Stolen Prey (39 page)

A pickup sat in front of the trailer, with its hood propped up. It looked as though it’d been propped up for a while.

“Do not want to fuck with that dog,” Lucas said, looking over his shoulder.

“Doesn’t look like the chain would reach the door,” Flowers said. “We could come up from the back, through the cornfield.”

“Wouldn’t be a surprise … and we know they’ve got that piece-of-shit pistol.”

“They never shot anybody,” Flowers said.

“Maybe come up behind the trailer, watch it for a while,” Lucas suggested.

T
HEY PARKED
Flowers’s truck on a gravel road on the opposite side of the field, where it would be out of sight for most cars going down to the trailer. Lucas took off his suit coat, and Flowers pulled on a long-sleeved shirt so he wouldn’t get scratched by the corn leaves. At the last minute, Flowers went back to the truck, got a pistol out from under the front seat, already in a carry holster. He stuck it in his back beltline and said, “I’m good.”

They climbed a barbed-wire fence and submerged in the tall corn. Lucas would have been lost in a minute or two, but Flowers pulled out his cell phone, called up a compass app, and they followed the arrow across the field.

When they got close, they found they were a bit too far to the west, and so went back in, walked east two hundred feet, then climbed another fence and jogged up to the back of the trailer, a single-wide.

“Smell it?” Flowers asked, in a whisper.

Lucas nodded: a faint odor, like a mix of alcohol and ammonia, hung about the trailer. They’d been cooking meth inside. Lucas pressed his ear to the metal siding on the trailer and listened. Not a sound. Not a creak. “Nothing moving,” he said.

“That smell—we’ve got probable cause,” Flowers said.

“Let’s go. Let’s kick the door,” Lucas said.

They walked around the side and then the front, and the dog went nuts. His chain would have covered the rut up to the front door, but fell short of the concrete-block stoop. Lucas took his
pistol out as Flowers, with cowboy boots, walked up to the door and simply kicked it open.

Lucas went through, with Flowers a couple steps behind: nobody home, but the place was saturated with the odor of the chemicals.

“Jesus, what a shithole,” Lucas said. Dirty clothes were stacked around the built-in couches, papers—bills and advertisements—were scattered over the tiny dinner table.

The dog was still going nuts.

“If we find them, we gotta do something about the mutt,” Lucas said.

“There’s a pit bull rescue place in the Cities. They’ll come down and get him.” Flowers shook his head. “A dog like that, you had to abuse it to make it that crazy. Once pits go nuts, sometimes you can’t get them back.”

They made a wide circle around the dog and hiked back to the truck, Lucas bitching about what the gravel was doing to his Italian shoes.

F
LOWERS HAD
addresses for two horse stables where Bird and Waters might be. He had Google maps for the locations, marked by the county agent. Bird and Waters were driving a rust-red 1994 Ford F-350.

They found them at the first farm, shoveling shit, no clue about the shoot-out they’d missed. The farmer walked Lucas and Flowers down to the main barn, explaining, “Most of the manure is taken out mechanically, but we’ve got to clean the last bit by hand.”

“That’s good information,” Lucas said. He stepped in something too soft, looked down at his shoes, winced.

The barn was empty, all the horses being out in a pasture. Flowers pointed them out, and said they were called Appaloosas, identifiable by their dappled asses.

“Then how come they’re not called Assaloosas?” Lucas asked. The farmer looked at him oddly, and they went around the barn.

The two robbers were working with coal shovels and brooms, dragging shovelfuls of horse shit off a manure pile and throwing it on the truck. They were dressed in overalls, a tall, tough woman and the skinny man; when the man looked at them, and tried to smile, Lucas realized he’d lost all his teeth.

Lucas recognized them instantly, and said to them, “Yup. You’re them.”

The woman said, “Who?”

“The two who took five hundred dollars off me up in St. Paul this spring and broke my wrist,” Lucas said. He held up his ID. “I’m a cop. You’re under arrest.”

The couple looked at each other for a moment, and the man’s shoulders slumped. The woman had a push broom in her hands and said, “Thank God,” and tossed the broom on a pile of lumpy manure.

The man said, “Fuck me. What’s gonna happen to my truck?”

