“Just barely. They lost Stirzaker. What the hell happened out there?”
“According to Whittaker, D’Antonio wanted to trade her life for the gang’s,” said Hall. “Said he’d let her go if they gave themselves up. Somehow the kids got their hands on some guns and blew the roof off the joint.”
Windermere and Stevens shared a look. “What else did she say?”
“Oh, here’s the kicker,” said Hall. “She said the survivors, Sawyer and Pender and the girl? Yeah. They’re coming to Detroit.”
seventy-two
Christ on a cracker,” said Windermere. “They’re going to try a jailbreak.”
Stevens watched the smile grow wide on his partner’s face. She looked like she wanted to hug him. Stevens wasn’t sure he shared her enthusiasm.
Pender and his gang were coming to Detroit. And they had guns. These kids were audacious. It could mean a bloodbath.
Windermere spun on her heels and started away from the interrogation room, headed for the elevators. “Let’s go, Stevens,” she said. “We’ve got plans to make.”
Hall watched her go. “What about the girl?”
“What about the girl?” said Windermere. “What do we need with her now?”
“She’ll make damn good bait,” said Stevens. “Those kids could have run for the border at any time. They could be home free. But they’re coming to Detroit to chase this girl instead.” He started after Windermere.
Hall took a step to follow. “What about the plea bargain?”
“Let the lawyers worry about it. We’re doing fine without her.”
Stevens caught up to Windermere at the elevators. She grinned at him. “You think we should tell her?” he asked her.
“About Stirzaker?”
Stevens nodded. “Might shock her into submission.”
“Pitch it like we’ve got to end the violence,” said Windermere. “Save them from themselves. Hall!”
Agent Hall appeared from around the corner. “Go tell the girl about Stirzaker,” she told him. “Tell her she could save her boyfriend from ending up the same way.”
“Will do,” said Hall. He turned to go.
“And Hall—” Windermere looked around. Grabbed a wastebasket and handed it to him. “Bring this along. It’s liable to get messy in there.”
The agents got off the elevator a couple floors up, Windermere still giddy, and made their way over to the makeshift office that was serving as de facto case headquarters for the duration of their stay. It was a tiny third-floor room, one hazy window looking out onto Michigan Avenue, barely enough space for one double-wide communal desk and two ancient computers. They’d plastered every available surface with case information; the place looked like the offices of a couple of sad-sack associate professors at some second-rate university. Home sweet home.
“So, what?” said Stevens when they’d reached their flimsy chairs. “You really think those kids are going to try and storm the jail?”
Windermere laughed. “Let them storm it. I hope that’s what they do. Then we just mop up the mess, nice and easy.”
“You sure?” said Stevens. “From the sounds of it, those kids can make one hell of a mess.”
“This is the FBI, Stevens,” said Windermere. “We specialize in big messes.”
Stevens thought about it. “Yeah, but if it comes down to a shoot-out, chances are they all die. And don’t you at least want to meet these guys?”
Windermere had picked up a pencil and was doodling, idly, on a photocopied Wanted poster. She shrugged. “What for?”
“We’ve been chasing them for weeks,” said Stevens. “They’ve pulled a shit ton of kidnapping jobs, and we might have never known it if they hadn’t killed Donald Beneteau.”
“You had them before Beneteau. You had them with Harper.”
“Yeah, maybe. But the trail would have gone pretty cold if they hadn’t shot up that mobster.”
“True,” said Windermere. “Okay. But I still don’t care if I meet them.”
Stevens peered into an old cup of coffee and frowned at its contents. “I want to know them,” he said. “I want to see how they compare in real life to the images in my head. I want to look at Arthur Pender just once and try and figure him out. I want to know why.”
Windermere drew a mustache on Arthur Pender’s Wanted photo. “The way this case has gone, Stevens, I’m going to guess you’ll get your chance to hear the why. Personally, I’d rather just see these kids locked up.”
“You finally getting sick of this?”
