The Box

by Jeremy Brown

  She shrugged but wouldn’t look at him.

  “It’s technically for sale. And I already told you I’m leasing the fields out in the meantime, but that’s mostly because I have to pay Razvan when the time comes.”

  “And when is that?”

  “Soon,” she said, and Connelly didn’t push it.

  He said, “What are these Romanians going to do to you, if you don’t sell your home to them?”

  “Keep making threats. Keep harassing me.”

  “And then what?”

  She shrugged again.

  He said, “Is that why you’re carrying the gun?”

  She nodded.

  They found a gas station a few miles later and Connelly got her a ginger ale while she filled the tank, then she got into the northbound lanes and headed back toward the town.

  Connelly said, “I don’t want to sound too concerned, but do you think those guys are still at Len’s?”

  “We aren’t going there.”

  “We aren’t?”

  “No. You want to see the farm?”

  “Oh, sure. Yeah. If you want to show me.”

  “I want you to understand why I can’t just sell it to them.”

  “You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

  “I appreciate that, thank you. But I also kind of want a second opinion. Maybe I should just cave in and sell it. Maybe I’m being stubborn and stupid and ridiculous.”

  “You can be all of those things,” Connelly said, “and still be right.”

  They had to drive all the way into town before Nora could turn left, west, then left again to work her way in a general southwest direction.

  When she slowed along a straight road with fields on both sides Connelly looked at the house coming up on the right.

  It was was tall and white with black shutters and a wraparound porch with an actual porch swing hanging next to the front door.

  The crushed stone driveway led past the manmade pond in the large front yard, up a gentle hill to the right side of the house and under a canopy of mature trees.

  Off to the right of the driveway and about even with the house was a large weathered barn that had been painted red at one point and now looked like driftwood with red veins.

  Past the trees, the driveway spread into a wide gravel lot where you could curve left behind the house or go straight.

  Left led to an attached three-car garage that had been added on at some point and made to look like part of the original construction.

  Straight took you into the gravel lot with two larger, newer barns made of metal along the left. The huge sliding doors along the fronts were closed.

  Nora stopped the Lexus between the house and the wooden barn, under a canopy of leafless branches.

  Connelly got out and looked around and pointed at a tire hanging by a rope from one of the trees.

  “A porch swing and a tire swing? You were spoiled.”

  “Every time I pull in, I tell myself to cut that down so it doesn’t hurt the tree. Then I take my stuff inside and forget all about it.”

  Connelly studied the tire.

  “I’d offer to help, but that seems like a private moment.”

  Nora shrugged.

  “I’m trying to think of everything here as assets, rather than memories.”

  “So forget the swing. Let the buyer decide what to do with it.”

  She seemed to like that idea.

  “Come on. I’ll show you the inside.”

  Connelly got the feeling she was trying to maintain the demeanor she carried in Minneapolis, but it was hard to do here at her childhood home. Her shoulders were more relaxed, her hair bounced a little more when she walked to the set of stairs leading to a side door.

  He followed her up the steps and waited while she unlocked the door.

  “So…I heard your parents are out of town.”

  She smiled.

  “They are.”

  Two weeks after that, when Connelly came into the Vegas suite and said, “I know when it’s happening,” Bruder and Rison and Kershaw all looked up from the catalog of surveying equipment.

  Connelly had been spending the weekends with Nora and getting some decent results, background and such, but nothing solid to act or plan on.

  So Bruder was skeptical when he said, “When?”

  “Two weeks from Wednesday.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Nora told me she’s going to be in town early, Wednesday instead of Friday, and wondered if I could meet her. I asked why, and she said the subsidy checks come on that Monday, she’ll cash hers, and the Romanians will come on Wednesday morning to collect.”

  Bruder said, “Just hers, or everyone’s?”

  “She said it they make the rounds that morning.”

  “So everyone,” Rison said. “That’s the day.”

  Bruder looked down at the catalog.

  He and Rison and Kershaw had spent their time gathering the gear—the truck, weapons, disguises, surveying tools—and he wanted a few more things to complete the facade.

  If Connelly was right, they had time.

  He asked, “What did you tell her?”

  “Nothing yet. I just got the message when I landed.”

  Bruder said, “Tell her you’ll be there Wednesday night.”

  “I think she wants me there for the pickup, in the morning. When the Romanians come to her house.”

  “You’re going to be busy in the morning.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.”

  Bruder looked at him.

  “You can keep things going with her until then?”

  Connelly shrugged.

  “Sure.”

  “And it won’t be a problem when you don’t show up on Wednesday night.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Bruder glanced at Rison, then told Connelly, “After the job on Wednesday morning we’re gone. You can’t see or speak to her again.”

  “Right, I know that.”

  He wanted to say more, so Bruder waited.

  Connelly said, “But I was thinking, if I don’t show up, or call, or anything, she’s going to put two and two together and realize I had something to do with the heist.”

