Stolen Prey

by John Sandford

“That’s when you called?”

  “No, I heard shouting…. It didn’t sound like David. I don’t have a gun, I don’t shoot, but I started to walk that way, and then I started to run, and I went to the steps and I saw him lying there, his shoes, anyway, and I knew it was him, he wears those white stockings, and I went up the steps and then the men ran out the back door, I think, and I heard the truck start and I ran up the steps so they couldn’t see me, because I’m afraid they will … kill me … and David is there and I see he is dead and the car goes past the door, fast, and I run outside, I fell down.”

  She turned her wrists toward them, showing them the bloody scrapes. “And I tried to call you, but I couldn’t push the button right….” She brought her purse with her, like women do, unconscious of it, but always with them, and she dug inside and produced a cell phone. “The fuckin’ telephone, this is a piece of shit, this telephone, this, this, Samsung shit…”

  She stood suddenly and pitched the phone into the street, where it clattered across the blacktop, and she said to Lucas, “He is gone. I was waiting for this. I rehearsed this, sitting talking to the investigators, saying, ‘David is gone.’”

  THEY WORKED through the details. Halfway through, she began to sob, and asked where they could find a bathroom. She didn’t want to go back in the death house, so they walked her down to a neighbor’s place, and asked, and the neighbor said she’d be welcome to use the bathroom.

  She was in there for ten minutes, and Morris said, “Jesus, wonder what’s going on in there.”

  “Crying out of sight,” Lucas said. “She’s got her pride.”

  When she finally came back out, they went back to the porch and walked her through the details: how they’d found the shooters’ car, the meeting the night before. She said Rivera had gotten some information about the shooters’ car from his friends, but she didn’t know exactly what that information was.

  “But he didn’t tell you?” Lucas asked.

  “He might have told me, but I don’t remember. The name, I don’t remember—but he said it was a silver SUV, and it was. I don’t know cars. My job was to drive slowly up the streets, and his job was to look for the car.”

  “Why didn’t he tell us?” Lucas asked.

  She shrugged. “He might have told you, but this Shaffer … Shaffer runs this investigation, and David does not like how he is treated, like he is a stupid brown man up here in the white state. You know what I mean?”

  “I got a small feel for that,” said Morris.

  “Yes, a Negro, yes, I suppose,” she said, unself-consciously. “So this is how he is treated, and he told me that when he learned about the truck, and then this morning, with the Zapp’s place … he thought they must be close, and that if we drove around…”

  “You found them,” Lucas said.

  “It took a long time,” she said. “Three hours.”

  “Hell of a lot better than we did,” Morris said. “We hardly got started in three hours.”

  MORRIS’S PARTNER showed up, and leaned against the banister with Lucas, and they walked through it all over again. When they were finished, Morris and Lucas walked off a bit and Morris said, “You know what the British say, this ‘fuck-all’ thing that they say? ‘You don’t know fuck-all about whatever’?”

  “Sure,” Lucas said.

  Morris looked back at Martínez sitting on the porch, still talking with his partner. “That’s what we got from her,” he said. “We got fuck-all.”

  “I’m gonna go find this Latino guy he talked to last night,” Lucas said. “You want to come?”

  “Let me talk to Larry, I’ll be right with you,” Morris said. Larry was his partner. While Morris was doing that, Lucas went back up the porch steps and looked at Rivera’s body. Martínez said he’d done this before, but Lucas thought that it didn’t look like he’d done it before. Why he thought that, he couldn’t say: but he thought it.

  He walked back out to Martínez and said, “We have to notify the Mexican police. Can you do that informally, and then we could follow up? We need to know the official contact. Preferably somebody who speaks English.”

  She nodded: “I will arrange that.”

  And he asked, “Did David bring that pistol with him? On the plane?”

  She shook her head. “No, he got it last night. If he hadn’t gotten it, he would be alive now.”

  She’d driven to the meeting the night before, and the address was still on the car’s GPS. Lucas took it down and then said, “I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”

  Red-eyed, she started snuffling into another Kleenex, and he went to get Morris.

