Stolen Prey

but I’ll quit and get out of here. Get down to LA, make some pickups, put in some more orders,” Albitis said. “Make up my story.”
    “Be careful,” Turicek said. “If you feel anybody is looking at you, quit. Better to take what we’ve got now, than spend the next twenty years in prison. Or have these crazy people come down on us.”
    “I thought it was a hedge fund,” Albitis said. “This isn’t something a hedge fund would do.”
    “No, it’s more like the fuckin’
Vory
,” Turicek said, and he shuddered as he said it. If they’d stolen from the Russian mob, the mob would want both the money and their heads; or, if forced to choose, just their heads.
    “Jesus,” said Albitis. She glanced nervously up and down the street: the fat woman was receding in the distance. Albitis worried about her epithets. Being disguised as an observant Muslim woman was fine for handling bank cameras, but as a natural-born wiseass, she’d never been that good at controlling her language.
    Did conservative Arab women walk around blurting out, “Jesus Christ,” or “Holy shit”? She suspected they did not. “All right,” she said. “I’m running.”
    W HILE ALL that was going on, three Mexican males were checking out of the Wee Blue Inn in West St. Paul, fifteen or twenty minutes apart.
    The Wee Blue Inn catered to hasty romances and to men who arrived on foot, who really needed a shower and a few hours’ sleep, a sink to wash their clothes in, and who had no credit card to pay with. Didn’t bother the owner: cash was as good as credit, but you had to have the cash.
    The Mexicans had checked in two days before, a half hour apart, small young men—two of them were still teenagers—but with muscles in their arms and faces, no bellies at all; and with hard eyes that reminded the owner of the obsidian-black marbles of his childhood, the ones called peeries.
    They checked in a half hour apart, and got separate rooms, but they were together. The owner didn’t ask them any questions. That didn’t seem prudent. An illegal Latino was cleaning up around the place, saw them check in, and told the owner he was going to take the next day or two off.
    “I didn’t hire you to take no days off,” the owner said.
    “I take them anyway,” the illegal said. “You wanna fire me, so fire me. I’m going.”
    He went.
    It occurred to the owner that the temporary departure of his wage slave might have something to do with the small men.
    Once again, it didn’t seem prudent to ask.
    In certain businesses, prudence is mandatory.

2
    P atrick Brooks had run Sunnie Software out of an office suite in a rehabbed brick warehouse north of Minneapolis’s downtown. Lucas decided to swing by on his way back to the BCA offices to sniff around and get a feel for the Brooks operation.
    He left the car on the street and climbed the internal stairs to the third floor; the office was glass and gray carpet, with potted palms sitting around on redbrick room dividers. The place smelled like feminine underarm deodorant and carpet cleaner. A dozen employees were sitting in a low-walled cube farm, each with his or her own computer, but nobody was working. Instead, they’d pulled their chairs into groups of three and four, and were talking about the killings.
    A BCA agent named Jones was keeping an eye on them. He spotted Lucas at the door, and as the employees turned to watch, came over and said, “We’re talking to them one at a time. Not seeing much yet.”
    Lucas said, “Shaffer says they do Spanish-language software.”
    “Yeah. We already talked to the office manager. She said some of the sales are down in the Southwest, but most of them are south of the border—Mexico and Central America. They do some down in South America, Colombia and Venezuela.”
    “All drug countries,” Lucas said. “You think they’re running a money laundry?”
    “Can’t tell yet,” Jones said. “If it is, it’s not that big. They only did about two million in sales last year. Brooks took out about two hundred thousand, himself. They got a million-dollar payroll on top of that, they’re paying some stiff rent, they contract for the software, there’re taxes…. There’s not really much left over.”
    “Is there any way to verify the sales?” Lucas asked.
    “Not really, not if somebody wanted to tinker with the books. It’s all delivered online, there aren’t any physical deliveries.” Jones nodded at the office, and added, “We’ve got