Lucas had stayed in touch with Mitford all afternoon, and on the last call, Mitford said, “I have six names for you. If they’re going to hit again, there’s a good chance it’ll be one of these six guys. They’ve got the most money and they all got early reservations—before this Sabartes guy died in D.C.”
“All six?”
“Well, I actually got eleven names, but five got reservations too late,” Mitford said. “You shouldn’t need those.”
“All right. E-mail me the names: we’ll set up with them this evening.”
13
RANDY WHITCOMB SAT IN THE BACK of the van as they cruised Davenport’s place, the sun going down across the Mississippi Valley. They went around and around the neighborhood looking for the girl, until Ranch said, “Man, she ain’t here. We been doing this for hours.” They’d been doing it for half an hour.
“Gotta be a better way,” Whitcomb said. As he looked out the van window, he saw a woman who’d been digging in a garden stand up to look at them as they went by. They’d gone by her a half-dozen times, and were starting to attract attention. “We need a plan.”
Juliet Briar didn’t say anything; she just drove.
“I thought you were gonna bullshit her over to the house,” Ranch said.
“I don’t think the bullshit was working,” Whitcomb said. He’d read the distance in Letty’s eyes during their few words at the Mc-Donald’s. Whitcomb wasn’t the sharpest knife in the dishwasher, but he had an exquisite sense of class, and Letty was several class-steps above him. The chances that she’d fall for his bullshit were fairly thin, he’d decided. She was like one of the prom queens back in high school—they’d look right through him. They couldn’t even see him; they couldn’t even hear his bullshit. He was like a mosquito buzzing around their heads.
He scratched his nose, breaking open a scab left by the Pollish twins, when they rolled him down the front steps onto the sidewalk. He looked at the blood on his fingertips, shook his head and wiped it on his pants leg.
Ranch said, “Maybe we just oughta do it.”
“Do what?”
“Just grab her,” Ranch said. “Me ’n Juliet. See her on the street, pick her ass up, throw her in the van.”
“She’d scream and moan and piss and fight . . .”
“Whack her on the head,” Ranch said. “Put a bunch of pennies in a sock, punch her out or whack her on the head. Throw her in the van.”
“You ever done anything like that?”
“Used to whack fags down on Hennepin,” Ranch said, a lie so transparent that his voice wavered halfway through it.
“You never whacked a fag in your life,” Whitcomb said.
“Well—I heard about it,” Ranch said. “Swat them with a sock full of pennies, you don’t kill them, you knock them out. Hit them with a pipe, you kill them.”
“You probably are a fag,” Whitcomb said.
“I’m not a fuckin’ fag, man, you seen me fuck Juliet.”
“Yeah, well, when we get this chick, you’re gonna have to fuck her.”
Ranch nodded. “I can do that.” Ranch would use any drug he could find, but methamphetamine was his drug of choice. He could no longer fuck on reefer or cocaine, but crank would still do it for him. Enough crank, and Ranch tipped over the edge into sexual insanity, and other kinds of insanity, for that matter: Whitcomb once saw him run full-tilt, face-on into a garage door, as a joke. He’d never flinched or slowed down. The impact had knocked him out, and somebody had to call an ambulance to come get him.
“What if we have Juliet call her up and pretend she’s a friend whose car broke down . . .”
Whitcomb came up with a half-dozen plans and Juliet and Ranch took turns punching holes in them: like, how would they find out the name of a friend of the girl?
Finally, Ranch rubbed his throat, then smacked his lips. “Wonder where George is?”
George sold crank outside the X Center, but his business had been displaced by the Republicans.
Randy’s brain switched tracks. Formerly on the Letty track, now it was on the crank track. “Probably down by the park. When they get too many cops at the X, he walks over to the park.”
“Maybe we could find him,” Ranch said.
Randy pretended to consider the idea, to make it clear that it was his choice, but he was now far down the crank track and he said, “Okay. Let’s go find George.”
COHN AND CRUZ and McCall and Lane sat in the condo and argued about the next move: Cruz had worked a way to do the last hit with the three of them inside, and she wanted to stay down until it was time to make the final move.
