“So what else about him?” Lucas asked.
“He was just a kid, and he was looking for a place to pray while he waited for the pizzas, so I sent him down to the cathedral. He went, or at least he said he went, and he said he saw the big windows, and Jesus spoke to him.”
“Spoke to him,” Lucas repeated.
“Yeah, he said Jesus spoke to him, and Jesus told him he was going to die soon.”
Morris looked at Lucas, and they simultaneously shrugged. From the back, Rivera asked, “How many pizzas did he buy?”
“Two. Extra large.”
Rivera said, “Enough for three or four.”
The pizza guy didn’t know whether the kid had arrived on foot or had come by car, but had the impression that he’d been on foot. “I don’t know why, it’s just an impression.”
Morris: “Is a cold-blooded killer going to church? I don’t think so.”
“But you’d be wrong,” Rivera said. “Some of these bangers, they go to church every Sunday and pray for their souls. And because their mothers make them go.”
“Then, if he is one of the guys, they’d be holed up around here somewhere,” Morris said. They all looked out the window.
“I’ll tell you what,” Lucas said, when they looked back. “We’ve probably got DNA on these guys, we probably have at least one fingerprint and maybe more, they’ve committed at least five torture-murders of the worst kind. If we catch them, they’re going away forever, so they’ve got nothing to lose by shooting as many cops as they see. They’ve probably got an arsenal with them, and they’ve had lots of practice.”
Morris said, “Huh. Better talk to SWAT.”
“Better talk to everybody,” Lucas said. “You don’t want a lot of patrol cops rolling around sticking their noses into everything. If somebody finds them just sort of spontaneously, he’ll probably be killed. I think you put together a good crew, start working the neighborhood, but you gotta be discreet. You don’t want to scare them off, but you don’t want to get anybody killed, either. No impetuosity.”
“No impetuosity,” Morris repeated.
WHEN THEY’D extracted everything they could from the Zapp’s crews, they broke up. Lucas headed over to the BCA, and Morris went back to the murder scene—from there he’d head to police headquarters, which was about five minutes away, to arrange for a careful survey of the neighborhoods around Zapp’s.
RIVERA AND MARTÍNEZ went back to their car, and Rivera dug his pistol out from under the front seat and said to Martínez, “You drive.”
“To where?”
“Up and down these streets. If he walked, he is not far. We’ll circle the streets, go out for a kilometer—”
She said, “This is crazy. We—”
“We know the car. This neighborhood, most of the cars are on the street,” Rivera said. “I predict that we will find them.”
“Then what?”
“Then we will see,” Rivera said.
“You are too crazy,” Martínez said. She bit her lip, as though she feared she’d gone too far.
All Rivera said was, “Drive.”
THE NEIGHBORHOOD around Zapp’s Pizza was all old. From north to south, it varied from rich, south of Grand Avenue, to increasingly poor, north of Summit Avenue, to poor, next to I-94. Grand Avenue itself was mostly commercial and apartments.
Rivera didn’t think the shooters would be in an apartment. Somebody, he thought, had probably arranged a house. The house wouldn’t be on Summit, because those houses were basically mansions. This would be more discreet, in a neighborhood where people might be a bit more reluctant to ask questions.
The streets stepped back from the expressway were the most likely place, he told Martínez. The faces on the sidewalks were of every shade of black, brown, and white, from African to Scandinavian to Latino and American Indian. The Mexicanos would fit here, he said.
Even so, there were a lot of streets to look at, in the grid around Zapp’s. They started a little after ten o’clock in the morning. Rivera was a little surprised when it took them only three hours to find them; or that they found them at all.
After several false alarms—it seemed that half the people in St. Paul drove oversized SUVs—and a stop for a quick lunch and to fill up the car’s gas tank, they spotted the Tahoe sitting down a driveway, tight between two aging white houses.
“There it is,” Rivera said suddenly. Martínez looked that way, and saw the truck. “There. Keep going, keep driving … Yes, Texas plates.” He was sweating with excitement. “Go to the corner.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Look in the window,” Rivera said. “See what is what.”
