Stolen Prey

running gear, and when he hit the door—the first place the watchers could see him—he was running.
    J ENKINS WAS up in the public parking ramp where he could watch both Turicek’s car and the street entrance to the bank, and Shrake was loitering in the Skyway. Jenkins had recently bought a chunk of blue goop that came in a plastic egg and was meant to be squeezed, to strengthen hands and forearms. It also had somebubble-gum-like qualities: a pinch of it could be stretched almost indefinitely, into long gummy strings, and doing that was oddly engrossing.
    He was pulling out one of his longest strings when Turicek burst through the door and started running down the street. Jenkins shouted into his handset, “Shit, I think he’s running, but I’m not sure it’s him. He’s on the street running south.”
    “Watch him,” Shrake called back, and thirty seconds later, Shrake burst onto the same street and looked south, but Turicek was far down the next block, and Shrake couldn’t see him through the people on the street. Jenkins shouted into the handset, “He turned left … he’s gone.”
    Shrake ran that way, and Jenkins got the car, and they cruised, looking for a man in running shorts, but they never saw him again. Jenkins called the bank and asked for him, and the woman who answered the phone in the systems division said he’d gone jogging.
    “Goddamnit,” Jenkins said. He got on his cell phone and called Lucas. “I got bad news and bad news. Which do you want first?”
    Lucas asked, “What happened?”
    “Turicek must have spotted us, and then he ran. We never had a chance,” Jenkins said. “He either knew we were here, or he assumed it.”
    “Goddamnit,” Lucas said.
    “That’s just what I said.” He described the circumstances, and Lucas asked, “You think he’s really jogging?”
    “Not unless he’s practicing for the hundred-yard dash. He came out of there like he was being chased by the houndof the coupe de villes,” Jenkins said. “What do you want us to do?”
    “Drive around. Hang there. Call the cab companies, see if they picked up a jogger. Quit when it’s quitting time. I mean, I don’t know.”
    “All right. I’m sorry, man.”
    “Call me if anything changes. Goddamnit, again, we need to know where that guy goes,” Lucas said.
    T URICEK RAN four blocks, swerved into the Pillsbury Center and took the escalators up, watching the doors, then turned and walked quickly down toward the Government Center, ninety percent sure he’d lost the men behind him.
    In the Government Center men’s restroom, he changed into his street clothes, put the running clothes in the pack, and called a cab. Five minutes later, he was on his way to St. Paul. There, he directed the cabbie through a couple of back streets to a bar, paid off the cab, walked into the bar and out the back, called another cab. When that cab arrived, he took it to the rental office, picked up the packages, and took them to Sanderson’s mom’s house and stashed them in the closet.
    He left the house on foot, called Albitis, told her what he’d done.
    “This is the last time I can pull this off—they probably know I was on to them, but they can’t be sure,” Turicek said. “I can’t do it again or they’ll pick me up.”
    “Can they know for sure that we took the money?” she asked.
    “No. They can believe it, but they can’t
know
. We’ll have tofigure out what to do next—I think we’re going to have to leave the gold for a while. You can get yours, and take off, but the other three of us, we’re going to have to stash our shares and wait for a while.”
    “Quite a while. Years,” she said.
    “Maybe a couple of years,” Turicek agreed. “We’ll figure something out. Maybe we’ll start a software company and get rich, in quotes.”
    “Yeah, well, good luck,” Albitis said. “I’ll see you in Pest. If you need to call me again, I’ll be on the other phone. I’m sitting in the gate here, and I’m throwing this one away.”
    W HEN HE got off the phone, Turicek called a fourth cab—he’d walked a half-mile from Mom’s, by then—and took it to his apartment. If they picked him up again, so what? He was out of it, now. Albitis would pick up the last shipment, take it to Mom’s. From here on out, it was the daily grind at the bank.
    A year, or two … he could handle two years, if he knew he was getting paid a tax-free two and a half million a year to do it.
    Boring, but manageable.
    He