The Town: A Novel

by Chuck Hogan

  Four cash-on-wheels teller trucks lined the back of the vault. The top drawers held about $2,500 each, and Doug cleared out all of it except the bait bills, the thin, paper-clipped bundles of twenties laid out at the bottom of each slot. The first drawer was the one tellers drew from during routine transactions, the one they emptied in the event of a stickup.

  The second drawers were deeper than the first, containing higher denominations for commercial transactions and account closings, more than four times as much money as the first drawers. Doug again emptied each one down to the bait bills.

  They ignored the safe-deposit room altogether. Opening boxes would have meant drilling each door individually, ten minutes per lock, two locks per box. And even if they did have all day, the Kenmore Square BayBanks branch served a transient community of Boston University students and apartment renters, so there was no point. In an upscale-neighborhood bank, the safe boxes would have been the primary target, since branches in wealthier zip codes usually carry less operating cash, their customers relying on direct deposit rather than paycheck cashing, purchasing things with plastic rather than paper.

  Dez’s blue palm halted them on the way back. “Asshole at the ATM.”

  Through the blinds, Doug made out a college kid in sweats playing the machine for allowance money. His card was rejected twice before he bothered to read the service message on the screen. He looked to the door, checking the bank hours printed there, then lifted the customer service phone off the receiver.

  “Nope,” said Dez.

  In the middle of this, Doug looked at the manager lying behind the second teller’s cage. He knew things about her. Her name was Claire Keesey. She drove a plum-colored Saturn coupe with a useless rear spoiler and a happy-face bumper sticker that said Breathe! She lived alone, and when it was warm enough, she spent her lunch hours in the community gardens along the nearby Back Bay Fens. He knew these things because he had been following her, off and on, for weeks.

  Now, up close, Doug could see the faintly darker roots of her hair, the pale brown she treated honey blond. Her long, black linen skirt outlined her legs to the lacy white feet of her stockings, where jagged stitching across the left heel betrayed a thrifty mending never meant to be seen.

  She rolled her head along her bent arm, just enough for a peek up at Gloansy, who was hunched over and watching the kid on the ATM phone. Her left leg began to creep toward the teller’s chair. Her foot slipped underneath the counter and out of Doug’s sight, poking around under there, then gliding swiftly back into position, her eyes returning to the crook of her elbow.

  Doug exhaled slowly. Now he had a problem.

  The kid in the ATM gave up on the dead telephone and kicked the wall before shoving bitchily through the doors out into the early morning.

  Jem dropped the loot bag next to the tool bag and the work bag. “Let’s blow,” he said, exactly what Doug wanted to hear. As Gloansy pulled plastic ties from his pockets, and Jem and Dez lifted jugs of Ultra Clorox from the work bag, Doug turned and walked fast down the rear hall into the employee break room. The security equipment sat on wooden shelves there, and the system had tripped, the cameras switched on and recording, a small red light pulsing over the door. Doug stopped all three VCRs and ejected the tapes, then unplugged the system for good measure.

  He brought the tapes back out to the front and dumped them into the work bag without anyone else seeing. Gloansy had the assistant manager in one of the teller’s chairs, binding the guy’s wrists behind the chair back. Bloody snot painted the assistant manager’s lips and chin. Jem must have flat-nosed him on their way in.

  Doug lifted the heavy tool bag to his shoulder just as he saw Dez quit splashing bleach, setting his jugs down on the floor.

  “Hold it!” Dez called out.

  Dez’s finger went to his ear as Jem emerged from the vault, jugs in hand. Gloansy stopped with the manager seated behind the assistant manager now, back-to-back, a tie for her wrists ready in his free hand. Everyone looked at Dez—except Doug, who was looking at the manager staring at the floor.

  Dez said, “Silent alarm call, this address.”

  Jem looked for Doug. “What the fuck?” he said, setting down his bleach. “

  We’re done here anyway,” said Doug. “We’re gone. Let’s go.”

  Jem drew his pistol, keeping it low at his hip as he approached the seated bankers. “Who did it?”

