“I agree.” Shaffer began directing traffic, sending four cars on the other side of the parking lot, calling, “We’re coming, Jack. You and Roy follow on foot, come up behind him so he can’t run back into the park.”
Jack called, “He’s walking now. He’s walking around the car wash.”
Uno was looking around, saw nobody. He stopped, put the phone, which was still open, to his ear and asked, “Can you hear me? Can you hear me, Mama?”
There was nobody on the other end. He heard what might have been traffic, but no human being.
He looked around, and started walking, out onto a huge parking lot, toward a squat five- or six-story redbrick office building. He was thinking, now,
The glimmer of possibility died as he came up to it, and a man emerged at the side of the building and shouted, “Police. Stop.”
Another man, in a dark uniform, stepped out with a long arm of some kind, a rifle.
Uno had been born to have this moment happen. There had been other possibilities, that he might have wound up as a dirt farmer, or stuck in a barrio, scratching out a small life, but he’d chosen the narcos and they’d chosen him, and this moment was always going to come.
He stripped off his jacket and threw it on the ground.
The man out in front of him was shouting, “Stop! Stop!”
Uno shouted back:
Then with a single motion, long practice, he swept the Mac-10 from behind his back up into the shooting position, raking off the safety and tightening his finger against the trigger, the stuttering burst beginning as the muzzle came up….
They’d seen the move and the man who’d first shouted at him dropped behind a car, and Uno saw him dropping and then the first impacts came, in his chest, turning him, and then…
Nothing.
Shaffer was screaming, “He’s down, he’s down, everybody okay? Everybody okay?”
Uno’s burst from the Mac-10 had mostly spattered off the parking lot, ricocheting nobody knew where, but nobody, other than Uno, had been hurt.
Uno was dead; the cops stood back, in a circle around his short, thin crumpled body, and a couple of sirens started-St. Paul cops responding to reports of a shooting. Lucas arrived with Del, Jenkins, and Shrake, and as they walked across the parking lot, they could see his face, looking up at the blue sky and the summer clouds. Shaffer said, “Mac-10. Haven’t seen one for a while.”
And Shrake said, “The kid had legs.”
18
They were all still standing around the parking lot, looking at the body, when Sandy, the researcher, called Lucas and said, “All that bullshit you said at the meeting this morning, about the Martha White woman on the airplane?”
“Yeah?”
“You were right. Except that her name is Edie Albitis and she flew in here last night from Newark,” Sandy said. “She’d just picked up two hundred thousand dollars in gold at Biedermann’s in Manhattan, and another two hundred thousand at Scone’s in Brooklyn.”
“You’re sure?”
“Well, every time we get a sale or a pickup, the TSA says we’ve got Albitis flying in and out of the local airport,” Sandy said. “Another thing-she’s an immigrant, from the same neck of the woods as Turicek.”
“Call the TSA,” Lucas said. “We want her held the next time she goes through airport security, if we don’t get her first.”
“I talked to Rudy, and we’ve already started the process.”
“Excellent. Be nice if we could find an address.”
“I’m looking for all that,” Sandy said. “Nothing so far, anywhere in the metro area. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s using another name, or staying with somebody. I’m trying for her credit cards, to see if we can pick up hotels or whatever.”
Lucas told her to keep pushing it and rang off, told Del about it.
“Almost done,” Del said.
The shooting scene was shut down, and the media showed up, and after a while Lucas went back to the office to start writing his piece of the after-shooting report. Shaffer’s team had gotten a warrant and had gone into Martinez’s hotel room, and found it empty. Security tapes from BCA cameras covering the parking lot got them a description of her car, and the number on its plate. The TV stations were running photos of her every fifteen minutes or so, along with photos of two other Mexican suspects.
Lucas suggested that Shaffer, in the inevitable press conference after the killing of Uno, tell the reporters a strategic lie. Shaffer thought about it for a while, then demurred, saying that it felt unethical.
“But I won’t give you up, if you tell it,” he said.
So Lucas, speaking last, told the assembled reporters that the fleeing Mexicans were believed to have escaped with millions of dollars in gold coins, taken from the thieves who had stolen from the drug gang’s account. The gold, he said, had been taken from Turicek’s apartment at the time the gang had kidnapped him.
Lucas watched tapes of his performance, with Shaffer standing next to him, and Shaffer said, “You lie really well.”
“If I have to,” Lucas said. “I figured it was too important to pussy out on.”
“Hey…”
“Ana’s got a problem, now,” Lucas said. “Can’t stay here-and if she goes back to Mexico, the gang’s gonna want the gold, and the Federales are gonna want her ass.”
“I didn’t pussy out.”
“Yeah, you did, Bob. Pretty amazing-you’ve got no problem shooting it out with a Mexican hit man, but you puss out when it comes to lying to reporters. Listen: everything you see on TV news is bullshit,” Lucas said. “You would have added a teaspoon of bullshit to an ocean of it. Nobody would have noticed, and it’ll help catch a couple more killers. So fuck your qualms, and your ethics.”
Del got between them and said, mildly, “Let’s agree to disagree. At least while there are cameras around.”
Virgil Flowers called a while later and said he didn’t have much to report. “We’re trying to figure out how to get some surveillance on the farm. I might have actually seen the truck that your two robbers drive around, but we didn’t want to stop them. We’re afraid we might give something away.”
“Like what?”
“Dunno,” Flowers said. “Something.”
Martinez knew the police would be looking for her car, so they dumped it for the Toyota and headed back to the Newport house, and put the car in the garage.
Tres hadn’t asked about Uno: he knew what had happened. When they got inside, they turned on the television and saw the breaking news story. Tres said, “I thought I would be the one to go. The saints said so.” Martinez patted him on the shoulder, went out in the backyard, sat on the ground between a couple of bridal wreath bushes, and called the Big Voice.
“They know about me, my photo is on the television. We have lost the car, but still have the truck. We are