“Hell, no,” she said. “I’m having fun. I just think motive’s overrated. You get caught up in stuff like that you start forgetting about the crimes. You start rationalizing. We know who did it, and we know how. The fun’s not in the why. The fun’s in getting ahead of these kids, outsmarting them. Bringing them down and laughing as we lock them up.”
Stevens poured out the remains of his coffee. “Well,” he said. “Let’s hope we both get what we’re looking for.”
“We will,” she said. “Hall!”
A moment later, Agent Hall showed up in the doorway. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m here. What’s up?”
“You tell the girl?”
“I told her.”
“She puke?”
Hall shook his head. “No puke. She cried. Then she told her lawyer she was done talking.”
Windermere waved her hand. “We don’t need her. Tell us more about the Cincinnati angle. Give us all you got.”
“Okay,” said Hall. “I’ll give you the easy stuff first. They’re driving a late-model Ford Explorer with Florida license plates and a shot-out passenger window. I don’t have the tag number.”
“Hospital might.”
“Hospital don’t. The emergency room camera is from like 1988. Picture’s too fuzzy. But the truck’s dark green, if that helps.”
“Can’t hurt,” said Stevens. “What else?”
“Whittaker said they were coming up to Detroit to get Marie. Didn’t say how. But she said they had guns. Machine guns, lots of them.”
“So they’re coming in hot,” said Windermere. “Anything else?”
Hall nodded. “She said they stopped off at Amtrak before they dropped her off. They all came out with manila envelopes. I have no idea what that’s about.”
“Someone’s shipping them something,” said Windermere. “Money?”
“Passports,” said Stevens. “They’re getting ready to leave the country.” He turned to Hall. “There should be a fourth envelope at Cincinnati station with Ben Stirzaker’s name on it. See if you can get a hold of it and find out where it came from.”
“And let us know if this Whittaker girl gives up anything else,” said Windermere. “She’s probably got plenty of intel on this guy Zeke in Miami, so give racketeering a heads-up as well.”
“I’m on it.” Hall gave a mock salute and then disappeared. Windermere and Stevens watched him go.
“Kids,” said Windermere. “These FBI brats get younger every year.”
Stevens glanced at her. “I thought you were supposed to be the youth movement around here.”
Windermere punched him on the arm. “Thanks,” she said. “Guess I’m getting old before my time.”
She glanced down at Pender’s Wanted poster and shuffled it away. “Okay,” she said. “We need to put an APB out on that green Ford Explorer. Anything with Florida tags gets stopped. We need to double security around here, and we’ve got to get Pender’s and Sawyer’s pictures up on every street corner.” She stared across the desk at him. “If those kids aren’t in Detroit already, they’re just about here. We’ve got to figure them out, and we’ve got to be ready for them.”
“Roger,” Stevens said, and he leaned back in his chair and stared out at the city. This is it, Pender, he thought. What are you going to do?
seventy-three
Hey, Tessa? It’s me. It’s Matt.”
From across the room, Pender watched Sawyer cradle the phone. His
friend’s laconic baritone was gone, replaced by the gentle tenor the big guy reserved for his sister and his grandmother. Or some semblance of it, anyway; the big guy was still speaking through broken teeth and split lips from the beating he’d taken in Cincinnati, and frustration showed on his face as he struggled to connect with the woman he loved most.
It was funny, Pender thought. Sawyer had never wanted a real girlfriend: he took women to bed with ease, but come morning they were invariably gone and forgotten. The guy loved his sister, was fiercely protective of her, and Pender had sometimes wondered if his friend was only looking for Tessa in the women he seduced and rejected.
“I know,” said Sawyer. “Tessa, I’m sorry I lied.”
Mouse used to mock Sawyer for the way his voice rose an octave or two on these long-distance phone calls, and Pender usually laughed along with him. Now, though, listening to Sawyer try to keep his voice steady, Pender didn’t find it funny anymore.
“No, I’m fine,” Sawyer said. “I just didn’t want you getting hurt.”
Sawyer glanced over at Pender, who raised an eyebrow in commiseration, but Sawyer just frowned and turned away. Pender felt guilty for eavesdropping, and he turned on the television and muted the sound. He lay back on his bed and wondered who he would call when it was time to say good-bye.
