Past Crimes

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  “At this point we have not determined if the suspects were shot by other individuals or whether they inflicted the wounds on one another,” said Detective Paul Toomey of King County Sheriff Major Crimes Unit. “Assault rifles were found near the bodies. We do believe there was at least one other person at the scene.” A Ford Taurus was also found in the hangar, and police are verifying if it was the same vehicle used in the robbery.

  There was a lot more from the news services during the last part of February. Updates on where the school bus had been stolen from. Escalating offers of reward from Talos. A few outraged editorials, both conservative and liberal. And follow-up blurbs about the criminal records of Orren and McGann, the two dead robbers. Orren had done some minor county time in his youth, for car theft and burglary. He seemed to work exclusively around Seattle.

  Burt McGann was more of a mystery. And more of a hard case. He’d done two years in Indiana for assault with intent and had been suspected of “other violent crimes,” as the police spokesperson put it. Not the kind of cowboy that Dono would usually choose to work with.

  The real meat on the Web was from private sources. Six million dollars of missing diamonds provoked a lot of interest. There were whole blogs devoted to the crime and scores of low-res pictures taken by passersby on the day of the robbery.

  One Web page in particular, run by an elderly crime buff in southern Washington, had done an expert job of finding the best photos. I studied them carefully and then started the truck.

  I wanted to see the scene for myself.

  *

  RAVENSDALE WAS ONLY A few miles from Covington, down Highway 516 which turned into Kent-Kangley Road as it went due east. I drove along its length until I spotted the church steeple that had been visible in the background of photographs I’d looked at.

  The gray afternoon was edging into evening, and the tall trees surrounding the road hastened the sunset. A cold night wind had already started to kick up from the west, and it bit at my cheeks as I got out of the truck and looked at the road. I had maybe another thirty minutes of decent light. The school bus that had forced the armored car to stop had pulled out of the church’s parking lot.

  I walked back up the road toward the church entrance, thinking about the sequence of events during the robbery. The pictures showed multiple angles on the armored car, which had not been the big silver tank that I’d imagined but a white reinforced panel van. It made sense. Securiguard wasn’t hired to deliver stacks of cash to dozens of ATMs. They were making a single drop of eighty kilos of industrial stones.

  Fast and discreet, I’m sure they had thought. Until the school bus pulled out and they’d been forced to hit the brakes. Then the real fun had begun.

  The armored van had been wedged solid between the bus and a flatbed truck in back. The flatbed had a bumper extension on the front of it, set low enough that it wouldn’t block the rear doors on the van.

  Force the armored van to stop cold. An instinctive reaction, when there might be kids on the school bus. Come up behind the van fast with the flatbed and its heavy bumper. On the asphalt of the road, there were thick, dark hash marks of abraded rubber. Bam.

  Other photos had shown the back of the armored van. One of the doors was completely off, lying on the road. I had recognized the black scoring and almost clean punched holes where the door’s hinges had been as the sign of shape charges, probably C-4 or Semtex. BAM again.

  The score had been as slick as shit through a goose. At least until the three men had reached the abandoned hangar to trade one getaway car for another with less heat, and Orren and McGann had killed each other.

  I stepped off the road to let a Volvo sedan go by. A boy in the backseat wearing a bright yellow cap made a face at me as it cruised past.

  Okay. Think about the scene the way Dono might have.

  A remote location, away from cameras and witnesses. Inside information, of course, to know about the diamonds and exactly when they were due. A lot of prep work, with multiple vehicles preset, and explosives to boot.

  All of that felt like Dono. Careful and considered.

  On the flip side, there was the human factor, which he’d always despised. Orren and McGann, maybe getting greedy, maybe just freaking out with the adrenaline high. One of them twitches wrong. A third and fourth BAM.

  Incredibly good fortune for the third robber, if you wanted to look on the bright side. They might just as easily have aced him as well.

