Wicked Prey (8 page)

And he
was
bored. The convention was the biggest single cop-action in the Twin Cities’ history, and he was out of it, part of the crowd, and the crowd wasn’t doing much. Letty was supposed to be around here somewhere . . .

* * *

“HEY, DAD! DAD!”

Letty was there, under a spreading elm tree, waving. He smiled and headed over. She had a couple of credentials hung on an elastic string around her neck, like his. She was standing next to an orange nylon tent, where a young woman in a tired blue blouse and blue-jean shorts sat on a blanket next to a baby in a papoose sling.

The woman went straight for his liver: “Are you a cop?”

He tried for a wry smile: “Do I look like a cop?”

“Yup.” She wrinkled her nose, being funny about it, but the question was serious. Letty broke it up with, “Did you see John and Jeff? They were going to give me a ride over to the convention center.”

“What are they doing here?” Lucas asked.

“Just looking around. They got a car . . .”

“Letty . . .”

“I know, I know. They’re okay,” she said.

“I know
exactly
what they’re like, because they’re exactly like I was,” Lucas said.

“Dad, I can handle them, all right?” Fists on her hips.

“All right. Be careful,” he said. He looked around. “Wasn’t a march supposed to go off five minutes ago? I need some street stuff.”

The woman with the baby now had bought the cameras. She said, “Nothing is on time. These people couldn’t organize a phone call. My husband said he’d be back in five minutes and he’s been gone two hours.”

“Yeah? He’s a marcher?” Lucas asked.

“Anarchist,” she said. “Or anti-Christ. One of the two. I can’t keep them straight.”

Letty laughed and said, “I gotta get a camera in here . . . Hey, there they are.” She waved across the hillside at two gangling teenage boys, brothers, both with braces on their teeth. One of them, the older one, was a wicked street basketball player, and had nearly taken it to Lucas at the hoop mounted on Lucas’s own garage. Lucas generally approved of them, but they were
looking.
He knew it, and they knew he knew it, and so were careful. “Take it easy,” he said.

“Yeah . . . could I get ten dollars?” Letty asked.

“I suppose . . .”

She said quickly, “Twenty would be better.”

He gave her a twenty and she was gone.

“Nice girl,” said the woman with the baby.

“That sun is nasty,” Lucas said. “Is the kid okay?”

“The kid’s fine, but he’s sucking the life out of me,” she said. “I desperately need a cheeseburger and Mark’s got the money.”

“I could float you a cheeseburger loan,” Lucas offered.

She stood up and dusted off the seat of her shorts: “I accept. I’m really starving. Who do you shoot for . . . ?”

“BCA,” he said, and she nodded, and Lucas asked, “Too quiet. I’d like to see a little life in the crowd.”

“Too hot,” she said. Speaking as an old riot professional: “Basic rule of riots: you don’t have riots when it’s too hot. People get all pukey. Gotta wait until the evening, when things cool off. The best riots are when you have a long summer day, with a long evening where it cools off a little.”

“I don’t know all that technical stuff,” Lucas said with a smile.

They stepped around legs and bikes and clumps of people with signs and got to a street grill—the woman and the kid were convenient cover—and he bought her a cheeseburger and fries and a Coke, and got a Diet Coke for himself, and twiddled his fingers at the baby, and then took the baby while the woman, whose name was Lucy, ate the cheeseburger and they walked back to the tent. The baby had quiet blue eyes, observant and contained, and seemed interested in Lucas’s nose.

A passing stoner, with a sun-bleached ponytail, hazy blue eyes, and a lute in his hand, looked at Lucy, and then Lucas and the baby, and said, “Got that May and December shit going, huh? Good one.”

Lucy said, “Well, the sex is terrific.”

Lucas said, “More like May and August.”

The stoner tapped Lucas on the chest and said, “Good one, man. I mean, you know? Keep it going, you know? Long as you can.”

