The Professionals (6 page)

“These people bought two phones. At once.”

“Lots of people buy two phones.”

Stevens shot the guy a look. “Come on,” he said. “Help me out. Young people. A white girl with curly brown hair.”

Aziz shrugged and gestured to the ceiling. “You check the security cameras?”

Stevens hit up the security console, explained the situation. Ran straight into a stonewalling rent-a-cop with an attitude problem.

Management was a bit more obliging, but the tapes, they said, were
on a three-day cycle. Every three days they were erased and reused. Monday was five days ago. Therefore, no tapes.

Police work. Sometimes it made Stevens want to be a long-haul trucker.

Night after night, he found himself shackled to his desk in the BCA long after sundown, his wife and kids having given up on dinner with Daddy yet again, his eyes bleary and his head aching. Tim Lesley, Special Agent in Charge of Special Investigations, was riding him for answers—and Lesley, a tall, mean bastard whose wire-rimmed glasses belied a long history as a shit-kicking homicide cop in the old vein, wasn’t trying to hear about Stevens’s lack of progress. A case was a case, and a kidnapping, goddamn it, didn’t happen in Minnesota without someone getting their ass locked up.

Now Stevens sat in the BCA offices, watching the clock make its idle circuit, waiting for his break. Another weary night.

Then the phone rang. Loud. Scared the shit out of him. Stevens sat up at his desk. Fingers crossed, he thought. “Stevens.”

“Hi, honey.” Nancy.

“Oh, hey,” said Stevens. “I was just thinking about you.”

“Really?”

“Sure. You’re wanted for armed robbery. The kids turned state’s witness.”

“Those brats. Never should have brought them along.”

“Hard to find a good babysitter.”

“I never figured they would squeal.” He could hear the smile in her voice. Nancy Monroe’s wicked sense of humor was one of the first things that had attracted Stevens to his wife. That and she was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen.

Tonight, he couldn’t see her, but he could picture her smile and it was almost enough. She was just calling to say hi, she said, and to remind Stevens how lucky he was to have a wife who understood a state policeman’s long hours—though he hardly needed reminding. The sound of her voice perked him up, brightened his mood, and he hoped she’d be awake when he finally got home.

As his wife gave him the daily report, Stevens fiddled around with the security footage from the drop site, playing it on a loop and staring, mindless, into the grainy black-and-white footage, watching the pixels move back and forth on his screen.

“So the teacher says that J.J. is going to have to take the remedial math program,” Nancy was saying. “At least until he figures out long division.”

“Long division,” said Stevens. “A dead language. Who needs it?”

“Means he spends lunch hour inside with Mr. Davidson and some other kids. I guess it’s not a big deal, right?”

“Should be fine.” Stevens blinked. He stared at the screen, rewound the loop. Terrence Harper storming over to his car. Sandra Harper ditching, getting in on the passenger side. The Harpers sitting in the car for a couple minutes, Terrence yelling something at his wife. Then the headlights turning on and Terrence adjusting the rearview mirror before slowly pulling out of the lot.

All fine. Stevens had watched the footage a hundred times already.

But now, as he kept watching, a small Korean sedan moved into the frame. The car stopped for a moment, directly in front of the camera, and Stevens caught a half-second glimpse of the driver before the car pulled out of the lot, headed in the same direction as the Harpers.

“Honey?”

“What?”

“I was just saying that Andrea needs to be picked up from volleyball practice tomorrow.”

“Oh.” Stevens paused the tape, his heart pounding. “Sure. I can do that.”

“Great.”

“Listen,” he said. “Can I call you back? I think I just found something.”

Nancy paused. “Fine,” she said, sighing. “Come home soon.”

After Nancy hung up the phone, Stevens turned back to the screen. He rewound the tape, playing it forward to that brief moment when the driver of the sedan was visible to the camera.

She was a white woman, young by the looks of it. The camera footage was grainy, and Stevens couldn’t make out much of her facial features. What he
could
see, however, was her hair: a mass of dark curls that spilled over her face and her shoulders, partially obscuring her eyes.

S
am Porter was a major disappointment.

The guy should have been the perfect score. He had a big house and a couple of nice foreign cars and a blond wife who was obviously a decade or so his junior. He was the kind of guy who enjoyed being rich, who would throw money at a problem and expect it to disappear. The kind of guy who would pay off sixty thousand dollars with a smirk and then go home and make it all back plus interest playing the stock market the next day.

He was the kind of guy who would spend his Novembers on a beach in the Turks and Caicos.

They lost him Thursday morning. One day before D-day. Mouse was on shadow detail, hanging out down the street from Porter’s place and babysitting him on the drive in to work. Thursday, though, Porter was running late. Mouse cruised the block a couple times, thinking he’d missed him, but both cars stayed put in the driveway, and after a while, Mouse realized he hadn’t seen the guy’s kid leave for school yet, either.

At quarter to ten, the whole family—Porter, the wife, the fourteen-year-old son—piled into Grace Porter’s Mercedes SUV and backed out onto the street. Mouse followed in the rental Impala, tailing the Benz
southwest to the airport, where the Porters parked in the long-term lot and disappeared into the terminal.

