Stolen Prey

Shrake and Jenkins, were rolling down East Seventh, pulled in by Shaffer’s agents, when one of the agents called, shouting, and said, “We got a problem. We got a problem. He just jumped the fence around the railroad track, and I’m not sure, but it looks like he’s got a fuckin’ Uzi slung over his back.”
    Shaffer came back: “An Uzi? You’re sure?”
    “It’s a short black gun with what looks like a thirty-mag hanging under it. Hang on, hang on, Jack is coming up, he’s got glasses.”
    A moment later, a new voice: “This is Jack. He jumped another fence and he’s running up toward that car wash place, and I’m looking at him, and it—That’s a Mac-10, not an Uzi.”
    Shaffer said, “Lucas? What do you think?”
    “We’re busted. She sent him out there to see what would happen. If he’s got a Mac-10, I don’t think we can let him get intotown. There’s some big parking lots on the other side of the car wash. If he runs across those, we’d have him out in the open.”
    “I agree.” Shaffer began directing traffic, sending four cars on the other side of the parking lot, calling, “We’re coming, Jack. You and Roy follow on foot, come up behind him so he can’t run back into the park.”
    Jack called, “He’s walking now. He’s walking around the car wash.”
    U NO WAS looking around, saw nobody. He stopped, put the phone, which was still open, to his ear and asked, “Can you hear me? Can you hear me, Mama?”
    There was nobody on the other end. He heard what might have been traffic, but no human being.
    He looked around, and started walking, out onto a huge parking lot, toward a squat five- or six-story redbrick office building. He was thinking, now,
They have left me
. Not that they had been caught, or that they were waiting, but that he’d been abandoned. He felt like crying, but hadn’t cried since he was six, and so he didn’t. And there glimmered in his heart the possibility that they were waiting for him, just around the redbrick building….
    The glimmer of possibility died as he came up to it, and a man emerged at the side of the building and shouted, “Police. Stop.”
    Another man, in a dark uniform, stepped out with a long arm of some kind, a rifle.
    Uno had been born to have this moment happen. There had been other possibilities, that he might have wound up as a dirt farmer, or stuck in a barrio, scratching out a small life, but he’dchosen the narcos and they’d chosen him, and this moment was always going to come.
    He stripped off his jacket and threw it on the ground.
    The man out in front of him was shouting, “Stop! Stop!”
    Uno shouted back:
“Chingate!”
    Then with a single motion, long practice, he swept the Mac-10 from behind his back up into the shooting position, raking off the safety and tightening his finger against the trigger, the stuttering burst beginning as the muzzle came up….
    They’d seen the move and the man who’d first shouted at him dropped behind a car, and Uno saw him dropping and then the first impacts came, in his chest, turning him, and then…
    Nothing.
    S HAFFER WAS SCREAMING , “He’s down, he’s down, everybody okay? Everybody okay?”
    Uno’s burst from the Mac-10 had mostly spattered off the parking lot, ricocheting nobody knew where, but nobody, other than Uno, had been hurt.
    Uno was dead; the cops stood back, in a circle around his short, thin crumpled body, and a couple of sirens started—St. Paul cops responding to reports of a shooting. Lucas arrived with Del, Jenkins, and Shrake, and as they walked across the parking lot, they could see his face, looking up at the blue sky and the summer clouds. Shaffer said, “Mac-10. Haven’t seen one for a while.”
    And Shrake said, “The kid had legs.”

18
    T hey were all still standing around the parking lot, looking at the body, when Sandy, the researcher, called Lucas and said, “All that bullshit you said at the meeting this morning, about the Martha White woman on the airplane?”
    “Yeah?”
    “You were right. Except that her name is Edie Albitis and she flew in here last night from Newark,” Sandy said. “She’d just picked up two hundred thousand dollars in gold at Biedermann’s in Manhattan, and another two hundred thousand at Scone’s in Brooklyn.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “Well, every time we get a sale or a pickup, the TSA says we’ve got Albitis flying in and out of the local airport,” Sandy said. “Another thing—she’s an immigrant, from