The guy nodded and then shrugged.
"Is that what happened?" Lucas asked him.
Ranch turned hollow yellow eyes to Lucas and opened his mouth, and then said, "I can't remember."
"You can't remember? It happened one minute ago," said the uniform cop, as he stepped back to them. Regions Hospital was just down the hill, and they heard a siren start.
"Uh, Randy and Ranch-this is Ranch-had been partying pretty-hard," Briar said.
"On what?" Lucas asked.
"Maybe ' a little amp," Briar said.
"A little? Or a lot?" the cop asked.
"Three zippies," she said.
Enough to kill the average pony Lucas thought. "What about you?" the cop asked her.
"They don't allow me. If I smoke, I can't work." She looked at Lucas. "Randy was going to take Letty and do stuff to her."
"Yeah? Did she know that?" Lucas asked.
"I think so," Briar said. "We mostly talked about my situation."
"Who's Letty?" the cop asked. "What's your situation?"
Lucas shook his head: "This is really screwed up. Letty's my daughter. I don't know where the hell she is…" He looked at Briar, then at Ranch. "If she's hurt'"
Briar stepped away from him.
***
The ambulance pulled into the yard, its headlights sweeping across them, as the second cop, the one who'd gone down the hill, climbed back using his hands as well as his feet to keep his balance. Red-faced and out of breath, he said, "He's alive, but his head looks funny. He might have broken his neck."
One of the paramedics walked over from the ambulance and looked over the edge. "Holy cripes," she said. "Maybe we ought to come up from the bottom."
The second cop shook his head. "He's less than halfway down, and it's even steeper below him. Gotta hurry, guys, he's hurt."
The paramedics got a lightweight carry stretcher, a backboard, a cervical extrication collar, and safety straps, and went over the edge with the second cop.
The St. Paul cop with Lucas asked, "What are we doing here?"
Lucas shook his head: "Not my case. We picked up Briar earlier today'"
He told the cop about the scene at the motel, and the cop listened to it all, and then said, "What about your daughter?"
"I'm looking for her. She was down at the convention, but she was supposed to be home hours ago."
Lucas looked at Briar again, but Briar said, "We haven't seen her. Honest. Not since day before last."
"How do you know her?" the cop asked. "How's she involved?"
"She's not," Lucas and Briar said simultaneously.
Briar said, "She works for a TV station. She found me downtown. She wanted to interview me."
Lucas said to the cop, "She was trying to do a story on young ' prostitutes. For Channel Three."
"Oh, yeah," the cop said. "I know her-the good-looking blond chick."
"She's fourteen," Lucas said.
The cop was unembarrassed: good-looking is good-looking. "You a young prostitute?" he asked Briar. "I'm just a kid," she said.
Ranch, naked except for his Jockey shorts, dug his hand in his pants, scratched himself and said: "Some pretty good pussy, though."
Lucas and the cop both turned to him, and Lucas asked, "What'd you say?"
"Pretty ' uh…"
"They raped me," Briar said. "Or, Ranch did. I think."
"You think?" the cop asked. "You're not sure?"
"Does it count if they do it in your butt?"
The cop rubbed his forehead and said, "Yeah, that counts." He said to Ranch, "Turn around." Ranch, head bobbing, turned around, and the cop cuffed him. "Hey, dude, that's pretty fuckin' ' rude."
Briar said, "Randy made him do it."
***
Lucas's phone rang, and he pulled it out of his pocket and checked the number: Letty.
"Where the fuck are you?" he snarled, without preamble.
"I'm at the Capitol," she said. "I didn't realize how late it was. I'm sorry-I'm going home now."
"You're at the Capitol?" He wasn't sure he believed her.
"Yeah. I did some tape on some political kids here. For the weekend. Frat boys for Obama."
Lucas felt as though he were strangling: "You get home. Get home. Goddamnit, Letty…"
"I'm going," she said meekly.
Too meekly, Lucas thought, but she'd hung up, and he wouldn't call her back in the presence of the St. Paul cop.
"That was her?" Briar asked brightly.
"Yeah. She's at the Capitol," Lucas said.
"Glad she's okay," Briar said.
The cop shook his head, but didn't press. He had enough problems, without picking at one that seemed to have solved itself. You could ruin a perfectly good evening, he believed, with one extra ill-placed question. He stepped away, got on his radio, and said, "We need another ambulance and we're gonna need a rape kit at Regions, better alert them…"
***
Down below, the paramedics were thrashing through the trees. The first cop, with Lucas, began talking to Briar about what had happened that evening, and Briar couldn't get through it-couldn't think of what to say, other than that they were partying and that Randy had been crazy in his wheelchair, and she told him about how Ranch had made the crank pipe. The cop asked, "Mind if we look inside?"
