Wicked Prey

control it, but the wheels were spinning too fast, and there was never any hope, and he pitched forward and skidded face-first down the sidewalk, his legs slack behind him like a couple of extra-long socks.
    Moline bent over him. “Next time, we ain’t playing no patty-cake.”
    Juliet showed up three or four minutes later, crying, “Oh, God, oh, God. Are you all right, honey? Are you all right? The cops are coming . . .”
    Whitcomb had managed to roll onto his back. Most of the skin was gone from his nose, and he was bleeding from scrapes on his hands and forearms and belly.
    He started to weep, slapping at his legs. He couldn’t help himself, and it added to the humiliation. “Davenport did this to me,” he said. “That fuckin’ Davenport . . .”
    * * *
    BRUTUS COHN didn’t have much to unload. He tossed his suitcase on the motel bed and said, “I need to take a walk—haven’t been able to walk since I got on the train in York. You get the guys together. See you in a half hour.”
    Cruz nodded and picked up a pen from the nightstand and handed it to him: “Write my room number in your palm. Remember it.”
    Cohn wrote the number in his palm and Cruz led the way out, and he said, “See you in a bit, babe,” and gave her a little pat on the ass. She didn’t mind, because that was just Cohn being Cohn, no offense meant.
    So Cohn took a walk, looking up and down the street. They’d gotten off at Exit 2 in Wisconsin, a major fast-food and franchise intersection outside the built-up part of the metro area.
    From the front of the motel, straight ahead, he could see a Taco Bell, which made his mouth water, and a McDonald’s, both a block or two away. Closer, an Arby’s, Country Kitchen, a Burger King, and a Denny’s. To his right, across the main street off the interstate, a Buffalo Wings, a Starbucks, a Chipotle, and a couple of stores. To his left, a supermarket, a liquor store, some clothing stores, a buffet restaurant. Behind 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