Stolen Prey

22

Letty turned the corner and walked down toward the house, when her hot-chick spider-sense kicked up: the feeling that somebody was watching her. She’d mentioned the spider-sense to Lucas one time, and he’d said, “Yep. It’s there. Ask anyone who’s done surveillance.”

It came, he said, because when people are watching someone, they tend to lock their heads in place; instead of wobbling here and there, making subtle changes each and every second, their head goes still. Even when the watcher points his head in another direction, and watches from the corner of his eye, the head freezes. That’s picked up by the human social sense, which can find even the most subtle of cues.

People doing surveillance learn not really to watch the target at all, in a specific sense. They look past the target at something else, or at nothing at all … and keep the head moving.

“When somebody’s watching you from a car, they almost always slow the car down, to keep you in sight for a longer time. Once the target picks up on that, you’re cooked,” Lucas said.

That’s what she picked up on: the car was moving too slowly, as though keeping her in sight. Could be a couple of guys from school, she thought. A girlfriend had passed along the results of a dirty, rotten sexist jock-o poll in which Letty’s ass had ranked among the top five at the school.

She was insulted to be the subject of something so low. Sort of.

SO SHE picked up on the car…

As she turned up the sidewalk, she used her key to go through the front door. Heard Weather in the kitchen and called, “Hi, Mom,” and Weather called back, “Sam’s playing with his Leapster, and he probably needs a diaper change. Could you get him? Could you get him?”

Letty said, “Sure,” but before she did that, she stopped and peeked through the palm-sized door window.

The car was in the driveway, and Martínez and a short Mexican man were getting out. Letty recognized them instantly: she’d been working at Channel Three, and Martínez’s picture was everywhere. Martínez had a gun in her hand, and the short man was carrying what might have been a log. They were coming, she thought, for Dad, but they wouldn’t leave anybody alive.

LETTY TURNED to the kitchen and screamed, “Mom: run upstairs. The Mexicans are here and they’ve got guns. Mom, run upstairs!”

Weather, sounding confused, called, “What?”

Letty screamed, “Run! Run! Get up in the apartment, block the door, block the door, the Mexicans, the Mexicans…”

And she turned and ran up the stairs to the second floor, screaming, “Run, run….”

MARTÍNEZ HAD cracked at five o’clock, or thereabouts, an hour after a call with the Big Voice.

The Big Voice didn’t believe her. “We have seen this video. They say you have the gold, Ana.”

“I have no gold.”

“So they are lying on TV, these police.”

“Yes, they are lying. It’s this Davenport, he’s the one. He does this to split us apart.”

The Big Voice sighed and said, “I understand. So, tonight, if you will run to Des Moines, we will have a van for you, and a driver. He can hide you in the van, and you will be back tomorrow night.”

To Martínez, it had been quite clear. They were fifty-fifty on whether she was telling the truth. In her shoes, they would have taken the gold. They understood that Davenport might be lying, but then again, he might not be. Once the Criminales had their hands on her, they would get the truth.

Martínez might not survive the process, but then, she just wasn’t that important at the moment. Whatever importance she had once had, had diminished when Rivera went down, and wouldn’t come back until she knew her new assignment with the Federales. If she was shuffled off to a clerical job, the LCN would no longer be interested. If she was attached to another inspector, or even a higher rank, then she might be important again.

But for now…

And if the Federales got her, they would get their own truth, and that would not help the Criminales either: she had far too much personal information on them.

The fact of the matter was, Martínez realized as she took a turn around the living-room carpet, she might now be considered a liability to the LCN. They would kill her, perhaps with a twinge of regret, but not too much. Any American police agency would drop her in jail, forever; and the Federales…

She shuddered when she thought what the Federales might do.

She went round and round with it, grew angrier and angrier.

No way out. There was no way out.

At five o’clock, she cracked, and growled at Tres: “Get your gun.”

Tres had been watching the television: “¿Qué?”

“We go to kill this cop,” she said. “This cop who lies about us, who has done this.”

Tres made a moue, then said, “Okay.” He was going to die anyway, pretty soon. The saints had told him so, and one day was as good as the next.

AS THEY CAME UP to Davenport’s house, she saw his Lexus truck in the driveway and said, “He’s there.”

“We will do it?”

“We will do it right now.”

The door was a stout one, a cop’s door, but gave way before the battering ram, a four-by-four that Tres scavenged from a parking lot.

As the door splintered, Letty screamed a last time, “Mom, Mom, run in the apartment, run in the apartment, block the door…”

Then she turned and ran toward her parents’ bedroom.

TRES CAME through the door first, the four-by-four discarded on the stoop, a Mac-10 in his hand. Martínez was a step behind him with a nine-millimeter handgun. Tres scanned to his left, toward the main part of the house, which may have saved Letty’s life, because he did not instantly pick up on her as she fled along the open hallway above the living room. As it was, he got off one burst, which peppered the wall behind her—almost missing.

But not quite. One nine-millimeter slug hit her left forearm, broke the bone, and blew bloody tissue onto the wall behind it; the pain was intense, but she’d been hurt before and didn’t slow down. Sam’s room was halfway down the hall, on the right, and as she passed his door, she could see him staring at his video game, oblivious to the screaming. She reached out with her good hand and yanked the door shut and went on down to the master bedroom.

