Shouldn’t have worried. She snapped out a hand and caught it in midair without even looking back. Must have heard it coming. Setting the sharp edge into the gap, she ripped the doors off four boxes at once, causing me to raise an eyebrow. It was certainly a more efficient way of doing robbery.
She slid out Miranda’s box first, and I crossed over to help her with the others. She busted open that one and wordlessly handed me the pry bar. I took up its weight and opened the other three while she flipped the top and ruffled through a stack of legal papers.
“What is it?” I asked. I don’t what I’d expected, but it wasn’t a stack of files that filled the box to the rim.
“Paperwork,” she said, staring into it. “There’s a note up top, but—” She looked up, as though she could hear something beyond the wail of the alarm. “Our time’s up.”
“Right,” I said, dumping the contents of the one box I had open into the bag and sliding it off the table. “I guess this is enough robbery for one night.” I mean, it probably still looked like we’d targeted one box in particular, especially since we were about to leave with it in hand, but really, “stealing” the rest of this stuff was more about appearances and producing a little deniability than giving us some ironclad alibi. Which we would not have, being actually at the bank while it was being robbed. “Let’s boogie.”
“Mmhm,” Angel said, taking the box in both hands and heading for the door.
I made to follow her, taking care to grab the bag off the table carefully and dragging it along until we’d cleared the door. “Just a sec,” I said, and paused, putting down the bag as I passed a teller drawer. Sliding it open, I found nothing but a single, lonely stack of bills at the bottom of the till. Pulling it up, I waved it at Angel. “Look, a dye pack.” I shook my head, tossed it back in, and pretended to forget all about my bag of pilfered goods in my rush to get out. “Let’s go.” And I ran for the hole in the wall.
Angel followed, hurrying down the alley behind me as I circled, heading back for the car. The alarm klaxon faded but the police sirens picked up where they left off. “Y’all need to hurry,” came Jamal’s muffled voice from the burner phone in my pocket. “Cops are two blocks away.”
“Thanks for the heads up,” I said, and we poured on the speed. Angel overtook me crossing the road (I totally let her) and threw open the driver’s door, dumping the box in the back seat. It made a loud thump as it hit, bouncing and thudding hard against the back of our seats. I slid in the passenger side as she started the ignition, and we hit the road running.
“Take a right,” Jamal commanded via the phone as we hit an intersection. Angel squealed the tires and did as he asked, popping the e-brake as she was drifting us around the corner, crossing into the opposite lane of traffic, which was, fortunately, empty at this hour. “Gun it,” he said. “You have six blocks until you run into cops. Take advantage of it and go left in three.”
Angel didn’t answer him, but she did lay on the pedal, putting it right to the metal. In three blocks she executed another sliding turn, this time onto a side street, residential, lined with thick, leafy trees that looked like dark clouds under the illumination of a full moon and countless street lamps.
“You’re almost clear,” Jamal’s voice squawked from my pocket. “The cops are converging on the bank. You’re through the heaviest part of their net. Slow down.”
Angel followed his advice and brought the speed down. I saw a sign ahead: Interstate 94 was a couple blocks up.
“Should we go east or west?” I asked, not bothering to grab the phone out.
“Stick to the surface streets,” Jamal said. “MNDOT’s going to be watching the freeways for the cops for the next little bit. Work your way north and east, toward St. Paul. Follow all the traffic bylaws. You’ll have some time. There’s a parking garage over there where you can trade cars.”
“Got it,” I said. “Now make yourself digitally scarce unless it’s an emergency, okay? I don’t need to be worrying about you getting in trouble on my behalf.”
There was a moment’s delay, and I wondered what it meant when he replied, a little tense. “Will do.” Then he was gone, and I didn’t have time to worry about it.
“I’m gonna climb in the back and start checking out our paperwork,” I said, looking around once real fast to make sure no one was around us. There was no sign of cars, so I did a quick dive over the back seat and almost landed on the safe deposit box. A quick adjustment brought me down in the back seat, allowing me to miss dinging my knee on it by a bare inch. That would have stung.
