Stolen Prey

by John Sandford

  The other possibility, they agreed, was that the cops were already inside the apartment, maybe in an adjacent room, and would not come out until they had jumped Kline.

  They decided to reconnoiter, without making a definite move until they had a better idea of the interior terrain.

  Kline’s apartment, they found, was one door down from a stairway. They made a plan: “I go in for him,” Uno said. “You stay here in the stairway with your phone. If you hear people running down, you tell me, then you wait below, and after they go through the door, you tell me when, and then you take them, and I will come out the door at the same time and take them from the other direction.”

  “This could work,” Tres said.

  “It will work if you don’t shoot me when I come out the door.”

  “I’ll be careful,” Tres said. “If they are in the next apartment, instead of above or below…”

  “You’ll still hear them when they come out. Same thing. Tell me on the phone, then take them.”

  Tres nodded.

  “And be careful. Don’t shoot me,” Uno said.

  “And you also,” Tres said.

  “It’s not much of a plan,” Uno said.

  “Well, what else do we have?”

  SO THEY DID IT. They went to his apartment, knocked, waited, knocked … nobody answered. “He’s not home.”

  “Come back later.”

  “Go to church now,” Uno said.

  SO THEY FOUND a church, Uno dropping Tres in front of the place, and then waiting for a half hour, until he came back out. As he had before, Tres came out deep in conversation with somebody not there. The most worrisome thing, Uno thought as he watched his friend coming down the sidewalk, was the possibility that whatever saint Tres was talking to would turn him against the killing. Tres said they were not that kind of saints, but how could you tell?

  Tres got back in the car with that quiet, unfocused look that Uno had come to recognize, and said, “Go now. I think he’s back.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “A saint told me,” Tres said.

  Uno crossed himself. But when they got back, the apartment windows were still dark, and their knock went unanswered. “I think your saint, uh, has bad information,” Uno said. He didn’t want to say that the saint was full of shit.

  Tres shrugged.

  THEY HAD no photo of Kline, but they had a description: tall, thin, dark hair worn in an Afro. They waited another hour and a half, saw a bus pull to the corner stop, and a man of that description stepped off the bus, carrying a brown paper grocery bag.

  “Here,” Uno said.

  “Sí,” said Tres.

  The man disappeared into the apartment building, and a moment later, the lights came on in his apartment.

  “Let’s go,” Uno said.

  KLINE HAD brought back six packs of ramen, two large quart jars of apple cider, two packs of spaghetti, and a jar of Newman’s Own All-Natural Italian Sausage & Peppers pasta sauce. He put them on the kitchen counter, opened the jar of pasta sauce and dropped it in a saucepan, put it on the stove, lit a cigarette, blew smoke at his reflected image in the kitchen window, and thought about Turicek.

  He’d told Turicek and Sanderson about the cops. He’d been cool about it, getting them back in an isolated hallway at the bank, in case there were monitors they didn’t know about.

  “They think it might be me, but they’ve got no idea about you two, or Edie,” he said. “They think it might be me because those assholes at Polaris tried to shift the blame onto me.”

  “Correctly,” Sanderson observed.

  “Still a fucked-up thing to do,” Kline said. “Anyway, they may be watching. I may get another visit. I’m not going to talk to you or call you outside of work, and you better stay away from me, too. I can’t help with the gold.”

  Both Turicek and Sanderson said that he’d done well, but he could see that both were sweating. He’d seen Turicek studying him, past his computer monitor, during the afternoon, and it occurred to him that if something should happen to him—call it like it is, he thought: if somebody killed him—then there would be no connecting thread between the theft at Polaris and Turicek and Sanderson.

  Would Turicek be capable of killing someone?

  He didn’t know. He suspected, though, from stories Turicek had told about his life in post-Soviet eastern Europe, that he’d know somebody who would not only be capable of it, but would do it for ten bucks and a pair of hubcaps.

  Huh.

  He got a kettle out and dropped in a package of spaghetti, blew more smoke. He could just begin to smell the sauce starting to get hot when there was a knock at the door.

