'm going to cut your head off," she said to Whitcomb.

  Whitcomb saw the knife and recoiled, then lifted his stick overhead with both hands and screamed at Briar, "Push me, push me," and at Ranch, "Get her, get her," and Ranch stumbled off the ramp and Letty turned the knife at him, and Ranch ran at her and she ducked away and he kept going in a straight line and then stumbled over his own feet and fell facedown.

  Letty turned back to Whitcomb, who was screaming at Briar, "Push me, get her," and unsatisfied with the progress, turned and slashed at Briar with the butt of his punishment stick. The butt caught her on the end of the nose and she went down, bleeding from the nose, and he screamed at her, "Get up, you bitch; you fuckin' ' gonna cut you a new goddamn nose…"

  She got to her feet and Letty shouted, "Juliet, go back, go back in the house, the police are coming," but Briar pulled the wheelchair around in a circle and Whitcomb slashed at her again and screamed, "Not that way, you cunt, not that way…"

  She'd aimed the chair at the back of the yard. The last renters had had a bad dog which they kept staked out at the back of the house, and the dog had worn the grass down to hard dirt; and behind that was the bluff that led down into Swede Hollow.

  Briar said, "I loved you, Randy," and then she began pushing the chair toward the bluff, faster and faster, Letty calling, "Juliet, Juliet…" Ranch staggered to his feet and Letty turned toward him, pointing the knife at his chest, but he staggered around her, after Briar, as though he were trying to catch them-no chance of that; one of his legs was working harder than the other and he couldn't keep going in a straight line, but tended off in circles.

  Whitcomb was still trying to thrash back at Briar with his stick, and tried to brake with one hand, but Briar was stronger than he was and at the end of the yard he grabbed both wheels and shouted, "Oh, shit," and she ran him right off the edge and Randy Whitcomb went screaming sixty miles an hour down a seventy-degree slope into a wall of trees.

  He hit it with the impact of a small car driving into a brick wall.

  Briar stood, looking down, stunned by what she'd done. Letty came up and looked over the edge; then Ranch got there, well away from Letty, and he peered down the bluff and then said to Briar, "You fuck."

  Letty heard a siren: still a way out, but not too far. She said to Briar: "Juliet, don't tell them I was here. Lie. Okay? Don't tell them."

  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.

  Chapter 21

  ***

  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. "Whe
n 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.

  "Then in England, they put up these movie cameras everywhere," Cohn continued. "You see them on posts and street corners, watching you all the time. Big Brother. You're always watched. There were these Arab guys, they were up to something, they tracked them all the way across town on these cameras. Right from one camera to the next. You knock over an armored car there, or a bank, and the cops could get out the cameras and track you wherever you go. That'll be here, sooner or later. They'll watch every fuckin' thing you do, and people will be saying, well, if you don't do anything wrong, what's your problem? That's what they say in England."

  "It's only going to get worse," Cruz agreed. "Look how quick they tracked me down-they're all talking to each other all the time now. They can do fingerprints in five minutes. Five minutes! Twenty years ago, it could take them weeks, even with a good set of prints. When I was scouting this thing, I read that Minnesota has a law that says everybody who's convicted of a crime has to give up some DNA. They put it on file, and when they get a crime, and they get some DNA, they can run it like that," and she snapped her fingers. "They were going to pass a law that said that whenever anybody was arrested, they had to give up DNA, even though they hadn't been proven guilty of anything. That got stopped, but it'll come back. Pretty soon, they'll start taking DNA from babies, to protect the babies, is what they'll say. In case your kid disappears, they can find him later. Identify him. They'll scare people into giving it up."

  "There are still places you can go, and get away from it-in our lifetimes, anyway," Cohn said. "Belize, maybe. Lots of Americans in Costa Rica. New Zealand, maybe."

  "I'll just go back to the farm. Try to make that work," Lane said. "Get serious about it."

  ***

  Cohn said to Cruz after a while, "Tell me the truth. Are you Mexican?"

  She shook her head. "I was born and raised in LA. My folks came across the border back in the fifties. Funny thing is, one of my grandfathers was an American who settled down there. Liked the women. Never did go back across to the States."

  "You speak Spanish?"

