The Professionals E-Book

Owen Laukkanen

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: Stevens & Windermere
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 496

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Four friends, caught in a terrible job market, joke about turning to kidnapping to survive. And then, suddenly, it's no joke. For two years, the strategy they devise works like a charm - until they kidnap the wrong man. Now two groups are after them - the law, in the form of veteran state investigator Kirk Stevens and hotshot young FBI agent Carla Windermere, and an organized crime outfit looking for payback. As they crisscross the country in a series of increasingly explosive confrontations, each of them is ultimately forced to recognize the truth: the real professionals, cop or criminal, are those who are willing to sacrifice everything.

Leseprobe

THE

PROFESSIONALS

A graduate of the University of British Columbia’s creative writing program, Owen Laukkanen spent three years in the world of professional poker reporting before turning to fiction. He currently lives in Vancouver, where he’s hard at work on the third and fourth installments in the Stevens and Windermere series.

Praise for Owen Laukkanen:

‘Really terrific – characters that live and breathe, a just-right story, and chills aplenty. Highly recommended’ Lee Child

‘A page-turning blend of classic suspense fiction and chillingly postmodern amorality. Ingenious plotting, perfect-pitch characterization and evocative sense of place combine to create an impressive debut’ Jonathan Kellerman

‘The Professionals is a high-octane adrenaline and gunpowder-fueled rocket ride across the country from Seattle to Miami to Detroit and points in-between. What is remarkable about Owen Laukkanen’s debut is how skillfully he makes the reader care for his characters on both sides of the law. An excellent first novel!’ C.J. Box

‘The Professionals grips you on page one and doesn’t let go until the last, satisfying page. Laukkanen provides plenty of twists along the way while developing a well-juggled array of complex and evolving characters’ Alafair Burke

‘Fasten your seat belts, Owen Laukkanen’s The Professionals is one heck of a wild ride. A first-class thriller by a terrific new voice’ John Lescroart

‘Smoothly written, with a slam-bang ending, The Professionals is a brutally beautiful piece of work’ John Sandford

‘A coiling plot, insightful characters, and a tale fraught with danger. What more could any thriller reader want? The Professionals has it all. It’s top-notch entertainment’ Steve Berry

‘A fast-moving debut thriller with enough twists to fill a pretzel bag… The characters are as much fun as the plot… Let’s hope Laukkanen writes more thrillers like this one’ Kirkus Reviews

‘Laukkanen’s clever debut, the first in a new crime thriller series, compares favorably to Scott Smith’s classic caper novel, A Simple Plan… the story’s breakneck pace will carry most readers along’ Publishers Weekly

First published in the United States in 2012 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of the Penguin group.

Published in e-book in 2013 and paperback in 2014 in Great Britain by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Owen Laukkanen, 2012

The moral right of Owen Laukkanen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

Book design by Katy Riegel

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78239 366 5E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 367 2

Printed in Great Britain.

CorvusAn imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk

For my parents

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

Chapter Thirty-nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-one

Chapter Forty-two

Chapter Forty-three

Chapter Forty-four

Chapter Forty-five

Chapter Forty-six

Chapter Forty-seven

Chapter Forty-eight

Chapter Forty-nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-one

Chapter Fifty-two

Chapter Fifty-three

Chapter Fifty-four

Chapter Fifty-five

Chapter Fifty-six

Chapter Fifty-seven

Chapter Fifty-eight

Chapter Fifty-nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-one

Chapter Sixty-two

Chapter Sixty-three

Chapter Sixty-four

Chapter Sixty-five

Chapter Sixty-six

Chapter Sixty-seven

Chapter Sixty-eight

Chapter Sixty-nine

Chapter Seventy

Chapter Seventy-one

Chapter Seventy-two

Chapter Seventy-three

Chapter Seventy-four

Chapter Seventy-five

Chapter Seventy-six

Chapter Seventy-seven

Chapter Seventy-eight

Chapter Seventy-nine

Chapter Eighty

Chapter Eighty-one

Chapter Eighty-two

Chapter Eighty-three

Chapter Eighty-four

Chapter Eighty-five

Chapter Eighty-six

Chapter Eighty-seven

Chapter Eighty-eight

Chapter Eighty-nine

Chapter Ninety

Chapter Ninety-one

Chapter Ninety-two

Chapter Ninety-three

Acknowledgments

THE

PROFESSIONALS

one

Martin Warner checked his watch as the train slowed for Highland Park. Quarter to seven. Not early, but not terribly late, either; time enough for a relaxed dinner and a couple hours babysitting the Bulls before putting Sarah and Tim to bed.

The train jostled and the brakes squealed and Warner stood, thinking about a hot lasagna and a cold beer and maybe, if Leanne wasn’t too tired, a little bit of fun in the master bedroom before they turned in for the night.

It was dusk by the time he stepped onto the platform, the crisp October air and the chill wind off Lake Michigan already hinting at the long winter ahead, and Warner shivered involuntarily and pulled his coat close around him as he joined the rest of the Highland Park commuters, a uniform crush of tailored suits and tasteful ties and thousand-dollar briefcases, a collective desire to get home, get warm, get fed.

The arrivals streamed out of the station, and Warner moved with the current toward the far end of the parking lot, the herd thinning around him until only a few stragglers remained. When he was alone on the pavement, he stopped and surveyed the archipelago of cars, searching in vain for his own. The light was dim in the back corners of the lot, and he couldn’t see his car. He squinted into the shadows, turned around, and realized after a moment that someone had parked a van in front of it, a white Ford cargo van.

I must be tired, he thought, fingering his keys in his pocket and skirting the van to where his Lexus sat waiting. He pressed a button on his key fob and the car chirped in response as he reached for the door handle. Before he could open the door, however, a woman’s voice called out behind him.

“Marty?” she said. “Martin Warner? Is that you?”

It was a younger woman’s voice, a happy, what-a-coincidence voice, and Warner set his briefcase down and turned around with a smile to match. But when he turned to greet the mystery woman, hoping a little guiltily that her face was as attractive as her voice, he found no smiling beauty but instead two men, their faces hidden behind black ski masks. Behind them stood the van, its sliding side door wide open, and Warner stared inside, not comprehending, before someone wrapped something over his eyes and he could no longer see.

He felt hands grip his shoulders and shove him into the back of the van, and Warner heard the men talking around him, low voices tinged with urgency.

