John Sandford - Stolen Prey

Bird raised a hand.

They were at the farm when Letty called. She was screaming at him: “Dad, Dad, we’ve got a problem, Dad…”

Lucas listened for one moment and said, “I’m coming, honey, I’m coming, hold on….”

Lucas left Flowers and the sheriff without a word, sprinting in his ruined shoes across the farm lawn, down the driveway. A moment later the Porsche fishtailed past the driveway and they could hear it accelerate off into the distance, ripping through the gears.

“That don’t sound good,” said Richie, the sheriff.

“No. It doesn’t,” Flowers said.

Letty turned the corner and walked down toward the house, when her hot-chick spider-sense kicked up: the feeling that somebody was watching her. She’d mentioned the spider-sense to Lucas one time, and he’d said, “Yep. It’s there. Ask anyone who’s done surveillance.”

It came, he said, because when people are watching someone, they tend to lock their heads in place; instead of wobbling here and there, making subtle changes each and every second, their head goes still. Even when the watcher points his head in another direction, and watches from the corner of his eye, the head freezes. That’s picked up by the human social sense, which can find even the most subtle of cues.

People doing surveillance learn not really to watch the target at all, in a specific sense. They look past the target at something else, or at nothing at all … and keep the head moving.

“When somebody’s watching you from a car, they almost always slow the car down, to keep you in sight for a longer time. Once the target picks up on that, you’re cooked,” Lucas said.

That’s what she picked up on: the car was moving too slowly, as though keeping her in sight. Could be a couple of guys from school, she thought. A girlfriend had passed along the results of a dirty, rotten sexist jock-o poll in which Letty’s ass had ranked among the top five at the school.

She was insulted to be the subject of something so low. Sort of.

So she picked up on the car…

As she turned up the sidewalk, she used her key to go through the front door. Heard Weather in the kitchen and called, “Hi, Mom,” and Weather called back, “Sam’s playing with his Leapster, and he probably needs a diaper change. Could you get him? Could you get him?”

Letty said, “Sure,” but before she did that, she stopped and peeked through the palm-sized door window.

The car was in the driveway, and Martinez and a short Mexican man were getting out. Letty recognized them instantly: she’d been working at Channel Three, and Martinez’s picture was everywhere. Martinez had a gun in her hand, and the short man was carrying what might have been a log. They were coming, she thought, for Dad, but they wouldn’t leave anybody alive.

Letty turned to the kitchen and screamed, “Mom: run upstairs. The Mexicans are here and they’ve got guns. Mom, run upstairs!”

Weather, sounding confused, called, “What?”

Letty screamed, “Run! Run! Get up in the apartment, block the door, block the door, the Mexicans, the Mexicans…”

And she turned and ran up the stairs to the second floor, screaming, “Run, run….”

Martinez had cracked at five o’clock, or thereabouts, an hour after a call with the Big Voice.

The Big Voice didn’t believe her. “We have seen this video. They say you have the gold, Ana.”

“I have no gold.”

“So they are lying on TV, these police.”

“Yes, they are lying. It’s this Davenport, he’s the one. He does this to split us apart.”

The Big Voice sighed and said, “I understand. So, tonight, if you will run to Des Moines, we will have a van for you, and a driver. He can hide you in the van, and you will be back tomorrow night.”

To Martinez, it had been quite clear. They were fifty-fifty on whether she was telling the truth. In her shoes, they would have taken the gold. They understood that Davenport might be lying, but then again, he might not be. Once the Criminales had their hands on her, they would get the truth.

Martinez might not survive the process, but then, she just wasn’t that important at the moment. Whatever importance she had once had, had diminished when Rivera went down, and wouldn’t come back until she knew her new assignment with the Federales. If she was shuffled off to a clerical job, the LCN would no longer be interested. If she was attached to another inspector, or even a higher rank, then she might be important again.

But for now…

And if the Federales got her, they would get their own truth, and that would not help the Criminales either: she had far too much personal information on them.

The fact of the matter was, Martinez realized as she took a turn around the living-room carpet, she might now be considered a liability to the LCN. They would kill her, perhaps with a twinge of regret, but not too much. Any American police agency would drop her in jail, forever; and the Federales…

She shuddered when she thought what the Federales might do.

She went round and round with it, grew angrier and angrier.

No way out. There was no way out.

At five o’clock, she cracked, and growled at Tres: “Get your gun.”

Tres had been watching the television: “?Que?”

“We go to kill this cop,” she said. “This cop who lies about us, who has done this.”

Tres made a moue, then said, “Okay.” He was going to die anyway, pretty soon. The saints had told him so, and one day was as good as the next.

As they came up to Davenport’s house, she saw his Lexus truck in the driveway and said, “He’s there.”

“We will do it?”

“We will do it right now.”

The door was a stout one, a cop’s door, but gave way before the battering ram, a four-by-four that Tres scavenged from a parking lot.

As the door splintered, Letty screamed a last time, “Mom, Mom, run in the apartment, run in the apartment, block the door…”

Then she turned and ran toward her parents’ bedroom.

Tres came through the door first, the four-by-four discarded on the stoop, a Mac-10 in his hand. Martinez was a step behind him with a nine-millimeter handgun. Tres scanned to his left, toward the main part of the house, which may have saved Letty’s life, because he did not instantly pick up on her as she fled along the open hallway above the living room. As it was, he got off one burst, which peppered the wall behind her-almost missing.

But not quite. One nine-millimeter slug hit her left forearm, broke the bone, and blew bloody tissue onto the wall behind it; the pain was intense, but she’d been hurt before and didn’t slow down. Sam’s room was halfway down the hall, on the right, and as she passed his door, she could see him staring at his video game, oblivious to the screaming. She reached out with her good hand and yanked the door shut and went on down to the master bedroom.

Weather was in the kitchen with the baby. Martinez and Tres couldn’t see her, but they heard her when she knocked over a chair as she ran toward the back stairs, up to the housekeeper’s apartment over the garage.

Martinez snapped at Tres, “Take the girl,” and Tres ran that way, toward the stairs, as Martinez ran toward the kitchen. She expected Davenport to appear, and ran awkwardly, with the pistol extended in front of her, toward the kitchen.

In the bedroom, Letty pulled open the bottom drawer of Lucas’s bedside stand, forced herself to calmly go through the quick two-finger-three-finger-two-finger sequence of Lucas’s pistol safe’s combination lock.

Had to get it right the first time and she did it deliberately, even as she heard the footsteps on the stairs, the man with the machine gun…