Stolen Prey

by John Sandford

  “I’ll come,” she said. She added, “I don’t want to go to prison.”

  Turicek couldn’t think of how to answer, so he said, “Good.”

  WHEN SANDERSON showed up, an hour later, Turicek took the elevator down to the Skyway and walked over to Macy’s, looking in windows and mirrors for familiar faces. Was he being watched? He had that familiar creepy feeling at the back of his neck, familiar from the old days back in Lithuania, when he was a fifteen-year-old school kid dealing in American cigarettes and British pornography.

  In the Macy’s men’s store, he bought a pair of athletic shorts, a T-shirt, a pair of white socks, a black ball cap, and Nike cross-training shoes. He paid and carried the bag back out of the store, went to the office-supply store next door, bought a backpack, the kind kids wore to school. When he walked across the bridge between Macy’s and the IDS Center, he risked a quick glance back and picked up a large man ambling along behind a fat woman, as though he were using her as a blind. He thought he’d seen the face earlier.

  They were, he thought, tracking him.

  Of course, they hadn’t grown up in Vilnius.

  He carried the clothes down to the security center, changed in the men’s room, put his work clothes in the backpack, slipped his arms through it, and pulled the cap down over his eyes. “I’ll be a couple of hours,” he said, quietly, to Sanderson.

  “Be careful…”

  “If anybody asks, tell them I’m out jogging.”

  He walked out in the running gear, and when he hit the door—the first place the watchers could see him—he was running.

  JENKINS WAS up in the public parking ramp where he could watch both Turicek’s car and the street entrance to the bank, and Shrake was loitering in the Skyway. Jenkins had recently bought a chunk of blue goop that came in a plastic egg and was meant to be squeezed, to strengthen hands and forearms. It also had some bubble-gum-like qualities: a pinch of it could be stretched almost indefinitely, into long gummy strings, and doing that was oddly engrossing.

  He was pulling out one of his longest strings when Turicek burst through the door and started running down the street. Jenkins shouted into his handset, “Shit, I think he’s running, but I’m not sure it’s him. He’s on the street running south.”

  “Watch him,” Shrake called back, and thirty seconds later, Shrake burst onto the same street and looked south, but Turicek was far down the next block, and Shrake couldn’t see him through the people on the street. Jenkins shouted into the handset, “He turned left … he’s gone.”

  Shrake ran that way, and Jenkins got the car, and they cruised, looking for a man in running shorts, but they never saw him again. Jenkins called the bank and asked for him, and the woman who answered the phone in the systems division said he’d gone jogging.

  “Goddamnit,” Jenkins said. He got on his cell phone and called Lucas. “I got bad news and bad news. Which do you want first?”

  Lucas asked, “What happened?”

  “Turicek must have spotted us, and then he ran. We never had a chance,” Jenkins said. “He either knew we were here, or he assumed it.”

  “Goddamnit,” Lucas said.

  “That’s just what I said.” He described the circumstances, and Lucas asked, “You think he’s really jogging?”

  “Not unless he’s practicing for the hundred-yard dash. He came out of there like he was being chased by the hound of the coupe de villes,” Jenkins said. “What do you want us to do?”

  “Drive around. Hang there. Call the cab companies, see if they picked up a jogger. Quit when it’s quitting time. I mean, I don’t know.”

  “All right. I’m sorry, man.”

  “Call me if anything changes. Goddamnit, again, we need to know where that guy goes,” Lucas said.

  TURICEK RAN four blocks, swerved into the Pillsbury Center and took the escalators up, watching the doors, then turned and walked quickly down toward the Government Center, ninety percent sure he’d lost the men behind him.

  In the Government Center men’s restroom, he changed into his street clothes, put the running clothes in the pack, and called a cab. Five minutes later, he was on his way to St. Paul. There, he directed the cabbie through a couple of back streets to a bar, paid off the cab, walked into the bar and out the back, called another cab. When that cab arrived, he took it to the rental office, picked up the packages, and took them to Sanderson’s mom’s house and stashed them in the closet.

