Hardboiled Crime Four-Pack

by Jack Bunker

  “Whatever she is,” said Leproate, “I can tell you one thing, she hates men.”

  “Lucky you,” Jennifer said. And soon after, her breathing changed and Leproate knew she was asleep. He lay awake for a long time, thinking of what Jill Wellsley looked like naked, and hating himself for it.

  THREE

  The next day Leproate skipped his run and got to the office early. Wellsley had a deposition that took all morning. When she finally got done, it was after lunch. Leproate said, “I’m sorry about last night.”

  “What? Why?” asked Wellsley, all business.

  “I hate those fucking pork chops.”

  For the briefest of instants, Wellsley smiled. But it was interrupted by ASAC Harberg. He didn’t say a word. He just pointed at the conference room. They followed.

  The first thing out of his mouth was, “Pack your shit, you’ll run it out of Tallahassee.”

  Wellsley asked, “Run what?” but Leproate already knew. Hot damn.

  “Somebody flipped an armadillo,” said Harberg.

  “What?” asked Wellsley, totally perplexed.

  “We think somebody hit an armored car. Twenty-three million dollars,” said Harberg.

  Leproate whistled low. “We have the truck?”

  “No, it’s gone. Moonis-Brainerd lost contact with it about an hour and a half ago. It’s twenty minutes late to its first stop in Apalachicola.” He slid the folder across the table toward Leproate. “You’ll run it. You want back in the bureau’s good graces, this is your shot.”

  “Why is he in charge?” Wellsley asked.

  “Because I said so,” said Harberg.

  “Is this discrimination?” Wellsley asked, not veiling her threat very much. Leproate rubbed his eyes.

  Harberg considered Wellsley for a moment. “The word’s out about you, Agent. I don’t know if the word is right, but I’m gonna tell you two things anyway. One, if you decide this job isn’t for you, you can quit anytime you want, and it might be better for everybody if you did. Do you want to work for the FBI?”

  Wellsley, sounding small, said, “Yes, sir.”

  “Two, this broken-down old wreck of a partner of yours may quite possibly know more about armos than anybody else we’ve got. There was a time, before he shot himself in the foot, when he was the go-to man. So if you shut up and follow his lead, you just might learn something.”

  Wellsley shut up. Nobody was convinced that she was going to follow Leproate’s lead.

  As they packed up, Harberg pulled him aside. “Look, if she goes all Billie Jean King on you, you let me know and I’ll pull her.”

  Leproate said, “Boss, Billie Jean King could play.”

  “You know what I mean. If she ain’t FBI, she ain’t. Nothing you can do about it.”

  “I know, but let’s give her some rope and see where she goes.”

  “Just make sure she doesn’t hang you with it,” said Harberg.

  On the ride to Tallahassee, Leproate felt the anger radiating from Wellsley. He avoided the matter by spending most of his time on the phone. For a second he thought about telling her that she was hot when she was angry. Not because it was true, though it was, but because it might be fun to see her blow her stack. But then again, the car might not survive the explosion.

  When they got to the Florida Highway Patrol HQ in Tallahassee, it already had a war room set up. And ten minutes after they walked into it, it was standing room only and Leproate was giving the rundown.

  “I am Special Agent Leproate, this is Special Agent Wellsley. We will be coordinating this investigation and are grateful for all the assistance you have just been ordered to provide.” This got a chuckle out of the room. Leproate had seen other agents come down all Charlie Hard-Ass in situations like this, but he believed that people would try harder for you if you weren’t an asshole to them.

  “We have a missing, presumed stolen, Moonis-Brainerd armored car. Last we knew of it, it passed through Medart headed south on 319. It never made its first scheduled stop in Apalachicola. Giving us a search area from Panama City east to Branford and north to Thomasville, Georgia. Somebody keep an eye out the window, they might drive by.

  “We’ve got three coast guard cutters on patrol in the Gulf and an E-2C plane on loan from Miami. Nothing gets on the Gulf without being searched.

