Stolen Prey

than we do.”
    Her face went blank, and Lucas added hastily, “We don’t want to do that. Rivera was hurt. We need to find out what was said at the meeting last night. Miz Martínez is cooperating with us, she’s back … uh…”
    “How bad hurt?” she asked.
    “Ah, he’s dead, Miz Garza. He was shot to death an hour or so ago, when he found these bandits who murdered the family over in Wayzata.”
    She put a hand to her face: “He is dead? He was just here.”
    “We know, Miz Martínez told us,” Lucas said. “That’s why we need to talk to Tomas. Somebody last night told him the kind of car and maybe the license plate numbers of the bandits…. We desperately need that information.”
    She said, “Nobody knew the license plate numbers. But it was a silver Chevrolet Tahoe with Texas license plates, and they thought it was a rental car. This came from somebody else—not Tomas. I don’t know who.”
    “I’m going to call that in,” Morris said.
    “Let me do it,” Lucas said. “My researcher’s looking for that Nuñez guy. She can switch over to this. She’ll have it for us in twenty minutes.”
    Morris nodded and went back to Garza: “We still need to talk to your husband.”
    “He works very hard for his family,” she said.
    “We really don’t care about his status,” Morris said. “We really don’t.”
    “He works at Europa Car,” she said.
    L UCAS GOT on the phone and called his office, got switched to Sandy, and told her what he needed. “How long?”
    “Not too,” she said. “Fifteen minutes. Half an hour.”
    “Fifteen minutes,” he said. “The shooters may still be in the car. Push Nuñez.”
    “I can’t push both of them,” she said.
    “Sure you can.”
    E UROPA C AR was a repair shop a half-mile down the street, a bunch of older BMWs, Mercedeses, and an ancient Porsche, covered with gray primer paint, in its parking lot, which was surrounded by a chain-link fence with concertina wire on top.
    Garza was sitting in the outer office, nervously smoking a cigarette, when they arrived: his wife had called, and he’d decided to talk.
    “We know the Tahoe and the Texas plates. What else?”
    Garza took them through the meeting, didn’t mention thegun until Lucas asked. He looked away, then back and said, “David said you treated him like a child. This is a man who’d been fighting the gangs in a way you Americans just don’t know. You have nothing like this, except, maybe Afghanistan.”
    Lucas and Morris looked at him, but he turned away again, and Lucas decided, what the hell, and said, “Okay. He needed the weapon. I’ll buy that.”
    “If anybody pushes it, it could be a problem, later on,” Morris said. “I’m not saying it will be, but it could be.”
    “Whatever,” Garza said, in what was almost a valley accent.
    T HEY TALKED for a few more minutes, then Sandy called back and said, “There’s a silver Tahoe out on the road from El Paso, been gone a week, to a man named Simon Perez, who showed a Texas driver’s license and credit card. It looked good, so I called this Perez in El Paso, and he answered and he says he doesn’t know anything about a car rental. Says he’s never rented a Hertz in his whole life.”
    “That’s it,” Lucas said. “Put that out to every agency in the state, the description and the plate, and get the highway patrol looking down the interstates. They might be running for home. Tell everybody for God’s sakes be careful: they’ve now killed six people that we know about, and another two or three won’t make any difference to them. Put an alert out on that credit card. I want to know where and when they use it.”
    “I’ll do that. About that International ReCap—I’m not sure, but I think it’s a tire place. They buy used tires here in the U.S., recap them, and ship them south, across the border.”
    “Where’s their headquarters?”
    “Brownsville, Texas.”
    “Call them up and find out about Nuñez—where he might be.”
    “I did that, but I got a woman who says she’s an answering service,” Sandy said. “She can take messages, but that’s all she does. She won’t give me Nuñez’s phone number.”
    “So call the Brownsville cops, have them drop in and ask her. Those places don’t like cop trouble.”
    “I’ll try,” Sandy said.
    L UCAS WENT back to Morris and told him about the car: “All right. Now we’re getting some traction,” Morris said. “They’re either riding in a car we know,