  The manager kept staring at the floor. The assistant manager stared at Jem, a black forelock of hair hanging ragged and sullen over his eyes.

  “We were gone,” said Jem, pointing at the back hallway with his gun. “We were out that fucking door.”

  The assistant manager winced at Jem through his hair, eyes watering from the bleach fumes, still sore from his cuffing at the door.

  Jem locked on him. Wounded defiance was the worst possible play the assistant manager could make.

  Dez picked up his bleach, hurriedly finishing splashing it around. “Let’s go,” he said.

  “We’ve gotta move,” Doug told Jem.

  Another few seconds of staring, and the spell was broken. Jem stepped off, relaxing his gun hand, slipping the piece back inside his belt. He was already turning away when the assistant manager said, “Look, no one did any—”

  Jem flew at the man in a blur. The sound of knuckles against temple was like a tray of ice being cracked, Jem holding back nothing.

  The assistant manager whipped left and slumped over the armrest, the chair tipping and falling onto its side.

  The assistant manager sagged, still bound to the chair by his wrists. Jem dropped to one knee and hammered away again and again at the defenseless guy’s cheek and jaw. Then Jem stopped and went back for his bleach. Only Doug’s hooking his arm stopped Jem from emptying the jug over the man’s shattered face.

  That close, Doug could see the pale, nearly white-blue of Jem’s irises within the recesses of the goalie mask, glowing like snow at night. Doug twisted the bleach out of Jem’s hand and told him to load the bags. To Doug’s surprise, Jem did just that.

  Doug soaked the night drop in the lobby. He soaked the carpet where they had filled the loot bag, jumpy near the windows, expecting sirens. He shook out the jug over the ATM cassette, then returned to the counter.

  The assistant manager remained hanging off the overturned chair. Only his wheezing told Doug the guy was still alive.

  The bags were gone. So was the manager.

  Doug walked to the back, bleach fumes swamping his vision. The bags were stacked and waiting, and Dez and Jem both had their masks off, standing at the rear door, Jem’s hand clamped on the back of the manager’s neck, keeping her from seeing their faces. Dez picked up her brown leather handbag where it had fallen upon entry, shooting Doug a hard look of warning.

  Doug whipped off his goalie mask, his ski mask still on underneath. “Fuck is this?”

  “What if they already got us walled in?” said Jem, wild. “We need her.”

  Wheels skidding on alley grit, the work van pulling up outside, and Gloansy, unmasked now, jumping from the wheel to throw the side doors open.

  Dez started out, two-handing the first duffel bag, swinging it aboard.

  “Leave her,” Doug commanded. But Jem was already rushing her out to the van.

  Doug’s ski mask came off, crackling with electricity. Seconds mattered. He carried the work bag into the glaring sunlight and dumped it into the van with a crash. Jem was next to him, trying to load the manager into the van without her glimpsing his face. Doug took her by the waist, boosted her up, then cut in front of Jem, leaving Jem the third bag.

  Doug pushed her down the length of the soft bench seat to the windowless wall. “Eyes shut,” he told her, stuffing her head down to her knees. “No noise.”

  The last bag thudded and the doors slammed and the van lurched up the sharp, ramplike incline, bouncing off the curb and onto the street. Doug pulled his Leatherman from its belt pouch. He opened up the largest blad
e and tugged the hem of her black jacket taut, cutting into the fabric, then collapsing the blade and tearing off a long strip. She flinched at the noise, shaking but not struggling beneath him.

  He looked up and they were headed around into Kenmore Square, the red light at the end of Brookline Avenue. The bank was on their right. Doug kept his weight on the manager’s upper back, watching. No cruisers yet in the square, nothing.

  Gloansy said, “What about the switch?”

  “Later,” Doug said, through his teeth, sliding the Leatherman back onto his belt.

  The light turned green and the traffic started forward. Gloansy went easy, bearing east on Commonwealth Avenue.

  A cruiser was coming, no lights, rolling west toward them, around the bus station in the center island of the square. The cruiser lit up its rack to slow traffic, making a wide U-turn and cutting across behind them, pulling up curbside at the bank.

