"It'll get swamped by all the other noise ' Listen, come on over and meet these guys. They might have some ideas."
The guys were out-of-towners, professional handlers, Democrats in town to watch the Republicans do their stuff. Ray Landy and Dick
McCollum were talking about McCain and his vice-presidential pick, the unknown governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. They couldn't stop talking about her, veering from amazement to ridicule, watching their BlackBerrys as commentary poured in from friends, reading the messages aloud. They got a table in the tiny bar, and Landy said to Lucas: "You're an outside guy. What do you outside guys think about Palin?"
Lucas said, "I'm mostly a Democrat, so ' maybe I'm not the best judge."
"Oh, bullshit," Landy said. "What do you think?"
"I don't know anything about her. What bothers me is that it was a quick decision, I guess-that's what the papers all say," Lucas said. "They say that McCain is rolling the bones. I don't know about Palin, but I'm not sure I want to vote for a guy who'd roll the bones on a presidential election. Doesn't make him seem like a calm, rational decision-maker."
"Bless you," Landy said. "I hope everybody's thinking that way."
The three pols ordered Bloody Marys and Lucas got a Diet Coke. Mitford said, "Guys, Lucas is a big shot in our Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. He's looking into the robberies…"
McCollum was a pale-eyed man who fiddled with an unlit cigarette, twiddling it like a pencil between his nicotine-stained fingers: "You a cop?"
Lucas nodded. "Yup."
"He's handled things for the governor for a while-I asked him to look into these things," Mitford said.
The drinks came and they stopped talking until they'd all had a sip, and the waitress left, and McCollum said, "There are fifteen guys like them. Well, there were, anyway. Some of them might have taken off."
"You ever heard of anything like this before?" Lucas asked.
Both men shook their heads, and Landy said, "You hear about it at a lot lower level-but not at this level. You know, when the money gets down to the street, you'll have robberies, but they're random, small-time stuff. A few hundred here or there. That's what happens when you walk around in a bad area with your pockets full of twenty-dollar bills." He said "bad air-ee-a" in a way that suggested it was a clich`e wherever he came from.
"I never quite understood where the money was going," Lucas said.
Landy looked at Mitford, who shrugged, and Landy said, "When you're running a campaign, you've got all these people down at the bottom who need walking-around money. They want to get lunch, or buy lunch for somebody, or catch a cab, or get somebody a cab, or pay for gas, or even get some lawn signs together. These are people who turn out the vote. You can't issue a check to all of them-and a lot of them don't have money to do it on their own. I mean, any money."
"Say you're working an area with gangs," McCollum said. "There might be somebody who is, like, an officer in a gang. He can turn out a certain vote-fifty people, seventy-five people, a hundred people, maybe even a few hundred people. He needs to get around for a few weeks. Somebody might toss him a few hundred dollars, depending on what he does…"
"A couple grand, maybe," Landy said.
"And the candidate might not want his name on a check going to a gang leader," McCollum said. "So, the cash is like oil. It greases the wheel."
"Seems like a lot of money," Lucas said. "A million bucks, more…"
"It is a lot, at this level, when it's in a suitcase. Once you get down to the street, it's pretty parceled out. You might put a couple of million in a big place like Philly or Dade County, or Cleveland, but it's mostly in handfuls. Mostly, less than a grand. You know, you get two or three thousand people working informally, they need lunch and cab fare and so on ' you can go through a mil pretty damn fast."
"Inflation," Mitford said.
"Damn right. Back in "eighty-eight, I bet the dollar amounts were maybe a quarter of what you see now," Landy said. "Gas was cheap, food was cheap, everything was cheap. Now, it's more. Million doesn't go as far as it used to."
"If it's a million in Philly or Miami, what's it in Chicago or LA?" Lucas asked.
"Mmm, doesn't really work that way. Pennsylvania's in play, so's Florida," Landy said. "They could go either way, so getting out the street vote is critical. Illinois and California are pretty safe for us, so it's not that critical. Republicans won't spend much, either. There's going to be money, but' maybe not quite as intense."
While Lucas was sitting in the bar, sipping on his Coke, talking political money, Rosie Cruz was walking back toward her room from the Coke machine, and saw the cop in the lobby. The cop car was parked a few spaces down from the lobby door, andwitha bad feeling, Cruz pushed through the lobby door and walked up beside the cop, a pudgy young blond guy, who was talking to a couple of desk clerks.
The cop was showing the clerks a badly colored Xerox printout of a photograph of Brutus Cohn. One of the clerks glanced at her and she asked, brightly, "What time is the shuttle to the airport?"
The clerk pointed at a sign, which said that the shuttle left every four hours starting at 7 a.m., and turned back to the cop. The other clerk was saying, "It sorta looks like a guy. But it sorta doesn't, too. Let me see, he's in a corner room, let me see…" And he hunched over a schematic of the hotel and the cop crooked his neck to look at it.
Cruz walked out the door and turned away from Cohn's room, and as soon as she was out of sight, called Cohn on her cell. Cohn's phone rang four times before he answered, and he said, "Yeah?"
"Get out of there. There's a cop in the lobby with a picture of you and he's coming down to your room. Get out, get out'"
"How many?"
"One, here, but he could call in more," she said. "Get out."
Then Cohn was gone and she snapped the phone shut and walked up a flight of stairs to an exposed walkway where she could see the parking lot. A minute or two later, she saw the cop, one hand on his gun, walking down the parking lot toward Cohn's room. She punched the speed dial and Cohn came up: "Yeah?"
"He's walking toward your room. He's alone. He'll be there in one minute," she said. And he was gone again.
Brutus Cohn was buck-ass naked, in bed with Lindy, when Cruz called with the warning. He jumped up, looked around: normally neat, he was with Lindy, now, and she was a walking hurricane. Clothes were strewn all over the room, shoes, papers, everything. "Get dressed," he snapped.
They had a picture of him. They had fingerprints, too, but they'd never taken a DNA sample, because they didn't do DNA samples the last time he was in jail. Now his prints and his DNA were all over the place '
"What's going on?" But she'd been a criminal's girlfriend long enough not to ask too many questions, and she was already pulling up her underpants and the phone rang again and he said, "Yeah?" listened and snapped it shut.
"Take your pants off," he said.
"What?"
"Take your fuckin' pants off. A cop is coming down here, he'll be here in ten seconds and I want you to answer the door."
"Naked?" Now she sounded interested.
"Yeah, goddamned right, naked. Get your goddamned pants off'"
He looked around, picked up an end table by the legs, and smashed it against the floor. The legs broke, but didn't come completely free, and he flipped the table and wrenched one loose. It was half the length of a pool cue, but shaped like a ball bat.