Wicked Prey

and twisted them, which rolled Weimer onto his face. Weimer felt the wallet slip out of his pocket, and then, “Got the key. Let’s go,” and the van started to move.
    * * *
     
    WEIMER WAS at the Embassy Suites, twenty blocks away. “Anybody else in your room?” Cohn asked.
    “No.”
    “Better not be, because we don’t want no one seeing our faces, you know? If you got a girlfriend, or something, and she sees our faces, well, too bad for her.”
    “There’s nobody but me,” Weimer said.
    “Where’s the money?”
    Another moment of silence, then Cohn hit him again, hard, this time in the left kidney. The pain was excruciating, and Weimer groaned, and Cohn said, “You only got two kidneys.”
    “It’s under the bed. But it’s a platform, you gotta pull the headboard back a little.”
    There were cops all along the streets, but they made a wide circle to the hotel, no problem. They parked on the street, and McCall took the card: “See you in five.”
    Inside the hotel, he rode the elevator up to seven, put on his gloves when he saw the hallway was empty, entered the room, closed the door and turned on the light, wrenched the headboard off the bed, saw the briefcase, a square leather one, like a lawyer might carry, pulled it out, clicked it open—a third full, maybe, less than they’d gotten before. A lot less. Not so many hundreds and fifties, lots of twenties and tens.
    He started to leave, then thought about what Weimer had said: “You’re them.”
    He knew about them . . . He thought about it for a minute, then checked Weimer’s other bags, found nothing but an expensive-looking camera. Started toward the door again, then stopped, went back, yanked the bed apart, pulled the whole platform away from the wall . . . and saw the backpack jammed against the foot of the platform. A cheap black nylon backpack. Weimer had been smart, having heard of the other robberies, and had set up a decoy bag . . .
    McCall popped the backpack: here were the hundreds. Lots of them. McCall smiled and said aloud, “You da man.”
    Back out to the van, driving away, said, “Weimer’s a wiseass. There were two bags. I got both of them.”
    Weimer said, “I had to try.”
    “Shouldn’t have,” Cohn said, and he hit Weimer in the kidney again, and this time, Weimer screamed, and Cohn hit him once more.
    McCall said, “Coming up.” They took a one-way road between the back of St. John’s Hospital and the freeway, a dark road, weeds on the freeway side, and halfway down, stopped, and Cohn rolled Weimer out into the street, the bag still over his head.
    As they pulled away, Cohn slid the door shut and asked, “How’d we do?”
    “Did good,” McCall said. “Maybe more than the first guy.”
    “Damnit: it’s like taking candy from kids. Put that with the hotel deal, and we can get anything we want. Anything.”
    “If it’s what I think, we already got more than three million . . .”
    “What’re you going to buy in LA with three mil divided by five? Huh? Tate? You can’t even buy a nice house with your share. We hit the hotel; if it’s what Rosie says it’ll be, you’ll get maybe three for yourself. That’ll buy a nice house. Live in Beverly Hills with that kind of money.”
    McCall thought about it, said, “Not in the best part of Beverly Hills,” and Cohn started to laugh.
    * * *
    THE PAIN in his back was brutal and Weimer stayed on the concrete, pulled the bag free, got oriented, and rolled to the gutter. All he saw of the van was two red taillights, disappearing around the corner. He had no idea what kind of van it was, or even what color it was.
    The pain in his back was ferocious. He tried to stand, almost fell, then turned and vomited up most of the sandwich he’d eaten, along with all the sauerkraut. When it was all up, he remained hunched over, spitting, and he thought, A million-five. Jensen was going to shit.
    He got to his feet, took a step and groaned again. He was hurt, and maybe bad. He didn’t know which way to go, didn’t know that the building he was looking at was the back of a hospital. He took a couple of steps, and the pain radiated through his back; he took another step and then headlights flared behind him.
    He stepped to the side and started waving at the car. Hospital security, as it turned out. “I got robbed and beat up,” he told the security guard, who’d stopped thirty feet away. “I gotta get to a hospital. I’m hurt bad. You know where a hospital is? We