  They rolled past the bus station toward the Storrow Drive overpasses. Doug wrapped the fabric twice around the manager’s head, tying it tight in a blindfold. He pulled her halfway up, waving his hand in front of her face, then made a fist and drove it at her, stopping just short of her nose. When she didn’t flinch, he let her sit up the rest of the way, then slid to the far end of the bench, as far away from her as he could get, tearing off his jumpsuit as if he were trying to shed his own criminal skin.

  2

  CRIME SCENE

  ADAM FRAWLEY PARKED HIS Bureau car in the slanting shadow of Fenway Park’s Green Monster, jogging across the short bridge over the Massachusetts Turnpike with his folder and notebook trapped under his elbow, pulling on a pair of latex gloves. The fence along the side of the bridge was high and curved at the top to keep Red Sox fans from hurling themselves off it every September. At the tail end of Newbury Street, two windbreakers from the Boston Police crime lab were crouching inside yellow tape, dusting a graffiti-tagged metal door and bagging loose alley trash near a plum Saturn coupe.

  Newbury Street was the tony promenade listed in every Boston guidebook, beginning downtown at the Public Garden and riding out in orderly alphabetical blocks, Arlington to Berkeley to Clarendon, all the way to Hereford before skipping impatiently to M, the broad Massachusetts Avenue that formed the unofficial western border of the Back Bay. Newbury Street continued beyond that dividing line, but with its spirit broken, forced to run alongside the ugly turnpike more or less as a back alley for Commonwealth Avenue, its humiliation ending at the suicide bridge.

  Frawley rounded the corner to the front of the bank, at the tail end of a block of brick-front apartment buildings topping street-level retail stores and bars. Kenmore Square was a bottleneck fed by three major inbound roads, Brookline, Beacon, and Commonwealth, converging at a bus station where Comm boulevarded into two lanes split by a proper grass mall. Curbside clots of police cruisers, fire engines, and news vans were squeezing traffic down to one lane.

  An industrial-sized fan blocked the bank’s open front door, broadcasting pungent bleach out onto the sidewalk. A handwritten sign on the window said the branch was closed for the day and directed customers to area ATMs or the next nearest branch at the corner of Boylston and Mass.

  Frawley opened his credentials holder, pressing his FBI ID card and his small gold badge against the window near the FDIC sticker that was his ticket inside. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation guaranteed all deposit accounts up to $100,000, making any bank crime committed on U.S. soil a federal offense. A Boston cop holding a handkerchief to his mouth stepped into the ATM vestibule and switched off the big fan in order to let Frawley inside.

  “Here he is,” said Dino, greeting him beside the check-writing counter, clipboard in hand. The smell of violation was not so strong there as at the door.

  Frawley said, “I was fine until I hit the expressway coming back.”

  The Boston Bank Robbery Task Force operated not out of the field office downtown but out of a resident agency in Lakeville, a small bedroom community thirty miles south of the city. Frawley had been pulling into the industrial park there when he got this call.

  Dino had a pair of paper bootees for him. Dean Drysler was Boston Police, twenty-seven years, a lieutenant detective on permanent assignment to the task force. He was local product, tall, long-boned, sure. Boston saw more per capita bank jobs and armored-car heists than anywhere else in the country, and Dino was indispensable to Frawley as someone who knew the terrain.

  Frawley was thirty-three, compact, laser-sighted, a runner. He had less than two years with the Boston office, eight overall with the FBI following rapid-fire assignments in Miami, Seattle, and New York. He was the youngest bank robbery agent in the country, one of a platoon of five Boston agents assigned to the BRTF, investigating bank crimes throughout Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine. The working partnership he and Dino had formed was of the teacher-student variety, though the roles of teacher and student flip-flopped day to day, sometimes hour to hour.

  Frawley pulled the bootees on over his size-eight-and-a-halfs and organized his rape kit: paperwork folder, notebook, tape recorder. He scanned the various uniforms and acronym-proud windbreakers. “Where is she now?”

  “Break room in back. They let her go at Orient Heights, north of the airport. She walked to a corner market, they called it in. We already had a cruiser here on the silent bell.”

