Wicked Prey

if we need it.” His tongue touched his dry bottom lip. “I’m running low on cash.”
    She nodded and took an envelope from her pocket, ripped the end off, and thrust the naked stack of bills at him, holding on to the envelope. He pulled the bills free—fifties—thumbed them, and nodded. “How’s Bill?”
    “Bill’s lying low,” she said. “There are about a million cops out here.” She checked the time on her cell phone. “He’s moving around, but he said he’ll call you at eight-thirty, or thereabout, if he can get to a clean phone. The last time I talked to him, he was in some roadhouse over in Wisconsin.”
    Shafer turned to look at the bedside clock: 8:13. “I’ll hang around here.”
    Cruz stepped back to the door. “You keep down, Justice. There’s a big chance that nothing’ll happen and you can go on your way, no harm done. But you gotta stay sober. If this thing does pop, and the anarchists head in toward the Capitol, we’re gonna need every man we can get. Gonna need to take out the leadership.”
    “I’m ready,” Shafer said. He squared his shoulders. “How long should I wait for Bill to call?”
    “I’d wait until nine—after that, I doubt that he will. Like I said, things are getting tense. One of these anarchist guys put out the word that he wants Bill’s head. They put a hundred thousand on it.”
    “Ah, man, a hundred grand?” Shafer was amazed by the amounts they threw around. He’d never made more than twelve dollars an hour, except when he was holding up gas stations.
    “Stay tight,” Cruz said, and she was out the door.
    Shafer was a moron, and he was undoubtedly sitting on the bed staring at the phone, but once down in the parking lot, she sat five minutes and watched the door to his room. She’d made a big point about his policing up his brass at the quarry where he sighted the gun in . . .
    Five minutes gone, she pulled on a hairnet and gloves and walked over to his truck and took the key out of her pocket and popped the back hatch on his topper, crawled inside and pulled it down. He’d thrown a plastic sheet over the gear inside, and she pulled it back, spotted the olive drab army-surplus ammo boxes. There were three of them, and she popped the lid on the lightest one and found it half-full of empty .50-caliber shells. She took four, crawled back out of the truck, locked it, and went back to her car.
    Looked up at the room: the dummy was still sitting there, she thought, staring at the phone, waiting for Bill. But Bill wasn’t making any phone calls to hotels in Minnesota: Bill was in jail in Port-land, Oregon.

    COHN, LANE, AND MCCALL had each driven separately to the hotel, positioning the cars for trouble. If the cops got a call about three guys doing a stickup, and saw a car with three guys in it, they might pull a traffic stop to take a peek. If there was no trouble, and they all left separately, they had an extra inch of safety.
    The night was warm and starlit, quiet in Hudson, but with traffic building into Minneapolis. At the hotel, Cohn circled the block a half-dozen times, saw Lane’s car ahead of him, saw Lane spot a car backing out of its parking place, circled a couple more times, saw a movement, pulled in smoothly, got the space. McCall would have gone to the parking ramp, the other emergency car. The scene was just as Cruz said it would be, people coming and going around the hotel. He walked a block back, could hear cheering in the distance—some political thing in Loring Park, he thought—and turned down the alley toward the hotel’s loading dock. McCall was already crossing the dock, Lane behind him. Cohn took a last look around.
    This was a danger point—if, for some reason, a cop car went past the mouth of the alley, saw him, and the cop got curious, Cohn was there with a mask and a gun, and that would be hard to explain.
    So he’d kill the cop. He’d killed a cop in Houston one time, and never thought about it anymore. Bad luck, for him and especially for the cop. No animus involved. Some black guy went to death row for the killing—more bad luck for the black guy.
    Lane and McCall were inside. There were five concrete steps up to the dock, nothing on the dock but a metal Dumpster, two steel doors where deliveries would go in, and a steel door to the left, open just an inch. He walked through it and found Lane and McCall at the bottom of the stairs, their masks in their hands.
    “Ready?” He pulled his mask out, slipped it