WEATHER WAS in the kitchen with the baby. Martínez and Tres couldn’t see her, but they heard her when she knocked over a chair as she ran toward the back stairs, up to the housekeeper’s apartment over the garage.

Martínez snapped at Tres, “Take the girl,” and Tres ran that way, toward the stairs, as Martínez ran toward the kitchen. She expected Davenport to appear, and ran awkwardly, with the pistol extended in front of her, toward the kitchen.

IN THE BEDROOM, Letty pulled open the bottom drawer of Lucas’s bedside stand, forced herself to calmly go through the quick two-finger-three-finger-two-finger sequence of Lucas’s pistol safe’s combination lock.

Had to get it right the first time and she did it deliberately, even as she heard the footsteps on the stairs, the man with the machine gun…

TRES RAN up the stairs and saw the bloody splotch on the wall, and heard the girl in the far bedroom. He smiled and slowed his step: it was over.

LETTY LOOKED and mostly behaved like a young upper-middle-class girl, but she’d grown up so desperately poor, in the far-northern Minnesota backcountry, her father long gone, her mother a helpless and hopeless alcoholic.

She had, as a child, learned to fend for herself trapping muskrats off the local swamps, for grocery money. Pushed to the wall, she’d had no problem with killing, either muskrats or people. Davenport met her on a murder investigation, during which her mother had been murdered. He and Weather had later adopted her.

The early desperation had marked her, indelibly. She did all the things that young girls now did, texted and Tweeted and Facebooked, fretted over lip glosses and uncurling her hair, and a few other things as well. When Lucas went to the range to work with his pistols, she went along as often as she could.

And she had an ability.

WITH HER left arm dangling at her side, she used her right hand to do the two-three-two-finger sequence, meant for rapid access to the pistol, and there was the Gold Cup Colt .45. She picked it up and slapped the butt against her thigh, to make sure the magazine was well seated, then, holding the stock between her knees, used her good hand to jack a shell into the chamber. There was a second magazine in the safe, and she stuffed it in her back jeans pocket, gripped the pistol, and turned back toward the door.

All of it, from the time she’d shouted at Weather to the time she turned toward the door, had taken no more than eight or ten seconds; perhaps not that. But she could hear the gunman pounding up the stairs, and she ran toward him, heard him coming down the hallway, lifted the pistol eye-high, stepped sideways, and saw him.

Right there.

Eight feet and coming fast, but his gun pointed sideways toward the bloody wall. He wouldn’t have done it that way if he’d believed Lucas was upstairs. He would have moved more slowly with the pistol up.

As it was, he had just tensed his diaphragm for what would have been a grunt of surprise, but he never got it out. Tres never had a chance to talk to his saints, to see that their prediction of his early death would be correct. Before he could begin any of that, Letty, shooting for the white spot in his left eye, pulled the shot a bit and sent the .45 slug through the bridge of his nose. As she stepped over his dead, falling body, she shot him a second and third time in the heart.

LETTY SPENT no time worrying about the Mexican boy: he was dead. She heard a burst of shots, one at a time but fast, from the stairs to the housekeeper’s apartment above the garage, and she went that way, running lightly, quietly, down the stairs, turning the corner, through the living room and kitchen, to the bottom of the stairs, and then up.

MARTÍNEZ HAD gone into the kitchen expecting a close-up shoot-out with Davenport, but the kitchen was empty. At the same time, she heard somebody running in the back, and she followed the noise, pushing the pistol out ahead of her, as she’d been trained, found a door going into the garage and a carpeted stairway going up.

She heard a door slam at the top of the stairs, but took just a second to pop the garage door and look inside the garage. There were two cars, but no sign of life. She ran up the stairs, heard a heavy thump behind the door, and fired five shots through it, fast as she could, bam-bam-bam-bam-bam.

She heard Weather scream something, and she kicked at the door, but it didn’t budge, and she fired five shots at the doorknob and lock, and then kicked it, but unlike the usual Hollywood-movie sequence, the door remained closed.

Frustrated, she emptied the gun at the door, ejected the magazine, and fumbled another magazine from her jacket pocket.

A woman’s voice, on the stairs, said, “Hey.”

LETTY WAS HALFWAY UP the stairs when she saw Martínez empty the gun at the door and jack out the magazine. She said, “Hey.”

Martínez turned, jerking her head around, saw Letty there, with the big .45 in her hand. Tres, she barely had time to think, must have failed. She blurted, “I have no gun. I am empty.”

She dropped the pistol and the magazine.

LETTY SAID, “Bullshit. You tried to kill my mom and my little sister.”

She shot Martínez in the heart. Martínez didn’t go down, but staggered backward, a shocked look on her face. She lifted her hand, and Letty shot her again, in the heart, and Martínez sagged but still brought the hand up, as if to fend off the bullets. They were now only six feet apart, and Letty shot her a third time, in the face, and then Martínez slid down the wall, leaving behind a smear of blood. Letty screamed, “Mom, are you all right?”

“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.