“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 Martínez, 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.”
“I see him,” Shaffer said. Shaffer was a full block behind Uno, sitting at an intersection.
“She’s sent him out here to look for us,” Lucas said. “She’s not sure we’re here, but she’s worried. And she’s close. Not more than a few blocks away. I’m going to break off with Del and start turning blocks, see if we can spot her car.”
“Go,” said Shaffer. “John, come in a block. Look for people in cars.”
“The guy’s looking at the house,” Jenkins called.
JENKINS, SHRAKE, and Shaffer took turns recounting Uno’s progress down the block, and Lucas and Del started turning corners, looking for Martínez. They started north and west of the target house, while Martínez was south and east. As they went first south, and then east, they turned a block too soon and passed a block north of Martínez’s position. They never saw her car, and she never saw their truck.
MARTÍNEZ ASKED UNO, on the phone, “How close are you?”
“I’m crossing the street,” he said. “I see nobody here. There is a porch. It’s an old house. All the curtains are closed.”
“All the curtains?” She tensed.
“Yes, all the curtains. I am at the front. Should I go up?”
“You see nobody?”
“Nobody.”
She thought about it for a few seconds, but it was only Uno. “Go up,” she said.
UNO WALKED UP the porch to the door. The door had a glass panel in it, at head height. He peeked. He didn’t see anybody, but he saw a shadow, and the shadow moved.
He stepped back and put the phone to his mouth. “There is somebody inside,” he said.
Martínez closed her eyes. She said, “Is there a doorbell button?”
Uno said, “Sí.”
“Push the button, then count to thirty. If they don’t answer, it is the police. Then, fast as you can, run down Margaret Street toward the big hole,” she said. “We will catch you on the other side.”
“Push the button and count to thirty,” Uno repeated.
“Like you were waiting for an answer. Then run like the wind.”
AS SHE TALKED to him, she’d made a U-turn on Fremont and headed west, following the aerial photo on the iPad. She jogged onto Fourth Street, turned left on Hope, and as Uno shouted, “I’m running,” she pulled into a Laundromat parking lot on West Seventh.
Uno shouted, “I am one block.”
“Faster,” she shouted back. “Run faster.”
THERE WAS one car out in front of Uno, and others following on parallel streets. Jenkins ran sideways out to Cypress, jumped in his car, pulled onto Margaret with Uno now a full block ahead, drove down to Shrake, closing the gap a bit, opened the door so Shrake could climb in.
“That motherfucker has legs,” Shrake said.
“But we got wheels,” Jenkins said.
“Easy, easy,” Shaffer called. “Keep him boxed, but let him run.”
“I’m coming up to East Seventh,” Lucas said. “You want me up the hill?”
“Come up partway.”
“He’s coming up to Seventh,” one of the other agents said, from a car in front of Uno, on Margaret. “I’ve got to get out of his way. You want me to cross, or turn, or what?”
“Take a right and pull over,” Shaffer said.
“Taking the right.”
“I see you,” Lucas called. “We got him this way.”
AT THAT MOMENT, Uno bolted straight across the four-lane street, through traffic, and on down Margaret. “Holy shit, he ran straight across, he could lose us,” an agent called.
“We’re on it,” Lucas said. Del accelerated up the hill, ready to take a left on Margaret.
“I can’t see him anymore,” Jenkins said. “There’s a jog at the intersection.”
Del made the left, and up ahead they could see Uno running hard as he could, straight up the street. “Got him,” Lucas said. “He’s heading straight for Swede Hollow. Shit, he’s going down the Hollow. I bet they set this up. We need to get somebody on the other side. If he runs down, we’ll spot him from up on top.”
UNO HAD DONE his job. From the Laundromat parking lot, Martínez had seen Uno bolt across the street, and then, as he ran out of sight, the car swerving out from a curb into the turn lane, and then down Margaret.
She saw Lucas quite clearly, a handset to his mouth.
She turned to Tres and said, “Ah, well.”
“¿Qué?”
LUCAS AND DEL parked at the top of the park bluff, and ten seconds later Shrake and Jenkins arrived, Shrake with his binoculars, and they followed the flight of Uno down the hill, through the trees, and across the park. It was a long, hard run, and Uno fell at one point, and apparently lost his phone. He scrambled back to pick it up, and then ran on.
Shaffer’s team was out in front of him. As Lucas called out his location on the handset, another of the agents came back and said, “We got him. We see him. We’re out of the car, we’re going to run down the track here, try to keep him in sight.”