When I came up, I quickly fastened my seatbelt, and then picked up the box, putting it on the seat next to me before I flipped open the lid. “You see any of this?” I asked.
“Just leafed through,” Angel said. She sounded a little tense, and she was definitely white-knuckling the steering wheel again. We’d ditched our masks, though we were both still wearing gloves. “Couldn’t see that well in the dark of the vault.”
“Uh huh,” I said, pulling out page one, which was laid out neatly across the top. It was a printed page, looked like a letter. I skipped it for now and went to page two, which was a continuation of said letter, then page three, which was the beginning of an index that listed files in some sort of meticulous order. Once I was past all that, I found a copy of the paperwork for an LLC headquartered in Houston, Texas.
“What is it?” Angel asked, voice betraying the tension she was feeling.
I flipped back to page one, holding it up so that the passing street lamps would allow me to read it as we passed each. I had to squint a little because the light was terrible, but after about passing about five lamps … I got the gist.
“Wow,” I said.
“Wow what?”
“So … your sister really was a lawyer for the Tamaulipas Cartel,” I said. “Unknowingly, at first.”
“Uh, duh,” Angel said. “I told you that, remember?”
“I know, I know,” I said, because she had told me that—and a whole lot more—in my backyard while we lay low. Lots and lots of stuff she’d told me.
Like how I’d actually met her before.
How I’d been involved in this whole mess from the beginning without even realizing it.
How I’d known both her and Miranda; that it hadn’t been a coincidence that I’d hired them both to oversee the agency after I’d gone on the run. Miranda had recommended my first law firm, Rothman, Curtis and Chang, who’d abandoned me when the first criminal charges started circling.
She’d been pissed enough to move to Minneapolis and bring her cousin with her to take over the responsibility herself—because we knew each other.
And I … couldn’t remember a bit of it.
Thanks for stealing my useful memories, Rose. You bitch.
If I could have killed that Scottish ginger again every day … I honestly would have. Of all the people I’d killed in my life … hers was maybe the only memory I’d end up treasuring for all time rather than regretting it had come to that.
“This box …” I said, “contains all her suspicions, a connect-the-dots look at how they went about it, based on her own work and some digging she did. I’m not sure it’d hold up in court because … well, it’s been a while since I had to dig into legal theory and whatnot, and it kinda looks like she’s violating the shit out of attorney-client privilege, but …” I looked up to find Angel giving me a worried glance over her shoulder. “This looks like a doomsday package. Blackmail material, maybe, an In-Case-of-Emergency-Break-Glass kind of thing? She mentions keeping it in case she or her family was ever threatened.”
“I was the only family she had left,” Angel said, turning her eyes forward to the road again.
“Well, there you go,” I said. “Looks like she was endeavoring to cover both your asses in the event of … I dunno, someone like Adoncia losing her damned mind and swearing revenge, which hey, appears to have happened.”
“This is …” Angel just shook her head.
“Miranda would never violate attorney-client privilege. This doesn’t make sense.”
“The way I see it, she didn’t.” I waved the sheaf of papers. “This wasn’t to be used under normal circumstances. And she doesn’t have actual evidence of wrongdoing here. She has suspicions. Suspicions that are probably correct, and that, if acted on by the Justice Department, would probably close off an awful lot of money laundering routes to the cartel. Which would be good. But also violate Miranda’s oath or whatever, which … would be bad, I guess.” Lawyer scruples were a funny thing to me in that they existed at all. It was probably a lot easier to criticize the profession from the outside, looking in, and as a person for whom lawyers had mostly done jack diddly shit save for drain money. Miranda being the key exception. “Also, I have no idea about lawyer stuff, but doesn’t attorney-client privilege end when your client tries to murder you?”
“Maybe,” Angel said. “I just know that she worked really hard to put herself through law school. Being disbarred … it’d kill her.”