Cohn was entranced by the money they were taking from the political guys.
“We’ve got three million dollars,” he said, waving at a pile of cash in the middle of the condo floor. “No problem: not a word about it in the newspapers or on TV. And it’s so easy. The money is there. We take it away.”
“We know they’re looking for us, for you,” Cruz objected. “Somehow, they got onto us . . .”
“And two years from now, or five years from now, they pick me up down in South Africa or Australia or somewhere, how are they gonna be able to prove any of it?” Cohn asked. “They can’t. These political guys can’t even admit that I got the money. What are they going to charge me with? Random terrorism? They got nothing. Nothing. They don’t even know about Tate or Jesse or you. They don’t have a clue. Look at this money—it’s like picking apples.”
“But they’re looking . . .”
Cohn said to McCall and Lane, “One more. You guys up for one more?”
Lane shrugged and McCall said, “Rosie’s got a point. We could let it cool off for a day or two. Or we could say fuck it, cut up the money and go home.”
“Three million just isn’t gonna do it, boys,” Cohn said.
“But we got the hotel,” Cruz said. “God only knows how much that’s worth, but if we pull it off, it could be four or five times what we’ve got.”
“What if we hit one more guy, and that guy had two million?” Cohn asked. “Then we could be talking about retirement.” Cohn got two shares, everybody else got one. They all did the numbers in their heads: if they got two million on the next score, one share would be worth a million dollars in cash, and Cohn would get two. Cohn continued: “This hotel deal is pretty complicated. I’d say if we could pick off two more of these political guys, maybe we could skip the hotel. Say fuck it, and go home.”
“Not going to get two,” Cruz said, shaking her head. “The guys are already passing out the money—some of them might not have any left.”
“It’s only the first day of the convention, I bet they’re saving up until the big shots get here, make more of a splash,” Cohn said.
Lindy was sitting on the floor next to the pile of cash, and she reached out and picked up a bundle of fifties. “You know what I think? I think we ought to go to New York and spend some of this. Like, right now.”
They all looked at her for a moment and then McCall laughed and said, “That’s one idea.”
Cruz said, “Brute, let’s go over the hotel. Let’s work that through. We really need to be on it, if we’re going to do it. These guys, the moneymen, they were supposed to be the cherry on the sundae; they weren’t supposed to be the whole goddamned sundae. I’ve already got other stuff running on the hotel.”
“One more,” Cohn said. “Come on, Rosie, work it out for us. One more. Which one’s got the most? I swear to God, whatever he’s got, he’ll be the last one.”
Cruz looked at him for a long beat, then said, “It’s a her, not a him. Goddamnit, Brute . . .”
LUCAS HAD sprung five agents, including himself: Jenkins, Shrake, Jim Benson, Dave Tompkins. “Better if we had two guys in each room,” he said, “but we just don’t have the people. So: everybody has armor, everybody has a shotgun, you don’t answer the door. After the knock, you wait: they can’t stand there long, because of the masks. They’ll walk away . . . that’s when you pop the do
or.”
Tompkins grinned: “Now I see why you picked all single guys.”
“Hey. It’s dangerous. No question about it. But we’ve got to do something.”
They were all in place by eight o’clock.
ELEVEN O’CLOCK. Lucas got up and stretched, yawned, looked at Buddy Snider and Sally Craig, sitting at the breakfast table, playing gin rummy, then looked at his watch. From the hotel windows, he could see across the interstate all the way up to Capitol Hill. There’d been some semi-violent demonstrations during the afternoon, and a few more people had been taken off to jail, but nothing extreme. The downtown area was still loaded with cops, but everything below looked quiet.
Craig, a thin, fiftyish blond woman from Washington, without looking up, said, “You’re pacing again.”
“Yeah, well. You’re playing gin rummy,” Lucas said.
“Cards exercise the mind,” she said.
Snider said to Lucas, “Maybe you should check your gun again. That was interesting.”
“Gun’s fine,” Lucas said.