Shaffer asked, “You see anybody following him?”
“Nobody. There’s no way anybody could, unless they were waiting in here. I think they’re probably on the other side of East Seventh.”
“I don’t think you’ll see them,” Lucas said. “She bro
ke us out. She knows we’re on to her.”
“Should we take him?” one of the agents asked.
“Where’s he headed?” Shaffer asked.
“He’s running down the track alongside the creek. He’ll be coming out at East Seventh in a minute or so. He’s really motoring. I can’t keep up, but he’s not running off into the trees, anyway.”
Lucas called, “He’s out of sight from here. We’re coming your way.”
Another agent: “I’m out of the car on East Seventh. I saw him, he’s still on the track.”
Shaffer said, “Keep out of sight. Let him run for a minute. Let’s box him again at East Seventh.”
UNO WAS in good shape and a fast runner, but as the track led under a bridge, he paused, caught his breath, got on the phone and called for help, but got no answer. He thought that perhaps Martínez and Tres had been caught, somehow, and that he might be on his own. He thought about it, saw the tall buildings ahead, remembered what Martínez had said about finding him downtown, and turned that way.
He came to a fence at a railroad track, tried to climb it, got his jacket snagged, pulled the jacket off and threw it over, then climbed over after it. The jacket was a mess from a couple of falls he’d taken while running through the park, but he picked it up, ran across the tracks, careful not to break an ankle in the rough gravel, threw the jacket over another fence, climbed the fence, pulled the jacket back on, and jogged toward a car wash.
LUCAS AND DEL, in Del’s car, followed by Shrake and Jenkins, were rolling down East Seventh, pulled in by Shaffer’s agents, when one of the agents called, shouting, and said, “We got a problem. We got a problem. He just jumped the fence around the railroad track, and I’m not sure, but it looks like he’s got a fuckin’ Uzi slung over his back.”
Shaffer came back: “An Uzi? You’re sure?”
“It’s a short black gun with what looks like a thirty-mag hanging under it. Hang on, hang on, Jack is coming up, he’s got glasses.”
A moment later, a new voice: “This is Jack. He jumped another fence and he’s running up toward that car wash place, and I’m looking at him, and it—That’s a Mac-10, not an Uzi.”
Shaffer said, “Lucas? What do you think?”
“We’re busted. She sent him out there to see what would happen. If he’s got a Mac-10, I don’t think we can let him get into town. There’s some big parking lots on the other side of the car wash. If he runs across those, we’d have him out in the open.”
“I agree.” Shaffer began directing traffic, sending four cars on the other side of the parking lot, calling, “We’re coming, Jack. You and Roy follow on foot, come up behind him so he can’t run back into the park.”
Jack called, “He’s walking now. He’s walking around the car wash.”
UNO WAS looking around, saw nobody. He stopped, put the phone, which was still open, to his ear and asked, “Can you hear me? Can you hear me, Mama?”
There was nobody on the other end. He heard what might have been traffic, but no human being.
He looked around, and started walking, out onto a huge parking lot, toward a squat five- or six-story redbrick office building. He was thinking, now, They have left me. Not that they had been caught, or that they were waiting, but that he’d been abandoned. He felt like crying, but hadn’t cried since he was six, and so he didn’t. And there glimmered in his heart the possibility that they were waiting for him, just around the redbrick building….
The glimmer of possibility died as he came up to it, and a man emerged at the side of the building and shouted, “Police. Stop.”
Another man, in a dark uniform, stepped out with a long arm of some kind, a rifle.
Uno had been born to have this moment happen. There had been other possibilities, that he might have wound up as a dirt farmer, or stuck in a barrio, scratching out a small life, but he’d chosen the narcos and they’d chosen him, and this moment was always going to come.
He stripped off his jacket and threw it on the ground.
The man out in front of him was shouting, “Stop! Stop!”
Uno shouted back: “Chingate!”
Then with a single motion, long practice, he swept the Mac-10 from behind his back up into the shooting position, raking off the safety and tightening his finger against the trigger, the stuttering burst beginning as the muzzle came up….
They’d seen the move and the man who’d first shouted at him dropped behind a car, and Uno saw him dropping and then the first impacts came, in his chest, turning him, and then…
Nothing.
SHAFFER WAS SCREAMING, “He’s down, he’s down, everybody okay? Everybody okay?”
Uno’s burst from the Mac-10 had mostly spattered off the parking lot, ricocheting nobody knew where, but nobody, other than Uno, had been hurt.
