Stolen Prey

money.”
    “Very much money,” Uno said.
    “Yes, but if it’s gone, it’s gone. There’s no point in crying over spilled milk:
No llores por leche derramada
.”
    A T A LATER phone check, the Big Voice said that one of the thieves may have been identified. He told Uno, “It is possible, likely, that he is being watched by the American police. When you go after him, be very, very careful. Examine the ground, inch by inch. If you see anything, walk away from this man.”
    The Big Voice gave him the address, and Jacob Kline’s name.
    T HEY WENT after him at dark. Spent an hour driving slowly through the streets around Kline’s apartment, looking at every car where a cop might be stationed, checking anyone who seemed to be loitering. After the hour, they decided that if somebody was there, watching, they wouldn’t find them.
    The other possibility, they agreed, was that the cops were already inside the apartment, maybe in an adjacent room, and would not come out until they had jumped Kline.
    They decided to reconnoiter, without making a definite move until they had a better idea of the interior terrain.
    Kline’s apartment, they found, was one door down from a stairway. They made a plan: “I go in for him,” Uno said. “You stay here in the stairway with your phone. If you hear people running down, you tell me, then you wait below, and after they go through the door, you tell me when, and then you take them, and I will come out the door at the same time and take them from the other direction.”
    “This could work,” Tres said.
    “It
will
work if you don’t shoot me when I come out the door.”
    “I’ll be careful,” Tres said. “If they are in the next apartment, instead of above or below…”
    “You’ll still hear them when they come out. Same thing. Tell me on the phone, then take them.”
    Tres nodded.
    “And be careful. Don’t shoot me,” Uno said.
    “And you also,” Tres said.
    “It’s not much of a plan,” Uno said.
    “Well, what else do we have?”
    S O THEY DID IT . They went to his apartment, knocked, waited, knocked … nobody answered. “He’s not home.”
    “Come back later.”
    “Go to church now,” Uno said.
    S O THEY FOUND a church, Uno dropping Tres in front of the place, and then waiting for a half hour, until he came back out. As he had before, Tres came out deep in conversation withsomebody not there. The most worrisome thing, Uno thought as he watched his friend coming down the sidewalk, was the possibility that whatever saint Tres was talking to would turn him against the killing. Tres said they were not that kind of saints, but how could you tell?
    Tres got back in the car with that quiet, unfocused look that Uno had come to recognize, and said, “Go now. I think he’s back.”
    “Why do you think that?”
    “A saint told me,” Tres said.
    Uno crossed himself. But when they got back, the apartment windows were still dark, and their knock went unanswered. “I think your saint, uh, has bad information,” Uno said. He didn’t want to say that the saint was full of shit.
    Tres shrugged.
    T HEY HAD no photo of Kline, but they had a description: tall, thin, dark hair worn in an Afro. They waited another hour and a half, saw a bus pull to the corner stop, and a man of that description stepped off the bus, carrying a brown paper grocery bag.
    “Here,” Uno said.
    “
Sí
,” said Tres.
    The man disappeared into the apartment building, and a moment later, the lights came on in his apartment.
    “Let’s go,” Uno said.
    K LINE HAD brought back six packs of ramen, two large quart jars of apple cider, two packs of spaghetti, and a jar of Newman’sOwn All-Natural Italian Sausage & Peppers pasta sauce. He put them on the kitchen counter, opened the jar of pasta sauce and dropped it in a saucepan, put it on the stove, lit a cigarette, blew smoke at his reflected image in the kitchen window, and thought about Turicek.
    He’d told Turicek and Sanderson about the cops. He’d been cool about it, getting them back in an isolated hallway at the bank, in case there were monitors they didn’t know about.
    “They think it might be me, but they’ve got no idea about you two, or Edie,” he said. “They think it might be me because those assholes at Polaris tried to shift the blame onto me.”
    “Correctly,” Sanderson observed.
    “Still a fucked-up thing to do,” Kline said. “Anyway, they may be watching. I may get another visit. I’m not going to talk to