The Box

by Jeremy Brown

  “What am I looking for?”

  “Oh, just trouble of any sort.”

  “Plenty of that to go around today.”

  “I’ll sign off on that, for damn sure. One-four, what about you?”

  Unit One-Four, Donaldson, came back: “Two miles west of town, speed trap in the median.”

  Wern said, “Do me a favor, take a look up Pine, to the intersection with 64th. Keep an eye out for the missing Cherokee.”

  Donaldson had been out there with one of the Romanians during the whole lockdown and had told Wern he wasn’t going to shoot anybody, no matter what the Romanian said, unless his or another resident’s life was in danger.

  Meaning, if the Romanian got into trouble, that was his own damn problem.

  Donaldson was a combat veteran and hadn’t been shy about telling the Romanian the same exact thing.

  Wern winced when he heard about that, but it hadn’t amounted to anything serious.

  Now Donaldson said, “You think they stole Jim’s Jeep?”

  “Apparently somebody did. Don’t make the turn, now. We don’t want anybody getting more riled than they are. Just take a look up Pine and see what you can see.”

  “What if I see the Cherokee?”

  “Uh…let me know, I guess.”

  “Copy that.”

  Connelly stood with the remote in his hand and watched while the two Romanians who escorted him to the compound eased the duffel bags out of the Lexus’ trunk and lined them up on the ground.

  The silos loomed behind him, about twenty yards away, which seemed an odd thing to walk out of your front door and see, but maybe not in Iowa.

  He looked at the front door, Razvan standing there with an arm around Nora’s shoulders, the hand resting on her upper arm.

  His other hand held a mean-looking pistol with the barrel pointed at Nora’s stomach.

  Nora stared back at Connelly, her chest rising and falling rapidly.

  But her mouth was a straight line, determined to keep it all together until this was over, and he felt bad for her, getting sucked into this nonsense between the two groups of rough men.

  If it got her hurt, or killed, he didn’t see much point in working the rest of his life to get over it.

  The man who’d driven the Lexus said something to Razvan, who told Connelly, “They’ve uncovered the explosives. Now, slowly, bring them to her.”

  He gestured with the pistol.

  “No,” Connelly said. “They stay with the cash.”

  Razvan nodded, then dragged Nora down the concrete steps over to the bags on the ground.

  Now they were about five yards from Connelly.

  “She is with the cash,” Razvan said. “Put the explosives in her hands.”

  Connelly was stuck.

  He considered Razvan for a few moments, the two men staring at each other, then looked at Nora again.

  “Just give them to me,” she said.

  Connelly stepped over the bags and went to the trunk.

  The driver moved ten yards away and used a blinding flashlight to illuminate the inside of the car, spotlighting the satchel of explosives and making sure Connelly didn’t have a flamethrower or anything else stashed in there.

  The other Romanian stood next to him, both of them looking uneasy.

  Connelly lifted the satchel by its strap and let the weight swing a bit while he turned.

  He couldn’t see the men standing behind the flashlight now, but the beam did move back a few more steps.

  He carried the satchel to Nora and laid the strap across her outstretched hands.

  “Hold it close,” Razvan told her. “Hug it to your chest.”

  She did, staring straight ahead with her jaw muscles working.

  “This is the only one?” Razvan said.

  Connelly nodded.

  “You have the money. We’re leaving now.”

  “Not until we count it.”

  “It’s all there.”

  Razvan shrugged.

  “Maybe. Also, not until you tell me how to find your friends.”

  Connelly expected this but tried to look caught off-guard.

  “That’s not part of the deal.”

  “The deal is, you give me what I want and the two of you get to leave.”

  “Unharmed.”

  “That’s subjective. I think we have different definitions for it.”

  “No, it means you keep your hands off us.”

  Razvan smiled but didn’t respond, so Connelly said, “You said you wanted the money. It’s here.”

  “And your friends.”

  “They aren’t my friends. They left. And I don’t know how to find them myself, so how can I tell you?”

  “Figure it out. You have until the money is counted.”

  “This is bullshit,” Connelly said.

  “Then blow us all up. That will teach me, no?”

  Another man came out of the house.

  Connelly recognized him as the one who walked into the shed at Nora’s, the one he’d almost shot.

  He picked up two of the duffels and carried them past Connelly to one of the low concrete and steel buildings.

  Connelly watched while he dropped the bags at the door and went through.

  When the lights in there came on Connelly saw a very clean space, white walls with no furniture except tables and folding chairs. The tables were set up with cash-counting machines.

  The man carried the bags inside and came back for the next pair.

  The other two, Connelly’s escorts, moved faster now that the explosives were out of the car. They opened the back doors and yanked the duffels out, carrying them all the way to the counting room.

  Connelly figured they wouldn’t notice the partially open zipper with the radio inside if they kept up their current pace, but eventually someone would find the gear.

  When it happened, things would change.

  Razvan said, “The bomb stays with the money, right?”

  He pulled Nora and the explosives toward the counting room.