He wondered what his parents would say if he tried to call them. Wondered what they’d thought when the FBI showed up at their door. Had they been surprised? Had they cared, even?
Marie was his real family. He’d been so consumed with planning and logistics that he hadn’t had time to think about her. Now, with the planning almost done, he yearned for her. He kind of liked missing her, he realized: it made him feel human, made him feel like they were doing the right thing.
Earlier in the evening Tiffany had gone out for food. She’d returned with a bag of cheap tacos and a copy of the Free Press, a big smile on her face. “I got us our target,” she said, pointing to an article below the fold and a picture of a balding white man in his mid-forties, a movie producer with a young family and a home in a tony Detroit suburb. His name was Jason Cardinal.
“Says here he banked fifteen million last year alone,” Sawyer read. “This cat is loaded.”
“His wife is twenty-three, and they already have two kids,” said Tiffany. “We could write our own check if we snatched his wife.”
Pender saw Haley Whittaker’s face again and he shook his head. “No women, no children.” From the start, he’d tried to rationalize the kidnappings, told himself the victims weren’t seriously affected, but one look at Haley’s face had shamed him into seeing the truth. One more job, he thought. I’ll be damned if we’re going to take a woman.
So Jason Cardinal became the final target. And now, holed up in another cheap dive, this one off I-94 just north of Detroit, Pender tried to put a plan together. It would be their most ambitious job yet, their most visible. The fame of the target and the demands they would make would mean exactly the kind of publicity Pender had tried to dodge from the outset.
It was a bad plan, and Pender knew it. It was a desperate plan. But he couldn’t figure out anything better, and he’d be damned if he was going to let Marie rot in prison while he walked free.
If everything went right, Pender thought, this would be the last crummy motel room they would ever sleep in. If everything went right, their next beds would be beachside hammocks.
Pender glanced at the television and sat up on the bed. His face was on screen, and then so was Sawyer’s. Sawyer was on the beach with a bottle of Corona and a big goofy grin. Pender was with Marie in the San Juans. He still got a chill when he saw that picture. The heading on the TV screen read, “Coming to Detroit.”
Well, it wasn’t surprising. Haley had talked, like he’d known she would. The girl was shell-shocked and beaten when they left her, and he suspected she felt closer to D’Antonio than she did to anyone else.
Pender turned up the volume just in time to hear the anchor make the case for their green Ford Explorer with Florida plates. So that’s a plus, he thought. Sawyer had swapped the Florida tags for Michigan plates courtesy of a beat-up Nissan Altima in a Super Kmart parking lot the day they rolled into town. It would take some time for the police to catch up to the change.
“All right, listen,” Sawyer was telling his sister. “I gotta go.” Christ, Pender thought. The guy sounds close to tears.
“No, I gotta go,” he said. “I’ll be fine, Tess. Don’t worry.” He paused. “Look, I love you, okay? Whatever happens.”
Then he hung up the phone. He stared at it for a minute, and then he sighed and straightened his shoulders. He turned to face Pender, his expression unreadable. “Goddamn,” he said, his voice back to normal. “That was really fucking hard, man.”
seventy-four
Jason Cardinal’s house was a vast redbrick mansion on a quiet street three blocks from Lake St. Clair. It sat on acres of land: plenty of trees and a football field front lawn, a fitting house for a millionaire movie producer.
Cardinal left for his office at quarter to nine, commuting alone in a bright red vintage Jaguar. Sawyer’s eyes goggled when he saw it. “What the hell is he thinking?” he said. “Driving that thing at this time of year. That car’s worth a hundred grand, easy.”
“So he’s careless with money,” Tiffany said. “He’ll pay the ransom just fine.”
“It’s not the ransom I’m worried about,” Pender replied, pulling the truck into the street behind the Jag.
They followed Cardinal into a modern industrial park and to his office, a nondescript warehouse marked Cardinal Rule Studios. Then they drove to get breakfast and came back and parked across the street outside an electronics plant. They turned on the radio and settled in to wait.
