Free The Professionals by Owen Laukkanen Page B

You fucked us up, bad.”
    Pender drove. He pointed the van away from Birmingham, and he drove the speed limit as he tried to keep his heart from pounding out of his chest. Tried to keep his hands from wrenching off the steering wheel. We’re screwed, he thought. What a stupid goddamn play. What the hell are we supposed to do now?



eighteen
    T hey got rid of the van in River Rouge, parking it on a deserted industrial back lot, wiping it down, stripping the plates, and setting it aflame. Pender watched it burn for a minute or two before he turned back and joined the others in the Impala.
    They threw the license plates and the gun into the Detroit River a few miles downstream, and then they pointed the car west and drove out to the airport. They rode in silence, each of them staring out a different window, cringing with every police car and trying to forget.
    Only Pender couldn’t forget. He could still hear Beneteau cackling, could hear the smirk in the man’s voice as he played Pender’s name like a trump card, could see the back of the man’s head explode as Sawyer pulled the trigger. It had been a brutal act, an unnecessary act. An unprofessional act.
    We could have done this forever, he thought. We could have worked these scores for as long as we wanted. Now, because of one lapse in judgment, we’re on the run. We’ve killed a man, and we’re on the run.
    He sank back in his seat and watched Detroit through the window, rainy and miserable.
    They stopped at a motel a mile from the terminal. Pender paid cash for a double room, and they all piled in, dragging ass, exhausted. Mariecollapsed on one bed and Sawyer on the other. Mouse sank into a chair, and for a couple minutes they said nothing. Pender leaned against the wall and closed his eyes and tried again to wipe Beneteau’s death from his mind.
    He should have known that they would find themselves in a situation like this, he thought. He should have foreseen it. One day they were bound to meet a person who didn’t want to be kidnapped. A person whose family didn’t really want to pay the ransom. He should have foreseen that one day they were going to have to make good on their threats.
    But he’d never imagined they would kill anyone. They’d bluffed in the past, and Pender supposed he had figured they would bluff every time. And if the bluffs didn’t work now and again, they could call off the deal and get back on the road and nobody would be the wiser. He’d never intended to kill anyone. He’d never really thought of his team as the bad guys.
    They’d never talked about it, not ever, not in two full years pulling jobs. As a team, they had never acknowledged the reality of what they were doing. The implications, morally and legally. In the beginning it was easy to get caught up in the rush, the madcap spitballing in that motel in Salinas after the Sinclair job, everyone yelling over top of one another, the ideas coming fast and exciting as each of them realized that, yes, they could do this, go pro and pull more scores and never get caught.
    The first few jobs had been a balls-out adrenaline high. No time to think of the consequences. The tech geek in Silicon Valley, that first awkward terrifying job, and then the accountant in Long Beach, Robert Thompson. It was all about the challenge. It was about cheating the system and not getting caught. It was about some crazy Robin Hood thing, this gang of broke kids outsmarting the rich, redistributing the wealth, and proving that yeah, crime
could
pay, and a hell of a lot more than some useless college degree besides.
    But there was never any acknowledgment that what they were doing was wrong. That what they were doing, besides causing a bit ofstress to a bunch of upper-class families, was hard-core, no safe word,
wrong
. If we get caught, he thought, we’ll go to jail for life.
    Of course, he had thought about the consequences of failure before. He was Arthur Pender; he worried about everything. It was his