Stolen Prey (15 page)

“Is there a church where I can pray?” Tres asked.

The man behind the counter, who wasn’t Mexican, but was extremely white and wide across the shoulders, gave him a smile and said, “Man, you are a five-minute walk from one of the phattest churches in the United States of America.”

“Yes? Fat?”

“Yes. St. Paul’s Cathedral. They’d be happy to have you come and pray.”

T
HAT THE
church should be so close was like a sign, Tres thought, as he walked along the street. In five minutes, like the pizza man said, he came to a large but ugly church, sitting on the edge of a hill, like a frog ready to jump into a pond. There were thousands of churches in Mexico, and he was not intimidated either by the cathedral’s size or by its holiness, although the gray, stark walls were somewhat forbidding. He found the heavy fort-like doors open, and people walking out, trailing the scent of incense. A religious service had just ended, he thought.

He stepped inside, intending to find a pew, to recite an Ave Maria or two, and perhaps a Gloria Patri, and to check the place out. And inside, he found the most glorious vision of his life:

Three rose stained-glass windows glowed like fire, the Jesus and the saints and the martyrs reached down to him. He turned and turned and turned, in the church aisle, looking at first one and then another, then stopped, breathless, transfixed, as the saints began to move, like willow trees in the wind, gracefully, a dance even.

And Jesus called, “Juan…”

T
RES GOT BACK
to the pizza place an hour later, and the man behind the counter still smiled, but he was annoyed. Although the pizza was still warm, he said, “The crust may be a little crispy because you’re so late,” and Tres said, “I went to the church. Like you said. Jesus called my name.”

“Hey, that’s really awesome,” the pizza man said. “That’ll be thirty-eight ninety.”

Tres fumbled a couple of twenties out of his jeans pockets. He was still distracted, dazzled by the procession of Jesus and the saints. The pizza man handed him the boxes, and Tres went toward the door and turned to the pizza man and said, “Jesus said I will die soon.”

The pizza man stepped back, and when Tres went out the door, thought,
Jeez. Is that a big goddamn gun in his pants?

He watched Tres as he walked past the front window, and then turned to his pizza-maker and said, “Man, that kid had a big goddamned gun in his pants.”

“All the better to shoot you Anglos with. Need a big gun to shoot a big fat man like you,” said the pizza-maker, whose name was Ochoa.

“Fuck you,” the counter man said. “Tell you what: no fuckin’ Sweeney is any fuckin’ Anglo.”

W
HEN
T
RES GOT BACK
, the others were unhappy with the delay—they were really hungry, and tired of watching
fútbol
reruns on the Spanish-language channels. He explained about the backup, and his trip to the church, how Jesus said he would die soon, and then they fell on the pizzas and ate them in five minutes.

When they finished, Dos gathered up the empty boxes and took them into the kitchen, where they’d left Pruess’s bundled-up body. Blood had leaked out of the package onto the kitchen floor, like red sauce out of a burrito. Dos made a
sttt
sound with his tongue and palate, and bent and wiped it up and looked for somewhere to throw the napkin. Didn’t want to put it in the garbage,
in case somebody found the hideout; the blood could be used to tie the home owner, Big Voice’s friend, to the murder.

As he was looking around, he heard Uno call, sharply, “Look at this! Look at this!”

Dos went into the front room and looked at his own face on the television; then a moment later, Uno’s, and then the faces of two other men he knew, one who was dead and one who was somewhere around, in Sonora, both shooters, and then two more faces he didn’t know. The local Latina anchorwoman was talking about them, about the killings in Wayzata.

“They know us,” Uno said, unbelieving, staring at the screen.

“Don’t know about me,” said Tres.

“How did this happen?” asked Dos.

“Don’t know. We have to call Big Voice.”

“This is very bad,” Dos said. “Very, very bad.”

Instead of throwing the bloody napkin in the garbage as he went back through the kitchen, he did something
really
stupid, without even thinking about it.

A
T THE END
of the meeting with Bone, Lucas headed back home, and to dinner with Weather.

Rivera, with Martínez driving, went to St. Paul, to a house off Robert Street. Four men were sitting around a kitchen table, drinking Budweiser. Rivera and Martínez were shown inside by the wife of one of the men, who led them through a living room with a sixty-inch television set up like a shrine, down a hall, to the kitchen.

