Wicked Prey

Benson, landing on his butt, while Whitehead bounced away, fired a single shot with his pistol that hit McCall in the stomach. McCall staggered and shot Benson in the chest, in the vest, and Benson fired again, this time hitting McCall in the spine, and McCall dropped as though somebody had cut his puppet strings.
    Cohn, still to the left of McCall, stepped farther to his left, the gun already up, and shot Benson in the face. Benson went down, dead, though Cohn didn’t know it, and Cohn shot him again, in the head, and then stepped over McCall’s body to Whitehead, who was crawling between the two beds, and shot her twice through the heart from the back.
    McCall was on the floor, eyes wide, his mouth working, and Cohn, his hands covered with gloves as they had been in all the holdups, shot McCall in the forehead. Nothing more he could do.
    Elapsed time, ten seconds? Cohn turned and ran down the hall.
    * * *
     
    OUTSIDE, HE SLOWED, made sure he was out of camera range, peeled off the mask and jacket and gloves and wadded them up into a small ball, which he carried under his arm, and walked a hundred feet to the street and saw Cruz coming in the Toyota, and flagged her and when she stopped, yanked open the door and climbed in.
    “What happened?”
    “Blew up. Fuckin’ blew up.” Cohn’s voice was cold, uninflected, the way it got when there was trouble. “Tate’s dead, woman’s dead, cop in the room with her, he’s dead, they’re all fuckin’ dead.” He said it quietly enough, but she could tell that he was beaten up.
    “Tate’s dead? You’re sure he’s dead?” she asked.
    “Yeah, he’s dead, his brains are all over the hotel room, for Christ’s sakes . . . Ah, Jesus, Tate, he walked right into the cop’s gun. He kicked the door and the cop was right there and, boom, and he goes down, ah, McCall . . .”
    “So now we’re done,” Cruz said bitterly. She was watching the speedometer. There was a tendency to drive fast after a hit, and she didn’t want to do that. “Now we’re done. Jesse’s gonna be really screwed up about this, Tate was a good friend.”
    “Tate was a good friend of all of us,” Cohn said.
    “You’re sure he’s dead?”
    “Yeah, I’m sure.”
    “If he’s not dead, then the cops are going . . .”
    “He’s dead ,” Cohn said. “Ah, Christ . . .”
    Cruz shut up and they drove along and Cohn thought, Maybe I could have saved him.
    But he didn’t really think so. McCall had been hit hard, right through the center of his body, he was dying on the floor, and Cohn didn’t have time to wait for him to die, and no way to get him out of the hotel in a hurry. If Cohn abandoned him, and McCall did somehow survive, well, McCall might have been a little pissed.
    Nobody was immune to extortion by the legal system. They would have given McCall a chance to get out, in fifteen, maybe, if he talked about Cohn and the other gang members. He’d done the right thing, but goddamn: it was Tate .
    * * *
    LUCAS HEARD about it from the duty officer at the BCA who called and shouted, “Benson’s down. Benson got shot, Benson’s dead, he’s shot . . .”
    Lucas ran out of the hotel room with Snider and Craig calling after him, “What? What?” and he shouted back, “Keep the door locked,” and he ran down the stairs because the elevators were too slow, piled into the car and screamed across town and dumped the Porsche in a cluster of cop cars and a cop flagged him and he held up his ID and shouted back and then he plowed through a flower bed, through the lobby and into an elevator with another cop, a St. Paul uniform he didn’t recognize, and he asked, “Is my guy dead?” and the cop nodded and said, “Yeah, fuckin’ awful.”
    Lucas pounded the elevator doors, once, twice, with the heel of his hand, and then they came on out on twelve and two St. Paul detectives were standing in the hall outside an open door. Lucas headed for the door and one of the detectives, whose name was John Elleson, caught him around the waist and said, “Whoa, whoa, Lucas, slow down, slow down.”
    Lucas tried to push past him, but Elleson held on, jammed him into a wall. Elleson was a small guy, but strong. “I wanna . . .”
    “We think that the shooter’s on the loose, one of them, anyway,” Elleson said. “You can go in, but stay on the edges. We need to take everything we can get out of there.”
    Lucas nodded, took a breath, relaxed, and when Elleson let him go, went in past the busted