Free Wicked Prey by John Sandford

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