Stolen Prey

Which was okay. The job brought in extra money, on top of money sent by his parents back in Egypt, while he studied advertising and business management at Metro State.
    He was a happy enough young man until he stepped around the corner of his four-year-old Subaru and popped the door. Immediately, a thin young brown-skinned man was behind him, with a handgun, and he said, with a Latino accent, “Give me the keys.”
    Then another brown-skinned man came around the nose of the car and said, “The keys,” and he also had a gun.
    Chakkour handed over the keys and said, “Let me go,” but the smaller of the two men backed away from him and said, “Get in the backseat. We will let you go, but we need your car for a while. Get in or I will shoot.”
    Chakkour got in without a struggle: for one thing, he hoped he might get the car back.
    Once in the car, Tres told him to slide across, then Tres got in beside him with the handgun pointed at Chakkour’s stomach.
    Uno got the bags from the Tahoe, threw them in the trunk of the Subaru, and they headed out of the parking lot and ontoI-35W north. Chakkour began pleading: “Don’t hurt me. I’m like you, I come from another country, I come from Egypt, my family sent me here to work to get an education…. I’m brown like you, we’re brothers….”
    Tres laughed and said, “I think you are even browner. But you are like a terrorist, huh? Like an Arab terrorist.”
    Chakkour picked up on the joke and got the two Mexicans talking, and twenty miles north, they took an exit, chosen just at random, drove four miles and then took a side road, and another mile, and another side road. No houses around. Uno stopped and said, “We leave you here. When you walk to a house, you don’t tell anybody who took you. We need one hour. One hour, and you never see us again.”
    “Okay. Okay.”
    Tres got out first, and Chakkour scrambled out after him and moved to the side of the road. Tres said, “Good-bye,” and shot Chakkour in the heart, and when he’d fallen, put a shot in his head.
    Some red-winged blackbirds startled out of a cattail swamp in the ditch and flew away, but the Mexicans could see or hear nothing else but the breeze; this was in the best part of Minnesota’s August, with the roadsides turning golden brown, and the wind carrying the scent of ripening grain.
    “In the weeds,” Uno said, getting out of the car.
    They took Chakkour’s wallet, with his driver’s license, then picked him up by the hands and feet and threw him back into a tall stand of reeds. The body disappeared as effectively as if it’d been thrown into quicksand.
    “So. We have a car. Now we need a house,” Uno said. “We need to talk to Big Voice.”
    They got back in the car and turned around and headed back out toward the interstate. On the way, Uno looked at the photo on Chakkour’s driver’s license. “He’s the right age, the picture, it could almost be me.”
    “We are all brown together,” Tres said, and then he giggled. “All brown brothers.”
    “What a moron,” Uno said in English. Then back to Spanish: “Brown brothers.”
    A T THE HOTEL , Martínez went first to Rivera’s room, for which he’d given her a key. She knew the St. Paul police would eventually show up, so she went quickly to his suitcase, opened it, pulled up a seam at the bottom, and slipped out an envelope. She thumbed the flap on the envelope, saw the sheath of fifty- and hundred-dollar bills, and put it in her purse. Moving to the closet, she checked his suits, then his shoes, for a second envelope. She eventually found it in a bundle of dirty underwear. Altogether, six thousand dollars.
    In her own room, she stashed the money, then undressed, except for her underpants, and pulled on a man’s T-shirt, which she used as a nightgown. Then she lay on the floor, her hands at her sides, her eyes closed, in a yoga position called the Corpse Pose. The pose was useful for eliminating tension. Breathing through her nose only, willing her breathing to slow, and then her mind, then letting go even of her will, she felt herself clearing….
    M ARTÍNEZ had been born in the same kind of village that had given birth to Uno, Dos, and Tres. She had no more hope thanthey had, no more possibilities, but something primal, something in her soul, kept her going to school when most everybody else had given up. She learned very early, though, that while she was smarter than most men, men were stronger.
    That was a very