The Professionals by Owen Laukkanen Read Free Book Online

babysitting him on the drive in to work. Thursday, though, Porter was running late. Mouse cruised the block a couple times, thinking he’d missed him, but both cars stayed put in the driveway, and after a while, Mouse realized he hadn’t seen the guy’s kid leave for school yet, either.
    At quarter to ten, the whole family—Porter, the wife, the fourteen-year-old son—piled into Grace Porter’s Mercedes SUV and backed out onto the street. Mouse followed in the rental Impala, tailing the Benzsouthwest to the airport, where the Porters parked in the long-term lot and disappeared into the terminal.
    Mouse called Pender, panicked. Pender called Porter’s office and got the goods from a secretary. The family was gone for three weeks. The West Indies—isn’t that nice? Howard Bartley would be handling Porter’s accounts.
    Pender half debated switching the job over to Bartley, just to maintain the theme, but then Mouse punched a couple keys on his laptop and revealed that Bartley was a bachelor with serious credit problems. No chance they’d get a penny in ransom.
    Pender gathered the gang at the Super 8 that afternoon. “What now?” he asked them. “What do you guys want to do?”
    “No worries,” said Mouse. He started typing again. “We can find another mark in a minute and a half. Easy.”
    Pender stared at Mouse’s computer screen. “We could just ditch and go on vacation.”
    Sawyer frowned. “No sense coming to Detroit if we’re not getting paid for it.”
    “Besides, who’s going to pay for the hotel if it’s not the mark?” said Mouse. “And the rental car? It ain’t coming out of my share.”
    Pender turned to his girlfriend. “What do you think, Marie?”
    She was quiet a moment, but then she sighed and looked up. “Let’s just do it.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “Yeah,” she said. “Let’s get paid and get out of here. Go somewhere warm.”
    Pender stared at her a second, almost wishing she’d wanted to jet. I really don’t like these slapdash encounters, he thought. We work best when we’re prepared. But he mulled it over a little longer, and then he thought, man up. You’ll pull this job and spend a week on the beach. Nothing to it. He looked around the room, the gang waiting for him, and he squared his shoulders and looked down at Mouse’s laptop. “All right,” he told Mouse. “Bring up those targets again. Let’s find us a good one.”

    T hey picked Donald Beneteau. But Donald Beneteau did not go easy.
    They collared him in Birmingham, a couple blocks from his house, as he walked back from the grocery store with a half gallon of milk and the day’s
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. He turned around nice and easy when Marie called out his name, but once Sawyer and Pender put their hands on him he broke free and bolted.
    Beneteau made it half a block before they got him in the van, punching and kicking and swearing his lungs out. Sawyer fed him a right cross and he calmed down enough that Pender could rope him up, but the man got his kicks in, nailing Pender square in the jaw as he tried to fit the gag.
    “Do you know who I am?” he kept saying. “Do you
know
who the fuck I am?”
    Pender and Sawyer swapped looks. They knew what Mouse knew. Beneteau owned his own tool-and-die operation. Four factories. Thirty million dollars in annual revenue. Commuted to work daily in a Mercedes-Benz sedan. Married fifteen years to Patricia Beneteau, forty, VP of Marketing for the Motown Casino. Three sons. Million and a half dollars in real estate, another couple million in the bank. Perfect target.
    Perfect targets, though, didn’t tend to put up such a fight. Perfect targets didn’t act like their kidnappers should know who the fuck they were.
    They got Beneteau back to the Super 8 and let him cool down a little while Pender took Mouse into the other bedroom. “Why’s this guy acting like a superstar?” he asked. “Is there something we should know about him?”
    Mouse shrugged. “Guy thinks he’s a