Wicked Prey

exactly this minute—or maybe in a little while.” He grinned at them. “Or maybe not at all. Shit, I don’t know. But I think so. The thing is, if they’re in there, we have to stop them. If they’re still on the way in, we can’t let them see us, because we need them to make their move. And maybe . . . we’re wasting our time.”
    A squad car turned the corner and pulled to the curb. Shrake jogged over and talked quietly to the cops inside, and they both got out, unconsciously hitching up their gun belts.
    “What’re we going to do?” one of the cops asked Lucas.
    “Shrake and I will take a peek at the hotels. We want one of you with us, for the uniform, and we want a couple more blocking the back exit. We need at least one guy to run around and take the stairway up into the skyway . . .”
    The cops from the squad had a shotgun and an M16 in the trunk. Lucas put them back in the car: “Get around behind the hotels, fast as you can do it. I want you”—he pointed at the guy with the M16—“at the top of the stairway in the St. Paul. Don’t let anybody through, but be careful with that thing, for Christ’s sakes. Don’t shoot any little old ladies.”
    The shotgun he wanted outside the back door.
    Another cop car, directed by St. Paul communications, stopped behind Lucas’s Porsche and two more cops got out. Lucas kept talking to the first four:
    “Talk to your guys, get some backup behind you, but get into place. If they’re in there, they could be coming out any minute.”
    It took longer to get organized than Lucas had hoped, because it was, technically speaking, a cluster-fuck. But with everybody on their way, with more St. Paul cops moving in, he nodded at Shrake and said, “Let’s look at it.”
    * * *
     
    THE ST. PAUL HOTEL was probably the oldest, and one of the two fanciest, in St. Paul. Lucas, Shrake, and the chosen St. Paul cop, a gray-haired sergeant whose name was Larkin, strolled down the sidewalk that ran past the side of the hotel, looking at the front entrance. The hotel cultivated a garden alongside the circular drive in front, and in the cold light from the street, the flowers looked pale and ghostly.
    “Don’t see anybody watching,” Shrake said.
    Lucas said, “Goddamnit. I fucked this up.” He looked around him, in a circle, at the buildings surrounding the park: the central library, the old federal courthouse, the Ordway Music Theater. “We should have met somewhere else, but I didn’t take the time. What if they’re in the old courthouse? Or the library? That’s where I’d be. I’d have a lookout up there with a radio . . . They might be looking right down at us, right now. C’mon.”
    Now he started jogging, down the street, up the driveway to the front of the hotel. He looked in. Two women behind the check-in counter, a guy in hotel livery, with a lunchbox next to his hand, talking to them, leaning on the counter. He looked real, but the box might hold a gun.
    Before they’d started over, he’d told Larkin to take off his cop hat and put it under his arm—it was too readily identifiable at a distance. Now he told him to put it back on: “Get your hand on your gun, but keep it out of sight,” Lucas said to Shrake. “Through the doors all at once.” He pushed through the revolving door, with Shrake and Larkin going through the swing doors beside it.
    * * *
    THE PEOPLE at the desk looked down at them, and Lucas, one hand on the .45 under his jacket, held up his credentials. “Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and St. Paul Police. I’m a police officer, let me see your hands, please. Put your hands on the desk.”
    The guy said, “What?” but then put his hands on the desk. “What?”
    Larkin asked, “Where’s your safe?”
    One of the women said, “Uh . . .” and looked to the side.
    Nobody in the strong room: and Shrake checked their IDs. All Minnesota driver’s licenses.
    Lucas said to Larkin, “Call the guy on the back door. I want him here, behind the desk, in case they come in. Move the other guys around behind the St. Andrews. I think there’s a skyway exit, too, out to the parking ramps; we need somebody in the skyway . . .”
    As Larkin called, Shrake said, “St. Andrews?”
    Lucas nodded. “Let’s go.”
    “Starting to feel like an idiot yet?” Shrake asked.
    “About forty percent,” Lucas said. “It seemed like a really good concept. Christ, years ago, when I was first on the Minneapolis force, there was a hotel that got