Eleven o'clock. Lucas got up and stretched, yawned, looked at Buddy Snider and Sally Craig, sitting at the breakfast table, playing gin rummy, then looked at his watch. From the hotel windows, he could see across the interstate all the way up to Capitol Hill. There'd been some semi-violent demonstrations during the afternoon, and a few more people had been taken off to jail, but nothing extreme. The downtown area was still loaded with cops, but everything below looked quiet.
Craig, a thin, fiftyish blond woman from Washington, without looking up, said, "You're pacing again."
"Yeah, well. You're playing gin rummy," Lucas said.
"Cards exercise the mind," she said.
Snider said to Lucas, "Maybe you should check your gun again. That was interesting."
"Gun's fine," Lucas said.
He'd been penned up for three hours; the first two hours in utter darkness, until Snider and Craig got back from the convention center, where, he suspected, they'd been passing out cash. Maybe lots of it. When they came through the door a few minutes before eleven o'clock, Craig had had a gorgeous soft deer-hide backpack slung over one shoulder, and it appeared to be empty. Lucas had carefully worked through the room while they were gone, and hadn't found any money. There was a safe in the closet, though, that might have held anything up to a half-million dollars. Since Craig presumably had a safe in her own room, that could be another half-million.
Lucas got on his cell phone and called Shrake: "Nothing here. Nothing at all," Shrake said.
Benson: "Nothing here." Voice dropped. "Whitehead's in the bathroom, she has some kind of a problem. The whole place stinks."
Jenkins: "Haven't heard or seen a thing. Sitting here watching West Coast baseball."
Tompkins: "Schott's gone to bed. Says he's too tired to stay up anymore. I'm lying here watching Star Wars with the sound turned off."
"Which Star Wars?" Lucas asked.
"A New Hope. Channel three-forty."
"That's the first one," Lucas said. "Where Princess Leia hints that she might go for a three-way with Han and Luke."
"Yup. That's the one."
Off the phone, he searched through the TV channels until he found Star Wars. "You mind if I watch this?"
"Better than this card game," Craig said. She tossed her cards on the table and said, "Go gin yourself," sprawled on the bed, and said, "Turn the sound up. They're about to jump down the garbage chute."
The knock on the door came at eleven-fifteen, three raps with a key, like a hotel maid would do it, and Jim Benson rolled to his feet, slipped the vest over his head, and pulled the Glock 9mm from its holster. The shotgun was in the corner, and he stepped over to it. Janet Whitehead, who was lying on the bed, sniffed and said, "Oh my God," and then an envelope slipped under the door, and they could hear, faintly, somebody walking away. Benson, a short, square-shouldered blond with a dimpled chin and chiseled nose, did a quick peek at the peephole and saw nothing. Whitehead picked up the envelope, opened it, glanced at the paper inside and said, "Hey," and before Benson could slow her down, she turned the knob on the door.
The door latch-lock was engaged, as well as the safety chain; the chain allowed the door to open three or four inches. The doorjamb anchor was held in place by three Phillips screws. They were not sufficient. The instant Whitehead turned the knob, the door exploded, and Whitehead hurtled back into Benson, who staggered backward, off-balance, and then McCall was there in the doorway, Cohn behind him, a gun in his hand.
McCall looked with surprise at Benson and opened his mouth to say something but Benson, landing on his butt, while Whitehead bounced away, fired a single shot with his pistol that hit McCall in the stomach. McCall staggered and shot Benson in the chest, in the vest, and Benson fired again, this time hitting McCall in the spine, and McCall dropped as though somebody had cut his puppet strings.
Cohn, still to the left of McCall, stepped farther to his left, the gun already up, and shot Benson in the face. Benson went down, dead, though Cohn didn't know it, and Cohn shot him again, in the head, and then stepped over McCall's body to Whitehead, who was crawling between the two beds, and shot her twice through the heart from the back.
McCall was on the floor, eyes wide, his mouth working, and Cohn, his hands covered with gloves as they had been in all the holdups, shot McCall in the forehead. Nothing more he could do.
Elapsed time, ten seconds? Cohn turned and ran down the hall.
Outside, he slowed, made sure he was out of camera range, peeled off the mask and jacket and gloves and wadded them up into a small ball, which he carried under his arm, and walked a hundred feet to the street and saw Cruz coming in the Toyota, and flagged her and when she stopped, yanked open the door and climbed in. "What happened?"
"Blew up. Fuckin' blew up." Cohn's voice was cold, uninflected, the way it got when there was trouble. "Tate's dead, woman's dead, cop in the room with her, he's dead, they're all fuckin' dead." He said it quietly enough, but she could tell that he was beaten up.
"Tate's dead? You're sure he's dead?" she asked.
"Yeah, he's dead, his brains are all over the hotel room, for Christ's sakes ' Ah, Jesus, Tate, he walked right into the cop's gun.
He kicked the door and the cop was right there and, boom, and he goes down, ah, McCall'"
"So now we're done," Cruz said bitterly. She was watching the speedometer. There was a tendency to drive fast after a hit, and she didn't want to do that. "Now we're done. Jesse's gonna be really screwed up about this, Tate was a good friend."
"Tate was a good friend of all of us," Cohn said.
"You're sure he's dead?"
"Yeah, I'm sure."
"If he's not dead, then the cops are going…"
"He's dead," Cohn said. "Ah, Christ'"
Cruz shut up and they drove along and Cohn thought, Maybe I could have saved him.
But he didn't really think so. McCall had been hit hard, right through the center of his body, he was dying on the floor, and Cohn didn't have time to wait for him to die, and no way to get him out of the hotel in a hurry. If Cohn abandoned him, and McCall did somehow survive, well, McCall might have been a little pissed.
Nobody was immune to extortion by the legal system. They would have given McCall a chance to get out, in fifteen, maybe, if he talked about Cohn and the other gang members. He'd done the right thing, but goddamn: it was Tate.
Lucas heard about it from the duty officer at the BCA who called and shouted, "Benson's down. Benson got shot, Benson's dead, he's shot'"
Lucas ran out of the hotel room with Snider and Craig calling after him, "What? What?" and he shouted back, "Keep the door locked," and he ran down the stairs because the elevators were too slow, piled into the car and screamed across town and dumped the Porsche in a cluster of cop cars and a cop flagged him and he held up his ID and shouted back and then he plowed through a flower bed, through the lobby and into an elevator with another cop, a St. Paul uniform he didn't recognize, and he asked, "Is my guy dead?" and the cop nodded and said, "Yeah, fuckin' awful."
Lucas pounded the elevator doors, once, twice, with the heel of his hand, and then they came on out on twelve and two St. Paul detectives were standing in the hall outside an open door. Lucas headed for the door and one of the detectives, whose name was John Elleson, caught him around the waist and said, "Whoa, whoa, Lucas, slow down, slow down."
Lucas tried to push past him, but Elleson held on, jammed him into a wall. Elleson was a small guy, but strong. "I wanna…"
"We think that the shooter's on the loose, one of them, anyway," Elleson said. "You can go in, but stay on the edges. We need to take everything we can get out of there."
Lucas nodded, took a breath, relaxed, and when Elleson let him go, went in past the busted door: Benson was there, with two other bodies. Benson was on his back, his head cranked backward, his forehead shattered, his bulletproof vest skewed around to his left, a pistol near his hand, a shotgun under his legs. A black man lay on the floor at Benson's feet, and a woman lay beside a bed, shot in the back.