Wicked Prey

I’m gonna pee my pants just thinkin’ about it. I’m not doing it.”
    “All you have to do is be a desk clerk. You’ve even done that,” Cruz said.
    “They’ll wind up with a picture of me, and I’ll be right out there in some fuckin’ African jungle with you and Cohn.” She started to cry. “I just wanna go back to B-B-Birmingham.”
    Lane jumped in on her side: “If you make her do it, I ain’t going. She’ll screw it up. No offense, Lindy, it’s what you’re saying your own self. If she screws it up, we could all go down. I’m telling you, this whole thing is running off the tracks.”
    Cohn asked lazily, “Does that mean you’ll do it if she doesn’t go?”
    * * *
    LANE NEVER got a chance to answer, because Cruz’s cell phone rang. She had three cell phones in her purse, all with different rings, and she looked at her purse and then back at Cohn and said, “Uh-oh.”
    “What?”
    “Nobody’s got that number,” she said.
    She went to the purse and took the cell phone out, looked at the LCD screen and frowned.
    “Who is it?”
    “Says it’s Shafer, but that can’t be right.” She clicked on the phone and said, “Hello?”
    “You know who this is?” Shafer asked.
    She did: “Yes. How did you get this number?”
    “It’s the only number on my phone, from when you called me before,” Shafer said. “Listen, my daddy called me. He said the sheriff came around and they’re looking for me. He said the Secret Service called the sheriff from St. Paul and they say that I’m up there with my .50-cal and they think I’m going to shoot McCain.”
    “Justice . . .”
    “So I’m going home. I’m headin’ out,” Shafer said. “I got to get this straight with the sheriff.”
    “Justice, damnit, we might need you,” Cruz said.
    “I want to talk about it, face-to-face,” Shafer said. “From what my daddy says, you’ve been lying to me. They say Bill is in jail somewhere.”
    “You sit right there,” Cruz said. “I’m coming to talk to you. Give me an hour.”
    “Well, I don’t know . . .” There was an odd pause, and then Shafer said, “My daddy said the sheriff was looking for me, and that the Secret Service, you know . . .”
    “Sit right there,” Cruz said, and she punched off the phone, turning it in her hand, staring at it.

    COHN ASKED, “That was the gun guy?”
    “Yeah.” She told him what Shafer had said, and then, “There was something not right about it. He was talking in whole sentences, and loud. He usually mumbles around. Then there was this minute, there, when he ran out of things to say, and I could feel like something was going on, off the phone. You know? Then he repeated everything he said the first time, in the same words. And then . . .” She frowned.
    Cohn asked, “What?”
    “He said his daddy called to tell him that the sheriff was looking for him, down in Oklahoma . . . But when I was recruiting him, he told me his father had abandoned them years ago. That he hadn’t seen him since he was a kid.”
    “You think the cops got him?” Cohn asked.
    They all looked at one another, and then Lane said, “We need the guy, right?”
    Cruz: “He’s the cherry on the ice-cream sundae. People spot him down Seventh Street, and every cop in the area will be down there. Every one.”
    “And they’d spot him,” Cohn said.
    Cruz cracked a smile: “I can guarantee it. I was going to call nine-one-one every two minutes, to tell them where he was. But he didn’t sound like himself.”
    Lane asked, “So . . . the cops got him?”
    Cruz shook her head: “I don’t know.”
    Cohn studied her for a minute, then rolled up from the couch he was lying on, carefully tied his shoes, and said, “I know how we can find out.”
    * * *
     
    LUCAS LISTENED to Wilbur Rivers talk on the telephone, then Rivers took the phone away from his ear and said, “The conversation was too short to narrow it down much, but the woman was calling from a St. Paul cell, and the tech thinks the signal was coming from south of Seventh Street, between St. Peter and Sibley. North of the river. That’s as close as he could get it.”
    Shrake scratched his chin and said to Lucas, “That’s probably thirty or forty blocks, total. Lot of condos in there. Apartments above some of the stores.”
    “But it’s manageable,” Lucas said. “We can handle that. We just grind it out. Talk to the guys at the City Hall, the tax assessor’s office, nail down the highest possibilities,