Stolen Prey

coin was worth about sixteen hundred dollars. Together, they were worth a little less than $200,000, give or take.
    He looked at the coins for a moment, thinking how useless andridiculous gold was, except for the two things it did. The first was to store value, the second was to look good around the necks of rich women. In some places, as in the Middle East and India, both of those things. He picked up one of the coins, carried it to the window, and looked at it in a pencil-thin beam of light. The gold shimmered, and the eagle looked alive. He shook his head and began opening the other packages.
    In the course of the morning, the rest of the packages showed up in a second delivery. Twelve in all, with a hundred to a hundred and fifty coins in each.
    All together, by the end of the morning, he had two and a half million dollars in gold in the car, repacked into the three smallest of the delivery boxes—almost a hundred pounds in all.
    Not enough: it was coming in too slowly. If the cops had gotten to Polaris, they’d eventually track the cash into the buying accounts. But they’d have a way to go before they could do that—a lot of wire transfers in and out of Cayman Island banks, and then back to the U.S. That would take some time. Turicek was sure they had another two days, but after that…
    T URICEK WAS hypersensitive about surveillance, and so when he called Albitis, he called her on a disposable phone. She answered on the same kind of phone, standing outside a gold shop in Duarte, California.
    She said, “Yes?” and Turicek asked, “How’s it going?”
    “Fast, but risky. I committed fifty thousand to Clark Lewis at Venice City and he tried to bullshit me a little. He’s getting curious. I put him off by saying my folks in Syria were moving money,” she said.
    “I like that. I like the Syria story,” Turicek said.
    “So do I. Lots of people trying to get their money out of Syria,” Albitis said. “Did you get today’s deliveries?”
    “Yeah, the morning boxes are all here. We’re at what, nineteen?”
    “A little more than that,” Albitis said. “We’ll be close to the end. It’ll take another three days to get the last of it. As soon as I’ve arranged the Vegas wires, I’m flying to New York, and I should put the rest of the money down in New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. Then I’m back to Vegas for the pickup and ship, and then back to New York for the pickup there. How are we doing on time? Have you heard anything?”
    “Yeah, and it’s not good. The cops are at Polaris,” Turicek said. “You’ve got to hurry.”
    “I’m hurrying—I’m hurrying,” she said. “We’re doing it way too fast as it is. I’m getting scared. You gotta tell me if anything happens. I don’t want to ditch three million, but I’ll do it if it means we don’t get busted.”
    “Absolutely. I will tell you the instant I hear,” Turicek said.
    “And, Ivan—don’t run on me. I know you’re thinking about it, but honest to God, if you dump me, I’ll tell the fuckin’ Vory that you’ve got twenty million in gold and no protection. They’ll cut you up like fish bait.”
    “I’m not running—”
    “But you’ve thought about it,” Albitis said.
    “I thought about it, but I’m not running,” Turicek admitted. “I’ve done the numbers, and I wouldn’t make it.”
    “That’s right: you wouldn’t,” Albitis said. “So keep talking to me. Call me every hour.”
    “I’ll call you … but I’ll tell you, you’d be less frightened if youcould see the gold we’ve got here, all together,” Turicek said. “I’ve never seen anything like this. Sixteen hundred dollars for every single coin, and we’ve got a river of them. It’s like a pile of oyster shells.”
    “Sixteen-twelve an hour ago,” Albitis said. “And going nowhere but up. I’m moving as fast as I can.”
    “Keep moving,” Turicek said. “Keep it coming.”
    L UCAS SAT outside the Nuñez house, watching Morris direct traffic, until the medical examiner’s people moved Rivera’s body out. Sandy called to say that the Brownsville cops had come through, had jacked up the answering service for the ReCap guy. Nuñez was supposedly in Atlanta, Georgia, buying old tires, but nobody answered his cell phone.
    If he was a bad guy, Lucas thought, looking at his watch as he talked to Sandy, and if the shooters had called home, and if Nuñez had been tipped … He could already be in the air, on the way to