“Crazy,” Martínez said. “David, don’t do this.”
“You sound like an American, like Shaffer,” Rivera said. “Pull over, pull over.”
She pulled over and Rivera jacked a round into the chamber of the single-action pistol, and said, “When you see me look at the window, call Lucas. Do not call before you see me look in.”
“David, please, please don’t do this. Let me call the police. You watch them. I will call—”
“I won’t be made a fool. I will look before we call. I’ll know that I am right.”
“All you will do is look in?”
“The situation could develop,” Rivera said. “Be ready.”
“Ah, no, David…” She grabbed his jacket sleeve. “Don’t go, don’t go—”
“Call Lucas when you see me look in,” Rivera said again, and he hopped out. She watched him down the street, a stout man with a dark face behind his sunglasses, his street-side hand under his jacket. He walked right past the house, only glancing at it, but she shook her head. He did not look like a pedestrian: he looked like a cop giving the place the once-over.
RIVERA’S HEART was pounding like a trip hammer. He gave the house what he thought was a casual glance, went on by. The house was small, shabby, probably built after World War II. He’d seen houses like it in eastern California, in Riverside, in parts of San Diego, and down the coast in Baja.
The house would probably have a living room in the front, he thought, with a hall at one side leading back to a kitchen, a utility room, and a side door. A hall on the other side of the living room would lead back to two bedrooms and a single bath. There’d be a stairway leading to an attic, or a converted third bedroom, under the roof.
A large window looked out at the street from the left side of the front door, and a smaller one from the right. The window on the left had drapes, with a two-inch gap between them. The gap was dark, but there could have been somebody standing back, watching him. The window on the right had venetian blinds, fully lowered. He continued down the block, then came back in a hurry, walking across the lawns of the adjacent houses, close to the front of houses, the gun now in his hand.
He came into the house on the side with the venetian blind, and clambered up the concrete stoop. There was a small head-height window in the front door, and the door looked weak. He stood beside the door, unmoving, listening.
He heard laughter, and the sounds of a video game, not far behind the door. They were probably sitting on a couch in the living room, he thought. At least two, but from the jumble of voices, he thought probably three.
And the door looked really weak—dry rot in the wood, flaking paint. He risked a peek at the door window, just his left eye, drifting slowly across a corner of the glass. There was no entryway: the door opened directly on the living room, and he could see one man, and the shoulder of another, on the couch. The man he could see had a game remote in his hand and was looking to his right, at what must have been the TV. Then a third man, just his arm and shoulder, came into view, for a second or two. He was also watching the game. Two of the faces were from the mug shots.
He had them.
HE TURNED and looked at the car, and saw Martínez looking at him. He put his hand to his ear, gesturing “phone,” and she waved, a flash of her hand.
Rivera got his guts together, sto
od back, took a deep breath. He’d done this before. He was a large man, and strong, and he could kick like a horse.
With one quick move, he shifted back on his right foot, lifted his left, and kicked the door as hard as he could, two inches from the knob. The door exploded open and he was inside, behind the muzzle of the gun.
Inside was chaos, three men scrambling off the couch, a game console and cables and a bag of Cheetos flying, and Rivera screamed at them in Spanish, “Stop! Stop or I’ll kill you! Stop!”
One of the men didn’t stop: Dos had a gun on the back of the couch, and quick as a snake, he reached over for it and got his hand on it and started to swing back to Rivera, but he did it too fast and fumbled the pistol and it went up in the air and landed on the rug with a thump.
They all froze, looked first at the gun and then at Rivera, and Rivera said to Dos, “Too bad for you,” and shot him twice in the heart. To the others: “Raise your hands.”
Uno and Tres raised their hands, and Rivera heard footsteps behind him and saw Martínez coming and called, “Did you call…?”
Martínez came up close behind and took a small revolver out of her purse and put it one inch behind Rivera’s skull and pulled the trigger. The slug blew through the back of his head and emerged at the forehead and Rivera went down, dead as Dos.
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…”
LUCAS 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.
8
The 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.
LUCAS 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.
THE 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.”
THE 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.”
Stolen Prey Page 13
