Stolen Prey

house. They moved in after dark on their third day in the Twin Cities, the day after they’d slaughtered the Brooks family.

Then they sat and waited for more instructions. Every few hours, they’d go out to the backyard, turn on a satellite phone, and talk to a man they called the Big Voice. The Brooks family, they told the Big Voice from Mexico, hadn’t known where the money went. They were quite certain of that. If the Brookses didn’t know, they were confronted with a mystery. How should they work that out? They weren’t exactly detectives. Big Voice got back to them and said, “Stay out of sight, but be ready. We will send help.”

The three-El Uno, El Dos, and El Tres-had all been named Juan by their parents, and were all cousins to one another. Because they had the same job at the same time and place, they became El Juan Uno, El Juan Dos, and El Juan Tres, or One, Two, and Three.

They were young men, the youngest still in his teens, the oldest only twenty-four, but even the youngest had been killing for five years. They were not overly bright, were poorly educated and a long way from sophisticated. They knew four things well: guns, cars, road maps, and video games. In their temporary living quarters, they had a theater-quality television equipped with a PlayStation, and two cases of Budweiser.

They gathered around the PlayStation and wrecked a lot of cars, and shot up a lot of aliens, hooting and laughing at the chaos. They didn’t talk about the Brooks family, because the Brooks family was dead, and therefore irrelevant. Uno and Dos and Tres simply waited, in the cool of the air-conditioning, washed by the slightly stale breezes of Real Housewives of New Jersey and Dancing with the Stars reruns, the artificial excitement of the shooter games, a bagful of real guns by their feet.

Tres was the odd one out, the youngest, and the one for whom both the others had the greatest affection. Tres was not entirely of the world. He could kill as efficiently as anyone else, but he talked with God and other spirits, and went to church when he could.

The spirits lived in churches. All churches. He could find his dead baby sister in Dallas as easily as in Juarez. She was always there, playing around the feet of the plaster Virgin.

There were evil spirits in the churches as well, mean old priests and nuns ready to stick their claws in your neck. Tres was afraid of them, but he went anyway, and always to confession on Saturday afternoons. He confessed all of his sins, down to the smallest verbal transgression, with the exception of those committed on behalf of the LCN. Always, “I took the Lord’s name in vain, three times,” but never “I carved his eyeballs out with a pocketknife.”

When he was done, he scuttled out of the churches, sweating and shaking, but clean.

His uncle had brought him to the LCN when he was fourteen, said that he could do anything, but “This boy is a little crazy. Not a problem, but something you should know.”

A little craziness was not a problem with the LCN. So he talked to ghosts? There were worse things in the world. And, with a good pistol, the boy could shoot the heart out of a peso coin at twenty feet. Also, he loved his mother greatly, and knew that if he ever said a word to the Federales, his employers would cut his mother’s head off. He was ultimately trustworthy.

So the three Mexicans sat and played with the toys, and Tres would take his personal pistol out sometimes and stroke it and speak to it, and then Big Voice called and said they had another target.

“A gay boy,” Big Voice said.

Inspector David Rivera inspected his room at the Radisson Plaza. It was okay, he decided, not great; a faint odor of disinfectant lingered in the air, mixed with the scent of thousands of Golden Gopher supporters, their beer and potato chips.

He had checked both himself and Martinez into separate rooms. After he’d looked at the first one, he turned and handed the other key to her and said, “I won’t need you anymore tonight.”

She’d nodded and left.

When she was gone, Rivera went to the window and looked out, then stepped back to his bag, unzipped the top compartment, and took out a cell phone. He carried it to the window, waited for it to come up: and he could see a satellite. He punched in a number and a man on the other end said, “David.”

Rivera said, in Spanish, “I’m here. I was taken to the crime scene. The Americans already are looking for Mexican involvement, and Martinez told them that it looks like LCN. We’ve given them the six faces, which they will put on television.”

“Do they have any solid leads?”

“No. Not that they told me about,” Rivera said. “The team leader on the investigation does not like us. He thinks we are talking to the cartels. I think he will hold back information.”

“I have two names for you. Good people, I’m told. They will meet you at the Garzas’. They might have useful information, if you can get away from the Americans.”

“Getting away won’t be a problem,” Rivera said. “The Americans are polite, but they know almost nothing. They don’t care if we’re around, or not. I will go to any crime scenes they find, and to meetings in the morning. Otherwise, I will work on my own.”

“Call me often,” the man said. “The names, addresses, and telephone numbers of the contacts will be in your home file.”

“I’ll see to it.”

He rang off, plugged in his laptop, went online, went to a Facebook location, copied the names, addresses, and phone numbers to an encrypted file on the laptop. When he was done, he looked in the minibar, took out miniature bottles of rum and blended whiskey, and a bottle of Coca-Cola, mixed himself two drinks, and drank them both. Looked at the telephone.

The alcohol slowed him down a bit; he was hungry, he thought. He called room service, ordered a steak and salad, then went into the bathroom and showered. The food came, and he ate it, looked at the telephone, lay on the bed, and finally picked up the phone.

And sighed.

Another sin, he thought.

He called Martinez’s room and said, “I’ve changed my mind. I’ll need you tonight.”

Kristina Sanderson looked at Jacob Kline, who was lying facedown on his bed, wearing nothing but a grayed pair of white Jockey briefs. His bed smelled like sweat and other bodily fluids. She said, “I can’t possibly know what it’s like from the inside, but I can tell you that there isn’t any doubt about it, looking at you from the outside. You’re more cheerful, you get around, you eat-”

“Can’t think,” Kline said. They were talking about the possibility that he might go back on his antidepressant meds.

“You don’t have to think,” she said. “All you have to do is be there. Skipping work could make it look like you’re hiding something. Like you’re guilty. If the police came down on you, do you really think you’re in any shape to resist?”

“Yeah, I could. I think they’d look at me and talk to me and give up,” Kline said. “I can handle it. I’m like one of those demonstrators who goes limp in the street. I go mentally limp. And, I am guilty.” They both thought about that for a few seconds, and then Kline added, “I could kill myself.”

“I don’t see it,” Sanderson said. She sometimes thought he played with his own depression, deliberately deepening it, walking right up to the edge of the pit and looking in. If he looked too long, he might kill himself, and she couldn’t have that, not at the moment. “The thing is, if you kill yourself, that’d look like guilt, too, and then they’d get all over the rest of us. So if you’re going to kill yourself, do it on your own time.”

Kline groaned, and did a low crawl across the bed to the top end, which was pushed against the bottom of a window. He parted the venetian blinds and looked out. “Still light,” he said. And, “I’m not going to kill myself, yet. Though, I have to say, it’s an attractive option. I just don’t want to hurt myself when I do it, or screw up and turn myself into a vegetable. All the painless and safe ways, like pills, are such a drag to organize.”

He let go of the blind, rolled onto his back, and scratched his balls. “I guess I better get up.”