“It’s hard, man, you know, sometimes, with a woman like this,” Lucas said. “They want too much, sometimes.”

The stoner bobbed his head: “I know that for sure, man. Life is hard, and then you fuckin’, you know . . . die.” Sobered by the thought, he wandered away.

* * *

“WE’RE GONNA build a new egalitarian culture,
man,
” Lucy said to Lucas, as she sat down on her blanket, chewing on the cheeseburger. “To each, according to his needs, from each, according to his ability. Which means that the insurance agents can keep on selling insurance for sixty hours a week and that stoner can keep getting wrecked every day.”

“Just a guy,” Lucas said. “A lost soul.”

“I’m getting tired of it,” Lucy said. She squinted up through the tree leaves, and the sun sliding down to the west. Equinox coming in three weeks, and then winter. “Think I’m going home to Massachusetts. Get my dad to send me to grad school.”

“Think he’ll do it?”

“My dad will do anything I want him to,” she said. “Like you and your daughter.”

Lucas nodded. “Yeah . . . What about your husband?”

“Why wasn’t he here to buy me a cheeseburger when I needed it?” she asked. She took a few fries. “Fuck the revolution.”

A group of ten protesters in black began a chant: “No War but the Class War! No War but the Class War!” and people in the park began drifting that way, and a couple of cops idled along with them.

Lucas and Lucy chatted for a while—Lucy had been living in Iowa, where she and her husband were summer visitors at a drama commune, which gave revolutionary plays to local farm communities, and her husband was working on a screenplay—and then Lucas got up to leave. “Say hi when you see me around,” he said.

“Thanks for the food,” she said. “I was starting to hurt.”

* * *

BACK IN the HomTel, Lindy screeched, in a high-climbing soprano, “Goddamnitttttt . . . Brutus . . .”

Brutus had turned her every way but loose, faceup, facedown, upside down, and when he was all done, he lay sweating and naked and red on the bed, and said, worn out, “You really are the best piece of ass on the North American continent.”

“Not including Europe?” She was sitting on a towel, because she didn’t want to leak on the bed. She must be in her mid-thirties, now, Cohn thought, and still had small curved breasts with pink nipples and freckles.

“I don’t know about Europe,” Cohn said. “You hear stories about the French women. But hell, they’re in France. It’s like that song: ‘She ain’t Rose, but Rose ain’t here.’”

Lindy pouted: “I’m better than anybody in France.”

“Probably,” Cohn agreed. “I sorta haven’t tested those waters.”

“Better not, either,” she said.

“You fuck anybody while I was gone?” he asked.

“Well, sure, a couple,” she said. “It was two years, Brute. What was I supposed to do, scratch?”

“I hope to hell you didn’t catch anything,” he said.

She slapped his leg: “I didn’t. I’m careful. They were married men—I was saving my good stuff for you.”

“They pay you?”

“They bought me some stuff,” she admitted.

“Expensive stuff?”

“Well, Richard, there was this guy Richard Blanding in Birmingham, he paid my rent and bought me a car.”

“That’s something,” Cohn said.

“A Pontiac Solstice. Bright yellow. Not exactly a Ferrari.”

Cohn closed his eyes and sighed, and sank into the softness of the memory foam, and let all his bones relax. She started to hum, like she did when she was getting bored. He thought, Fuck her.

He’d lied to her about being the best piece of ass in North America. Lindy was a good old country girl, but more the Pontiac Solstice of pussy, rather than the Ferrari. Richard Blanding, whoever he was, had known precisely what he was getting.

* * *

LINDY, FOR HER PART, humming, rubbing at the polish on her toe-nails, thinking that she needed another pedicure, took a long careful look at the naked man beside her. She’d met him when she was sixteen, and he was in his mid-twenties. He’d been a wild one, who liked it all: money, women, gambling, cocaine and reefer and Saturday night fights in the gravel parking lots outside country road-houses, with the frogs croaking from the roadside ditches and the fireflies blinking out over the farm fields.

