Wicked Prey

round Indian woman with a dot on her forehead.
    They knew cops when they saw them, and the straw man said, “What’s up?” and Del rolled out the pictures of Cohn and the woman-of-many-names. The clerks studied them for a minute, then the Indian woman, who wore a name tag that said, “Jane,” shook her head and said, “No. They are not here.”
    “You’re sure,” Lucas said.
    “I work here twelve hours a day,” she said. “They’re not here. Not only are they not here, they’ve never been here, not in the last eight months and twelve days, since I got here.”
    So they talked about the phone calls, and Jane explained that the phone number was the main number. If somebody called that number, one of the clerks answered it, and then switched it to the room. There was no record of which room took which call.
    “Nothing suspicious lately? Nothing out of the ordinary?” Del asked. “Nothing that caught your eye?”
    Straw Man glanced at Jane, then said, “Curtis Ramp was here. Not with his wife.”
    Curtis Ramp was a Minnesota Vikings running back. Shrake said, “Jesus, I hope it wasn’t before a game?”
    Straw Man shook his head: “It was Wednesday. He paid cash. He didn’t want us to know who he was.”
    “That doesn’t help a lot,” Lucas said.
    “Sorry, dude.”
    “We may send a couple of guys over here to sit with you for a while, watch who comes and goes,” Lucas said. “We’ll call you.”
    “Call the manager,” Jane said. “He’d have to set it up.”
    * * *
    IN LUCAS’S absence, a cold front had come through, and the night was now chilly: the first night of the northern autumn, which sometimes started in August. Out in the parking lot, they looked up at the rows of windows, and Lucas said, “Well, shoot. I thought it might be something.”
    “Still might be,” Del said. “Oughta get somebody here early tomorrow morning, watch people when they’re moving around. Run some license tags . . .”
    Shrake and Jenkins had come together in Jenkins’s Crown Vic, and they broke away, and Lucas and Del ambled down to the end of the parking lot to Lucas’s Porsche, talking babies. Del was saying, “. . . dilating, but then she got stuck. The doc said if she doesn’t go by the end of the week, she wants to do a C-section. I worried about it, but . . .” He realized he’d lost Lucas, who’d stopped, staring back at the lot: “What?”
    “Look at that old rattrap pickup,” Lucas said.
    “Uh . . .”
    “It’s got Oklahoma plates.”
    Del said, “Ah, jeez.” He went and looked, and came back. “This can’t be right, man. This can’t be right.” Down the lot, they could see Jenkins unlocking the door of his car, and Del whistled at them, and Jenkins looked up, and Del waved them back.
    Lucas said, “It’s got an NRA sticker; it’s got a Bushmaster sticker.” Bushmaster sold M-15 variants.
    “Can’t be right,” Del said. “What’d the connection be?”
    “Don’t know,” Lucas said. He scratched his head, mystified.
    “Jenkins had some of the guy’s pictures in his car,” Del said.
    Jenkins and Shrake came up and looked at the truck, and Jenkins said, “There’re only two possibilities. Either it’s a terrific coincidence and no big deal, or something is a lot more fucked up than we know about.”
    “You got those pictures?” Lucas asked.
    “Got one,” Jenkins said.
    “Let’s go ask Jane,” Lucas said. “She should know.”
    * * *
    JANE SAID, “Two-fourteen. Been here almost a week.”
    Lucas said, “Let me get my gun. We’ll take him right now.”

16
    DEL WAS WEARING JEANS AND A military-style olive drab shirt and yellow leather boots, and looked less like a cop than the rest of them, so they sent him ahead. He tiptoed up to Justice Shafer’s hotel room and stood with his ear to the door for a minute, and heard both the television and then a clunk from somebody moving around, and he tiptoed back down the hall and said, “He’s there.”
    Shrake said, “How do we want to do this?”
    “These guys have been rapping on the hotel doors with keys so they sound like a maid or something,” Lucas said. He took a quarter out of his pocket and held it up.
    Del said, “There’s a peephole. He’ll see us.”
    Lucas looked back down the stairway where they’d clustered, and said, “Go get Jane.”
    Jane had a well-developed sense of self-preservation, and didn’t want to do it, but the four of them were several times larger than she, and they