Pender smiled at Marie. “We’ll take the train, you and me. These guys can pick us up at the station tomorrow.” He pulled out his wallet and put cash on the bill. “Great work, everyone,” he said. “See you in Minnesota.”
three
Kirk Stevens stared down at the body on the pavement and shivered. He blew on his hands and rubbed them together and looked back longingly at his Cherokee, parked some thirty yards back in the shadows. He shivered again and looked down at the body, and then into the yawning cab of the Peterbilt parked behind.
The sheriff’s deputy glanced into the cab and then looked back at Stevens. He was a young guy, buzz-cut and brash. “Don’t know why they had to call you all the way out here,” he said, frowning. “Not like we can’t solve a murder or nothing.”
Stevens crouched down to get a closer look at the body. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said.
The dead man was barely more than a kid himself. He wore a Twins hat cocked sideways and a big camouflage parka, and his 9 mm pistol lay on the pavement where it had scattered off behind him. His chest was a mess of blood and goose down and buckshot.
The deputy leaned against the cab of the Peterbilt. He looked down at Stevens. “So what do you think happened?” he said.
Stevens glanced up at him, and then at the truck, lit up in the blue-and-red glow of the deputy’s patrol car lights. Besides the truck and the patrol car and Stevens’s old Cherokee, the rest stop was deserted, though through the trees Stevens could trace the lights of the cars headed north to St. Paul on Interstate 35.
The cab door was open. The dead kid had eaten a hot buckshot dinner. The truck driver was nowhere to be found.
“I’ll tell you what happened,” the deputy said. “This yo tried to hijack the truck. Driver let him have it. Then he panicked and ran. Stole the yo’s car and he vanished. Sound good?”
Stevens looked up at him. “Maybe,” he said.
The deputy snorted. “Sounds better than good. This is open-and-shut, is what it is. No reason to get the BCA out here.”
No argument there, Stevens thought, feeling his muscles groan as he pulled himself to his feet. He’d been watching a movie—a good movie for once—with Nancy and the kids when the call came down the line. Stevens was next up on the rotation, and for his luck he’d earned a sixty-mile drive and a smart-ass rookie companion out in the bitter air of the Minnesota hinterlands, any hope of rest or relaxation now gone.
Life with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Stevens had been a city cop, once, fifteen years ago now. Five years in Duluth. Five years was enough. He’d gotten sick of the murders and the drug grabs and the cheap dollar-store robberies, the boring sawed-off crimes of desperation. A job came up at the BCA and he took it, and the requisite move to St. Paul, and had never regretted the decision. These days, however, life with the state’s police force seemed to consist mainly of paperwork and whodunit homicides, another small town with another new body, a rate of about a couple per month.
Robberies gone bad, drug deals gone bad, marital squabbles gone bad. It wasn’t exactly world-changing stuff.
Stevens looked around at the crime scene. The cab of the big truck was riddled with holes, and the mirror hung half shot off its stanchion. Stevens walked around the back of the truck to where the rear door had been wrenched open. The cargo inside—a mountain of DVD players in slim cardboard boxes—was strewn haphazardly across the floor of the trailer. He peered in and kept walking.
He walked alongside the rig to the passenger-side door. The truck was parked close to the trees, and the light from the trooper’s blue-and-reds didn’t quite permeate. Stevens squinted in the darkness at the door. He reached out and touched it and felt the door give. He let it go and it swung back, a half inch or so open.
Stevens called out to the deputy, who came around with a flashlight. He held the light up to Stevens and then at the door. “Shit,” he said. “What does this mean?”
Stevens looked down at the pavement leading up to the brush. “Shine a light down there,” he said, and the deputy obliged him.
“Shit,” said the deputy.
“Sure looks like blood,” said Stevens. He glanced into the brush. In the dim light, he could just make out an impromptu path. “Follow me with that light.”
They found the truck driver about fifteen feet in, the shotgun by his side and a bullet hole in his head. Stevens looked back at the deputy. “There’s a third player,” he said. “Probably headed north to St. Paul.”