  But there was something else bothering me about the score. I backed up and played the scene through my mind again. Not like a crook this time. Like a soldier.

  The two points of view weren’t dissimilar, at least when it came down to tactical choices. Adequate cover. Clear fields of fire. Methods of extraction.

  Both lenses showed me the same picture.

  It had been a weak plan.

  Three men in the crew. One to drive the school bus and cover the guards in the cab of the armored car. One to drive the flatbed and cover the road behind. While the last man would need to drive up in the getaway car, set the charges, and unload more than one hundred and seventy pounds of diamonds.

  There should have been at least one more man. Sitting at the wheel of the running getaway car, watching the road in front. At the first sign of any trouble, the three men could pile into the car and be out of sight in ten seconds.

  Without that fourth set of eyes, a large part of their horizon was left unwatched. Very risky. Almost unthinkable, for a man like Dono.

  Almost.

  And that was the conclusion that my mind kept circling back to. Even without knowing that the bugs connected my grandfather to Cristiana Liotti, or her torture and murder, that pretty much clinched her as the inside source on the robbery. Even discounting all of Dono’s odd behavior lately.

  It just felt like the old man. Almost like I could catch the scent of his shaving cream, still at the scene.

  Shit, Dono. What was it? Reliving your wild years? Why suddenly start gunslinging like liquor-store trash?

  With six million in stones and three partners, you would have expected to clear at least a million if you were running the show. Was that kind of money simply worth rolling the dice?

  The wind heightened in pitch but didn’t give me any answers. I walked back to the truck, over the permanent black scars left on the road.

  AGE FOURTEEN

  The day after school let out for the summer, Granddad and I packed our suitcases and a few other bags into a rental car and drove to a motel twenty miles south of the Canadian border. When we checked in, the fat woman behind the reception desk asked how long we expected to stay. Granddad said we weren’t sure. He told her we were visiting his sister, who was ill. The woman clucked in sympathy.

  When Granddad went outside to move the car, she eagerly asked me what was wrong with the sister. I just shrugged. She frowned and didn’t bother pressing for more details. Granddad told me later that he envied teenagers, being able to get away with shit like that.

  We stayed in the motel for a week. A few times each day, at different hours, we drove north on I-5 toward the border. We varied our route but always wound up on the same access road off the freeway, cruising smoothly past the same large buildings.

  In the early-summer heat, we could drive with the windows rolled down. The white-noise hum threatened to make me drowsy. But I stayed sharp.

  It was my show this time out.

  Every evening we stayed in the motel room and watched TV, or went out to a movie, or played cards. Granddad preferred canasta, while I liked poker. We’d switch games each time we played.

  On one of the daytime drives, we turned down a different road, parked the car, and put on rubber boots to take a hike through the wide, marshy forest behind the buildings. The forest was thick. We stopped behind a large tangle of blackberry bushes, fifty yards out from one particular warehouse.

  It was a larger structure than the others along the access road. Four stories tall, with walls made of s
ilver corrugated steel between green I-beams. Around the front there was a blue sign with the warehouse name in script two feet high, but here by the back doors the name was painted in plain black right on the steel, the narrow letters waving with the ripples in the metal. I knew what it said, even though most of the words were obscured behind forest. A. J. CARLSON BONDED WAREHOUSE AND TRANSFER.

  The blackberry branches had thorns half an inch long. Carefully, I pushed one aside with my fingertips to see more. I could make out stick-insect outlines of workers hurrying around on the warehouse loading dock. That far away through the brush, Granddad and I were probably the next thing to invisible, but we still kept our movements to a minimum.

  I looked at the dock through Granddad’s good set of 10×50 binoculars. The workers were busy wheeling hand trucks on and off a large panel van, filling it with boxes.

  “How’s the height of it?” Granddad said.

  I sized the loading dock against the panel van and the workers. “Looks like a standard four feet. There’s a ramp.” I focused the lenses past the open loading-dock door into the warehouse. “And I see a forklift inside. A little Hyster three-wheeler.”

