Stolen Prey

was a trap, and they had to run, the BCA agents knew Martínez’s rental, but not the Toyota.
    As she waited for traffic at the edge of the parking lot, she remembered her shock when Davenport had suddenly appeared at Sanderson’s apartment, running up the apartment steps with the gun in his hand.
    She began to sweat. Something about the feel of the thing.
    The direct route to Margaret Street would be a left turn and straight ahead. She considered, checked her iPad again, and took a right. She turned right again on East Seventh, then left on Greenbrier, drove a block, and found herself looking out the driver’s-side window, down a long, steep bluff, into a vast weedy hole in the ground. She’d seen it on the iPad, but hadn’t been quite sure what she was looking at.
    Another block and they came to Margaret Street, but five blocks from the target house, and across the four-lane East Seventh Street. Margaret dead-ended at the hole, which a sign said was Swede Hollow Park.
    She looked at it for a moment, then turned around and drove back the way she came, again overshooting the direct route to Margaret.
    Uno, who was now looking at the iPad, said, “No, you turned the wrong way.”
    “We’re going another way,” she said.
    Uno turned the iPad in his hands, and the map image turned with him, frustrating him—he wanted to look at it sideways, andit wouldn’t allow him to do that. “Shit,” he said. “This machine is shit.”
    Martínez took the tablet away from him, propped it against her steering wheel, and followed the map along Mounds Boulevard to Third Street, took Third to Cypress, turned left on Cypress to Fremont, turned the corner on Fremont and pulled over.
    “So now, one of you has a mission.” She didn’t care about which one—one was as dumb as the other.
    Uno was querulous:
“¿Qué?”
    She explained: there was some small chance that the cops were watching this house. A small chance, but a chance. They nodded.
    “There may be twenty-two million dollars inside,” she told them. “Big Voice says that if we get the gold, I will get ten percent for taking the chance to get it, and each of you will get five percent. That’s one million dollars in gold for each of you, if we take this chance. A million in gold will buy a very nice life for you and your mother and your wife, if you have one. A Toyota Tundra with a cap, running boards, brush guard, bush lights. Whatever you want. Ten of them, if you like, and you still won’t have spent even half of the gold.”
    They nodded, listening closely now.
    If the police were waiting up ahead, it would be better if only one of them was caught. The others could then try to rescue that one, or get away, and send money for lawyers and so on.
    “So which one goes?” Uno asked.
    “You decide,” she said.
    The two killers looked at each other and Uno finally lit upand said,
“Piedra, papel o tijera.”
Rock, paper, scissors, best two out of three.
    Tres laughed and nodded. Uno promptly won the first round, rock breaking scissors. Tres groaned with excitement, and they went again, and Tres won this time, paper covering rock, when Uno tried to get smart and do “rock” twice in a row. Tres pulled out a second victory with another paper over rock.
    Uno giggled and said to Martínez, “I thought he would do scissors because he thought I would go to paper, but, I fail.”
    Martínez nodded, contained an impulse to smack them both, and said, “Look for people in cars, or people standing around not doing much, or even people hiding. Look in windows. Walk slowly. We will keep the telephone on, you and me. If you see something, tell me.”
    If he didn’t see something, she told him, he was to check the house, and perhaps go in. “If you do see something, go this way on the same street, on Margaret. If they chase you, keep going, and you will come to that big hole we saw. They can’t follow in their cars, and you are very fast, so you will lose them when you go through the hole.”
    “Ah,” Uno said. He was, indeed, very fast. “Walk on to East Seventh Street, and then down the long hill to the city.”
    “We will be on this street, and will watch behind you.” She tapped the iPad. “When you get here, in the city, you will call us and we will come and get you.”
    Uno looked at the iPad for a long moment, then said, “So I walk to this Margaret Street and then to the right number, and then, if I find the gold, I call you. If I don’t, I call