  Before he ducked inside he told Connelly, “Start thinking. And don’t make me ask again. This won’t take long.”

  Donaldson drove his cruiser northwest on Pine, splashing the cornfields with his spotlight because who knows what the hell he might see on a day like this?

  He stopped at the sign before the railroad tunnel, where all of the horseshit allegedly started.

  Well, today anyway.

  The Romanians had started it years before, and now things had taken a turn on them.

  There weren’t any headlights coming toward him so he pulled through the tunnel, thinking about the crew who’d somehow found out about the armored car and decided it was something to try and take.

  Part of him hoped they got away with it.

  Teach Razvan and his cocky boys a lesson, maybe pull them out of town on a manhunt.

  But what he thought would happen, and dreaded, was some sort of vengeance upon the town and its people. Payback for the humiliation and perceived conspiracy against them and their enterprise.

  Donaldson had seen it during his time in the sandbox, and it was infuriating to imagine it happening here at home.

  He didn’t think the sheriff would allow anything like that to happen, but he wasn’t certain of it.

  Donaldson shook his head, finding it hard to believe.

  How, if it came down to backing his officers or the Romanians, he wasn’t sure what Wern would do. Wern was a good man, trying to do what he thought was best for everyone, but even so it was horseshit, all around.

  Donaldson was about a mile away from the dirt road leading to the damn compound they had out here, caught up in a fantasy about going in all by himself and cleaning it out, when the taillights reflected back at him.

  He sped up.

  At first, he thought the vehicle was pulled off the left side of the road, but when he got close enough to hit it with his spotlight he saw it was parked across the dirt road leading
west, toward the compound.

  The vehicle was dark, shut off, with no sign of anyone around it.

  Donaldson got on the radio.

  “Sheriff, you should ask that crystal ball of yours about some Lotto numbers. I just found the Cherokee.”

  Wern came back with, “Is that so? One piece?”

  “Looks like it. Parked across 64th, like it’s blocking the way in or out.”

  The radio was silent for a moment.

  Then Wern said, “Anybody around it?”

  “Negative. And, if I may speak freely here, I think the folks out here in the compound finally came across somebody a little badder than they are.”

  “Seems that way,” Wern said.

  It wasn’t meant to be a slight against the sheriff, but Donaldson couldn’t help it if he took it that way.

  “Well,” Wern said, “if the Cherokee’s not hurting anybody or messing with Pine, let’s leave her there until morning. I’ll let Jim and Carol know, and they can either come and get it or we’ll have it towed out to them.”

  Donaldson said, “So, do nothing?”

  “Maybe put a reflective sticker on it, for safety.”

  “Sure, copy that.”

  Donaldson grinned, pleased about the sheriff’s willingness to step back and let these two groups have it out, if that’s what was going to happen.

  He didn’t think it was quite to the level of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ but it felt close.

  He kept the spotlight on the Cherokee as he opened his door and stepped out, then instinctively dove back into the car when the gunfire started.

  Bruder heard voices coming from the far side of the house but he couldn’t make out the words.

  Nobody was screaming yet, which was good.

  He focused on the voices and sounds coming through his earpiece.

  The voices spoke Romanian and the sounds were things being moved, slid around, dropped, then loud mechanical chattering, like something being dispensed.

  Or cash being counted.

  Bruder switched his radio to the channel he and Kershaw and Rison were using.

  “Go.”

  Stealing the same money twice from the same people wasn’t something Bruder found appealing, especially when those people seemed to be expecting it.

  But the money was right there, on the other side of a fence along with Connelly and the woman, Nora.

  And the men protecting the money were the sort to hold a grudge, and Bruder didn’t want to worry about anybody with a grudge and the means to track him down.

  He stood outside the southwest corner of the fence, shielded from the rest of the compound by the two story house. He was just beyond the halo of security lights coming across the fence, watching the windows of the house and everything else in front of him while Kershaw worked on the chain link with the cutters on his Leatherman.

  When Kershaw pulled the flap open and slipped through with his rifle and took up a spot at the near corner of the house, staying below the windows, Bruder moved forward and used the same opening. He went to the other corner, where he could see the pickup truck and armored car parked near some piles of junk.

  He leaned the rifle against the wall and went flat on his stomach, not caring about the marks he left in the snow and crusted ice. He slid his head forward an inch at a time, easing his eyes to the corner and looking at the scene in front of the house.

  Two men, one lean and one big and wide, carried duffels past Connelly into a bunker-like building with bright lights coming from inside.

  Bruder caught a glimpse of Razvan in there, and an elbow and shoulder that had to belong to Nora.

  That was three, plus the one they’d spotted on the way in from the Cherokee, the one moving around inside the building next to the gate with the machine gun sticking out of the window.

  That left one missing Romanian, who could be right on the other side of the wall from Bruder.

  The men made another trip to the trunk and only brought out two bags—the last two, apparently—and the big one carried them away while the lean one closed the car doors and lifted a rifle out of the bed of the truck parked next to Nora’s car.

  He kept the rifle on his hip but pointed it at Connelly, who said something Bruder couldn’t hear.