Mouse called Pender, panicked. Pender called Porter’s office and got the goods from a secretary. The family was gone for three weeks. The West Indies—isn’t that nice? Howard Bartley would be handling Porter’s accounts.

Pender half debated switching the job over to Bartley, just to maintain the theme, but then Mouse punched a couple keys on his laptop and revealed that Bartley was a bachelor with serious credit problems. No chance they’d get a penny in ransom.

Pender gathered the gang at the Super 8 that afternoon. “What now?” he asked them. “What do you guys want to do?”

“No worries,” said Mouse. He started typing again. “We can find another mark in a minute and a half. Easy.”

Pender stared at Mouse’s computer screen. “We could just ditch and go on vacation.”

Sawyer frowned. “No sense coming to Detroit if we’re not getting paid for it.”

“Besides, who’s going to pay for the hotel if it’s not the mark?” said Mouse. “And the rental car? It ain’t coming out of my share.”

Pender turned to his girlfriend. “What do you think, Marie?”

She was quiet a moment, but then she sighed and looked up. “Let’s just do it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Let’s get paid and get out of here. Go somewhere warm.”

Pender stared at her a second, almost wishing she’d wanted to jet. I really don’t like these slapdash encounters, he thought. We work best when we’re prepared. But he mulled it over a little longer, and then he thought, man up. You’ll pull this job and spend a week on the beach. Nothing to it. He looked around the room, the gang waiting for him, and he squared his shoulders and looked down at Mouse’s laptop. “All right,” he told Mouse. “Bring up those targets again. Let’s find us a good one.”

T
hey picked Donald Beneteau. But Donald Beneteau did not go easy.

They collared him in Birmingham, a couple blocks from his house, as he walked back from the grocery store with a half gallon of milk and the day’s
Free Press
. He turned around nice and easy when Marie called out his name, but once Sawyer and Pender put their hands on him he broke free and bolted.

Beneteau made it half a block before they got him in the van, punching and kicking and swearing his lungs out. Sawyer fed him a right cross and he calmed down enough that Pender could rope him up, but the man got his kicks in, nailing Pender square in the jaw as he tried to fit the gag.

“Do you know who I am?” he kept saying. “Do you
know
who the fuck I am?”

Pender and Sawyer swapped looks. They knew what Mouse knew. Beneteau owned his own tool-and-die operation. Four factories. Thirty million dollars in annual revenue. Commuted to work daily in a Mercedes-Benz sedan. Married fifteen years to Patricia Beneteau, forty, VP of Marketing for the Motown Casino. Three sons. Million and a half dollars in real estate, another couple million in the bank. Perfect target.

Perfect targets, though, didn’t tend to put up such a fight. Perfect targets didn’t act like their kidnappers should know who the fuck they were.

They got Beneteau back to the Super 8 and let him cool down a little while Pender took Mouse into the other bedroom. “Why’s this guy acting like a superstar?” he asked. “Is there something we should know about him?”

Mouse shrugged. “Guy thinks he’s a big shot. No big deal.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” Mouse gave him a smile. “It’s fine, boss. Do your thing.”

Pender gave it a minute. He shrugged. Of course it was fine. The guy was just pissed off, was all. “Fine,” he said. He went back to Beneteau’s room.

There, Pender lay out the story, closing with a hundred-thousand-dollar payoff. Beneteau looked like he could stand to pay a premium, and the extra forty grand would make a nice vacation bonus when they hit Florida next week. When Pender finished his spiel, however, Beneteau laughed in his face.

N
ice speech, pal,” he said. “But you won’t get a dime from me.”

Sawyer smacked him. Beneteau came up bloody, but he kept laughing.

“We’re going to put you on the phone to your wife,” said Pender, trying to sound calmer than he felt. “You can lay out the situation. Talk it over.”

“Think about your wife,” said Sawyer. “Think about your kids.”

“Think about fuck you,” said Beneteau. “Let me go now and maybe you live.”

Pender picked up the phone. “Call your wife.”

“Last chance. I make this call and you fuckers are roadkill.”

Sawyer smacked him again. “Dial the number.”

Pender dialed. Beneteau put the phone to his ear. After a few seconds, he spoke. “Honey,” he said. “I’ve been kidnapped. Some chumps. I’m all right. They want a ransom. No, listen. Hundred grand. That’s the price. Twenty-four hours. You know what to do … All right. All right.”

Beneteau hung up the phone. He turned his face in Sawyer’s direction and flashed a bloody grin. “You motherfuckers just made the biggest mistake of your lives.”

Y
eah, I remember her. How could I forget?”

Agent Stevens found himself at the Avis counter at the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, listening to the clerk nearly blow his wad as he tried to describe the girl who’d rented the brown Hyundai last Tuesday.

It hadn’t taken much for Stevens to follow the McDonald’s security footage to the rental car agency. Just a couple frames forward on the tape to where the car waited to pull into traffic and Stevens could almost read the full license plate straight off the screen. A few keystrokes later and he’d traced the car back to Avis. If only all police work was that easy.