I looked at the papers in my hands. “Well, if she’s disappeared, I don’t really know what else we’re supposed to do with this, especially with Adoncia all homicidal on our asses. I mean, sitting on it in the face of … the face of the Tamaulipas Cartel chasing us down with murderous intent seems kinda foolish.”
“But if you get the law involved—” Angel started, “then they’re after Adoncia, and how do you think that’ll turn out?”
“Good, if they hire Reed and company to do the dirty work,” I said. “Old Laser Eyes won’t know what hit her. I mean, seriously—’if looks could kill’? That’s Adoncia. Also, she has laser eyes.”
“Haha,” Angel said, a weak laugh for my weak joke. “Because she has a mean look plus laser powers. You are HI-larious.”
“Finally, someone gets me,” I muttered. “Funny that it’s you. Who I can’t remember.”
The squawk box in my pocket went off. “The parking garage is about two miles ahead on this road. Be on the lookout, because I’m getting some funny traffic on the net, like someone else with some juice is trying to track you down. They’re being a little sloppy about it, though.”
“Shit, that’s probably Cassidy, telegraphing her move to warn us,” I said. “That’s—”
“Bad,” Angel finished for me, revving the engine and upping the speed. We tore through the dark night, only the blur of streetlights to keep watch on us, as we blazed on, trying to make good our escape.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“You’re picking up a couple tails,” Jamal said, voice staticking its way out of the burner phone in my pocket. The cool dark had closed in around us, the street lamps illuminating the St. Paul street as we drove toward the multilevel parking structure a couple blocks up. “If you can get inside quick, we should be able to trade cars and get you out of there with no one the wiser.”
“We’re going to drive into a garage in the middle of the night, probably the only people doing so, then drive out, and hope Cassidy doesn’t notice us and tell her psychotic drug lord clients?” I shook my head. “Bad plan, Jamal. Also, garages have one conventional way in and one conventional way out. A chokepoint if ever there was one.”
Angel was frowning at that. “Conventional?”
I shook my head. “If it gets bad, you’ll see what I mean. Until then … you probably don’t want to know.” I rounded up the sheaf of papers I’d been browsing and tossed them into the safe deposit box. I was going to need this and my “go bag” before we left, because there was no way I was leaving all these goodies for the cops. Especially since, if Harry packed it, it was stuff he knew I’d need. It was a real goodie bag, too, but filled with enough slightly worrying items, especially toward the bottom, that I had a bad feeling about how this was all going to end.
Somewhere in the quiet that loomed around us, I had a second to miss Harry. Yeah, already. Less than a day away and I was already regretting leaving him behind.
But … this was who I was. No running from fate.
“You need to change out cars,” Jamal’s voice came back. “The cops are already reviewing street cam footage, and your car’s gonna catch a BOLO within minutes. Dump it, or you’re going to have bigger problems than just the Cartel being up your trunk.”
“You heard the man,” I said, nodding toward the garage ahead. “One massive, heinous problem at a time, I guess.”
Angel didn’t look too happy about this, and I couldn’t blame her, but she made the turn nonetheless.
Straight ahead on the road two sets of headlights snapped on, and through the dark I could see a couple of big black SUVs light up the night.
“You got made,” Jamal’s voice squawked. “I think those are Cartel people.”
“No shit,” I said, as Angel accelerated into the garage. It was a straight ramp up ahead of us; to the left it broke into a downslope, parking spaces heading down to the basement. She took the right fork and raced us up a level. I looked back in time to see the first SUV turning into the garage, squealing tires as it did so. It was too far back and too dark for me to see what was going on, but there it was, nonetheless.
“This is going to get tight,” Angel said, slowing down a lot more than necessary on the curve, as the ramp switched back to the left in a 180 degree turn. She decelerated down to single digits, and the first Cartel SUV took full advantage of her move to close in on us.
“What the hell …?” I asked, wondering what exactly she was thinking.