“Got him?”

“We’re clear.”

The door slammed shut, and Warner lay stunned in the rear compartment as the van rumbled to life and reversed. He was blindfolded, his hands tied behind him, and he had sudden nightmarish thoughts, visceral, involuntary images of his broken body, bloody and anonymous in death. “You’re making a mistake,” he said, his voice pitiful and weak. “Whoever you’re looking for, I’m not the guy.”

The woman spoke again. “You’re Martin Warner of 15 Linden Park Place? Married to Leanne Warner, father of Sarah and Tim Warner?”

Warner felt like he was going to be sick. “Don’t hurt them,” he said.

“Your kids are fine, Martin. Sit back and relax.”

“Why are you doing this?” He twisted in his bindings, craning his neck toward the sound of her voice. “Where are you taking me?”

“Don’t worry about it now,” she said. “We’ll explain it all when we get there.”

The van drove fifteen, maybe twenty, minutes, before pulling in somewhere and stopping. Someone cut the ignition. “Have a look.” A door opened and slammed shut.

A minute later, the rear door slid open. “We’re clear.”

Someone lifted Warner to his feet and pushed him out of the van. “Hurry.” He let them guide him up a flight of stairs and down a long hallway before they turned him left, walked him a few paces, and deposited him on what felt like a bed.

“Sit,” said the man. “Listen.”

Warner sat up. Listened to the sounds around him: the rustle of feet on carpet, chairs being moved. A door shut and was locked.

“Okay, Marty.” A third voice, a man’s, youngish but assertive. “I apologize for the blindfold. Just a precaution. If you promise not to take it off, I’ll untie your hands. Deal?”

Warner nodded. “Okay.”

“If you take off the blindfold and see our faces, Marty, we’ll have to kill you.”

Warner swallowed. “I promise I won’t look.”

Someone untied his hands, and he rubbed his wrists gingerly. A glass was pressed into his hands, and he brought it to his lips. Water. He realized he was thirsty and drank, emptying the glass.

“You’re wondering why we’ve brought you here,” the third voice continued. Warner was already thinking of him as the boss. “Yeah?”

Warner nodded. “I . . . am.”

“It’s really simple. You’ve been kidnapped, Marty. We’re holding you for ransom. We don’t want to hurt you. We don’t even want to inconvenience you that much. If all goes according to plan, we’ll have you back home tomorrow.”

“The police,” said Warner. “They’ll find you.”

“They won’t,” said the man. “Because they’re not going to know about it. We’re watching your house, Marty. We have eyes on your family right now. If anyone calls the police, we’ll know about it. And then we’ll have to react.”

Warner swallowed again. “No police.”

Someone pressed a phone into his hand. “This is not a big deal,” the man said. “You’re going to call Leanne and tell her you’re all right. You’re going to tell her not to call the police. You’re going to tell her if she does call the police, she’ll never see you again.”

“How much do you want?”

“Then you’re going to tell her she can have you back tomorrow. Good as new. All we want is a small finder’s fee.”

“How much, damn it?” said Warner.

“Sixty grand, Marty,” said the man. “Unmarked twenties. We need it within twenty-four hours. Tell your wife she’ll get the drop details once she’s secured the money.”

“Sixty thousand dollars?” said Warner. “That’s absurd. I expensed more than sixty grand last year alone.”

“We know that,” said the man. “And we know you made a million dollars last year speculating on oil futures, yeah? Sixty grand should be a cinch.”

Warner paused. “How do you know this stuff?”

“We did our research, Marty.” He could feel someone beside him, punching numbers into the phone. “Now, go ahead and make that call.”

two

Arthur Pender stared out the window of the restaurant, watching cars pull in and out of the parking lot as the night settled in beyond. Another perfect score, he thought. This is easier than flipping burgers.

Sawyer had purchased the van in Kansas City on Monday, the day after LaSalle’s wife paid his ransom. The four of them had driven up to Chicagoland that night, arriving in Highland Park around four in the morning. They found a cheap motel by the highway and turned in at dawn. For Pender, it was the first time he’d slept, really slept, in a week.

Tuesday was decompression day. Mouse and Sawyer rented a little Toyota, headed into Chicago, caught a Blackhawks game. Pender and Marie hit Lake Michigan. Took a long walk. Ate a nice dinner. Got a bit drunk and made the best of their alone time.

They spent Wednesday doing preliminary intel, scoping out Warner, getting a feel for his routine. Confirming travel times. Double-checking Mouse’s computer work with practice and old-fashioned observation.

Thursday: dress rehearsal. Everyone a bit antsy. Fraying tempers. Everything nailed down and nothing to do. Sawyer and Mouse fighting over the remote. Marie withdrawn, worried.

Friday was D-day. Pender didn’t sleep much, as usual. Game day always gave him a rush. Like waiting for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.

He kept Marie awake with his tossing and turning and finally left her around three in the morning, headed to Sawyer and Mouse’s room. Found them watching action movies on cable. Watched for a while and fell asleep in an easy chair.

They spent the morning doing final recon work. Parked the van beside Warner’s Lexus in the Metra lot, babysat Leanne Warner all day in the Toyota, and then headed back to the motel. The hostage room all set up. Marie locked in the bathroom, rehearsing her lines in the mirror. Sawyer taking a nap and Mouse watching TV. Loose.

They drove back to the parking lot in the late afternoon. Pender and Sawyer in the van. Mouse in the Toyota. Marie on the platform. Everybody focused. Everybody calm.

Ten to seven. The train arrived. Marie found Warner on the platform. Followed him out into the parking lot. Pender phoned Mouse and gave him the all clear. Mouse flashed the high beams at Marie. Point of no return. No quitting now. Go go go.

It played exactly as they drew it up. They snagged Warner no problem, got him back to the motel, made the pitch.

Warner called his wife. Calmed down a little. What’s sixty grand to this guy? Probably kept that kind of change in a jam jar in his basement. Walking-around money.

Leanne Warner had no trouble producing the ransom. Had the money by Saturday afternoon with plenty of time to spare. No police. Mouse tailed her in the Toyota to be sure.

She drove a black Lincoln Navigator, and came alone, as instructed. Left the money in a duffel bag at the drop site and parked nearby to wait.

