LUCAS GOT a call back from Dom, the brother-in-law, who’d found a house off East Margaret Street, owned by an absentee landlord who’d be happy to take a thousand dollars for three days, plus costs, if the cops did any damage. Lucas okayed the deal, Dom gave him the number for the realtor’s lockbox on the front door and said he’d pull the FOR SALE sign.
“You could do the landlord a favor and fire a few shots through the roof,” Dom said. “The place really needs a new roof before he can sell it.”
“We’ll do that for sure. You can count on it,” Lucas said.
THEY WERE out of the coffee shop by eight-thirty, and since the house was not too far from the BCA, they went that way. The key was in the lockbox, as Dom had said, and they cracked the door and walked through. The house was probably eighty years old, Lucas thought, and thoroughly scuffed up, two stories, fifteen hundred square feet or so, with gritty hardwood floors and a refrigerator-stove combination that came from the fifties. It smelled like plaster, nicotine, and old rugs. There were three outside doors.
“You want to use it as a dummy, or do you want to put a couple of guys in here?” Shaffer asked.
“I don’t have anybody to spare, but if we could get a couple of guys from the SWAT, that’d work,” Lucas said.
O’BRIEN FROM the DEA was at the morning meeting, along with Shaffer and three members of his team, Lucas and Del, and Martínez. She arrived carrying her five-pound briefcase, pulled out several report books that appeared to run to a hundred pages or more, each, and said, “I spent last night printing these. This is a report from our central headquarters on known and suspected gang connections in St. Paul. We thought it might provide some information on where the fugitives have hidden themselves.”
She handed a copy to Lucas, slid one across the table to O’Brien, walked around the table and passed one to Shaffer, and left another one in the middle of the table. Lucas, Shaffer, and O’Brien spent a few seconds flipping through the reports, which were in English, then Lucas put his copy aside and said, “That’s gonna take some reading time.”
“Why are they in English?” Shaffer asked.
“Because they are prepared with a DEA task force. They are both English and Spanish.”
“Any specific contacts for the Criminales?” Lucas asked.
“Two possibilities, but we are not sure. They might be worthy of surveillance,” Martínez said.
“We’ve had a break,” Shaffer said, setting his copy aside, as Lucas had. “Lucas, do you want to tell us about it?”
Lucas nodded and said, “We know when the money was taken from Polaris. We know when they stopped. We know that they will have to break the chain of checks and formal money transfers, which we are now tracing. Both the DEA and the bankers involved agreed that they would probably use the stolen money to buy gold coins, which would break the identification chain. They’d have to buy a lot of gold—twenty-two million dollars’ worth. We figured they’d have to go to several major dealers, so I assigned my research assistant to track down all the major dealers in the U.S. She found a Syrian woman….”
The woman had disguised herself by wearing a veil, and nobody had seen her face. Purely by coincidence, he said, one of the dealers had seen Delta airline tickets in her shoulder bag, and she’d said that she was in a hurry to get to the airport.
“We checked Delta flights around that time, out of Los Angeles to several major destinations, but there weren’t many: one was to here. We got the names for all the female passengers on that trip and ran them against the other major gold sellers, in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Denver, New York, Philadelphia, Miami, and so on. A Martha White shows up right after a purchase in each of those cities.”
“So you got her,” one of the agents said.
“Sort of,” Lucas said. “The problem is, she looks nothing like an Arab woman. She was born here, and though she has a passport, it doesn’t show her traveling to anywhere in the Middle East. She has no connection with either of the banks involved in this. She’s got a house not far from here.”
He looked at his notebook and read off the Margaret Street address. “That’s a block or two south of East Seventh. It’s a rental. She’s had it for three months. We think … and I emphasize think, or suspect … that she’s sending the gold back here, probably by FedEx or UPS or even registered mail, then flies back here to receive it. It’s possible that it’s in her house. But. We can’t get a warrant. Our attorney says we’re not even close. We need to show some connection between her and the other suspects—Kline, Sanderson, anything that would help. If we can build a solid enough case, without her knowing it, we can hit the house.”
