From not too far away, a siren started.
23
The house that Lucas and Weather had designed and built, and where they intended to live until they died, was sealed with police tape for two days.
Lucas was profoundly shocked by the shoot-out, and feared in his soul that the house had been ruined for Weather, spoiled by the blood. But Weather was defiant: “Nobody will run me out of my house. Nobody.”
Lucas loved the place, and hoped that she could hold to that.
The St. Paul crime-scene people, following Letty’s narration of the shooting, confirmed her story and said that it really wasn’t all that complex, compared to some scenes. But there’d been a lot of damage, a lot of bullet holes, and a lot of blood, and it would take time to clean up.
While crime-scene specialists did their work, and the DEA and BCA tried to determine whether there was any further danger, Lucas moved the family to a condo in downtown Minneapolis. The apartment was owned by Polaris Bank and normally used to house visiting board members. Jim Bone said they could stay for as long as they wanted.
Three days after the shoot-out, Lucas walked through the house with a carpenter named Ignacio Jimenez, who was a Mexican illegal, though he’d come to the U.S. when he was a year old, and who didn’t even speak Spanish. Lucas said, “I want everything with blood on it gone-ripped out, not cleaned up. How long will it take?”
“The biggest problem is the maple walls. I’ll do my best to match it, but it could be tough.”
“How about if you rip it out?” Lucas asked. “All of it?”
“I’ve got some gorgeous American cherry planks I’ve been saving up. They’re pricey, and it’s a little redder, but it’d look great.”
“Do it,” Lucas said. “What about the rest of the damage?”
“I’ll have the carpeting out of here this evening. I can get a good solid door upstairs, that’s not a problem, and a temporary door for the front entrance. It’ll take a month or so to get a new custom door in there. But the house’ll look okay by the end of the week, except for the paneling. I’ll have to have some of that milled….”
And so on.
The house, Weather and Lucas agreed, was the least of it.
Weather had run into the housekeeper’s apartment with the baby and dragged a couch in front of the door. Since the door was set down a short entry hall, the couch effectively blocked it, and she lay off to one side, bracing it with her feet.
When Martinez emptied the gun through the door, the slugs came through well above Weather’s supine body, and the couch, and buried themselves in the opposite wall.
Then the shooting stopped, and Letty shouted at her, and she’d crawled to the housekeeper’s hardwired phone and called 911. That done, she dragged the couch away, picked up the baby, stepped over Martinez’s body without a second look, and ran downstairs to find the bleeding Letty still pointed at the door.
Weather took it from there….
The ambulance arrived three minutes after the cops, and Letty was taken to Regions Hospital in St. Paul. The bullet had shattered the middle of her left arm’s radius bone before exiting. She was in surgery by the time Lucas arrived. He waited with Weather outside the OR.
“It’s not terrible,” Weather told him. “She’ll need some pins and braces. She’ll be in a cast…. Aw, my God, Lucas,” and she broke down, weeping, and Lucas put his arm around her and squeezed her tight.
The operation went well, done by the best general surgeon Weather knew. He came out and said, “She’ll sleep for a while. There’ll be some pain, but she’ll be okay eventually.”
“Will she have any problems with the arm?” Lucas asked.
“It’s too early to tell. She might have some loss of feeling, but I don’t think she’ll have any loss of function,” the surgeon said. He was a short blond man with green eyes.
“But you’re not sure.”
“The break itself is small, but she lost some bone,” the surgeon said. “On the other hand, she’s young, and the young come back from this kind of thing. Look, I’ll go out on a limb: she’s gonna be fine.”
Eventually, late that night, with Letty still asleep, Lucas took Weather and the other two kids to the Polaris condo. “They’ll keep Letty sedated overnight, so there’s no point in our being there,” Weather said. “We need to get some sleep, because tomorrow’s going to be hell.”
He tried to sleep, but woke up at four in the morning to an empty bed, and found Weather sitting in the kitchen. “I’m going over to the hospital,” he said. “Could you stay with the kids?”
“No. I’m going with you.” She’d already called the housekeeper, who’d been shopping during the shoot-out, and who’d temporarily moved in with a sister; she was on her way over.
Letty’s eyes cracked open at six o’clock, about the time the hospital woke up. She was disoriented for a moment, sleepy, then saw Weather and Lucas staring at her face.
“Is everybody okay?” she asked.
Lucas opened his mouth to say, “Yes,” but nothing came out, and then, for the first time since his mother died, he put his face in his hands and began choking, which was the only way he knew how to cry.
The DEA debriefing was irritating. Lucas was fine with talking to O’Brien, but then he had to repeat everything to a DEA deputy director in Washington, D.C. The director, Lucas thought, was on a speakerphone, and shouting.
The most important thing he said was that the Mexican Federales heard things from the Criminales, and they’d heard that the Criminales were done with Minnesota. The gang wasn’t completely out of control, and now that one of their members had killed a well-known Federale, and then had attempted to kill an American cop’s family…
“The bottom line is, they don’t want a war. Or, more of a war,” the DEA boss shouted. “They’re done with you guys. For one thing, we’ve got the gold, and there’s no way they’re going to get it back.”
“How sure are you about that?” Lucas asked. “That they’re done?”
“Pretty sure,” the DEA man shouted back down the line. “That’s about as good as we can get. I’d even say, ‘Very sure.’”
“What about Kline or Sanderson? Do they need protection?”
“I’ve been reading the reports about the whole thing,” the director shouted back. “I think they’re probably okay. Did they even have anything to do with it? From what I’ve read, it seems like they might be innocent.”
“They’re not-they were in it, up to their necks,” Lucas said. “But we can’t prove it.”
“So … seventy-five percent? That they were involved?”
“More like ninety-five,” Lucas said. “The problem is, I’m told, that if we go to court, they can blame it all on Turicek. Especially since we got the gold back, and we know Turicek rented the place where the gold was stashed. Kline’s attorney makes the point that if his client was involved, he and Sanderson had to know where the gold was, and they could have picked it up anytime. So if they knew … why did they let eighteen million in gold get away? The other thing is, Kline’s attorney says that if Kline was involved, he could have stolen the money anytime after he left Polaris, but he didn’t, even though he was unemployed and needed money. Our county attorney, our prosecutor, and your U.S. attorney agree they were probably involved, but say it’s only ten percent that they can be convicted. And they don’t like to lose.”
“So we’re dead in the water,” the director shouted.
“Things still worked out for us,” O’Brien said. “Not only did we grab that eighteen mil, but we know how the