Mouse scoped the scene in the Toyota and phoned in the all clear. Sawyer and Pender drove up in the van, sunglasses on and hats pulled low. Pender grabbed the cash bag. Checked it, counted it, found it clean. All glorious, well-used twenties. Kicked Warner from the van blindfolded. Slid the door shut behind him and drove off into traffic.

Perfect execution.

Leanne Warner was good with instructions. She didn’t try to follow. According to Mouse, she played the usual tune: ran to her husband, hugged him, took off the blindfold, tearful reunion. Then they drove home.

“No cops,” Pender warned them both. “Even after it’s over. We’ll be watching the house. You call the cops, and we come for the kids.”

They divvied up the money in Racine, just across the state line. Pender set aside twenty thousand for expenses: van, rental car, cell phones, motel, food, and gas. That left forty thousand for the team. Ten thousand apiece. Even split. Ten thousand for the Warner job and ten thousand from Kansas City made twenty for the month. Add it to the twenty-five or so from the September jobs and you had the makings of a decent autumn.

They stripped the van clean and abandoned it behind a warehouse in Waukegan. Pender and Sawyer paid cash for a GMC Savana on lease return at a used-car dealership in Lake Forest, and they threw the burner phones and the old plates into Lake Michigan when they dropped off the rental car.

Now they sat in a Denny’s in Racine, trying to figure the next move. “We could do Milwaukee next week,” Mouse was saying. “Won’t take much looking to find something suitable.”

“Milwaukee’s too close,” said Pender. “We pull a job in Wisconsin, there’s a chance someone catches on. I was thinking Minneapolis. Quick, before it gets too cold. Then down to Detroit and then south to the sunny stuff.”

“I like that,” said Marie. “Can we do Florida?”

“Disney World,” said Mouse.

“Disney World,” said Pender. “You want to kidnap Mickey Mouse?”

“You know he’s filthy rich,” said Mouse. “Minnie pays the ransom and we’re set for life.”

Pender laughed. “How about it, Sawyer? Florida?”

Sawyer looked up from his Grand Slam breakfast. He nodded. “Would be nice to try some surfing.”

“Cheers to that,” said Mouse, lifting his glass. They drank to the plan and then ate in silence, reflecting on the success of the job, and when the plates had been cleared and the bill was on the table, Pender cleared his throat. “All right,” he said. “Sawyer and Mouse, you guys drive up to Minnesota tonight. Grab a motel and try and find someone for us to key on.”

Pender smiled at Marie. “We’ll take the train, you and me. These guys can pick us up at the station tomorrow.” He pulled out his wallet and put cash on the bill. “Great work, everyone,” he said. “See you in Minnesota.”

three

Kirk Stevens stared down at the body on the pavement and shivered. He blew on his hands and rubbed them together and looked back longingly at his Cherokee, parked some thirty yards back in the shadows. He shivered again and looked down at the body, and then into the yawning cab of the Peterbilt parked behind.

The sheriff’s deputy glanced into the cab and then looked back at Stevens. He was a young guy, buzz-cut and brash. “Don’t know why they had to call you all the way out here,” he said, frowning. “Not like we can’t solve a murder or nothing.”

Stevens crouched down to get a closer look at the body. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said.

The dead man was barely more than a kid himself. He wore a Twins hat cocked sideways and a big camouflage parka, and his 9 mm pistol lay on the pavement where it had scattered off behind him. His chest was a mess of blood and goose down and buckshot.

The deputy leaned against the cab of the Peterbilt. He looked down at Stevens. “So what do you think happened?” he said.

Stevens glanced up at him, and then at the truck, lit up in the blue-and-red glow of the deputy’s patrol car lights. Besides the truck and the patrol car and Stevens’s old Cherokee, the rest stop was deserted, though through the trees Stevens could trace the lights of the cars headed north to St. Paul on Interstate 35.

The cab door was open. The dead kid had eaten a hot buckshot dinner. The truck driver was nowhere to be found.

“I’ll tell you what happened,” the deputy said. “This yo tried to hijack the truck. Driver let him have it. Then he panicked and ran. Stole the yo’s car and he vanished. Sound good?”

Stevens looked up at him. “Maybe,” he said.

The deputy snorted. “Sounds better than good. This is open-and-shut, is what it is. No reason to get the BCA out here.”

No argument there, Stevens thought, feeling his muscles groan as he pulled himself to his feet. He’d been watching a movie—a good movie for once—with Nancy and the kids when the call came down the line. Stevens was next up on the rotation, and for his luck he’d earned a sixty-mile drive and a smart-ass rookie companion out in the bitter air of the Minnesota hinterlands, any hope of rest or relaxation now gone.

Life with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Stevens had been a city cop, once, fifteen years ago now. Five years in Duluth. Five years was enough. He’d gotten sick of the murders and the drug grabs and the cheap dollar-store robberies, the boring sawed-off crimes of desperation. A job came up at the BCA and he took it, and the requisite move to St. Paul, and had never regretted the decision. These days, however, life with the state’s police force seemed to consist mainly of paperwork and whodunit homicides, another small town with another new body, a rate of about a couple per month.

Robberies gone bad, drug deals gone bad, marital squabbles gone bad. It wasn’t exactly world-changing stuff.

Stevens looked around at the crime scene. The cab of the big truck was riddled with holes, and the mirror hung half shot off its stanchion. Stevens walked around the back of the truck to where the rear door had been wrenched open. The cargo inside—a mountain of DVD players in slim cardboard boxes—was strewn haphazardly across the floor of the trailer. He peered in and kept walking.

He walked alongside the rig to the passenger-side door. The truck was parked close to the trees, and the light from the trooper’s blue-andreds didn’t quite permeate. Stevens squinted in the darkness at the door. He reached out and touched it and felt the door give. He let it go and it swung back, a half inch or so open.

Stevens called out to the deputy, who came around with a flashlight. He held the light up to Stevens and then at the door. “Shit,” he said. “What does this mean?”

Stevens looked down at the pavement leading up to the brush. “Shine a light down there,” he said, and the deputy obliged him.

“Shit,” said the deputy.

“Sure looks like blood,” said Stevens. He glanced into the brush. In the dim light, he could just make out an impromptu path. “Follow me with that light.”

They found the truck driver about fifteen feet in, the shotgun by his side and a bullet hole in his head. Stevens looked back at the deputy. “There’s a third player,” he said. “Probably headed north to St. Paul.”

