Wicked Prey

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 stop-light 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