John Sandford - Stolen Prey

Lucas said, “Ah, that’d be two hundred bucks an hour . Sometimes she works sixteen or eighteen hours straight … so it could be like three grand a day. Or four. If she’s available and if she likes the idea.”

O’Brien’s eyebrows went up: “That, I’d have to get approved,” he said. “I can probably do it, for a couple days, anyway, if you guys say she’s really good.”

“She’s really good,” Shaffer said, and Lucas added, “She’s as good as they get.”

“So I’ll make a call,” O’Brien said. “Why don’t you guys line her up?”

The rest of the meeting was a review of crime-scene evidence; one of the BCA cops passed Lucas a file of printouts of all the reports made so far. “We’ve got some prints, and we’ve got DNA, so … if we can find them, we’ve got them,” Shaffer said, summing up.

“But, you don’t really have them,” Rivera said. “You have the instruments, but you don’t have the men who ordered this done.”

“Just for the time being, I’ll take the instruments,” Shaffer snapped. “I’ll worry about the big chief after I get the guys I know about.”

Rivera shrugged and muttered something to Martinez in Spanish. Whatever it was, it made a couple of the DEA guys swallow smiles.

Out in the hallway, after the meeting, Rivera caught up with Lucas, who’d been the first man out the door. He said, quietly, “This Shaffer. He’s not so smart. I was hoping for somebody smarter.”

“He’s … effective,” Lucas said. “When he gets done, there’ll be no stone unturned.”

“Do you think he’ll catch these killers, or the people who ordered this done?”

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. He added, “The meeting seemed a little tense. What happened?”

Rivera stopped in the hallway and did some straightening-out motions, shooting out his shirtsleeves, pulling his suit together. “When I came up here, I was told by your Justice Department that I could be involved in the investigation. Otherwise, what’s the point for me to come? But Shaffer will not give me copies of your reports. He says it’s for your agency only, that he has no authority to give them to me. So we sit here and tickle our thumbs. Is that right? Tickle? It makes no sense.”

“Twiddle your thumbs,” Lucas said. “That makes no sense either, but it means this.” He put the report file under one arm and twiddled his thumbs for a few seconds; the cast made it difficult, since his left thumb was immobilized, but he got the idea across.

“Exactly,” Rivera said. “I had the right idea, but not the word. Twiddle?”

Lucas looked back down the hall. Shaffer and another agent were just turning the corner, and Lucas said to Rivera, “Listen, I can’t give you the report if Shaffer thinks it’d be improper. But if you want to sit in my office for a while, I’d let you read it. If you keep it under your hat…. I mean, don’t talk about it.”

“I knew you were the bright one,” Rivera said. “Lead us to your office.”

So they sat in Lucas’s office for an hour, passing reports back and forth, and Lucas went out once to buy Cokes, which would give Rivera a chance to make a few notes if he needed to. When he returned, he noticed a book with a foiled cover, that had slid, facedown, out of Rivera’s briefcase.

“What’re you reading? The novel?” Lucas asked.

Rivera looked down, saw the book, and said, “Ah. Yes. It’s bullshit. In English, I only read bullshit. I got it at the airport in San Diego.”

Lucas couldn’t help but smile. “What kind of bullshit?”

Rivera reached down and picked up the novel and turned it faceup. “In this one, the angels of the Lord and the devils of Hell-the fallen angels-are fighting each other, to control the future of humanity. The key to this struggle is an American CIA agent and this beautiful woman-”

“Of course.”

“Of course, and the agents save the world at the last minute, and we don’t all fall in the pit. It’s all bullshit. But I finish it and I think, ‘Okay, the good guys win.’ That’s wonderful. That’s why I read it. The good guys win.”

“You don’t think the good guys are going to win?”

“I see no evidence of it. Even worse, I don’t know who the good guys are,” Rivera said. Lucas sat down again and put his heels up on his desk, as Rivera continued: “I always look at real estate when I come to the U.S. The first day here, when we were at the Brooks house, I looked at the real estate before I went inside. You know why?”

“Why is that?” Lucas asked.

“Because I have this dream. I hear about this narco, he has ten million dollars in hundred-dollar bills, in his backpack, and I find him. He tries to shoot me, and I righteously shoot first. But then I open the backpack and here is all this money. I do not hesitate. I take the backpack, I go to Ciudad Juarez, where nobody knows me. I hire a coyote to get me across the border to Texas,” Rivera said. “In El Paso, I get on a bus with my backpack, I go to Kansas, or Minnesota, or Montana, to some small town. I buy a nice house with a span of land, ten hectares, twenty hectares. I plant some fruit trees, I plant a garden, I marry a fat white American farm woman. We live on the farm and I raise goats and maybe a cow, maybe some pigs, some corn…. Sometimes, I have a small boat, and we take it to a lake on a wheeler. Hey? I dream this all the time. My fantasy. I live in these fantasy books, where the good guys win. I live in my fantasy dream, where I win…. It’s all bullshit, but that’s what I do.”

Lucas said, “Well, if you make it across the border, you can stay at my house until you find the farm.”

Rivera smiled and slapped the desktop. “Thank you. If I make it across the border, I will come here, for sure. But this won’t happen. They’ll kill me first. For the last three years, I have thought I have perhaps a year to live, probably less. So far, I defy the odds. But one of these years, I won’t. They’ll kill me. I hate them. I hate the motherfuckers. This is correct in English, right? Motherfuckers?”

“Yup, motherfuckers,” Lucas said. “But it’s trailers, not wheelers. You put a boat on a trailer.”

“Because it goes on trails?”

“No, because … never mind. So … why don’t you just quit and come up north?” Lucas asked.

“I can’t. I am a patriot. These motherfuckers are destroying my country,” Rivera said. “I have to help stop them. But in the end, I lose. This is not a fantasy.”

“That’s pretty goddamn bitter,” Lucas said.

Rivera nodded, held Lucas’s eyes for a second, then turned to Martinez and said, “We have to go.”

Lucas asked, “What are you up to? Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Your only, mmm, report of interest is your visit to this hotel, the Wee Blue Inn,” Rivera said. “There are Mexicans there. I have introductions here in St. Paul, I will be able to find people who know the people in this town…. Maybe I’ll find something.”

“Be careful,” Lucas said.

“That is my name,” Rivera said. “Careful Rivera.”

Martinez shook her head. “Careless Rivera, I think.” She wasn’t being funny; she was absolutely morose.

As they were walking away down the hall, Lucas stuck his head out and called, “Hey, wait a minute.” He walked down to them and asked, “Could you guys come to my house tonight? For dinner?”

Rivera smiled and said, “This is very nice of you, but … I am afraid we have another dinner, with friends. If we could do it some other time?”

“Sure,” Lucas said.

When they were gone, Lucas went back to reading the reports and found an enormous amount of detail, but nothing he considered important-not yet, anyway. The techs thought they’d probably get all kinds of DNA, which meant that after they caught the killers, they could convict them. Unfortunately, they had to catch them first.