Stolen Prey (17 page)

Uno and Tres stood, hands still up, stunned, and Martínez said, “You have one-half minute. Get all the guns and money you have, get the telephones, leave everything else, run out to the car and go. Find a motel, not the Wee Blue Inn, the police have been there. Check into a motel, put the guns inside, and your suitcases, and then abandon the car. I will find you one hour to do this. Call the Big Voice and he will tell you where to go after that, will tell you where to get a new car. Tell Big Voice that I will call tonight. Now run, children. RUN.”

They were out of the house in thirty seconds, never looking at Dos’s body, or Rivera’s. As they went out the back door, she handed them the revolver and said, “Take this. Throw it where they’ll never find it. A river.” They took the revolver, threw the bag of guns in the back of the truck, along with their suitcases, backed out of the drive, and were gone.

Martínez took ten seconds, gathering herself, looked at Rivera, and said, “You idiot.” If he’d called for backup, she would
have found time to step away, to call the Big Voice to warn the children, to get them out. She shook her head, then turned and ran screaming out the front door, half fell down the steps, went down on the sidewalk, skinning her hands, ricocheted down the empty street. She landed a bit sideways on one of her heels and lost the shoe and let it go, and got on the cell phone and called Lucas and when he answered, screamed, “Help us. David is shot David is shot help us…”

L
UCAS WAS
working the computer when the call came in, and he listened astonished to the screaming and then shouted at her, “Where? Where are you? Where?”

“I don’t know, near the pizza, near the pizza…”

“Look for a street sign,” he shouted. “Find a green sign at the end of a block.”

She called back a minute later, “Marshall and Kent.”

“I’m coming,” Lucas said. He punched in 911 and shouted at the man who answered, “Davenport, BCA. We’ve got a cop down at Marshall and Kent in St. Paul. There’s a woman there who was with him. Look for the woman. Tell everybody to be careful, there’s three men with guns.”

And he was running down the hall, the people in the offices around him looking after him because he was running like something very bad had happened.

T
he first St. Paul cop car got to the shooting scene in three minutes. Morris had been organizing the search of the streets around Zapp’s Pizza, which had been going slowly, but it also meant that a dozen additional cops arrived in the next five minutes.

The first cops gathered up Martínez and locked her in their car, and posted watchers on the corners of the house, nobody going in or out. Martínez, apparently in shock, told them she thought the house was empty and she didn’t know how badly Rivera was hurt, so the next cops went in and cleared the place.

One came out a minute later and told an arriving patrol sergeant, “Two down. Both of them are gone.”

“You sure?”

“Oh, yeah. One of them’s missing most of his brain. The other one took two shots in the heart.”

“No sign of anybody?”

“Didn’t clear the basement, but I think it’s empty. I didn’t recognize either of them, but one could be a cop. He’s gotta be federal or something. Doesn’t look local. He was shooting some big old automatic like you don’t see anymore.”

The sergeant nodded and saw Morris’s car fishtail into the street. “Here comes the man. You get Rudy and block off the street.”

The cop took off and then Morris was there. He nodded at the sergeant and walked up the steps, took a look at Rivera and said, “Shit. I was just talking to this guy.”

“He’s a cop?”

Morris nodded. He might have been Mexican, but a dead cop was a dead cop. The dead man in the dumpster was just another dead man in a dumpster.

Morris walked back outside and saw Davenport’s Porsche curl into the curb up the street. Davenport jumped out and jogged toward them.

“He got here in a hurry,” the sergeant said.

“He’s gonna kill somebody,” Morris said.

L
UCAS DUMPED
the Porsche and jogged through the scene, past clusters of neighbors watching from the sidewalks. Morris was talking to a couple of other cops, and he waved Lucas toward the front door of the house, which stood open.

Lucas stepped up, looked inside, said, “Ah, man.” He stepped inside, moved carefully around the body, squatted to look at it: Rivera was facedown, his brown eyes still open, but flat and dead. A pistol sat a few inches from his right hand, the hammer back, the safety off.