  “FBI evidence techs are working on stoplight cameras and surveillance footage and tracker data from the truck itself. But y’all know better than me, once you get south of here, it gets pretty wild.

  “I’ve got a list of people we want help questioning. And I want a sweep of the area. It’s late for roadblocks, so we’ve got BOLOs clear across to Texas and all the way up to Atlanta just in case. There’s twenty-three million dollars out there somewhere. And the people who stole it. Let’s go find them.”

  The meeting broke up. Leproate glad-handed the troopers for a little while. Some he knew, some he was glad to meet. One or two of them walked over to the far corner of the room and made an effort to introduce themselves to Wellsley. Leproate thought nothing of it. He was exchanging a word with Jim Cummings, a giant of a man who had helped him out a few years back.

  Wellsley’s voice rose in anger. “That is not appropriate!” A few strained chuckles followed. Jim turned and Leproate could see the rest of the room. Wellsley was alone in her corner with a look of righteous indignation.

  “What was that?” Jim rumbled.

  “She’s a bit high-strung.”

  Jim chuckled. “Good luck.”

  Leproate crossed the room. Before he could even ask, Wellsley said, “Did you see the way they treated me?”

  “I didn’t notice anything special.”

  “Two of them hit on me! I’m a goddamned FBI agent.”

  “Y’know, some people would take that as a compliment.”

  “And others would call that harassment! We’ve got a job to do. Am I never going to be clear of this bullshit? Who do I have to castrate to get respect?”

  Leproate took a deep breath. Don’t look at her breasts, he thought to himself. Do not look at her breasts under that tight button-down shirt. Why did women do these things to men? Leproate said, “I’m not sure that would…”

  “And they all called me ma’am!”

  “Ma’am, in this part of the country, that’s called being polite.”

  “In any part of the country, that’s called being unprofessional. I am not a ma’am. I am a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They should call me Agent, not ma’am.”

  Leproate sighed. “It doesn’t always have to be a fight.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. You don’t have to deal with all the bullshit I have to. And forget about it if I was African American.”

  “What is your intention here, Agent Ma’am?”

  She hit him in the mouth.

  Leproate rode the punch by taking a step back. He lifted a hand to his lip, and when he took it away, it was bloody. Wellsley glared a challenge. He heard a snicker from the knot of guys over by the door. He ignored them, but was grateful to hear the door shutting behind them as they left.

  Leproate asked, “You feel better now that you got that out of your system? Or you need to castrate me?”

  She didn’t answer. She breathed heavily, hands tight, ready for a fight.

  “Agent Wellsley, believe it or not, I have never hit a woman. But if you do that again, I am going to make one hell of an exception to that rule.”

  “You know how condescending that is? You think I can’t fight? Poor little defenseless woman!”

  Holy shit she was angry! A deep anger that smoldered in her bones. Barry’s eyes flicked to the Glock on her hip, then back to her lovely face, contorted in rage. He lowered his voice.

  “I know you can fight. I’m sayin’ I don’t want to fight you.” He could see that it didn’t even make a dent. “OK, Agent Ma’am. You want to beat the hell out of me, go ahead.”

  “What?”

  “Go ahead
, get it out of your system. I’ve had my ass kicked before. I lived.” At this Wellsley calmed down, just a little bit. A little bit was better than nothing. “Agent, my intention is to catch whoever stole all that money. Because that’s the job. What is your intention?”

  “It’s not right,” she said through clenched teeth.

  “The job, or the rest of it?”

  “The rest of it, all this patriarchal bullshit. It’s wrong. It’s fucking wrong and it’s tearing the world apart.”

  “Well, what do you want me to do about it?” Leproate kept speaking so she wouldn’t have a chance to answer. That was one question he wanted to stay well and truly rhetorical. “There’s a lot wrong with the world and most of it I can’t do a damn thing about. But I can do something about this robbery. That is something I can fix. But I can’t do it without your help. And I can’t do it if you piss off the entire State of Florida.”

