Wicked Prey

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.

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. “When 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.