  MORRIS DROVE a city sedan so bland that Lucas could barely see it, even when he was sitting inside it.

  “Better than the death trap you’re driving around in,” Morris said.

  TOMAS GARZA lived south of downtown St. Paul, just off one of the main commercial streets, amid a clutter of food, shoe, and auto franchises, mom-and-pop restaurants, carpet stores, remodeling contractors, and a couple of big box stores and supermarkets.

  He wasn’t home, but his wife was, and worried when they showed her their IDs. “He is gone. I don’t know when he’ll be back,” she said.

  “We don’t have anything to do with immigration,” Lucas said. “We need to talk to him about David Rivera. We need to talk to him right away.”

  Morris played the bad guy: “If we don’t find him right away, we’ll have to ask the immigration people to get involved. They’ve got more sources than we do.”

  Her face went blank, and Lucas added hastily, “We don’t want to do that. Rivera was hurt. We need to find out what was said at the meeting last night. Miz Martínez is cooperating with us, she’s back … uh…”

  “How bad hurt?” she asked.

  “Ah, he’s dead, Miz Garza. He was shot to death an hour or so ago, when he found these bandits who murdered the family over in Wayzata.”

  She put a hand to her face: “He is dead? He was just here.”

  “We know, Miz Martínez told us,” Lucas said. “That’s why we need to talk to Tomas. Somebody last night told him the kind of car and maybe the license plate numbers of the bandits…. We desperately need that information.”

  She said, “Nobody knew the license plate numbers. But it was a silver Chevrolet Tahoe with Texas license plates, and they thought it was a rental car. This came from somebody else—not Tomas. I don’t know who.”

  “I’m going to call that in,” Morris said.

  “Let me do it,” Lucas said. “My researcher’s looking for that Nuñez guy. She can switch over to this. She’ll have it for us in twenty minutes.”

  Morris nodded and went back to Garza: “We still need to talk to your husband.”

  “He works very hard for his family,” she said.

  “We really don’t care about his status,” Morris said. “We really don’t.”

  “He works at Europa Car,” she said.

  LUCAS GOT on the phone and called his office, got switched to Sandy, and told her what he needed. “How long?”

  “Not too,” she said. “Fifteen minutes. Half an hour.”

  “Fifteen minutes,” he said. “The shooters may still be in the car. Push Nuñez.”

  “I can’t push both of them,” she said.

  “Sure you can.”

  EUROPA CAR was a repair shop a half-mile down the street, a bunch of older BMWs, Mercedeses, and an ancient Porsche, covered with gray primer paint, in its parking lot, which was surrounded by a chain-link fence with concertina wire on top.

  Garza was sitting in the outer office, nervously smoking a cigarette, when they arrived: his wife had called, and he’d decided to talk.

  “We know the Tahoe and the Texas plates. What else?”

  Garza took them through the meeting, didn’t mention the gun until Lucas asked. He looked away, then back and said, “David said you treated him like a child. This is a man who’d been fighting the gangs in a way you Americans just don’t know
. You have nothing like this, except, maybe Afghanistan.”

  Lucas and Morris looked at him, but he turned away again, and Lucas decided, what the hell, and said, “Okay. He needed the weapon. I’ll buy that.”

  “If anybody pushes it, it could be a problem, later on,” Morris said. “I’m not saying it will be, but it could be.”

  “Whatever,” Garza said, in what was almost a valley accent.

  THEY TALKED for a few more minutes, then Sandy called back and said, “There’s a silver Tahoe out on the road from El Paso, been gone a week, to a man named Simon Perez, who showed a Texas driver’s license and credit card. It looked good, so I called this Perez in El Paso, and he answered and he says he doesn’t know anything about a car rental. Says he’s never rented a Hertz in his whole life.”

  “That’s it,” Lucas said. “Put that out to every agency in the state, the description and the plate, and get the highway patrol looking down the interstates. They might be running for home. Tell everybody for God’s sakes be careful: they’ve now killed six people that we know about, and another two or three won’t make any difference to them. Put an alert out on that credit card. I want to know where and when they use it.”