  “If I’m going to work, I need to be treated with respect.”

  “No argument. But they were respecting you, just not the way you see fit. I mean, goddamn, it’s not like anybody patted you on the ass.”

  And right there Leproate thought she might shoot him. Wellsley held it together, saying through her teeth, “There’s all kinds of sexism.”

  “And I can’t do a thing about any of it. Now, you want to get down to work?”

  FOUR

  Wellsley didn’t want to get down to work. Instead she left.

  Twenty minutes later she called and attempted to apologize. Well, maybe that’s what Leproate could have called it. She was now headed to the local Moonis-Brainerd armored car depot to interview (and hopefully not piss off) everybody there. It needed to be done. But Leproate didn’t hold high hopes for any breakthroughs.

  Leproate put his head down and worked the case. He was going to get what he needed, one way or another. Late that afternoon, ASAC Harberg called him on his cell. Leproate gave him the update. Then Harberg asked, “How is it with Billie Jean King?”

  Leproate answered without thinking about it, “Good. Little rough around the edges, but she’s working her end.”

  “Yeah,” said Harberg. “You watch her.”

  Leproate killed the call and walked down the hallway to where three techs were scouring video surveillance.

  Leproate said, “Whattya got?”

  The middle tech hit pause and looked up at Leproate. “All I can see so far is they loaded up the truck and left.”

  “Smart money is on an inside job,” said Leproate.

  “I ain’t arguing that, Agent, I’m just sayin’ from what we can see in the evidence, smart money might be betting against the house.”

  Leproate nodded.

  “We’ve got clips of the truck leaving Tallahassee. I scoured a clip from a Walmart security camera in Crawfordville. So far that’s it.”

  “OK,” said Leproate, “Uncle Sam has got full overtime for two days. I’m signing all the checks, so if you don’t stay up all night, I’ll find somebody who will.”

  “Where’s that pretty partner of yours?”

  Leproate said, “We’re working shifts.”

  “Is she taking the night shift?” said the tech with a stupid, suggestive leer.

  “She’s a federal agent. I’m pretty sure she’ll shoot you if you say that to her. And I’m pretty sure she’ll get away with it.”

  He went back into the war room and sat looking at his laptop. His stomach had turned sour from all the coffee. When he burped up a little acid, he opened his bag and pulled out a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. Leproate took a slug right from the bottle and then started tapping questions into the National Crime Information Center database. It was hard because he wasn’t too good with computers, but eventually he got a list of reports to page through.

  As he read them, his eyes grew bleary and his stomach pained him again. He should really sleep, but this was a case. He wanted to close this one so badly he would have been able to taste it, if not for the stomach acid. He hit the bottle again and left the top off when he set it down. He was gonna need it again for sure. And more coffee, God help him. For a moment he wondered if he could use Pepto as creamer and get both drug effects at once. Then he saw it.

  He got up so fast, he knocked over the bottle of Pepto-Bismol and left it running out over the conference room table.

  He collected Wellsley at the hotel. She was the kind that wakes up slowly. Leproate waited until she was in the car to explain.

  “It’s not an inside job.”

  “I didn’t find anything to suggest that. One of the guys was cheating on his wife, but nobody was preparing to leave.”

  “On that Loomis Fargo heist in North Carolina, the agents knew it was an inside job the first time they watched the tapes. They literally saw one guy loading his personal truck with cash and driving off. The rest was just finding him.”

  “They were amateurs, idiots, right?” asked Wellsley.

  “Yeah, the guy who actually stole the money was rooked out of his share. The people who got it spent it like idiots. Bought a big house. ATVs. They even filled a wine cellar with box wine. You know what white trash is, Agent Wellsley?” Leproate asked, letting his Southern accent manufacture extra syllables in her name.

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “That right there is the very definition of white trash. Box wine in the cellar of a million-dollar house.”

  “Why did you get me out of bed?”

