Forty Thieves

by Thomas Perry

  She didn’t want to simply commit herself to a branch of the military before she had some idea of what she would be doing. The solution was to skip out on her lease and use the savings to attend a camp in Tennessee called Training Command. They claimed to have marine veterans as instructors in combat techniques, survival, martial arts, and use of the M4 rifle, Beretta M9 pistol, and M249 Squad Automatic Weapon. After giving it more thought she sold her car and signed up for the eight-week course.

  Nicole was put into a class with twenty-six men and three women. She was terribly intimidated at first, but since her drug days she had taken great care of her body. She ran pretty well, and could do a few push-ups. When the physical training began, her confidence collapsed. She strained and suffered to stay ahead of the two old men who were in their sixties and the three women. As she ran she would feel the air searing her lungs and her legs giving out, and watch the main group of men disappearing far ahead up the road between tall pines. When the class did pull-ups the men did them endlessly. She could do three, but only because by then she had lost a lot of weight.

  Then one day she discovered she had a talent. She could shoot. There had been no reason whatever to expect this. She was not athletic. The only indications of good command over her muscles had been pretty penmanship and the ability to dance, and her style of dancing relied more on an ability to move her hips than her feet.

  Nicole was good. She instinctively did the things a person had to do to line up the sights of a weapon on the bull’s-eye. In spite of her small size, the grips and forestocks seemed to have been made to rest in her hands and the rifle butts to nestle into her right shoulder. She had perfect vision, but it had never seemed to her to be a big advantage before. She often wore contact lenses anyway, to make her eyes the color she wanted that day. But she could put a hole in a bull’s-eye just about any time she wanted to.

  At the beginning of her second week on the range, her name started going around the camp. After two more days, students from other classes started to appear behind the firing line to watch her shoot. Soon there were instructors among them.

  Eventually Ed Hoyt turned up. He was tall and muscular but not freakishly big. He had dark brown hair, and at that time he had a mustache. Nicole had always thought of a mustache as a declaration that a man was celibate, or at least not interested in women, because so many gay men and cops had them, but that turned out not to be accurate in Ed’s case, and within a week she had gotten him to shave it off.

  She was, by the end of the eight-week course, well prepared to become a marine. She could perform all of the rudimentary martial arts moves they would teach her in boot camp. She could break down and reassemble all of the standard-issue firearms blindfolded, and she was the best sharpshooter in the school. She was good, but not quite as spectacular, on the combat pistol course. Still, her small size and guile made her unbeatable at the hide-and-seek, run-and-gun kinds of games the school set up in the forest.

  Then the camp ended. Instead of taking the bus to the nearest recruiting office, she carried her backpack out of the cramped women’s cabin and got into the passenger seat of Ed Hoyt’s Dodge Bighorn pickup and waited while Ed loaded her gear into the cargo box in the bed with his and locked it. He drove her south to his apartment in Tampa.

  When they reached his place, they unloaded their packs into his spare room, then locked the door, turned on the air conditioner, and stayed indoors for six days. It was less like a honeymoon than a contest. They broke each other the way trainers broke wild horses. They exhausted each other and then came together again, wrestled and fought, overcoming every sense of reserve or separateness. If one of them was awake and wanted, the other had no right to refuse or to hold back. Because he was the man he always began as the aggressor, but her knowledge that she could wait him out and demand more would arouse her to ask. And hearing her ask would tease him into the next encounter. The only time she wore anything, it was an old camouflage army shirt that had HOYT embroidered over the left pocket and had a black scroll that said 75 RANGER RGT. It went down nearly to her knees, and protected her skin from being spattered with grease when she cooked.

  At the end of the week they were through. Nicole had lost more weight, and she could see he had too. The bed linen desperately needed washing, and the recycling bin was filled with empty liquor bottles. The trash was overflowing with cans, because after they’d used up the fresh food, they had opened most of the canned food in the apartment, heated it hurriedly, and eaten it together from the pot.

  They went out for breakfast at a restaurant on Tampa Bay. When they had ordered their food he leaned forward with his elbows on the table. He said, “Are you tired of me yet?”

  She said, “No. Are you tired of me?”

  “No. I never met a woman like you. I think we should get married.”

  “Why? Do you think I’ve been holding something back for my future husband?”

  “All this week I kept wondering what next week would be like. I want to find out.”

  “I don’t want to marry somebody who will cheat on me.”

  “You ruined me. Another woman would have a hard time holding my attention. And if I cheat, you’re welcome to cut off my ring finger to take the ring back.”

  She remembered him looking straight into her eyes across the table when he said that, and she remembered reminding herself that all liars stared into a person’s eyes, but still being swayed by his disgusting offer.

  The buzz of Nicole’s cell phone startled her, and she reached into her pocket, pulled it out, and pressed it to her ear as she stared into the rearview mirror. “I’m still here,” she said.

  “I’m done,” Ed said. “Bring the van to pick me up.”

  Nicole jumped down from the van, put the orange cones into a stack and tossed them into the back, then got in and swung the van around to pull up beside the driveway of the Abels’ house.