  “I’ll do that. About that International ReCap—I’m not sure, but I think it’s a tire place. They buy used tires here in the U.S., recap them, and ship them south, across the border.”

  “Where’s their headquarters?”

  “Brownsville, Texas.”

  “Call them up and find out about Nuñez—where he might be.”

  “I did that, but I got a woman who says she’s an answering service,” Sandy said. “She can take messages, but that’s all she does. She won’t give me Nuñez’s phone number.”

  “So call the Brownsville cops, have them drop in and ask her. Those places don’t like cop trouble.”

  “I’ll try,” Sandy said.

  LUCAS WENT back to Morris and told him about the car: “All right. Now we’re getting some traction,” Morris said. “They’re either riding in a car we know, or they’re walking around with a bunch of suitcases.”

  “No traction on Nuñez,” Lucas said.

  He explained, and then they said good-bye to Garza—told him to stay away from street guns—and headed back to the crime scene. On the way, Lucas took a call from the BCA duty officer who said he had a Mexican cop on the line. “He says he’s Rivera’s boss. You want the call?”

  “Yeah, give him the number,” Lucas said.

  The phone rang again a minute later. A Comisario General Jorge Espinoza, a secretary said, and Espinoza came on a minute later. “David is gone, I’m told.”

  “I’m afraid so,” Lucas said. “He located the shooters in our case, and he went after them himself. He shot one of them, but was shot himself. The shooters are running, and we’re trying to track them.”

  “I can give you a probable car and license plate number for them,” Espinoza said. “David called in to our office last night and asked us to trace a late-model Chevrolet Tahoe with Texas license plates. We were waiting to call the information to him, but then we could not reach him this morning….”

  Lucas took down the information, which matched the information he’d gotten from Sandy; and that made Lucas feel that Espinoza could be trusted, to some extent. He gave Espinoza the details of the investigation, including the discovery of the pizza napkin, and told him how Rivera and Martínez had used the car information to track the killers.

  “This is typical: I have told him at least one hundred times that someday he would be killed kicking down doors like this. He did it anyway. I think he got some kind of pleasure from it, going in with a gun, naked, so to speak.”

  “So he’s done it a lot,” Lucas said, thinking again of Rivera’s body.

  “More than anybody else,” Espinoza said. “Ah, David, this is so stupid. So stupid, to get killed like this….”

  BACK AT the Nuñez house, the St. Paul crime-scene people were at work. Martínez was still sitting on the porch of the house next door, but when she saw Lucas and Morris arrive, she came down and asked, “Did you find them?”

  “Got the plates and make and model,” Lucas said. “We’re looking for them now. Couldn’t find Nuñez, but we found his answering service in Brownsville. We’re going to ask the Brownsville cops to check for a cell number. That should give us his location.”

  She nodded, then said, “I’m going back to my room, if you don’t need me.”

  “I’ll drop you,” Lucas said.

  She shook her head: “No. You stay here and do what you do. I have a taxi on the way.”

  “What a day,” Lucas said. “What a sad day. I’m sorry for David and for you. So sorry.”

  9

  Uno and Tres were freaked, not so much about the death of Dos—that was going to happen, sooner or later, to all of them, and probably sooner than later, part of the business—as the morra who shot him. She’d done it as well as either of them might have, had come out of nowhere, like a vision behind the muzzle blast of the Federale, when they’d been caught cold, and Dos had been shot….

  She’d known the Big Voice and they’d said to each other, as they sped away, heading for the Rosedale mall, their bailout site, “The Big Voice is everywhere. Did you see this morra with the baby gun, she goes boom…”

  She’d given them one hour to get rid of the car. That wouldn’t be a problem, they’d worked it out in advance. But did you see her with the baby gun…?

  At the mall they found a space in a thickly occupied corner of the parking lot between Macy’s and JCPenney. They had a box of Handi Wipes and used them to wipe the plastic surfaces of the car, everything they could reach, although they knew there’d probably be a few prints remaining when they finished. Still, no reason to make it easy for the gringo cops.

