Stolen Prey

one another. Because they had the same job at the same time and place, they became El Juan Uno, El Juan Dos, and El Juan Tres, or One, Two, and Three.
    They were young men, the youngest still in his teens, the oldest only twenty-four, but even the youngest had been killing for five years. They were not overly bright, were poorly educated and a long way from sophisticated. They knew four things well: guns, cars, road maps, and video games. In their temporary living quarters, they had a theater-quality television equipped with a PlayStation, and two cases of Budweiser.
    They gathered around the PlayStation and wrecked a lot of cars, and shot up a lot of aliens, hooting and laughing at the chaos. They didn’t talk about the Brooks family, because theBrooks family was dead, and therefore irrelevant. Uno and Dos and Tres simply waited, in the cool of the air-conditioning, washed by the slightly stale breezes of
Real Housewives of New Jersey
and
Dancing with the Stars
reruns, the artificial excitement of the shooter games, a bagful of real guns by their feet.
    T RES WAS the odd one out, the youngest, and the one for whom both the others had the greatest affection. Tres was not entirely of the world. He could kill as efficiently as anyone else, but he talked with God and other spirits, and went to church when he could.
    The spirits lived in churches. All churches. He could find his dead baby sister in Dallas as easily as in Juárez. She was always there, playing around the feet of the plaster Virgin.
    There were evil spirits in the churches as well, mean old priests and nuns ready to stick their claws in your neck. Tres was afraid of them, but he went anyway, and always to confession on Saturday afternoons. He confessed all of his sins, down to the smallest verbal transgression, with the exception of those committed on behalf of the LCN. Always, “I took the Lord’s name in vain, three times,” but never “I carved his eyeballs out with a pocketknife.”
    When he was done, he scuttled out of the churches, sweating and shaking, but clean.
    H IS UNCLE had brought him to the LCN when he was fourteen, said that he could do anything, but “This boy is a little crazy. Not a problem, but something you should know.”
    A little craziness was not a problem with the LCN. So he talked to ghosts? There were worse things in the world. And, with a good pistol, the boy could shoot the heart out of a peso coin at twenty feet. Also, he loved his mother greatly, and knew that if he ever said a word to the Federales, his employers would cut his mother’s head off. He was ultimately trustworthy.
    So the three Mexicans sat and played with the toys, and Tres would take his personal pistol out sometimes and stroke it and speak to it, and then Big Voice called and said they had another target.
    “A gay boy,” Big Voice said.
    I NSPECTOR D AVID R IVERA inspected his room at the Radisson Plaza. It was okay, he decided, not great; a faint odor of disinfectant lingered in the air, mixed with the scent of thousands of Golden Gopher supporters, their beer and potato chips.
    He had checked both himself and Martínez into separate rooms. After he’d looked at the first one, he turned and handed the other key to her and said, “I won’t need you anymore tonight.”
    She’d nodded and left.
    When she was gone, Rivera went to the window and looked out, then stepped back to his bag, unzipped the top compartment, and took out a cell phone. He carried it to the window, waited for it to come up: and he could see a satellite. He punched in a number and a man on the other end said, “David.”
    Rivera said, in Spanish, “I’m here. I was taken to the crime scene. The Americans already are looking for Mexican involvement,and Martínez told them that it looks like LCN. We’ve given them the six faces, which they will put on television.”
    “Do they have any solid leads?”
    “No. Not that they told me about,” Rivera said. “The team leader on the investigation does not like us. He thinks we are talking to the cartels. I think he will hold back information.”
    “I have two names for you. Good people, I’m told. They will meet you at the Garzas’. They might have useful information, if you can get away from the Americans.”
    “Getting away won’t be a problem,” Rivera said. “The Americans are polite, but they know almost nothing. They don’t care if we’re around, or not. I will go to any crime scenes they find, and to meetings in