  Ed was standing by the entrance in his orange and yellow DPW vest with his pickaxe, chisel, hammer, and spade. He opened the back door, set everything on the floor and went around to the driver’s seat while Nicole crawled to the passenger seat. He drove off.

  After a couple of turns he glanced at her. “Have you got something to tell me?”

  She shrugged and said, “I was just thinking that I like to see you all sweaty like that.”

  “How long can you hold that thought?”

  “Why? Where are we going now?”

  “We still have to get rid of the van and get ready for the Abels.”

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “You might want to park the van in some isolated place for a little while first. We can put the sun shade over the windshield so nobody can see in.”

  7

  It was after midnight when Sid guided the Volvo up the street toward home. Ronnie said, “The thing that keeps bothering me is why those two in the car had a .308 rifle with them in the first place.”

  “I don’t know. I assume they knew we were investigating the Ballantine murder. Maybe they killed Ballantine and were watching us to be sure we didn’t find anything.”

  “And they just happened to have the rifle with them, knew we’d spotted them, and didn’t have an explanation for the rifle that the cops would buy?” she said.

  “That doesn’t feel right,” Sid said. “More likely they’d been following us since we left in the morning, waiting for a good place to kill us.”

  “What if this has something to do with the place itself, that housing development? Maybe they killed Ballantine there because there’s something they didn’t want anybody to see.”

  “You don’t kill somebody and then watch the place where you dumped the body for a year just in case somebody looks there.”

  “I guess I’m giving them too much credit. The only reason they’d open up on us from their car is if they got surprised when we went after them, and panicked.”

  “Right,” said Sid. “I think tomorrow morning we should back up and start over again. This is sti
ll a regular homicide. Solving it is going to be done the same way it was when we were cops—footwork and asking the right people the right questions. We should start with the people who knew the victim best.”

  “At least when we were cops, the suspects didn’t generally shoot at us until we were closer.”

  They reached their gate and Sid pressed the remote control to turn on the electric motor to open the gate. He pulled forward into the driveway and pressed the button again to close the gate behind them. He began to drive up the long driveway toward the house.

  “We’ve got a lot to look at,” Ronnie said. “We need to talk to—”

  The car gave a sudden violent lurch and dropped abruptly. The undercarriage hit the pavement with a spine-jarring jolt and a loud bang. The front of the car was angled downward into the ground, caught there.

  Sid said, “It’s a deadfall. Stay low and get ready to run for the house.” He freed himself of his seat belt, took out his pistol, and switched off the dome light. Then he flung his door open and slipped out.

  Ronnie had started to open her door when the first shot came. The round pounded the door and Ronnie pulled the door shut again. She slithered over the console between the two front seats and into the backseat while bullets smashed through the side windows above her head, spraying her with glittering bits of glass. She pushed out through the opposite door onto the driveway beside Sid.

  Sid aimed his pistol over the hood of the car at the two spots where he had seen muzzle flashes, fired four rounds, and then ducked down. “It’s coming from the yard over by the porch.”

  During a bad case three years ago the Abels had equipped their new Volvo with half-inch steel plates inside the door panels to protect them from small arms rounds piercing the doors. Now they could hear bullets punching through the outer sheets of painted metal and ricocheting off the steel plates to rattle in the space between.

  Ronnie hit 9-1-1 on her phone and said, “This is Veronica Abel at 13551 Vista Matilija in Van Nuys. We’re under fire in our driveway from unknown attackers.” She ended the call, and then lay across the driver’s seat to reach the remote control, and pressed the button to reopen the gate to the street.

  Sid said, “Is that to let the shooters leave or the cops come in?”

  “I’m not particular.”

  The firing began again. Three shots came from the right side by the garden, and then two more from twenty feet to the left of it, punching through the rear window and spraying glass into the backseat.

  Sid fired at the flashes, aiming by resting his arm on the car door. Ronnie crawled along the side of the car to the trunk, and lay on her belly to look for targets from beneath the car.

  The next time the shooting began, the muzzle flashes came from different places. One shooter had moved up the lawn toward the house, and the other was firing while trying to make a run along the hedge. Ronnie fired six rounds at the darker spot in the dark yard that she judged to be one of the shooters, and then two more into what she hoped was the other, then scrambled to hide behind the armored door.

  Both shooters fired now, their rounds punching through the far side of the car, across the inside of the trunk, and then pounding against the inner wall, by then mushroomed or fragmented so they didn’t penetrate. Other rounds punctured both rear tires, so the car sat down hard and closed most of the space Ronnie had used as a window for her line of fire.

  Ronnie sat with her back to the rear wheel and saw that lights had come on in the upper windows of nearby houses. “It looks like we woke the neighbors.”

  “It’s about time.” Sid glanced at the lighted windows across the street as he reached to his shoulder holster pouch and to ok out a loaded magazine. “Do you have a spare magazine?”

  “Three of them.” She reached to the passenger seat and pulled out her purse by the strap. “Want one?”

  “No. Just be ready to reload.”