  He left the house on foot, called Albitis, told her what he’d done.

  “This is the last time I can pull this off—they probably know I was on to them, but they can’t be sure,” Turicek said. “I can’t do it again or they’ll pick me up.”

  “Can they know for sure that we took the money?” she asked.

  “No. They can believe it, but they can’t know. We’ll have to figure out what to do next—I think we’re going to have to leave the gold for a while. You can get yours, and take off, but the other three of us, we’re going to have to stash our shares and wait for a while.”

  “Quite a while. Years,” she said.

  “Maybe a couple of years,” Turicek agreed. “We’ll figure something out. Maybe we’ll start a software company and get rich, in quotes.”

  “Yeah, well, good luck,” Albitis said. “I’ll see you in Pest. If you need to call me again, I’ll be on the other phone. I’m sitting in the gate here, and I’m throwing this one away.”

  WHEN HE got off the phone, Turicek called a fourth cab—he’d walked a half-mile from Mom’s, by then—and took it to his apartment. If they picked him up again, so what? He was out of it, now. Albitis would pick up the last shipment, take it to Mom’s. From here on out, it was the daily grind at the bank.

  A year, or two … he could handle two years, if he knew he was getting paid a tax-free two and a half million a year to do it.

  Boring, but manageable.

  He was imagining himself in the new life when he got to his apartment door. He put the key in, pushed it open, and the Mexican hit him in the back. They’d been in the apartment across the hall and they took him down in a heap.

  Turicek was strong, and he fought back, tried to scream, or shout, but managed nothing but a gargling sound as they rolled across the floor. One of the Mexicans had his arms and legs wrapped around him, while the other one stumbled over them, punching him in the face, then picked up a plaster lamp and whacked Turicek on the forehead and everything went gray. He heard them cursing, heard the door close, knew, vaguely, that he had to resist, but couldn’t make anything work, felt them rolling him, his arms pinned, his hands taped, then his feet.

  They picked him up, like a six-foot cigar, slung him over their shoulders, looked out in the hall, and then they were running, away from the entrance to the fire stairs. They went down the stairs, then they were outside and Turicek, coming back now, felt himself folded at the waist, and thrown in the trunk of a car. He heard two doors slam, and the car began rolling.

  TURICEK COULD feel himself bleeding, was sick with the impact of the lamp, but knew in a cold corner of his mind, just as Kline had, that he was a dead man, but not for a while—the time it took them to cut him to pieces.

  When they’d thrown him in the trunk, they’d folded him at the waist, with his hands behind him. He realized then, cramped as he was, that he could touch the back of his feet, and the tape that bound them together. He tore at the tape, felt fingernails ripping, but caught an edge, and ripped at it frantically, now pulling whole fingernails loose….

  As he did it, he thrashed around, and saw a green-white glow, a small T-shaped plastic handle, with a pictogram of a stick-figure man jumping out of the trunk of a car. An emergency trunk release. The Mexicans must not have known it was there.

  It was, as bad luck would have it, near his head, not far from his eyes, but he couldn’t lever himself far enough up to catch it with his teeth. So he pulled at the tape, and he thrashed, and tried to turn around, thought he would break his neck, but fina
lly one foot came free, though the other was wedged against something, and it took another ten seconds to wiggle it free, and another long two minutes to turn himself around.

  Now he felt hope for the first time. The car suddenly slowed and pitched down, going down a hill, and he got a foot up near the emergency release, cocked himself as best he could: if he kicked it loose, he’d throw his legs over the back of the trunk, and then throw his body backward.

  He took a breath, and did it: kicked the release. Nothing happened. He kicked it again, and again, then thought to hook it with his toe, and pulled, and then the trunk popped an inch. He kicked it open, and threw his legs out the back, and heaved himself out of the car.

  The car was traveling thirty or forty miles an hour, and he hit with a terrific impact, unable to protect his head, felt and even heard a shoulder break, was clouted in the face, rolled forever and forever, bouncing; it was like being beaten by a bare-knuckle boxer, without defense, simply pounded, until finally … he stopped.