The deputy nodded and disappeared down the path. Stevens looked down at the dead truck driver in the shadows for a moment. Then he turned back toward the truck. The wind howled through the trees and he shivered again, thinking about Nancy and the kids and the movie he’d missed. He walked back to the pavement and around the truck and back to where the deputy sat in his patrol car, hollering excited instructions into his radio.

Stevens stood alongside the patrol car, waiting for the deputy to finish. In Duluth, he thought, I was just like this kid. I thought every case made me a hero.

He caught his dim reflection in the patrol car’s rear window as he waited, and he stared at it a moment, a forty-three-year-old career cop with thinning hair and a paunch, his tired eyes betraying a mounting fatigue. Sooner or later they would catch the third player, some woebegone kid with a gun and a trunk full of hot electronics. They’d lock him up and he’d cop to the robbery and do time and be ruined, and someone else would jump in and hijack tractor trailers, and sooner or later they’d wind up a body themselves.

Another botched robbery, Stevens thought to himself. Another day in the glamorous life.

four

They arrived in Minnesota on Sunday afternoon, and by noon Tuesday they’d picked out a target.

“His name’s Terrence Harper,” said Mouse, reading off the screen of his laptop. “Junior vice president at North Star Investors Group. Age forty-seven. Wife Sandra Harper, daughter Alice. Lives close to downtown and two major highways.”

Pender stared at the computer over Mouse’s shoulder. “His finances?”

“A-1,” said Mouse. He turned in his chair, caught Pender’s eye. “Says this guy made a million-six betting against the housing meltdown. That’s on top of his half-million-dollar salary and bonuses.”

Mouse turned back to the computer, brought up Harper’s bank statements. The target was certainly liquid. His wife would have no problem scraping together the finder’s fee.

Moreover, Terrence Harper looked like just the kind of target Pender had had in mind when he’d started making scores. A fat-cat day trader, grown rich short-selling the American Dream while the rest of the country struggled to pay the mortgage.

Guys like Harper, thought Pender, were the reason they were kidnapping bankers in the first place.

In the beginning, the whole thing had been Marie’s idea. It had started as a joke, some throwaway line spouted off one rainy night in Seattle, the gang holed up at Sawyer’s place bitching about the job market over cheap beer and pizza, scholarships almost gone and graduation upon them, nobody but Mouse with a future to speak of.

“Listen,” Marie said. “Maybe Mouse can hack his way to a million dollars, but for me it’s either robbing banks or making lattes.”

They laughed at her, half drunk and rueful, some shitty action movie on in the background, buildings blowing up and machine guns blasting full bore. Pender reached for the remote, changed the channel. Got the news, the grim forecast: unemployment, foreclosures.

“This is what I’m talking about,” Marie said. “My parents lost half their savings in the last six months alone.”

Mouse nodded. “My dad nearly gave up his house.”

“You think anyone’s got time for three kids with three useless degrees?” Marie said. “Nobody’s making money but investment bankers. And they’re getting paid with our taxes.”

“Construction,” said Sawyer.

“Maybe you could build houses,” Marie told him. “I don’t have the muscle. Anyway, the housing boom’s over. Construction workers aren’t getting paid, either.”

“So what,” Pender asked her. “You want to work on Wall Street?”

“No,” said Marie. “I want to rob those bastards.” She smiled as she said it, and she caught Pender’s eye. “Think about it. A couple big scores and then we could retire.”

Pender laughed again. His eyes met Sawyer’s. “One more time, Marie,” Pender said. “You want to rob banks for a living?”

“I have a history degree, Pender.” Marie twisted around to look up at him from the floor. “I don’t want to make coffee my whole life.”

Pender glanced around the room. They all had reason to be desperate, each one of his friends. Marie’s history degree was worth just enough to overqualify her for most entry-level jobs. If she wanted a career, she’d have to go back to school, and her parents, both doctors, still smarted from their daughter’s choosing arts over science. They weren’t writing any more checks for tuition.

After six years of flunking and fighting, meanwhile, Sawyer’s GPA was a punch line. He’d flirted with dropping out more than once, spent a couple nights in jail, and it was only with Pender’s help that he’d qualified—barely—for his degree.

Mouse had it best of them all, having landed himself a programming internship with Microsoft with the potential for lucrative full-time employment. But Mouse was a hacker at heart, and his anarchist tendencies didn’t mesh with the Microsoft ethic. At the end of the semester, he found himself unemployed, and with his father out of work and his own finances dwindling, Mouse needed money and fast.

They all needed money. They all had degrees, and degrees were supposed to pave the way to careers. They hadn’t, and it was time for another solution. But crime? Crime seemed a little extreme. Pender shook his head. “Robbing banks is tough work. Dangerous.”

“What about kidnapping?” That was Sawyer, slow and thoughtful.

“Kidnapping, yeah.” Marie nodded. “Mouse could get us close to Bill Gates.”

“Screw off.”

“We could make a million dollars in one shot.”

“No,” said Pender. “That’s how people get caught. Greed. If you were going to kidnap someone and get away with it, you’d need to stay out of the spotlight.”

“What do you mean?” said Mouse. Nobody was smiling now.

“I mean, you could grab one movie star and ask for a million dollars or you could get ten normal people and ask for a hundred grand,” said Pender, making it up as he went. “You get a junior VP at a Fortune 500 company, tell his wife to hand over a hundred grand in the next twenty-four hours, and she’ll do it without thinking. It’s an inconvenience at those stakes, not a crime.”

“You want to kidnap ten people? Won’t the police catch on?”

“Not if you keep moving,” said Sawyer.

“Yeah,” said Pender. “Yeah. You make a score and then you hit the next city down the road. Rinse and repeat.”

Nobody spoke for a minute or two. Nobody made eye contact. Sawyer stared at the floor, Mouse into his beer, Marie out onto the avenue, watching drunk students stream past. Pender changed channels again, back to the action movie. This time he watched closer, his stomach turning to jelly and his mind moving nonstop.

Then Marie straightened. “Well,” she said. “We don’t have to make a career out of it.”

Pender nodded. “Of course not.”

Mouse sat up. “If we pulled one job, like you said, we walk away with a hundred grand. That’s twenty-five for each person. Not a bad summer project.”

“Nobody gets hurt.”

“I could go back to Microsoft. Beg for my job.”

“And we could buy time to figure out options,” said Marie. She sat up on the couch and looked at Pender, hard. “Let’s just do it,” she said. “Just once. Just to see if we can.”