Rivera stepped in and one of the men stood up and smiled
and said, “David, good to see you,” in Spanish. He introduced the other three, and they all stood to shake hands, and then Rivera took a chair and a beer while Martínez leaned against the refrigerator.

The man who greeted Rivera was named Garza, and he said, “So, Miguel here”—he nodded to one of the other men—“talked to this man Flores, who has a cleaning crew and cleans up at the Wee Blue Inn. He saw these three men, and he believes that one or two of them were among those photographs that you put on television.”

Rivera grunted and said, “Excellent. Now, does he know where they were going?”

Miguel shook his head. “No. But he recognized the kind they were, narcos. He didn’t want to be around when they were, so he left work. Before he left, he saw their car, which he thinks was rented. It was a new Chevrolet Tahoe, silver. He thinks it had Texas license plates. That’s all he could say.”

“More than I hoped for,” Rivera said. “I will call home and ask for help—if it was rented at the border, and since we know the type, we might find the number.”

“What else can we do?” asked one of the other men.

“The basic thing, we need to find these three men,” Rivera said. “We don’t want anyone to be hurt. So, if you ask, ask gently. People who might see three small Mexicanos driving in a new Chevrolet Tahoe, they’ll remember.”

The men all looked at each other, and nodded, and then Rivera said to Garza, “So, Tomas, you have four more Garzas since I last saw you,” and the meeting turned into a party, and Garza’s wife brought in some very good mole poblano and roast turkey,
and tortillas, and Martínez helped serve it around and then the kids came down and they had a very good evening….

At the end, when the others had left, and Garza was taking them to the door, Rivera asked him, “Did you—”

“Yes.” He reached behind a couch table and produced a yellow envelope and handed it to Rivera, who bounced its heft and said, “I am in your debt, Tomas. If you need anything, call me.”

In the car, Rivera took the pistol out of the sack, checked it, cycled it: a well-used but nice Browning Hi Power, not a modern gun, but one he knew and liked. He put it in his belt and sighed.

“Ah. I feel right for the first time since I got here.”

“If the Americans find out…” Martínez began.

“Fuck them,” Rivera said, as he started the car. “They treat us like children or traitors. So … fuck them.”

T
res couldn’t stop talking about his conversation with Jesus and the saints, and his continual reflection began to get on the others’ nerves, and finally Dos told him to shut up. Tres smiled and said, “I’m to die soon, why should I listen to you?”

“Because if you don’t, you will die immediately.” They all laughed at that, and Tres shut up.

They hung out and watched television until midnight, then carried Pruess’s body out through the side door to the driveway, and heaved it into the back of the Tahoe. They planned to go out far enough that the body, if discovered, wouldn’t bring the police into their neighborhood, and then throw it in a dumpster, and hope that it was hauled away to the dump, or the incinerator, or wherever the
yanquis
got rid of their trash.

Nothing worked quite right for them.

There were dumpsters everywhere, but it was hard to find one where they could safely and discreetly lift the lid and deposit a two-hundred-pound body. Especially since the body, wrapped in its blue tarp, looked more like a dead body than it would have if it’d been in a coffin. Somebody would look at the bundle and say, “Well, there’s the head, and there’s the feet, and that thick part is the butt….”

Another problem was that the body wasn’t easy to handle: it carried like two hundred pounds of Jell-O. They found an obscure dumpster behind an office building, but after pulling up in the car, realized that none of them were tall enough to lift the lid on the dumpster. That got them laughing, but didn’t make things any smoother.

They laughed less when they found one short enough that they could lift the lid—barely—and then found they couldn’t both hold the lid up and lift the mushy body high enough to get it inside. They were strong little guys, but it was two hundred pounds of mushy dead weight. They kept looking.

Eventually they found a shorter dumpster on Upper St. Dennis Road, outside a driveway where a house was being remodeled. After driving past a few times, they quickly hopped out, in the deep dark night, popped open the lid, and threw the body in.

Five seconds later, they were gone.

