“Where’re the boys?”
“Jesse’s across the street at the Windmill, Tate is at the Cross Motel, Jack is at a mom-and-pop called Wakefield Inn, all in Hudson. All within easy walking distance from the HomTel.” Multiple nearby rooms in different hotels made it easier to get together, and also easier to find an emergency hideout if the cops made one or another of them. They could be off the street in minutes, in a motel where they’d never been seen by the management.
Standard operating procedure, worked out and talked over in prisons across the country. Cohn nodded and said, “Okay.”
“I almost went home when you invited Jack back in,” Cruz said, threading her way through the concrete pillars of the parking ramp.
“Better to have him inside the tent pissin’ out, than outside the tent pissin’ in,” Cohn said.
“I don’t know what that means,” she said.
“It means that when he gets picked up — and I do mean when, it’s only a matter of time — he’ll try to cut a deal,” Cohn said. “We’re one of the things he’s got. I need to talk to him.”
“He’d cut a deal whatever we do.”
“No. Not really. I’ve thought on that,” he said, in an accent that spoke of the deep southern part of Yorkshire. “There are circumstances in which he would not cut a deal, no matter what the coppers might have offered to him.”
“You’ve got to lose that bullshit British syntax, right now,” Cruz said. “You’re Billy Joe Wakefield from Birmingham, Alabama. You need khakis and golf shirts.”
“Give me two minutes listening to country music,” Cohn said. “That’ll get ’er done.”
“Anyway, about Jack…”
“Let it go,” he said. “I’ll take care of Jack.”
“Okay,” she said. “Put your sunglasses on.”
At seven o’clock, the sky was still bright. Cohn took a pair of wraparound sunglasses from his jacket pocket and slipped them on. At the pay booth, Cruz dropped the window and handed ten dollars to a Somali woman in a shawl. Cruz got the change from the ten, and a receipt, rolled the window back up, pulled away from the booth, and handed the receipt to Cohn.
“Check it out,” she said.
He looked at the receipt, said, “Huh. The tag number’s on it.”
“There’s a scanning camera at the entrance,” Cruz said. “I’m wondering if it might digitize faces at the same time that it picks up the license plates — hook them together, then run them through a facial recognition program.”
“Would that be a problem?”
“Not as long as somebody doesn’t put your face in the car with your face in the FBI files,” she said. “That’s not a question with me, of course.”
“Got the beard, now,” he said. “And the hat and glasses. I cut the beard off square to give my chin a different line. I was wondering about the baseball hat…”
They rode along for a minute or two, as she got off the airport and headed into St. Paul, past the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers. Even in the middle of a big urban area, the river valleys had a wildness that reminded him of home in Alabama. In Britain, even the wild areas had a groomed look.
“Jack, I can’t get him off my mind. I’m sorry…”
“Never mind Jack.” He was looking out the window. “You almost went home, huh? That’d be… Zihuatanejo?”
“Never been to Mexico in my life, Brute,” she said with a grin. “Give it up.”
“With a name like Cruz, you gotta have been in Mexico.”
Her eyes flicked to him. “Why would you think my name is Cruz?”
He laughed and said, “Okay.” But she looked like a Cruz.
She clicked on the radio, dialed around, found a country station. “Instead of worrying about where I’m from, see if you can get the Alabama accent going.”
The first song up was Sawyer Brown singing “Some Girls Do,” and Cohn sang along with it, all the way to the end, and then shouted, “Jesus Christ, it’s good to be back in the States. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and North Ireland can go fuck itself.”
RANDY WHITCOMB, Juliet Briar, and a man whose real name might have been Dick, but who called himself Ranch, lived in a rotting wooden house on the east side of St. Paul, that sat above a large hole in the ground called Swede Hollow; once full of houses full of Swedes, the hole was now a neglected public park.
Whitcomb was a pimp. He’d become a pimp as soon as he could, after his parents had thrown him out of the house twelve years earlier. He liked the idea of being a pimp, and he liked TV shows that featured pimps and pimp-wannabes and his finest dream was to own a Mercedes-Benz R-Class pimpmobile in emerald green. He enjoyed the infliction of pain, as long as he wasn’t the object of it.