Pender looked at Sawyer. Sawyer looked back, said nothing, waited. “I say we do it,” said Mouse. “We’re smart enough. We can pull this thing off.”

Pender hesitated a moment. Then he nodded. “Let’s try it,” he said. “Just to see if we can.”

Now, sitting in the work van outside a Minneapolis bank tower two years down the road, Pender waited for Terrence Harper to show and he wondered whether his friends had ever really imagined they would wind up career criminals. Maybe we were all just daring each other, he thought. Maybe none of us wanted to be the one who pulled the cord.

Mouse pointed across the sidewalk, jolting Pender back to the present. A squat middle-aged man had just exited the North Star offices and was walking quickly down the sidewalk. “That’s our guy.”

Pender glanced down at the laptop. Compared the picture on the screen with the real thing outside. Same jowls, same receding hairline. A paunch and a wrinkled tie and the look of a man who didn’t want his time wasted. Pender looked at the laptop again. Then he opened the van door. “That’s him,” he said. “Let’s go for a walk.”

five

They took Terry Harper on another Friday evening, nabbing him on the sidewalk as he turned to walk the last block to his home. He was a struggler; he bit at Sawyer and screamed as the big guy, cursing and bloody, dragged him into the van.

They drove Harper to the Super 8 and got Sawyer bandaged up. Marie took off in the rental car to stake out the Harper residence, and Pender made his speech to Harper, laid it out and promised to remove the gag and untie his wrists if he’d promise to behave.

Harper promised. He seemed broken by the situation and incredulous, as they always were, about the low sum being demanded for his ransom. Pender made the call and pressed the phone to Harper’s cheek, and the mark played his tune perfectly until the end.

“It’s just sixty thousand, honey,” he told his wife. “Just take it from savings first thing tomorrow.” Then he paused. Glanced around despite his blindfold. “There are three, maybe four, of them. One woman. I’m in an apartment, I think—”

Sawyer backhanded him, hard, and down he went. Pender hung up the phone before Sandra Harper could connect the dots, and Sawyer kept going, his fists hammering down on the hostage, his face contorted with rage.

“Don’t you ever try to get cute like that again,” he said. Harper curled up on the floor beneath him, ducking the punches and sobbing.

Pender put his arm on his shoulder. “All right.”

Sawyer straightened. He glanced at Pender. “Had to,” he said, breathing heavily.

Pender knew Sawyer was right, even if he didn’t like it. Harper needed to be taught that he was dealing with professionals, and Sawyer had established that, brutally and effectively.

It was a part of his friend’s personality that sometimes scared Pender. Matt Sawyer could be smart, articulate, and deadly funny, his infectious smile and slow, steady baritone a favorite with the women on campus. But Sawyer’s parents had divorced when he was a teenager, leaving him moody and violent and itching to fight, and even ten years later the big guy had a temper, could still get pissed off and black out, swinging his fists until his problems were solved. Pender could remember the first time he’d met Sawyer, a big scrappy freshman talking trash in the wrong kind of bar. Pender had talked the kid down and out of the place before a dozen drunk longshoremen did them both in.

Even in their new lives as kidnappers, though, Pender had hoped to get more use out of Sawyer’s brain than his brawn. He held out hope that cuties like Terry Harper would continue to prove few and far between.

Marie phoned in on her new burner phone every couple hours. She’d parked the rental car a couple houses down and was taking periodic walks around the block to make sure Sandra Harper didn’t take after her husband in the cuteness department.

Marie reported lights on at the Harper residence until one in the morning, when the final second-floor light was extinguished. She hung around outside, sitting low in the driver’s seat of the Hyundai, listening to rock music at low volume and calling in until dawn.

Pender stayed up all night to take the calls. He never slept, anyway, when Marie was playing the point. Hell, he could barely sit down. Kept pacing the room. Turning on the TV, flipping through channels. On the second bed, Terry Harper shifted in his sleep, groaning every time Pender made a move.

“You gonna stay up all night?” he said finally. “Thought I’d at least get a good night’s sleep out of this deal.”

Pender stopped pacing. Stared at Harper a minute. “Yeah, fine,” he said. “Sorry. I’ll keep it down.”

“I just got one question for you, though.” Harper pointed his face in Pender’s vague direction. “Why me? I’m nobody special.”

The same old question. “You’re special to me,” said Pender.

“Seriously. Why me? And why so little money?”

“Don’t worry about it. Go back to sleep.”

Harper sat back on the bed. “I guess you’re thinking it’s easier to get sixty thousand than six hundred thousand. Quicker.” He sighed. “Well, pal, I gotta tell you. You could have had six hundred grand for me. Easy.”

“Sleep,” said Pender. “Now.”

I’m glad nobody else heard him say that, he thought, as Harper turned back onto his side and began snoring a tractor-trailer snore. We’re risking enough just by pulling these jobs. We don’t need to get greedy besides.

Of all of his worries, it was greed that kept Arthur Pender awake at night. It wasn’t his own greed that bothered him; Pender was happy with sixty-thousand-dollar scores. He worried, though, that the long grind would wear on his team.

Most would-be kidnappers treated the job like a Hail Mary. Tried to knock down some CEO, some pop star, tried to take ten million and disappear after one big haul. One shot for all the glory. To Pender, that kind of thinking was stupidity, plain and simple. Those heroes who aimed for the big scores always attracted the big crowds. Police. Feds. TV cameras. Publicity like that made it impossible to remain anonymous. Publicity like that meant investigations, manhunts, Wanted posters. Ultimately, publicity like that meant jail or death. Nobody got away from the Big American Machine.

Far better, then, to pull quick scores. Lower numbers, but higher volume. The Pender method. Snatch guys like Terry Harper, Martin Warner. Midlevel executives, hedge-fund managers, guys with enough cash to make the job worthwhile, with families to pay the ransoms, but with no glamour to their names. No romance. Anonymous upper-class fellas who just wanted to see things return to normal.

The first of their marks had been a Silicon Valley systems engineer, a tech-boom millionaire whose girlfriend delivered the ransom in a bright red Ferrari. Marcus Sinclair, an arrogant braggart in thousand-dollar sneakers and a solid-gold Rolex, a prick with a fake tan and a potty mouth. To a gang of impoverished students used to part-time jobs and ramen noodles, Sinclair’s hundred grand seemed like a fortune.

