Forty Thieves

by Thomas Perry

  “We’re—” and then he said two words that sounded like “panda lopova.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Thieves. Just thieves. We came here to California about three years ago because we wanted to retire here. It’s warm and sunny. We go to the beach, we play golf, and go to each other’s houses to play cards. We haven’t done anything bad here. We don’t have anything you want.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Nicole said. “I want not to be dead. I don’t mind killing as many as it takes to keep from being dead. Starting with you right now.”

  “I can fix this,” the man said. “I can!” He was sweating, and his breathing accelerated, but he was intent, not scared.

  “How?”

  “You have nothing to gain by killing us, but neither do we, by killing you. All we want is to be left alone. So do you.”

  “That’s true. So?”

  “So you haven’t lost anything yet. You’ve already made your money. We’ve lost three men, and we’ve lost the money we spent just keeping people away from us.” He leaned forward now, his eyes intense and unmoving. “But we don’t need revenge or repayment.”

  “What do you want from us?” asked Nicole.

  “Nothing. You go away right now, before somebody else shows up here. I tell my friends about our deal, and you go on with your life. You don’t bother us. We don’t bother you.”

  Nicole looked at Ed for a few seconds. Ed was one of those men who made thinking look like hard work. Finally, she saw him turn to glance at her. She shrugged, knowing that he would like the decision only if he thought he was the one to make it.

  He said, “All right.”

  The man grinned, his teeth giving him a discomfortingly canine expression. Nicole wondered if she had made a mistake.

  “You’re being smart,” he said, as though he’d read her mind. “You can go, and you won’t have to worry about being dead next week, next month, next year. We won’t come after you again.” He seemed so happy that Nicole almost began to feel worse. She told herself it was just his teeth. He had come from some country where people didn’t have a lot of use for dentists.

  She took a step backward, and Ed took one too.

  The man said, “Wait. Don’t forget to free my hands.”

  Ed stepped toward the man, and flicked open his knife.

  Nicole said, “No. Don’t cut him loose. Leaving him will give us another few seconds to get going.”

  As they backed up toward the staircase, Nicole heard the sound of a car pulling into the driveway. She heard a car door slam, then another. She spun on her heel and ran toward the kitchen door at the back of the house. She felt rather than heard Ed’s big, heavy feet running on the floor behind her, vibrating the boards and making them sink and spring upward as he came. She flung the door open and turned to aim her rifle back up the hallway in the direction of the front door while Ed got outside. She heard the front door swing open, and then the bound man’s voice.

  He shouted in some other language, calling out to his friends as they came in the door. She could tell it was at least two men, from their overlapping voices and the noise of their feet as they entered and ran to cut him loose. She stepped out, shut the kitchen door, leapt to the ground, and ran after Ed across the backyard to the fence.

  She ran hard, sprinting to catch up with him and to maximize the distance between the back door of the house and the spot between her shoulder blades where they would aim.

  After a few seconds she came close enough so Ed could hear her. “What if he tricked us?” she gasped. “What if he lied?”

  “Give him time to tell his friends the deal,” he said. “We just can’t hang around while he does that.”

  They ran for a few more steps, and then there was a shot. She could tell from the sound that it went high and to the right, more at Ed than at her. Then there were three more in a rapid burst.

  Ed and Nicole dropped to their bellies and rolled to face the house. Nicole aimed her MP5 at the back door while Ed took his rifle out of his shoulder bag and extended the buttstock to shoulder it. They lay there watching the doors and windows for a few seconds. “He had time,” she said.

  Ed said quietly, “What do you think he was saying when he was yelling to his friends?”

  “‘The Hoyts are here. Kill them.’”

  “You really think so?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I really think so. No matter how crappy their language is, he could have said ‘don’t shoot’ in a lot less time than that.”

  “They’re waiting for us to get up and run,” he said.

  She looked at her watch. “It won’t be dark for, like, six hours.”

  “If we try to stay here, there will be forty of them looking for us,” he said.

  “Are there that many?” she said.

  “You know what I mean. There’s only one way to do this,” he said. “Let’s go.” He began to crawl toward the house, holding his rifle in front of him.

  Nicole joined him, keeping her eyes trained on the back of the house. They slithered along, staying in the weeds and moving as quickly as they could. She tried to make peace with the idea that at any second the thieves could spot them and open fire. One second and she would be dead. But it wasn’t this second. Or this one. Or this one. Each second made her think it had to be the next.

  But here she was, right at the back of the house again. She was on one side of the steps, and Ed was on the other. Her knees and elbows ached, and she was a little winded. She sat still for a few seconds, recovering. She could see that Ed felt the same way. He rubbed his knees, and she could see his chest rising and falling.

  Two minutes later, he seemed ready. She looked at him and raised her eyebrows in a mute question. He nodded.

  Ed collapsed the stock of his MP5 rifle, took the sling out of his shoulder bag, attached the sling, and hung the rifle over his shoulder. He took out his silenced .45 pistol. Nicole completed the same operations. They climbed onto the back steps holding their pistols. Ed peered in the window, and found the kitchen was empty. They stayed low and slipped inside.