The deputy nodded and disappeared down the path. Stevens looked down at the dead truck driver in the shadows for a moment. Then he turned back toward the truck. The wind howled through the trees and he shivered again, thinking about Nancy and the kids and the movie he’d missed. He walked back to the pavement and around the truck and back to where the deputy sat in his patrol car, hollering excited instructions into his radio.
Stevens stood alongside the patrol car, waiting for the deputy to finish. In Duluth, he thought, I was just like this kid. I thought every case made me a hero.
He caught his dim reflection in the patrol car’s rear window as he waited, and he stared at it a moment, a forty-three-year-old career cop with thinning hair and a paunch, his tired eyes betraying a mounting fatigue. Sooner or later they would catch the third player, some woebegone kid with a gun and a trunk full of hot electronics. They’d lock him up and he’d cop to the robbery and do time and be ruined, and someone else would jump in and hijack tractor trailers, and sooner or later they’d wind up a body themselves.
Another botched robbery, Stevens thought to himself. Another day in the glamorous life.
four
They arrived in Minnesota on Sunday afternoon, and by noon Tuesday they’d picked out a target.
“His name’s Terrence Harper,” said Mouse, reading off the screen of his laptop. “Junior vice president at North Star Investors Group. Age forty-seven. Wife Sandra Harper, daughter Alice. Lives close to downtown and two major highways.”
Pender stared at the computer over Mouse’s shoulder. “His finances?”
“A-1,” said Mouse. He turned in his chair, caught Pender’s eye. “Says this guy made a million-six betting against the housing meltdown. That’s on top of his half-million-dollar salary and bonuses.”
Mouse turned back to the computer, brought up Harper’s bank statements. The target was certainly liquid. His wife would have no problem scraping together the finder’s fee.
Moreover, Terrence Harper looked like just the kind of target Pender had had in mind when he’d started making scores. A fat-cat day trader, grown rich short-selling the American Dream while the rest of the country struggled to pay the mortgage.
Guys like Harper, thought Pender, were the reason they were kidnapping bankers in the first place.
In the beginning, the whole thing had been Marie’s idea. It had started as a joke, some throwaway line spouted off one rainy night in Seattle, the gang holed up at Sawyer’s place bitching about the job market over cheap beer and pizza, scholarships almost gone and graduation upon them, nobody but Mouse with a future to speak of.
“Listen,” Marie said. “Maybe Mouse can hack his way to a million dollars, but for me it’s either robbing banks or making lattes.”
They laughed at her, half drunk and rueful, some shitty action movie on in the background, buildings blowing up and machine guns blasting full bore. Pender reached for the remote, changed the channel. Got the news, the grim forecast: unemployment, foreclosures.
“This is what I’m talking about,” Marie said. “My parents lost half their savings in the last six months alone.”
Mouse nodded. “My dad nearly gave up his house.”
“You think anyone’s got time for three kids with three useless degrees?” Marie said. “Nobody’s making money but investment bankers. And they’re getting paid with our taxes.”
“Construction,” said Sawyer.
“Maybe you could build houses,” Marie told
him. “I don’t have the muscle. Anyway, the housing boom’s over. Construction workers aren’t getting paid, either.”
“So what,” Pender asked her. “You want to work on Wall Street?”
“No,” said Marie. “I want to rob those bastards.” She smiled as she said it, and she caught Pender’s eye. “Think about it. A couple big scores and then we could retire.”
Pender laughed again. His eyes met Sawyer’s. “One more time, Marie,” Pender said. “You want to rob banks for a living?”
“I have a history degree, Pender.” Marie twisted around to look up at him from the floor. “I don’t want to make coffee my whole life.”
Pender glanced around the room. They all had reason to be desperate, each one of his friends. Marie’s history degree was worth just enough to overqualify her for most entry-level jobs. If she wanted a career, she’d have to go back to school, and her parents, both doctors, still smarted from their daughter’s choosing arts over science. They weren’t writing any more checks for tuition.
After six years of flunking and fighting, meanwhile, Sawyer’s GPA was a punch line. He’d flirted with dropping out more than once, spent a couple nights in jail, and it was only with Pender’s help that he’d qualified—barely—for his degree.
