The Box

by Jeremy Brown

  They checked the cracks along the front wall and the gap in the big hinged doors being held in place with a length of scratchy rope and could see the road just fine.

  Kershaw took the northeast corner, watching for anything coming from the town.

  Rison had the southeast, in case any Romanians were further out than Grigore and his buddy had been.

  Bruder peered through the gap between the doors and said, “Who can you call to find out what’s happening in town?”

  Nora didn’t respond, so Bruder turned from the doors and looked at her.

  Connelly was by her side, standing between her and Bruder like a mediator. He had his rifle now, slung across his chest, and she kept frowning at it and him like they wouldn’t fit together in her mind.

  He told her, “Come on. Help us out.”

  “Help you out? Are you kidding me? How much of what you’ve told me is actually true?”

  Connelly opened his mouth, ready to get into it, but Bruder cut him off.

  “That doesn’t matter now. Sort it out later. Or don’t, nobody cares. What matters right now is what the Romanians are doing. Are they still holding the crossroads? Are they flooding this area with men and trucks? Who can you get that information from?”

  Nora still didn’t answer.

  “Do you know how many men there are? We know of eight.”

  Kershaw said, “Well, five now.”

  Bruder nodded.

  “Right. Nora, who can you call?”

  She just stared at him.

  Connelly said, “What about Helen?”

  She gave him a look like it was too soon to mention that name, and he might never be allowed to say it.

  “Call Marie,” Bruder said.

  Nora squinted at him.

  “From Len’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, I…she and I aren’t friends like that. I don’t even know her number.”

  “Adam does,” Rison said from his spot in the corner, providing zero help.

  Before that could change the subject Bruder said, “Call somebody. Trust me, you’ll want to know if they’re coming this way.”

  “Trust you…” Nora said.

  But she took her phone out and started tapping.

  Bruder told Connelly, “Watch the screen.”

  Connelly leaned closer and Nora let the arm holding the phone drop.

  “Watch the screen for what?”

  Bruder said, “To make sure you aren’t calling any Romanians. Or cops.”

  “Oh, right, let me scroll through my contacts. Here’s Razvan, a fucking murderer who almost killed my parents and threatened to burn their house down. I’ll just hit him up real quick and let him know you’re here. Please.”

  Connelly said, “See? We’re all on the same side.”

  Nora whirled on him.

  “No. No we are not. The people around here—me included—are just trying to live their lives without any trouble from Razvan and his men. You, you assholes come in and steal from them, and now you want my help to get away. Well what happens if you do get away? When you disappear? Guess who pays the price for what you’ve done?”

  “I’m not going to disappear,” Connelly said, and everyone looked at him.

  Nora said, “What?”

  “I’m not going to disappear. I have money. From before, other jobs, and now this, of course. I’ll buy this place from your folks so you don’t have to worry about it anymore. You’ll be free and clear to stay in Minneapolis or go wherever you want.”

  “With you?”

  Connelly shuffled his feet and glanced at Bruder and the others.

  “I hope so, yes. And if you want to stay here, that’s fine too. I’ll stay with you and keep an eye on the…the fallout from our little endeavor.”

  Kershaw said, “You against the Romanians?”

  Connelly just shrugged.

  Kershaw and Rison both looked at Bruder.

  The sensible thing would be to shoot both of them, right then, and find another way to get status updates about the town.

  But Bruder didn’t want to make that sort of decision without talking to the others first, in case they had a good reason not to do it, one he didn’t see yet.

  He told Connelly, “Watch the road.”

  Then, to Kershaw and Rison: “Let’s talk in the back.”

  They left Connelly and Nora at the front of the barn and walked around the rusted cultivator and stood in the opposite corner under a part of the loft draped with cobwebs.

  Kershaw kept his voice low when he said, “We can’t kill them.”

  “Convince me,” Bruder said.

  Rison looked back and forth between them. His eyes were wide in the hole of his balaclava.

  “Holy shit guys, that’s where we’re starting? Killing them?”

  Bruder said, “This little lover’s quarrel or whatever it is can get us all killed. Better to cut it off now. It was bad enough before, now we got a crew coming in from Chicago. We don’t have time for this.”

  “No, no, listen.”

  Rison glanced over at Connelly, who stood close to Nora so they could have their own private chat.

  “He’s good to go. Even if he does stay here with her, or wherever they go, he’s a stand-up guy. He won’t ever speak our names. To anyone.”

  “He will if the Romanians start playing that card game with him. Or her.”

  “They don’t know he’s in on this,” Rison said. “Everybody who’s seen him with us is dead.”

  “They don’t have to know. They just have to wonder. That’s how it starts.”

  Rison looked at Kershaw.

  “You said we can’t kill them. Can you jump in on this, please?”

  Kershaw told Bruder, “All the dead bodies so far are Romanian. When their crew finds them, my guess is they’ll go in a pit or a burn pile and nobody outside that group will know about it. If we start dropping other bodies—civilians—it’ll bring attention.”