He’d grown up with a middle-class family, and if he’d done what they’d wanted him to do, he’d have gone to college and might have had his own construction business now, building out the suburbs of Atlanta or Birmingham. Might even be rich: but he wouldn’t have had any fun.

His fun—the women, gambling, cocaine and reefer—took cash money, and didn’t leave much time for actual work. The solution to the problem was obvious: take the money from people who already had it. He did it for a few years, finally got caught and sent to prison, where he got his graduate education and had time to think it all over.

He’d decided not to go straight, but simply to get better at his job.

He had.

That’s when they met, Cohn flush after an armored car holdup, and now here they were, almost twenty years later, in another motel. Cohn’s face had developed some harsh lines on both sides of his mouth—smile lines, but frown lines, too—and crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. His hair was still thick and curly, and he had the great teeth. Still thin and tough: but getting older. Gray in his chest hair . . .

Getting older, like she was, she thought. Not many more years when she could count on being taken care of because she was nice to somebody . . .

COHN REACHED OVER and stroked her leg: “Can’t tell you how much I like seeing you,” he said.

“Me too,” she said.

* * *

RANDY WHITCOMB had red hair precisely the same shade as Cohn’s, but never had Cohn’s potential. Whitcomb had been caught up in the early days of gangsta music, riveted to MTV when he should have been in school. Unlike most people, he believed the words. And though he lived in a ticky-tacky St. Paul white-bread suburb where the biggest public facility was a hockey arena, Whitcomb was naturally a gangsta, even with his bony white face and improbable thatch of hair. When he finally got kicked out of high school, he moved to north Minneapolis, a modest but occasionally violent black ghetto, where he picked up the language and sold dope on the street and eventually started running two or three whores that nobody else wanted.

Those were the big days of the crack wars, when everybody was buying the stores out of baking soda and everybody was cooking up the crack in the kitchen, twelve-year-olds were walking the streets with nines and bad attitudes. The cops were going crazy, and nobody really paid much attention to a small-time white guy living off marijuana and a short chain of low-rent women.

But Whitcomb was living the gangsta life, with paisley shirts and wide-wale corduroy pants and green-dyed lizard-skin cowboy boots. Then one day he found out that one of his whores was talking to a cop about who was doing what, who was selling what, who might be getting what package from El Paso through UPS or FedEx, or what guy might be coming in from Chicago with a big suitcase, riding in on the ’dog . . . well, Whitcomb, with one too many gangsta musicals banging in his head, went for the pimp punishment: found her and cut her face up with a church key.

The thing is, she’d been talking to Davenport.

Davenport got him in the back of a bar and beat him like a big bass drum.

Later Whitcomb had gotten accidentally involved with a guy who was a serial killer—really was an accident, in that street way, where all kinds of people bump into each other—had gotten involved in a shootout, and was left paralyzed from the waist down. That ended his sex life, but hadn’t changed his head that much. Davenport had been responsible for the shootout, in Whitcomb’s eyes; had been responsible for everything that had gone wrong in his life, including two stretches behind bars . . .

He sat in the van and watched the cops and the protesters streaming up and down the hill, another guy in a wheelchair, one of those happy dildos you see around who don’t even seem to realize how fucked-up they are, and he tracked Letty through the park, as she talked to a woman at a tent, and then to a tall guy who looked like Davenport, but didn’t dress right, and then hooked up with two kids, boys, the kind whom Whitcomb hated, good-looking athletes who probably got good grades and had money and ate peanut butter sandwiches with Mom and Wally and the Beav . . .

Briar sat behind the wheel, watching the crowd, until Whitcomb said, “There she goes. They’re going someplace. Get going that way . . . that way, dummy. Hurry . . .”

* * *

LETTY LEFT Lucas in the park and went off with John and Jeff, taking the front passenger seat in John’s car. John would have to concentrate on his driving—he’d only had his license for a month—and Jeff was safely stuffed in the back. No hands to deal with.