Wicked Prey

time in Belize or Costa Rica.”
    Lane said to him, “That’s what you gotta do, man. You can have Tate’s cut—they’re not looking for me or Cruz, but you’ve got to get out of here, you need the money. With Tate’s cut, you got almost a million and a half.”
    “Not enough,” Cohn said. He ran his hands through his hair and said, “Fuck it, I’m gonna go get a drink.”
    Cruz said, “Brute, don’t do it. The cops . . .”
    Cohn said, “Fuck ’em.”
    “There are a million cops out there. If they spot you . . .”
    “Fuck ’em,” he said again. “I don’t look anything like those pictures. Especially if I’m sitting down. I’m gonna get a drink.” To Lindy: “You coming?”
    “Brute: bad idea, I’m really scared.” She looked scared.
    “I’m going,” he said. “That fuckin’ McCall, man,” and tears ran down his face and he went out the door.
    The door opened behind him and Cruz came out with her purse and said, “If you’re going, I’ll go with you.”
    * * *
    SHE’D SCOUTED the town thoroughly, and steered him through the nearly empty skyways, for the best part of a half mile, then outside and across a street and into an outdoor mall, with bars and outdoor seating, to a place called Juicy’s. They got a table in a corner back against a building where Cohn couldn’t be seen head-on, and he ordered a cheeseburger and a double martini with four olives, and she got fries and a Diet Pepsi. He sat looking at the tabletop for five minutes, drinking the martini, then said, hollow-eyed, “What do I do, Rosie?”
    “Can’t do the hotel anymore,” she said. “We really needed four people. Three was marginal. Now we’ve only got two, even if Jesse was willing. That won’t work; too many people to control. So, we do what we did when there was trouble in the past—we get out. Jesse and I both have cars at the airport. We take the rentals back right now, clean out the apartment, get out of here late tonight, in my car. You and me and Lindy, maybe to Des Moines. Go out to the airport, you rent a car there, take it to Vegas, give the cash to Harry and move it to your investment account. What do you have left in there?”
    “Maybe a quarter.”
    “So you’ll have almost two. That’ll kick off eighty thousand a year until you die. There are lots of nice places where you can live pretty well on eighty thousand.”
    “Pretty well—if you want to live like a retiree. You know, watching your dollars. Watching your budget,” Cohn said. “Won’t be any Social Security or Medicare or any of that . . . Goddamnit, I need at least four. Five would be better. On two hundred thousand a year, you know, I could live okay.”
    “Brute, you’ve got to deal with reality,” Cruz said. “You get someplace safe, cool off, maybe I can put together one more big one. A good safe armored car, a credit union.”
    “Credit union won’t do it. Most we ever took out of a credit union was a half,” Cohn said.
    “With no work and no risk,” she said.
    “So I need three more million, and my cut on a big credit union is maybe two hundred, so you’re saying we ought to do fifteen credit unions?”
    She leaned forward: “What I’m saying is, we need to get the hell out of St. Paul. We can worry about money some other time. There are more important things: like staying alive.”
    “But this hotel . . .”
    “We don’t have the personnel . . .”
    They were talking about it, working through the original plan with Cohn on his second double martini, when a crippled man in a wheelchair, a dusty head-bent street kid, and an overweight woman took a table fifteen feet away. The cripple looked at Cohn without recognition, sneered and turned away and waved at a waitress and shouted, “Hey! Hey! Am I invisible or some fuckin’ thing?”
    Cohn leaned close to Cruz and said, “It’s yon bugger—the one who ran over my feet at the airport.” The yon bugger came off as an Alabama drawl—the British accent had vanished with four days in St. Paul.
    “Ignore him,” Cruz said.
    “Right.” Cohn gulped the last of the second martini and waved at the waitress.
    Cruz said, “Better slow down on the martinis, you’re gonna be on your ass.”
    “Ah . . .” He ordered the third one and said, “When I was living in York, I’d get up every morning and read the Times , the Independent , the Guardian, and the Financial Times . I’d have four cups of coffee, and by the time I was finished with all that,