  "Pretty good," she said, nodding. "My mother learned to speak good English, but my father, not so much. So, we spoke Spanish in the house. I've lost some of it, though."

  "Still, it gives you more options," Cohn said. "Me and Jesse, if we've got to run for it, it's gonna have to be an English-speaking place."

  "Go to Israel," Lane suggested. "Lots of people speak English there."

  "Ah, I don't count as a Jew," Cohn said. "They got something about how your mother has to be a Jew. We never did have a mother who was a Jew in our family. They were all Baptists."

  "Well, fuckin' lie about it," Lane said. "You wouldn't be going there as Brutus Cohn anyway."

  "Let me share something with you, Jesse. You get to be a Jew the same way you get to be a peckerwood," Cohn said. "You peckerwoods know all about stump-training a heifer, about using a corncob for toilet paper'"

  "… bullshit, that's fuckin' nuts. A corncob?"

  "… because you grow up with it. I didn't grow up being a Jew. I know as much about being a Jew as you do. End of story."

  ***

  More time passed, the minutes dragging their feet.

  Then, "If Lindy hadn't run, we'd have had enough money to go somewhere for a while," Cruz said. "We could have gotten ourselves back together."

  "I would've wanted to do the hotel anyway," Cohn said. "Yeah, but' I've got a story about a guy out in LA who's supposed to be the big money-mover man for a Russian gang. He moves cash around at a big discount, and the Russians get stocks and bonds and buy land and apartments and so on. The story is, this guy sometimes has ten or fifteen million dollars at his house. He's got some guys with guns around, but hell, if you feel fine about hitting an armored car, we'd have no trouble taking out a few guards."

  "Have to kill them, probably, if they're Russians," Cohn said.

  "Well, yeah," she said.

  "I wouldn't do that unless it was just you, me, Jesse, and Tate," Cohn said. "You couldn't ever take the chance that somebody would talk about it. The Russians would track you down and cut you up an inch at a time."

  "I was thinking about it as a last job. I never had the time to develop it, but, if you went in shooting, you could probably do it with three people-just like tonight," she said. "But it would have taken a lot more research."

  "If Lindy hadn't run," Cohn said. "I'm gonna kill her when I find her."

  "You keep saying you were going to do this one anyway," Lane said.

  "Yeah, but now I feel pushed," Cohn said. "I'm afraid it might be coloring the way I think. I need that money bad. I need to get out of this. I need to end it. If I'd ha
d that money that Lindy took, and if we came up to the hotel tonight and I got a real bad feeling, maybe I'd just decide we should walk away. Now ' I feel pushed. I can't explain it."

  "I know exactly what you're saying," Cruz said.

  "Wish Tate was here," Lane said. "He was a good ol" boy."

  Cruz looked at her watch: "Goddamnit, time is really crawling."

  Chapter 22

  Lucas saw the cops standing at the back of the yard in the headlights of their own cars, the spinners on the car roof flicking scarlet light into the treetops at the back of the lot. A man and a woman stood with the cops, and they were all looking down into Swede Hollow, and then one of the cops started down.

  Lucas parked and got out of the car and hurried toward the group, and the uniformed cop looked at him and held out a hand, and Lucas called, "Davenport, BCA."

  The cop nodded and said, "Hey, Lucas," and Lucas recognized him but couldn't remember his name. Lucas looked at the woman standing next to the cop and recognized her as Juliet Briar, and he asked, "What the hell are you doing here?"

  "I live here," she said.

  "You live here?" Lucas looked from her to the cop, who asked, "What's going on?"

  Briar asked, "Are you Lucas Davenport? Letty's dad?"

  "What?" the cop asked.

  Lucas said, "Where's Letty?"

  Briar shook her head. "I haven't seen her. Is she coming?"

  As they were talking, the cop below had skidded down the slope to the tree line and disappeared into the trees. Now he called back up, "Get an ambulance. Get an ambulance. Tell them to hurry."

  The cop said to Lucas, "Keep an eye on them," and stepped away and called for an ambulance.

  "What happened?" Lucas asked Briar.

  "Randy was messing around and his chair went over the edge," she said, looking at the man with her, rather than at Lucas.