  He went and asked, “Who is it?” and a voice said, “Police.”

  He opened it and started to say, “Hey—”

  Not careful enough.

  The two Mexicans blew through the door and smashed Kline back across his kitchen table, over the chairs, into the living room, and when he finally stopped rolling and twisted to look up, there was a gun in his face.

  “Do not say a thing.”

  Kline’s jaw worked but no sound came out. His mind was working, though: and his mind told him that these two Mexicans would find a way to get him out of his apartment, and then they’d cut him into sausages. Getting shot would be far preferable, and the only rational way out, if he couldn’t think of anything else.

  The second Mexican had shut the door; he had a small backpack and took out a roll of tape, and Kline figured that if they taped him up, he was dead. He loosened his bowels as much as he could, and tightened his stomach, and cried at the Mexican over him, “I shit my pants. Oh, God, I shit my pants.”

  The stench confirmed the fact; the two Mexicans were disgusted at this sign of abject cowardice, and Kline thought, Gotta get in the bathroom.

  The Mexican with the tape said, “Put your hands up,” and Kline sobbed, “I shit my pants, man. I got a load in my pants…. Oh, God, I’m still shitting myself….”

  The older of the two Mexicans looked around and said, “The bathroom,” and Kline thought, Please, Br’er Fox, don’t throw me in the bathroom, and he sobbed, “Aw, Jesus, it’s still running out of me….”

  “Get in the bathroom,” said the Mexican with the gun. The muzzle was four inches from Kline’s eyes, and, still sobbing, and now holding the seat of his pants, he pushed himself to his feet and hobbled toward the tiny bath. The toilet sat directly in front of the door. To the left, there was a vanity counter with an absolutely critical drawer, part of an incompetent remodel: the vanity was too big for the tiny bathroom, but had been on sale at Home Depot.

  To the right of the sink, a tiny window, no bigger than Kline’s head, which might once have been intended to provide ventilation, was sealed shut with years of paint and silicone. The window looked out over the bookstore; or would have looked out, if somebody hadn’t painted the glass yellow.

  To the left of the door, an old cast-iron bathtub.

  Kline hobbled into the bathroom and turned and undid his belt, and dropped his pants, and the stench got worse, and Uno frowned and stepped back, but kept the gun pointing at Kline. Kline kicked off his jeans, and then his underpants, and then unrolled about ten feet of paper from the toilet paper roll, and looked down between his legs.

  The Mexican looked away, not wanting to witness this, and quick as a snake, Kline kicked the door closed and pulled the drawer out of the vanity.

  The open drawer blocked the door as effectively as a chain lock; Kline threw himself into the bathtub as the Mexican outside kicked the door, once, twice, and then Kline reached across with the handle of the toilet plunger and punched out the small window and began screaming for help.

  He screamed, at the top of his lungs, “MURDER! THEY’RE MURDERING ME! HELP! FIRE! FIRE! THEY HAVE GUNS! MURDER!…”

  The first bullets punched through the door and took out the toilet tank, and Kline dropped lower in the tub, but the tub was short, and his knees stuck up, and t
he Mexican, still kicking the door as Kline screamed, finally simply sprayed the bathroom with bullets, one of which went through both of Kline’s thighs and he began screaming even louder, “I’M SHOT, THEY SHOT ME, MURDER…”

  Uno fired the whole magazine through the door, angling the gun around, heard the whank-whank-whank as a few of them hit the tub, but he didn’t know what the sound was. He was using hollow-points, which began coming apart as they went through the old-fashioned oak-paneled door, and didn’t have enough residual energy to pierce the tub. He continued to kick, but the door wasn’t moving, and finally Tres shouted at him, “We go, we go, the police…”

  They were making a lot of noise; and the sound of Uno’s silenced pistol still sounded like a gun when it was fired quickly: it went bop-bop-bop-bop, and while it was quieter than an unsilenced weapon, it still sounded like a gun and nothing else. In the meantime, Kline was screaming for help.