One of Shaffer’s agents asked, “So we’re surveilling the house?”
Lucas said, “Not yet. Not enough people, is what it comes to. She’s coming into the airport today. In fact”—he looked at his watch—“she ought to be getting up in the air right now, out of Phoenix. We’re putting six people on her, we’ll keep her in a moving box. Once we ID her car, we’ll get a tech to put a GPS on it. At the same time, with her coming in, we’re going to have a couple guys each on Sanderson and Kline. Kline’s getting out today. He’s still screwed up, but he’s getting out. If we’re watching the house, and they meet somewhere … I mean, maybe we’re wrong about the house, but I don’t think we’re wrong about her.”
Shaffer said, “The house isn’t going anywhere. The thing is this: they think they’ve kept Martha White out of sight. And now they’ve got lots of reasons to lie low for a while. I suspect what they’re going to do is, they’re gonna leave the gold alone.”
“Seems kind of strange to leave twenty-two million in gold coins unguarded in a neighborhood like that,” another of the agents said. “Seems more like they’d put it in a bunch of safe-deposit boxes.”
Lucas nodded. “Bob and I considered that, and you’re right. They might have done that: it’s probably fifty-fifty. That’s why we cannot lose her. We need to see everywhere she goes. If she goes into a bank, we can make inquiries. On the other hand, they’ve got to know that if they put it in a bank, and the smallest thing goes wrong, we can paper every bank in the country and keep them from getting the gold back. If she hides it in this old house, and she’s smart about it, her biggest worry wouldn’t be some crackhead finding it, it’d be that the house burns down.”
They spent another five minutes talking about it, working through the equities, dismissing suggestions that they bring in more cops from St. Paul or Minneapolis.
Martínez hadn’t said a word during the discussion, and during a lull in the arguments, Lucas turned to her and asked, “Rivera’s remains…”
“I will get them today.”
“We’re so sorry about what happened.”
“Before we start celebrating United Nations Day,” one of the agents said, “I’m happy enough that we’re getting these thieves, but what about the shooters?”
Shaffer said, “Well, it’s mostly a snake hunt, now, Roy. I’m calling up every police chief between here and the border. We don’t think these guys can move, but who knows? Maybe they had a private jet over in St. Paul, and they’re now on the beach at Cabo, drinking cocktails with little umbrellas.”
“It just seems like we’re giving everything we’ve got to tracking down the thieves, and do we really care that much?” said another agent.
“There are a couple bankers who care that much,” Lucas said.
“Is that what this is about? Bankers getting their money back? Did somebody make a phone call?”
“Hey, fuck you, George. We’re not paying anybody off.” Lucas was pissed, and let it show.
Shaffer held up his hands and said, “George, I’ll talk to you in my office in just a bit. But that was bullshit. I agree with Lucas. I mean, what the hell are you planning to do, drive around town until you see them?”
“There’s gotta be something.”
“Well, I’m waiting,” Shaffer said. “Tell me what it is. I’m more interested i
n the killers than the money, but I got nothing. So what do you have that we don’t? That we could personally do? Come on. Tell me.”
George had nothing, and, cornered, he admitted it. O’Brien said, “I’ll tell you what, if we can get that gold, that’s not going to wreck the Criminales, but it’s going to give them a couple of flat tires. We’re starting to see some places that they’re taking their investments in Europe.”
“What about the thieves?” Lucas asked. “You see where their money is going?”
“Yeah, but we’re not getting to the end of the line. We’ve got them in Europe, but it’s coming out of there to somewhere else. We’re talking to Interpol now, but that always takes time.”
“We don’t have time.”
“Tell that to some time-wasting asshole in Lyon,” O’Brien said. “They gotta cross every T twice.”
“So we’re doing a full-court press on Martha White,” Shaffer said. “We keep our mouths shut on this. If anything leaks, somebody’s gonna be learning the private detective trade, because his ass is gonna be outa here. We all clear?”
