Stolen Prey

by John Sandford

  “We’re all right,” Weather shouted back. “We’re all right.”

  “Stay there,” Letty shouted. “Call nine-one-one, call nine-one-one.” The housekeeper had a hardwired phone in her room.

  The pistol was empty. She ejected the magazine and slapped in the second one, and followed the muzzle down the stairs. Were there more of them, out in a car? She crawled into the kitchen, took Weather’s cell phone off the kitchen counter, crawled back to the stairway where she could make a stand, if necessary, and, with her good thumb, punched Lucas’s call icon.

  He came up five seconds later, and she shouted, “Dad, Dad, we’ve got a problem, Dad….”

  Lucas said he’d be there, and she believed him. Nobody else came through the door. She crawled up to the kitchen doorway, sat with the gun, not at all in shock, feeling not bad, but feeling ready.

  Two dead, and she felt not bad at all, except for the ache in her arm. She looked down at it, vaguely surprised by the damage: she knew she’d been hit, but blood was draining out of the wound, so she pressed it against her shirt and looked back toward the door.

  From not too far away, a siren started.

  23

  The house that Lucas and Weather had designed and built, and where they intended to live until they died, was sealed with police tape for two days.

  Lucas was profoundly shocked by the shoot-out, and feared in his soul that the house had been ruined for Weather, spoiled by the blood. But Weather was defiant: “Nobody will run me out of my house. Nobody.”

  Lucas loved the place, and hoped that she could hold to that.

  The St. Paul crime-scene people, following Letty’s narration of the shooting, confirmed her story and said that it really wasn’t all that complex, compared to some scenes. But there’d been a lot of damage, a lot of bullet holes, and a lot of blood, and it would take time to clean up.

  While crime-scene specialists did their work, and the DEA and BCA tried to determine whether there was any further danger, Lucas moved the family to a condo in downtown Minneapolis. The apartment was owned by Polaris Bank and normally used to house visiting board members. Jim Bone said they could stay for as long as they wanted.

  Three days after the shoot-out, Lucas walked through the house with a carpenter named Ignacio Jimenez, who was a Mexican illegal, though he’d come to the U.S. when he was a year old, and who didn’t even speak Spanish. Lucas said, “I want everything with blood on it gone—ripped out, not cleaned up. How long will it take?”

  “The biggest problem is the maple walls. I’ll do my best to match it, but it could be tough.”

  “How about if you rip it out?” Lucas asked. “All of it?”

  “I’ve got some gorgeous American cherry planks I’ve been saving up. They’re pricey, and it’s a little redder, but it’d look great.”

  “Do it,” Lucas said. “What about the rest of the damage?”

  “I’ll have the carpeting out of here this evening. I can get a good solid door upstairs, that’s not a problem, and a temporary door for the front entrance. It’ll take a month or so to get a new custom door in there. But the house’ll look okay by the end of the week, except for the paneling. I’ll have to have some of that milled….”

  And so on.

  THE HOUSE, Weather and Lucas agreed, was the least of it.

  WEATHER HAD run into the housekeeper’s apartment with the baby and dragged a couch in front of the door. Since the door was set down a short entry hall, the couch effectively blocked it, and she lay off to one side, bracing it with her feet.

  When Martínez emptied the gun through the door, the slugs came through well above Weather’s supine body, and the couch, and buried themselves in the opposite wall.

  Then the shooting stopped, and Letty shouted at her, and she’d crawled to the housekeeper’s hardwired phone and called 911. That done, she dragged the couch away, picked up the baby, stepped over Martínez’s body without a second look, and ran downstairs to find the bleeding Letty still pointed at the door.

  Weather took it from there….

  THE AMBULANCE arrived three minutes after the cops, and Letty was taken to Regions Hospital in St. Paul. The bullet had shattered the middle of her left arm’s radius bone before exiting. She was in surgery by the time Lucas arrived. He waited with Weather outside the OR.

