Wicked Prey

Chapter 2 4

Lucas woke in the dark, disoriented, his neck twisted a little by the pillow propped against the arm of the couch. His pant legs and shirtsleeves were pulled up, and felt wrinkled and unclean, and his mouth tasted sour. He squinted through the dark at the red numbers of the alarm clock: 2:56. The alarm would go off in four minutes.

Not an easy sleep: he'd been disturbed by a sense of something undone, unrecognized, the running tail of a thought, but he couldn't quite catch it.

He sat up, in the light of a single lamp in the corner of the room, turned off the clock, picked up his shoes and then dropped them again, stretched and tiptoed down the hall through the master bedroom-Weather was breathing deeply, evenly, into her pillow- and into the bathroom. He shut the door, brushed his teeth by the light of a nightlight, splashed cold water in his face, and snuck back through the bedroom to the couch, and put on his shoes.

He stuck his face out the front door: the night was cool, almost cold. He relocked the door, got a light jacket from the front closet, and walked out to the car. The cool air felt good, fresh, and drove the sleep further back. He pulled out onto Mississippi River Boulevard, the lights of Minneapolis winking across the river valley, turned the corner and headed down to Cretin Avenue.

Mentally reviewed the evening before: the deployment of the troops, the search for Cohn, the discovery of the apartment. It was most likely, he thought, that Cohn had gone. At the moment, he could be rolling through Omaha, or Kansas City, or Chicago, on his way to a private plane ride to obscurity.

But why had he lingered as long as he had?

Cretin Avenue was essentially empty. In the mile or so out to I-94, he passed only a half-dozen other cars. The highway itself was busier, but mostly with long-haul trucks, going about their nocturnal businesses. He let the car out a little, and was downtown in a couple of minutes. He parked in a no-parking area out front of the condos, and called Shrake on his cell phone: "I'm out front."

"Be right there," Shrake said.

Shrake pushed open the glass door to let Lucas inside, and asked, "Everything okay with Letty?"

"She's fine-I goddamned near had a heart attack," Lucas said; and again he felt the mental bump.

What the hell. He looked querulously at Shrake, who asked, "What?"

And then he got it.

"Ah ' ah." He looked wildly around the condominium, turned back toward his car, said, "Ah…" and Shrake asked, again, "What?"

Letty had said something like, Maybe they're holding up the Republican Party.

Lucas said to Shrake, urgently, "Come on, come on ' We need some guys…"

"What?"

"They're holding up the Republican party," Lucas said. "The party-the goddamn ball. The dance. All those people on the streets, we saw them all night walking up there, diamonds all over them…"

Shrake was the tiniest bit skeptical: "They're holding up the party?"

"C'mon," Lucas said. "Get in the car. Get on the phone. It's gotta be either the St. Paul or the St. Andrews. Hell, maybe it's both."

Shrake shook his head but got in the car and called the duty man at the BCA and said, "Get onto St. Paul, right now, get some guys over in Rice Park, over behind that TV stand, over by the Ordway anybody you can get. If they got armor, it's better, don't let them be seen from the St. Paul Hotel or the St. Andrews. We think there could be a holdup going on ' The Cohn gang, yeah, get some guys…"

Lucas let him talk and concentrated on the driving: in a straight line, six blocks or eight or ten blocks, something like that. But the streets were all blocked off, and he didn't know exactly where the barricades were. He headed up the hill at speed, running every stoplight they came to, and they were all red, and around the north side of the blockades. Shrake was clutching his phone: "Easy, man, easy, man, Jesus Christ, you're gonna kill us before we get there."

The Porsche held on like it had claws until he pumped to a stop behind the old federal building. "Let's go," he said.

Shrake was on the phone: "Gotta get some guys ' I don't care, we gotta get some guys…"

There were two cops waiting, both from St. Paul. Lucas ran up, said, "I'm Davenport, with the BCA. This is Shrake. It's possible that either the St. Paul Hotel or the St. Andrews is being robbed exactly this minute-or maybe in a little while." He grinned at them. "Or maybe not at all. Shit, I don't know. But I think so. The thing is, if they're in there, we have to stop them. If they're still on the way in, we can't let them see us, because we need them to make their move. And maybe ' we're wasting our time."

A squad car turned the corner and pulled to the curb. Shrake jogged over and talked quietly to the cops inside, and they both got out, unconsciously hitching up their gun belts.

"What're we going to do?" one of the cops asked Lucas.

"Shrake and I will take a peek at the hotels. We want one of you with us, for the uniform, and we want a couple more blocking the back exit. We need at least one guy to run around and take the stairway up into the skyway…"

The cops from the squad had a shotgun and an Mbleaf in the trunk. Lucas put them back in the car: "Get around behind the hotels, fast as you can do it. I want you"-he pointed at the guy with the Mbleaf- "at the top of the stairway in the St. Paul. Don't let anybody through, but be careful with that thing, for Christ's sakes. Don't shoot any little old ladies."