Everybody nodded, and the meeting broke up, with Shaffer saying, “We’ll get back here in two hours. Everybody take a leak, get something to eat. We could be on her for a while.”
OUT IN THE HALL, Martínez touched Lucas’s arm and said, “If I get the ashes, and they say I will, I will not be here tomorrow morning. My flight leaves at nine o’clock. So, I thank you for your help.”
“What can I say?” Lucas said. “It’s a tragedy, but honestly … he brought it on himself. If he’d only called us…”
“I tried to get him to do it,” she said. “But he was a very stubborn man, with very big…” She hesitated, looking for the right word.
“Cojones,” Lucas said.
She smiled then and said, “Ah, your Hemingway. But yes, exactly. So…” She put out her hand, which was small and soft, and Lucas took it and said, “If I don’t see you again, I thank you for coming and trying to help.”
THAT CONVERSATION, Lucas thought as they parted, should just about cover the state of Minnesota’s daily minimum requirements for hypocrisy.
From his office, he watched her walk across the parking lot to her car, and when she was rolling, he called Shaffer and said, “She’s gone.”
“You think she bit?”
“She was so straight that I’m beginning to worry that I could be wrong,” Lucas said.
“She’s been spying on the guy she’s been working next to for, what, four, five years, and then she killed him? If she couldn’t look you in the eye and sell you a lie, she would have been dead a long time ago,” Shaffer said.
“Yeah, you’re right. I know goddamn well she’s the one,” Lucas said.
“I’m calling my crew back. Get Del, Jenkins, and Shrake over here, and let’s put it together. She might be moving fast.”
“Wish we’d had time to box her,” Lucas said.
“Just no time,” Shaffer said. “Besides, she’ll be coming back.”
MARTÍNEZ was moving fast. After leaving the BCA headquarters on Maryland Avenue, she took Maryland west to a CVS pharmacy and got out in the parking lot with her sat phone. A few minutes later, she was speaking to the Big Voice, telling him what had happened at the meeting, reading off the address for Martha White. The Big Voice got it on his computer screen, asked her where she was, and said, “You are perhaps two kilometers away. A few minutes.”
“I will find it on my iPad.”
“I will alert Uno and Tres. Meet with them, go in there, see if the gold is there, and get out. Do you have your alternate ID?”
“Yes.”
“I will have a car rental for you in … Bloomington, Minnesota,” the Big Voice said. “This one is near the airport, on the same freeway, but farther west than the airport. I will send a map for your iPad.”
“Thank you.”
“I will have another car and a new ID for you in Kansas City, Missouri. If you drink enough coffee, you can be on the border tomorrow afternoon.”
“Yes.”
“You’re not worried about entering the house?”
“Not if we do it fast enough,” Martínez said. “They are deploying at the airport in two hours…. We have to be out in two hours, or sooner.”
“Then go.”
BUT SHE was worried. Her conscious mind had bought the charade at the BCA, but her unconscious, her intuition, nagged at her. She paid attention to that, the nagging feeling. Rational analysis argued that she had not given herself away, but there was something about the situation….
And she still hadn’t made up her mind about the gold. Keep it, or turn it over to the boss? If she kept it, she’d have to do something about Uno and Tres. She decided that she’d worry about that when the gold was in her car.
The phone rang a minute later, and it was Uno.
“Where do we meet?”
“There is a school here. In the parking lot. I will tell you the directions….”
They were fifteen minutes away.
She resented all fifteen of them.
17
Martínez’s problem, which she’d recognized before she ever set foot in the U.S., was that none of her subordinates, Uno, Dos, and Tres, were particularly bright; they were the Mexican equivalent of the hapless American shitkicker who discovers the power of the gun. Which was fine when somebody needed to be killed right now, or chopped to pieces. Not so fine when subtlety was needed.
She waited for Uno and Tres in a Metro State University parking lot; when they arrived, they got out wearing jeans and black sport coats, and not-so-subtly armed with Mac-10s over their shoulders, nine-millimeter pistols tucked in their belts.