  I could hear the smile in his voice. “Good. The truck I’ve in mind for us has enough load capacity for an elephant and his lunch besides. We can drive the damned forklift right into the back.”

  I laughed and kept looking. Behind the forklift was the end of the first massive row of racks. Each rack in the warehouse was twenty feet tall, stacked with crates and pallets of merchandise waiting for processing. Some intended for export to Canada, others on their first leg of distribution within the States. Granddad had told me the warehouse handled everything from liquor to lumber. Almost every bit of it had passed or would pass through the Peace Arch crossing at the border in Blaine.

  Like the biggest open bank vault in the world.

  I suddenly noticed that my breath was coming really fast, and realizing it made me feel dizzy. I let the binoculars hang from my neck and closed my eyes, not opening them even when one of the thorns poked into the side of my hand. The sharp pain of it steadied me a little. I knew Granddad was watching me.

  When I opened my eyes again, he was looking at the warehouse.

  “When I was nineteen—this was when your grandmother, Fionnuala, and I were still in Belfast, mind, before your own mother was born—I needed some extra money for the holidays. So I put my eye on a pub owned by a man named Hargen. Nasty bastard. Which was part of the reason I picked his place, I suppose. Anyway, I was sure that Hargen kept his weekend earnings at least a day too long, and I thought I’d visit one Monday night and lighten his burden.”

  Granddad’s accent came out when we worked. I liked it.

  “So I thought on it for a week or so. When Monday came along, I waited all night in the alley across from the place. I mean all night. The sun came up, and there I was, standing like I was waiting for a bus to come along.”

  I was confused. Maybe Granddad was hinting at something I hadn’t seen yet. I quickly raised the binoculars and trained them on the building.

  “The pub didn’t look right?” I said, hoping for a hint.

  “It looked just fine. It was me that wasn’t right. That’s why I couldn’t move a step from that alley.”

  “You were nervous.”

  “I was, sure. But I was always nervous. I’m nervous now. We’ve talked about that.”

  We had. Nerves were okay. Granddad had given me a whole speech before he’d taken me on my first run with him, right after my twelfth birthday. Just a simple house job, and I’d had nothing to do but keep an eye peeled. Even though the nearest neighbor was a hundred yards away and out for the night. I could’ve yodeled and not gotten us into trouble.

  Still, my stomach had been as knotted as a kinked garden hose. I’d puked up my cheeseburger after we’d arrived safely back home.

  Since then Granddad had brought me on another score at least once every other month. Businesses and houses alike. Sometimes not so much for the money as the practice. Different places had different rules and different tools. By my count we’d stolen a hundred or more cars as well, driving most of them eight or ten blocks and abandoning them again, just to get the feel of it.

  Over time he had started having me case our targets and letting me grease the doors or the alarms, too.

  Nothing as big as A. J. Carlson Bonded Warehouse and Transfer, though. Not nearly.

  “So if it wasn’t nerves,” I said to him, eyes fixed firmly on the loading dock, “why didn’t you go into Hargen’s pub?”

  “Well, I believed it was because I’d thought too much about it. I cursed myself for having feet of clay. Swore I’d come back the next week, strip that villain down to nothing.”

  I’d heard a lot of Granddad’s lessons. Enough to know there was a twist coming. I tried to guess.

  “You saw something,” I said. “And you didn’t even really know you saw it, right? But it still made you stay away.”

  He laughed, and I lowered the binoculars and looked at him. The evening sun was behind his head, and his dark hair stuck out like the bristles of the world’s rangiest bear.

  “I’d love to have that particular magic power,” he said. “What is that thing that your man in the comic books has?”

  I knew what he meant. But I hadn’t read comics in like two years, since before that first house job, even. I’d tossed them all, not long after Granddad came back from County. “Spider sense,” I said reluctantly.

