Wicked Prey

think I’m good-looking?”
    “I think you’re one of the most gorgeous things I ever saw,” Shafer said, the sincerity shining through. “I wish you could come visit me sometime, down in Oklahoma.”
    * * *
     
    LUCAS TALKED to the lead Secret Service agent by phone, then he and Shrake and Jenkins went back into the room and found Shafer and Briar talking, and Lucas said, “Here’s the deal. We’re going to take you guys into St. Paul so you can talk to the Secret Service. They’ll decide what we’re gonna do.”
    “They owe me a truck and a bunch of gear,” Shafer said. There was an assertive note in his voice that hadn’t been there before.
    “You’ll get the truck,” Lucas said. “I wouldn’t push them on the gun.”
    “Hey, that gun is perfectly legal . . .”
    Lucas held up a hand: “Justice, I’m just telling you. I wouldn’t push them. A guy who’s wandering around a national political convention with a .50-cal in his truck . . . he’d be best off not pushing too hard.”
    Shafer thought about that for a minute, then said, “I definitely want the truck. Then I’m going home to Oklahoma and I’m never coming back to this place. Minnesota sucks.”
    Jenkins said, “ Casse toi, pauvre con .”
    Shrake said to Lucas, “French lessons.”
    * * *
     
    BACK AT the apartment, Cruz told Lane and Lindy about the cops at the motel. “They’re right on top of us,” Lindy said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
    Cohn was watching her: she was excited, pink-faced, scared, rattling around inside a thin cotton dress, and it was making him horny. Cruz, on the other hand, was pulling together, tighter and tighter.
    “No. What they did was, after they found my place in LA, they checked phone numbers and got the number from my phone,” Cruz said. “That was the phone I used to call my friend, to get her out of the house. She did, and she’s . . . safe. But they found the record and they traced that to the calls I made to Shafer. They’re moving really fast. Really fast. I don’t know how they dug Shafer out of the motel, but I’ve put enough word around about him, to wind them up, that they might have shaken down the whole motel and picked him up at random. So they get him, and they co-opt him, get him to call me. They still don’t know where we are. They do know who we are. Brute and me, anyway. And Tate. They’ve digitized all the fingerprints and they’ll nail Tate down in two minutes. If they find any connection to Jesse, they’ll have him, too.”
    They all looked at Lane, who said, “I hung out with Tate a few years ago, in LA, but never got busted with him. The only jobs I done with him I did with Brute.”
    “So you might still be clear,” Cohn said. “Besides, they’ll be looking for a guy with swastika tattoos. That little idea may save your bacon, someday.”
    Cruz looked at her watch: “We’re twelve hours away from hitting the hotel. If we can get through the twelve hours, we’re good. I mean, we could have used Tate, but . . . we could still do this.”
    “We’ll be in there for an hour,” Lane said. “We’ll be making noise. Christ . . .”
    “We can do it,” Cruz said. “If Lindy can make it as a desk clerk, we can pull it off.”
    Lindy shook her head, but she didn’t say anything.
    * * *
    CRUZ HOOKED her laptop to the television, took them through it, using PowerPoint, a series of photos and diagrams of the St. Andrews Hotel.
    “We go in between three and four o’clock in the morning. Everything will be over for two hours, by then. Two cars here, in the parking ramp.” She flashed the route with a laser pointer. “From the hotel, if we have to run, we have access to the ramp twenty-four hours a day, up the back stairs to the skyway, or down on the street, up through this stairway.” She pointed out the access and escape routes on the photos. “We should walk it one last time, this evening. There’ll be a night manager on duty, and a desk clerk, but all the restaurants and bars are closed. The safe-deposit room is right behind the reception desk. When I put my stuff in it, I got these photos . . . this is just a cell phone cam, so excuse the quality.”
    The safe-deposit room was a six-by-eight-foot rectangle, with sixty steel-door boxes set into a concrete wall.
    “What worries me is that whole ‘one minute’ business,” Lane said. “Sixty boxes, sixty minutes. But if it’s a minute and a half, then we’re in for an hour and a half.