The Professionals

by Owen Laukkanen

  Mouse slammed the door shut, and now he started yelling, too. Lights started blinking on outside. Pender’s head rang from the shot, the sound. Marie screamed. “We gotta go, Pender. We gotta go!”

  Sawyer smacked him, hard, and he stomped on the gas. A reflex. The van jumped forward, and the tires squealed. The noise came in loud. Lights on at the Beneteau residence. People at the window. Go, go, go.

  Pender stood on the gas pedal, and the van fishtailed down the block. He got traction, got the van back under control, and made it to the end of the street. Hard right and more speed. He drove fast, not daring to look in the mirrors, not wanting to know who was behind him.

  They made the main roads and he was still standing on the gas pedal and Sawyer and Marie were grabbing onto his sweater, shouting, and finally he heard them. “We gotta slow down, man. We gotta slow down,” Sawyer was saying. “We can’t be driving so fast right now.”

  Pender realized he was right. He slowed down and tried to blend into traffic. Tried to breathe.

  “How the hell did he know your name, Pender?” said Marie.

  “He must have heard us arguing in the other room,” said Mouse. “Walls are so goddamn thin.” Pender glanced at him in the rearview mirror. He was pale, shaking. Pender was shaking, too. The adrenaline rush.

  “We were too loud,” said Sawyer. “We should have shut the fuck up.”

  Pender watched a blue-and-white patrol car cruise past them in the opposite direction. “We didn’t have to kill him,” he said.

  Mouse stared. “He knew your name.”

  “My last name. So what?”

  “We had to do it, man,” said Sawyer. “We had to get rid of him.”

  Pender shook his head. “There’s gotta be a million Penders in the United States. There’s probably a couple hundred in Detroit alone. They were never going to find us based on one fucking last name, Sawyer.”

  “We couldn’t take the chance.”

  “Bullshit,” said Pender. “That’s bullshit, and you know it. You just wanted an excuse to use that gun.”

  “Hey.” Sawyer leaned forward between the two seats. “I was trying to protect us. I shot him so we’d get away clean.”

  “Yeah, well, now we’ve got a body on our hands.” Pender couldn’t keep the anger from his voice. “Not just any body, a mobster’s body. That means not only do we have the police looking for us, we’ve got Carmela fucking Soprano as well. If you’d let the guy go, he would have gone back to his family and started searching Penders in the phone book. The Detroit phone book. We would have been hundreds of miles away before he figured out his Pender wasn’t from around here. If he figured it out.”

  Pender turned to look Sawyer in the eye. “You fucked us up, Matt. You fucked us up, bad.”

  Pender drove. He pointed the van away from Birmingham, and he drove the speed limit as he tried to keep his heart from pounding out of his chest. Tried to keep his hands from wrenching off the steering wheel. We’re screwed, he thought. What a stupid goddamn play. What the hell are we supposed to do now?

  eighteen

  They got rid of the van in River Rouge, parking it on a deserted industrial back lot, wiping it down, stripping the plates, and setting it aflame. Pender watched it burn for a minute or two before he turned back and joined the others in the Impala.

  They threw the license plates and the gun into the Detroit River a few miles downstream, and then they pointed the car west and drove out to the airport. They rode in silence, each of them staring out a different window, cringing with every police car and trying to forget.

  Only Pender couldn’t forget. He could still hear Beneteau cackling, could hear the smirk in the man’s voice as he played Pender’s name like a trump card, could see the back of the man’s head explode as Sawyer pulled the trigger. It had been a brutal act, an unnecessary act. An unprofessional act.

  We could have done this forever, he thought. We could have worked these scores for as long as we wanted. Now, because of one lapse in judgment, we’re on the run. We’ve killed a man, and we’re on the run.

  He sank back in his seat and watched Detroit through the window, rainy and miserable.

  They stopped at a motel a mile from the terminal. Pender paid cash for a double room, and they all piled in, dragging ass, exhausted. Marie collapsed on one bed and Sawyer on the other. Mouse sank into a chair, and for a couple minutes they said nothing. Pender leaned against the wall and closed his eyes and tried again to wipe Beneteau’s death from his mind.

