The Professionals

by Owen Laukkanen

  “These days,” said Stevens, “that might just make you an asshole.”

  nine

  They drove over the top of northern Michigan, stopping for the night at a deserted roadside motel just north of the Straits of Mackinac. In the morning it snowed, a few flakes of dandruff and a bitter wind off the lake. It took Sawyer ten minutes to scrape the frost from the van’s windows.

  It was a nice little spot, Pender thought, the cold notwithstanding. Would be amazing in the summer. Fishing, boating, maybe some swimming. A little chunk of heaven.

  They slept in that morning, Sawyer and Mouse in one room and Pender and Marie in the other.

  Marie woke first and when Pender opened his eyes he saw her, curled up in a baggy university sweatshirt and her nose in a paperback novel. She smiled at him when he sat up, her frizzy hair an explosion and her eyes still bleary. He leaned over and kissed her. “Getting ideas?” he said.

  She shook her head. “It’s a romance novel.”

  “What do you need with a romance novel?” He kissed her again. “You have me.”

  She smiled again and kissed him back, and then she sank back into the sheets and stared up at the ceiling. “It’s nice here,” she said.

  “Would be better in the summer.”

  “I was thinking,” she said. “It would be nice if we could stay.”

  He watched her. “Yeah?”

  “If we weren’t always in such a hurry.” She sighed. “I just wish we could be normal sometimes.”

  “In a couple more years, we’ll be done with this stuff. We can be normal the rest of our lives.”

  She sat up again. “I’m just kind of tired,” she said. “Motel rooms and minivans and stuff. I feel dirty, Pender. Unhealthy. This isn’t really what I had in mind when I thought about seeing the world.”

  He reached out to her and ran his hands over her hip and her side. Slid his hand underneath her sweatshirt and along the contours of her body. “You look pretty healthy to me,” he told her.

  She sighed again. “We need exercise, Pender,” she said. “Maybe we should start doing yoga or something.”

  “I have a better idea.” He pulled her closer and kissed her long and hard, loving the way her body curved to fit his. He tugged at her sweatshirt and she sat up to pull it over her head, casting a sideways look down at him.

  “This is your idea of exercise?” she said.

  He grinned at her. “It’s better than yoga. No offense.”

  She swatted playfully at him and then he pulled her back to him. He admired her for another long minute, and then he closed his eyes and kissed her some more.

  They stayed in bed until noon. Then the phone rang and it was Mouse and Sawyer, ready to go. They showered and dressed and ate breakfast with the guys in an empty diner down the road, and then they piled back in the van and drove on.

  They made Detroit by the middle of the afternoon, swooping down on the I-75 into the city’s grimy suburbs under a sky as bleak as the surroundings. They found a Super 8 off the highway and paid cash for two double rooms. When they got in and got settled, Mouse booted up his computer and started looking for prospects.

  “This is good,” he said, staring at a map on his screen. “Looks like we’re pretty close to a lot of rich neighborhoods.”

  “Rich?” said Sawyer. “Who the hell are we going to nab in this broke-ass town?”

  “No kidding,” said Marie. “If we take the president of GM, they’ll make us pay to give him back.”

  They had a point, Pender thought. He worried a little about the target possibilities in this part of the country. The whole southern half of the state looked like a fallout zone, and Detroit itself wasn’t exactly millionaires’ row these days. It almost felt wrong taking money from the people around here.

  But Mouse was confident, and he was good. By next morning he had pulled up three worthy candidates, none of whom seemed to have suffered at all in the recession. By noon, Pender had made his decision.

  The target was Sam Porter, a forty-two-year-old executive with an agricultural engineering firm headquartered outside the Detroit city limits. Porter lived with his young family in Royal Oak, an affluent bedroom community and an easy highway drive from the Super 8.

  “House is worth about a million, and he’s got stock,” said Mouse. “Must have got in early with his company and rode it north. He’s perfect.”