  Uno shouted, “Son of a whore,” at Kline, and he and Tres turned and ran out of the apartment and away from the direct stairway down, to the back of the building. They came out in an alley and heard sirens, sprinted to the end of the alley, walked a hundred feet down to their car, did a U-turn, and rolled away through the dark streets.

  Kline, in the bathtub, was bleeding from four through-and-through holes caused by one slug, and from about a hundred oak splinters. When the shooting stopped and he thought he heard the Mexicans running, he continued to scream and managed to reach over the side of the tub to his pants. He fumbled out his cell phone and called 911.

  “I’m shot, it’s the Mexicans, it’s the fucking Mexicans.”

  The woman on the other end sounded almost robotically calm. “Sir, please tell me where you are and the situation there.”

  “Get me some help! I’m shot, I’m shot, you stupid shit!” He screamed the address at her, and then screamed, “Get that cop Davenport. Davenport knows, it’s the Mexicans, they shot me, I’m bleeding, I’m shot….”

  THE FIREMEN who eventually got him out had to use an ax to open the door, and the paramedics wearing yellow toxic-waste gloves lifted him out of the tub and bundled him onto a stretcher and off to the hospital.

  Both the cops and the paramedics were talking to him as they went, the paramedics asking about street drugs he may have ingested, the cops wanting to know who did it. Kline, in deeper pain than any he’d previously experienced, managed to say, “It’s those Mexicans. The ones everybody wants. Davenport the cop was here today. They think I took that money…. Call Davenport.”

  Eventually, the cops did.

  LUCAS FOUND Kline sedated but still conscious at Hennepin County Medical Center, conscious but woozy, but not so woozy that he still wasn’t pissed, and when Lucas came through the door, the doc trailing behind, Kline asked, “Who told them about me? Who told them?”

  Lucas said, “We’re trying to figure that out. We’re thinking that they may have an insider at Polaris.”

  “Man, I gotta get out of here,” Kline said. “You know what happens. They’ll come in here while I’m sedated and they’ll put some shit into my drip bag and that’ll be it. That’ll be it! Game over, man! Game over!”

  “That’s mostly in the movies, where they do that,” Lucas said. “There’s about fifteen people right outside your door, including a couple of cops. Nobody’s coming in here that we don’t know about.”

  “Aw, Jesus, they killed my legs.” Kline began weeping. “You guys did this. I don’t know anything about any money. You guys sicced them right on me. I’m suing you guys for everything you got.”

  LUCAS CALMED him down enough to get him to describe the shooting, and when Kline was done, Lucas said, “That’s the smartest goddamn thing I ever heard of. You’re the only one who survived these guys, and you did it with a gun in your face…. Man…”

  “They would have cut me up like a summer sausage,” Kline said.

  “Yeah, probably—but most people would have frozen,” Lucas said. “You came up with a plan.”

  “I shit my pants,” Kline said.

  “You’re still here, it was a hell of a move,” Lucas said. He patted Kline on the arm. “You look like a stoner and wastoid, but you got some major balls.”

  “I’m still gonna sue you,” Kline said. His eyelids dipped. “They’re giving me the good stuff, but when I come out of it, I’m gonna hurt. If the Mexicans don’t get me first…”

  Two minutes later, he was gone, sound asleep.

  The doc said, “He’ll be gone for a while. You get what you wanted?”

  Lucas looked down at Kline, then shook his head. “There wasn’t much. They crashed his door, he got them to put him in the toilet, and he started screaming…. Hell of a thing, but he doesn’t know anything.”

  “Well … want somebody to call you when he wakes up?”

  Lucas shook his head. “If you don’t mind, I’m just going to sit here with him for a minute, until I’m sure he’s not going to wake up.”

  “He won’t.”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind, but you’re wasting your time.”

