Wicked Prey

couldn’t walk . . . I thought maybe you made sure.”
    “Jesus Christ,” he said. The red-eyed anger was right there. “He was shot in the head and the heart by the cop. He was dead before he hit the ground. If I’d gone through first, it would’ve been me.”
    “Sorry,” she said. But she wasn’t; and she wasn’t quite sure of Cohn’s answer.
    * * *
     
    AN HOUR and fifteen minutes after they left the apartment, they were back. They found Lane standing in the apartment—almost crouched, when they pushed the door open. He looked past them. Cohn asked, “What?”
    “Is Lindy with you?”
    “Ah, shit,” Cohn said, looking around the apartment.
    “She’s not here,” Lane said. “Her clothes are gone. So’s the money. All of it.”
    * * *
    AFTER A while—a while—Cohn had to laugh. “She’s fucked us, that’s for sure. Now, there’s no choice. Now, we have to do it. No calling it off.”
    “I should have thought of it,” Cruz said. “It honest-to-God never occurred to me, because I didn’t think anybody in the group would have the balls to do it to you.”
    “With good reason,” Cohn said. “When I catch her, and I will, I’m going to kill her and anyone she’s with. I’m gonna take my time with it, so she can see it coming.”
    Lane said, after a bit: “She has to know that.”
    Cohn looked at him.
    Lane said, “She has to know that you’ll kill her. So she has to believe that you won’t be able to. She either figures the whole plan is fucked . . . or . . .”
    “Or the bitch is gonna turn us in,” Cohn said, erupting from the couch where he’d sat down. “Just to make sure . . .”
    * * *
     
    THEY PACKED up, and wiped the apartment, in fifteen minutes. As they were stuffing what they could into their bags, Cohn said to Cruz, “You didn’t say, ‘I told you so.’ You never wanted her here.”
    Cruz said, “I didn’t have to say it. You knew it. No point in pouring salt in the wound. Wouldn’t get us anywhere.”
    Then Cohn said, “You know what? She might turn us in—might get us raided. But she’s not going to tell them about the hotel. She’s not going to implicate herself. She’s going to call in anonymously, and tell them that we’re here. Call from a Target store. Like she’s some citizen. Then, she’s got to figure that whatever happens, she’ll come out okay. If they get us, fine. If they get us at the hotel, that’s fine. If they don’t get us, and we get out with twenty million dollars, she figures that she can buy her way back in with us. Keep me from killing her. Tell us she panicked, and here’s the money back . . .”
    “Still can’t take a chance,” Cruz said. “Pack faster.”
    “But we’re still good for the hotel,” Cohn said.
    “We can’t do it, without Lindy as a desk clerk,” Cruz said.
    Cohn said, “You’re the desk clerk.” When Cruz opened her mouth to object, Cohn waved her down. “Yeah, yeah, you have to watch the radios. Well, watch them from the desk. Bring them with you. Anybody coming through the door will just think you’re listening to the cops fighting the protesters.”
    Cruz said, “I’ve never been inside.” That wasn’t true. She’d just never been inside with Cohn.
    “First time for everything,” Cohn said. “We go with what we got, and you’re what we got.”
    They were out of the building in fifteen minutes, and gone.
    * * *
    LUCAS LEFT Shafer with the Secret Service. He’d be pushed around a little more, but nobody expected much: nobody mistook either Shafer or Briar for masterminds. Shafer was probably going to be locked up again, until after the convention and things had calmed down. After talking to Lucas, the Secret Service expressed little interest in Briar: her involvement was local, as far as they were concerned.
    Lucas decided to take her back to the BCA, with Shrake trailing in her van. He took her up to the third floor, to the labs, where he sat her down with a guy who’d done the photo touch-ups. “When you’re done with the pictures, you can take off,” he told her. “Don’t leave town. I’ll need your address and phone number.”
    She gave him her mother’s address and phone, and Lucas went down to his office, collected Shrake and Jenkins, and suggested that they go back to his house for an early dinner and to talk over the next move. He worked the phones as they drove along, trying to round up some help, and to warn the housekeeper that they were coming. He and Shrake