  The target acquired, they settled in to the work. There was plenty of it. Burner phones to buy and a car to rent. Routines to establish and intelligence to gather. The team was at its best with a job to do, Pender believed, himself included. With tasks at hand, he could forget about the bigger worries and throw himself into the grind. And he did. They all did, enjoying the anticipation of a job coming together, another D-day just two days away.

  ten

  For all of Agent Stevens’s initial enthusiasm, the Harper job didn’t exactly hightail it out of the gate. There were few leads to start with, and none of them seemed to be leading to much.

  The drop site McDonald’s did indeed have a security camera, but whoever had taken Harper had gone to great lengths to stay out of the shot. Stevens had watched Harper stomp over to his Infiniti eight or nine times, peering at the edges of the frame for any hint of the kidnappers’ ride, but to no avail. Shit outta luck in that regard.

  SOL university-wise, too. The Minneapolis PD had canvassed the U of M campus as well as the North-Central, Capella, Walden, and St. Thomas schools. Nobody was saying anything about any kidnapping, and as for girls with curly brown hair, well, there were only about eight thousand of them.

  Stevens left word with the Minneapolis PD and the various campus police forces to watch out for kids who were throwing money around and had even hauled one sophomore in a Hummer down to the BCA for questioning. But the kid was a basketball player and the Hummer was a loaner from a booster—a clear violation of NCAA rules, but not something the BCA was looking to prosecute.

  He still doubted his perps were addicts, but just to be on the safe side, Stevens asked the knockos at the Minneapolis PD to keep an eye out for blue vans and rich junkies in the poorer neighborhoods.

  Blue vans. Every time Stevens saw a blue van, he had to resist the urge to pull it over. It happened probably five or six times a day. Still, he looked close at every van he saw, hoping for that perfect combination, praying for a brown-haired girl in the driver’s seat.

  The phone records weren’t much help, either. The kidnappers had made two calls to the Harper residence, one each from a pair of T-Mobile pay-as-you-go cellular phones. Simple. Only the phone company wouldn’t give up the locations of the calls without a warrant.

  Lawyers, Stevens thought. It’s a kidnapping case. These are the kidnappers calling with ransom demands. There’s obvious probable cause. The company has to know we’ll come back with a warrant. They’re just slowing down the process with this bullshit insistence on protocol. Meanwhile, the case is getting colder by the minute.

  The phone company did, however, allow that the phones had been purchased from the T-Mobile kiosk at Mall of America on the Monday before the kidnapping. A clerk named Aziz had made the sale.

  Earlier in the day, Stevens had driven over to the Mall and searched out Aziz and the T-Mobile kiosk. The guy looked barely out of high school and half stoned besides, but Stevens tried it on anyway, asking Aziz if he remembered anyone coming in and buying two burners last Monday afternoon.

  The results were predictable. Aziz shrugged. “Lots of people buy phones.”

  “These people bought two phones. At once.”

  “Lots of people buy two phones.”

  Stevens shot the guy a look. “Come on,” he said. “Help me out. Young people. A white girl with curly brown hair.”

  Aziz shrugged and gestured to the ceiling. “You check the security cameras?”

  Stevens hit up the security console, explained the situation. Ran straight into a stonewalling rent-a-cop with an attitude problem.


  Management was a bit more obliging, but the tapes, they said, were on a three-day cycle. Every three days they were erased and reused. Monday was five days ago. Therefore, no tapes.

  Police work. Sometimes it made Stevens want to be a long-haul trucker.

  Night after night, he found himself shackled to his desk in the BCA long after sundown, his wife and kids having given up on dinner with Daddy yet again, his eyes bleary and his head aching. Tim Lesley, Special Agent in Charge of Special Investigations, was riding him for answers—and Lesley, a tall, mean bastard whose wire-rimmed glasses belied a long history as a shit-kicking homicide cop in the old vein, wasn’t trying to hear about Stevens’s lack of progress. A case was a case, and a kidnapping, goddamn it, didn’t happen in Minnesota without someone getting their ass locked up.

  Now Stevens sat in the BCA offices, watching the clock make its idle circuit, waiting for his break. Another weary night.