  The man they had interrogated stepped into his kitchen. When he saw them, his eyes widened. Nicole fired her silenced pistol and hit him in the chest, aiming for the heart. He dropped to his knees, and then toppled forward, facedown.

  Ed and Nicole stepped past his body, down the hall into the living room. As they came around the staircase, a man appeared. He seemed to be coming to investigate the thud his friend’s body had made falling. Ed shot him twice before he could raise his short machine pistol. Ed and Nicole dashed past him around the foot of the stairs and saw the other man. He was engaged in fitting a magazine into one of the machine pistols. Ed put his next round into the man’s head while Nicole shot him in the chest.

  Nicole and Ed went to the bodies and patted their pockets. Nicole was the one who found the keys in one man’s pocket. She held them up and shook them, and Ed locked the front door and headed through the hallway to the side entrance that led to the garage. They went out and got in the car that the two men had left in the garage, and Ed backed out. He fought the temptation to stomp on the gas pedal so the car would roar down the street, but he accelerated steadily.

  Nicole held her MP5 aimed downward between her feet, and her pistol in her hand. She used the side mirror to see if people were coming out of the houses on the street. If they did, she knew, some of those people would realize that their friends weren’t the ones driving off in this car. The corner was coming up, and as the car came closer to it, she waited. Here it comes, she thought. Five seconds and we’ll be out of sight and out of range. Four. Three. Here it is.

  24

  Mira Cepic walked through the rooms of her house for the tenth time, making sure she had picked up everything she would be taking with her. She walked past the photographs of her family she had hung on the walls, ignoring most of them. She glanced at the one of her mother, a very pretty woman in a traditional peasant costume, h
er blond hair twisted into a rope-like arrangement on the top of her head, smiling at the camera with an old, forgotten festival in the background. Mira had picked her out of an old issue of German Vogue and adopted her as mother. For her father Mira had picked the man in the same magazine photo spread. Some photographer had undoubtedly selected the two, and they went well enough together. Mira had Photoshopped four pretty blond children into another shot of them in modern clothes, and always told visitors that she was the little girl second from the right—almost the youngest.

  Mira didn’t mind leaving the pictures where they were. She knew the magazine issue number, and could always find it again if she wanted to make herself new family portraits. She did mind leaving some of the other props she had accumulated during her three years in America. She had a kitchen that could have been a corner in a Williams-Sonoma store, with good, heavy French pots and pans, knives sharp enough to skin grapes, and lots of gadgets that buzzed and whirred to whip, froth, or mix.

  She had never owned any real photographs of herself except the ones on licenses and passports. At the moment she had four of each, for the United States, Switzerland, Canada, and France. She considered France a necessity because the French wouldn’t extradite anyone wanted for a capital crime in the United States.

  She filled her pack with things she couldn’t leave—money, her Scorpion Evo 3, her CZ .45 pistol, and ammunition. She always kept much of her wealth in diamonds, in case of an emergency like this one. She’d had a jeweler in Belgrade reset a few of them for her. She had a couple of big stones in cheap costume earring settings, an ugly necklace with ten real stones and twenty fakes so they all looked fake, a belt with a buckle made of a hollowed-out piece of silver with a few big diamonds hidden inside covered in lead. She also had a table-size cigarette lighter encrusted with identical diamonds that were real but looked fake because there were so many.

  Mira had kept most of these things in her pack and ready to go. Most of her time had been spent cleaning the house as though it were the site of a burglary. She had shredded, burned, and flushed all of the pieces of paper she had accumulated. She had vacuumed everywhere to be sure of picking up hair and fibers, emptied the vacuum, and then thrown it away in a dumpster.

  Mira stopped and looked out the rear window over the kitchen sink into her yard. She had shot Jimmy Ballantine in the back of the head out there one night with a little .22-caliber pistol with a silencer on it, and then fired a second round to be sure. That night, after her friends had taken away the body, the rain had begun again, harder than it had been, and the water had washed away the blood on the lawn. She had gone into the garage and disassembled the pistol, then sawed the parts with an electric hacksaw. Thinking about that night still made her sad. She had been in love with Jimmy. Even after she’d realized that he was not the way he had pretended to be, she had still loved looking at him and touching him and wishing he had been.

  As she stepped in front of the big mirror on the bathroom door to push her blond hair up under her baseball cap, she wondered whether she should simply go on alone from her house right now. The others were sure to be feeling resentful. A few of them might even be ready to kill her. Each of them had taken risks, spent money, and finally come to believe he had succeeded in retiring to a safe, pleasant life in California.

  She had ruined all of their plans, and gotten the three Russians killed. And then last night, Todor had sent a text message to tell her there was more trouble at Jovan’s house. Right after that she had taken the battery out of her phone, but she knew that the others would be talking. Some would be saying all this trouble had come to them because Mira Cepic was incapable of keeping men out of her pants. And there was very little she could say to defend herself, because it was true.

  Mira studied her reflection. It was all right. She slouched a little, pulled the cap down nearly to her eyebrows, and adjusted her stance to keep her feet a bit farther apart. The loose men’s jeans she was wearing would help, and so would the big sweatshirt. She picked up her backpack by one strap, stepped out the back door, and locked it.