  “It’s not terrible,” Weather told him. “She’ll need some pins and braces. She’ll be in a cast…. Aw, my God, Lucas,” and she broke down, weeping, and Lucas put his arm around her and squeezed her tight.

  The operation went well, done by the best general surgeon Weather knew. He came out and said, “She’ll sleep for a while. There’ll be some pain, but she’ll be okay eventually.”

  “Will she have any problems with the arm?” Lucas asked.

  “It’s too early to tell. She might have some loss of feeling, but I don’t think she’ll have any loss of function,” the surgeon said. He was a short blond man with green eyes.

  “But you’re not sure.”

  “The break itself is small, but she lost some bone,” the surgeon said. “On the other hand, she’s young, and the young come back from this kind of thing. Look, I’ll go out on a limb: she’s gonna be fine.”

  EVENTUALLY, late that night, with Letty still asleep, Lucas took Weather and the other two kids to the Polaris condo. “They’ll keep Letty sedated overnight, so there’s no point in our being there,” Weather said. “We need to get some sleep, because tomorrow’s going to be hell.”

  He tried to sleep, but woke up at four in the morning to an empty bed, and found Weather sitting in the kitchen. “I’m going over to the hospital,” he said. “Could you stay with the kids?”

  “No. I’m going with you.” She’d already called the housekeeper, who’d been shopping during the shoot-out, and who’d temporarily moved in with a sister; she was on her way over.

  LETTY’S EYES cracked open at six o’clock, about the time the hospital woke up. She was disoriented for a moment, sleepy, then saw Weather and Lucas staring at her face.

  “Is everybody okay?” she asked.

  Lucas opened his mouth to say, “Yes,” but nothing came out, and then, for the first time since his mother died, he put his face in his hands and began choking, which was the only way he knew how to cry.

  THE DEA DEBRIEFING was irritating. Lucas was fine with talking to O’Brien, but then he had to repeat everything to a DEA deputy director in Washington, D.C. The director, Lucas thought, was on a speakerphone, and shouting.

  The most important thing he said was that the Mexican Federales heard things from the Criminales, and they’d heard that the Criminales were done with Minnesota. The gang wasn’t completely out of control, and now that one of their members had killed a well-known Federale, and then had attempted to kill an American cop’s family…

  “The bottom line is, they don’t want a war. Or, more of a war,” the DEA boss shouted. “They’re done with you guys. For one thing, we’ve got the gold, and there’s no way they’re going to get it back.”

  “How sure are you about that?” Lucas asked. “That they’re done?”

  “Pretty sure,” the DEA man shouted back down the line. “That’s about as good as we can get. I’d even say, ‘Very sure.’”

  “What about Kline or Sanderson? Do they need protection?”

  “I’ve been reading the reports about the whole thing,” the director shouted back. “I think they’re probably okay. Did they even have anything to do with it? From what I’ve read, it seems like they might be innocent.”

  “They’re not—they were in it, up to their necks,” Lucas said. “But we can’t prove it.”

  “So … seventy-five percent? That they were involved?”

  “More like ninety-five,” Lucas said. “The problem is, I’m told, that if we go to court, they can blame it all on Turicek. Especially since we got the gold back, and we know Turicek rented the place where the gold was stashed. Kline’s attorney makes the point that if hi
s client was involved, he and Sanderson had to know where the gold was, and they could have picked it up anytime. So if they knew … why did they let eighteen million in gold get away? The other thing is, Kline’s attorney says that if Kline was involved, he could have stolen the money anytime after he left Polaris, but he didn’t, even though he was unemployed and needed money. Our county attorney, our prosecutor, and your U.S. attorney agree they were probably involved, but say it’s only ten percent that they can be convicted. And they don’t like to lose.”

  “So we’re dead in the water,” the director shouted.

  “Things still worked out for us,” O’Brien said. “Not only did we grab that eighteen mil, but we know how the Criminales are moving and investing a lot of their money. We’re gonna be a big pain in their ass for a long time—I’m thinking we can claw back another hundred million.”

