Wicked Prey

If it’s two minutes . . .”
    “We get the point,” Cohn said. “If we get pushed, we drop the tools and walk. But Don Walker said that he knows those boxes, and it won’t take a minute. He says it’ll take more like thirty to forty-five seconds . . . So now we’re in for less than an hour.”
    “I would have liked to have drilled one myself,” Lane said. “Just to know .”
    * * *
     
    “I’M THINKING, if we get in clean, I might want to talk to the desk clerk for a couple of minutes,” Cohn said. “I’ll take a rope along and strangle her a little, if I need to. Tell her we need the names of the boxes she put stuff in. The ones with the most jewelry, the most cash . . . She’ll have an idea.”
    “That could work, if you’re not herding other people around,” Cruz said, nodding. “If we get in clean, we move the manager and the clerk onto the floor in the safe-deposit room, put on the restraints. If they won’t talk, maybe get rough with one of them . . .”
    “That would cut the time down,” Lane said. “If we knew which boxes to do first—or which ones were empty.”
    “We’ll know which ones are empty, if there are any, because the desk will have both keys for them. For the ones being used, they’ll only have one key. They keep their keys in a cupboard behind the front desk,” Cruz said.
    Cohn said, “The other thing is, I could take a look at what we’re taking out. If we hit some certain point, we quit. Or, if nothing much is happening, if we’re getting junk, if there’s no cash, we wrap it up and take off.”
    Lindy asked, “Are you going to kill the clerk and the manager?”
    Cohn said, “See when we get there. It’s bad business, killing somebody when you don’t have to. Tends to attract the eye.” He didn’t want her to know ahead of time.
    Lindy was looking at the photograph of the safe-deposit room, and said, “Look at the wall plug-in. It looks like it’s burnt.”
    They all looked and Cruz said, “Picture’s not clear enough.”
    “I wonder if they had to drill a box, and it sucked down too many amps,” Lane said. “If that outlet is burned out, we’d be fucked.”
    “That’s a good catch, Lindy,” Cruz said. “I didn’t see that. There’s another outlet on the wall behind me, behind where the camera is, but if there’s a circuit problem . . . You know what, Jesse? You should stop at a hardware store and pick up one of those long heavy-duty extension cords. It’s ninety-nine percent that we won’t need one, but if we need one and don’t have it . . .”
    “I’ll get one,” Lane said.
    * * *
    WHEN THEY finished working through it, they ordered out for pizza. Lindy met the pizza man at the door, overtipped him, and brought the pizza back into the living room and said, “What we need to do is ask, ‘What if we didn’t do this?’ We know there are a bunch of cops on our asses. They know what Brute looks like, and Rosie. What if we walked away from it, and started planning another job somewhere else? We could get in the cars and be in Missouri by midnight. Jesse could be home by tomorrow morning . . .”
    “Maybe not,” Jesse said. “That’s a long haul, south of St. Louis.”
    They all sat and chewed on the meat-eater’s specials, with olives and mushrooms, and Cohn sighed and said, “The big money keeps getting harder. The trucks get better, the guards get better, there are more cops all the time. They got DNA now, and instant fingerprints . . . This money is right there . And Rosie and I gotta go deep, this time. We’ve got to stay gone for years, maybe. If we pull this off tonight, we won’t ever have to come back. I can move to India or New Zealand or South Africa and stay lost forever. If we have to come back for another job . . . I mean, the way fingerprints work now, if I get stopped coming across the border, and they print me, I could get busted right there.”
    “It’d still be safer,” Lindy said. “I got a really bad feeling about this one, Brute. Really, really bad. We don’t even know how the cops got onto this Shafer guy, we don’t even know what they’re doing.”
    Cohn sat chewing for a minute, then said, to Lane, “We can’t do it without you. You in, or out?”
    “If you make the call, I’m in,” Lane said. “But Lindy has some points.”
    Cohn bobbed his head, smiled at Lindy. “You do have some points. You’re smarter than I thought. Saw that thing on the outlet, too.” He shook his head. “But