  “Are you thinking we should make a run for the house?”

  “I think that’s what they’re hoping we’ll do,” he said.

  “Me too. So let’s not.”

  “I think that as soon as they hear sirens they’ll make their last, best attempt to kill us.”

  “I’m ready. Are you?”

  Sid reloaded. “Yes.”

  “Aren’t you grateful that I shamed you into taking more target practice yesterday? Admit it. I’m a good wife.”

  “You are. If you light up one of these bastards, you’ll be a great wife, and mother of the year.”

  “I think I hear sirens. Ready?”

  In the distance there was the whoop of a police siren, then another, and then the sirens blended into a single steady noise, getting louder as the cars moved closer.

  The firing had stopped. Sid crawled to the front of the car where he was protected by the engine block and peered across the yard. “I don’t see them.”

  They both became aware of a new sound that was overwhelming and drowning out the others—the deep throbbing of a helicopter’s engine. “That explains it,” she said. “They heard it coming and knew they were out of time.”

  Sid remained on his belly at the front of the car, his pistol in his hand aimed in the direction where he’d last seen muzzle flashes. The sirens stopped and the road outside the gate was suddenly bright, the canopy of tree limbs and leaves above the street lit by alternating flashes of red and blue.

  The helicopter arrived overhead, circling, as three police cars sped past the others and bumped up over the gate’s track into the driveway. An amplified voice said, “Place your weapons on the ground and move away from the car.”

  Sid and Ronnie obeyed. They kept their hands up with their fingers spread and their palms visible. The world brightened as the light from the helicopter shone down on them and the spotlights mounted on the police cars swept the yard.

  In the lights they could see the reflected golden glow of brass casings that had been ejected from the attackers’ guns on the far side of the yard. There were also casings from their own Glocks scattered at their feet on the driveway.

  Police officers rushed to Ronnie and Sid while others fanned out all over the property with guns drawn and flashlights dissolving the pockets of darkness along the hedges and near the fountain. There were sounds of more police cars that arrived and never stopped. They continued up the street and then turned in various directions to search for the shooters.

  The four police officers who stood by the Abels kept close watch on them while a sergeant spoke to them.

  “What happened here?”

  Sid said, “They dug a trench across our driveway and covered it, so when we drove in tonight the car got caught in the trap. Then they started firing.”

  “Who are they and why did they want to kill you?”

  “We’re private investigators, and we’re on a case that seems to be worrying someone. Last night, two men shot out the windshield of our BMW up in the North Valley, and now this.”

  “Did you get a look?”

  “Not really,” said Ronnie. “There were definitely two of them both times. We opened the gate, thinking we’d see them when they ran off, but they didn’t go that way. They were firing at us, and then when we heard the sirens and the chopper, the shooting stopped.”

  The sergeant surveyed the driveway and gestured at the brass. “I see you returned fire. Is there any chance you hit one of them?”

  “I doubt it,” Sid said. “They would fire and then move in the dark. We were always firing at the place where they’d been. And they kept us pinned down pretty well. I think they were using compact semiauto rifles—Uzis, Tec-9s, or something like that.”

  The sergeant spoke into his radio. “We’re looking for a minimum of two shooters. Possibly on foot. Any pedestrian you meet could be one of them, so proceed with caution.”

  A cop hurried up to the sergeant, and handed him a brass casing.

  The sergeant looked at the end of it, and spoke into the radio. “We’ve got lots of brass from
the shooters at the scene, 9mm. Could be a compact tactical weapon, like an Uzi or Tec-9.” He didn’t need to say the rest, because the other police officers knew the implications—that the weapon might be hidden under a coat, or that the suspects might be at a distance aiming at them right now.

  The sergeant’s radio squawked a rapid series of short messages, units in the search conveying their locations and directions. After a few seconds there were some overriding instructions from an unseen supervisor to redirect a couple of units. The sergeant turned to the Abels. “Is there a chance they got into your house?”

  “It’s possible,” Sid said. “We didn’t see them leave. We reopened the front gate so they might leave if we returned fire, but they didn’t go that way.”

  “All right,” said the sergeant. “Can you lend me the keys?”

  “They’re on the keychain in the car ignition.”

  “Sit tight.” He took the keys from the car, assembled six men, and sent them to take positions around the house. An assault group of another six appeared, three of them carrying shotguns.

  In a moment they were in the front door, and as they cleared each room they turned the lights on and moved to the next. The sergeant kept silent as the team reported their progress.

  Five minutes later the team declared all the rooms cleared, and began to leave the house. The sergeant said to the Abels, “They didn’t get into your house.”

  “Cops!” said Sid.

  “What do you mean?” the sergeant said.

  “The only people we’ve seen are cops. That’s how the shooters got off the property,” he said. “They must have been dressed as cops.”

  “Sid’s right,” said Ronnie. “They knew that if they fired rifles in the middle of a residential neighborhood, police would be arriving in serious numbers in a few minutes. After a couple more, there would be officers going in every direction. All they had to do was wait until then and walk out after them.”