Stolen Prey

“I’m afraid so,” Lucas said. “He located the shooters in our case, and he went after them himself. He shot one of them, but was shot himself. The shooters are running, and we’re trying to track them.”

“I can give you a probable car and license plate number for them,” Espinoza said. “David called in to our office last night and asked us to trace a late-model Chevrolet Tahoe with Texas license plates. We were waiting to call the information to him, but then we could not reach him this morning….”

Lucas took down the information, which matched the information he’d gotten from Sandy; and that made Lucas feel that Espinoza could be trusted, to some extent. He gave Espinoza the details of the investigation, including the discovery of the pizza napkin, and told him how Rivera and Martinez had used the car information to track the killers.

“This is typical: I have told him at least one hundred times that someday he would be killed kicking down doors like this. He did it anyway. I think he got some kind of pleasure from it, going in with a gun, naked, so to speak.”

“So he’s done it a lot,” Lucas said, thinking again of Rivera’s body.

“More than anybody else,” Espinoza said. “Ah, David, this is so stupid. So stupid, to get killed like this….”

Back at the Nunez house, the St. Paul crime-scene people were at work. Martinez was still sitting on the porch of the house next door, but when she saw Lucas and Morris arrive, she came down and asked, “Did you find them?”

“Got the plates and make and model,” Lucas said. “We’re looking for them now. Couldn’t find Nunez, but we found his answering service in Brownsville. We’re going to ask the Brownsville cops to check for a cell number. That should give us his location.”

She nodded, then said, “I’m going back to my room, if you don’t need me.”

“I’ll drop you,” Lucas said.

She shook her head: “No. You stay here and do what you do. I have a taxi on the way.”

“What a day,” Lucas said. “What a sad day. I’m sorry for David and for you. So sorry.”

9

Uno and Tres were freaked, not so much about the death of Dos-that was going to happen, sooner or later, to all of them, and probably sooner than later, part of the business-as the morra who shot him. She’d done it as well as either of them might have, had come out of nowhere, like a vision behind the muzzle blast of the Federale, when they’d been caught cold, and Dos had been shot….

She’d known the Big Voice and they’d said to each other, as they sped away, heading for the Rosedale mall, their bailout site, “The Big Voice is everywhere. Did you see this morra with the baby gun, she goes boom…”

She’d given them one hour to get rid of the car. That wouldn’t be a problem, they’d worked it out in advance. But did you see her with the baby gun…?

At the mall they found a space in a thickly occupied corner of the parking lot between Macy’s and JCPenney. They had a box of Handi Wipes and used them to wipe the plastic surfaces of the car, everything they could reach, although they knew there’d probably be a few prints remaining when they finished. Still, no reason to make it easy for the gringo cops.

When they finished, they got out and began wiping the exterior door handles and under the back hatch release; that done, they got back in the car and turned it on, and found a radio station that played Mexican music and sat and waited.

They’d taken less than fifteen minutes to drive to the mall, and they’d waited almost another fifteen, passing on a number of shoppers who came and went, until Uno said, “There. That one.”

Ferat Chakkour came out of the shopping center twirling his car keys on his index finger. He worked in one of the Rosedale kiosks, selling oversized soft pretzels, for which he made seven dollars an hour. Which was okay. The job brought in extra money, on top of money sent by his parents back in Egypt, while he studied advertising and business management at Metro State.

He was a happy enough young man until he stepped around the corner of his four-year-old Subaru and popped the door. Immediately, a thin young brown-skinned man was behind him, with a handgun, and he said, with a Latino accent, “Give me the keys.”

Then another brown-skinned man came around the nose of the car and said, “The keys,” and he also had a gun.

Chakkour handed over the keys and said, “Let me go,” but the smaller of the two men backed away from him and said, “Get in the backseat. We will let you go, but we need your car for a while. Get in or I will shoot.”

Chakkour got in without a struggle: for one thing, he hoped he might get the car back.

Once in the car, Tres told him to slide across, then Tres got in beside him with the handgun pointed at Chakkour’s stomach.

Uno got the bags from the Tahoe, threw them in the trunk of the Subaru, and they headed out of the parking lot and onto I-35W north. Chakkour began pleading: “Don’t hurt me. I’m like you, I come from another country, I come from Egypt, my family sent me here to work to get an education…. I’m brown like you, we’re brothers….”

Tres laughed and said, “I think you are even browner. But you are like a terrorist, huh? Like an Arab terrorist.”

Chakkour picked up on the joke and got the two Mexicans talking, and twenty miles north, they took an exit, chosen just at random, drove four miles and then took a side road, and another mile, and another side road. No houses around. Uno stopped and said, “We leave you here. When you walk to a house, you don’t tell anybody who took you. We need one hour. One hour, and you never see us again.”

“Okay. Okay.”

Tres got out first, and Chakkour scrambled out after him and moved to the side of the road. Tres said, “Good-bye,” and shot Chakkour in the heart, and when he’d fallen, put a shot in his head.

Some red-winged blackbirds startled out of a cattail swamp in the ditch and flew away, but the Mexicans could see or hear nothing else but the breeze; this was in the best part of Minnesota’s August, with the roadsides turning golden brown, and the wind carrying the scent of ripening grain.

“In the weeds,” Uno said, getting out of the car.

They took Chakkour’s wallet, with his driver’s license, then picked him up by the hands and feet and threw him back into a tall stand of reeds. The body disappeared as effectively as if it’d been thrown into quicksand.

“So. We have a car. Now we need a house,” Uno said. “We need to talk to Big Voice.”

They got back in the car and turned around and headed back out toward the interstate. On the way, Uno looked at the photo on Chakkour’s driver’s license. “He’s the right age, the picture, it could almost be me.”

“We are all brown together,” Tres said, and then he giggled. “All brown brothers.”

“What a moron,” Uno said in English. Then back to Spanish: “Brown brothers.”

At the hotel, Martinez went first to Rivera’s room, for which he’d given her a key. She knew the St. Paul police would eventually show up, so she went quickly to his suitcase, opened it, pulled up a seam at the bottom, and slipped out an envelope. She thumbed the flap on the envelope, saw the sheath of fifty- and hundred-dollar bills, and put it in her purse. Moving to the closet, she checked his suits, then his shoes, for a second envelope. She eventually found it in a bundle of dirty underwear. Altogether, six thousand dollars.

In her own room, she stashed the money, then undressed, except for her underpants, and pulled on a man’s T-shirt, which she used as a nightgown. Then she lay on the floor, her hands at her sides, her eyes closed, in a yoga position called the Corpse Pose. The pose was useful for eliminating tension. Breathing through her nose only, willing her breathing to slow, and then her mind, then letting go even of her will, she felt herself clearing….