  It was probably wise, and it would be just like him to get shot right before the plan went into full swing.

  The man with the rifle had his left profile to Bruder.

  It was an easy shot, but beyond the man was the bunker with the men and money inside, and Nora, and Bruder didn’t want any bullets to pass through the guy’s body and go through the metal siding if the concrete blocks didn’t go all the way up.

  He pulled back from the corner and met Kershaw near the middle of the house, to the side of a back door that looked like it hadn’t been used in a decade.

  They spoke in low voices and agreed on the next steps, and just in case Bruder reached up and tried the back door.

  Locked or nailed shut with no keyhole on the outside.

  Either way, too loud to open.

  Bruder nodded and they went back to their corners.

  He stayed on his feet this time and counted to ten, then slid his right eye past the corner.

  Same arrangement, only now the door to the counting room was closed.

  It didn’t matter.

  He said, “Hey,” just loud enough for the man to hear.

  The man turned his head, startled, and frowned at the shape of Bruder’s head leaning around the corner.

  He opened his mouth and started to turn his body, bringing the gun around, and as soon as his attention was away from the front of the house Kershaw’s shots came, three of them, knocking the man against the truck and dropping him near the front tire.

  They were suppressed but still loud, unmistakable as gunshots, and Bruder moved around the corner with his rifle up, zeroed on the doorway of the counting room.

  He got to the front corner and found Kershaw covering the front door and windows of the house, waiting for the fifth man to come out.

  Connelly was already moving toward the counting room.

  “They’re all over here!” he said. “And watch that one, that door, the machine gun is inside!”

  “We know,” Bruder said. “Get back here, get down.”

  Connelly turned to say something else and the M249 machine gun—as if it knew they were taking about it—opened up from inside the building, ripping through the sheet metal like a buzzsaw.

  Connelly ducked and kept moving toward the counting room and got around the corner near the door.

  “Nora, get down! Stay down!”

  Bruder knelt next to the dead Romanian, putting the pickup truck’s engine block between him and the gunner.

  Kershaw moved up to the Lexus and returned fire, though the man with the M249 didn’t seem to notice.

  Bruder got onto his stomach again with his sights on the door of the gunner’s bunker and waited for it to open.

  “Front gate, go, go, go,” Kershaw said.

  Bruder heard him through the earpiece as well.

  Rison came back: “Keep your heads down.”

  Kershaw yelled at Connelly, “Down! Down!”

  They couldn’t see Rison or the explosive charge labeled with ******4 come over the fence and land on top of the gunner’s nest, but they heard and felt it when Rison pressed the remote.

  The door in Bruder’s sights disappeared in a wave of splinters and dust and smoke.

  Pieces of roof and concrete fell around and on top of him, and when he stood up a shape stumbled out of the doorway clutching an arm that seemed to be attached by a few threads of a smoldering coat.

  Bruder put three rounds into the shape and saw it fall back into the dust.

  He pressed the mic.

  “Gunner’s down. We have a hole in the fence behind the house.”

  Rison said, “Nah, I’m good.”

  A moment later they watched him jog toward the gate wit
h two rifles slung across his back—his and Connelly’s—then scale the fence, straddle the barbed wire, and come down the inside without getting hung up.

  “Damn,” Kershaw said.

  Rison peered into the mess made by the explosives and shook his head, then met Bruder and Kershaw in front of the pickup truck.

  “You guys had to cut a hole? Impound lots have better fences than these guys.”

  Connelly poked his head around the corner of the counting room building.

  “Hey guys.”

  Then, toward the counting room door: “Nora! You okay?”

  No one answered.

  Rison gave the door a wide berth and handed the extra rifle to Connelly, who checked it and said, “Listen up in there. We got four men out here with automatic weapons. You have a few pistols, maybe, and a big ass pack of explosives. Do the smart thing and send Nora out, then we’ll talk about how you guys walk away from this.”

  There was no answer for nearly a minute, then Razvan yelled, “Fuck you. You open that door, she dies.”

  When Razvan heard what he thought were gunshots he told everyone to shut up and turn off the counting machines.

  They did, and Benj and Costel picked up on Razvan’s posture of looking at nothing in particular while he strained to hear what was happening outside.

  Nora looked between all of them, trying to interpret this new development while her arms shook from holding the explosives.

  Razvan had tried to reassure her, saying there was no way her boyfriend would blow her up, or the money. This was all just an insurance policy to make him behave while they counted the money.

  And, because there was no way for her to send a warning, he also showed her the knife he was going to use on Adam to make sure he told them everything.

  That was to make her behave.

  Get her thinking about the knife being used on her, and how it would be better to just come out with it.

  But now something was happening outside.

  Benj frowned at the door and said, “Was—”

  Then the unmistakable sound of the M249 ripping through a belt of ammunition made them all duck.

  “What the fuck?” Benj yelled.

  Costel pulled his pistol out of his belt and pointed it at the door.

  From outside the door a man—it had to be the boyfriend—yelled, “Nora, get down! Stay down!”