After seven or eight hours of talk radio, cheap tacos, warm Cokes, and glossy magazines, the studio doors opened and Jason Cardinal walked out again. He climbed into the Jaguar, fired up the engine, and reversed out of his parking space. Sawyer tapped Pender on the arm. “See that?”
The Jag was halfway down the block by the time they pulled out, and Pender was half afraid they weren’t going to catch up in time. But he stood on the accelerator and pulled alongside Cardinal a couple miles down the road, and then he beat a yellow light a couple blocks farther, leaving the Jaguar staring at red.
Pender drove back to Cardinal’s neighborhood. He brought the truck to the curb a half block down from the producer’s house, and Sawyer jumped out. He opened the rear door and reached into the back of the truck for the. 45.
Pender watched Sawyer tuck the gun into his waistband and walk casually to the end of the block. Then Pender put the truck in gear and pulled into a driveway a few houses down from Cardinal’s. He turned to Tiffany. “Grab a gun,” he said. “Another pistol if we’ve got one. Sawyer’s going to throw him in the back and you keep your gun trained on him, cool?”
Tiffany nodded. “Cool.”
Pender stared out the window at Sawyer, who loitered on the corner doing his nonchalant act. Sawyer checked his watch and then perked up. He glanced back at the Explorer and nodded, and Pender turned the key in the ignition. The truck rumbled to life, and he backed it out of the driveway and into the street, angling it so it blocked any access but would still allow them to get away clean.
A couple seconds later, Pender heard the Jaguar’s engine behind him and saw the car pull into the street, as red as a fresh strawberry in the gray winter backdrop, Cardinal’s head poking up above the windshield.
The Jag slowed to a stop about ten feet behind the Explorer, and Cardinal peered out at the truck. He glanced in the mirror and looked ready to lean on the horn when Sawyer showed up on the driver’s side, waving the Glock in his face.
The producer went pale as Sawyer wrenched open the door. He dragged Cardinal out of the car and hustled him over to the Explorer and into the backseat. Tiffany flashed him her teeth and showed him the pistol. “Hello,” she said. “Please don’t try anyt
hing stupid.”
“Who are you?” said Cardinal. “What do you want with me?”
Tiffany gestured with the gun. “Buckle up.”
Sawyer ran back to the Jaguar and parked it by the curb. Then he came back to the truck and climbed in the shotgun seat, and Pender hit the gas. Sawyer let Cardinal watch his house disappear and then twisted around to face him. “So listen,” he said, holding the Glock aimed steady at the producer’s face. “This is a kidnapping, bud. How soon can you get five million dollars?”
seventy-five
Windermere stared at the phone on her side of the desk. On his side, Stevens had booted up the ancient desktop and was using every bit of RAM to search the Internet for model train sets for his son. Christmas and toy trains, he thought. Does anyone still do that?
Suddenly, Windermere sat up in her chair, startling Stevens away from his search. “Hall,” she yelled. “Get in here!”
They had been sitting in their crummy office for almost two days, waiting on Arthur Pender to make a move. Security was doubled downstairs, and Detroit PD had a tactical team on standby. There was a helicopter waiting on the roof and plainclothesmen posted at the airport and train station. The green Explorer was all over the news, and there was nothing to do, thought Stevens, but wait.
Agent Hall appeared in the doorway. He flashed Stevens a grin and then turned to Windermere. “What’s up?”
“I’m bored, Hall,” she said. “Tell me we’re making progress.”
Hall shrugged. “We got maybe ten reports of Ford Explorers. Half of them green. None with Florida plates. We got people all over the map phoning in sightings of these kids, especially the blond girl. I bet every blonde in Michigan is pissed as hell at Tiffany Prentice right now.”
“That’s all?”
“Not quite,” said Hall. “Talked to Amtrak in Cincinnati about that Stirzaker thing. Picked up that fourth envelope just like you called it. Passport, credit card, birth certificate, and driver’s license. Stirzaker’s face, but the name was Adam Goulding.”
The Professionals Page 26
