Stolen Prey

church, how Jesus said he would die soon, and then they fell on the pizzas and ate them in five minutes.
    When they finished, Dos gathered up the empty boxes and took them into the kitchen, where they’d left Pruess’s bundled-up body. Blood had leaked out of the package onto the kitchen floor, like red sauce out of a burrito. Dos made a
sttt
sound with his tongue and palate, and bent and wiped it up and looked for somewhere to throw the napkin. Didn’t want to put it in the garbage,in case somebody found the hideout; the blood could be used to tie the home owner, Big Voice’s friend, to the murder.
    As he was looking around, he heard Uno call, sharply, “Look at this! Look at this!”
    Dos went into the front room and looked at his own face on the television; then a moment later, Uno’s, and then the faces of two other men he knew, one who was dead and one who was somewhere around, in Sonora, both shooters, and then two more faces he didn’t know. The local Latina anchorwoman was talking about them, about the killings in Wayzata.
    “They know us,” Uno said, unbelieving, staring at the screen.
    “Don’t know about me,” said Tres.
    “How did this happen?” asked Dos.
    “Don’t know. We have to call Big Voice.”
    “This is very bad,” Dos said. “Very, very bad.”
    Instead of throwing the bloody napkin in the garbage as he went back through the kitchen, he did something
really
stupid, without even thinking about it.
    A T THE END of the meeting with Bone, Lucas headed back home, and to dinner with Weather.
    Rivera, with Martínez driving, went to St. Paul, to a house off Robert Street. Four men were sitting around a kitchen table, drinking Budweiser. Rivera and Martínez were shown inside by the wife of one of the men, who led them through a living room with a sixty-inch television set up like a shrine, down a hall, to the kitchen.
    Rivera stepped in and one of the men stood up and smiledand said, “David, good to see you,” in Spanish. He introduced the other three, and they all stood to shake hands, and then Rivera took a chair and a beer while Martínez leaned against the refrigerator.
    The man who greeted Rivera was named Garza, and he said, “So, Miguel here”—he nodded to one of the other men—“talked to this man Flores, who has a cleaning crew and cleans up at the Wee Blue Inn. He saw these three men, and he believes that one or two of them were among those photographs that you put on television.”
    Rivera grunted and said, “Excellent. Now, does he know where they were going?”
    Miguel shook his head. “No. But he recognized the kind they were, narcos. He didn’t want to be around when they were, so he left work. Before he left, he saw their car, which he thinks was rented. It was a new Chevrolet Tahoe, silver. He thinks it had Texas license plates. That’s all he could say.”
    “More than I hoped for,” Rivera said. “I will call home and ask for help—if it was rented at the border, and since we know the type, we might find the number.”
    “What else can we do?” asked one of the other men.
    “The basic thing, we need to find these three men,” Rivera said. “We don’t want anyone to be hurt. So, if you ask, ask gently. People who might see three small Mexicanos driving in a new Chevrolet Tahoe, they’ll remember.”
    The men all looked at each other, and nodded, and then Rivera said to Garza, “So, Tomas, you have four more Garzas since I last saw you,” and the meeting turned into a party, and Garza’s wife brought in some very good mole poblano and roast turkey,and tortillas, and Martínez helped serve it around and then the kids came down and they had a very good evening….
    At the end, when the others had left, and Garza was taking them to the door, Rivera asked him, “Did you—”
    “Yes.” He reached behind a couch table and produced a yellow envelope and handed it to Rivera, who bounced its heft and said, “I am in your debt, Tomas. If you need anything, call me.”
    In the car, Rivera took the pistol out of the sack, checked it, cycled it: a well-used but nice Browning Hi Power, not a modern gun, but one he knew and liked. He put it in his belt and sighed.
    “Ah. I feel right for the first time since I got here.”
    “If the Americans find out…” Martínez began.
    “Fuck them,” Rivera said, as he started the car. “They treat us like children or traitors. So … fuck them.”

7
    T res couldn’t stop talking about his conversation