Duke City Split (19 page)

“Perfectly.”

Wyman’s boots crunched on the gravelly soil. Caro watched in his mirrors as he walked toward a dark blue Charger parked on the street, maybe sixty feet away.

“Fucker,” Caro muttered.

He cranked the engine to life. Wyman didn’t even turn at the noise.

Caro threw the rental car into reverse and stood on the accelerator. He swiveled in the seat, looking back over his shoulder, taking aim. Weeds and rocks thudded in the wheel wells as the car rocketed backward.

Wyman turned and saw the car bearing down on him. He brought up the Colt and blasted away. The car’s rear window frosted and bits of glass blew all over the backseat. Caro kept his foot on the gas.

Wyman leaped out of the way at the last second, and Caro spun the wheel, trying to catch him with a fender, the car skidding in the loose dirt. Wyman fired again. The right rear window blew out. Caro felt the thud as the bullet buried itself in the front seat’s upholstery.

Barely braking, he slammed the car into drive. The transmission caught with a shriek and the car leaped forward. Wyman sidestepped it again as Caro spun the wheel. Another shot, but it sang off metal.

The car bounced over a concrete curb into the street. Caro wrestled it to the left. The tires caught with a chirp, and he zoomed away.

He checked his mirrors as he reached the end of the block, but he couldn’t see Wyman anywhere. Just a cloud of dust hanging over the vacant lot.

Mick Wyman coughed against the pale dust as the Chevy disappeared around a corner. He considered chasing the car and finishing the out-of-town smartass who’d nearly run him down, but it was too dangerous now. He could already hear sirens in the distance.

He peered through the dust at his apartment complex across the street. Two of the doors were open, heads cautiously peeking out, checking on the shots. One belonged to the silver-haired manager, Bob.

Damn. The apartment was rented under his real name, which meant cops all over the city soon would be hunting for him because he fired those shots.

Mick trotted over to the Charger and got behind the wheel. The sirens were drawing closer. He cranked the engine and sped away. He turned at the next corner and again two blocks later, putting some obstacles between himself and the cops. He’d have a few minutes while the manager filled them in, then his name and the make of his car would blare over every police radio.

He wheeled onto Lomas Boulevard and weaved between clumps of traffic on the six-lane thoroughfare, which was lined with thrift stores and fast-food joints. By the time he hit a red light, he was certain no one was on his tail. He tried to relax. He needed to stay calm and work his way through the next few steps—get rid of the Charger, procure new wheels, split up the money, get the hell out of Albuquerque.

He took a phone out of the center console and hit the numbers programmed to speed-dial Bud. He needed to warn his partner about Caro. He needed to set up a rendezvous to split the money. That would be the only time he and Bud should meet face-to-face, and it would be damned brief. If they were smart, they’d go their separate ways and never communicate. Mick felt a twinge of emotion. He was fond of Bud and his family. He’d hate to never see them again, but it would be the safest way to go.

Bud’s phone rang in his ear four times, then voice mail picked up. Mick grimaced. Too much information to impart over voice mail. Information that shouldn’t be heard by anyone but Bud.

He hung up.

The old jeweler smoked a pipe. The aroma took Pam Willis straight back to her childhood. Her father had been a pipe smoker, too, an itinerant English professor always wreathed in smoke and surrounded by books. Much of Pam’s early ambition had stemmed from wanting to avoid the boring life of a professor’s wife, passing out cookies at undergraduate tea parties. She’d rather take a bullet.

She and Hector met the jeweler within minutes of responding to the police call about a purple Cadillac. APD spotted the lowrider in a service alley behind a row of stores on San Mateo Boulevard. The jewelry shop was on the south end of the row, separated by a narrow parking lot from a store that sold car stereos.

Hector was on the phone, arranging for a tow truck to take the Cadillac in for fingerprinting. Pam suspected the car had been wiped down before it was abandoned.

The jeweler came out the back door of his shop, lighting his pipe as soon as he was outdoors. He was a stoop-shouldered man with a bald head fringed in white fuzz. Glasses sat on his beak of a nose, and a jeweler’s loupe was attached to one corner of the glasses’ frame.

“What’s happening back here?” he asked Pam between puffs.