Briar said, "No, go ahead."
Lucas, who'd been looking down into the hollow, smiled to himself: there were a bunch of ill-considered words, he thought, though the cop could probably go in anyway. Now, there was no problem at all-he'd been invited.
"I heard that," he said to the cop, turning toward them, and the cop nodded to him. Lucas was looking right at Briar's back, and in the thin flickering lights from the house, saw what looked like stripes across her dress; but he recognized blood when he saw it.
"Hey…"
The cop picked up the tone and looked toward him. "Check her back," Lucas said. "She's bleeding." Briar started to weep, and sidled away from them. "He didn't mean nothing by it," she said. "He didn't mean nothing."
***
The paramedics brought Whitcomb up out of the trees, strapped to the board, and hauled him to the ambulance and raced away toward the hospital. He moved not at all, though he appeared to be semiconscious.
The second cop watched them go, then turned to Lucas and said, "He's fucked. His neck is not right."
Lucas was about to comment when Ranch, who'd been standing, silently, a few feet away, fell over, unconscious. Because his hands were cuffed, he landed directly on his face. Lucas and the cop both flinched and glanced around, listening for a gunshot, then the cop crouched over Ranch and said, "He's breathing."
"Better call another meat wagon," Lucas said. He looked toward the house, where the first cop had taken Briar. He could hear Briar weeping again. "These people are messed up."
***
Lucas left the St. Paul cops to straighten it all out, called Shrake and was told that nothing was happening at the apartment; and that the armored car companies were being monitored. "They might be gone."
"Maybe," Lucas said. "But they lingered. Why did they linger?"
"What about the SWAT?"
Lucas looked at his watch: "Leave them for a while. I'm coming back, but I've got to talk to Letty first. Something weird is going on."
***
When he got back to the house, he was determined to stay calm. He did, somewhat to his own surprise, because Letty was apparently as confused about events as he was.
"You arrested her at a motel? What for? How did you know her?" Letty asked. "Did you arrest Randy?"
"I didn't even know she was involved with Randy," Lucas said. "How do you know Randy?"
"I only saw Randy once, when I was in a McDonald's with John and Jeff, the day they picked me up at the Capitol, when you gave me the twenty. I don't know what Randy wanted-I just thought Juliet would make a story."
"But you knew I'd been involved with Randy?"
"Yeah, later. I figured
he might be coming after me to get back at you, but he was such a dummy, I decided that he really wasn't much of a threat."
"You were wrong about that," Lucas said. "He was a threat. People like that are always a threat, because they're nuts. But then ' you kept going back, didn't you?"
"Only to Juliet," Letty said. "I didn't mess with Randy. Did Jennifer tell you about the perverted mailman? That whole thing?"
"What perverted mailman?" Lucas asked. He looked at Weather, who was draped over a couch, looking at both of them with great skepticism. "Do you know about a mailman?"
"First I've heard about a perverted mailman," Weather said.
"But what about the motel?" Letty asked. "You arrested a possible assassin who Juliet was supposed to ' you know?"
"Let's go back to the mailman," Lucas said.
***
When they worked through it all, none of it seemed to make too much sense. Lucas finally said, "All right, this is all done, okay? Randy's hurt, and it's pretty bad-he's broken his neck, maybe. But you're all done with Randy and Juliet and I want a no-shit promise from you. I'm not pressuring you, I'm asking you: on our relationship, I'm asking you."
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.
Chapter 23
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. We
ll, 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.
***
They popped out of the van, Cruz and Cohn together, and walked through the gilt front doors of the hotel, toward the two women still behind the desk. Except for the Muzak-playing an orchestral arrangement of "A Hard Day's Night," heavy on the strings-the hotel was utterly silent.
Cohn stepped up to the desk and said, "Good evening, ladies," smiling, and they smiled back, and Cohn lifted the gun and said, "This is a robbery-If you don't do exactly what I tell you, I'll kill you. I'm not joking."
***
They moved the two stunned, frightened women into the darkened nondenominational chapel, which featured a small group of pews looking at a stand with nothing on it. Cruz pulled down her mask-the stocking obscured her features, while still allowing her to see. They ordered the two women into one of the pews, and Cruz said, "If you make a sound, we will kill you. Do you understand that?"
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