  He should have known that they would find themselves in a situation like this, he thought. He should have foreseen it. One day they were bound to meet a person who didn’t want to be kidnapped. A person whose family didn’t really want to pay the ransom. He should have foreseen that one day they were going to have to make good on their threats.

  But he’d never imagined they would kill anyone. They’d bluffed in the past, and Pender supposed he had figured they would bluff every time. And if the bluffs didn’t work now and again, they could call off the deal and get back on the road and nobody would be the wiser. He’d never intended to kill anyone. He’d never really thought of his team as the bad guys.

  They’d never talked about it, not ever, not in two full years pulling jobs. As a team, they had never acknowledged the reality of what they were doing. The implications, morally and legally. In the beginning it was easy to get caught up in the rush, the madcap spitballing in that motel in Salinas after the Sinclair job, everyone yelling over top of one another, the ideas coming fast and exciting as each of them realized that, yes, they could do this, go pro and pull more scores and never get caught.

  The first few jobs had been a balls-out adrenaline high. No time to think of the consequences. The tech geek in Silicon Valley, that first awkward terrifying job, and then the accountant in Long Beach, Robert Thompson. It was all about the challenge. It was about cheating the system and not getting caught. It was about some crazy Robin Hood thing, this gang of broke kids outsmarting the rich, redistributing the wealth, and proving that yeah, crime could pay, and a hell of a lot more than some useless college degree besides.

  But there was never any acknowledgment that what they were doing was wrong. That what they were doing, besides causing a bit of stress to a bunch of upper-class families, was hard-core, no safe word, wrong. If we get caught, he thought, we’ll go to jail for life.

  Of course, he had thought about the consequences of failure before. He was Arthur Pender; he worried about everything. It was his fear of failing that had led them to their MO: the quick scores, the low ransoms, the constant moves around the country. But he had always worried about failure in the abstract. It was always a question of how to avoid getting caught. He didn’t let himself think about what would happen if the police did catch up, just as he tried not to think about the families they left in their wake.

  Jail, though, was a terrifying prospect.

  Pender lay awake in bed deep into the night, thinking about jail, about murder, about Donald Beneteau and Marie and Sawyer and Mouse. Sawyer had acted rashly and unprofessionally, and Pender could not—could not—believe his friend could be so stupid. Even now as he lay awake in the motel room bed, listening to airplanes take off and land in the distance, Pender felt sick with anger as he replayed the moment, his mind running loops as he imagined what fates must await them, and considered what they’d become.

  He lay awake, looking for a way out. He listened to his friends asleep around him and he pictured them in prison cells. He pictured them shot dead by mobsters. What the hell are we going to do, he thought. How do we come back from this mess?

  Pender thought back to his life in Seattle, his precriminal days. He thought about his family in Port Angeles. His parents. His dad on his fish boat and his brothers alongside. Proud men, hardworking and honest. Men who struggled with boat payments and money for rent, who starved in the winters when the salmon didn’t run. Men who’d never lain awake nights in some shitty hotel room
, thinking about murder and jail.

  He remembered learning to drive on the Olympic Peninsula, ten or twelve years ago. Driving his dad’s battered pickup down the 101 from Port Angeles to Dungeness Bay and back, his mind running through every worst-case scenario a driver could encounter. All it takes is one slipup and we’re all dead, he would think to himself, his stomach winding itself into knots and his foot lifting unconsciously off the accelerator. One blink at the wrong time and we’re toast.

  “You gotta banish those thoughts,” his dad told him. “You gotta focus on the road. Stay alert. You’re not helping anybody by worrying so much.”

  He’d found, once he could stomach it, that his dad was right. If he stayed focused and kept aware—and yeah, got a little lucky—he’d get down the road all right. If he panicked and gave into the fear, all he’d do is wind up at the side of the road, a terrified little boy in his daddy’s truck, too scared to become a man.

  Time to become a man, Pender decided. There’s no bringing Beneteau back. You can only move forward. Stay focused on the job. Stop worrying about jail. If you take care of your business, you’ll never see the inside of one. We’re a good team. We can get out of this.

