John Sandford - Stolen Prey

“Not a bad idea,” Lucas said.

They took ten minutes getting to the McDonald’s, and Andrews called his watchman, Walker, on a handset and confirmed that Castells was still in his booth.

“He is,” he told Lucas, after he’d rung off. “He’s been talking on his cell phone for the last hour.”

University and Snelling was a mess because of construction for a light-rail right-of-way, and Lucas had to dodge around traffic barriers to get into the parking lot. When they were parked, they walked across the blacktop to the McDonald’s, past the window where Castells was sitting. He saw them coming, making eye contact with all three of them, one after the other. He looked at his phone and pushed a button, and Lucas nodded to him.

Inside, they walked over to his booth, and Castells said, “Officers,” and Lucas gestured at the other seats in the booth and asked, “Do you mind?”

Castells had sun-bleached eyebrows and sandy hair, over a well-tanned face. His face was thin, like a runner’s, his eyes pale gray. He was wearing a lavender short-sleeved shirt with a collar, and narrow jeans, with black running shoes. “Would it make any difference if I did?”

Lucas said, “Sure. Then we’d all stand up and talk to you, and pretty soon everybody in the place would be looking at us.”

“So sit down,” Castells said, waving at the booth.

Although he was the only one in it, he’d taken the biggest booth in the place, and had his phone charger plugged into a wall outlet below the table. A dealer of some kind, Lucas thought, with his own table at McDonald’s.

Andrews fitted in next to Castells, with Lucas and Del sitting across the table. Lucas said, “So, a couple cops from St. Paul were talking to some dope dealers, and one of them said you told him to look out because there were some bad Mexican people in town. Is that right?”

Castells didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he seemed to think for a moment, and then showed a thin flicker of a smile. He’d just figured out who’d talked to the cops, Lucas realized. Castells asked, “Does this have anything to do with those people who got killed on the other side of town?”

Del said, “Maybe.”

Castells said, “I gotta change my name. People keep thinking I’m a Mexicano.”

Lucas asked, “What kind of name is Castells?”

“Catalan,” Castells said. The three cops looked at one another, and Andrews shrugged, and Castells said, “Catalonia is a country currently occupied by Spain.”

“You some kind of radical?” Del asked.

Castells laughed and said, “No. I’m an antiquities dealer. You know-statues and stuff.”

“Who talks to dope dealers,” Andrews said.

“I talk to everybody,” Castells said. “I’m a friendly guy.”

“You never know who might need a statue,” Del offered.

“That’s right,” Castells said, smiling at Del. “You just put your finger on the core of the business, Officer Capslock.”

Del leaned back: “Where do you know me from?”

“You were pointed out to me once,” Castells said. “I was told that I shouldn’t be misled by the fact that you were wearing a trucker’s hat backwards.”

“Mmm,” Del said. Castells had pushed him off-balance. He asked, pushing back, “You haven’t seen a big bronze statue, have you? Some women dancing on some fish?”

“The Naiads ,” Castells said. “No, I haven’t, and neither has anybody else in the statue business. There wouldn’t be any way to sell it. Your statue is now a bunch of little bronze pieces, if it’s not already been turned into ingots.”

“I hate it when people say things like that,” Del said.

Lucas jumped in: “So what about these bad Mexicans?”

“The thing about cops is, cops blab,” Castells said to Lucas. “They bullshit with everybody. If somebody’s talking about a particular group of bad Mexicans, well … you could get your head cut off on television.”

“Not us,” Lucas said. “We’ve all worked in intelligence. We keep our mouths shut.”

Castells made an open-hand gesture, as if to say, “Whatever,” and asked, “Which one of you is the boss?”

“We don’t actually have bosses,” Lucas said, but Andrews pointed a finger at Lucas and said, “He is.”

Castells looked at Lucas and said, “I don’t know very much, but I was talking to a couple of Mexicanos over in West St. Paul and one of them said to the other that it’d be best to stay away from the Wee Blue Inn, because there were some heavy hitters going through, supposedly from Dallas, but actually, he said, from Mexico. That is the sum total of what I know. I passed it on to another guy I know, because he is also a Mexicano. I didn’t know he was a drug dealer.”

“Why’d you think about the killings on the other side of town?” Andrews asked.

“’Cause I watched the TV news last night. Sounded like Mexican dopers to me.”

They talked for a couple more minutes, and when asked where he’d come from, Castells said, “Washington, D.C.”

“You were a congressman, or something?” Del asked.

Castells said, “Something like that.”

“You speak Spanish?” Del asked.

“Yes.”

Lucas asked, “French?”

“Mm-hmm. You looking for a language teacher?”

“No. German?” Lucas asked.

“Maybe a little. I travel on business.”

“Antiquities.”

“Yes. And high-end furniture.”

He did not, he said, have any more relevant information, but he’d keep his ear to the ground, his nose to the grindstone, and his feet on the fence. If he heard anything more, he’d call Lucas. Lucas gave him a card and stood up. “Stay in touch. We could be a valuable contact for a hardworking antique dealer.”

“Antiquities, not antiques. Antiques were made in Queen Victoria’s time. Antiquities were made by the Greeks and Romans and Egyptians. Entirely different market,” Castells said, as he put the card in his pocket. He was, Lucas thought, exactly the kind of guy who would keep it.

Outside, Lucas said to Andrews, “Interesting guy.”

Del said, “Yeah. So are we going down to the Wee Blue Inn?”

“Thought we might,” Lucas said.

The Wee Blue Inn was a hole-in-the-wall motel and bar on Robert Street in West St. Paul. All three of them knew it, and Del and Andrews had been inside. “The owner is a guy named John Poe, like in Edgar Allan, but he doesn’t write poetry,” Del said. “He sells the occasional gun, and he’ll rent you a room for an hour at a time.”

“He sweats a lot,” Andrews said. “He usually smells like onion sweat. I think he eats those ‘everything’ bagels.”

“Can we jack him up without anybody looking in a window at us?” Lucas asked. “I’d rather talk to Poe straight up, see what he has to say, than go in with the whole SWAT squad.”

“I could go in and look around,” Del said. He looked nothing like a cop, a major asset in his job.

“Except that Poe knows you,” Lucas said.

“He won’t tell anybody,” Del said. “He doesn’t want his clientele knowing that cops are hanging around.”

“Let’s do that,” Lucas said. “If there are three bad Mexicans in there, we’ll call up the SWAT.”

They talked about Poe on the way over, and Andrews called headquarters and got them to put a couple squads in a dry cleaner’s lot two blocks away, no stoplights between them and the Wee Blue Inn. “Just in case,” he said.

At the Wee Blue Inn, they dropped Del and went on their way, around the block. Del called one minute later and said, “I talked to Poe. He says the Mexicans were here, but they’re gone. Checked out yesterday morning. They said they were going back to Dallas.”

“Did he ask them where they were going, or did they volunteer it?”