Angel let a tight grin slip as she revved up and sent us up the ramp a little faster. Only a smattering of cars remained parked here overnight, which was good for us, I figured. Gave us more room to maneuver. “Watch this,” Angel said, and gunned it harder, the Cartel car in close pursuit, maybe twenty feet behind us. I expected bullets to come raining in on us at any second, their engine already so loud it was like a purring in my head.
We came up on an older model Honda, faded blue, a four-door that would be a tight squeeze for anyone taller than me. Angel jerked the wheel to the left, angling our car right into a collision. I grabbed the oh shit! bar and she pulled to the right at the last second, controlling her crash.
Our front bumper impacted the rear of the Honda as Angel skidded us into a pirouetting one eighty, back end of our car sliding up the ramp as the Honda jerked around, interposing itself between us and the first cartel SUV.
BOOM. The cartel SUV T-boned the Honda, and Angel spun our car back around and got us peeling out up the ramp again as the Honda flipped and the Cartel vehicle actually slammed its roof against the concrete support beams in the garage ceiling, making a world-ending noise. It thumped back down on its axles, which broke under the ridiculous strain of having the entire car’s weight dropped from something like ten feet. It rattled off to the side, wheels pointed in directions they were not supposed to point under normal function.
“Shit, yeah,” I said, looking back over my shoulder. “That was some fancy driving.”
“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” Angel breathed, as we drifted around another one-eighty. Apparently she’d been holding out a little on what she could do behind the wheel. Now she was going the full Fast and Furious.
The first gunshots rang out seconds later, the occupants of the second cartel SUV apparently having deemed us too dangerous to dink around with given what we’d done to their vanguard car. Fortunately, they were firing through the concrete pillars that separated our side of the garage from the downslope where they were working their way around the crash of Honda and their buddies’ car. They wouldn’t be on a straight, unobstructed line of sight with us for a few seconds, during which I was hopeful Angel would be already about to turn the next corner and remove us from a clear view again.
“This might get interesting,” Angel said, tensing as a couple stray rounds hit our car. The rear window on the driver’s side shattered into a rain of safety glass pebbles, and it sounded like our engine took a hit. Small caliber, probably .223 by the noise, but
those things could still do some damage.
Or kill us. Obviously.
“Okay, Harry,” I said, sliding the AR-15 out of my go bag and pulling the scope caps off. “I think it might be ‘go time’ on this one …”
“Please don’t shoot me with that,” Angel said, throwing us into a hard drift around the next one-eighty turn.
I gestured at the long barrel, which was basically so extended I’d have to practically lean out of the vehicle to line it up with Angel in the next damned seat. “If I hit you with this, it’s going to have to be via the world’s most epic ricochet. Besides, statistics say you’re a lot more likely to die in a car accident than via gun violence.”
Her eyes almost bugged out of her head, but she kept them front and her hands on the wheel. “Seems to me I’m about fifty-fifty on both of those right now.”
“Well, you are exhibiting some increased risk factors for both, being in a drift race up a parking garage and a gunfight at the same time,” I said, elbowing the passenger window so that it shattered and then leaning out as she whipped the car around. I eyeballed my shot because using the scope while in this much motion was an exercise in near-futility. I stroked the trigger three times, looking straight down the barrel and trying to point at the driver’s seat of the second cartel SUV.
“I feel like just hanging out with you is increasing all my risk factors for everything,” Angel said, gunning us up the next stage of the ramp.
“Bullshit,” I said. “I’m totally easy on the cholesterol. Also, secondhand smoke? Not a problem with me.” The barrel of my AR had a little smoke coming off of it, which caused me to frown. “At least of the nicotine variety.”
Swiveling my barrel, I took aim through the concrete parking garage supports as we charged up our side of the garage and the enemy drove up theirs. Apparently my shots hadn’t swayed them.
So I sent four more their way as we passed, peppering the hell out of the side of their SUV and busting both the front and rear windows on the driver’s side before the angle got too lopsided.
Driven Page 14