Uno was dead; the cops stood back, in a circle around his short, thin crumpled body, and a couple of sirens started—St. Paul cops responding to reports of a shooting. Lucas arrived with Del, Jenkins, and Shrake, and as they walked across the parking lot, they could see his face, looking up at the blue sky and the summer clouds. Shaffer said, “Mac-10. Haven’t seen one for a while.”
And Shrake said, “The kid had legs.”
18
They were all still standing around the parking lot, looking at the body, when Sandy, the researcher, called Lucas and said, “All that bullshit you said at the meeting this morning, about the Martha White woman on the airplane?”
“Yeah?”
“You were right. Except that her name is Edie Albitis and she flew in here last night from Newark,” Sandy said. “She’d just picked up two hundred thousand dollars in gold at Biedermann’s in Manhattan, and another two hundred thousand at Scone’s in Brooklyn.”
“You’re sure?”
“Well, every time we get a sale or a pickup, the TSA says we’ve got Albitis flying in and out of the local airport,” Sandy said. “Another thing—she’s an immigrant, from the same neck of the woods as Turicek.”
“Call the TSA,” Lucas said. “We want her held the next time she goes through airport security, if we don’t get her first.”
“I talked to Rudy, and we’ve already started the process.”
“Excellent. Be nice if we could find an address.”
“I’m looking for all that,” Sandy said. “Nothing so far, anywhere in the metro area. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s using another name, or staying with somebody. I’m trying for her credit cards, to see if we can pick up hotels or whatever.”
Lucas told her to keep pushing it and rang off, told Del about it.
“Almost done,” Del said.
THE SHOOTING SCENE was shut down, and the media showed up, and after a while Lucas went back to the office to start writing his piece of the after-shooting report. Shaffer’s team had gotten a warrant and had gone into Martínez’s hotel room, and found it empty. Security tapes from BCA cameras covering the parking lot got them a description of her car, and the number on its plate. The TV stations were running photos of her every fifteen minutes or so, along with photos of two other Mexican suspects.
Lucas suggested that Shaffer, in the inevitable press conference after the killing of Uno, tell the reporters a strategic lie. Shaffer thought about it for a while, then demurred, saying that it felt unethical.
“But I won’t give you up, if you tell it,” he said.
So Lucas, speaking last, told the assembled reporters that the fleeing Mexicans were believed to have escaped with millions of dollars in gold coins, taken from the thieves who had stolen from the drug gang’s account. The gold, he said, had been taken from Turicek’s apartment at the time the gang had kidnapped him.
Lucas watched tapes of his performance, with Shaffer standing next to him, and Shaffer said, “You lie really well.”
“If I have to,” Lucas said. “I figured it was too important to pussy out on.”
“Hey…”
“Ana’s got a problem, now,” Lucas said. “Can’t stay
here—and if she goes back to Mexico, the gang’s gonna want the gold, and the Federales are gonna want her ass.”
“I didn’t pussy out.”
“Yeah, you did, Bob. Pretty amazing—you’ve got no problem shooting it out with a Mexican hit man, but you puss out when it comes to lying to reporters. Listen: everything you see on TV news is bullshit,” Lucas said. “You would have added a teaspoon of bullshit to an ocean of it. Nobody would have noticed, and it’ll help catch a couple more killers. So fuck your qualms, and your ethics.”
Del got between them and said, mildly, “Let’s agree to disagree. At least while there are cameras around.”
VIRGIL FLOWERS called a while later and said he didn’t have much to report. “We’re trying to figure out how to get some surveillance on the farm. I might have actually seen the truck that your two robbers drive around, but we didn’t want to stop them. We’re afraid we might give something away.”
“Like what?”
“Dunno,” Flowers said. “Something.”
MARTÍNEZ KNEW the police would be looking for her car, so they dumped it for the Toyota and headed back to the Newport house, and put the car in the garage.
Tres hadn’t asked about Uno: he knew what had happened. When they got inside, they turned on the television and saw the breaking news story. Tres said, “I thought I would be the one to go. The saints said so.” Martínez patted him on the shoulder, went out in the backyard, sat on the ground between a couple of bridal wreath bushes, and called the Big Voice.
“They know about me, my photo is on the television. We have lost the car, but still have the truck. We are safe for now, I think, but I’m afraid to move.”
“Stay there. One day, two days, we can get you out. If they have your face, and the Federales have it, then the only safe place for you is farther south. If we can pick you up, arrangements can be made—Venezuela, perhaps. Ecuador. So. Hide. Call me every four hours.”
Stolen Prey Page 26