  Rison said, “So? She doesn’t know your real name. She knows your face, but if you stay out of the town, and maybe Minneapolis, you’re fine.”

  “Yeah,” Connelly said, like he still thought it was an option.

  Bruder said, “I don’t care what you do or where you go after the job, but you can’t go back to her. You do that, you’re putting all of us on the line. And her.”

  “She’ll already be on the line, man. After the job the Romanians will be on the warpath. If they hear anything about me going missing, they’ll ask her some hard questions. No doubt in my mind. They might do it no matter what, to her and everybody else in town.”

  “She has a gun,” Bruder said. “And so does everybody else in town, probably. And I’m not just talking about the Romanians.”

  Connelly stared at him, then looked at Rison and Kershaw, who both just looked back at him.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “She’s already close to being a loose end,” Bruder said. “If you go back to her after the job, you make a direct connection from her to us. The Romanians or the cops get a hold of her, and then you, it makes trouble for us.”

  “You can’t just kill her,” Connelly said.

  “Yes I can,” Bruder said, “but I won’t. If you go back to her, she becomes your problem to deal with.”

  “You want me to kill her?”

  “I want you to decide, right now, that you aren’t going to do something stupid that will force you to.”

  “Okay, fine. Just…give me a minute to process everything.”

  “You knew going in this was the deal,” Rison said.

  “Yeah, I get it. I’m just still in character, you know? I’ll be fine. You don’t have to worry about her.”

  B
ruder didn’t bother telling him that if it came down to it, if they gave him reason to worry, he’d clip both of them off.

  Rison broke the tension by clapping his hands once.

  “My boy came through.”

  He looked at Kershaw.

  “You owe me a hundred bucks, amigo.”

  Part Two

  Chapter Eleven

  Inside the hunting trailer, Bruder pulled a can of compressed air from Kershaw’s tools and used it to freeze the blood and brains Claud had left on the wall.

  He looked over at Connelly, who seemed to be taking his sweet time looking for the phone he’d been using with the Nora woman.

  Bruder went back to the blood and brains and thought about what to do with Claud’s car. Someone would find the body, eventually, but if the Romanians came around he didn’t want any obvious signs they were a man down.

  Better to keep them guessing.

  He used his knife to scrape the frozen bits off the wall, then the edge of his boot to shove it down the ragged drain hole in the floor.

  Done with that, he said, “What’s taking so long?”

  “I didn’t think I’d need it again,” Connelly said without turning around.

  It was a feeble dig, implicating Bruder and his demand that Connelly act like a professional and sever all communications with Nora.

  Then Connelly straightened up with the old phone and SIM card and battery, separated but in the same plastic bag.

  Bruder looked at it like it was radioactive. It went against every rule he had to still have the phone around, but Connelly and the other two convinced him it might be necessary.

  Bruder had said, “If we need you to call her again for some reason, just use a clean phone.”

  “Oh,” Connelly said, “so right after we pull the job and shit goes sideways—because I’m guessing that’s the only way you’ll grant me permission to call her—and I call her from a strange number. That won’t seem odd?”

  “Will it matter at that point?”

  “It might.”

  “No reason to tip our hand any more than necessary,” Rison had said, and Kershaw agreed.

  So they’d kept the damn phone, and now Connelly reassembled the pieces and fired it up.

  Rison was still in his camp chair listening to the police scanner and news, but his eyes slid back and forth between Bruder and Connelly, waiting for something to happen.

  The phone made some noises.

  Connelly looked at the screen and shook his head.

  “Five messages. Seventeen missed calls. All of them from Nora.”

  “So she’s still alive,” Bruder said.

  “Or the Romanians have her, and the messages are her screaming for help.”

  “We don’t have time to listen to all of them. Just call and see what happens.”

  Connelly walked toward Bruder and the door.

  “Where are you going?” Bruder said.

  “I’m going outside to make the call. Is that okay?”

  “I want to hear what she says. Put it on speaker.”

  Connelly looked at him.

  “You know, you can be a real prick bastard sometimes.”

  Bruder just waited for him to make the call.

  Rison said, “Sometimes?”

  Connelly held the phone like a waiter holding a tray, with the speaker aimed toward the ceiling.

  Nora answered after the second ring.

  “Adam, where are you?”

  She sounded like she’d been running.

  Connelly said, “Hey, is everything okay?”

  “No, I mean…I don’t know. Are you coming today? Where are you? Why aren’t you answering your phone?”

  Bruder frowned at the phone, then nodded.

  Connelly said, “Yeah, I’m on my way now. My phone was dead and I lost my charger, it’s a whole thing. Why, what’s up?”

  “Something happened with the…you know. The rounds.”

  “They didn’t show up this morning?”

  “Oh yes, they did. They took it all. And I talked to some neighbors, they all got a visit. But now everybody is freaking out, the whole town is on lockdown.”

