Wicked Prey

.”
    “Let it go,” he said. “I’ll take care of Jack.”
    “Okay,” she said. “Put your sunglasses on.”
    At seven o’clock, the sky was still bright. Cohn took a pair of wraparound sunglasses from his jacket pocket and slipped them on. At the pay booth, Cruz dropped the window and handed ten dollars to a Somali woman in a shawl. Cruz got the change from the ten, and a receipt, rolled the window back up, pulled away from the booth, and handed the receipt to Cohn.
    “Check it out,” she said.
    He looked at the receipt, said, “Huh. The tag number’s on it.”
    “There’s a scanning camera at the entrance,” Cruz said. “I’m wondering if it might digitize faces at the same time that it picks up the license plates—hook them together, then run them through a facial recognition program.”
    “Would that be a problem?”
    “Not as long as somebody doesn’t put your face in the car with your face in the FBI files,” she said. “That’s not a question with me, of course.”
    “Got the beard, now,” he said. “And the hat and glasses. I cut the beard off square to give my chin a different line. I was wondering about the baseball hat . . .”
    They rode along for a minute or two, as she got off the airport and headed into St. Paul, past the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers. Even in the middle of a big urban area, the river valleys had a wildness that reminded him of home in Alabama. In Britain, even the wild areas had a groomed look.
    “Jack, I can’t get him off my mind. I’m sorry . . .”
    “Never mind Jack.” He was looking out the window. “You almost went home, huh? That’d be . . . Zihuatanejo?”
    “Never been to Mexico in my life, Brute,” she said with a grin. “Give it up.”
    “With a name like Cruz, you gotta have been in Mexico.”
    Her eyes flicked to him. “Why would you think my name is Cruz?”
    He laughed and said, “Okay.” But she looked like a Cruz.
    She clicked on the radio, dialed around, found a country station. “Instead of worrying about where I’m from, see if you can get the Alabama accent going.”
    The first song up was Sawyer Brown singing “Some Girls Do,” and Cohn sang along with it, all the way to the end, and then shouted, “Jesus Christ, it’s good to be back in the States. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and North Ireland can go fuck itself.”
    * * *
    RANDY WHITCOMB, Juliet Briar, and a man whose real name might have been Dick, but who called himself Ranch, lived in a rotting wooden house on the east side of St. Paul, that sat above a large hole in the ground called Swede Hollow; once full of houses full of Swedes, the hole was now a neglected public park.
    Whitcomb was a pimp. He’d become a pimp as soon as he could, after his parents had thrown him out of the house twelve years earlier. He liked the idea of being a pimp, and he liked TV shows that featured pimps and pimp-wannabes and his finest dream was to own a Mercedes-Benz R-Class pimpmobile in emerald green. He enjoyed the infliction of pain, as long as he wasn’t the object of it.
    Briar was his only employee.
    She was a heavy young woman in a shapeless gray dress; her hair the sad tatters of a curly perm gone old. She sat half-crouched over the steering wheel of Whitcomb’s handicapped van, and alternately chirped brightly about the sights on the street, and sobbed, pressing her knuckles to her teeth, fearing for what was coming. What was coming, she thought, would be a whipping from Whitcomb, with his whipping stick.
    He’d broken the stick out of a lilac hedge a block from their house. A sucker, looking for light, the branch had grown long and leggy, an inch thick at the butt, tapering to an eighth of an inch at the tip. Whitcomb had stripped the bark off with a penknife; the switch sat, white and naked, spotted here and there with blood, in the corner of the room next to his La-Z-Boy chair.
    He’d beaten her with it three times over the summer, when her performance had sagged below his standards.
    He liked the work. He couldn’t stand up, so he made her drop on the floor like a dog, on her hands and knees, while he sat on his chair and whipped her with the switch. The thing was limber enough that it didn’t break bone—he wouldn’t have cared, except that broken bones would have kept her from waiting on him—but it did maul her skin. So she laughed and chirped and pointed and giggled and then sobbed, the fear rising in her throat as they got