Stolen Prey

again and put his heels up on his desk, as Rivera continued: “I always look at real estate when I come to the U.S. The first day here, when we were at the Brooks house, I looked at the real estate before I went inside. You know why?”
    “Why is that?” Lucas asked.
    “Because I have this dream. I hear about this narco, he has ten million dollars in hundred-dollar bills, in his backpack, and I find him. He tries to shoot me, and I righteously shoot first. But then I open the backpack and here is all this money. I do not hesitate.I take the backpack, I go to Ciudad Juárez, where nobody knows me. I hire a coyote to get me across the border to Texas,” Rivera said. “In El Paso, I get on a bus with my backpack, I go to Kansas, or Minnesota, or Montana, to some small town. I buy a nice house with a span of land, ten hectares, twenty hectares. I plant some fruit trees, I plant a garden, I marry a fat white American farm woman. We live on the farm and I raise goats and maybe a cow, maybe some pigs, some corn…. Sometimes, I have a small boat, and we take it to a lake on a wheeler. Hey? I dream this all the time. My fantasy. I live in these fantasy books, where the good guys win. I live in my fantasy dream, where I win…. It’s all bullshit, but that’s what I do.”
    Lucas said, “Well, if you make it across the border, you can stay at my house until you find the farm.”
    Rivera smiled and slapped the desktop. “Thank you. If I make it across the border, I will come here, for sure. But this won’t happen. They’ll kill me first. For the last three years, I have thought I have perhaps a year to live, probably less. So far, I defy the odds. But one of these years, I won’t. They’ll kill me. I hate them. I hate the motherfuckers. This is correct in English, right? Motherfuckers?”
    “Yup, motherfuckers,” Lucas said. “But it’s trailers, not wheelers. You put a boat on a trailer.”
    “Because it goes on trails?”
    “No, because … never mind. So … why don’t you just quit and come up north?” Lucas asked.
    “I can’t. I am a patriot. These motherfuckers are destroying my country,” Rivera said. “I have to help stop them. But in the end, I lose. This is not a fantasy.”
    “That’s pretty goddamn bitter,” Lucas said.
    Rivera nodded, held Lucas’s eyes for a second, then turned to Martínez and said, “We have to go.”
    Lucas asked, “What are you up to? Is there anything I can do for you?”
    “Your only, mmm, report of interest is your visit to this hotel, the Wee Blue Inn,” Rivera said. “There are Mexicans there. I have introductions here in St. Paul, I will be able to find people who know the people in this town…. Maybe I’ll find something.”
    “Be careful,” Lucas said.
    “That is my name,” Rivera said. “Careful Rivera.”
    Martínez shook her head. “Careless Rivera, I think.” She wasn’t being funny; she was absolutely morose.
    As they were walking away down the hall, Lucas stuck his head out and called, “Hey, wait a minute.” He walked down to them and asked, “Could you guys come to my house tonight? For dinner?”
    Rivera smiled and said, “This is very nice of you, but … I am afraid we have another dinner, with friends. If we could do it some other time?”
    “Sure,” Lucas said.
    W HEN THEY WERE GONE , Lucas went back to reading the reports and found an enormous amount of detail, but nothing he considered important—not yet, anyway. The techs thought they’d probably get all kinds of DNA, which meant that after they caught the killers, they could convict them. Unfortunately, they had to catch them first.
    He was still reading when Ingrid Caroline Eccols called. Lucas’ssecretary stuck her head in the door and said, “ICE is on line one.”
    Lucas picked it up and said, “Hey, Ingy.”
    “If I was there, and had a gun, I’d shoot you for calling me that,” ICE said.
    “Yeah, I know, but you’re not,” Lucas said. “So how you doin’, ICE?”
    “Good. I just heard a funny joke. You want me to tell it to you?”
    “Not especially,” Lucas said. “You have a very limited sense of humor, and you don’t tell a joke very well. You tell me one every time I see you, and they’re never funny.”
    “Fuck you, Lucas. My rate just went up to two and a half.”
    “Tell the joke,” Lucas said. “Come back down to two hundred, and I might even laugh.”
    S HE TOLD the joke in what was supposed to be a heavy southern accent, but