The Professionals (8 page)

“Mom,” he said, panting. “Ian found a bird on the deck. I think its wing’s broken.”

Beneteau turned to her son. Forced a smile. “I’m a little busy now, honey,” she said. “I’ll come see your bird later, okay?”

The fourteen-year-old stared at her a moment, then shrugged and disappeared down the hall. Beneteau listened to his footsteps. Heard the back door slam and then she was alone again.

Kidnapping, she thought. Those maniacs. Stealing my husband for a hundred thousand dollars.
My
husband. Must have been crackheads. Crackheads or maniacs. Either way, they’re in for a surprise.

She walked back to the phone and dialed Rialto. “This is Mrs. B,” she said. “We have a situation.”

P
ender could feel the bile welling up in his stomach as he stared at Mouse’s computer screen. My God, he thought. We’ve kidnapped John Gotti.

A few minutes earlier, Mouse had pulled him out of the hostage room where Beneteau lay bound and blindfolded. He dragged Pender down the hall to the next room, his face ashen.

“We might have a little problem,” Mouse told him. “This guy Beneteau? We were right. He owns those tool-and-die shops or whatever. He’s just your everyday rube, yeah?”

“Yeah,” said Pender. “So? The hell’s going on?”

“It’s his wife, boss.” Mouse’s eyes were oh-shit wide. “His wife’s not quite so everyday.”

Now Pender peered over Mouse’s shoulder and wanted to throw up. In less than twenty minutes, Mouse had come up with an encyclopedia of news reports, all concerning Patricia Beneteau and her alleged organized crime connections at the city’s Motown Casino. The reports suggested the casino was run by a low-profile offshoot of a prominent New York crime family and that the majority of the company’s executives possessed strong ties back to the Manhattan home office. Beneteau—née Liakos—was mentioned repeatedly by name.

“Holy shit,” said Pender. “This is straight out of a mob movie.”

Mouse looked up at him. “What do we do, boss?”

“I’m not sure yet,” he said. “We don’t get killed, that’s the main thing.”

His phone rang. Marie, standing guard at the Beneteau house. Pender felt his heart start to pump even faster. She might as well be wearing a target, he thought. “Arthur?”

“Yeah,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. “How’s it going out there?”

“I’m not sure,” said Marie. She sounded shaky. “No cops yet, anyway.”

“No cops,” said Pender. Probably the last thing we have to worry about now. “Okay. What else?”

“Arthur—these cars just started showing up. Fifteen minutes ago, maybe. People just started rolling into the house.”

“What cars? What people?”

“Big black cars,” she said. “Cadillacs. And a big truck. People everywhere, Arthur. Scary-looking people.”

“All right,” said Pender. “Get the hell out of there. Come on back to the motel.”

“What if they call the police?”

“They’re not calling the police, Marie,” he said. “These aren’t the calling-the-police kind of people. Get out of there. Now.”

Twenty minutes later, Marie was at the Super 8, and Pender called a team meeting. They left Beneteau bound in the first room, and the four of them crowded into the second, everyone jumpy and confused and scared.

“So here’s the deal,” Pender said. He cleared his throat. Tried to sound confident. “Beneteau’s wife is connected.”

“Connected?” said Marie. “What does that even mean?”

“Means she’s in the mob,” said Mouse. “She knows people who know people.
Sopranos
shit.”

“Those people you saw at her place were thugs,” said Pender. “Goons? Henchmen? I don’t even know what they call them.” He surveyed the room. “The point is, what are we going to do?”

“We let him go,” said Marie. “Right, Pender? We cut our losses and leave him by the side of the road. Get the hell out of Detroit and forget all of this.”

“Yeah,” said Mouse. “We don’t need this headache. Those guys will kill us.”

“Bullshit.” Suddenly Sawyer had a gun in his hands, a big black pistol that freeze-framed the room. “Nobody’s going to kill us.”

Marie gasped. The room went silent. Pender stared at the gun like it was a lit stick of dynamite, the whole room moving faster and faster
around him. He glanced at Mouse. The kid stared back, one eyebrow raised. “Jesus, Sawyer,” Marie said at last. “Where the hell did you get that?”

Sawyer kept his eyes on Pender. “Thought we might need it.”

“Need it for what, exactly?”

“We never needed guns before,” said Pender.

“My God, Sawyer. What are you thinking? We’re not
killers
.”

Marie was this close to hysterical. Pender put his arm around her. “It’s okay,” he said. “We’ll figure this out.”

“He has a goddamn
gun
, Pender.”

“I know. I don’t know where the hell it came from.” He glared at Sawyer. “But it’s not our biggest problem right now. We gotta figure out this Beneteau thing first. Put the gun away, Matt.”

Sawyer shrugged. The gun disappeared.

Pender looked around the room, the dim light, the claustrophobic walls. Fought the rising tide of panic. “Let’s work through this. We ditch Beneteau tonight and skip town.”

“You guys watch too many mob movies,” said Sawyer. “These guys are businessmen. They’ll pay up.”

“You don’t watch enough mob movies,” said Mouse. “They’ll come looking for us.”

“Big deal. We ditch the van and catch a plane somewhere they won’t find us.”

“It doesn’t matter where we go, Sawyer. They’ll find us.”

“How?”