“Probably sold for restitution,” Lucas said. “Okay. You have the right…”

A
FTER THEY
read them their rights, Lucas asked Waters, “Why’d you say, ‘Thank God’?”

“Because I’m still on parole,” she said. “They’ll send me back
to Shakopee. That’s the best place I ever been. Warm dorms, nice beds, good food. I’d live there the rest of my life, if I could. I had a job in the cafeteria.”

Bird said, “Got good medical, too. Maybe I can get my teeth fixed.”

Lucas looked at them and said, “Well, shit.”

Flowers started laughing, clapped him on the back and said, “Revenge is sweet, huh?”

T
HE STABLE OWNER
wanted the Ford out of his yard, and finally Flowers suggested that they let Bird drive the truck back to the farm, and from there, the sheriff’s deputies would take over. Bird agreed to do it, and Flowers tapped him on the chest and said, “If you go anywhere but the farm, we’ll bust your ass and pile some more time on you. You’re not running anywhere with that truck.”

Bird said, “Be lucky if we don’t run out of gas.”

They made it back to the farm, and the two were turned over to sheriff’s deputies. The sheriff came over and said, gleefully, “Boy oh boy, this is the biggest bust since old Marilyn Snow went off the rails and shot up the Hot Spot. I’m smelling like…” He sniffed and asked, “What smells like horse shit?”

Bird raised a hand.

T
HEY WERE
at the farm when Letty called. She was screaming at him: “Dad, Dad, we’ve got a problem, Dad…”

Lucas listened for one moment and said, “I’m coming, honey, I’m coming, hold on….”

Lucas left Flowers and the sheriff without a word, sprinting in his ruined shoes across the farm lawn, down the driveway. A moment later the Porsche fishtailed past the driveway and they could hear it accelerate off into the distance, ripping through the gears.

“That don’t sound good,” said Richie, the sheriff.

“No. It doesn’t,” Flowers said.

L
etty turned the corner and walked down toward the house, when her hot-chick spider-sense kicked up: the feeling that somebody was watching her. She’d mentioned the spider-sense to Lucas one time, and he’d said, “Yep. It’s there. Ask anyone who’s done surveillance.”

It came, he said, because when people are watching someone, they tend to lock their heads in place; instead of wobbling here and there, making subtle changes each and every second, their head goes still. Even when the watcher points his head in another direction, and watches from the corner of his eye, the head freezes. That’s picked up by the human social sense, which can find even the most subtle of cues.

People doing surveillance learn not really to watch the target at all, in a specific sense. They look past the target at something else, or at nothing at all … and keep the head moving.

“When somebody’s watching you from a car, they almost always slow the car down, to keep you in sight for a longer time. Once the target picks up on that, you’re cooked,” Lucas said.

That’s what she picked up on: the car was moving too slowly, as though keeping her in sight. Could be a couple of guys from school, she thought. A girlfriend had passed along the results of a
dirty, rotten sexist jock-o poll in which Letty’s ass had ranked among the top five at the school.

She was insulted to be the subject of something so low. Sort of.

S
O SHE
picked up on the car…

As she turned up the sidewalk, she used her key to go through the front door. Heard Weather in the kitchen and called, “Hi, Mom,” and Weather called back, “Sam’s playing with his Leapster, and he probably needs a diaper change. Could you get him? Could you get him?”

Letty said, “Sure,” but before she did that, she stopped and peeked through the palm-sized door window.

The car was in the driveway, and Martínez and a short Mexican man were getting out. Letty recognized them instantly: she’d been working at Channel Three, and Martínez’s picture was everywhere. Martínez had a gun in her hand, and the short man was carrying what might have been a log. They were coming, she thought, for Dad, but they wouldn’t leave anybody alive.

L
ETTY TURNED
to the kitchen and screamed, “Mom: run upstairs. The Mexicans are here and they’ve got guns. Mom, run upstairs!”

Weather, sounding confused, called, “What?”

Letty screamed, “Run! Run! Get up in the apartment, block the door, block the door, the Mexicans, the Mexicans…”

And she turned and ran up the stairs to the second floor, screaming, “Run, run….”

M
ARTÍNEZ HAD
cracked at five o’clock, or thereabouts, an hour after a call with the Big Voice.

