Forty Thieves

by Thomas Perry

  “If it’s possible, I’d really like it if you could keep what I’ve told you quiet—that I was the one. I remarried about a year ago, and—”

  “We’ll do everything we can to protect your privacy,” said Ronnie. She touched her arm gently, and gave a comforting smile. “Thank you again.”

  A few minutes later, as they were walking to their car, Sid said, “You didn’t tell her where all the videos went.”

  “Neither did you.”

  “Not my job. I was letting you take the lead on the interviews with the women. They always seem to trust you.”

  “They all see me and think they’re talking to their mother. They’re not.”

  17

  Nicole’s fear was like a whip. It woke her at dawn with an awareness of things she was going to have to force herself to accomplish, and the list seemed to have no end. She had already spent the past two days evicting herself from her house. Bugging out was incredibly hard work. First she had gathered items that were incriminating or might lead a pursuer to find her and Ed. Next she had gone through the whole house retrieving small but valuable possessions—money, her jewelry, a few garments that she knew made her look thinner or younger and that she could never hope to find in a store again.

  In the first load she included a few well-disguised guns and the ammunition that went with them, thinking less of the cost of high-end firearms than of which ones were most likely to be useful in their current predicament, and which should be stored.

  Nicole wanted to take the things out of the house that were dangerous to them, not empty it completely. She didn’t remove any big items like appliances or furniture, or cheap items like framed prints or bedclothes or pots and pans or towels. She left enough of her clothes and Ed’s so a person who didn’t know them well would think the Hoyts had never left.

  She was careful to remove every photograph. Most were pictures of her or of Ed, but she didn’t leave any of the others either. She didn’t want an enemy to have pictures of her friends and relatives, or of the places where she and Ed had been. In her time working with Ed they had been hired a number of times to hunt some person down and kill him. She had learned that people on the run tended to favor pleasant places they had visited on vacations or at school or in the military. Some of them were foolish enough to think they could seek shelter with their families, and some chasers were mean enough to start butchering the families to bring a fugitive out into the open. Photographs would show a hunter what she and Ed looked like, where they had been, what their relatives looked like, and maybe even where they lived. Sometimes she felt tempted to leave false leads for the pursuers, but she had learned that it was best to leave no information at all.

  She left all of the things necessary to make the house look occupied. If it took a pursuer three days to be sure that the Hoyts were gone, then those were three whole days that Nicole and Ed could use. In three days, a person could go around the world and back. She even decided to sacrifice her Lladro figurines, because they were too pretty and expensive for anybody to believe she’d leave them. She moved them into the antique china cabinet that she and Ed had been using as a wine case, and stuck the wine bottles in a cheap wine rack she’d always refused to have in her way in the kitchen. The process gave her a chance to wipe the fingerprints off those smooth, perfect glass surfaces.

  Nicole washed all the sheets, blankets, towels, and clothes that weren’t already clean, vacuumed all the floors, and had Ed replace the vacuum bags. She put them in trash bags along with all of the shredded receipts, bills, and other financial paper, and drove them to a dumpster behind a store five miles away. She collected the credit cards and licenses and other identification cards and replaced them with the cards in false names that she and Ed had kept for an occasion like this.

  She put everything she and Ed wanted to keep in a storage space they rented in a storage facility on Vineland Avenue in North Hollywood. It was a single building with a high fence around it, and all the spaces were inside, so there was no likelihood of casual theft. The company was having a long-term rental sale, so she rented the space for three years in advance. She took the batteries out of their cell phones and left them in storage, and then bought new prepaid phones.

  Nicole left a little of the money she had found in Boylan’s house in the rented storage space, and put the rest in their bugout kit. The bugout kit took quite a bit of planning, and that was where Ed concentrated his efforts now. The kit was in two medium-sized ballistic nylon travel duffels. Inside each duffel Ed placed a layer of stacked hundred-dollar bills in sealed plastic bags. Above that was a 9mm Heckler & Koch MP5 rifle configured for full automatic fire with a retractable stock and four loaded thirty-round magazines. In a pocket just under the zipper were a Sig Sauer P250 compact .45 semiauto pistol with a silencer and three full magazines. The rest of the duffel he filled in with clothes they would need.

  Ed spent more time with their cars, particularly the gray Toyota Camry that Nicole called the invisible car. He changed the oil, filled the gas tank, adjusted the tire inflation, and loaded the bugout kits into the trunk. He had already decided that he would leave his big black pickup truck in the driveway if they ever had to disappear. That was a worthwhile sacrifice for several reasons. People would assume that he would never leave it, because anyone could look at that truck and know he loved it. The truck was clean, unscratched, and waxed by a detailer, and its deep, shiny finish was like a dare. The truck was capable of hauling heavy weights—its frame, engine, and wheels were big and strong—but it was not a work truck. Parking that truck in the driveway in front of the closed garage door was like placing a sign there that said the man who owned it was inside the house waiting for you to try something.

  If Ed and Nicole had to go on the run, a vehicle like that would be far too memorable. And besides, leaving it would prevent Nicole from being tempted to bitch about the things she had to abandon.