  “A hundred million. I like the sound of that,” the director said. “That’s a nice round number.”

  After the call, O’Brien sighed, looked at Lucas, and said, “Well, that’s it then.”

  “I’d really like to get Kline and Sanderson,” Lucas said. “And Albitis, for that matter, if she ever comes back.”

  “We at the DEA have a little … mmm … aphorism … to cover such yearnings,” O’Brien said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Tough shit, pal.”

  THE DAY after the debriefing, the Brooks family was buried. Lucas did not go to the funeral, and was told by Shaffer that for such a well-publicized mass murder, the funeral attendance was remarkably subdued. The Brookses did not belong to a church, and so the funeral was attended mostly by family members, Sunnie employees, and reporters. “Hard way to go, all at once, like that,” Shaffer said. “Nobody left behind.”

  THAT SAME DAY, Albitis opened one eye and looked around, then opened the other. Hospital room. She felt terrible: her head, neck, spine, arms, and hips hurt. Her mouth was dry, and something stank. She suspected it was her. Her feet seemed okay. She tried to turn her head but couldn’t. She managed to raise one arm into her field of view and found it punctured by a number of needles that led to plastic drip lines.

  A moment after she woke up, a nurse, apparently alerted by the monitoring equipment, stuck her head in the room and said, “There you are.”

  Albitis tried to speak, but her tongue was like sandpaper.

  “You need something to wet your mouth,” the nurse said. “I’ll be right back.”

  She was back a minute later with a bottle of water and a straw. Albitis took a sip, then two more. Her voice didn’t seem to work quite right, so she whispered, “Was I in an accident?”

  The nurse said, “We don’t know exactly what happened to you. We were hoping you could tell us.”

  Albitis thought for a moment, then said, “I don’t know.” Then, “You’re speaking English. Where am I?”

  “You’re in a hospital in Minneapolis,” the nurse said.

  “Minneapolis? In the U.S. What am I doing here?”

  “We don’t know exactly,” the nurse said.

  Albitis’s eyes wandered away, then came back. “Minneapolis? I live in Tel Aviv.”

  The nurse said, “Oh, boy.”

  A WEEK AFTER the shooting, the Davenports moved back into the house. Jimenez had been working his ass off—there were no bullet holes or blood to be seen. He’d replaced the carpet in the hallway where Tres had died, with carpet indistinguishable from the original. He hadn’t yet put in the new upstairs hallway wall, but the maple was gone, and the hall showed bare studs and electric wiring down its length.

  The hallway where Martínez had died had a varnished hardwood floor. Jimenez had stripped the varnish and redone it. He’d found a good door to replace the one Martínez had shot through, and had already fitted and painted it. The far wall had been peppered with pieces of nine-millimeter hollow-points, and he’d patched the drywall and repainted.

  The temporary front door and the bare studs in the upper hallway were the only remaining signs of the fight.

  Letty walked through, checked it all out, and pronounced herself satisfied. “If I didn’t have this cast … I hate this cast.”

  “Better than the alternative,” Lucas said.

  She thought about that for three seconds, then said, “But he didn’t hit me in the head. He hit me in the arm, and I hate this cast.”

  “I got this little … aphorism … from the DEA,” Lucas said.

  WEATHER WAS watching Letty like a hawk, and the third day after they’d gotten back in the house, she said to Lucas, “I hope there’s nothing wrong with her.”

  “Like what?” Lucas asked.

  “She’s not showing any signs of the psychological trauma that she should be. I’ve been reading everything I can find on it. The shock—”

  “She’s okay,” Lucas said.

  “But—”

  “I know exactly what you’re saying,” Lucas said. “You’re worried that she might be a psychopath, or a sociopath, or one of those path things. She’s not. Or at least, that’s not all she is.”

  “You know I love her,” Weather said.

  “Of course you do, but that doesn’t have anything to do with what you’re worried about,” Lucas said. “But stop worrying.”

  “I’m not sure I can. I want her to be … happy. I want her to be well.”

