“Too old? What the hell…” Flowers was gone.
“What’s that?” Morris said, when Lucas rang off.
“Best news I’ve had all summer,” Lucas said, as they turned into Zapp’s parking lot.
Zapp’s Pizza was a tightly run ship, with good pizza and bread, a bunch of red-vinyl booths in the back, along with a half dozen tables, and, this early in the morning, an empty salad bar. The owner, John Sappolini, was not happy about the napkin, but had no trouble talking to police. “Half the cops in St. Paul eat here,” he said.
He’d once told Lucas that he called the place Zapp’s because his Wells Fargo small-business counselor suggested he not call it Sapp’s.
Sappolini had two crews working eight-hour shifts, from ten o’clock in the morning until two o’clock in the morning, with the restaurant open from eleven o’clock until one. After the call from Morris, he’d called both crews in. He had the first ones brew up a few gallons of coffee, and Lucas and Morris sat at one of the tables and everybody pulled chairs around to talk about the situation; Rivera and Martinez sat out on the edge.
They’d been talking for fifteen minutes, with late-arriving members of the crew straggling in as they talked. One of the last ones in was a short, wide-shouldered man who listened for one minute and then said, “There was a short Mexican kid in here yesterday afternoon with a gun in his belt. I think.”
Lucas looked at him and asked, “You think?”
“Couldn’t see it because he was wearing an iguana shirt,” the man said.
“Guayabera,” Morris said.
The guy shook his head. “No, iguana. It’s like a golf shirt, but instead of like that polo pony, you know, it had an iguana on it.”
“Yes, they sell them in Mexico, on the coast,” Rivera said.
The pizza guy said, “See?”
“
“So what else about him?” Lucas asked.
“He was just a kid, and he was looking for a place to pray while he waited for the pizzas, so I sent him down to the cathedral. He went, or at least he said he went, and he said he saw the big windows, and Jesus spoke to him.”
“Spoke to him,” Lucas repeated.
“Yeah, he said Jesus spoke to him, and Jesus told him he was going to die soon.”
Morris looked at Lucas, and they simultaneously shrugged. From the back, Rivera asked, “How many pizzas did he buy?”
“Two. Extra large.”
Rivera said, “Enough for three or four.”
The pizza guy didn’t know whether the kid had arrived on foot or had come by car, but had the impression that he’d been on foot. “I don’t know why, it’s just an impression.”
Morris: “Is a cold-blooded killer going to church? I don’t think so.”
“But you’d be wrong,” Rivera said. “Some of these bangers, they go to church every Sunday and pray for their souls. And because their mothers make them go.”
“Then, if he is one of the guys, they’d be holed up around here somewhere,” Morris said. They all looked out the window.
“I’ll tell you what,” Lucas said, when they looked back. “We’ve probably got DNA on these guys, we probably have at least one fingerprint and maybe more, they’ve committed at least five torture-murders of the worst kind. If we catch them, they’re going away forever, so they’ve got nothing to lose by shooting as many cops as they see. They’ve probably got an arsenal with them, and they’ve had lots of practice.”
Morris said, “Huh. Better talk to SWAT.”
“Better talk to everybody,” Lucas said. “You don’t want a lot of patrol cops rolling around sticking their noses into everything. If somebody finds them just sort of spontaneously, he’ll probably be killed. I think you put together a good crew, start working the neighborhood, but you gotta be discreet. You don’t want to scare them off, but you don’t want to get anybody killed, either. No impetuosity.”
“No impetuosity,” Morris repeated.
When they’d extracted everything they could from the Zapp’s crews, they broke up. Lucas headed over to the BCA, and Morris went back to the murder scene-from there he’d head to police headquarters, which was about five minutes away, to arrange for a careful survey of the neighborhoods around Zapp’s.
Rivera and Martinez went back to their car, and Rivera dug his pistol out from under the front seat and said to Martinez, “You drive.”
“To where?”
“Up and down these streets. If he walked, he is not far. We’ll circle the streets, go out for a kilometer-”
She said, “This is crazy. We-”
“We know the car. This neighborhood, most of the cars are on the street,” Rivera said. “I predict that we will find them.”
“Then what?”
“Then we will see,” Rivera said.
“You are too crazy,” Martinez said. She bit her lip, as though she feared she’d gone too far.
All Rivera said was, “Drive.”
The neighborhood around Zapp’s Pizza was all old. From north to south, it varied from rich, south of Grand Avenue, to increasingly poor, north of Summit Avenue, to poor, next to I-94. Grand Avenue itself was mostly commercial and apartments.
Rivera didn’t think the shooters would be in an apartment. Somebody, he thought, had probably arranged a house. The house wouldn’t be on Summit, because those houses were basically mansions. This would be more discreet, in a neighborhood where people might be a bit more reluctant to ask questions.
The streets stepped back from the expressway were the most likely place, he told Martinez. The faces on the sidewalks were of every shade of black, brown, and white, from African to Scandinavian to Latino and American Indian. The Mexicanos would fit here, he said.
Even so, there were a lot of streets to look at, in the grid around Zapp’s. They started a little after ten o’clock in the morning. Rivera was a little surprised when it took them only three hours to find them; or that they found them at all.
After several false alarms-it seemed that half the people in St. Paul drove oversized SUVs-and a stop for a quick lunch and to fill up the car’s gas tank, they spotted the Tahoe sitting down a driveway, tight between two aging white houses.
“There it is,” Rivera said suddenly. Martinez looked that way, and saw the truck. “There. Keep going, keep driving … Yes, Texas plates.” He was sweating with excitement. “Go to the corner.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Look in the window,” Rivera said. “See what is what.”
“Crazy,” Martinez said. “David, don’t do this.”
“You sound like an American, like Shaffer,” Rivera said. “Pull over, pull over.”
She pulled over and Rivera jacked a round into the chamber of the single-action pistol, and said, “When you see me look at the window, call Lucas. Do not call before you see me look in.”
“David, please, please don’t do this. Let me call the police. You watch them. I will call-”
“I won’t be made a fool. I will look before we call. I’ll know that I am right.”
“All you will do is look in?”
“The situation could develop,” Rivera said. “Be ready.”
“Ah, no, David…” She grabbed his jacket sleeve. “Don’t go, don’t go-”
“Call Lucas when you see me look in,” Rivera said again, and he hopped out. She watched him down the street, a stout man with a dark face behind his sunglasses, his street-side hand under his jacket. He walked right past the house, only glancing at it, but she shook her head. He did not look like a pedestrian: he looked like a cop