  Connelly said, “Police? Did they finally get busted?”

  They heard footsteps through the speaker and more breathing.

  Connelly mouthed: She’s on the porch.

  He could picture her pacing back and forth, doing laps and watching the road.

  Nora said, “No, I don’t think so. Nobody I talked to has seen any police. It’s all the, you know. The group.”

  Connelly smiled. He’d told her she needed to be careful about what she said on the phone, but she was taking it to the extreme.

  “The Romanians,” he said.

  “Shh, yes. They aren’t letting anyone out of town without getting checked. They have the four roads completely blocked.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I don’t know. But you might not be able to get here.”

  Connelly looked at Bruder, who nodded again.

  “I’m still gonna try.”

  “Adam, I don’t know. I think something happened to the truck. The one with the money. That’s the only thing that would cause this kind of trouble.”

  “Are they letting people into town?”

  “I don’t know. Shit, I just don’t know. But they already don’t like you, and you’re from out of town. I don’t know if you’re safe here right now.”

  “I’ll check it out. If it looks sketchy, I’ll turn around and call you back.”

  “Okay. How far out are you?”

  “Twenty minutes, maybe? But probably longer if I have to go through some stupid-ass Romanian checkpoint.”

  “Please, please be careful. And don’t cause any trouble.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. And if you get too close and then turn around, they might think you’re hiding something and chase you down. So if you’re going to turn around, do it before they see you.”

  “You got it, babe.”

  “Okay. I love you.”

  Connelly looked at Bruder, whose expression didn’t change.

  “I love you too.”

  He ended the call and Bruder took the phone out of his hand before he could put it away.

  “Don’t smash it,” Connelly said.

  Bruder put the phone in his jacket pocket.

  If they had to carry a live grenade around, he wanted to be the one holding the spoon down.

  “Get the truck loaded,” he said. “Let’s go see Nora.”

  While Connelly was inside the trailer pouting and repacking his bag, Bruder opened the back of the white truck, then stopped and walked around to stare at Claud’s Honda.

  Rison followed, looked between him and the Honda a few times, then said, “What?”

  “I’m figuring out how much of the money we can put in there and still have room for us.”

  Rison squinted at the Honda.

  “Not all of it.”

  “No. But if it’s enough to make us happy, we might be able to use the car to get close enough to one of the checkpoints without raising an alarm. Everybody but the driver ducks down. The Romanians see the car and wave it forward. By the time they see it’s me at the wheel, it’s too late. We go loud with the guns and floor it out of town.”

  Rison said, “Yeah, but how many guys are at this checkpoint? Do they have chase vehicles set up? We blast our way through one level but end up in a high-speed chase in this piece of shit. Does it stall out? Does it only go up to fifty?”

  Bruder thought about it.

  Rison said, “What if you’re in this car and we’re behind you in the truck? You get us close, maybe even through, then jump in the truck and we’re off to the races. We won’t set any records, but at least we know what the truck can do.”

  Bruder shook his head.

  “We have to assume the truck is burned. The guys from the armored car saw it from behind, maybe even spotted the DOT logo on the side. If we
roll up to a checkpoint in that thing we’re in a shootout.”

  “Shit,” Rison said. “Then let’s just peel the logos off.”

  “I thought about that. The Romanians will still be looking for a white truck full of men. If they see us, it won’t matter what’s on the doors. But if we run into any locals, the DOT charade might still be helpful.”

  “Yeah…I can see that, I guess. So what are we gonna do with the car?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’ll think about it while we work.”

  They put the money into the truck bed first, consolidating it into the minimal number of duffels and stacking them against the front of the bed like sandbags.

  Rison said, “Fourteen million?”

  Like he wanted to believe it but wasn’t convinced.

  “Feels like less,” Connelly said.

  “How would you know?”

  “It just seems like fourteen million dollars would take up more space.”

  They looked at Bruder, who shrugged.

  “Whatever it is, it won’t change just because we count it.”

  That was unsatisfying to them, but they got back to work anyway.

  The hard case with the explosives went in next, all three charges toggled on in the event they had to use the cash as a bargaining chip, and Connelly put the remotes in the middle console cupholders.

  Then they started on everything from the trailer.

  If any of the Romanians came after they were gone it would be obvious someone had been there, even if they swept every track and wiped every surface, but as with the Honda and blood and brains from Claud, the more questions they could leave unanswered the better.

  They moved the gear out of the trailer like a bucket brigade, with Rison inside handing bags and boxes and gear to Connelly on the stairs, who carried it all to Bruder at the truck.

  Connelly was standing in the doorway, waiting for the next load, when he said, “How are we gonna get to her place?”

  “Carefully,” Bruder said.

  “We have to cross the main road going east-west.”

  That didn’t require any sort of response, so Bruder just waited by the truck.

  Connelly said, “If we get spotted, they’ll come after us. I heard you guys talking about the truck being burned.”