“Look,” said Pender. “Maybe they pay. Maybe they don’t find us. But why risk it? We don’t need the money that bad. We ditch this guy and we run another score next week. We do better research and we get back on the grind. It doesn’t make sense to start pissing off mobsters. Not if we want to stay clean.”

Sawyer stared at him. Said nothing. “Please, Matt,” said Marie. “Let’s just let this one go.”

Sawyer sighed. “Whatever,” he said. “I guess I’m outvoted.”

P
atricia Beneteau stared out into the street as the last of the day’s light slipped away. Behind her, Rialto’s three goons sat waiting, looking oversized and uncomfortable on her sofas and easy chairs. She turned and examined them: two Italian, one Greek. Muscle from top to bottom. Shaved heads, dead eyes, long scars. Might as well have been clones.

A car door slammed outside. Beneteau turned back to the window to see another mammoth of a man step out of his Escalade and start up toward the house. A minute later he was inside, rubbing his hands together, his cheeks rosy and his eyes bright. He looks like an overgrown child, she thought. A teddy bear. He peeled off his coat and fixed his eyes on hers. “You’re Mrs. B?”

“That’s right,” she said. She watched him walk into the room. He surveyed the muscle, nodded slightly, and then examined her in the same way.

“You would be Mr. D’Antonio,” she said. He didn’t look like a teddy bear now. Not when his eyes got so hard, anyway. “Would you like some coffee?”

“Just D’Antonio. And no coffee.” He waved at an empty chair. “May I?”

“Please.”

“You had a girl parked down the street in a Chevy Impala watching the house, talking into a cell phone.”

Patricia spun. “She’s not ours. Go back out there and get her.”

D’Antonio shook his head. “She bolted. Either something spooked her or she got called back to home base.”

She stared at him. “So you lost her.”

He shrugged. “I took down her plates. We’ll find her again.”

Patricia walked away from the window and sat down opposite. The muscle watched her with uniform disinterest. She ignored them and kept her eyes on D’Antonio. “So what do we do?” she said. “How do we punish these people?”

A
shley McAdams was no student. Neither was Adam Tarver or Eugene Moy. Stevens had Singer double-check with every university in the state. No luck. Not students.

Neither were they criminals, though. The NCIC database spit out no results for either Tarver or Moy. No criminal records, no warrants, no nothing.

Either they were rookies or they just never got caught. Or they had aliases. Could be they were keeping their real names to themselves.

Rotundi brought in Sheena and Jimmy, and after a couple hours with a composite artist they had a couple pretty good sketches making Tarver and Moy. Then Brian came in from Avis and gave them the girl, McAdams, leaving only the fourth suspect, the nameless man who’d come in with McAdams. Jimmy begged off working the last sketch. It was dark, he said. He could barely trust his eyes in the daytime.

Stevens examined the sketches, searching the faces of his suspects. Who are you, he wondered.
Where
are you?

He had Rotundi put the sketches on the wire. Every cop shop in the region would get a copy. Lesley was still pushing the university angle, so every post-secondary institution in the state would get a nice poster to tack up in campus security. As for Georgia and Maryland and
Illinois, don’t ask. “I don’t want those Fed bastards thinking we can’t compete,” Lesley told him. “We solve this in-house, understand?”

Stevens spent a couple hours paging through the FBI’s Most Wanted lists, comparing the pictures and looking for matches, but the closest he came was making Tarver as James Walter Lawson, a fugitive from Alaska in his late thirties who was suspected to have died somewhere in the wilderness, fleeing from an armed robbery gone wrong. No dice.

Stevens clicked off the FBI database and turned to where Nick Singer sat at his computer, going hard at a roast beef sandwich. “Hey, Nick,” he said. “Maybe call Avis, some of the other rental companies. See if McAdams, Tarver, or Moy ever rented cars from them elsewhere.”

Singer chewed slowly. “Probably need a warrant for that stuff.”

“Fine,” said Stevens, silently cursing Tim Lesley. Singer and Rotundi weren’t exactly the BCA’s ringers. “Maybe get a warrant, then.”

Singer nodded and kept chewing. Stevens was about to say something else when his phone rang. He answered.

“Is this Agent Stevens?”

“Speaking.”

“This is Stu Courtney with the highway patrol. Understand you’re looking for blue vans.”

“Sure,” said Stevens. “GMCs in particular. Savanas.”

“Perfect,” said Courtney. “I’ve got just the car for you.”

Ten minutes later, Stevens was on I-94 in his Crown Vic headed northwest and out of the city. He glanced at Courtney’s directions. Town called Rogers, the trooper had said. Out by the Crow-Hassan Reserve.

The suspects had made one phone call to each other at the Crow-Hassan Reserve the day after the kidnapping. This had to be connected. Someone’s looking out for us, he thought.

He turned off the I-94 at Rogers and took the back roads west toward the park border. Fifteen minutes and a couple of three-point turns later, he found himself squinting down an unmarked dirt road, trying to make out if there was a black-and-white at the end.

As he drove closer he could make out the trooper’s sedan and Courtney inside it, the windows starting to fog up and the exhaust a white cloud billowing around the rear of the car. Stevens parked behind and got out, shivering in the bracing air as Courtney turned off his ignition. Stevens looked around at his surroundings: forest in all directions, dark and tangled and dense.