Afterward, walking on a long, empty stretch of California coastline, Marie had wrapped her arms around Pender, staring out at the Pacific Ocean, eyes wide and bright, and asked if he really thought they should retire right now or if they could maybe manage one more score.

The question had surprised him. He’d been asking himself the same thing. He had believed from the start they could make a career as kidnappers, but it had been a daydream to Pender, a theory. He figured they’d cash out and go home and try and find normal jobs. He had never imagined Marie would get off on the rush as much as he did. He’d turned to her. “You’re serious.”

She smiled at him, drunk off success, beautiful in the dying light of the day. She kissed him. “Just one more time,” she said.

“You know we’ll go to jail for this,” he said. “This is a major crime.”

“We won’t go to jail,” said Marie. “We won’t get caught. Anyway, we’re not hurting anyone. Not really.”

“That guy was an asshole.”

“He was an asshole,” she said. “We didn’t hurt him. What’s a hundred thousand dollars to a guy like that?”

“Nothing,” said Pender. “Less than nothing.”

“To us, though.” She kissed him again. Smiled. She was beautiful that night, even more than normal, the way her eyes caught the light, the way that thick mane of deep chestnut hair fell over her shoulders— and, above all, her perfect, carefree smile. She was happy tonight, Pender realized. He hadn’t seen her this happy in weeks.

“I don’t want to go back to Seattle,” she said. “Wondering what I’m going to do with my life. Not yet, Arthur. Think what we could do with another hundred grand.”

She had visions of a long vacation, a chance to see the world— Machu Picchu and South Africa and Rome—and then a master’s degree in something useful and a chance at some kind of career. Just one more score to get a head start on real life. One more perfect crime.

But Pender was dreaming bigger. And when he told her that in four years they could afford to retire in the Maldives or New Zealand, she’d laughed him off, disbelieving. But he’d mapped it out for her, for the team, showed them his projections, and now they held tight to that image, a little grass-roofed hut at the edge of a sparkling sea a million miles from anywhere.

The goal. The Dream. Pender’s five-year plan. Criminals in the short term. The only way to get ahead. No job market, no unemployment lines, no Social Security or foreclosures. No 401(k) and no taxpayer bailouts. Just five years making low-risk, no-violence scores and then a worry-free existence forever.

Sawyer and Mouse, he knew, had similar aspirations. Maybe not the Maldives and maybe not a grass-roofed hut, but dreams nonetheless. Sawyer, Pender remembered, had been taken with that Silicon Valley man’s Ferrari. Mouse was more into the guy’s girlfriend, a pneumatic blonde with enhanced breasts and legs up to her ears. Both men saw their current occupations as a means toward those ends, toward fast cars and girls with fake breasts, a long life of leisure and luxury.

As they’d migrated eastward after those first big scores, however, away from the slacker-rich Silicon Valley geeks and gaudy Hollywood players and inland toward Middle America, even a hundred grand began to sound like an exorbitant ransom. Now, two years into the project, working sixty-thousand-dollar deals in frigid Minnesota, Pender knew it would be easy to forget the grind. It would be tempting to get greedy, to go for one big haul to end the show and set each of them up for life. And though nobody on the team had said anything yet, Pender still lay awake nights, fearing his teammates’ greed and praying they’d stay on the program—his program—for as long as it would take to make the Dream something real.

six

Sandra Harper paid the ransom by sunset.

Pender chose a suburban McDonald’s for the drop spot and gave the woman fifteen minutes to be there. Told her put the money in a trash bag, leave it by the dumpster out back. Come alone. Park in the northwest corner of the lot. Way out in back. Do not follow us after the drop. Any deviation and your husband gets it.

They got there first. Pender watched from the van as Sandra drove in a few minutes later, a slight, graying woman in a navy blue Infiniti. She dropped the money bag beside the dumpster and parked as instructed.

Sawyer drove up, and Pender counted the money. All of it there. Pender nodded and Mouse kicked Harper to the curb and the men drove off in the van.

Marie hung around the parking lot in the rented Hyundai, watching Terry Harper pick himself up off the pavement and walk, indignant, to his car, where his wife had vacated the driver’s seat and waited on the passenger side, darting nervous glances at her husband and then back into the lot.

Marie followed them home and waited outside for a few hours, watching the lights go on and off, watching the shadows and silhouettes playing in the windows. Then Pender called and, with no police in sight, told Marie to bring it home.

They drove the Savana out to a nature reserve northwest of town. Marie met them in the barrens in the Hyundai, and they wiped the van clean, parked it deep in the woods at the end of a long dirt road, and said prayers for early snow. Then they drove the Hyundai back into Minneapolis and checked out of the Super 8 and checked into a Best Western across town and divvied up the money in the room.

The next day Pender and Marie took the rental car out and went van shopping, putting cash down on a red Ford E-Series passenger van and using another of Mouse’s fake IDs for the registration. They took the rental car back to the airport and swung back to the Best Western to pick up Mouse and Sawyer.

Then Pender drove them out onto the highway, pointing the van northeast on a bearing for Green Bay and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the late afternoon sunset a fire show over the Twin Cities in the rear-view mirror.

They said no police,” said Sandra Harper, peering through the living room blinds and out into the shadows beyond. “They said they’d hurt Alice if we did.”

“Bullshit.” Terry Harper paced the room behind his wife. “They’re not out there anymore. They’re not watching us.”

“But how do you know?”

“They have their money. Makes no sense them sticking around. They throw a threat at us and get the hell outta Dodge.”

“But how do you know?”

“Goddamn it, Sandra, I just know.”

In a corner of the living room, Alice Harper lingered, watching her father pace the room as her mother stared out into the street. Sandra replaced the curtain, looked back, and noticed her daughter, her eyes wide. “We’re safe, Terry.”

Her husband stopped pacing. “What?”

“We’re safe. All of us. Safe.” She gestured around the room. “You’re safe. Alice is safe. I’m safe. So we lost some money. Big deal. Do you really want to risk our lives to get it back?”

For the first time that evening, Terry Harper looked his wife in the eye. “Yes,” he said. “We have to send a message. You don’t fuck with Terry Harper and expect to get away with it. Whether it’s two dollars or two million.”

Sandra sank into a couch. “I just want this to be over.”

