Miami Heist

by Van Allen Plexico

  Goggans held up a placating hand and nodded quickly. “I got it, chief. No problem. Gonna be smooth as glass.”

  “No,” Harper said. “You need another man for that part. I’d suggest Benny Weiskopf. He’s local, and we’ve worked with him before.”

  The two started to object to that, but Bigelow waived them quiet. “Understood,” he said to Harper. “So—what about the truck? Do we need a driver to stay with it?”

  Harper shook his head. “We can’t spare the manpower. And there’s no real need. We’ll move it to the right place the night beforehand and leave it there. I’ve found a spot. It should be fine.”

  “Where?” Bob asked.

  “Someplace safe, with access to the water.”

  Bob described a couple of spots he knew about that seemed to fit. “One of those?”

  Harper frowned.

  “I’d like to know,” Bigelow said, “in case something bad happens.”

  Harper continued to gaze back at Bigelow in silence.

  “Say, Bob,” Goggans interjected, “I think Harper’s afraid if he tells you that, something bad will happen!”

  The guys all chuckled at that.

  “Just tell him,” Salsa said to Harper. “He makes a good point.”

  “Fine,” Harper said, and gave the specific spot he was leaving the truck: an area adjacent to Coconut Grove.

  “Good. What about afterward?”

  Harper motioned airily. “We’ll take it straight to the safehouse, before the heat gets turned up. We unload the gold, and then I’ll drive the truck off to the west, toward the Everglades, and ditch it out that way, just to be safe. Salsa can follow me and bring me back. That should also help throw them off our trail.”

  Bigelow nodded slowly. Then he frowned. “About the gold bars. We’re just gonna be carrying them out of the house by hand, then? There’s not a better way to get them to the boat?”

  “Not that I can think of,” Salsa said, still peering down through the swirling smoke at the photos and the map. “Sure, if we had the time and the resources, we could put something together—a ramp or a pulley deal or something—but we won’t have anything like that much time. So we figure, we each can carry a stack of them, and we just do a Chinese fire drill or whatever you call it, and get as many as we can down to the boat as quick as we can.”

  “Those things are heavy,” Goggans said. “Heavier than you think.”

  “Small stacks, lots of quick trips,” Salsa replied.

  The redhead shrugged but didn’t seem happy.

  “It’ll be fine,” said the bald guy, Mike Wilson. “You shouldn’t worry so much, Danny. It ain’t good for ya.” He was large, almost hulking, with a smooth scalp and a blunt nose. His voice was nasally; off somehow, coming from such a big guy. “Besides—we won’t be the ones carrying them.”

  Goggans was still worrying. “How many bars are there?” he asked. “They’re heavy, is all,” he repeated.

  Harper puffed his cigarette. “It’s hard to be sure. But it looked like it was a good section of the wall. Assuming that whole area is gold, I’d guess at least a couple hundred of them,” he said.

  “How much does that work out to be in cash?” Bigelow asked.

  “You mean you don’t already know that, Bob?” asked the bald guy, surprised.

  “We have a very general idea,” Salsa stated. “Let’s just round it off, conservatively, and say there are an even hundred of them—though, like Harper said, we think there are quite a few more. But if it was a hundred, we think we can get at least five million for them. Two hundred, obviously, double that.”

  The room grew quiet. Bigelow’s guys glanced at one another, blinking, almost salivating.

  “Five or ten million bucks?” came Wilson’s nasally voice at last. “Are you serious?”

  “Give or take,” Salsa said with a tight smile.

  Goggans leaned in. “Divided seven ways?”

  Salsa reacted to that. He glanced at Harper, who gazed back at him impassively.

  “Well, not exactly,” Salsa said after a moment.

  The others all darkened.

  “What does that mean?” Bigelow said.

  Salsa rubbed his chin for a second, then started to respond, but Harper cut him off.

  “A couple of things,” Harper said to the others. “Number one, Salsa and I are fronting all the costs of this operation.” He saw no reason to clarify that it was actually Lois who was putting up the funding. “Number two, we found the job and did the set-up for it. We brought you fellas in, but this isn’t an equal-split type of deal. That doesn’t make sense.”