  Then the phone rang. Loud. Scared the shit out of him. Stevens sat up at his desk. Fingers crossed, he thought. “Stevens.”

  “Hi, honey.” Nancy.

  “Oh, hey,” said Stevens. “I was just thinking about you.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. You’re wanted for armed robbery. The kids turned state’s witness.”

  “Those brats. Never should have brought them along.”

  “Hard to find a good babysitter.”

  “I never figured they would squeal.” He could hear the smile in her voice. Nancy Monroe’s wicked sense of humor was one of the first things that had attracted Stevens to his wife. That and she was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen.

  Tonight, he couldn’t see her, but he could picture her smile and it was almost enough. She was just calling to say hi, she said, and to remind Stevens how lucky he was to have a wife who understood a state policeman’s long hours—though he hardly needed reminding. The sound of her voice perked him up, brightened his mood, and he hoped she’d be awake when he finally got home.

  As his wife gave him the daily report, Stevens fiddled around with the security footage from the drop site, playing it on a loop and staring, mindless, into the grainy black-and-white footage, watching the pixels move back and forth on his screen.

  “So the teacher says that J.J. is going to have to take the remedial math program,” Nancy was saying. “At least until he figures out long division.”

  “Long division,” said Stevens. “A dead language. Who needs it?”

  “Means he spends lunch hour inside with Mr. Davidson and some other kids. I guess it’s not a big deal, right?”

  “Should be fine.” Stevens blinked. He stared at the screen, rewound the loop. Terrence Harper storming over to his car. Sandra Harper ditching, getting in on the passenger side. The Harpers sitting in the car for a couple minutes, Terrence yelling something at his wife. Then the headlights turning on and Terrence adjusting the rearview mirror before slowly pulling out of the lot.

  All fine. Stevens had watched the footage a hundred times already.

  But now, as he kept watching, a small Korean sedan moved into the frame. The car stopped for a moment, directly in front of the camera, and Stevens caught a half-second glimpse of the driver before the car pulled out of the lot, headed in the same direction as the Harpers.

  “Honey?”

  “What?”

  “I was just saying that Andrea needs to be picked up from volleyball practice tomorrow.”

  “Oh.” Stevens paused the tape, his heart pounding. “Sure. I can do that.”

  “Great.”

  “Listen,” he said. “Can I call you back? I think I just found something.”

  Nancy paused. “Fine,” she said, sighing. “Come home soon.”

  After Nancy hung up the phone, Stevens turned back to the screen. He rewound the tape, playing it forward to that brief moment when the driver of the sedan was visible to the camera.

  She was a white woman, young by the looks of it. The camera footage was grainy, and Stevens couldn’t make out much of her facial features. What he could see, however, was her hair: a mass of dark curls that spilled over her face and her shoulders, partially obscuring her eyes.

  eleven

  Sam Porter was a major disappointment.

  The guy should have been the perfect score. He had a big house and a couple of nice foreign cars and a blond wife who was obviously a decade or so his junior. He was the kind of guy who enjoyed being rich, who would throw money at a problem and expect it to disappear. The kind of guy who would pay off sixty thousand dollars with a smirk and then go home and make it all back plus interest playing the stock market the next day.

  He was the kind of guy who would spend his Novembers on a beach in the Turks and Caicos.

  They lost him Thursday morning. One day before D-day. Mouse was on shadow detail, hanging out down the street from Porter’s place and babysitting him on the drive in to work. Thursday, though, Porter was running late. Mouse cruised the block a couple times, thinking he’d missed him, but both cars stayed put in the driveway, and after a while, Mouse realized he hadn’t seen the guy’s kid leave for school yet, either.

  At quarter to ten, the whole family—Porter, the wife, the fourteen-year-old son—piled into Grace Porter’s Mercedes SUV and backed out onto the street. Mouse followed in the rental Impala, tailing the Benz southwest to the airport, where the Porters parked in the long-term lot and disappeared into the terminal.

  Mouse called Pender, panicked. Pender called Porter’s office and got the goods from a secretary. The family was gone for three weeks. The West Indies—isn’t that nice? Howard Bartley would be handling Porter’s accounts.