  “We can make bodies disappear as easily as the Romanians can,” Bruder said. “And even if they do get found, we make it so the finger gets pointed at Razvan.”

  Kershaw thought about it.

  Rison said, “So this is what we do now? We don’t like how somebody acts, so we put a bullet in him?”

  Bruder nodded.

  “When how they act puts the rest of us at risk. He’s making himself a loose end. I warned him not to do this.”

  “You didn’t warn her.”

  “That’s on him, not us.”

  Rison looked down, shaking his head.

  “What happens if I don’t go along with it?”

  “I don’t need your help,” Bruder said.

  “No, I mean what happens if I don’t allow it? You gonna shoot me too?”

  He looked up at Bruder, then Kershaw.

  It wasn’t quite a standoff, but it was heading in that direction.

  “You feel that strongly about it?” Kershaw said.

  “I do. It’d be one thing if he fucked up, like he didn’t set the charges right or ran his mouth before the job and got us jammed up. But he did everything right. Hell, he’s the reason we know all we do. Him and Nora. I just can’t get on board with punishing him for…well, let’s call it what it is: Falling in love.”

  He pulled a bottle of water out of his jacket and turned away from Nora’s direction, then tugged his mask down and took an aggressive drink. He didn’t look at Bruder or Kershaw, and Bruder had the sense he was embarrassed, talking about love.

  After a moment Kershaw told Bruder, “I see his point. I’m not sold on Connelly being a liability yet. I don’t like what he’s doing, but he doesn’t have blinders on. He knows what we’re talking about right now. And he’s still willing to try to make it work. My opinion, it’s not worth a bullet.”

  “By the time your opinion changes, it’ll be too late,” Bruder said. “But I’ll let it play out. For now.”

  While the three men talked in the back of the barn
Connelly watched the road and, out of the corner of his eye, Nora, to gauge her level of anger.

  He was a little worried about the gun in her pocket.

  “So, what do you think?” he said.

  She didn’t answer for a while.

  Then: “About what?”

  “Me sticking around. With you, wherever that is.”

  “I think it’s pretty goddam presumptuous.”

  He glanced over to see if she was smiling when she said it.

  She was not.

  He couldn’t think of anything to say, so he said, “It’s a lot to process.”

  “Not really. You lied. Why go any further than that?”

  “I lied out of necessity.”

  She turned to him.

  “Oh, necessity? You needed to steal Razvan’s money? You needed to put my life in danger, and everyone who lives here?”

  “Well, no. But once the job was a go, certain things had to happen. Lying to you was one of them, to keep you safe.”

  “No,” she said. “Don’t even. Don’t try to make yourself feel better by framing this as some bullshit white knight scenario. If you wanted to keep me safe, you never would have talked to me. But you did, on purpose, because why? I’m starting to see it all, right now—you got me to tell you all about them. About the town.”

  She shook her head, bewildered.

  “And just now, when that man said your name. ‘Adam does.’ The way he said it. That’s not even your name, is it?”

  Connelly dreaded this, knowing it wasn’t going to make anything better, but lying again would only make it worse.

  “No.”

  “You piece of shit. What’s your real name?”

  He winced.

  “I’ll tell you when this is all over.”

  Her mouth fell open.

  “What? You’re not going to tell me?”

  “Nora, I’m serious, it’s for your own safety. If you don’t know my real name, or how the other guys look, their faces, you’re better off.”

  She crossed her arms and said, “In case of what?”

  “I think you know.”

  “I want you to say it.”

  Connelly couldn’t help wishing she wouldn’t give him such a hard time, even though he knew he had it coming.

  He said, “In case the cops come asking. Or the Romanians.”

  “Ah. There it is. And from what you’ve seen—oh wait, and from what I’ve told you—do you think they’ll be nice to me when they ask? When I tell them, I don’t know your name, or how ugly the rest of your team is, do you think they’ll just say, okay, sorry to bother you, have a nice day?”

  Connelly stared out at the road through the gap in the barn doors.

  He wanted her to keep her voice down but couldn’t say so, not then.

  Not if he didn’t want to get shot by that pocket gun.

  He knew what the other three were talking about, back there in the corner. If they looked over and saw him and Nora going at it, possibly a sign of what was to come, it might tip their decision a bad way.

  “You’re right,” he said. “It’s mostly in case of cops.”

  “And what about Razvan and his men? Should I just start packing now for Arizona so I don’t get tortured to death?”

  Something caught in her voice and Connelly looked over and saw tears in her eyes.

  Outraged, frustrated, terrified tears.

  He told her, “You don’t have to worry about Razvan. Or his men.”

  “No? These are the people who have the entire town locked down right now. Putting guns in people’s faces, and no one is stopping them. And no one stopped them when they threatened to kill my parents. I don’t have to worry about that?”

  “No.”

  “Because?”

  “Because if they come here, we’ll kill them.”

  She blinked.

  “We?”