Her husband followed her, stood staring down at her. “If we don’t make a stand, it will never be over,” he said. “It could be you next, or Alice, God forbid. We have to make a stand.”

His wife looked up at him, her eyes tired and swollen. His daughter crept out from the corner. “Daddy,” she said. “What if someone else gets kidnapped like you were?”

Harper looked at his daughter, then at his wife. Sandra stared at Alice. “You’re right,” she said finally. “Let’s call the police.”

seven

Kirk Stevens’s third player was not at all hard to find.

A Burger King employee found a pistol in the trash outside a restaurant in Burnsville and a ballistics test confirmed it for the semitruck shooting. Stevens checked out the gun and followed it back to a retired schoolteacher in Dayton’s Bluff. The teacher was clean; he’d bought the gun for protection and reported it stolen a week or so prior, but Stevens called in a favor with the St. Paul city cops and they came back with the news that the teacher had hired an old student of his to do the occasional odd job—rake leaves or buy groceries or whatever else. Wayne Harris was the kid’s name.

Stevens and the St. Paul police did some looking around. Found Wayne Harris holed up in his grandmother’s home in Burns Park. The kid played innocent for a minute, told the St. Paul city cop he was at a party that night. Stevens came around later and followed the kid to a pawnshop downtown, where Stevens made him unloading four or five hot DVD players from the back of his granny’s Corolla.

Stevens hauled the kid in and it didn’t take long. A couple hours in an interrogation room, a line or two about a long sentence and a brokenhearted grandmother and Harris burst into tears and confessed the whole thing. It wasn’t supposed to go bad, he said. Nobody was supposed to die.

Stevens bought the kid a sandwich and a Coke and then brought him down to be charged. He spent the rest of his afternoon doing paperwork at his desk, and by about eight his stomach was growling and he was ready to call the case closed. He shut down his computer and was halfway out of his chair when his phone started ringing, loud and obnoxious in the near-empty confines of the BCA headquarters. Stevens stared at it a moment, his stomach rumbling its impatience. Then he sighed and sank back in his seat and picked up the handset. “Stevens.”

“This is Special Investigations?”

“You got it,” said Stevens. “Who am I talking to?”

“Powell, Minneapolis PD. Agent, we’ve got a case you’re probably going to want to hear about.”

Minneapolis PD, thought Stevens. This ought to be good. In general, the police on the Twin Cities forces worked separate beats from their BCA counterparts. When Minneapolis PD came calling, it could only mean something major.

“Shoot,” said Stevens, reaching for his notepad. “I’m all ears.”

“Well, Agent,” said the detective. “We got a kidnapping.”

Stevens straightened, any thought of food now forgotten. “You’re serious.” Kidnappings were about as rare in Minnesota as swimsuits in January. “If it’s a kid gone missing, you gotta take it to the FBI.”

“Not a kid,” said Powell. “A grown man. Name’s Harper, Terrence. Late forties. Taken two days ago from the sidewalk outside his home in Lowry Hill. Walking home from work.”

Stevens leaned forward on his desk and started copying Powell’s dictation, his heart rate quickening. A kidnapping in Minneapolis, he thought. Bona fide. “Who is this guy Harper?” he said. “He a rich guy? Poor guy?”

“He’s rich,” said Powell. “Some kind of stockbroker or something.”

“All right. Family get any kind of note? Phone call? Any ransom demanded?”

“Phone call, night of. Harper himself, asking for sixty grand in unmarked twenties.”

“Small-time crooks.”

“You said it. Wife paid in full the next day. Harper released safe and sound.”

Stevens felt his stomach start to growl again. “The husband’s safe.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Not missing any fingers, toes, ears, eyes.”

“Everything present and accounted for.”

Stevens sighed. He rubbed his eyes. Probably just some kids going out on a dare. Not likely to be any fun at all.

“Sorry to disappoint,” said Powell. “If you don’t want it, I can tell my sergeant you’re passing.”

Stevens sat back in his chair. He glanced around the room, catching his own face reflected momentarily in a darkened window. He saw the career cop again, the bags under the eyes and the latest spiderweb wrinkles, the face of an agent who’d once dreamed of making a difference but who’d seen those dreams replaced by an admirable service record and a decent outlook and a comfortable chair in a comfortable office.

Cheer up, he told himself. A middle-aged man gets himself stolen and brought back within twenty-four hours. A sixty-thousand-dollar ransom. Maybe it wasn’t going to change the world, this case, but it sure beat the hell out of paperwork.

“I’ll take it,” he told Powell. “What else am I gonna do tonight?”

eight

Terry Harper was a bulldog of a man, a round ball of indignation who would not be calmed despite the presence of the state police and the best efforts of his wife and daughter, both of whom had given up by this point and slunk, defeated, to the margins of the room.

Stevens stood in the living room doorway, watching him pace and feeling his own stomach churn. He’d stopped for Taco Bell on the way over and the molten cheese and low-grade beef weren’t playing nice with his digestive tract. He swallowed a burp and fixed his eyes on Harper. “Give it to me from the beginning,” he said.

Harper didn’t break stride as he launched into his story. He had been walking home from work, he said, just before dusk. He was turning onto his block when a young woman called to him by name. No, he did not see the woman; she was behind him. Though he may have caught a glimpse of brown curls. She was, he believed, white.

Before he could notice anything else, he was wrapped up and tossed in the back of a van, his arms tied, his eyes blindfolded, and his mouth gagged. He was driven to some sort of compound—an apartment, it seemed like—where he was instructed to phone his wife and then beaten by an assailant.

There were probably three kidnappers, he thought, including the girl, and he had talked to one of them during the night. “The guy didn’t sleep,” said Harper. “Kept pacing the room. Changing channels on the TV.”

Ultimately, Harper slept, and spent the morning listening to the television before being tossed in the back of the van again and driven to a McDonald’s parking lot. No, he didn’t get a good look at the van. It was blue. Navy. The make? No idea.

“They said they were watching the house,” he said. “And we shouldn’t talk to the police.”

Sandra Harper eyed Stevens and stepped forward. “They said they’d come for Alice,” she said.

“They’re not coming for your daughter,” said Stevens. “Your family is safe.”

“I know we’re safe,” said Harper. He stopped pacing and fixed Stevens with a glare. “I’m not afraid. I’m mad. I want you to do your damn job. Find them.”