He’d been penned up for three hours; the first two hours in utter darkness, until Snider and Craig got back from the convention center, where, he suspected, they’d been passing out cash. Maybe lots of it. When they came through the door a few minutes before eleven o’clock, Craig had had a gorgeous soft deer-hide backpack slung over one shoulder, and it appeared to be empty. Lucas had carefully worked through the room while they were gone, and hadn’t found any money. There was a safe in the closet, though, that might have held anything up to a half-million dollars. Since Craig presumably had a safe in her own room, that could be another half-million.
Lucas got on his cell phone and called Shrake: “Nothing here. Nothing at all,” Shrake said.
Benson: “Nothing here.” Voice dropped. “Whitehead’s in the bathroom, she has some kind of a problem. The whole place stinks.”
Jenkins: “Haven’t heard or seen a thing. Sitting here watching West Coast baseball.”
Tompkins: “Schott’s gone to bed. Says he’s too tired to stay up anymore. I’m lying here watching Star Wars with the sound turned off.”
“Which Star Wars?” Lucas asked.
“A New Hope. Channel three-forty.”
“That’s the first one,” Lucas said. “Where Princess Leia hints that she might go for a three-way with Han and Luke.”
“Yup. That’s the one.”
Off the phone, he searched through the TV channels until he found Star Wars. “You mind if I watch this?”
“Better than this card game,” Craig said. She tossed her cards on the table and said, “Go gin yourself,” sprawled on the bed, and said, “Turn the sound up. They’re about to jump down the garbage chute.”
THE KNOCK on the door came at eleven-fifteen, three raps with a key, like a hotel maid would do it, and Jim Benson rolled to his feet, slipped the vest over his head, and pulled the Glock 9mm from its holster. The shotgun was in the corner, and he stepped over to it. Janet Whitehead, who was lying on the bed, sniffed and said, “Oh my God,” and then an envelope slipped under the door, and they could hear, faintly, somebody walking away. Benson, a short, square-shouldered blond with a dimpled chin and chiseled nose, did a quick peek at the peephole and saw nothing. Whitehead picked up the envelope, opened it, glanced at the paper inside and said, “Hey,” and before Benson could slow her down, she turned the knob on the door.
The door latch-lock was engaged, as well as the safety chain; the chain allowed the door to open three or four inches. The doorjamb anchor was held in place by three Phillips screws. They were not sufficient. The instant Whitehead turned the knob, the door exploded, and Whitehead hurtled back into Benson, who staggered backward, off-balance, and then McCall was there in the doorway, Cohn behind him, a gun in his hand.
McCall looked with surprise at Benson and opened his mouth to say something but Benson, landing on his butt, while Whitehead bounced away, fired a single shot with his pistol that hit McCall in the stomach. McCall staggered and shot Benson in the chest, in the vest, and Benson fired again, this time hitting McCall in the spine, and McCall dropped as though somebody had cut his puppet strings.
Cohn, still to the left of McCall, stepped farther to his left, the gun already up, and shot Benson in the face. Benson went down, dead, though Cohn didn’t know it, and Cohn shot him again, in the head, and then stepped over McCall’s body to Whitehead, who was crawling between the two beds, and shot her twice through the heart from the back.
McCall was on the floor, eyes wide, his mouth working, and Cohn, his hands covered with gloves as they had been in all the holdups, shot McCall in the forehead. Nothing more he could do.
Elapsed time, ten seconds? Cohn turned and ran down the hall.
OUTSIDE, HE SLOWED, made sure he was out of camera range, peeled off the mask and jacket and gloves and wadded them up into a small ball, which he carried under his arm, and walked a hundred feet to the street and saw Cruz coming in the Toyota, and flagged her and when she stopped, yanked open the door and climbed in.
“What happened?”
“Blew up. Fuckin’ blew up.” Cohn’s voice was cold, uninflected, the way it got when there was trouble. “Tate’s dead, woman’s dead, cop in the room with her, he’s dead, they’re all fuckin’ dead.” He said it quietly enough, but she could tell that he was beaten up.
“Tate’s dead? You’re sure he’s dead?” she asked.