  Still alive.

  He heard the noise, the screaming noise, looked wildly back and at the very last instant realized that he’d thrown himself into the middle of a freeway ramp, and though he didn’t have time to think it, or to recognize it, a Ford F-150 pickup was twenty feet away, slewing wildly as the driver tried to stop.

  Then it hit him.

  AND UNO LOOKED OUT the back window and said, “Pinche hijo de…” and said to Tres, “Faster now, faster.”

  VIRGIL FLOWERS called Lucas and said, “Things are getting interesting.”

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s a farm here, and your robbers are apparently going in and out of there with their loads of horse shit,” Flowers said. “We can’t figure out why anybody would need so much horse shit, but I’ve got Richie Jones interested. You know Richie?”

  “Yeah.” Richie was the sheriff.

  “We’re going to take a look at the farm,” Virgil said. “Talk to some people around there. There might be something else going on.”

  “Virgil, goddamnit, all I want to do is bust these two. I don’t need a fuckin’ Shakespeare festival.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s because you’ve got something to occupy your time up there. I’m just trying to drum up a little business, and Richie’s got to run for reelection this fall.”

  “Just get on with it, okay?”

  “Maybe,” Flowers said. “I’ll call you. Sometime.”

  LUCAS HEARD about Turicek five minutes later, when, still brooding over Flowers’s insubordination, he got a call from the duty officer at the BCA. “We got a woman who’s trying to reach you. She says her name is Kristina Sanderson and it’s an emergency. Sounds like she’s freaking out.”

  Lucas thought, Ah, with some satisfaction. She was cracking. He had the call switched through and then Sanderson was screaming at him, “They took Ivan, they, I think he’s going to die, I think, he’s oh, God, he looks like, oh God, he looks like a … like a … a stewed tomato.”

  15

  Turicek had been taken to Regions Hospital, the major St. Paul public hospital. The cops who’d followed the ambulance didn’t find a wallet, but did find his cell phone. His last call had been to a blocked number out of state, and when they called it, they got a ring but no answer.

  The next number had been Sanderson’s.

  She’d driven herself across town to Regions, found that Turicek was in surgery, but had been walked into the OR, and identified him behind the tangle of breathing equipment. When she asked the surgeon how bad he was, the surgeon had said, “You’ll have to leave now.”

  She followed the circulating nurse out of the room, and the St. Paul cops asked her if she knew what had happened, and she’d started blubbering. All she’d seen of Turicek was his head, which looked like an oversized raw turnip and was shaped all wrong, and a large patch on the abdominal covering, which showed a lot of blood and what she assumed was guts.

  She told the cops, “The Mexicans, the Mexicans,” and they said, “The Mexicans?” and she’d nodded and said, “There was a police officer, and agent, from the state…”

  One of the cops said, “Davenport?” and she nodded again, and the cop said, “Let’s give them a ring.”

  About that time, the surgeon walked out of the emergency OR, pulling off his bloody gloves, and one of the cops, looking past her, said, “Uh-oh.”

  BEFORE HEADING down to Regions, Lucas called Shaffer to fill him in. He’d parked and was walking toward the emergency room entrance when he saw Shaffer pulling into the parking area, and he slowed and waited until the other agent caught up.

  “What the fuck happened?” Shaffer demanded. “Shrake and Jenkins take the day off? They were supposed to be all over him.”

  “Take it easy,” Lucas snapped. “The guy knew we were there, and he bolted. He knew where he was going. We could have had a whole team on him and he would have lost them.”

  “Wouldn’t have lost my team,” Shaffer said. “For God’s sakes, this was our big chance. We knew the Mexicans were looking for him.”

  “Having a little trouble finding the Mexicans, Bob? Don’t lay it on us, that was your job.”

  They snarled at each other some more on the way to the ER; too much media, too much attention, too many people watching. Tempers were going to flare….

  “What about Turicek?” Shaffer asked.

  “Last I heard, he was still breathing,” Lucas said.