Mouse had it best of them all, having landed himself a programming internship with Microsoft with the potential for lucrative full-time employment. But Mouse was a hacker at heart, and his anarchist tendencies didn’t mesh with the Microsoft ethic. At the end of the semester, he found himself unemployed, and with his father out of work and his own finances dwindling, Mouse needed money and fast.
They all needed money. They all had degrees, and degrees were supposed to pave the way to careers. They hadn’t, and it was time for another solution. But crime? Crime seemed a little extreme. Pender shook his head. “Robbing banks is tough work. Dangerous.”
“What about kidnapping?” That was Sawyer, slow and thoughtful.
“Kidnapping, yeah.” Marie nodded. “Mouse could get us close to Bill Gates.”
“Screw off.”
“We could make a million dollars in one shot.”
“No,” said Pender. “That’s how people get caught. Greed. If you were going to kidnap someone and get away with it, you’d need to stay out of the spotlight.”
“What do you mean?” said Mouse. Nobody was smiling now.
“I mean, you could grab one movie star and ask for a million dollars or you could get ten normal people and ask for a hundred grand,” said Pender, making it up as he went. “You get a junior VP at a Fortune 500 company, tell his wife to hand over a hundred grand in the next twenty-four hours, and she’ll do it without thinking. It’s an inconvenience at those stakes, not a crime.”
“You want to kidnap ten people? Won’t the police catch on?”
“Not if you keep moving,” said Sawyer.
“Yeah,” said Pender. “Yeah. You make a score and then you hit the next city down the road. Rinse and repeat.”
Nobody spoke for a minute or two. Nobody made eye contact. Sawyer stared at the floor, Mouse into his beer, Marie out onto the avenue, watching drunk students stream past. Pender changed channels again, back to the action movie. This time he watched closer, his stomach turning to jelly and his mind moving nonstop.
Then Marie straightened. “Well,” she said. “We don’t have to make a career out of it.”
Pender nodded. “Of course not.”
Mouse sat up. “If we pulled one job, like you said, we walk away with a hundred grand. That’s twenty-five for each person. Not a bad summer project.”
“Nobody gets hurt.”
“I could go back to Microsoft. Beg for my job.”
“And we could buy time to figure out options,” said Marie. She sat up on the couch and looked at Pender, hard. “Let’s just do it,” she said. “Just once. Just to see if we can.”
Pender looked at Sawyer. Sawyer looked back, said nothing, waited. “I say we do it,” said Mouse. “We’re smart enough. We can pull this thing off.”
Pender hesitated a moment. Then he nodded. “Let’s try it,” he said. “Just to see if we can.”
Now, sitting in the work van outside a Minneapolis bank tower two years down the road, Pender waited for Terrence Harper to show and he wondered whether his friends had ever really imagined they would wind up career criminals. Maybe we were all just daring each other, he thought. Maybe none of us wanted to be the one who pulled the cord.
Mouse pointed across the sidewalk, jolting Pender back to the present. A squat middle-aged man had just exited the North Star offices and was walking quickly down the sidewalk. “That’s our guy.”
Pender glanced down at the laptop. Compared the picture on the screen with the real thing outside. Same jowls, same receding hairline. A paunch and a wrinkled tie and the look of a man who didn’t want his time wasted. Pender looked at the laptop again. Then he opened the van door. “That’s him,” he said. “Let’s go for a walk.”
five
They took Terry Harper on another Friday evening, nabbing him on the sidewalk as he turned to walk the last block to his home. He was a struggler; he bit at Sawyer and screamed as the big guy, cursing and bloody, dragged him into the van.
They drove Harper to the Super 8 and got Sawyer bandaged up. Marie took off in the rental car to stake out the Harper residence, and Pender made his speech to Harper, laid it out and promised to remove the gag and untie his wrists if he’d promise to behave.
Harper promised. He seemed broken by the situation and incredulous, as they always were, about the low sum being demanded for his ransom. Pender made the call and pressed the phone to Harper’s cheek, and the mark played his tune perfectly until the end.
