Stolen Prey

giving the place the once-over.

Rivera’s heart was pounding like a trip hammer. He gave the house what he thought was a casual glance, went on by. The house was small, shabby, probably built after World War II. He’d seen houses like it in eastern California, in Riverside, in parts of San Diego, and down the coast in Baja.

The house would probably have a living room in the front, he thought, with a hall at one side leading back to a kitchen, a utility room, and a side door. A hall on the other side of the living room would lead back to two bedrooms and a single bath. There’d be a stairway leading to an attic, or a converted third bedroom, under the roof.

A large window looked out at the street from the left side of the front door, and a smaller one from the right. The window on the left had drapes, with a two-inch gap between them. The gap was dark, but there could have been somebody standing back, watching him. The window on the right had venetian blinds, fully lowered. He continued down the block, then came back in a hurry, walking across the lawns of the adjacent houses, close to the front of houses, the gun now in his hand.

He came into the house on the side with the venetian blind, and clambered up the concrete stoop. There was a small head-height window in the front door, and the door looked weak. He stood beside the door, unmoving, listening.

He heard laughter, and the sounds of a video game, not far behind the door. They were probably sitting on a couch in the living room, he thought. At least two, but from the jumble of voices, he thought probably three.

And the door looked really weak-dry rot in the wood, flaking paint. He risked a peek at the door window, just his left eye, drifting slowly across a corner of the glass. There was no entryway: the door opened directly on the living room, and he could see one man, and the shoulder of another, on the couch. The man he could see had a game remote in his hand and was looking to his right, at what must have been the TV. Then a third man, just his arm and shoulder, came into view, for a second or two. He was also watching the game. Two of the faces were from the mug shots.

He had them.

He turned and looked at the car, and saw Martinez looking at him. He put his hand to his ear, gesturing “phone,” and she waved, a flash of her hand.

Rivera got his guts together, stood back, took a deep breath. He’d done this before. He was a large man, and strong, and he could kick like a horse.

With one quick move, he shifted back on his right foot, lifted his left, and kicked the door as hard as he could, two inches from the knob. The door exploded open and he was inside, behind the muzzle of the gun.

Inside was chaos, three men scrambling off the couch, a game console and cables and a bag of Cheetos flying, and Rivera screamed at them in Spanish, “Stop! Stop or I’ll kill you! Stop!”

One of the men didn’t stop: Dos had a gun on the back of the couch, and quick as a snake, he reached over for it and got his hand on it and started to swing back to Rivera, but he did it too fast and fumbled the pistol and it went up in the air and landed on the rug with a thump.

They all froze, looked first at the gun and then at Rivera, and Rivera said to Dos, “Too bad for you,” and shot him twice in the heart. To the others: “Raise your hands.”

Uno and Tres raised their hands, and Rivera heard footsteps behind him and saw Martinez coming and called, “Did you call…?”

Martinez came up close behind and took a small revolver out of her purse and put it one inch behind Rivera’s skull and pulled the trigger. The slug blew through the back of his head and emerged at the forehead and Rivera went down, dead as Dos.

Uno and Tres stood, hands still up, stunned, and Martinez said, “You have one-half minute. Get all the guns and money you have, get the telephones, leave everything else, run out to the car and go. Find a motel, not the Wee Blue Inn, the police have been there. Check into a motel, put the guns inside, and your suitcases, and then abandon the car. I will find you one hour to do this. Call the Big Voice and he will tell you where to go after that, will tell you where to get a new car. Tell Big Voice that I will call tonight. Now run, children. RUN.”

They were out of the house in thirty seconds, never looking at Dos’s body, or Rivera’s. As they went out the back door, she handed them the revolver and said, “Take this. Throw it where they’ll never find it. A river.” They took the revolver, threw the bag of guns in the back of the truck, along with their suitcases, backed out of the drive, and were gone.

Martinez took ten seconds, gathering herself, looked at Rivera, and said, “You idiot.” If he’d called for backup, she would have found time to step away, to call the Big Voice to warn the children, to get them out. She shook her head, then turned and ran screaming out the front door, half fell down the steps, went down on the sidewalk, skinning her hands, ricocheted down the empty street. She landed a bit sideways on one of her heels and lost the shoe and let it go, and got on the cell phone and called Lucas and when he answered, screamed, “Help us. David is shot David is shot help us…”

Lucas was working the computer when the call came in, and he listened astonished to the screaming and then shouted at her, “Where? Where are you? Where?”

“I don’t know, near the pizza, near the pizza…”

“Look for a street sign,” he shouted. “Find a green sign at the end of a block.”

She called back a minute later, “Marshall and Kent.”

“I’m coming,” Lucas said. He punched in 911 and shouted at the man who answered, “Davenport, BCA. We’ve got a cop down at Marshall and Kent in St. Paul. There’s a woman there who was with him. Look for the woman. Tell everybody to be careful, there’s three men with guns.”

And he was running down the hall, the people in the offices around him looking after him because he was running like something very bad had happened.

8

The first St. Paul cop car got to the shooting scene in three minutes. Morris had been organizing the search of the streets around Zapp’s Pizza, which had been going slowly, but it also meant that a dozen additional cops arrived in the next five minutes.

The first cops gathered up Martinez and locked her in their car, and posted watchers on the corners of the house, nobody going in or out. Martinez, apparently in shock, told them she thought the house was empty and she didn’t know how badly Rivera was hurt, so the next cops went in and cleared the place.

One came out a minute later and told an arriving patrol sergeant, “Two down. Both of them are gone.”

“You sure?”

“Oh, yeah. One of them’s missing most of his brain. The other one took two shots in the heart.”

“No sign of anybody?”

“Didn’t clear the basement, but I think it’s empty. I didn’t recognize either of them, but one could be a cop. He’s gotta be federal or something. Doesn’t look local. He was shooting some big old automatic like you don’t see anymore.”

The sergeant nodded and saw Morris’s car fishtail into the street. “Here comes the man. You get Rudy and block off the street.”

The cop took off and then Morris was there. He nodded at the sergeant and walked up the steps, took a look at Rivera and said, “Shit. I was just talking to this guy.”

“He’s a cop?”

Morris nodded. He might have been Mexican, but a dead cop was a dead cop. The dead man in the dumpster was just another dead man in a dumpster.

Morris walked back outside and saw Davenport’s Porsche curl into the curb up the street. Davenport jumped out and jogged toward them.

“He got here in a hurry,” the sergeant said.