Stolen Prey

goddamn gun in his pants?

He watched Tres as he walked past the front window, and then turned to his pizza-maker and said, “Man, that kid had a big goddamned gun in his pants.”

“All the better to shoot you Anglos with. Need a big gun to shoot a big fat man like you,” said the pizza- maker, whose name was Ochoa.

“Fuck you,” the counter man said. “Tell you what: no fuckin’ Sweeney is any fuckin’ Anglo.”

When Tres got back, the others were unhappy with the delay-they were really hungry, and tired of watching futbol reruns on the Spanish-language channels. He explained about the backup, and his trip to the church, how Jesus said he would die soon, and then they fell on the pizzas and ate them in five minutes.

When they finished, Dos gathered up the empty boxes and took them into the kitchen, where they’d left Pruess’s bundled-up body. Blood had leaked out of the package onto the kitchen floor, like red sauce out of a burrito. Dos made a sttt sound with his tongue and palate, and bent and wiped it up and looked for somewhere to throw the napkin. Didn’t want to put it in the garbage, in case somebody found the hideout; the blood could be used to tie the home owner, Big Voice’s friend, to the murder.

As he was looking around, he heard Uno call, sharply, “Look at this! Look at this!”

Dos went into the front room and looked at his own face on the television; then a moment later, Uno’s, and then the faces of two other men he knew, one who was dead and one who was somewhere around, in Sonora, both shooters, and then two more faces he didn’t know. The local Latina anchorwoman was talking about them, about the killings in Wayzata.

“They know us,” Uno said, unbelieving, staring at the screen.

“Don’t know about me,” said Tres.

“How did this happen?” asked Dos.

“Don’t know. We have to call Big Voice.”

“This is very bad,” Dos said. “Very, very bad.”

Instead of throwing the bloody napkin in the garbage as he went back through the kitchen, he did something really stupid, without even thinking about it.

At the end of the meeting with Bone, Lucas headed back home, and to dinner with Weather.

Rivera, with Martinez driving, went to St. Paul, to a house off Robert Street. Four men were sitting around a kitchen table, drinking Budweiser. Rivera and Martinez were shown inside by the wife of one of the men, who led them through a living room with a sixty-inch television set up like a shrine, down a hall, to the kitchen.

Rivera stepped in and one of the men stood up and smiled and said, “David, good to see you,” in Spanish. He introduced the other three, and they all stood to shake hands, and then Rivera took a chair and a beer while Martinez leaned against the refrigerator.

The man who greeted Rivera was named Garza, and he said, “So, Miguel here”-he nodded to one of the other men-“talked to this man Flores, who has a cleaning crew and cleans up at the Wee Blue Inn. He saw these three men, and he believes that one or two of them were among those photographs that you put on television.”

Rivera grunted and said, “Excellent. Now, does he know where they were going?”

Miguel shook his head. “No. But he recognized the kind they were, narcos. He didn’t want to be around when they were, so he left work. Before he left, he saw their car, which he thinks was rented. It was a new Chevrolet Tahoe, silver. He thinks it had Texas license plates. That’s all he could say.”

“More than I hoped for,” Rivera said. “I will call home and ask for help-if it was rented at the border, and since we know the type, we might find the number.”

“What else can we do?” asked one of the other men.

“The basic thing, we need to find these three men,” Rivera said. “We don’t want anyone to be hurt. So, if you ask, ask gently. People who might see three small Mexicanos driving in a new Chevrolet Tahoe, they’ll remember.”

The men all looked at each other, and nodded, and then Rivera said to Garza, “So, Tomas, you have four more Garzas since I last saw you,” and the meeting turned into a party, and Garza’s wife brought in some very good mole poblano and roast turkey, and tortillas, and Martinez helped serve it around and then the kids came down and they had a very good evening….

At the end, when the others had left, and Garza was taking them to the door, Rivera asked him, “Did you-”

“Yes.” He reached behind a couch table and produced a yellow envelope and handed it to Rivera, who bounced its heft and said, “I am in your debt, Tomas. If you need anything, call me.”

In the car, Rivera took the pistol out of the sack, checked it, cycled it: a well-used but nice Browning Hi Power, not a modern gun, but one he knew and liked. He put it in his belt and sighed.

“Ah. I feel right for the first time since I got here.”

“If the Americans find out…” Martinez began.

“Fuck them,” Rivera said, as he started the car. “They treat us like children or traitors. So … fuck them.”

7

Tres couldn’t stop talking about his conversation with Jesus and the saints, and his continual reflection began to get on the others’ nerves, and finally Dos told him to shut up. Tres smiled and said, “I’m to die soon, why should I listen to you?”

“Because if you don’t, you will die immediately.” They all laughed at that, and Tres shut up.

They hung out and watched television until midnight, then carried Pruess’s body out through the side door to the driveway, and heaved it into the back of the Tahoe. They planned to go out far enough that the body, if discovered, wouldn’t bring the police into their neighborhood, and then throw it in a dumpster, and hope that it was hauled away to the dump, or the incinerator, or wherever the yanquis got rid of their trash.

Nothing worked quite right for them.

There were dumpsters everywhere, but it was hard to find one where they could safely and discreetly lift the lid and deposit a two-hundred-pound body. Especially since the body, wrapped in its blue tarp, looked more like a dead body than it would have if it’d been in a coffin. Somebody would look at the bundle and say, “Well, there’s the head, and there’s the feet, and that thick part is the butt….”

Another problem was that the body wasn’t easy to handle: it carried like two hundred pounds of Jell-O. They found an obscure dumpster behind an office building, but after pulling up in the car, realized that none of them were tall enough to lift the lid on the dumpster. That got them laughing, but didn’t make things any smoother.

They laughed less when they found one short enough that they could lift the lid-barely-and then found they couldn’t both hold the lid up and lift the mushy body high enough to get it inside. They were strong little guys, but it was two hundred pounds of mushy dead weight. They kept looking.

Eventually they found a shorter dumpster on Upper St. Dennis Road, outside a driveway where a house was being remodeled. After driving past a few times, they quickly hopped out, in the deep dark night, popped open the lid, and threw the body in.

Five seconds later, they were gone.

Five hours later, Muffy St. Clair, a dog, stopped just down the street to poop. Her owner, Bonnie St. Clair, picked the poop up in a plastic baggie and carried it over to the dumpster to throw it in. Pruess’s body-bundle was folded into the dumpster, feet and head up, butt down, bent in the middle. It took a few seconds, then Bonnie said, “Jesus fuckin’ Christ, Muffy, it’s a body.”

She ran home to call the cops, and after a while, a St. Paul homicide cop named Roger Morris called Lucas, who had planned to sleep in late on a Saturday morning.

“Somebody tore the guy to pieces,” Morris said. “It looks like what happened to those people in Wayzata, if