Wicked Prey

Baptists.”
    “Well, fuckin’ lie about it,” Lane said. “You wouldn’t be going there as Brutus Cohn anyway.”
    “Let me share something with you, Jesse. You get to be a Jew the same way you get to be a peckerwood,” Cohn said. “You pecker-woods know all about stump-training a heifer, about using a corncob for toilet paper . . .”
    “. . . bullshit, that’s fuckin’ nuts. A corncob?”
    “. . . because you grow up with it. I didn’t grow up being a Jew. I know as much about being a Jew as you do. End of story.”
    * * *
    MORE TIME passed, the minutes dragging their feet.
    Then, “If Lindy hadn’t run, we’d have had enough money to go somewhere for a while,” Cruz said. “We could have gotten ourselves back together.”
    “I would’ve wanted to do the hotel anyway,” Cohn said.
    “Yeah, but . . . I’ve got a story about a guy out in LA who’s supposed to be the big money-mover man for a Russian gang. He moves cash around at a big discount, and the Russians get stocks and bonds and buy land and apartments and so on. The story is, this guy sometimes has ten or fifteen million dollars at his house. He’s got some guys with guns around, but hell, if you feel fine about hitting an armored car, we’d have no trouble taking out a few guards.”
    “Have to kill them, probably, if they’re Russians,” Cohn said.
    “Well, yeah,” she said.
    “I wouldn’t do that unless it was just you, me, Jesse, and Tate,” Cohn said. “You couldn’t ever take the chance that somebody would talk about it. The Russians would track you down and cut you up an inch at a time.”
    “I was thinking about it as a last job. I never had the time to develop it, but, if you went in shooting, you could probably do it with three people—just like tonight,” she said. “But it would have taken a lot more research.”
    “If Lindy hadn’t run,” Cohn said. “I’m gonna kill her when I find her.”
    “You keep saying you were going to do this one anyway,” Lane said.
    “Yeah, but now I feel pushed ,” Cohn said. “I’m afraid it might be coloring the way I think. I need that money bad. I need to get out of this. I need to end it. If I’d had that money that Lindy took, and if we came up to the hotel tonight and I got a real bad feeling, maybe I’d just decide we should walk away. Now . . . I feel pushed. I can’t explain it.”
    “I know exactly what you’re saying,” Cruz said.
    “Wish Tate was here,” Lane said. “He was a good ol’ boy.”
    Cruz looked at her watch: “Goddamnit, time is really crawling.”

22
    LUCAS SAW THE COPS STANDING AT the back of the yard in the headlights of their own cars, the spinners on the car roof flicking scarlet light into the treetops at the back of the lot. A man and a woman stood with the cops, and they were all looking down into Swede Hollow, and then one of the cops started down.
    Lucas parked and got out of the car and hurried toward the group, and the uniformed cop looked at him and held out a hand, and Lucas called, “Davenport, BCA.”
    The cop nodded and said, “Hey, Lucas,” and Lucas recognized him but couldn’t remember his name. Lucas looked at the woman standing next to the cop and recognized her as Juliet Briar, and he asked, “What the hell are you doing here?”
    “I live here,” she said.
    “You live here?” Lucas looked from her to the cop, who asked, “What’s going on?”
    Briar asked, “Are you Lucas Davenport? Letty’s dad?”
    “What?” the cop asked.
    Lucas said, “Where’s Letty?”
    Briar shook her head. “I haven’t seen her. Is she coming?”
    As they were talking, the cop below had skidded down the slope to the tree line and disappeared into the trees. Now he called back up, “Get an ambulance. Get an ambulance. Tell them to hurry.”
    The cop said to Lucas, “Keep an eye on them,” and stepped away and called for an ambulance.
    “What happened?” Lucas asked Briar.
    “Randy was messing around and his chair went over the edge,” she said, looking at the man with her, rather than at Lucas.
    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