Read Online Naked Prey by John Sandford - Free Book Online

Ruth said. Her chin was set, tough, square. “We need to keep working.”
    “I’m sorry, but we gotta stop, until we find out what’s going on,” Calb objected. “This may be coming out of Kansas City. If that’s what it is, maybe we can give some stuff to the cops, and they can settle it, but before then . . . ”
    “Ray, we can’t,” Ruth said urgently. “We haven’t made enough runs lately. The Ontario net just came back up, since Jeanette died.”
    “I can’t help that,” Calb said. “I talked to Sister Mary Ann yesterday, when she came in—she seemed pretty happy.”
    “She did fine, but the mix wasn’t that good. We can’t stop,” Ruth said.
    “Hey—I’m shipping a load of junkers out right now. George is on his way in with his truck and we’re getting them the fuck outa . . . excuse the language. I’m sorry.” He was genuinely worried that they might be offended. Ruth had once been a nun.
    “I don’t care about the language,” Ruth said. She switched a smile on, and then off. “All I care about is that we keep working—and we won’t stop. If we have to pile up the junkers on your doorstep, that’s what we’ll do.”
    “Ah, Jesus Christ on a crutch,” Calb said, forgetting himself again.
    T HE DEAL WAS complicated, but profitable for everyone.
    A man named Shawn Davis from Kansas City, Missouri, working with old drug-dealing friends in St. Louis,Des Moines, and Omaha, would spot and steal late-model Toyota Land Cruisers, 4Runners, and Tacoma pickups. No Nissans, no Fords, no Chevys. Nothing but Toyotas. That kept parts and paint supply simple.
    The stolen vehicles would be driven, individually, from Davis’s place in Kansas City to Calb’s body shop, in Broderick. Calb had been in the Army with Davis, and they’d done some chickenshit black market stuff in Turkey, selling U.S. government meat. They trusted each other, to a point. The stolen cars were driven north by Deon Cash, who was Davis’s cousin, or Joe Kelly, a friend of Cash’s.
    As Cash or Kelly was driving north, one of a group of religious women—as a group they were called the “nuns” by the Custer County people, and some of them were—would pick up a late-model, but high-mileage, last-legs Toyota in Canada, usually from a dealer auction. The nun would nurse the wreck across the border into Minnesota, and deliver it to the body shop.
    In the shop, the stolen car would be repainted to match the beater. Some of the parts and trim—the dashboard graphics indicating kilometers per hour, instead of miles—the ID numbers, and papers of the high-mileage Toyota would be transferred to the low-mileage machine.
    A nun would then drive the truck back across the border, where it would be resold. The remnants of the beater would be shipped to a junkyard, where it would be crushed into a cube and sent to a smelter.
    The money was great: a battered, busted-up two- or three-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser, often owned by the kind of long-distance salesman who’d put fifty thousand rough miles a year on his car, would be purchased at a used-car auction for a few thousand dollars Canadian. Three weeks later, it would turn up on a working ranch in Saskatchewan or Alberta, in near-new condition, with allthe right papers. The buyer would pay the equivalent of $20,000 for a $50,000 machine.
    After all the work was done, and the employees paid, and the investment in the vanishing truck was accounted for, Calb and Shawn Davis would split $5,000 on each Toyota sale, give or take. Two trucks a week added up to a quarter-million tax-free dollars a year, each. Hiding the cash was almost as much trouble as making it, but they found ways.
    T HERE WERE A few flies in the ointment.
    The nuns made everybody nervous. They weren’t paid anything, which meant that Davis and Calb didn’t have a good hold on them. The women were using the trucks and the body shop’s expertise to smuggle drugs south across the border. Although they had no