Stolen Prey (40 page)

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.

W
ITH 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.

L
ETTY 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.

M
ARTÍNEZ 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.”

L
ETTY 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.

L
ETTY 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.

T
he 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.

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

W
EATHER 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….

T
HE 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.”

E
VENTUALLY
, 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.

L
ETTY’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.

T
HE
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 his 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.”

T
HE 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.”