  Bigelow reddened. His speech pattern had changed again, Salsa noted. That had been going on in a more subtle fashion all evening, he realized; the drunker the others got, the more sober Big Bob sounded. Gone now was the amiable buddy-buddy guy with the slang. He sounded smarter now, and colder.

  “You’re saying an even split doesn’t make sense,” Bigelow said, summarizing Harper’s position, extremely dubious. “Okay. Then what kind of a split did you have in mind?”

  Harper blew out a narrow stream of smoke. “Our side gets half,” he said, leaning down and stubbing out his cigarette in the ceramic ashtray on the floor. Straightening back up, he met Bigelow’s gaze evenly. “Your side gets half. You can divide it up after that however you like, and so will we.”

  Bigelow and the others took this in.

  “And that’s your idea of a fair split,” Bigelow said at length. The room had grown noticeably chillier.

  “I think it’s more than fair,” Harper replied. He started to point out the fact that, with Lois and Connie each receiving a share, the split would actually be four or five ways for both groups, and so practically even. But he didn’t feel like arguing the minutiae with Bigelow. So he said, “I could’ve just offered you a flat fee for services. Instead, each of you could be looking at a half-million to a million bucks.” He took another cigarette from his pack and lit it. “You have some kind of objection to that? Because we could find another string to do your part.”

  Silence descended. Bigelow continued to stare back at Harper, his expression utterly blank. The other three appeared to be working the math out in their own heads for a few seconds. They must have agreed with Harper’s result, because they all slowly nodded.

  Big Bob looked away. He took a swig of his beer. When he brought the can down again, his expression was jovial once more. “Objections?” he asked. “Nah.” He made a dismissing gesture with his free hand. “You make a good point, Harper. This is your gig. We appreciate you brought us in.” He smiled at Harper, everybody’s buddy again. “Half for us is good.”

  “It’s very good,” Harper said evenly.

  “Yeah.”

  Salsa waited a second longer to make sure everyone was happy again. This was all still very strange and new to him—the idea of parceling out portions of millions of dollars. Not to mention the idea of his having recently been a millionaire himself, if only briefly.

  Until a few months earlier, Harper and Salsa had been anything but millionaires. Harper had been an occasional heister, well-regarded in the field, planning operations around the country from his base in Flagler Beach, Florida. Salsa—Saul Salzman—had been a low-rent attorney in Las Vegas, making his real money by working with Harper now and then, as opportunities arose. But then, in the fall of the previous year, Salsa had been made aware of an unprecedented opportunity right there in his hometown of Sin City. It seemed the recently-deceased contractor responsible for building part of the new Caesars Palace hotel and casino had left behind a hidden access tunnel that started beneath a store several blocks away, and led right under the casino and right up to the vault. With the assistance of the contractor’s widow, one Lois Funderburk, Harper and Salsa and their small team of associates had broken in and gotten away with millions. Their jugger, or safecracker, as well as their muscle guy, had both been killed in the aftermath of the robbery. The jugger was killed by a vengeful
gun-nut from a previous heist. The muscle —Brett Rooker— had ended up being shot and left in the collapsing tunnels beneath the city. Harper, Salsa and the widow had split the loot and Salsa and the widow had become an item, now going by the names “Mr. and Mrs. Gold.”

  Relocating along with the widow to South Florida, Salsa had heard about Ruby Island, and about the possibility of an El Dorado of gold hidden somewhere on it. And somehow he had dragged a reluctant but intrigued Harper back in.

  “So we do this in two days,” Salsa said. “During the big Bridge tourney on Saturday night.”

  Harper leaned over the table and placed a small, folded piece of paper on it. “This is the number where I can be reached for the next couple of days,” he said. “In case anything comes up.”

  Big Bob looked at it but didn’t reach for it, nor did any of the others.

  “Are we worried at all about the hurricane?” asked the fourth member of Bigelow’s crew, Oscar Diaz, speaking up at last. He was not much over five feet tall, heavy-set, with his black hair in a long ponytail. “Seems like it could mess things up for us.”