The shotgun he wanted outside the back door.

Another cop car, directed by St. Paul communications, stopped behind Lucas's Porsche and two more cops got out. Lucas kept talking to the first four:

"Talk to your guys, get some backup behind you, but get into place. If they're in there, they could be coming out any minute."

It took longer to get organized than Lucas had hoped, because it was, technically speaking, a cluster-fuck. But with everybody on their way, with more St. Paul cops moving in, he nodded at Shrake and said, "Let's look at it."

The St. Paul Hotel was probably the oldest, and one of the two fanciest, in St. Paul. Lucas, Shrake, and the chosen St. Paul cop, a gray-haired sergeant whose name was Larkin, strolled down the sidewalk that ran past the side of the hotel, looking at the front entrance. The hotel cultivated a garden alongside the circular drive in front, and in the cold light from the street, the flowers looked pale and ghostly.

"Don't see anybody watching," Shrake said.

Lucas said, "Goddamnit. I fucked this up." He looked around him, in a circle, at the buildings surrounding the park: the central library, the old federal courthouse, the Ordway Music Theater. "We should have met somewhere else, but I didn't take the time. What if they're in the old courthouse? Or the library? That's where I'd be.

I'd have a lookout up there with a radio ' They might be looking right down at us, right now. C'mon."

Now he started jogging, down the street, up the driveway to the front of the hotel. He looked in. Two women behind the check-in counter, a guy in hotel livery, with a lunchbox next to his hand, talking to them, leaning on the counter. He looked real, but the box might hold a gun.

Before they'd started over, he'd told Larkin to take off his cop hat and put it under his arm-it was too readily identifiable at a distance. Now he told him to put it back on: "Get your hand on your gun, but keep it out of sight," Lucas said to Shrake. "Through the doors all at once." He pushed through the revolving door, with Shrake and Larkin going through the swing doors beside it.

The people at the desk looked down at them, and Lucas, one hand on the.45 under his jacket, held up his credentials. "Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and St. Paul Police. I'm a police officer, let me see your hands, please. Put your hands on the desk."

The guy said, "What?" but then put his hands on the desk. "What?"

Larkin asked, "Where's your safe?"

One of the women said, "Uh…" and looked to the side.

Nobody in the strong room: and Shrake checked their ID'S. All Minnesota driver's licenses.

Lucas said to Larkin, "Call the guy on the back door. I want him here, behind the desk, in case they come in. Move the other guys around behind the St. Andrews. I think there's a skyway exit, too, out to the parking ramps; we need somebody in the skyway…"

As Larkin called, Shrake said, "St. Andrews?"

Lucas nodded. "Let's go."

"Starting to feel like an idiot yet?" Shrake asked.

"About forty percent," Lucas said. "It seemed like a really good concept. Christ, years ago, when I was first on the Minneapolis force, there was a hotel that got knocked over down in Miami, and they took millions out. Millions. That was more than twenty years ago ' And there was no kind of thing like they had tonight'"

At the door, Lucas turned around and called to the women at the desk: "Did you guys have the big ball tonight? The Gold Key, or whatever they called it?"

One of them shook her head and said, "I don't know anything about that," but the other one said, "That was at the St. Andrews. I saw them all coming out when I was coming to work."

"What time was that?"

"One o'clock…"

Lucas, Shrake, and Larkin jogged toward the white limestone structure at the other end of the block, Larkin and Shrake chatting now, Lucas feeling that they just didn't believe, but he felt the impatience pushing him, a hand in his back, and halfway up the block he stepped up the pace. The St. Andrews was a new hotel, less than four years old, but modeled on the St. Paul, with a similar rose garden in the front. A Toyota Sienna was parked in the drive. Lucas detoured around the garden, leading the other two by fifteen feet as he came up to the double front doors.

The lights were down in the hotel lobby; he could see lots of marble, plush red carpet, wood paneling, and gold paint. To one side, a single woman stood behind the check-in desk, doing nothing, and Lucas felt a tingle.

Shrake and Larkin came up and Lucas said, "She looks like a fuckin' cigar store Indian. Get your hands on your guns ' ready…"

They went in all at once, Lucas at the point, and six feet inside the doors, Lucas saw a second woman, this one in a gray suit with an odd face, something wrong here, and he dropped his gun hand to his side and suddenly the woman behind the desk dropped out of sight and the suit-woman lifted her hand and at the same time screamed, "Cops," and opened fire, flashes like firecrackers on the Fourth of July, and Lucas went down and rolled right and windows shattered and furniture exploded; he heard somebody screaming and he kept rolling and rolling and then somebody opened up with a machine gun '