  When they finished, they got out and began wiping the exterior door handles and under the back hatch release; that done, they got back in the car and turned it on, and found a radio station that played Mexican music and sat and waited.

  They’d taken less than fifteen minutes to drive to the mall, and they’d waited almost another fifteen, passing on a number of shoppers who came and went, until Uno said, “There. That one.”

  FERAT CHAKKOUR came out of the shopping center twirling his car keys on his index finger. He worked in one of the Rosedale kiosks, selling oversized soft pretzels, for which he made seven dollars an hour. Which was okay. The job brought in extra money, on top of money sent by his parents back in Egypt, while he studied advertising and business management at Metro State.

  He was a happy enough young man until he stepped around the corner of his four-year-old Subaru and popped the door. Immediately, a thin young brown-skinned man was behind him, with a handgun, and he said, with a Latino accent, “Give me the keys.”

  Then another brown-skinned man came around the nose of the car and said, “The keys,” and he also had a gun.

  Chakkour handed over the keys and said, “Let me go,” but the smaller of the two men backed away from him and said, “Get in the backseat. We will let you go, but we need your car for a while. Get in or I will shoot.”

  Chakkour got in without a struggle: for one thing, he hoped he might get the car back.

  Once in the car, Tres told him to slide across, then Tres got in beside him with the handgun pointed at Chakkour’s stomach.

  Uno got the bags from the Tahoe, threw them in the trunk of the Subaru, and they headed out of the parking lot and onto I-35W north. Chakkour began pleading: “Don’t hurt me. I’m like you, I come from another country, I come from Egypt, my family sent me here to work to get an education…. I’m brown like you, we’re brothers….”

  Tres laughed and said, “I think you are even browner. But you are like a terrorist, huh? Like an Arab terrorist.”

  Chakkour picked up on the joke and got the two Mexicans talking, and twenty miles north, they took an exit, chosen just at random, drove four miles and then took a side road, and an
other mile, and another side road. No houses around. Uno stopped and said, “We leave you here. When you walk to a house, you don’t tell anybody who took you. We need one hour. One hour, and you never see us again.”

  “Okay. Okay.”

  Tres got out first, and Chakkour scrambled out after him and moved to the side of the road. Tres said, “Good-bye,” and shot Chakkour in the heart, and when he’d fallen, put a shot in his head.

  Some red-winged blackbirds startled out of a cattail swamp in the ditch and flew away, but the Mexicans could see or hear nothing else but the breeze; this was in the best part of Minnesota’s August, with the roadsides turning golden brown, and the wind carrying the scent of ripening grain.

  “In the weeds,” Uno said, getting out of the car.

  They took Chakkour’s wallet, with his driver’s license, then picked him up by the hands and feet and threw him back into a tall stand of reeds. The body disappeared as effectively as if it’d been thrown into quicksand.

  “So. We have a car. Now we need a house,” Uno said. “We need to talk to Big Voice.”

  They got back in the car and turned around and headed back out toward the interstate. On the way, Uno looked at the photo on Chakkour’s driver’s license. “He’s the right age, the picture, it could almost be me.”

  “We are all brown together,” Tres said, and then he giggled. “All brown brothers.”

  “What a moron,” Uno said in English. Then back to Spanish: “Brown brothers.”

  AT THE HOTEL, Martínez went first to Rivera’s room, for which he’d given her a key. She knew the St. Paul police would eventually show up, so she went quickly to his suitcase, opened it, pulled up a seam at the bottom, and slipped out an envelope. She thumbed the flap on the envelope, saw the sheath of fifty- and hundred-dollar bills, and put it in her purse. Moving to the closet, she checked his suits, then his shoes, for a second envelope. She eventually found it in a bundle of dirty underwear. Altogether, six thousand dollars.

  In her own room, she stashed the money, then undressed, except for her underpants, and pulled on a man’s T-shirt, which she used as a nightgown. Then she lay on the floor, her hands at her sides, her eyes closed, in a yoga position called the Corpse Pose. The pose was useful for eliminating tension. Breathing through her nose only, willing her breathing to slow, and then her mind, then letting go even of her will, she felt herself clearing….