John Sandford - Stolen Prey

Martinez’s problem, which she’d recognized before she ever set foot in the U.S., was that none of her subordinates, Uno, Dos, and Tres, were particularly bright; they were the Mexican equivalent of the hapless American shitkicker who discovers the power of the gun. Which was fine when somebody needed to be killed right now, or chopped to pieces. Not so fine when subtlety was needed.

She waited for Uno and Tres in a Metro State University parking lot; when they arrived, they got out wearing jeans and black sport coats, and not-so-subtly armed with Mac-10s over their shoulders, nine-millimeter pistols tucked in their belts.

“How will you carry them if we have to go on the street?” she asked of the Mac-10s.

“Under a jacket,” Uno said.

“It’s warm. It’s hot.”

“So … if anybody asks, we shoot them.” Uno laughed to show that he was joking. Maybe.

They were in a hurry, but Martinez took five minutes to examine the target house, and the surrounding area, on a Google aerial photo that she pulled up on her iPad. When she was satisfied that she had the general lay of the land, they left, taking her car. If they were ahead of the BCA, then the car wouldn’t matter. If it was a trap, and they had to run, the BCA agents knew Martinez’s rental, but not the Toyota.

As she waited for traffic at the edge of the parking lot, she remembered her shock when Davenport had suddenly appeared at Sanderson’s apartment, running up the apartment steps with the gun in his hand.

She began to sweat. Something about the feel of the thing.

The direct route to Margaret Street would be a left turn and straight ahead. She considered, checked her iPad again, and took a right. She turned right again on East Seventh, then left on Greenbrier, drove a block, and found herself looking out the driver’s-side window, down a long, steep bluff, into a vast weedy hole in the ground. She’d seen it on the iPad, but hadn’t been quite sure what she was looking at.

Another block and they came to Margaret Street, but five blocks from the target house, and across the four-lane East Seventh Street. Margaret dead-ended at the hole, which a sign said was Swede Hollow Park.

She looked at it for a moment, then turned around and drove back the way she came, again overshooting the direct route to Margaret.

Uno, who was now looking at the iPad, said, “No, you turned the wrong way.”

“We’re going another way,” she said.

Uno turned the iPad in his hands, and the map image turned with him, frustrating him-he wanted to look at it sideways, and it wouldn’t allow him to do that. “Shit,” he said. “This machine is shit.”

Martinez took the tablet away from him, propped it against her steering wheel, and followed the map along Mounds Boulevard to Third Street, took Third to Cypress, turned left on Cypress to Fremont, turned the corner on Fremont and pulled over.

“So now, one of you has a mission.” She didn’t care about which one-one was as dumb as the other.

Uno was querulous: “Que?”

She explained: there was some small chance that the cops were watching this house. A small chance, but a chance. They nodded.

“There may be twenty-two million dollars inside,” she told them. “Big Voice says that if we get the gold, I will get ten percent for taking the chance to get it, and each of you will get five percent. That’s one million dollars in gold for each of you, if we take this chance. A million in gold will buy a very nice life for you and your mother and your wife, if you have one. A Toyota Tundra with a cap, running boards, brush guard, bush lights. Whatever you want. Ten of them, if you like, and you still won’t have spent even half of the gold.”

They nodded, listening closely now.

If the police were waiting up ahead, it would be better if only one of them was caught. The others could then try to rescue that one, or get away, and send money for lawyers and so on.

“So which one goes?” Uno asked.

“You decide,” she said.

The two killers looked at each other and Uno finally lit up and said, “Piedra, papel o tijera.” Rock, paper, scissors, best two out of three.

Tres laughed and nodded. Uno promptly won the first round, rock breaking scissors. Tres groaned with excitement, and they went again, and Tres won this time, paper covering rock, when Uno tried to get smart and do “rock” twice in a row. Tres pulled out a second victory with another paper over rock.

Uno giggled and said to Martinez, “I thought he would do scissors because he thought I would go to paper, but, I fail.”

Martinez nodded, contained an impulse to smack them both, and said, “Look for people in cars, or people standing around not doing much, or even people hiding. Look in windows. Walk slowly. We will keep the telephone on, you and me. If you see something, tell me.”

If he didn’t see something, she told him, he was to check the house, and perhaps go in. “If you do see something, go this way on the same street, on Margaret. If they chase you, keep going, and you will come to that big hole we saw. They can’t follow in their cars, and you are very fast, so you will lose them when you go through the hole.”

“Ah,” Uno said. He was, indeed, very fast. “Walk on to East Seventh Street, and then down the long hill to the city.”

“We will be on this street, and will watch behind you.” She tapped the iPad. “When you get here, in the city, you will call us and we will come and get you.”

Uno looked at the iPad for a long moment, then said, “So I walk to this Margaret Street and then to the right number, and then, if I find the gold, I call you. If I don’t, I call you, and then walk down the same street.”

He repeated it all, tracing the route on the aerial photo. When she was satisfied that he had it, she cut him loose.

They watched as he walked back to Fremont, looked at the street sign, and took a right. In a moment he was out of sight.

Shrake had gotten permission from a Margaret Street homeowner to sit behind the slats of his old-fashioned front porch, a block east of the decoy house. Jenkins was two blocks away, also on Margaret, west of the decoy, on his stomach behind a hedge. Lucas was in Del’s pickup with Del, parked a block over, north and west, toward East Seventh, where they expected she would come in. Shaffer was in a car with another agent, north and east.

The second meeting with the other agents had gone well enough, with a couple of them annoyed that they hadn’t been let in on the secret about Martinez, but most agreeing that not knowing had given the meeting, with its flashes of anger, more authenticity. “Never would’ve guessed it,” one of the agents said.

Shaffer found two members of the BCA SWAT team who weren’t on any immediate assignment, and grabbed them, and assigned them to hide inside the decoy house.

In any case, it was Shrake who saw Uno coming. There’d been a half dozen false alarms, guys walking alone or in pairs along the street, but none of them looked right. Shrake checked Uno with a pair of compact, image-stabilized Canon binoculars, then called in on a handset that all the other teams would pick up.

“Got a small guy coming in, he looks right, he looks Mexican, he’s small. Moving slow. He’s on Cypress, coming up to Margaret. He’s checking things out.”

Lucas: “He’s alone?”

“He’s the only one I see.”

“I’m moving over a block, to Margaret,” Shaffer called. “Everybody else stay put.”

A moment later Uno came up to the intersection and stopped on the corner, and with great, ostentatious nonchalance, stretched, yawned, took a good long look around, then turned toward the target. Shrake recognized that for what it was: “This is one of them,” he said, excitement riding in his voice. “He’s checking out the block. He’s got a phone in his hand, he just said something into it, so it’s turned on, or it’s a walkie-talkie. He’s turned toward the house.”