  “Damn, Oscar,” Bigelow said, turning to his teammate. “That’s a good point.”

  “Is that what all this rain is?” Salsa asked.

  “Haven’t you been listening to the news?” Diaz shook his head. “They’re calling it Hurricane Inez. It’s been doing all kinds of damage in Cuba and wherever down there, and now it’s heading this way.”

  “No, it’s not,” came a woman’s voice from the other room.

  Everyone looked up. Harper and Salsa frowned at each other.

  The woman leaned out around the corner from the kitchen. She was thin and very tanned, with stringy honey-blonde hair.

  “What?” Bigelow said to her.

  “Who?” Salsa added, still frowning. Harper looked even more unhappy.

  “The hurricane turned off northeast,” the woman said, shrugging. “It’s heading away from Miami now. Toward the Bahamas.”

  Harper leaned toward Bigelow. “Wife or girlfriend?” he asked in a low, terse tone.

  “What?”

  “Is she your wife or your girlfriend?”

  “She’s my sister,” Bigelow said after a second of being nonplussed. “Oh,” he added, catching on. “Don’t worry about her. Denise is in on what we do. She’s been a big part of our jobs for a couple of years now.”

  Denise leaned out further. She was wearing a red bikini top and holding a can of beer in one hand. With the other hand she waved as she smiled sheepishly at them, surreptitiously looking Harper and Salsa over. “I just thought you’d like to know,” she said. “About the hurricane.”

  Harper studied her for a second, not with any kind of physical interest but more as a scientist might examine a new form of animal life he encountered in the Amazon. He shrugged and looked back to Bigelow.

  “The hurricane is not a problem, whatever it’s doing,” he said. “In fact, a close brush with the coast and then turning away—that’s probably the best scenario.”

  “How’s that?”

  Harper shrugged. “It should tie up a lot of law enforcement that would otherwise be out looking for us.”

  “But without being bad enough to cause us undo trouble,” Salsa added. He frowned for a second. “And our truck might just blend in, too, if the government sends down some supplies and whatnot.”

  “That’s true,” Bigelow said, nodding slowly, starting to smile.

  “Perhaps Mother Nature is part of our string,” Salsa said with a chuckle.

  “Just as long as she don’t want her own share,” Big Bob guffawed, loosening up again.

  “And if we do this right,” Harper said, “they won’t even know the gold is missing, or have reason to check on it. They’ll think it’s just a robbery of the guests.”

  Salsa frowned for a moment. “You know, Harper,” he said, “I’m not sure Mr. Lansdale of Ruby Island will even tell the cops about the gold, if and when he does find out it’s gone.”

  Harper pursed his lips and nodded slowly. “That’s very possible. And if he doesn’t, the Law will still be looking for robbers who took the guests’ jewelry and furs, but maybe not for a big truck loaded with gold bars.”

  “How do you figure that?” Diaz asked.

  Salsa shrugged. “Somehow I doubt he wants the authorities, or anyone else, to know he has that particular stash of gold.”

  “He won’t have to worry about having it for much longer,” Big Bob said, his smile widening.

  “I’ll drink to that,” Salsa said, raising the can of Bud he had yet to sip from.

  They all toasted as the storm raged.

  11

  After Harper and Salsa had left the mildewy little house in North Miami, Bigelow turned back and regarded his three compatriots and his sister.

  “Well?” he asked, lighting another Marlboro.

  The three guys glanced at one another, offering diffident expressions and not much by way of words. Denise sipped her beer and looked away.

  “So we’re all good with this, then?” he pressed them.

  The others all looked like they wanted to say something, but none of them could quite find the gumption.

  Bigelow breathed in slowly. “Then I guess—”

  Goggans spoke up at last. “Bob—are we really gonna let them take half just for themselves, and leave all the rest of us to split the other half?”

  “Yeah,” Wilson, the bald one, joined in, encouraged now that the words had been spoken aloud. “I get what that Harper guy was saying, but…” He shrugged. “It still don’t seem quite right, you ask me.”