  When all of the cleaning and storage had been done, Ed and Nicole waited. Sooner or later somebody was going to find Vincent Boylan and his wife, and then the Hoyts would learn whether someone else—maybe the clients who’d dealt with Boylan—knew about them and wanted to kill them. Boylan had sworn he would never tell anyone, but that sort of assurance was worthless.

  While Ed and Nicole waited, they continued their preparations. They plugged timers into most of the sockets in the house. The bedroom lamps came on at 6:39 a.m. and went off at 7:27, and then came on again at 8:22 p.m. and off at 12:17. A radio in the kitchen came on at 7:20, off at 8:33, and came on again for a time after lunch. The big television set in the den went on at 8:00 in the evening and went off at 11:30. Ed had the air-conditioning thermostat set to seventy-two so it would run whenever an observer expected it to. When Nicole had finished washing virtually every piece of cloth in the house, Ed set the washer and the dryer on timers so they would run once in proper sequence on the day after the Hoyts left. Every room had its own schedule, so something that made light or noise would turn on as it would if the home were occupied.

  At the end of the fifth day Ed and Nicole learned that someone had found Boylan and his wife. The Hoyts had assumed that they would first read about it online or in the local paper, or see a story about it on television. Instead they saw the reaction.

  Each night after midnight they opened the blackout curtains on the windows, went out, and sat on a pair of lawn chaises in the big yard behind their property to watch their house from a distance. Their gray Camry was parked on a street two blocks away, and the house was locked. Each of them held one of the silenced .45 pistols under a light jacket. The first couple of nights they had simply fallen asleep and awakened at dawn then gone to a hotel for the rest of their night’s sleep.

  But the fifth night felt different almost immediately. Their house was near the end of a road, and there were only three houses past the corner, but twice during the late evening a car passed, moving very slowly as though the driver were studying their house minutely. Then the
street was quiet for a time.

  Ed and Nicole watched for a couple of hours, and then fell asleep. But then the car came back, and Nicole awoke. She saw a dark SUV moving along the road toward their house. It was going so slowly that she couldn’t think of a practical reason to drive that way except to keep the engine noise to an absolute minimum.

  The SUV stopped at the curb in front of their house, but nobody got out. Then a second SUV came along the same route and stopped behind the first. Nicole reached out and touched Ed. He leaned forward with the stillness of a big pointer hound, his eyes focused on the part of the road he could see between the houses.

  The lights of the two vehicles went out. Doors opened and shut. In a moment, shadowy shapes were moving along both sides of their house. She could see there were guns. Their weapons were short and stubby like Uzis or Mac-10s. Their movements were reminiscent of a police raid, but the cars and the equipment didn’t look official. A couple of the men were silhouetted briefly in the light of a bulb over the Hoyts’ garage. After a minute the light went out as though the bulb had been unscrewed. Each man took a position under one of the house’s windows. A silent signal passed from man to man, beginning at the rear of the house at the kitchen door and moving to the front.

  Nicole watched the kitchen window and saw a dim light at the end of the hall as the front door swung open, and then the shapes of men rushing inside—one, two, three, and then the front door closed and they were invisible. Ed placed his silenced pistol on his lap but stayed where he was, so Nicole imitated him.

  Inside the house, flashlights came on as the men moved through the living room. Two of the lights went out and then reappeared in the back bedroom, dancing along the walls and the ceiling, and then moved on. The men were clearing the rooms, making sure nobody was inside waiting to ambush them, or hiding in a closet. Nicole could follow their progress by watching the men stationed at the windows, because they stepped up to the glass with weapons raised as the penetration team reached their areas.

  After a few minutes a wave went from man to man along the outside of the house, and they all moved off in single file the way they had come. The men piled into the second SUV, and it backed up, turned around, and moved slowly up the street away from the house.

  But the three men searching the house stayed. Their flashlights came on and they moved from room to room, this time not looking for the Hoyts, but conducting a search of the contents of the house.

  Nicole leaned so close to Ed that her lips brushed his ear. “I’d like to get out of this yard.”

  He whispered back, “I’d like to get out of this state. But I’d better take a picture of that car’s plates so we can figure out who these guys are. Meet me at the car.”

  Ed climbed over the fence to the next yard, and then moved forward to the road, staying as low as he could. He stopped and looked toward his house. The SUV was sitting driverless in front. The three men inside the house were still busy ransacking the place, but he knew that probably wouldn’t go on for long. He and Nicole had taken everything out that was worth stealing, and anything that could be used to find out where they had gone.

  Ed moved closer, trying to get a picture of the SUV on his phone, then looking at the image and seeing it was too dark to read the plate number. This part of the road had no streetlamps, the houses nearby were dark, and the moon seemed to be obscured by clouds. He moved onto the sidewalk and began to trot. As long as the men were busy they wouldn’t see him.

  He kept glancing at the front door of his house to be sure the men weren’t coming out. Then he was close enough to read the plate number. He switched to the note function and a keyboard appeared, so he punched in the license number. He knew the plate might be stolen, so he stepped to the windshield of the SUV and used the faint glow of the phone’s screen to illuminate the vehicle identification plate and punched the long number into the phone’s memory.

