Wicked Prey

thinning black hair slicked back on his small head. His nose had been broken sometime in the past. He was mostly unemployed.
    Lane was sitting at the computer desk, McCall was draped over an easy chair, Spitzer sat on a bed, more or less facing the other two. Lane and McCall were wearing golf shirts and slacks, while Spitzer wore a short-sleeved dress shirt and a black sport coat, because, all the others thought, he was carrying a pistol in the small of his back, the dumb shit.
    Rosie Cruz came through the door that connected Cohn’s two rooms and said, “He’s coming.”
    “Nothing around here to see but chain restaurants,” McCall said.
    “How’d you know?” Cruz asked.
    “I looked,” McCall said. “While you were pickin’ up Brute.”
    “And that’s what Brute’s doing—looking,” she said. “You know what he’s like.”
    “We gotta get this shit straightened out,” McCall said, looking at Spitzer.
    Spitzer said, defensively, “I’ll do whatever Brute says.”
    “Goddamn right,” Lane said.
    * * *
    THEY ALL SAT, waiting, the television on but muted, a CNN chick soundlessly running her mouth with a forest fire on a screen behind her head. A minute or two, then a key rattled in the door lock, and Cohn came in. He was wearing tan golf slacks, a red golf shirt, and a blue blazer, carrying a grocery bag and a plastic sack. He looked like a city manager on his day off.
    He saw them and flashed his smile, genuinely happy to see them, and they knew it. He shut the door and said, “Boys. Damned good to see you. Jesse. Tate. Jack . . .” He stepped through the room, shaking hands, slapping shoulders. Cruz was leaning in the doorway to the second room, watching.
    Lane said, “Man, you’re looking good. I like that beard.”
    “Yeah, yeah,” Cohn said, scratching at the beard. “Let me run down the hall and get some ice.”
    He picked up the ice bucket, went out, and was back in a minute with a bucket of ice cubes.
    “Got some Dickel,” he said. “I been drinking nothing but scotch and gin, and it’s good, but it ain’t bourbon.”
    McCall said, “We got some shit to figure out.” He looked at Spitzer.
    “All right,” Cohn said. “Let’s get it out.” He found a glass, scooped some ice into it, and poured in a couple of ounces of bourbon. “I think we agree that Jack sorta screwed the pooch the last time out.” He took a sip of the drink and closed his eyes and smiled: “That’s smooth.”
    “Screwed the pooch? He signed us up for death row,” Lane said. “Wasn’t no point in shooting those boys.”
    “Accident,” Spitzer said. “Goddamn one in a million. I thought he was coming for me. What the fuck was I supposed to do? Once he was down, I had to do the other one.”
    “They were cops,” McCall said.
    “Jack’s right, though. After the first one went down, he had to do the second,” Cohn said. He was standing next to Spitzer, one hand on his shoulder, drink in the other hand.
    McCall said, “Brute, you know I like working with you. You got a class act. But this asshole . . .”
    Spitzer turned his head toward McCall and away from Cohn. When he did that, Cohn put the drink down, pulled the eighteen-inch-long crescent wrench from his back pocket, cocked his wrist, and slammed it into the back of Spitzer’s head. Spitzer jerked forward, his face suddenly blank, eyes wide, and fell on the floor.
    Cruz said, urgently, “No, no, Brute . . .”
    “Go in that other room,” Cohn said.
    “Brute . . .” She didn’t move.
    Cohn ignored her, went to a closet alcove with a dozen wire coat hangers on a rod. He’d already unwrapped one of them and he took it down, carried it back to Spitzer’s body. Spitzer was out, and maybe dying, but making low growling sounds. Cohn bent the coat hanger around Spitzer’s neck, put his knee down hard on the unconscious man’s spine, and pulled up on the wire until it cut halfway through his neck. His teeth bared with the effort, he did a quick twist of the wire, turning it around itself. Spitzer stopped making any sound, though a minute later, his feet began to tremble and run as his brain died.
    Cohn looked at McCall and Lane and said, “Sooner or later, he’d have given us up. He didn’t have a job, like you boys. He was on the street. Sooner or later, he was going to get caught, and then he was gonna cut a deal. We were nothing but money in the bank, to him.”
    They all looked at the body for a minute, then Cruz said, “You