Wicked Prey

“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