“It’s just sixty thousand, honey,” he told his wife. “Just take it from savings first thing tomorrow.” Then he paused. Glanced around despite his blindfold. “There are three, maybe four, of them. One woman. I’m in an apartment, I think—”
Sawyer backhanded him, hard, and down he went. Pender hung up the phone before Sandra Harper could connect the dots, and Sawyer kept going, his fists hammering down on the hostage, his face contorted with rage.
“Don’t you ever try to get cute like that again,” he said. Harper curled up on the floor beneath him, ducking the punches and sobbing.
Pender put his arm on his shoulder. “All right.”
Sawyer straightened. He glanced at Pender. “Had to,” he said, breathing heavily.
Pender knew Sawyer was right, even if he didn’t like it. Harper needed to be taught that he was dealing with professionals, and Sawyer had established that, brutally and effectively.
It was a part of his friend’s personality that sometimes scared Pender. Matt Sawyer could be smart, articulate, and deadly funny, his infectious smile and slow, steady baritone a favorite with the women on campus. But Sawyer’s parents had divorced when he was a teenager, leaving him moody and violent and itching to fight, and even ten years later the big guy had a temper, could still get pissed off and black out, swinging his fists until his problems were solved. Pender could remember the first time he’d met Sawyer, a big scrappy freshman talking trash in the wrong kind of bar. Pender had talked the kid down and out of the place before a dozen drunk longshoremen did them both in.
Even in their new lives as kidnappers, though, Pender had hoped to get more use out of Sawyer’s brain than his brawn. He held out hope that cuties like Terry Harper would continue to prove few and far between.
Marie phoned in on her new burner phone every couple hours. She’d parked the rental car a couple houses down and was taking periodic walks around the block to make sure Sandra Harper didn’t take after her husband in the cuteness department.
Marie reported lights on at the Harper residence until one in the morning, when the final second-floor light was extinguished. She hung around outside, sitting low in the driver’s seat of the Hyundai, listening to rock music at low volume and calling in until dawn.
>
Pender stayed up all night to take the calls. He never slept, anyway, when Marie was playing the point. Hell, he could barely sit down. Kept pacing the room. Turning on the TV, flipping through channels. On the second bed, Terry Harper shifted in his sleep, groaning every time Pender made a move.
“You gonna stay up all night?” he said finally. “Thought I’d at least get a good night’s sleep out of this deal.”
Pender stopped pacing. Stared at Harper a minute. “Yeah, fine,” he said. “Sorry. I’ll keep it down.”
“I just got one question for you, though.” Harper pointed his face in Pender’s vague direction. “Why me? I’m nobody special.”
The same old question. “You’re special to me,” said Pender.
“Seriously. Why me? And why so little money?”
“Don’t worry about it. Go back to sleep.”
Harper sat back on the bed. “I guess you’re thinking it’s easier to get sixty thousand than six hundred thousand. Quicker.” He sighed. “Well, pal, I gotta tell you. You could have had six hundred grand for me. Easy.”
“Sleep,” said Pender. “Now.”
I’m glad nobody else heard him say that, he thought, as Harper turned back onto his side and began snoring a tractor-trailer snore. We’re risking enough just by pulling these jobs. We don’t need to get greedy besides.
Of all of his worries, it was greed that kept Arthur Pender awake at night. It wasn’t his own greed that bothered him; Pender was happy with sixty-thousand-dollar scores. He worried, though, that the long grind would wear on his team.
Most would-be kidnappers treated the job like a Hail Mary. Tried to knock down some CEO, some pop star, tried to take ten million and disappear after one big haul. One shot for all the glory. To Pender, that kind of thinking was stupidity, plain and simple. Those heroes who aimed for the big scores always attracted the big crowds. Police. Feds. TV cameras. Publicity like that made it impossible to remain anonymous. Publicity like that meant investigations, manhunts, Wanted posters. Ultimately, publicity like that meant jail or death. Nobody got away from the Big American Machine.
The Professionals Page 2