Elleson said, "There's a couple in the room next door. They were in bed, heard the shots, the guy says he heard somebody running, so he thought it would be okay to look. They had to turn on the lights and he went to the door and looked, and the hallway was already clear. The shooter knew where he was going. There's no blood in the hallway or on the stairs, so if he was hit, he wasn't bleeding too bad."
"Benson shot the black guy?" Lucas asked.
"We don't know, but I think he probably did. We're gonna have to wait and look at the slugs, to see who shot who-it's too complicated."
"Ah, man…" Lucas put his hands to his temples, backed into the hallway.
"You okay?" Elleson asked.
"Fuck no." He wasn't; he was nauseous.
"We're gonna need a statement from everybody involved. We understand Benson was working as sort of a bodyguard."
"These are the same guys who did the robbery down behind St. John's last night," Lucas said. "The same guys who killed the Hudson cop. They're a murder gang hitting political money guys. I'll get you everything we know-we've got the main guy's picture out there…"
He gave Elleson a summary of what they knew then said, "We think they've got a hideout somewhere around here-they either rented a house or a condo or something. We've papered all the hotels and motels, and nobody's seen them."
"They got some balls," Elleson said. "There were two hundred cops within three blocks of here. They had to drive right through them to get in and out."
"Did we get them on video? Any chance?" Lucas asked. The feds had come up with a grant for surveillance cameras, and they were all over the streets.
"Depends on which street they were on," Elleson said. "We've got video on the front and the side, but not along the back."
"Got to look at it, man: if we could spot the car, that'd give us a big leg up. Can't hide the car."
"I'll get that going," Elleson said. "What's Benson's family situation?"
"He's single, divorced four or five years ago. No kids. Parents live up in St. Cloud, I think. I'll have our duty guy pull the file ' We gotta look at the tapes."
"I'm sorry about this, man," Elleson said.
The elevator dinged and Del stepped out, looked both ways, spotted Lucas and came on down the hall. "Is it true?" Looked at Lucas's face, and said, "It's true."
The condo was only six blocks from the hotel, and after parking the car, Cohn and Cruz took the back stairs up. Cruz took a peek at the lobby before they walked into it, and then they were inside. Lindy was sitting on the couch reading a copy of Women's Health magazine, and Lane came out of the back room, a smile on his face, and he asked, "How'd it go?" And then, the smile slipping away, "Where's Tate?"
Cohn told him: "They ambushed us."
"Oh, no," Lindy, pale-faced, hand to her mouth.
"It's my fault," Cruz said. "I should have known. We couldn't do this many…"
"I thought they couldn't tell the cops," Lane said to her.
"That must have gone out the window when the cop was killed in Hudson," Cruz said.
Cohn said, "I'm so sick I can't even spit." He looked at Cruz. "It's not your fault, Rosie. I pushed for it, but there's a smart guy on the other side, and he punked us." He gave them a blow-by-blow account of the entry and the shooting, lied about McCall getting shot, said the cop shot him twice. "Never had a chance. Tate kicked the door and boom-boom, he goes down and I see the cop and I hit him, then I hit him again, and then this woman's on the floor and I hit her, and then I'm out of there. I got out clean, but'"
"I'm heading home," Lane said. He looked around the condo. "Clean this place up ' get out of here."
"I'm with you," Cruz said. She looked at Brute. "You and Lindy ought to get out of here. You'd be safer as a couple. You can use your Visa card and driver's license for about two weeks yet, rent a car, head south. You've got enough money to last a long time in Belize or Costa Rica."
Lane said to him, "That's what you gotta do, man. You can have Tate's cut-they're not looking for me or Cruz, but you've got to get out of here, you need the money. With Tate's cut, you got almost a million and a half."
"Not enough," Cohn said. He ran his hands through his hair and said, "Fuck it, I'm gonna go get a drink."
Cruz said, "Brute, don't do it. The cops…"
Cohn said, "Fuck 'em."
"There are a million cops out there. If they spot you…"
"Fuck 'em," he said again. "I don't look anything like those pictures. Especially if I'm sitting down. I'm gonna get a drink." To Lindy: "You coming?"
"Brute: bad idea, I'm really scared." She looked scared.
"I'm going," he said. "That fuckin' McCall, man," and tears ran down his face and he went out the door.
The door opened behind him and Cruz came out with her purse and said, "If you're going, I'll go with you."
She'd scouted the town thoroughly, and steered him through the nearly empty skyways, for the best part of a half mile, then outside and across a street and into an outdoor mall, with bars and outdoor seating, to a place called Juicy's. They got a table in a corner back against a building where Cohn couldn't be seen head-on, and he ordered a cheeseburger and a double martini with four olives, and she got fries and a Diet Pepsi. He sat looking at the tabletop for five minutes, drinking the martini, then said, hollow-eyed, "What do I do, Rosie?"
"Can't do the hotel anymore," she said. "We really needed four people. Three was marginal. Now we've only got two, even if Jesse was willing. That won't work; too many people to control. So, we do what we did when there was trouble in the past-we get out. Jesse and I both have cars at the airport. We take the rentals back right now, clean out the apartment, get out of here late tonight, in my car. You and me and Lindy, maybe to Des Moines. Go out to the airport, you rent a car there, take it to Vegas, give the cash to Harry and move it to your investment account. What do you have left in there?"
"Maybe a quarter."
"So you'll have almost two. That'll kick off eighty thousand a year until you die. There are lots of nice places where you can live pretty well on eighty thousand."
"Pretty well-if you want to live like a retiree. You know, watching your dollars. Watching your budget," Cohn said. "Won't be any Social Security or Medicare or any of that' Goddamnit, I need at least four. Five would be better. On two hundred thousand a year, you know, I could live okay."
"Brute, you've got to deal with reality," Cruz said. "You get someplace safe, cool off, maybe I can put together one more big one. A good safe armored car, a credit union."
"Credit union won't do it. Most we ever took out of a credit union was a half," Cohn said.
"With no work and no risk," she said.
"So I need three more million, and my cut on a big credit union is maybe two hundred, so you're saying we ought to do fifteen credit unions?"
She leaned forward: "What I'm saying is, we need to get the hell out of St. Paul. We can worry about money some other time. There are more important things: like staying alive."
"But this hotel'"
"We don't have the personnel'"
They were talking about it, working through the original plan with Cohn on his second double martini, when a crippled man in a wheelchair, a dusty head-bent street kid, and an overweight woman took a table fifteen feet away. The cripple looked at Cohn without recognition, sneered and turned away and waved at a waitress and shouted, "Hey! Hey! Am I invisible or some fuckin' thing?"
Cohn leaned close to Cruz and said, "It's yon bugger-the one who ran over my feet at the airport." The yon bugger came off as an Alabama drawl-the British accent had vanished with four days in St. Paul.