“FBI,” she said. “We’ve been looking for this car. Any idea how long it’s been back here?”

“Wasn’t there when I locked up last night,” he said. “But I came in the front this morning, so I don’t know if it was there then. It belongs to somebody important?”

“A guard at a bank that was robbed this week.”

“I read about that robbery in the newspaper. A big one, no?”

“Yes, sir.” She took a step away from him, toward Hector. Didn’t want to get bogged down in a discussion of local crime with the old man.

“Maybe,” he offered, “we could look at the video.”

Pam turned back to him. “Video?”

He pointed his pipe at the corner of the building. There, where the wall met the building’s flat roof, was a tiny video camera.

“It’s to cover my back door,” he said. “But it shows this whole alley.”

“That would be very helpful.”

“Come on in,” he said. “When you’re ready.”

“Now would be good. Hector!”

Her partner turned, the phone still to his ear. She pointed at the camera.

“Video from overnight.”

Hector grinned. He followed as she trailed the old man back into the building.

“I didn’t introduce myself properly,” she said. “I’m Pam Willis, special agent with the FBI. This is my partner, Hector Aragon.”

“Samuel Dustin,” the jeweler said. “Good to meet you.”

He called to a clerk in the front of the store and said he’d be busy in the back for a while. He unlocked a blank wooden door and opened it wide. Inside was a closet with shelves holding video recorders and two flickering screens.

“I’ve owned this shop thirty-five years,” he said. “Started out downtown, but we moved out here twenty years ago.”

He punched buttons on one of the machines, still clenching his pipe between his teeth.

“Every time there’s an upgrade to security, I buy it,” he said. “Can’t be too careful when you’ve got a safe full of diamonds.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You want to see the video from all night? I can fast-forward through it.”

“That would be great.”

They crowded into the closet, watching one of the screens, where the alley was shown in full color. White lines danced across the screen as he fast-forwarded through the video. When the Cadillac turned into the far end of the alley, Pam said, “There!”

Dustin poked a button and the video slowed to real time. The Cadillac crept down the alley and stopped beside a Dumpster, right where the local police found it this morning.

Pam couldn’t make out the driver’s face but she saw a white rag flash on the dashboard.

“Just like we thought,” she said. “It’s getting wiped down.”

“Someone stole this ugly car?” the old man asked.

“We’re not sure yet,” Hector said.

The driver’s door popped open, and the agents leaned closer to the screen. Pam expected to see Diego Ramirez emerge from the car, but it was someone else. A young
Anglo guy, blond, wearing jeans and a black polo shirt. He walked directly toward the camera and disappeared from sight at the bottom of the screen.

“Not our man,” Hector muttered.

“Yeah, but who is it?”

The old jeweler, squinting at the screen, said, “I know him.”

Both agents turned to look at him.

“I mean, I don’t know his name. But I’ve seen him before. He works next door at the stereo place.”

Milton Abeyta was on the phone with his boss when Vincent Caro barged into his office. Caro looked the slightest bit disheveled—his slick hair mussed on one side of his head, his shirt wrinkled—and that was alarming enough for Milton to say, “I’ll have to call you back,” and hang up. He’d get yelled at later, but better to give Caro his full attention.

“What’s happened?”

Caro sat in the guest chair across from Milton and crossed his legs. He slipped a hand inside the jacket of his olive-green suit.

Milton stiffened, but Caro’s hand came out with a key ring bearing a green Enterprise Rent-A-Car logo.

“I ran into a little trouble.” He tossed the keys onto Milton’s desk. “There’s a light blue Malibu parked at the back of the hotel lot. It’s got a couple of broken windows and a bullet hole in it.”

“A bullet hole?”

Caro shrugged. “I found one of the bank robbers. He didn’t like being found.”

“Ah.”

“I tried to run over him with the car, but he pulled out this hand cannon and started blasting.”

“You’re okay?” Milton asked, though he could see that Caro didn’t have a scratch on him.

“Of course. So is the bank robber, unfortunately. Plus, I’ve lost him again, for the moment.”

“You found him before. You can do it again.”

Caro frowned, as if Milton were wasting his time with encouragement.

“Have one of your people get rid of that car,” he said.

“Rid of it?”