  “A lot of people think surgeons must have a little psychological thing, you know?” Lucas said. “They take perfectly good people and slice them to pieces so they can have a shorter nose. You’d have to be a little crazy to do that, or to get it done, for that matter. We’re all a little crazy, sweetheart.”

  Weather got puffed up. “Comparing what I do—”

  “I know, there’s no direct comparison.”

  They had a little five-minute exchange about the psychological stability of surgeons, punctuated with examples of crazy surgeons that Weather had talked about in the past, and she finally said, “Look, whatever—I’m not talking about all of that. I’m talking about our daughter.”

  “I know you are,” Lucas said. “And like I said, we’re all a little crazy, but basically, and overall, Letty’s okay.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because she’s just like me,” Lucas said. “And I’m okay, mostly.”

  LUCAS AND LETTY stopped at a coffee shop, and Letty got a grande latte and Lucas got a no-fat hot chocolate, and Letty asked, “Is Mom okay?”

  “She’s holding up. She’ll be working again tomorrow,” Lucas said.

  “Okay, that’s good,” she said.

  “How are you holding up?” Lucas asked.

  “I…” she said, then stopped. “I don’t know.” Her voice was distracted, Lucas thought, like she was taking effort just to talk. Usually she was chatty. She didn’t sound depressed, though. Just distracted.

  “Do you feel bad about it?”

  “I don’t,” she said. “I shot that one guy before, but I didn’t kill him. But this … nope. Nothing. Just … I had to do it, and I did it, and it was done. I’m not worried about it, I don’t feel bad. Is that normal?”

  “It depends,” Lucas said. “Sometimes, if—”

  “How many people have you killed?” Letty asked abruptly.

  Lucas considered. They’d never talked about it. Not directly. It was known, but it was a topic they’d always avoided. He did a quick tally in his head.

  “Ten,” he said. “That I know of.”

  “That you know of?”

  “There are a few more people dead, that I was responsible for, directly or indirectly,” Lucas said. “I’d get in a situation where pretty much it’s going to end with a death. That sort of thing.”

  “Is that normal?”

  “No. Not for most cops. But I was always pushed into the rough stuff. All of my professional life,” he said. “And sometimes, you’ll get something—a hostage situation, say—and you’ll find out that there’s no way to do it without someone dying. When that happens, if
it’s your only option … I just don’t have time to feel too bad about it.”

  “Do you regret any of them?”

  “Some of them,” Lucas said. “Sometimes they were just … crazy. You get into a situation like that, and what can you do? Like, you remember Alyssa? She was simply insane. Killing people. When we figured that out, we wound up in a confrontation. What happened was her call. She called it, and the whole situation went a certain way. I had no way to … to disarm her or anything. Either she died, or I did. I regret it because she was insane—she was ill. She might have been treatable…. I don’t know. It would have been nice to find out.”

  “Were any not like that? Where you had a choice and went for … the death?”

  “Did I set anything up, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  Lucas was silent for a moment, then said, “Twice.”

  “Tell me…”

  “One guy—I never talk about this, by the way, so if you open your trap…”

  “I don’t talk,” she said.

  “One guy was a lawyer, and a serial killer, and he would have gotten away with everything. Then, sooner or later, because he enjoyed it, because it was the main thing in his life, he would have started killing again. That was more than a decade ago. Now I look back on it and think maybe, maybe there was something else I could have done. But back then … no.”

  “Judge, jury, executioner. Like that?”

  “Back then, yeah,” he said. “Now I wonder if I wasn’t too hasty, if I couldn’t have done something more complicated. Couldn’t have figured another way to get him. But … it’s done.”

  “What about the other one?”

  “That was different. That was a hostage thing. You know about that one—the one where Weather was the hostage. I gave the orders to our sniper to take him. Shoot to kill, the instant he had an opening. As it happened, your mom had pretty much convinced him to give up, and he was about to do that, when we killed him. Maybe I could have done something different, but your mom’s life was on the line. Or seemed to be.”