Wicked Prey

grouped around her and looked down at her until she caved and said she would.
    “All you have to do is knock; as soon as you hear him start to open the door, you move away,” Shrake said.
    “What if he just shoots?”
    “For a knock on the door?” Jenkins asked.
    “It’s almost eleven o’clock,” she pointed out.
    “Nothing’s perfect,” Shrake said.
    “If it turns out nothing’s perfect, I’m the one who gets shot,” she said.
    “Maybe . . . what if he had a package at the desk?” Jenkins suggested. “She calls him from the front desk, says, ‘A woman just dropped a package for you...’”
    “Sounds like bullshit,” Shrake said.
    “To you, but if his file’s right, this guy ain’t no mental light-house,” Jenkins said.
    “I could go with that,” Lucas said. To Del. “What do you think?”
    “The big thing is, we don’t want him coming out of there behind a machine gun,” Del said. “We don’t want to spook him.”
    “We could call in an entry team,” Shrake said.
    Del: “You pussy.” And to Jane, “No offense.”
    “Let’s call him from the desk,” Lucas said.
    * * *
     
    JENKINS WAS RIGHT: Shafer was not the Wizard of Oz.
    Del was positioned at the end of the hallway, opposite the stairs that led down to the lobby, listening on his cell phone as Jane made the call from the front desk, with Lucas and his cell standing next to her.
    Upstairs, Shafer snatched up the phone and said, “Yeah?”
    “Mr. Shafer, a woman has left a package for you at the front desk. You can pick it up at your convenience,” Jane said. “I get off in an hour.”
    “Thanks. Be right down.”
    Jane hung up and Lucas said into his cell phone, to Del, “He’s coming out.”
    Lucas, Shrake, and Jenkins gathered at the bottom of the stairs, but in the cross-hall, out of sight from the stairs themselves. When Shafer unlocked his room door, Del started walking toward him, beer can in one hand, cell phone in the other. He said, “I’m on the way, darlin’.”
    Shafer glanced at him and turned away, headed down the hall, then down the stairs, Del moving fast now to catch up. At the very last second, as he stepped off the bottom stair, Shafer might have suspected that something was wrong. He turned and looked at Del, who was coming down on top of him in a linebacker’s rush, and he flinched and then Jenkins kicked his legs out and Shrake landed on him.
    Shafer started struggling and thrashing, but not too hard, grunting under the weight of Del and Shrake, because he knew cops when he saw them. He stopped thrashing after a few seconds and said, “What d’you want?” and Shrake put the cuffs on.
    Lucas said to him, “Who’re you gonna hit?”
    “What are you talking about?” A little more thrashing against the cuffs.
    “We know all about the .50-cal, Justice.” Lucas squatted next to his head. “We found your little spot up on the hill. You gonna hit McCain? You gonna hit Palin? Who you gonna hit?”
    “What hill? What?” His eyes were wild. “Hit McCain? Are you nuts?”
    * * *
    LUCAS CALLED Dan Jacobs at the security committee: “Listen, if you’ve got a couple of loose Secret Service guys rattling around, we nailed that Justice Shafer guy,” Lucas said.
    Jacobs shouted, “Lucas, goddamnit! That’s great. That’s wonderful. Where is he?”
    “We’re putting him in a car, taking him up to Ramsey County. Tell the Secret Service that they’re welcome to sit in. Things might be a little more complicated than we thought. We’ve got a BCA crime-scene crew on the way to the motel where we grabbed him and we’re staking the place out, looking for accomplices.”
    “Accomplices. What accomplices?” The joy was gone.
    “Like I said,” Lucas said, “it’s complicated, and it’s probably not good.”
    * * *
    SIX SECRET SERVICE agents showed up to watch Del talk with Shafer. Lucas got the feeling that if there were an assassination plot against McCain, it wouldn’t do a guy’s career any harm to get in on the ground floor when it was broken up.
    Del had brought the can of Budweiser with him, and it was sitting by his boot heel, unopened, where the video camera couldn’t see it. Shafer was dressed like Del, in a khaki hunting shirt, jeans, and hunting boots, and was handcuffed to a metal table. He kept looking at the video camera in the corner, as though trying to see the crowd that gathered behind it.
    One of the Secret Service guys, looking at the monitor, asked, “You sure