  The front door of the house swung open, and a man stood on the front steps, saw Ed, and raised his short-barreled machine pistol.

  In an instant Ed read the man’s reluctance to open up on the vehicle that was his way home, rested his silenced pistol on the hood just below the windshield, and shot him in the chest. He didn’t wait for the fall. Instead, he ducked and ran to take advantage of the two seconds of confusion in the minds of the other two men.

  When Ed made it to the rear of the SUV he kept running past instead of stopping to fire on them.

  The second man had already trained his silenced submachine gun on the spot where he expected Ed to be, a foot behind the SUV, so when he fired, his bullet passed through the space Ed had just left.

  Ed made it to the corner of his house near the driveway, but instead of sprinting past as the men now expected him to do, Ed stopped, dropped to his belly, brought his gun around the corner, and managed to shoot the second man as he jumped from the front steps to go after Ed. The bullet hit the man’s torso just below the sternum, so when his feet hit the ground his legs buckled and he sprawled on the front lawn.

  The third man was a quick thinker who saw instantly that there was nothing he could gain by staying. He sprang from the top step and dashed for the SUV.

  Ed fired, but he was distracted by the quick series of muzzle flashes from the other corner of his house. The man looked from Ed’s vantage as though he were running into the ground, his legs bending so they seemed shorter until his face hit the lawn. Nicole stepped out from the corner of the house and stopped to fire a round into the head of each of the three men, then approached Ed. “You okay?”

  “So far,” he said. “You?”

  “So far. We’d better get these guys off the lawn.”

  They loaded the three bodies into the SUV, and then Nicole relocked the front door of the house and turned on the sprinkler system to cycle once and wash the blood into the lawn. Ed drove the SUV and dropped Nicole two blocks away at their gray Camry.

  They drove a few miles to a neighborhood in Van Nuys where there were streets full of large old apartment buildings. Ed looked for one with big signs advertising vacancies, drove the SUV up the driveway to the parking area in the back, and found that four of the carports had no cars parked in them at this hour of the night. Those must be for the tenants of the vacant apartments. He pulled the SUV into one of them, spent a minute taking the wallets and cell phones from the three bodies, and then walked out the driveway to the street, where Nicole waited in the Camry. Ed got into the passenger seat of the Camry, and let Nicole drive off.

  Ed began to look through the wallets he had taken from the three dead men. “This one has a license from Kern County.”

  “Has he got a name?” she asked.

  “Volkonsky.”

  “With an i?”

  “No. A y.”

  “A Russian,” she muttered. “What about the others?”

  “Gregorin. Malikov. No Polacks. All Russians, I think. Now we don’t know if Boylan was working as a go-between for Russian gangsters, or if whoever he was working for just happened to know some Russians. Or if these guys were members of a gang.”

  “Well they weren’t a bunch of wedding planners.”

  “You know what I mean. Connected guys, not just guys with Russian names.”

  “I don’t think it matters a whole lot who they were. The guy we have to worry about is the one who hired them. He probably thinks Boylan told us who he is, and he’s afraid of us. He’s got a lot of money and he can just keep hiring people until one of them kills us.”

  Ed sat still for a few seconds, staring out the windshield. “You’re right. But we’ve got their cell phones. Those phones will show the numbers of the calls they got, where they’ve been, all kinds of things. The phones are our link to the guy who hired us all—Boylan, us, and these Russians.”

  18

  The Abels sat at the table in their hotel room with the curtain open, waiting for the coffee they’d made in the little machine the hotel supplied. The sky outside was still dark. In a half hour the
upper floors of the building would be painted in the orange light of dawn while the lower floors would still be in shadow. There was a steamy, spluttering noise, and Ronnie got up, walked to the coffeemaker, and filled two cups.

  She sipped her coffee, carried the cups back to the table, and sat down beside Sid. She kissed his cheek. “I guess we should start getting ready so we can go see what Ballantine’s next girlfriend can tell us. She’s got an appointment at nine, so she wants to see us before she has to leave.”

  Sid looked down at the file on the table. “Emily Prosser.” He sipped his coffee and set it back down. He didn’t look happy to have it.

  “Is something bothering you?” Ronnie asked.

  “Not really,” said Sid. “I was just thinking.”

  “You’re not eager to interview another one, are you? I would have thought you’d be interested in hearing all these women tell you about their sex lives.”

  “They all should have been interviewed a year ago, when their memories were fresh. If Kapp had asked Ballantine’s wife right away, she might have told him about them.”

  “I met Kapp in the old days, when I worked North Hollywood. You ever run into him?”

  “I don’t think so,” Sid said.

  “It wouldn’t have done any good if he had interviewed those women. They never would have told him anything.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded. “He was okay, but he wasn’t a woman, and he didn’t have the right personality to make women open up. He was a tough, all-business cop, and no genius. They would have known at the start that they didn’t have to tell him anything personal, just wait him out. And he didn’t exude enough bogus sympathy to make them forget to protect themselves.”

  “I’m glad I married you instead of him,” said Sid.

  “I can believe it,” she said. “I look better than Kapp even now. And with me around, you don’t have to be sensitive, or even smart.”