Stolen Prey

or they’re walking around with a bunch of suitcases.”
    “No traction on Nuñez,” Lucas said.
    He explained, and then they said good-bye to Garza—told him to stay away from street guns—and headed back to the crime scene. On the way, Lucas took a call from the BCA duty officer who said he had a Mexican cop on the line. “He says he’s Rivera’s boss. You want the call?”
    “Yeah, give him the number,” Lucas said.
    The phone rang again a minute later. A Comisario General Jorge Espinoza, a secretary said, and Espinoza came on a minute later. “David is gone, I’m told.”
    “I’m afraid so,” Lucas said. “He located the shooters in our case, and he went after them himself. He shot one of them, but was shot himself. The shooters are running, and we’re trying to track them.”
    “I can give you a probable car and license plate number for them,” Espinoza said. “David called in to our office last night and asked us to trace a late-model Chevrolet Tahoe with Texas license plates. We were waiting to call the information to him, but then we could not reach him this morning….”
    Lucas took down the information, which matched the information he’d gotten from Sandy; and that made Lucas feel that Espinoza could be trusted, to some extent. He gave Espinoza the details of the investigation, including the discovery of the pizza napkin, and told him how Rivera and Martínez had used the car information to track the killers.
    “This is typical: I have told him at least one hundred times that someday he would be killed kicking down doors like this. He did it anyway. I think he got some kind of pleasure from it, going in with a gun, naked, so to speak.”
    “So he’s done it a lot,” Lucas said, thinking again of Rivera’s body.
    “More than anybody else,” Espinoza said. “Ah, David, this is so stupid. So stupid, to get killed like this….”
    B ACK AT the Nuñez house, the St. Paul crime-scene people were at work. Martínez was still sitting on the porch of the house next door, but when she saw Lucas and Morris arrive, she came down and asked, “Did you find them?”
    “Got the plates and make and model,” Lucas said. “We’re looking for them now. Couldn’t find Nuñez, but we found his answering service in Brownsville. We’re going to ask the Brownsville cops to check for a cell number. That should give us his location.”
    She nodded, then said, “I’m going back to my room, if you don’t need me.”
    “I’ll drop you,” Lucas said.
    She shook her head: “No. You stay here and do what you do. I have a taxi on the way.”
    “What a day,” Lucas said. “What a sad day. I’m sorry for David and for you. So sorry.”

9
    U no and Tres were freaked, not so much about the death of Dos—that was going to happen, sooner or later, to all of them, and probably sooner than later, part of the business—as the
morra
who shot him. She’d done it as well as either of them might have, had come out of nowhere, like a vision behind the muzzle blast of the Federale, when they’d been caught cold, and Dos had been shot….
    She’d known the Big Voice and they’d said to each other, as they sped away, heading for the Rosedale mall, their bailout site, “The Big Voice is everywhere. Did you see this
morra
with the baby gun, she goes
boom…”
    She’d given them one hour to get rid of the car. That wouldn’t be a problem, they’d worked it out in advance.
But did you see her with the baby gun…?
    At the mall they found a space in a thickly occupied corner of the parking lot between Macy’s and JCPenney. They had a box of Handi Wipes and used them to wipe the plastic surfaces of the car, everything they could reach, although they knew there’d probably be a few prints remaining when they finished. Still, no reason to make it easy for the gringo cops.
    When they finished, they got out and began wiping the exterior door handles and under the back hatch release; that done,they got back in the car and turned it on, and found a radio station that played Mexican music and sat and waited.
    They’d taken less than fifteen minutes to drive to the mall, and they’d waited almost another fifteen, passing on a number of shoppers who came and went, until Uno said, “There. That one.”
    F ERAT C HAKKOUR came out of the shopping center twirling his car keys on his index finger. He worked in one of the Rosedale kiosks, selling oversized soft pretzels, for which he made seven dollars an hour.