  We were fugitives before, he thought. We’re fugitives still. Nothing has changed. It’s time to put your foot on the gas.

  nineteen

  Patricia Beneteau stood on her front porch, watching the parade of police officers and forensic technicians on the sidewalk before her. The night sky was cloudy and sullen, and a miserable drizzle was pissing down on the cops, washing away the chalk that outlined her husband’s body.

  She watched as a detective walked up the lawn toward her, gripping a flimsy umbrella in one hand and a fresh cigarette in the other. He was a tired-looking man—even his mustache looked worn out.

  “Mrs. Beneteau,” he said when he’d reached the porch. “I’m Detective Landry.” He didn’t offer to shake hands. “Awfully sorry about your loss.”

  She sighed. “I can only imagine.”

  He examined her face. “Any idea who did this?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “Some of your neighbors saw a van speed away after they heard the gunshot. Don’t suppose you’d have any idea who that might have been.”

  “No idea.”

  The detective sighed and took a drag from his cigarette. “Did your husband have any enemies, Mrs. Beneteau?”

  The front door swung open, and D’Antonio emerged from the house. “Mrs. Beneteau didn’t see anything,” he said. “She has nothing to tell you.”

  Landry turned to him. “And who are you?”

  “I’m her lawyer,” D’Antonio told him. “She’s not answering questions.”

  “We could bring her downtown.”

  “You’d have to arrest her.”

  Landry stared at them for a moment. Then he shrugged. “Suit yourselves.” He took a last drag from his cigarette and snuffed the butt beneath his feet. Then he started down the steps. When he reached the lawn, he turned back. “I just hope this whole mess doesn’t point back at you, Mrs. Beneteau. I’d hate to see your kids have to suffer any further.”

  He turned and walked back to the crime scene, and Patricia watched him disappear among the rest of the rumpled suits and soaking uniforms milling about on the street. Then she turned to D’Antonio. “Where do we stand?”

  D’Antonio stared out into the street beside her. “The girl’s Chevy was a rental,” he said. “We’ve got a couple guys posted at the Budget desk at the airport.”

  “That’s assuming they bring the car back.”

  D’Antonio nodded.

  “What if they don’t?”

  “I’ve got a guy at Detroit PD,” he said. “We’re keeping track of the investigation through him. Anything they know, we’ll know.”

  Beneteau turned her eyes to his. “I want you to find those bastards,” she said. “Find them before the police do.”

  “We’ll find them,” he told her. “Don’t you worry about that.”

  Down the street, Detective Paul Landry stood silent on the sidewalk, watching the forensic techs as they scurried around Donald Beneteau’s body. His coat was thin and his umbrella leaked, making Landry perhaps the unhappiest person at the crime scene besides Beneteau himself.

  He stared down at the body. Donald Beneteau lay splayed out on the sidewalk at an impossible angle, his arms outstretched and a smirk on his face. A hole in the back of his head, probably a 9 mm round, close range. The climax to the poor bastard’s life.

  Landry glanced back up to the house, where Patricia Beneteau and her quote-unquote lawyer stood silhouetted on the front porch. Of course she didn’t want to talk, he thought. Who the hell would want to talk to the police anymore? We’re only trying to find the goddamn killer.

  He’d heard the stories about Patricia Beneteau, of course. To Landry’s way of thinking, this case just about closed the proverbial book. Husband shot dead, execution-style. Large, ominous men lurking around the house. No cooperation with the police. This was a goddamn mob hit.

  “What’d the old woman say?” Bill Garvey, with a thicker coat and a working umbrella, was relishing the investigation. The kid was still new enough to homicide that even getting called out to the suburbs for a stone whodunit on a bleak November night wasn’t enough to dampen his enthusiasm. Landry watched his partner navigate the crime scene, grinning like a puppy with a tennis ball.

  “The old woman said nothing, Garv,” Landry told him. “She hadn’t got a clue.”

  “You believe her?”

  “Course not. Anything from the rest of the block?”