  She concentrated on her walk as she went across the backyard to the empty house she had bought a couple of years ago. She went in the back door and crossed the kitchen to go through the door into the attached garage. She got into the pickup truck, pressed the button on the garage door opener, started the engine, and drove out. The truck bed had three white plastic buckets of pool chemicals and a long-handled pool skimmer with a blue net, and a plastic hose. She had made the truck look as much like a pool man’s vehicle as possible. As she drove past her street she looked at her house. It had what the realtor had called curb appeal. She missed the house already. She let her eyes focus on the white van at the far end of the block, but detected no motion. The police officers inside doing surveillance on her house had only seen a pool man on his way from a customer’s house on the next street.

  Mira gave the surveillance van careful scrutiny until she couldn’t see it any longer, and then concentrated on her driving. She knew she had succeeded because her truck looked like something that was self-explanatory. But she knew better than to spend time too close to another driver and hope he thought she was a boy. She had to keep her distance from other cars.

  Mira drove the truck toward the Foothill Freeway entrance, timing the lights and adjusting her speed until she managed to coast onto the eastbound freeway entrance. She felt better after that, and it was easy to make sure nobody’s eyes rested on her for too long. She got off near Gavrilo’s house in La Cañada, where there were fewer other cars, and the corners had stop signs. When she drove up the long driveway to his house, and made it to the big, flat brick space at the back, she took a deep breath and let it out in relief. She took off her baseball cap and shook out her hair, and then walked to the side door carrying her backpack.

  The door swung open and in the space was the tall, broad shape of Gavrilo. He had a wide face like a mastiff, and as he stepped forward he opened his arms, each as thick as one of her legs, and folded her into them. “Mira,” he said. “Come in, come in. Why didn’t you call? We’ve phoned, texted, and e-mailed, and nobody seemed to get an answer.”

  She freed herself from him gently. “I heard there was trouble, and I didn’t know if it was safe to use my cell phone, so I killed it.” She slipped past him into the house.

  He closed the door and followed her as she moved across the shiny white marble floor into the vast living room. “You’re probably right,” he said. “It’s hard to know what these American killers are able to do to find us all.” There was a Persian carpet about twenty feet square, and he stepped onto it toward one of the big white couches.

  “Find us all? That’s what they’re doing?” She set her pack by the wall where she could see it.

  “You don’t know?”

  “I heard there was some trouble at Jovan’s, but that’s all.”

  Mira had known Gavrilo over twenty years. He had taken her in when she’d had no place to go in Belgrade and taught her to steal. They had been much younger then, and she had not minded that he had taken his repayment in sex. He was still a close friend after all these years. He sat on the couch and patted the seat beside him. She went and sat there.

  “We found Jovan, Mihailo, and Bogdan in their house. It was afternoon, and the killers must have come in the kitchen door and shot them with silenced weapons. Jovan was alone in the kitchen, making soup when they got him. We found the other two in the living room. The television set was still turned on.”

  Mira put her head in her hands and rocked forward and back. “Oh, God,” she said. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  Gavrilo lifted his big hand and patted her thigh. “I know, I know,” he said. “These people are barbarians. Our friends will be gathering here for the next few hours. We have to talk about what to do.”

  Mira thought she sensed something in the tone of his voice that wasn’t right. “What are the others saying?”

  He shrugged. “Just what
I said. What else can they say about the work of professional assassins?”

  “Not about the killers. About me.” She leaned forward a bit more so she could crane her neck and look at his eyes. “Do they want to blame me?”

  He met her stare, his eyes tired and sad. “They’re not happy about this. You brought trouble on us. It’s true.”

  She said, “Thank you for telling me the truth, Gavrilo. I’ll go right now, and I won’t bring any more trouble. I’ll leave the country by myself. You know that if I get caught, I’ll never tell about anyone else.”

  “No, no, no,” he said. “Nobody is going to harm you. All of us together made the decision to hire Vincent Boylan to take care of the detectives for us. And when his own killers killed and robbed him, all of us made the decision to send a squad to their house to get rid of them. We made the choice to do one stupid thing, and then to get out of it by doing the other stupid thing. Now we’re in a fight. When you’re in a fight you don’t kill your own soldiers.”

  “Thank you, Gavrilo.” She stood, leaned down, and kissed his cheek.

  He looked at her critically. “Do you have guns with you?”

  “My Scorpion and a .45 pistol. Why?”

  “You look pretty with a gun. Kind of tough and sexy. And comb your hair and put on some makeup.”

  She understood. She turned, went to her backpack, and picked it up. He added, “Look confident. Make them remember you’re somebody they’ll want on their side if bad things happen.”

  “When do you expect them to start coming?”

  He consulted his watch. “Ten minutes, maybe less.”

  She carried the pack to the small bathroom around the corner just past the entrance to the hallway, went inside, and locked the door. She took the pistol out and stuck it in the top of her jeans. She brushed her hair and put on makeup in the mirror, then stepped farther back and adjusted the angle of the pistol in the front of her jeans. It was hard and uncomfortable to carry it that way, but she knew Gavrilo was right about the look. And the way she looked was going to be important.