Wicked Prey

coat over an icy-blue long-sleeved dress shirt, black summer-weight woolen slacks hand-knit by an Italian virgin, and square-toed English-made loafers.
    * * *
    CAROL SHOUTED: “Lily Rothenburg on two.”
    Lucas said to Del, “I got a call coming here.”
    Del said, “Pick it up. I ain’t going anywhere, if it’s Lily calling.”
    “Fuck you,” Lucas said. He and Lily had once been a passing fashion, including a geometrical insanity in an earlier Porsche. Del knew all about it: Lucas shook his head and picked up the phone. “Lily?”
    “Lucas Davenport,” she said, “How’s every little thing?”
    “Well, we got a lot going on, so . . . pretty good,” Lucas said. “How about you? How’s the kid? If you’re divorced, I can offer you space in my garage.”
    She laughed and said, “From what I hear about Weather, it’d be more like the backyard. But, the kid’s fine and I’m not divorced.”
    “Del’s here, he says hi . . .”
    They caught up for a few minutes, then she said, “Look. We’ve got a problem—or, maybe, you’ve got a problem. We had an armored car robbery here two and a half years ago, and two guards were killed. They were off-duty cops. The robbery crew got away with a half-million dollars.”
    “Not that big, for an armored car,” Lucas said.
    “Well, there was more inside, but the thing went bad. Most of the money was behind a locked barrier inside the truck,” Lily said. “The idea was, if trouble started, the guards would put the keys in a solid-steel lockbox inside the back, which they didn’t have keys to, and then nobody could get at the money . . . that’s what they did. But somebody got pissed, we think, and started shooting, and all the shooters got were the receipts from a couple of big-box stores that hadn’t been put behind the barrier yet.”
    “How does that get to us?”
    “We think the leader of the crew was a guy named Brutus Cohn,” Lily said. “We got an anonymous tip. A male caller, deep southern accent, calling from Kennedy. He said that he’d seen Cohn getting on a plane at Heathrow, in England, yesterday, going to Los Angeles. He said he knew him from Alabama, and Cohn is from Alabama. He said Cohn had grown a red beard, and Cohn is a redhead.”
    “So he sounds good,” Lucas said.
    “Yes. Anyway, this guy said he was waiting to get on his plane, when he saw Cohn. He didn’t want to call from London, because he was afraid we’d identify him, and he’s afraid of Cohn. So he got way back and watched Cohn going into a gate for a flight to Los Angeles. By the time we got to the LA cops, Cohn’s flight was an hour out. They met the plane, and there was no Brutus Cohn. There was no way to get back to the original source, so we checked with Heathrow. Everything was right: there was the Kennedy gate, and down the way, the LA gate. But the gate was a joint gate—and the next gate down, where Cohn could also have been headed . . .”
    “. . . came here.”
    “Right. The Minneapolis plane was on the ground for three hours before we got it straight. Our people talked to the flight crew, and there was a man in first class who probably was Cohn. He almost certainly was the guy that the source saw, and the source said he knew Cohn pretty well. The crew said he was very tall, fairly thin, muscular, red hair, and charming with the flight crew. The girls liked him, and that’s Cohn, from what we hear.”
    “What’s he doing?” Lucas asked.
    “Don’t know. It’s possible he moved right on through the Cities, changed planes, and is gone. But it’s also possible that he’s up to something,” Lily said. “He’s a serious, ultra-violent holdup man who needs a big score so he can bury himself somewhere. He mostly worked in the south, down to Florida, north to Atlanta, west to New Mexico. Maybe California. Maybe one job in Mexico. The FBI isn’t sure about all of that, but if they’ve got him right, there have been at least five dead in thirty to forty robberies, and one survivor shot through the chest who should’ve died. He’s the guy who eventually identified Cohn for the FBI, from prison photographs. So. We’ve been looking, and waiting, and here he is. You’ve got that convention going on . . . lots of cash there. A boat-load of cash.”
    Lucas said, “Let me ask you this—how’d the caller know you were looking for Cohn?”
    “We didn’t make any secret about it,” she said. “We put out posters, we sent some guys to Birmingham