Caro closed his eyes for a moment, making a show of summoning patience. “Have him take it out in the desert somewhere and torch it. Okay?”

“Sure, sure. We can do that.”

“I’ll report it stolen,” Caro said. “Be a lot of paperwork and shit, but I won’t have
cops asking me about a bullet hole in the fender.”

Milton picked up the keys. “Happy to take care of that for you, Mr. Caro. Shall I call you when it’s done?”

“Just leave a message on my room phone. I’ll be going out again as soon as I get a fresh car delivered.”

Milton managed not to make a face. This Chicago hood thought he could just march in here, order him around, get him to aid and abet in crimes. But he was too fucking busy to take his calls.

“Consider it handled,” Milton said. “Anything else we can do for you?”

Caro pressed his lips together, as if it pained him to ask for another favor. He met Milton’s gaze and said, “I need a new gun.”

Bud drove his Equinox along shady suburban streets, smiling at the way the girls chattered in the backseat. They’d covered the day’s big news: soccer practice, the new girl in Angela’s class, and the boy who’d bloodied his elbow in a fall on the playground. Now they were lobbying for ice cream.

“We’re almost home,” he protested. “You can wait until dinner.”

“But I’m
star
-ving,” said Amy, the ten-year-old, always with a flair for the dramatic.

“Me, too!” her little sister chimed in. “I haven’t had hardly anything to eat all day!”

“What about lunch?”

“Mom made us eat at the school cafeteria,” Amy said. “Today was
meat loaf
!”

“I like meat loaf.”

“Ewww!” they both sang. “Not meat loaf!”

“Yummy.”

“You don’t know what this meat loaf is like, Dad. It’s
horrible
.”

“Come on. They couldn’t serve it if it were that bad.”

“They do, though,” Angela said. “Amy’s right. It’s horrible and smelly and gooshy.”

“Gooshy?”

“It squirts when you cut it.”

“Probably just grease.”

“Ewww!”

“Maybe we can have a healthy snack at home.”

“Ice cream! Ice cream! We want ice cream!”

They laughed until Bud noted, “Ice cream is gooshy, too.”

He watched in the rearview mirror as they looked at each other with wide eyes. “Ewww!”

“Too late anyway,” he said. “There’s the house. We’re home!”

“Awww!”

“Come on. We’ll go inside and have some fruit. You’ll be hungry for dinner when Mom gets home.”

“It’s not the same,” Amy said, giving him the sad face.

“At least an apple won’t be gooshy.”

Bud parked in the driveway, then helped them haul their heavy backpacks up to the porch. He’d put his keys in his pocket and now dropped the backpacks to fish them out again.

“Hurry, Dad. I’m starving, remember?”

He laughed as he opened the door. The girls bolted past him, headed for the kitchen, leaving him to schlep the backpacks inside.

He was halfway through the door, his hands full, when he realized the girls had frozen just inside the living room.

“Dad,” Amy said, alarm in her voice. “Who’s that man?”

The man was sitting in a floral-print wingback chair, his legs crossed and a smile on his freckled face. His narrow eyes were cold, though, and his reddish-brown hair was greased back into a ducktail. No one Bud knew.

“What the hell—”

Another man stepped from behind the front door. He was no taller than Bud but twice as wide at the shoulders. He wore a sweatshirt that had the sleeves cut away, exposing bodybuilder arms. His curly black hair sat on top of his head above twisted little ears.

The bodybuilder grabbed Bud’s arm and yanked him the rest of the way into the living room. He shut the front door.

The girls were wide-eyed and gaping.

“Look,” Bud said, “I don’t know who you guys are, but there’s no reason to scare my kids. Just leave now, and I won’t call the cops or—”

The seated man laughed, a loud bark that cut Bud off.

“Nice try, Mr. Knox,” he said. “But we need to have a talk. The girls look like they could use a bathroom break, don’t they, Dwight?”

Dwight nodded stupidly and pointed down the hall to the powder room, a closet-sized cell that held only a sink and a toilet. The window in there was a foot square, too small for even Angela to crawl through.

Amy looked up at Bud and said, “Dad? Do we have to?”

“Just for a minute, hon. Let me talk to these men and see what they want.”

The girls hesitated. Angela looked ready to cry.

“Go ahead,” Bud said.