Wicked Prey

worked. “Letty, that’s appalling. What you’re thinking. That’s the coldest thing I ever heard of.”
    “You do what you gotta do,” Letty said, her eyes cutting back into Carey’s.
    Carey recoiled: “Not that.”
    “Look,” Letty said. “She’s gonna get beat, sooner or later. All we’re doing is taking advantage.”
    “You’re setting her up,” Carey said.
    “I’m taking care of Dad. Okay? That’s what I’m doing. So let’s take care of Don, and get Juliet a place to go if . . . this other thing happens.”
    “Letty! I can’t do this. This is awful,” Carey said.
    “It’s already going. There’s nothing you can do to stop it that wouldn’t help Randy, and hurt Juliet and Dad and me.” Letty stepped back and said, “So make your pick. Who do you help?”

    LUCAS, BORED, called Jenkins and Shrake, and found them, bored, getting nowhere. He got some names from them and hit a dozen condo buildings himself, running down the presidents of the condo associations, getting head shakes and uh-uhs from each of them: nobody had seen anybody who looked like Cohn or the woman in the cell-phone photograph.
    One of them said, “You might be on the right trail, though. We’ve only got twelve units here, and two of them are rented out. Bought on spec, can’t be sold—might be foreclosed. Same thing all over town, so there’s lots of space to hide out.”
    Lucas had stayed in touch with Mitford all afternoon, and on the last call, Mitford said, “I have six names for you. If they’re going to hit again, there’s a good chance it’ll be one of these six guys. They’ve got the most money and they all got early reservations—before this Sabartes guy died in D.C.”
    “All six?”
    “Well, I actually got eleven names, but five got reservations too late,” Mitford said. “You shouldn’t need those.”
    “All right. E-mail me the names: we’ll set up with them this evening.”

13
    RANDY WHITCOMB SAT IN THE BACK of the van as they cruised Davenport’s place, the sun going down across the Mississippi Valley. They went around and around the neighborhood looking for the girl, until Ranch said, “Man, she ain’t here. We been doing this for hours.” They’d been doing it for half an hour.
    “Gotta be a better way,” Whitcomb said. As he looked out the van window, he saw a woman who’d been digging in a garden stand up to look at them as they went by. They’d gone by her a half-dozen times, and were starting to attract attention. “We need a plan.”
    Juliet Briar didn’t say anything; she just drove.
    “I thought you were gonna bullshit her over to the house,” Ranch said.
    “I don’t think the bullshit was working,” Whitcomb said. He’d read the distance in Letty’s eyes during their few words at the Mc-Donald’s. Whitcomb wasn’t the sharpest knife in the dishwasher, but he had an exquisite sense of class, and Letty was several class-steps above him. The chances that she’d fall for his bullshit were fairly thin, he’d decided. She was like one of the prom queens back in high school—they’d look right through him. They couldn’t even see him; they couldn’t even hear his bullshit. He was like a mosquito buzzing around their heads.
    He scratched his nose, breaking open a scab left by the Pollish twins, when they rolled him down the front steps onto the sidewalk. He looked at the blood on his fingertips, shook his head and wiped it on his pants leg.
    Ranch said, “Maybe we just oughta do it.”
    “Do what?”
    “Just grab her,” Ranch said. “Me ’n Juliet. See her on the street, pick her ass up, throw her in the van.”
    “She’d scream and moan and piss and fight . . .”
    “Whack her on the head,” Ranch said. “Put a bunch of pennies in a sock, punch her out or whack her on the head. Throw her in the van.”
    “You ever done anything like that?”
    “Used to whack fags down on Hennepin,” Ranch said, a lie so transparent that his voice wavered halfway through it.
    “You never whacked a fag in your life,” Whitcomb said.
    “Well—I heard about it,” Ranch said. “Swat them with a sock full of pennies, you don’t kill them, you knock them out. Hit them with a pipe, you kill them.”
    “You probably are a fag,” Whitcomb said.
    “I’m not a fuckin’ fag, man, you seen me fuck Juliet.”
    “Yeah, well, when we get this chick, you’re gonna have to fuck her.”
    Ranch nodded. “I can do that.” Ranch would use any drug he could find, but