  Connelly nodded toward the back corner, where Rison was fired up about something.

  “We. And you, with that dinky peashooter, if you feel like getting off your ass.”

  She finally smiled, a small flash that lasted less than a heartbeat, but it was there, breaking the tension and maybe, just maybe, putting them back on the same team.

  She cuffed at her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater and glanced at the men in the back.

  “One of them…I can’t tell which one anymore, maybe the one with glasses…he said five.”

  “Five?”

  “Yes, when the bigger one was taking about numbers, how many men Razvan has. He said, eight, and the other one said, ‘Well, five.’”

  “Yeah?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Oh. Huh. It means they started with eight, we think, and now they have five. We think.”

  “What happened to the other three?”

  He squinted out at the road.

  “Remember, way back in the day, when I said you shouldn’t know things for your own safety?”

  Nora shook her head.

  “Don’t start with that bullshit again. My safety is up to me, and I need to know what’s going on.”

  Connelly couldn’t argue with her.

  He’d demand the same.

  “They’re dead,” he said.

  She absorbed that for a moment.

  “How? Did you kill them?”

  “I can’t say any more than they’re dead.”

  “Oh, I get it. Some kind of code?”

  He wasn’t a fan of the tone, like he and the others were just playing a jackass game of cops and robbers, but he couldn’t expect her to jump on board with all of it right away.

  “That,” he said, “and knowing I deserve the same fate if I run my mouth about the details.”

  “Oh,” she said, pulled down a bit by the gravity of the truth.

  They both watched the road for a bit, then she said, “They’re talking about what to do about us back there, aren’t they?”

  “Yep.”

  “I think I’m more concerned about them than Razvan. The big one, anyway. He seems mean.”

  Connelly shook his head.

  “He’s not mean. Just very serious. I think they invented the term Zero Fucks Given for him. If negative fucks were possible, he’d give negative fucks.”

  He was jabbering, making noise because he sensed they were wrapping things up back there in the corner, and made himself stop.

  Nora said, “What are they going to do?”

  Connelly heard footsteps and turned to see the three of them coming back to the front of the barn.

  Bruder and Rison still had the long guns slung across their chests, but nobody had a hand on the grip. Rison’s pistol was tucked away somewhere.

  “Let’s find out,” Connelly said, and kept his finger near the trigger.

  Bruder noticed the trigger finger and watched Connelly’s eyes twitching between the three of them.

  He said, “You—”

  And stopped when Nora’s phone started ringing.

  She pulled it out and looked at the screen.

  “It’s Donna.”

  Everyone waited for more information.

  “She lives north of here, in the neighborhood southwest of town. You probably drove past her house to get here.”

  “Put her on speaker,” Bruder said.

  Nora hit the button.

  “Donna?”

  “Nora, sweetie, are you okay?”

  Nora glanced at the four men looming around her.

  “Yes, why? What’s happening?”

  “They opened up the crossroads, so that’s good, but this whole part of town is still locked down. I just talked to Yvette, you know Yvette, from church?”

  “Um, sure.”

  “I just talked to her, and the tall one came to her house with another one of them, and they opened her barn and looked in her garage, then her house! Can you believe that? Her house!”

  Nora’s face grew tight.

  “What are they looking for?�
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  “I don’t know, hon. Yvette said they had another vehicle parked at the end of her driveway, with another man there, and she saw a gun. They left her place a mess and drove down the road to her neighbors’, the Judsen place.”

  Nora said, “So they’re coming this way?”

  “Yes, that’s why I’m calling. We’re all making calls, letting folks know. Not that you have anything to worry about, but just so you know and don’t get a nasty shock when they show up. They’re coming to search your property. Just let them do it and they’ll go away.”

  “Thank you so much, Donna. I really appreciate it.”

  “Of course, sweetie. You be careful. I need to make some more calls, but I’ll check in with you later.”

  “Okay, bye.”

  She ended the call and looked around.

  Bruder said, “We need to get rid of the truck.”

  Kershaw stayed in the barn to watch the road.

  Everyone else started moving.

  Fast, purposeful steps but no rushing.

  On the way to the huge metal barns Bruder asked Nora, “How far away are they? If they just hit…who was it?”

  “The Judsens,” Connelly said.

  “Them.”

  Nora said, “Ten minutes if they’re driving straight here. But if they have to stop and check every property along the way, I mean…an hour? It depends on how long they stay at each place.”

  Bruder grunted.

  However long it was, it wasn’t long enough.

  He pointed out to the south and west.

  “What comes after these fields? More fields?”

  “Mostly. You can see the tree line out there to the west, and there’s a drainage ditch in there too.”

  “Can the truck get through?”

  “No. The ditch is probably fifteen feet deep, deeper mud at the bottom. With steep sides. Deer get stuck in there sometimes.”

  “No bridges?” Connelly said.

  “Not that we can get to. It’s a property line for as far as you can see. Last I knew there was one to the south, but that’s on the other side of the southern property line, which is another drainage ditch.”