  Pender half debated switching the job over to Bartley, just to maintain the theme, but then Mouse punched a couple keys on his laptop and revealed that Bartley was a bachelor with serious credit problems. No chance they’d get a penny in ransom.

  Pender gathered the gang at the Super 8 that afternoon. “What now?” he asked them. “What do you guys want to do?”

  “No worries,” said Mouse. He started typing again. “We can find another mark in a minute and a half. Easy.”

  Pender stared at Mouse’s computer screen. “We could just ditch and go on vacation.”

  Sawyer frowned. “No sense coming to Detroit if we’re not getting paid for it.”

  “Besides, who’s going to pay for the hotel if it’s not the mark?” said Mouse. “And the rental car? It ain’t coming out of my share.”

  Pender turned to his girlfriend. “What do you think, Marie?”

  She was quiet a moment, but then she sighed and looked up. “Let’s just do it.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Let’s get paid and get out of here. Go somewhere warm.”

  Pender stared at her a second, almost wishing she’d wanted to jet. I really don’t like these slapdash encounters, he thought. We work best when we’re prepared. But he mulled it over a little longer, and then he thought, man up. You’ll pull this job and spend a week on the beach. Nothing to it. He looked around the room, the gang waiting for him, and he squared his shoulders and looked down at Mouse’s laptop. “All right,” he told Mouse. “Bring up those targets again. Let’s find us a good one.”

  They picked Donald Beneteau. But Donald Beneteau did not go easy.

  They collared him in Birmingham, a couple blocks from his house, as he walked back from the grocery store with a half gallon of milk and the day’s Free Press. He turned around nice and easy when Marie called out his name, but once Sawyer and Pender put their hands on him he broke free and bolted.

  Beneteau made it half a block before they got him in the van, punching and kicking and swearing his lungs out. Sawyer fed him a right cross and he calmed down enough that Pender could rope him up, but the man got his kicks in, nailing Pender square in the jaw as he tried to fit the gag.

  “Do you know who I am?” he kept saying. “Do you know who the fuck I am?”

  Pender and Sawyer sw
apped looks. They knew what Mouse knew. Beneteau owned his own tool-and-die operation. Four factories. Thirty million dollars in annual revenue. Commuted to work daily in a Mercedes-Benz sedan. Married fifteen years to Patricia Beneteau, forty, VP of Marketing for the Motown Casino. Three sons. Million and a half dollars in real estate, another couple million in the bank. Perfect target.

  Perfect targets, though, didn’t tend to put up such a fight. Perfect targets didn’t act like their kidnappers should know who the fuck they were.

  They got Beneteau back to the Super 8 and let him cool down a little while Pender took Mouse into the other bedroom. “Why’s this guy acting like a superstar?” he asked. “Is there something we should know about him?”

  Mouse shrugged. “Guy thinks he’s a big shot. No big deal.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.” Mouse gave him a smile. “It’s fine, boss. Do your thing.”

  Pender gave it a minute. He shrugged. Of course it was fine. The guy was just pissed off, was all. “Fine,” he said. He went back to Beneteau’s room.

  There, Pender lay out the story, closing with a hundred-thousand-dollar payoff. Beneteau looked like he could stand to pay a premium, and the extra forty grand would make a nice vacation bonus when they hit Florida next week. When Pender finished his spiel, however, Beneteau laughed in his face.

  Nice speech, pal,” he said. “But you won’t get a dime from me.”

  Sawyer smacked him. Beneteau came up bloody, but he kept laughing.

  “We’re going to put you on the phone to your wife,” said Pender, trying to sound calmer than he felt. “You can lay out the situation. Talk it over.”

  “Think about your wife,” said Sawyer. “Think about your kids.”

  “Think about fuck you,” said Beneteau. “Let me go now and maybe you live.”

  Pender picked up the phone. “Call your wife.”

  “Last chance. I make this call and you fuckers are roadkill.”

  Sawyer smacked him again. “Dial the number.”