Wicked Prey

to the bathroom in his underwear.
    The apartment had two bedrooms, with Cruz in one, and Cohn and Lindy in the other, with Lane bagged out on the floor of the living room. Now he hung over the toilet, letting it all run out, coughing, finally dried up, pulled up his underpants, and went back to the living room.
    Needed a cigarette, but he’d quit smoking three years earlier. Still needed one, but he was used to the random flashes. He’d wait it out: turned on the TV and hit the mute, went in search of the local weather station.
    Saw Cohn’s face, and then, in a blink, Cruz’s. “Holy shit.”
    He yelled, “Rosie. Rosie, get in here. Rosie . . .” He was fumbling with the remote, finally brought up the sound, but Cruz’s face was gone and he shouted, “Rosie,” and caught, on the TV, the last part of a pitch for help: “. . . see her or Brutus Cohn, do not attempt to apprehend them, but call nine-one-one immediately. They are heavily armed and considered extremely dangerous.”
    The woman turned to another camera and said, “St. Paul police are braced for another day of trouble . . .”
    Cruz stumbled into the living room, dressed in a cotton night-gown, took in Lane, looked at the TV, said, “What?” and then Cohn stuck his head out, and Lane said to Cruz, “They just had your picture on TV along with Brute’s. They got a picture of you.”
    “Oh, shit . . .” She looked unbelieving, shaking her head, asked, “Are you sure?”
    “Sure I’m sure,” Lane said. He picked up the remote and started clicking through the channels. The apartment was a model, so they had only basic cable service, and after he’d run up to CNN, he ran back down, and at the bottom, on Channel Three, caught another shot of Cruz, a poor shot but identifiable enough, with the anchor in the background: “. . . Davenport said that the woman may come from the Los Angeles area, because the phone used to take the photo listed a large number of calls to a phone from the three-two-three area code in Los Angeles; that phone has not been found . . .”
    “He took my picture with a cell phone,” Cruz said, unbelieving. “He took my picture.”
    “Who?” Cohn asked.
    Cruz ran into the bedroom and came back a moment later with another phone, flipped it open and pushed a speed dial, let it ring, hung up, pushed the speed dial again, and then, a third time, said, “It’s only five o’clock out there . . .” and then somebody answered.
    She said, “We’re busted. Get out of there. Get the files and anything else you need, take them out to your car, move my car, and burn it. Burn it . . . I know, but they’ve busted us, and it’s bad. Get out. They could be there anytime. We’re seeing it now, on TV here, so you might have a couple hours. Get over to Ellen’s . . . just don’t let her see it. Don’t let her see it and when everything slows down, get down south. I’ll meet you at the beach. Yes. Yes. Maybe an hour. Don’t push it any further than that . . . Go. Go.”
    She hung up and Lane said, “I was right—about where you were from.”
    She looked at him and shook her head, then said, “The fucker took my picture with a cell phone. I never saw it. He tried to take one once, and I told him I hated that, I made him stop before he took it. He took one anyway.”
    “Who?”
    “The guy who gave me the names of the moneymen,” she said.
    “This changes everything,” Cohn said. “Now we need to do the big one.”
    Cruz shook her head: “Are you nuts? We needed four guys with me outside, and then Spitzer went, and then McCall . . . we’ve got two guys and . . .” She flipped a hand at Lindy. “You.”
    “Fuck you, Rosie,” Lindy said.
    “Everything’s changed,” Cohn insisted. Lane was flipping through the channels. “I need to bury myself deep and I need more money to do that. And now, so do you, Rosie. They’ve got your picture. There are four cops dead, counting the ones in New York. They’ll never give up. You need to go to Argentina or . . . India . . . or something. You can’t stay here, babe.”
    Lane was looking at her, and he bobbed his head. “I don’t know how much money you got, but . . .”
    Cruz spoke slowly, as though they were stupid: “We—don’t— have—enough—people. We don’t have enough! Is that hard to understand?”
    Cohn said, “We don’t have enough if we have a mob scene.”
    She stared at him for a minute, then said, “What’s the option?”
    “We have to get on