  “Guy down the road says it was a red Ford dropped off the body.” Garvey gestured in the vague direction of his witness. “Said he was walking the dog, watched the van come creeping up the block, lights off. Stopped about here for a minute or so, then the gunshot, then the body. Then the van sped off thataway.”

  “He get the license plate?”

  Garvey shook his head. “Too dark.”

  “A red Ford van. Full-sized?”

  “Yeah. Passenger van, not cargo. Some other guy said he saw a cute brunette hanging around in her car in the evening,” said Garvey. “Said he didn’t know whether it was relevant or not, but she seemed to be casing the Beneteau place.”

  “A brunette, huh?”

  “Yeah. Curly hair.” Garvey shrugged. “I dunno. Could just be a coincidence.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “Some kind of late-model Chevy, he said. Big car. Maybe an Impala?”

  “An Impala. Okay.”

  Garvey watched him, smile a mile wide, eyes bright. He’s feeling the rush, thought Landry. Loving this stuff.

  “So what do we do, Paul?” Garvey asked. “What’s the story?”

  Landry shrugged. “We let them handle it, I guess. Unless the family opens up, there’s not a hell of a lot we can do. Keep an eye out for red Ford vans, but that’s a long shot and a half.”

  “We’re going to let them get away?”

  “No,” said Landry. “We’re going to go back to the station, type up a report, come back tomorrow, and canvass the block again. We’ll put in the time. But without a statement from the old lady or any kind of solid lead on the Ford, we’re stuck.”

  He turned back toward the house, where Patricia Beneteau and her so-called lawyer were no longer visible in the light from the front room. They’d gone inside to the warmth, pretty much the only sensible thing to do on a night like this one. Even the techs were finishing up. In ten minutes, Beneteau’s body would be loaded into the medical examiner’s van and driven down to the morgue, and the street, chalk and bloodstains notwithstanding, would return to normal. Landry shivered under his umbrella. “All right, Bill,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

  twenty

  Agent Stevens parked his Cherokee downtown and walked into the FBI’s Minneapolis field office. A fifteen-story skyscraper in the heart of the city, the Feds’ Minnesota headquarters loo
ked like nothing more than the head office of some financial firm—North Star Investors, perhaps. It certainly didn’t look like a police station, and that, Stevens thought, was probably how the Feds wanted it.

  He walked inside the building and introduced himself at the front desk, surrendered his sidearm, and made a couple passes through the metal detector before he got it right. Then he climbed into an elevator and rode it up to the Criminal Investigative Division.

  When the elevator doors slid open Stevens stepped out onto a vast, open floor not unlike his own at the BCA, an expansive room of low cubicles and glass partitions ringed by private offices on the outside. It was the kind of office you’d expect to find at an investment bank or a software company, its long banks of monitors and server farms speaking to the reality of police investigation in the computer age.

  “Agent Stevens?”

  Stevens found himself staring into the eyes of the woman who had called his name. She was beautiful—she must have been about thirty, tall and slender, her brown skin rich and her hair coal black and ruler-straight—but it was her eyes that got him. Deep shimmering pools with startling hazel centers, they seemed to bore deep inside him as he stood rooted in the lobby, watching her approach.

  She came closer and proffered her hand, a polite smile on her lips. “I’m Carla Windermere,” she said. She spoke with the hint of an accent, somewhere southern. “We spoke on the phone.”

  Stevens took her hand and they shook. “Kirk Stevens,” he said. She had a firm, cool grip. “It’s good to meet you in person.”

  Windermere led him out of the reception area and down the first line of cubicles, stopping at a desk close to the end of the row. “I don’t have much of an office, I’m afraid.”

  She stole a chair from the cubicle beside hers and offered it to Stevens, then sat down in her own. Stevens glanced around the workstation. It was impeccably neat, almost obsessively so. One picture decorated the low walls, a snapshot of a man about her age in a Hawaiian shirt, posing on a dock with an enormous swordfish. “They told me when I came to Minneapolis I’d get my own office.” Windermere smiled. “Little did I know.”