  “From?”

  “Teller cage number two.” They walked through the security door behind the counter, where the vapors were stronger, the industrial carpeting already blanching in spots. Dino pointed his clipboard at a floor button. “Panic bell. The assistant manager is down the street at Beth Israel, he caught a pretty good beating.”

  “Beat him, then took her for a ride, let her go?”

  Dino’s eyebrows arched satanically. “Unharmed.”

  Frawley set his suspicion aside, trying to go in order. “Anything on the vehicle?”

  “Van, seems like. I put a BOLO out for car fires.”

  “You talk to her?”

  “I set her up with a female officer first.”

  Frawley looked at the open vault door behind Dino, its round piston locks disengaged. Two techs in jumpsuits and bootees were going over the inside walls with blue lasers. Print dust on the outer door showed a beautiful handprint over the dial, but small, likely the manager’s. “Morning Glory?”

  “Morning Glory and a Jack-in-the-Box. Worked a bypass and busted in overnight. Phones here are all dead. BayBanks central security tried a callback on the silent and got no answer, dispatched the patrolman. Security chief’s on his way over with the codes and specs, but I’m figuring two hard lines and a cellular backup. They tricked out the cell and one of the Nynex lines.”

  “Only one?”

  “Waiting on a Nynex truck to confirm. I’m guessing the vault is hardwired, bank-to-station, same as the teller panics. Our guys let the time lock expire and had the manager open sesame.”

  “Under duress.”

  “That is my understanding.”

  Frawley jotted this down. “Easier than humping in SLICE packs and oxy tanks and burning through the vault walls.”

  Dino shrugged his pointy shoulders. “Whether they could have jumped the vault bell or not.”

  Frawley considered that. “Neutralizing the vault might have tipped their hand too much.”

  “Though with some of these guys—you know it—burglary is pussy.”

  Frawley nodded. “It’s not a payday unless they’re robbing someone face-to-face.”

  “Bottom line is, they know phone lines and Baby Bell tech.”

  Frawley nodded, surveying the fouled bank from the perspective of teller station number two, his cop eyes starting to sting. “These are the same guys, Dino.”

  “Throwing us curveballs now. Look at this.”

  THE TREND IN “COMMUNITY BANKING” was to feature the branch manager’s office up front, prominent behind glass walls, playing up accessibility and putting a friendly,
local face on a corporation that charges you fees for the privilege of handing you back your own money. Kenmore Square was a prime location—high foot traffic with the student population, the nightclubs, the nearby ballpark—but the space itself was an odd fit for a bank, deeper than it was wide, owing to the ending curve of the road. The manager’s office was tucked away behind the tellers, along the back hallway near the break room and bathrooms.

  A police photographer was inside, his flash throwing shadows off the chunk of ceiling concrete atop the desk. It had crushed a telephone and a computer monitor, cords and keyboard dangling to the floor like entrails. Neatly sheared rebar and steel mesh lay among rubble of plaster, ceiling corkboard, concrete dust, and mottled gray chips.

  Frawley looked up at the layers of flooring visible in the square ceiling hole, seeing an eye chart above an examining-room sink. The robbers had broken into the second-floor optometry shop and cut through overnight. This was the hidden cost of doing business in an older city like Boston, and why banks preferred to open branches in freestanding buildings.

  A red helmet appeared in the hole, a fireman doing a pretend startle. “Thought you guys were bank robbers!”

  Dino nodded upward with a smile. “Off your break already, Spack?”

  He said it old-city style, Spack instead of Spark. Dino could turn the hometown accent on and off like charm.

  “Just getting my eyes checked. This your whiz kid?”

  “Special Agent Frawley, meet Captain Jimmy here.”

  Frawley waved at the ceiling with his free hand.

  “A perfect square, two by two,” said Captain Jimmy. “Nice work.”

  Dino nodded. “If you can get it.”

  “Hope you two catch these geniuses before the cancer does.” He pointed down through the hole. “Those gray chips there, that’s asbestos.”

  Frawley said, “Any tools up top?”

  “Nope. Nothing.”