  “Spiders. Lovely.” He was laughing hard now, but I realized it wasn’t at me. “No, it wasn’t any such thing. And I hadn’t thought about Hargen’s place too much. I hadn’t thought about it enough.”

  He took the binoculars out of my hand, put them back in their case, and slung the case over his shoulder. “I hadn’t done my schoolwork, you see. The place might have an alarm I didn’t know about. Or some friend of Hargen’s, bedded down in the back room after a fight with his wife. Or a fucking dog. I hadn’t thought about any of those possibilities. And the fact I hadn’t thought about them meant the whole thing was a bad idea, and my guts were telling me that.”

  He put his big hand on my shoulder. “Forget the money. What are your guts saying about the risk?”

  I thought about it. We knew the place and its people. We knew its alarm system.

  “We’ve done the homework,” I said. “Almost.”

  I instantly felt better.

  Later that night one of the businesses nearby had a rock thrown through its front window. The police response took four and a half minutes.

  On the next day, we took it easy. We went to a matinee. Dono napped while I watched Jackie Chan beat up everybody in sight. Late in the afternoon, we took one more pass, just to make sure nothing around the warehouse had changed.

  “Go?” Granddad said.

  I looked at the parking lot, at the way the workers went about their day. “Yeah.”

  He smiled and nodded.

  Seven hours later we were high on the roof of A. J. Carlson’s. Revving up the circular saws.

  Chain saws would have been faster, but their grinding howl would also carry a lot farther than the whine of the eighteen-volt cordless Makitas. We cut through the upper layers of roofing and insulation, gouging a shallow six-foot crater. Sweat trickled down my forearms into my cotton work gloves. We tossed aside scraps of asphalt shingle and felt, until piles of it littered the smooth white moonscape of the roof around us.

  Soon only a thick sheet of plywood separated us from the interior of the warehouse below. We pried at one end of the sheet with crowbars until the screws popped. Granddad wedged it open, far enough for me to saw off a couple feet at the end. We tossed the wood on top of the rest of the scraps.

  Light boomed out from the new hole in the roof, stretching toward the sky like a weak searchlight for a movie premiere. The light attracted bugs. A mosquito whined in my ear, and I slapped at it. One big-ass moth flew into the gap, into the upper reaches of
the warehouse. I had an instant’s terror that the alarms would start ringing.

  Dumb, sure. We knew the types of alarms inside. They were good, but not so delicate that an insect would set them off.

  Still, it reminded me that the roof was only the first hurdle.

  Granddad reached into one of the bags and took out a thin tarp, which he draped over the hole to block the light. There were four bags. Rope, power tools, hand tools, and a smaller one for Granddad’s burglar kit. We’d had to make two trips up the ladders from the parking lot to get all the gear onto the roof.

  “Go take another look around,” he said.

  I jogged to the nearest edge of the roof and gazed down at the wide expanse of parking lot in front of the warehouse. All the lampposts were dark. The automated timer turned them off at midnight, we’d learned. But the blue warehouse sign shone bright enough to let me see all the way to the access road at the far end of the lot.

  Farther out I could see the ribbon of white and red lights on I-5. Traffic was steady going north, even at three o’clock in the morning. The last stretch before the border, six miles up the freeway.

  A car was coming along the access road. I instinctively stepped back, even though it was probably impossible to see me from two hundred yards out. As I watched, it turned in to the parking lot of the warehouse. A white car, with a blue-and-red shield insignia on the door.

  A security patrol.

  I made myself breathe. This was good news. The security passes at the warehouse were infrequent, limited to a single driver making a slow roll through the parking lot of each business along the road. He’d take a look and then go on his way. We’d probably be clear for another two hours.

  As I peered over the edge, the car made a wide circle, cruising past the entrance and continuing on to the opposite side of the lot. Where he stopped.

  Oh, shit.

  I turned and waved frantically at Granddad. My eyes adjusted, and I could tell he was standing, watching me. I spun back to the security car.