Across the room, a Mexican guy slumped half-on, half-off the couch, looking dead. Lucas had read of shooting victims looking surprised, but he hadn’t seen that. They just looked dead. The
Mexican’s T-shirt was stained with blood, a circle at the heart with seepage lines down the front.

“Looks like he kicked the door,” Morris said.

Lucas stood up, made a hand-dusting motion, glanced at the door handle, then looked back in the room. “Did you talk to Martínez?”

“For a minute, but she’s fucked up. We’re looking for a silver SUV of some kind. Don’t know what kind, don’t know the size, don’t know the plates.”

“Good luck with that,” Lucas said.

“Yeah.” Morris waved at the scene. “What do you think?”

“Looks like he kicked the door, landed on his feet, the guy on the couch pulled a gun and he shot him.” Lucas looked at the front drapes. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he made a little noise, a sound, coming up the steps. Another guy steps over to the window, to look, he’s got a gun in his hand….”

Morris nodded. “Rivera kicks the door, lands inside looking at the couch, the guy on the couch goes for his gun, Rivera shoots him, never sees it coming from the guy at the window. I’d buy that.”

“The question is,” Lucas said, “where are those fuckers now?”

“Not too far away. This only happened fifteen minutes ago.”

Lucas looked around the living room. “We need to find out who owns this place and grab him. If we get to him quick enough, he might not know what happened.”

Morris said, “We probably can’t screw the scene up too much—we know what happened. There could be something that would tell us everything we need.”

“So we’ll walk easy,” Lucas said.

T
HE HOUSE
seemed to be lightly lived-in—not much in the way of personal stuff, but on the kitchen counter they found a basket full of paid utility bills, which had been sent to a Ricardo Nuñez, and in the bedroom, a box of business cards, half of them in English, half in Spanish. Under Nuñez’s name was a business name, “International ReCap, Inc.” with a phone number, but no address.

Lucas called his researcher, Sandy, at home, told her he needed her to work despite the fact that she’d planned to go to a flea market that morning. He gave her the information he had about the house and said, “We need to know where International ReCap is, and what it does, and we need to get our hands on Nuñez.”

“Sounds like some kind of finance company, International ReCapitalization, or something like that,” she said. “I’ll get back to you.”

“Quick as you can,” he said.

Lucas said to Morris, “Let’s go talk to Martínez.”

T
HE NEIGHBORING HOUSE
had a small covered porch, with two chairs behind a banister. Nobody home. Morris and Lucas took Martínez up onto the porch and sat her down, and Lucas leaned back against the banister: “You okay?”

“No, I’m not,” Martínez said, though she looked fairly composed, sitting with her hands in her lap. No tears.

“I was under the … impression … that you and David had a personal relationship,” Lucas said.

She nodded, and now Lucas saw the crystalline glimmer of a tear. “I hope this does not become official. He is married, he has four children.”

Morris, in the chair to her right, said quietly, “Do you remember anything else about the vehicle?”

She shook her head. “No. A silver truck. David knew something more about it, I think, he didn’t say anything to me. When he got out, he wasn’t sure it was right … so he peeked in the window. I was parked there”—she pointed down the street to the car—“and I heard the gunshots and I got out. I was going to call…” She pointed at Lucas.

“Okay,” Lucas said.

“I didn’t know what happened inside, but I thought David probably succeeded. He was a, mmm, not devil, that’s not right, I don’t know the English, a daring devil…”

“Daredevil,” Morris said.

“Yes. A daring devil. He has done this before. He is very proud of this, of taking down these Criminales. He calls it the American phrase,
going in hard
, from some movie, I do not know which.”

“That’s when you called?”

“No, I heard shouting…. It didn’t sound like David. I don’t have a gun, I don’t shoot, but I started to walk that way, and then I started to run, and I went to the steps and I saw him lying there, his shoes, anyway, and I knew it was him, he wears those white stockings, and I went up the steps and then the men ran out the back door, I think, and I heard the truck start and I ran up the steps so they couldn’t see me, because I’m afraid they will … kill me … and David is there and I see he is dead and the car goes past the door, fast, and I run outside, I fell down.”