  “Well, Agent, before my fall from grace, I was a man much in demand in the bureau because of my expertise with armored car robberies.”

  “Flipped armadillos?”

  “Yeah, well, that’s just one kind. A failed kind. See, back in the thirties, this gang hit a truck out in Nevada. They got the driver, but the two men in the back wouldn’t open up. Men”—he looked over at Wellsley and added, “and women, being made of sterner stuff in those days.

  “Now the robbers didn’t have anything to open the rear compartment, but they weren’t in any particular kind of a hurry. So they drove the truck way out into the desert—the Mojave Desert—and attempted to reason with the men in the back of the truck. At first it was a fruitless negotiation. But as the sun came up and beat down on the truck, the robbers thought that the men inside would soon change their tune. Literally sweat them out.

  “But somewhere in there, somebody misestimated. See, the Mojave gets hot. Holds the record for highest land temperature ever recorded in North America, 134 degrees. Now I don’t know how hot it was that day, but before the men inside the truck had time to come to their senses, they were overcome by heatstroke and died.”

  “What’s this have to do with this case?”

  “Well, the robbers didn’t give up. They took the truck to the nearest cliff they could find and rolled it off the edge, thinking, presumably, that the cargo portion would burst open and they would make a getaway.”

  “But the truck wouldn’t open.”

  “No, and that’s where it was found, six days later, and where legendary US marshal John Leonard declared, ‘Them boys were roasted, just like a flipped armadillo.’”

  “Colorful, but what’s the point?”

  Leproate sighed. That’s what was wrong with Yankees, no appreciation of history. “There’s all kinds of ways to steal an armored car. And they’ve changed over the years. But about the time of my…mistake, the armored car companies won. Between GPS and video cameras and dye packs and recording the serial numbers—it just became more trouble than it was worth to take an armored car. So the pros stopped trying.

  “So you’re saying professionals didn’t take our truck?”

  “There was this man, best thief I ever heard of. He was called Hobbs, but there’s no way that’s his real name. About twenty-five years ago he went on a streak. Fifteen armored cars in a row. I’m pretty sure I’ve been chasing him and his copycats most of my career. I think this one ol’ boy, all on his own, came up with three or four new ways to crack an armadillo. One of which was
stealing one and putting propane torches underneath it to heat it up and get the guys inside to open up. Hot enough to sweat them, but not hot enough to kill them.”

  “GPS defeats that?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Yes, Agent. With GPS there’s not enough time to get it all set up and sweat them out. We caught two crews before word got out, but we didn’t get Hobbs. But here’s the thing. Each time the ol’ boy changed his technique, he did a practice run. Or part of one. Because if you were going to try something totally new, what would you do?”

  “I’d test it to see if it works first.”

  “So I looked up every crime report that mentions an armored car in the United States in the last year. And what pops up, but the theft of an empty armored car from a refitting company in Saint Louis two months ago.”

  “So to find a stolen armored car full of money, we’re going to start with a stolen armored car that’s empty?”

  “Yes, we are.”

  They flashed badges through security and boarded a regional jet as the sun came up. Wellsley leaned against the window and was asleep almost instantly. Leproate envied that. Maybe it was youth. Now that she was unguarded, he watched her as she slept.

  She was a creature, wild and fierce. Nothing like his well-padded and domesticated wife. Before he fell asleep, Leproate’s second-to-last thought was, I should call Jennifer when we land. His last thought was about having sex with his new partner.

  FIVE

  The man who owned Regent Armored, Daniel McCaffery, made a point of saying, “I’m the official king of Regent Armored,” as often as he could. Leproate doubted that the line would ever be funny, but now, given the heavy bruises down the side of McCaffery’s face, it was just sad. He looked like the official king of taking a beating.

  Leproate ran through all the usual angles—disgruntled employees, competitors, known enemies. Nothing fit. The guy who’d swiped the truck had been young, but all of this felt to Leproate like the work of someone who knew what he was doing.