  NOT REALLY, Lucas thought, as the doc moved on. He sat looking at Kline for a couple minutes, then peeked out of the room at the nurses’ station. There were four or five people there, all busy with paperwork. In the other direction, the hall was empty. Lucas walked around the bed, around the monitoring equipment and the drip-bag rack, and pulled open the top drawer of the bedside table.

  The first thing he saw was Kline’s wallet, and next to that, his cell phone. Excellent. He picked up the cell phone and carried it back around the bed to the chair he’d been sitting in, got out his notebook, turned the phone on, and started going through the call log.

  He got an instant hit: starting the day of the murders, there were two dozen phone calls from a Kristina and just as many from an Ivan; there were other calls from a Kristina and Ivan before the murders, but only a couple. The murders, he thought, had caused a ripple.

  He took down the phone numbers of Kristina and Ivan, went looking for their last names, and failed to find them.

  Going back into the call log, he looked for more telltale contacts, but nothing jumped out at him. He moved to the contact directory, touched Kristina, went to History, found a list of messages, and clicked to them.

  All very short:

  Call me. Urgent. Urgent.

  Jacob, call me.

  Jacob, look at TV news. Call Ivan.

  Jacob, you need to take an office shift tomorrow. Call me.

  NOT MUCH information, but he’d learned that Kristina knew Ivan. There were no outgoing messages to Kristina, but Kline had made calls in response to a couple of them. He made one in response to the “office shift.”

  He got a break with Ivan. His messages were also short and cryptic, but one said, See you at the office.

  Lucas thought: Ah. They all work with him.

  The phone might have more information, but he didn’t know how to get at it—Kline listed dozens of contacts, far too many to copy in a short time, but listed no information other than names and phone numbers.

  He checked the apps, looking for photos, found none. He also found a password vault, and it was operational, but he had no idea what the password might be.

  Lucas closed down the phone, slipped it back in the drawer.

  He listened, heard only distant chatter from the nurses. He took Kline’s wallet out of the drawer, went through it quickly. He found only one thing of interest: a card from Sirius satellite radio, and on the back, an apparent password, 6rattata6.

  He noted it and replaced the wallet.

  There was not much chance that the Sirius password also would be the password for the vault. Most vaults, Lucas knew, gave you a prescribed number of chances to enter the password. If you got it wrong, it would then warn you about the number of remaining chances before it scrambled the contents. If he tried entering a password and it didn’t work, then Kline would know that somebody had been work
ing on his phone.

  Not worth it, he thought.

  He looked down at Kline, now sleeping deeply, said, “Huh,” and headed for the door.

  ICE HAD LEFT Polaris National after she and the security people cleaned the booby traps out of the computer system, and she’d gone back to Sunnie to see if she could find the incoming system.

  In the meantime, the DEA agents were trying to track money that, in earlier months and years, had been shipped out of the Bois Brule account … and to find out how it got to Bois Brule.

  Not much for Lucas to do but let them work. Still, he was right there, at the hospital, two blocks away…

  Lucas walked over to the bank, identified himself to the guard, and got him to call O’Brien in the systems center. Bone actually came to collect him.

  “Working late, for a Sunday,” Lucas said, as they went through the big glass doors to the elevator.

  “I’m having trouble getting across how serious this is,” Bone said. “We’ll talk about it sometime—but I have to tell you, it’s a hell of a relief to hear that it’s probably an inside job.”

  “ICE told you that?”

  “Everybody tells me that. It’s somebody in the company, or it’s this guy Kline,” Bone said. “If it were somebody in Russia, or China, which would suggest that we had a major undetected system vulnerability, I’d be sweating bullets.”

  “Kline just got jumped by the Mexicans.”

  “What!” Bone almost missed a step, caught himself and turned. “Is he dead?”

  “No, he managed to get out of it. But he got shot.” He told the story as they went through the door at the bottom of the stairs and started down the hall to Systems.

  “How’d they find out about him?” Bone asked.

  “Don’t know. ICE said a bunch of people in Systems had been talking about Kline. It’s probably all over the bank by now, and it’s possible that somebody here is monitoring things for this Mexican gang.”