The Big Voice didn’t believe her. “We have seen this video. They say you have the gold, Ana.”

“I have no gold.”

“So they are lying on TV, these police.”

“Yes, they are lying. It’s this Davenport, he’s the one. He does this to split us apart.”

The Big Voice sighed and said, “I understand. So, tonight, if you will run to Des Moines, we will have a van for you, and a driver. He can hide you in the van, and you will be back tomorrow night.”

To Martínez, it had been quite clear. They were fifty-fifty on whether she was telling the truth. In her shoes, they would have taken the gold. They understood that Davenport might be lying, but then again, he might not be. Once the Criminales had their hands on her, they
would
get the truth.

Martínez might not survive the process, but then, she just wasn’t that important at the moment. Whatever importance she had once had, had diminished when Rivera went down, and wouldn’t come back until she knew her new assignment with the Federales. If she was shuffled off to a clerical job, the LCN would no longer be interested. If she was attached to another inspector, or even a higher rank, then she might be important again.

But for now…

And if the Federales got her, they would get their own truth, and that would not help the Criminales either: she had far too much personal information on them.

The fact of the matter was, Martínez realized as she took a turn around the living-room carpet, she might now be considered a liability to the LCN. They would kill her, perhaps with a twinge of regret, but not too much. Any American police agency would drop her in jail, forever; and the Federales…

She shuddered when she thought what the Federales might do.

She went round and round with it, grew angrier and angrier.

No way out. There was no way out.

At five o’clock, she cracked, and growled at Tres: “Get your gun.”

Tres had been watching the television:
“¿Qué?”

“We go to kill this cop,” she said. “This cop who lies about us, who has done this.”

Tres made a moue, then said, “Okay.” He was going to die anyway, pretty soon. The saints had told him so, and one day was as good as the next.

A
S THEY CAME UP
to Davenport’s house, she saw his Lexus truck in the driveway and said, “He’s there.”

“We will do it?”

“We will do it right now.”

The door was a stout one, a cop’s door, but gave way before the battering ram, a four-by-four that Tres scavenged from a parking lot.

As the door splintered, Letty screamed a last time, “Mom, Mom, run in the apartment, run in the apartment, block the door…”

Then she turned and ran toward her parents’ bedroom.

T
RES CAME
through the door first, the four-by-four discarded on the stoop, a Mac-10 in his hand. Martínez was a step behind him with a nine-millimeter handgun. Tres scanned to his left, toward the main part of the house, which may have saved Letty’s life, because he did not instantly pick up on her as she fled along the open hallway above the living room. As it was, he got off one burst, which peppered the wall behind her—almost missing.

But not quite. One nine-millimeter slug hit her left forearm, broke the bone, and blew bloody tissue onto the wall behind it; the pain was intense, but she’d been hurt before and didn’t slow down. Sam’s room was halfway down the hall, on the right, and as she passed his door, she could see him staring at his video game, oblivious to the screaming. She reached out with her good hand and yanked the door shut and went on down to the master bedroom.

W
EATHER WAS
in the kitchen with the baby. Martínez and Tres couldn’t see her, but they heard her when she knocked over a chair as she ran toward the back stairs, up to the housekeeper’s apartment over the garage.

Martínez snapped at Tres, “Take the girl,” and Tres ran that way, toward the stairs, as Martínez ran toward the kitchen. She expected Davenport to appear, and ran awkwardly, with the pistol extended in front of her, toward the kitchen.

I
N THE BEDROOM
, Letty pulled open the bottom drawer of Lucas’s bedside stand, forced herself to calmly go through the quick
two-finger-three-finger-two-finger sequence of Lucas’s pistol safe’s combination lock.

Had to get it right the first time and she did it deliberately, even as she heard the footsteps on the stairs, the man with the machine gun…

T
RES RAN
up the stairs and saw the bloody splotch on the wall, and heard the girl in the far bedroom. He smiled and slowed his step: it was over.

L
ETTY LOOKED
and mostly behaved like a young upper-middle-class girl, but she’d grown up so desperately poor, in the far-northern Minnesota backcountry, her father long gone, her mother a helpless and hopeless alcoholic.