Stevens sighed to himself. You’d almost wish a guy like this would stay kidnapped, he thought. “These people,” he said. “Two men. One woman. All white?”

“Far as I could tell.”

“Weapons?”

Harper shrugged. “I was blindfolded. Maybe a handgun.”

“How old were they?”

“Young.” He started pacing again. “Late twenties, early thirties.”

“Catch any names?”

“No. Everything was tight. No wasted words. Everything quick.”

“Tell him the other thing,” said Sandra Harper. “The money thing.”

“Sixty grand,” said Harper. “Kind of small, don’t you think?”

“Sure.”

“You’d think, you’re kidnapping someone, you ask for more money. Big money. I’ve got it. I told the guy straight up. He could have asked for a million, and he would have got it.”

Stevens scratched his head. “What did he say?”

“Didn’t say anything. Told me go to sleep. But I figured they wanted me in and out, quick, before anyone else caught on. Twenty-four hours.”

“You figured, hey?”

“Why else would they aim so low?”

Maybe they were junkies, thought Stevens. Addicts looking to make a quick score. But junkies would be sloppy and desperate. They would make mistakes. If these kids had made a mistake, it wasn’t showing through yet.

A woman with curly brown hair. A blue panel van. A low ransom demand and a quick turnaround. A hit-and-run job.

Agent Stevens could count the number of kidnappings he’d worked on one hand. And they’d all been easy compared to this: a couple jealous parents playing musical kids, a drug dealer snatching his rival off a street corner. The kids came back overdosed on ice cream, and the rival came back in a block of concrete. Not exactly whodunits. Nothing like this job.

But he had to start somewhere. Kids in an apartment. A bunch of students, maybe, having a laugh. An elaborate senior prank. Minneapolis had a number of universities. Get a detail of Metro uniforms to canvass the campuses, ask around.

The McDonald’s may have had a security camera. And there was the blue van. Had to be hundreds in the Twin Cities, but it wouldn’t hurt to put out a notice, get people looking around. The phone records might work, too. Figure out where the calls were coming from and you get your kidnappers’ geography. The more Stevens figured, the better he liked it. Maybe it wasn’t such a dead end after all.

Stevens turned to Harper. “You have any enemies? Anyone who’d want to hurt you?”

Harper gave him a withering look. “I’m no asshole, buddy. I play the goddamn stock market.”

“These days,” said Stevens, “that might just make you an asshole.”

nine

They drove over the top of northern Michigan, stopping for the night at a deserted roadside motel just north of the Straits of Mackinac. In the morning it snowed, a few flakes of dandruff and a bitter wind off the lake. It took Sawyer ten minutes to scrape the frost from the van’s windows.

It was a nice little spot, Pender thought, the cold notwithstanding. Would be amazing in the summer. Fishing, boating, maybe some swimming. A little chunk of heaven.

They slept in that morning, Sawyer and Mouse in one room and Pender and Marie in the other.

Marie woke first and when Pender opened his eyes he saw her, curled up in a baggy university sweatshirt and her nose in a paperback novel. She smiled at him when he sat up, her frizzy hair an explosion and her eyes still bleary. He leaned over and kissed her. “Getting ideas?” he said.

She shook her head. “It’s a romance novel.”

“What do you need with a romance novel?” He kissed her again. “You have me.”

She smiled again and kissed him back, and then she sank back into the sheets and stared up at the ceiling. “It’s nice here,” she said.

“Would be better in the summer.”

“I was thinking,” she said. “It would be nice if we could stay.”

He watched her. “Yeah?”

“If we weren’t always in such a hurry.” She sighed. “I just wish we could be normal sometimes.”

“In a couple more years, we’ll be done with this stuff. We can be normal the rest of our lives.”

She sat up again. “I’m just kind of tired,” she said. “Motel rooms and minivans and stuff. I feel dirty, Pender. Unhealthy. This isn’t really what I had in mind when I thought about seeing the world.”

He reached out to her and ran his hands over her hip and her side. Slid his hand underneath her sweatshirt and along the contours of her body. “You look pretty healthy to me,” he told her.

She sighed again. “We need exercise, Pender,” she said. “Maybe we should start doing yoga or something.”

“I have a better idea.” He pulled her closer and kissed her long and hard, loving the way her body curved to fit his. He tugged at her sweatshirt and she sat up to pull it over her head, casting a sideways look down at him.

“This is your idea of exercise?” she said.

He grinned at her. “It’s better than yoga. No offense.”

She swatted playfully at him and then he pulled her back to him. He admired her for another long minute, and then he closed his eyes and kissed her some more.

They stayed in bed until noon. Then the phone rang and it was Mouse and Sawyer, ready to go. They showered and dressed and ate breakfast with the guys in an empty diner down the road, and then they piled back in the van and drove on.

They made Detroit by the middle of the afternoon, swooping down on the I-75 into the city’s grimy suburbs under a sky as bleak as the surroundings. They found a Super 8 off the highway and paid cash for two double rooms. When they got in and got settled, Mouse booted up his computer and started looking for prospects.

“This is good,” he said, staring at a map on his screen. “Looks like we’re pretty close to a lot of rich neighborhoods.”

“Rich?” said Sawyer. “Who the hell are we going to nab in this broke-ass town?”

“No kidding,” said Marie. “If we take the president of GM, they’ll make us pay to give him back.”

They had a point, Pender thought. He worried a little about the target possibilities in this part of the country. The whole southern half of the state looked like a fallout zone, and Detroit itself wasn’t exactly millionaires’ row these days. It almost felt wrong taking money from the people around here.

But Mouse was confident, and he was good. By next morning he had pulled up three worthy candidates, none of whom seemed to have suffered at all in the recession. By noon, Pender had made his decision.

The target was Sam Porter, a forty-two-year-old executive with an agricultural engineering firm headquartered outside the Detroit city limits. Porter lived with his young family in Royal Oak, an affluent bedroom community and an easy highway drive from the Super 8.

“House is worth about a million, and he’s got stock,” said Mouse. “Must have got in early with his company and rode it north. He’s perfect.”

The target acquired, they settled in to the work. There was plenty of it. Burner phones to buy and a car to rent. Routines to establish and intelligence to gather. The team was at its best with a job to do, Pender believed, himself included. With tasks at hand, he could forget about the bigger worries and throw himself into the grind. And he did. They all did, enjoying the anticipation of a job coming together, another D-day just two days away.