  They pushed through the door and saw a woman in a surgeon’s gown with blood at her waist, talking to Sanderson, one hand on Sanderson’s shoulder, and Sanderson was sobbing, and Lucas said, “Maybe that changed.”

  TWO ST. PAUL homicide cops told them the story, and they went outside, where the driver of the Ford pickup had been stashed, waiting, in his truck. His name was Robert Johnson, and he was with his girlfriend, whose name was Betty Johnson, no relation, yet, and Robert Johnson said, “I couldn’t help it.”

  One of the St. Paul detectives said, “We understand that, Mr. Johnson. We believe it was a kidnapping. If you could just tell the agents what you saw.”

  The two Johnsons took turns: they’d just taken a left onto the freeway ramp at Snelling Avenue, not going fast at all—they agreed on that—and pulled up behind a white car that was accelerating even more slowly than they were. They were a truck length or two behind the white car when the trunk popped open and a man came flying out. He landed on the pavement directly in front of them, and Robert, who was at the wheel, swerved, but said that he didn’t know if he hit the brakes before or after they hit the man.

  “It sounded like we’d hit a watermelon, or a basketball, there was this awful whump sound,” Betty said. “I knew we hit his head….”

  The white car sped away while the two Johnsons jumped out of their truck and found Turicek half under it, about halfway down the length of the truck. He had a tire track on his pants, and the Johnsons said they’d probably run over his body, just at the hips.

  They’d stopped traffic and called 911 on Robert’s cell phone. The ambulance had been there in five minutes, right behind a cop car. The ambulance attendants had pulled Turicek out from under the truck, and it seemed like he was dead, except that he kept blowing blood bubbles. They threw him on a gurney and rushed him back to the hospital. It was then, the responding St. Paul uniform said, that they saw that his arms were taped behind him.

  Lucas turned to Shaffer and asked, “How’d they know where to find him? How did they know that?”

  Shaffer shook his head: “Has to be a leak inside the bank. I mean, my team didn’t even know he’d run, and if it was only you and Jenkins and Shrake and…”

  They turned and looked at Sanderson. She said, “Not me. I didn’t tell anybody.” Then she remembered the phone call, put her fingers to her lips, and said, “Oh … wait.”

  Shaffer: “What?”

  “Somebody called me and asked where he was. I told them he went jogging,” she said.

  Lucas said to Shaffer, �
�That was Jenkins.”

  “Who else did you mention it to?” Shaffer asked her.

  “Nobody. Nobody else,” she said. “Not a single person called me, except that one person, after he went jogging. Who cares if somebody goes jogging?”

  Lucas: “Did he ever go jogging before?”

  “No. No. He showed up with some bags from Macy’s, went into the men’s room, changed, and said he was going jogging. He’d never jogged before.”

  Shaffer looked at Lucas and conceded, “Okay. He knew.”

  Lucas looked at Sanderson for another long minute, then said, “Miz Sanderson, I need to talk privately with Agent Shaffer for a few seconds, then I need to speak privately with you.”

  She said, nervously, “Okay.”

  Lucas and Shaffer walked down the sidewalk and Lucas said, “Why don’t you take off? You don’t want to witness this.”

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “Push her around,” Lucas said.

  Shaffer said, “I’ll see you at the meeting tomorrow.”

  LUCAS TOOK SANDERSON to an empty hospital room, pointed her at a chair, then stood over her, and too close.

  “You’re going to prison for life.”

  “No…”

  “Yes, I think so. I’m almost sure of it. The fact is, you’ve been withholding information from us, and that information could have led to the arrest of these Mexican killers. That makes you complicit in a whole series of first-degree murders. They have a source of information inside your bank, and you could probably tell us who it is. Instead, you keep passing along this bullshit about how you know nothing, it was all Turicek. Well, I don’t believe it, and neither will a jury. I am going to arrest you. Just a matter of time, Kristina. It’s a matter of time.”

  “But I don’t know anything,” she wailed. “I’ve tried to tell you everything—”