“Yeah, he’s dead, his brains are all over the hotel room, for Christ’s sakes . . . Ah, Jesus, Tate, he walked right into the cop’s gun. He kicked the door and the cop was right there and, boom, and he goes down, ah, McCall . . .”
“So now we’re done,” Cruz said bitterly. She was watching the speedometer. There was a tendency to drive fast after a hit, and she didn’t want to do that. “Now we’re done. Jesse’s gonna be really screwed up about this, Tate was a good friend.”
“Tate was a good friend of all of us,” Cohn said.
“You’re sure he’s dead?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
“If he’s not dead, then the cops are going . . .”
“He’s dead,” Cohn said. “Ah, Christ . . .”
Cruz shut up and they drove along and Cohn thought, Maybe I could have saved him.
But he didn’t really think so. McCall had been hit hard, right through the center of his body, he was dying on the floor, and Cohn didn’t have time to wait for him to die, and no way to get him out of the hotel in a hurry. If Cohn abandoned him, and McCall did somehow survive, well, McCall might have been a little pissed.
Nobody was immune to extortion by the legal system. They would have given McCall a chance to get out, in fifteen, maybe, if he talked about Cohn and the other gang members. He’d done the right thing, but goddamn: it was Tate.
LUCAS HEARD about it from the duty officer at the BCA who called and shouted, “Benson’s down. Benson got shot, Benson’s dead, he’s shot . . .”
Lucas ran out of the hotel room with Snider and Craig calling after him, “What? What?” and he shouted back, “Keep the door locked,” and he ran down the stairs because the elevators were too slow, piled into the car and screamed across town and dumped the Porsche in a cluster of cop cars and a cop flagged him and he held up his ID and shouted back and then he plowed through a flower bed, through the lobby and into an elevator with another cop, a St. Paul uniform he didn’t recognize, and he asked, “Is my guy dead?” and the cop nodded and said, “Yeah, fuckin’ awful.”
Lucas pounded the elevator doors, once, twice, with the heel of his hand, and then they came on out on twelve and two St. Paul detectives were standing in the hall outside an open door. Lucas headed for the door and one of the detectives, whose name was John Elleson, caught him around the waist and said, “Whoa, whoa, Lucas, slow down, slow down.”
Lucas tried to push past him, but Elleson held on, jammed him into a wall. Elleson was a small guy, but strong. “I wanna . . .”
“We think th
at the shooter’s on the loose, one of them, anyway,” Elleson said. “You can go in, but stay on the edges. We need to take everything we can get out of there.”
Lucas nodded, took a breath, relaxed, and when Elleson let him go, went in past the busted door: Benson was there, with two other bodies. Benson was on his back, his head cranked backward, his forehead shattered, his bulletproof vest skewed around to his left, a pistol near his hand, a shotgun under his legs. A black man lay on the floor at Benson’s feet, and a woman lay beside a bed, shot in the back.
Elleson said, “There’s a couple in the room next door. They were in bed, heard the shots, the guy says he heard somebody running, so he thought it would be okay to look. They had to turn on the lights and he went to the door and looked, and the hallway was already clear. The shooter knew where he was going. There’s no blood in the hallway or on the stairs, so if he was hit, he wasn’t bleeding too bad.”
“Benson shot the black guy?” Lucas asked.
“We don’t know, but I think he probably did. We’re gonna have to wait and look at the slugs, to see who shot who—it’s too complicated.”
“Ah, man . . .” Lucas put his hands to his temples, backed into the hallway.
“You okay?” Elleson asked.
“Fuck no.” He wasn’t; he was nauseous.
“We’re gonna need a statement from everybody involved. We understand Benson was working as sort of a bodyguard.”
“These are the same guys who did the robbery down behind St. John’s last night,” Lucas said. “The same guys who killed the Hudson cop. They’re a murder gang hitting political money guys. I’ll get you everything we know—we’ve got the main guy’s picture out there . . .”
He gave Elleson a summary of what they knew then said, “We think they’ve got a hideout somewhere around here—they either rented a house or a condo or something. We’ve papered all the hotels and motels, and nobody’s seen them.”