Wicked Prey

one more thing to do with either of them, no matter how small, I’ll tell you first,” she said. She meant it this time: the Randy problem was gone.
    They bumped fists and were done with it.
    “Now,” Lucas said, “if we could only find that fuckin’ Cohn.”
    “You gotta watch your language a little more,” Weather said to Lucas.
    “Maybe they’re holding up the Republican Party,” Letty said.
    “You can’t hold up a party,” Lucas said. “You gotta hold up a thing. There’s gotta be one place, there’s gotta be some money moving, we’re watching all the armored car warehouses, they’re all scrambling their routes . . . I can’t get it.”
    “Sleep on it,” Weather said.
    * * *
     
    BY THE time they were all done, it was after midnight.
    Weather and Letty went to bed, and Lucas checked again with Shrake, who said that nothing had changed. “I’m going to bag out on my couch for a while,” Lucas said. “Maybe you and Jenkins should trade off. We need somebody there to keep an eye on the place until we’re sure they’re gone; but there’s no point in both of you being there.”
    “What time will you be back?”
    Lucas looked at his watch: “I’ll set my alarm for three, see you about three-thirty. If you want to send Jenkins home, tell him to come back around seven to relieve me.”
    “Sounds like a deal,” Shrake said. “What about the SWAT?”
    “When were they due to quit?”
    “Anytime.”
    “Ah . . . tell them to hang on until three o’clock. It’s all overtime, anyway. But if it ain’t happened by three, it probably won’t—nobody working after that.”
    “See you at three-thirty,” Shrake said.
    Lucas got a pillow and an alarm clock from the bedroom—Weather was cutting in the morning, as she was most mornings, and he didn’t want to disturb her in the middle of the night—kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the couch.
    As he dozed off, he wondered what he had heard that night, pinging in the back of his head, that worried him so much.

23
    THEY’D BEEN STUCK IN THE VAN so long that they were all a little groggy. Toward the end of the wait, Cohn looked at his watch every three minutes and finally said, “Fuck it: let’s do it.”
    Cruz: “Twenty minutes yet. It’s all right to be late, but it’s not all right to be early.”
    “I’m going nuts in here,” Cohn said.
    “Then let’s go for a walk,” Cruz said. “There’s nobody around right now, we can get out of here, down the stairs, take a hike around the block. And we’ll feel better.”
    Lane said, “I could use a walk. I’m tired and I’m scared.”
    They piled out of the van, walked down the stairs. A nurse was just crossing the street from the hospital and she nodded at them and went into the parking structure. Lane said, “This way,” and they followed him down the street, away from the lights of downtown. Around the corner, it was even darker, but they weren’t worried, since they were the ones who were supposed to be lurking in the dark . . .
    They turned another corner and suddenly there were lights on the street, and, in the distance, people—not many, but a few, outside the Xcel Center where John McCain had been nominated for the presidency.
    “Still a little traffic,” Lane said.
    “This is why I had Shafer ready to go,” Cruz said. “I was going to call the cops, tell them I’d seen him on a roof. Like he was hiding out in one of these old buildings, waiting for McCain to come in. Every cop in town would have been over here.”
    “Woulda worked,” Cohn said. He windmilled his arms for a few steps, looked at his watch again. “Why’d you pick three-fifteen?”
    “Because most of the overnight hotel employees get off at three,” Cruz said. “There’ll be a short-order cook and a busboy in the kitchen, but they stay down there—it’s in the basement—because they’re cleaning up. The rest of the people . . . You figure most people who get off at three might linger a few minutes, but not long. There’s nothing to do. So, give them fifteen or twenty minutes to clear out. Then the day cooks and the rest of the kitchen staff start coming in at five o’clock. They never come in early—they’re getting up on alarm clocks. Add it all up and the best time to get in will be around three-fifteen or three-thirty. That’ll give us an hour without interference.”
    “Except maybe for a couple of night janitors.”
    “I explained that.”
    “I wish I could think of