She turned her wrists toward them, showing them the bloody scrapes.
“And I tried to call you, but I couldn’t push the button right….” She brought her purse with her, like women do, unconscious of it, but always with them, and she dug inside and produced a cell phone. “The fuckin’ telephone, this is a piece of shit, this telephone, this, this, Samsung shit…”

She stood suddenly and pitched the phone into the street, where it clattered across the blacktop, and she said to Lucas, “He is gone. I was waiting for this. I rehearsed this, sitting talking to the investigators, saying, ‘David is gone.’”

T
HEY WORKED
through the details. Halfway through, she began to sob, and asked where they could find a bathroom. She didn’t want to go back in the death house, so they walked her down to a neighbor’s place, and asked, and the neighbor said she’d be welcome to use the bathroom.

She was in there for ten minutes, and Morris said, “Jesus, wonder what’s going on in there.”

“Crying out of sight,” Lucas said. “She’s got her pride.”

When she finally came back out, they went back to the porch and walked her through the details: how they’d found the shooters’ car, the meeting the night before. She said Rivera had gotten some information about the shooters’ car from his friends, but she didn’t know exactly what that information was.

“But he didn’t tell you?” Lucas asked.

“He might have told me, but I don’t remember. The name, I don’t remember—but he said it was a silver SUV, and it was. I don’t know cars. My job was to drive slowly up the streets, and his job was to look for the car.”

“Why didn’t he tell us?” Lucas asked.

She shrugged. “He might have told
you
, but this Shaffer … Shaffer runs this investigation, and David does not like how he is treated, like he is a stupid brown man up here in the white state. You know what I mean?”

“I got a small feel for that,” said Morris.

“Yes, a Negro, yes, I suppose,” she said, unself-consciously. “So this is how he is treated, and he told me that when he learned about the truck, and then this morning, with the Zapp’s place … he thought they must be close, and that if we drove around…”

“You found them,” Lucas said.

“It took a long time,” she said. “Three hours.”

“Hell of a lot better than we did,” Morris said. “We hardly got started in three hours.”

M
ORRIS’S PARTNER
showed up, and leaned against the banister with Lucas, and they walked through it all over again. When they were finished, Morris and Lucas walked off a bit and Morris said, “You know what the British say, this ‘fuck-all’ thing that they say? ‘You don’t know fuck-all about whatever’?”

“Sure,” Lucas said.

Morris looked back at Martínez sitting on the porch, still talking with his partner. “That’s what we got from her,” he said. “We got fuck-all.”

“I’m gonna go find this Latino guy he talked to last night,” Lucas said. “You want to come?”

“Let me talk to Larry, I’ll be right with you,” Morris said. Larry was his partner. While Morris was doing that, Lucas went back
up the porch steps and looked at Rivera’s body. Martínez said he’d done this before, but Lucas thought that it didn’t look like he’d done it before. Why he thought that, he couldn’t say: but he thought it.

He walked back out to Martínez and said, “We have to notify the Mexican police. Can you do that informally, and then we could follow up? We need to know the official contact. Preferably somebody who speaks English.”

She nodded: “I will arrange that.”

And he asked, “Did David bring that pistol with him? On the plane?”

She shook her head. “No, he got it last night. If he hadn’t gotten it, he would be alive now.”

She’d driven to the meeting the night before, and the address was still on the car’s GPS. Lucas took it down and then said, “I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”

Red-eyed, she started snuffling into another Kleenex, and he went to get Morris.

M
ORRIS DROVE
a city sedan so bland that Lucas could barely see it, even when he was sitting inside it.

“Better than the death trap you’re driving around in,” Morris said.

T
OMAS
G
ARZA
lived south of downtown St. Paul, just off one of the main commercial streets, amid a clutter of food, shoe, and auto franchises, mom-and-pop restaurants, carpet stores,
remodeling contractors, and a couple of big box stores and supermarkets.

He wasn’t home, but his wife was, and worried when they showed her their IDs. “He is gone. I don’t know when he’ll be back,” she said.

“We don’t have anything to do with immigration,” Lucas said. “We need to talk to him about David Rivera. We need to talk to him right away.”

Morris played the bad guy: “If we don’t find him right away, we’ll have to ask the immigration people to get involved. They’ve got more sources than we do.”