Wicked Prey Read Free Page A

the hotel, to the left, a Home Depot.
    Excellent. He needed fuel, liquor, and a hardware store, and here it all was.
    He hit the Taco Bell first and got a Grilled Stuft Burrito with chicken; while he ate, he read the Star Tribune about the Republican convention. The paper was just short of hysterical, which was good. The more confusion, the more cops doing street security, the better. Besides, he was a political conservative and wished John McCain well. He liked the thought of a bunch of little anarchist assholes getting beat up by the cops.
    Out of the Taco Bell, he stopped at the supermarket, got some apples, one doughnut, and three Pepsis. He picked up a bottle of George Dickel at the liquor store, then carried the whole load down to Home Depot, where he bought a box of contractor’s clean-up bags and a crescent wrench, the biggest one he could find.
    “Big wrench,” said the cute little blonde at the checkout.
    He gave her a twinkle: “I gotta big nut to deal with,” he said.
    She giggled, seeing in the comment a double entendre of some kind, which may or may not have existed, Cohn thought, as he walked back to the motel with his bags.
    * * *
    SO THE GANG was back in town.
    Jesse Lane was a white man with dirty-blond hair that fell on his shoulders, a thick face with eyes too closely spaced, a bony nose marked by enlarged pores, and thin, pale-pink lips. A handmade silver earring, big as a wedding ring, hung from his left earlobe. Fifteen years earlier he’d done time in an Alabama prison, for armed robbery, where he picked up the weight-lifting habit. He was still a lifter, and showed it in the width of his shoulders and his narrow, tapered waist.
    Lane owned a farm in Tennessee, on the ’Bama border, where he grew soybeans and worked on cars in a shop in the barn. His specialty was turning run-of-the-mill family vehicles into machines that could flat outrun the highway patrol—not for crooks, but just the everyday Dukes of Hazzard wannabes.
    Tate McCall was a black version of Jesse Lane. He’d done a total of ten years in California, both sets for robbery, but had been clean for eight years. Like Lane, he’d been a lifter, but where Lane was square, McCall was tall and rangy, like a wide receiver, with hands the size of dinner plates. McCall owned a piece of a diner on Main Street in Ocean Park, a neighborhood in Santa Monica.
    Jack Spitzer was from Austin, Texas. He looked like a big-nosed French bicycle racer, or a runner, mid-height but greyhound-thin, his thinning black hair slicked back on his small head. His nose had been broken sometime in the past. He was mostly unemployed.
    Lane was sitting at the computer desk, McCall was draped over an easy chair, Spitzer sat on a bed, more or less facing the other two. Lane and McCall were wearing golf shirts and slacks, while Spitzer wore a short-sleeved dress shirt and a black sport coat, because, all the others thought, he was carrying a pistol in the small of his back, the dumb shit.
    Rosie Cruz came through the door that connected Cohn’s two rooms and said, “He’s coming.”
    “Nothing around here to see but chain restaurants,” McCall said.
    “How’d you know?” Cruz asked.
    “I looked,” McCall said. “While you were pickin’ up Brute.”
    “And that’s what Brute’s doing—looking,” she said. “You know what he’s like.”
    “We gotta get this shit straightened out,” McCall said, looking at Spitzer.
    Spitzer said, defensively, “I’ll do whatever Brute says.”
    “Goddamn right,” Lane said.
    * * *
    THEY ALL SAT, waiting, the television on but muted, a CNN chick soundlessly running her mouth with a forest fire on a screen behind her head. A minute or two, then a key rattled in the door lock, and Cohn came in. He was wearing tan golf slacks, a red golf shirt, and a blue blazer, carrying a grocery bag and a plastic sack. He looked like a city manager on his day off.
    He saw them and flashed his smile, genuinely happy to see them,