“How will you carry them if we have to go on the street?” she asked of the Mac-10s.
“Under a jacket,” Uno said.
“It’s warm. It’s hot.”
“So … if anybody asks, we shoot them.” Uno laughed to show that he was joking. Maybe.
THEY WERE in a hurry, but Martínez took five minutes to examine the target house, and the surrounding area, on a Google aerial photo that she pulled up on her iPad. When she was satisfied that she had the general lay of the land, they left, taking her car. If they were ahead of the BCA, then the car wouldn’t matter. If it was a trap, and they had to run, the BCA agents knew Martínez’s rental, but not the Toyota.
As she waited for traffic at the edge of the parking lot, she remembered her shock when Davenport had suddenly appeared at Sanderson’s apartment, running up the apartment steps with the gun in his hand.
She began to sweat. Something about the feel of the thing.
The direct route to Margaret Street would be a left turn and straight ahead. She considered, checked her iPad again, and took a right. She turned right again on East Seventh, then left on Greenbrier, drove a block, and found herself looking out the driver’s-side window, down a long, steep bluff, into a vast weedy hole in the ground. She’d seen it on the iPad, but hadn’t been quite sure what she was looking at.
Another block and they came to Margaret Street, but five blocks from the target house, and across the four-lane East Seventh Street. Margaret dead-ended at the hole, which a sign said was Swede Hollow Park.
She looked at it for a moment, then turned around and drove back the way she came, again overshooting the direct route to Margaret.
Uno, who was now looking at the iPad, said, “No, you turned the wrong way.”
“We’re going another way,” she said.
Uno turned the iPad in his hands, and the map image turned with him, frustrating him—he wanted to look at it sideways, and it wouldn’t allow him to do that. “Shit,” he said. “This machine is shit.”
Martínez took the tablet away from him, propped it against her steering wheel, and followed the map along Mounds Boulevard to Third Street, took Third to Cypress, turned left on Cypress to Fremont, turned the corner on Fremont and pulled over.
“So now, one of you has a mission
.” She didn’t care about which one—one was as dumb as the other.
Uno was querulous: “¿Qué?”
She explained: there was some small chance that the cops were watching this house. A small chance, but a chance. They nodded.
“There may be twenty-two million dollars inside,” she told them. “Big Voice says that if we get the gold, I will get ten percent for taking the chance to get it, and each of you will get five percent. That’s one million dollars in gold for each of you, if we take this chance. A million in gold will buy a very nice life for you and your mother and your wife, if you have one. A Toyota Tundra with a cap, running boards, brush guard, bush lights. Whatever you want. Ten of them, if you like, and you still won’t have spent even half of the gold.”
They nodded, listening closely now.
If the police were waiting up ahead, it would be better if only one of them was caught. The others could then try to rescue that one, or get away, and send money for lawyers and so on.
“So which one goes?” Uno asked.
“You decide,” she said.
The two killers looked at each other and Uno finally lit up and said, “Piedra, papel o tijera.” Rock, paper, scissors, best two out of three.
Tres laughed and nodded. Uno promptly won the first round, rock breaking scissors. Tres groaned with excitement, and they went again, and Tres won this time, paper covering rock, when Uno tried to get smart and do “rock” twice in a row. Tres pulled out a second victory with another paper over rock.
Uno giggled and said to Martínez, “I thought he would do scissors because he thought I would go to paper, but, I fail.”
Martínez nodded, contained an impulse to smack them both, and said, “Look for people in cars, or people standing around not doing much, or even people hiding. Look in windows. Walk slowly. We will keep the telephone on, you and me. If you see something, tell me.”
If he didn’t see something, she told him, he was to check the house, and perhaps go in. “If you do see something, go this way on the same street, on Margaret. If they chase you, keep going, and you will come to that big hole we saw. They can’t follow in their cars, and you are very fast, so you will lose them when you go through the hole.”
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