Wicked Prey

top of them. We kill one: we never give them a chance to resist. We pop one the minute we’ve got them, let them look at the body and think about being dead. I can hold them myself, that way. Even if we get twenty or thirty people. Jesse does the boxes, Lindy is the desk clerk, you’re on the radios.”
    Cruz said, “No,” and Lindy said, “I can’t do that,” but Cohn, ignoring Lindy, said, “Rosie, just think about it.”
    * * *
    CRUZ WENT BACK to her bedroom, which had a tiny bathroom with a tight shower, and got cleaned up and let the water run over her head, and shampooed and conditioned and didn’t think about it, until she was toweling off.
    She’d killed three people in her life, after some long consideration, and with great care. Before this benighted trip to the Twin Cities, five others had been killed in the series of robberies she’d done with Cohn and his gang. None of the killings had been cold. All had been necessary, and in some way, self-defense, with the exception of the two cops killed in New York. Spitzer had simply gotten nervous and pulled his trigger, and Spitzer had paid.
    Now the body count was out of control. Four dead in the Twin Cities, counting McCall. Another in the hotel would be five.
    But the cops had her photo.
    Laura was out of the Venice place, she thought, and the fire should already be cleaning up after them. She could change her face a bit, go blond . . . but she had to be far gone. Someplace like New Zealand, she thought. Some careful money, checks coming in from Ireland, a full-time straight job for a while . . .
    Laura was still clean.
    Five dead, best case. Hard to think about.
    But Cohn had put his finger squarely on one critical fact: if they went in shooting, they could do it with three.
    * * *
    A COLD FRONT was headed down from Canada, and this might be the last day of summer: but it was another good one, a good day for shorts. Don Johnson, the perverted mailman, wearing shorts and a wrinkled blue shirt, climbed out of his truck with a bag on his shoulder and started up the suburban driveway, his second block of the morning.
    Letty and Carey were in a Channel Three van driven by a tough nut named Andy Cramer, who Letty had thought was an Australian but turned out to be a South African. Cramer wedged the van into the curb in front of the postal truck and hopped out, slid back the side door and picked up his camera, and Carey took the microphone and they walked up the driveway behind Johnson, who looked back at them, and then at the house, wondering what was going on. Letty sat in the open door of the van and watched: Carey had said she wouldn’t do it if Letty got involved.
    “Mr. Johnson,” Carey called. “Mr. Johnson.”
    Johnson was befuddled. “Me?”
    Cramer said, for Johnson’s benefit, “We’re running,” and Carey shoved the microphone at Johnson’s face. “Mr. Johnson, we’ve been told by a sixteen-year-old girl that you have repeatedly forced yourself on her sexually.”
    “What-what-what?” Johnson held a handful of mail between his face and the camera lens. He was horrified and, Carey was pleased to see, frightened. Guilty-guilty-guilty.
    Carey: “She tells us that she can identify your intimate areas by a variety of birthmarks and also by a bite mark she left on your hip, which left a scar, when you were forcing her to perform oral sex on you.”
    “Get away, get away . . .” Johnson tried to run around them and Cramer tracked him with the camera, stayed with him.
    “Do you deny this, Mr. Johnson? Are you willing to speak to the police about these charges?”
    “Get away, get away,” Johnson shouted. “This is the mail, I’m delivering the U.S. mail here . . .” A few letters slipped out of his hand and he slapped at them, trying to catch them.
    Carey bored in: “Did you force this girl to perform oral sex?”
    “I did no such thing . . .”
    “Did you force the bathroom door, naked, while she was in the shower and press your body against hers?”
    “No-no-no . . .”
    “. . . Get into her bed naked after forcing the bedroom door?”
    “No-no . . .” Johnson was trying to get back to his truck, but Cramer blocked him and growled, “Don’t touch the camera, mate.”
    Carey put the knife in: “Are you going back to her house, Mr. Johnson? Are you going to continue seeing this girl’s mother?”
    “No, no, no . . .”
    Carey turned to Cramer and said, “Turn off the camera.”
    He dropped the lens toward the ground