Stolen Prey

got the make and model of her car and the license tags, and, as a bonus, her home and cell phone numbers.
    Sanderson lived in a small, yellow-brick apartment complex a short walk east of Lake Calhoun. The apartment had underground parking, with a gated entrance ramp, and he had no way into it. The place looked nice enough, without being rich—exactly the kind of place an orderly, intelligent, well-employed single woman would pick.
    He sat for five minutes, working out the possibilities, then called her home phone number. It rang seven times, then clicked over to the answering service, and he hung up.
    He was considering the possibility of trying to get into the building when his phone rang. Sandy. “Yeah?”
    “Okay, I’ve been calling the gold dealers, and I think we’ve got a hit.”
    “Excellent. Who is it?”
    “There’s a woman who says she’s Syrian, has been showing up at a lot of gold dealers, both on the left and right coasts, and buying gold coins, fifty, seventy, a hundred thousand dollars at a time. She says her family is Christian and is getting out of Syria, and they don’t think anything is safe but gold. That’s what she tells them. She’s gone to
all
of the dealers you checked—I’d like to know how you did that—and a half dozen more places.”
    “Have they got a passport, a name, a description, a photograph, an address…?”
    “They’ve got a cheap business card, the kind you print on your home computer, with an address in Damascus, in English, and some Arabic writing that nobody understands but looks like the same address. That’s it—we don’t even have a description, because she wears one of those veils. All they’ve seen is her eyes….”
    As she was talking, two men walked down the sidewalk on the other side of the street. They were coming from up the block behind him, and he didn’t notice them until they passed his car. He glanced at them, went back to Sandy, said, “I can’t believe…” then trailed off, frowned, and looked at the men as they approached the sidewalk that led to the entrance of the apartment.
    Two short men, slender, wearing baseball caps and T-shirts. Dark hair, athletic. Lucas said, “Holy shit,” and Sandy said, “What?” and Lucas said, “I’ll call you back,” and he punched in 911 and watched as the men walked up to the apartment entrance. They were planning to do wrong, he thought, because they had that wary, check-it-out attitude, looking here and there, while pretending not to.
    When the 911 operator came up he identified himself and half-shouted the address and said, “The two Mexican shooters, I think they’re here. They’re going into the apartment building where one of our suspects lives. I need help here, fast as you can get it. These guys are shooters. I need people with vests and shotguns, I need them flooded in here.”
    He was dealing with Minneapolis and expected a fast response,and a few seconds later the operator said, “We’ve got a car two minutes away. We’ve got another car five minutes out, we’ll route them in there. What are you doing—?”
    Lucas was shouting back at him, “They’re on foot, five-seven, five-eight, dark hair, jeans and running shoes, red T-shirt, blue T-shirt, worn outside their pants. I’m afraid they’ll take somebody down…. If they get in, I’m going after them. Tell everybody I’m in there….”
    “Do you think—”
    The two men disappeared behind the glass doors at the front of the apartment building, but he could see them behind the glass, apparently waiting to get through an inner door, and Lucas shouted over the operator, “They’re inside, but they’re stuck behind the inner door. Call that apartment if you can, tell them not to answer the—Shit, they’re inside, I can see them going in. I’m going, I’m going.”
    He was fifty yards up the street and he gunned the car down the block, stopped just short of the sidewalk, and jumped out, pulling his Beretta as he did it. He couldn’t see the Mexicans inside, in the outer lobby, so he ran up the four wide steps to the front door, staying to one side, remembering Rivera, peeked at the door, saw nothing, peeked again, then pushed through.
    Inside the door was a fifteen-foot-square lobby with mailboxes and an intercom, and he saw a button labeled Management and he leaned on it, and leaned on it some more, and nothing happened, nobody answered, and he leaned on it some more, and finally took a look at the door.
    The