F
IVE HOURS LATER
, Muffy St. Clair, a dog, stopped just down the street to poop. Her owner, Bonnie St. Clair, picked the poop up in a plastic baggie and carried it over to the dumpster to throw it in. Pruess’s body-bundle was folded into the dumpster, feet and head up, butt down, bent in the middle. It took a few seconds, then Bonnie said, “Jesus fuckin’ Christ, Muffy, it’s a body.”

She ran home to call the cops, and after a while, a St. Paul homicide cop named Roger Morris called Lucas, who had planned to sleep in late on a Saturday morning.

“Somebody tore the guy to pieces,” Morris said. “It looks like what happened to those people in Wayzata, if those rumors are true.”

“Half hour,” Lucas said. “Did you call Bob Shaffer?”

“Naw, he’s an asshole,” Morris said. “You can call him if you want.”

“Did the dead guy have any ID on him?”

“We haven’t completely unwrapped him yet. He’s wrapped in a plastic tarp.”

“Well, his name is probably Richard Pruess, and he was a vice president for Polaris National Bank over in Minneapolis. He was probably killed because some Mexican narcos think he stole a bunch of money from them.”

“Huh. So I got nothing left to detect,” Morris said.

“You could detect where the killers are,” Lucas said. “We have no idea.”

“Okay. Get your ass over here. And call Shaffer.”

L
UCAS DID
, but Shaffer lived in one of the far north suburbs, and his wife said he was out running. “He left his cell phone here. He doesn’t like to be disturbed,” Shaffer’s wife said.

“Well, tell him to call me,” Lucas said. “I need to disturb him.”

Then he called Rivera, who was eating breakfast, and gave him an address, and headed for the shower. Thirty-one minutes after he took the call, he pulled up to the St. Paul crime-scene tape and got out of the Porsche, held his ID up for the rookie who was minding the tape, and went through the line.

Morris, a fat black guy in a pink dress shirt and black slacks, was looking with discouragement into the dumpster, while a crime-scene guy walked around the area with a video camera. Morris’s partner, who was standing on a nearby front porch, talking
to the home owner, raised a hand, and Lucas waved back. Lucas walked up to Morris and said, “I really like you in pink, sweetie.”

“Fuck you. You don’t look this good in your dreams.” He tipped his head toward the dumpster. The body was still folded inside, but had been partially unwrapped.

Lucas looked in, winced, turned back to Morris and said, “Same guys.”

“Yeah, I thought maybe. I saw all that stuff on TV. They cut his fingers off at the joints, and the pieces are rolling around like unchewed chunks of Dubble Bubble gum.”

“Nice simile,” Lucas said. “Kinda literary.”

“I’m a literary kind of guy, but … who’re
these
people?” Morris was looking back over Lucas’s shoulder.

Lucas turned and saw Rivera and Martínez walking up to the crime-scene line. He shouted down to the cop,
“Let them in,”
and said to Morris, “Mexican cops. They’re up here to observe, see what they can pick up.”

Rivera walked up, looking unsettled: a kind of after-sex look, and Lucas glanced at Martínez, who looked a little glassy herself, and thought,
Hmm
. Rivera had told him he was married to a nice hometown girl.

Rivera said, “Thank you for the call,” and Lucas introduced him to Morris. Rivera looked in the dumpster, then called Martínez up with a crook of his finger, and they both looked in for a moment. Then Martínez turned to Morris and said, “This is the Agua Prieta group. The same people.”

“Mexicans?” Morris asked.

Rivera nodded and said, “Yes. We think somebody robbed one
of their drug laundries, and they are either trying to get their money back, or are on a punishment mission.”

“Well, hell. I am definitely nonplussed,” Morris said.

“As we all are,” Lucas said. “Let’s find a place to sit down, and we’ll fill you in.”

“One thing,” Morris said. “We found a clue.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Really. C’mere.” He led the way to his car, opened the door, took out a big plastic bag. “This was inside the wrapper right by the face. It’s a napkin with a smear of blood on it, and what smells like a little dog shit.”

“Dog shit?” Lucas, Rivera, and Martínez were looking through the transparent plastic.

“The body was found when a woman opened the dumpster to throw in a bag of dog shit. I guess they all go around picking up dog shit in this neighborhood,” Morris said. “Anyway, she threw it in, and it landed on the head part … but when we unwrapped, we found this. Looks like somebody used it to wipe up some blood or something. It’s a napkin from Zapp’s.”