  Diaz looked at the other two, tense, his thick brows furrowing, then back at Bigelow. He said nothing.

  “And—Benny Weiskopf?” Goggans shook his head. “Are we really bringing him in on this, too? And pay him out of our part of the take? We’re seriously gonna shrink the shares down even more, just on Harper’s say-so?”

  Bigelow looked at the others, exhaled, and his mouth split into a broad smile.

  “Well now,” he said with a chuckle, “Do you fellas think we’re gonna do all that?”

  For a second, no one reacted. Then grins slowly spread across the faces of Goggans and Wilson.

  “Hell no,” Bigelow said, answering himself. “I don’t plan on splitting this money with Benny—or anybody else.”

  Goggans and Wilson took this in. They began to cackle with laughter.

  “That’s what I want to hear,” Goggans all-but-shouted. “Yes, sir!”

  “Half, my ass,” Wilson growled, shaking his head. “Imagine coming in here and just telling us to our faces they’re gonna keep half, and we have to divvy up the other half all around.”

  “And telling us to add another guy to the string, but to pay him out of our share. Just imagine!”

  “I don’t have to imagine,” Goggans pointed out. “I just saw it. Right here!”

  Wilson flexed his rock-solid fists. “Half,” he repeated, as if it was a word he’d never heard before and he couldn’t quite figure out what it was supposed to mean. “They only wanna give us half.”

  “When this is all over, we gonna have a far sight more than half,” Goggans said, tossing his mostly-empty beer can at the trash can and missing. It clanked off the wall, startling Denise, and drops of beer splattered across the floor.

  “Dammit, Danny!” Big Bob grumbled. Then, “Denise. Clean that up.”

  “What if I don’t wanna clean it up?” She motioned toward Goggans. “He did it. Why don’t you make him clean it up?”

  “Because I told you to do it,” Big Bob shot back. He raised a fist, without getting out of his chair. “Or do you want to discuss it some more?”

  Scowling, Denise grabbed a dish towel and started to wipe up the beer.

  Goggans got to his feet and approached her. “Here, let me do it, sweetheart,” he said, offering her a greasy smile.

  “I’ve got it!” Denise all-but-yelled at him, causing him to
redden.

  “Sit down, Danny,” Bigelow said quietly.

  Goggans blinked, looked back at Bob, and sat down.

  Denise finished the job and, sullen, disappeared into the kitchen. As she went, she glanced back at where Harper had left the little slip of paper on the coffee table.

  Diaz meanwhile looked from Wilson to Goggans to Bigelow, blinking. He still didn’t say anything, but his frown deepened.

  Outside, the other member of their string, Mother Nature, boomed her own commentary on the proceedings. No one there took any note of it.

  + + +

  Later that evening, after Big Bob and the others had gone out to a local watering hole, Denise Bigelow lifted the telephone with one hand while holding the slip of paper in the other. She pursed her lips, her green eyes moving from the phone to the paper and back. After a couple of minutes of dithering, she dialed the number that was written on the paper and waited.

  Two rings, three, and then someone answered. “Fountainbleu.”

  Denise hesitated. Outside, the thunder rumbled.

  “Hello?” came the voice again. “Fountainbleu Hotel—can I help you?”

  She looked at the paper again, and saw another number, three digits long, below the phone number. A room. She read it aloud.

  “One moment please.”

  The ringing again. Then it was picked up.

  A man’s voice. Deep. She recognized it from earlier. “Yes?”

  Denise gathered herself up. “Mr. Harper?”

  “There’s no one named Harper here,” he said.

  She was taken aback for a moment. Then she understood. She tried to remember the name he was going by now, but couldn’t. Instead, she said, “Um… This is Denise. Denise Bigelow. We met earlier. At my brother’s.”

  The tone of the reply was perfectly even. “Yes?”

  She thought of her brother, and of all the times he’d hit her, punched her, threatened her. Anger welled up inside her. She started to just blurt it out, to tell him everything. They’re going to betray you. My brother and his goons. They want it all for themselves. They might even be planning to kill you. She started to say all of it. But she hesitated.