by Mason Cross
Sarah looked at the plate number doubtfully. She rubbed the bridge of her nose, suddenly realizing how tired she was. “Blake, even if we knew where to tell them to look, Kubler isn’t going to start stopping cars on our say-so.”
“He doesn’t need to,” Blake said. “Just ask him if it’s in the system. I think she’ll get rid of Gage’s car as quickly as she can. Or maybe we’ll be lucky and she runs a red light or gets stopped for speeding.”
She thought it over. “Worth a shot, you’re right.”
A minute later, she was speaking to Kubler again. She apologized for the evening call. Kubler told her she was lucky that he was a night owl.
“This is about your friend?”
“That’s right. I wondered if you could do me just one last favor.”
She laid it out for him, pre-empting his concerns by telling him she only needed to know if the plate had popped up in the system recently. Kubler told her he would see what he could do.
When she hung up, Blake was on his feet, bouncing the car keys in his right hand. “Ready for the return trip?”
Sarah picked up the tablet. “I have a better idea. I checked departures from Phoenix and there’s a red-eye out of Sky Harbor we can just make if we leave right now.”
She was watching his expression as she spoke, and he looked just as uncomfortable about the suggestion as she had expected.
“Or, you could drop me there and give me a head start while you drive four hundred miles through the night for no good reason.”
Blake had a pained expression. “Would you believe I have a crippling fear of flying?”
“Do I want to know?”
“You really don’t, trust me.”
Sarah rolled her eyes. She was dealing with enough insane revelations about people she thought she knew today without digging deeper into Carter Blake’s reluctance to go near an airport.
“Just get me to Sky Harbor, Blake.”
50
Gage reached the intersection of the Corinth road with the highway just under three hours after he had set out. The sign at the intersection told him the nearest town was a place called Iron City, and it was still another ten miles distant. There was nothing else to do but keep walking, so Gage kept walking.
At least he was on a main road now, and there was an outside chance of picking up a ride. Three northbound cars passed him during the following twenty minutes. Two of them blew by without a second glance. The third, a tiny blue Corvette, slowed as it approached him, and then immediately sped up when the young-looking brunette woman driving got a good look at him.
After another half hour or so, he crossed the invisible barrier between the wilderness and civilization and his cell phone erupted to life in his coat pocket. He ignored the first couple of buzzes, but the notifications kept coming. He reached for the phone and looked at the screen. Texts, voicemails, missed calls.
He didn’t need to look at the content to know that the three men in Vegas were not happy.
Mildly curious, he thumbed through the record as he walked. Six missed calls, starting before ten, with the gaps between getting shorter each time. Messages from the same number, repeating the same terse instruction: call when you get this.
He knew that meant Freel’s body had been found and identified. As he looked at the screen, the message disappeared and was replaced by the same number calling again. He ignored it and put it back in his pocket. He was confused by the fact they seemed so eager to talk to him. Did they think they could persuade him to unkill Freel or something? He would contact them when he was good and ready.
Gage kept walking. In contrast to the day the air was bitterly cold, but the exercise kept him warm. The sky was clear, the stars bright and countless above him. The hills in the distance created a black, fluctuating horizon against the stars. He heard an avian cry as some nocturnal predator swooped on its prey out in the desert. Just over an hour after the driver of the blue Corvette had thought better of stopping, the headlights of a Toyota pickup appeared, headed the same way he was going. Gage slowed his pace and watched as the pickup slowed.
It pulled to a stop a little ahead of him. Gage kept walking. The window rolled down and he heard a voice from within.
“Where you headed?”
The driver was an older guy, looked like he might be grateful for some company to keep him awake. As he spoke, his voice trailed off a little as he saw the blood on Gage’s head and the condition of his clothes. Perhaps poor eyesight had led him to stop where the others had passed by.
“Are you okay, mister?” the tone concerned, and not for Gage.
Gage smiled and tried to look non-threatening. “Can you get me to the nearest town? Anywhere I can get a car.”
The driver seemed to be physically shrinking into his seat. He shook his head slowly. “I’m sorry, mister, I don’t think I can help you.”
Gage sighed. “I really wish you hadn’t said that.”
He raised his gun and shot the old man in the head.
An hour and a half later, after dragging the old man’s body fifty yards off the highway and leaving him for the morning buzzards, he stopped at a gas station in Holbrook. He filled up the tank and took advantage of the restrooms. He stripped to the waist and scrubbed the dirt and blood off his arms and his head. His arm was still hurting, but his fingers all worked and he could move the arm in all directions with a little pain. It was manageable. He could book himself a hotshot physio or something, once he got the diamonds back.
He bought a microwave burrito from the store and went back out to the car, eating it on the way. He got behind the wheel and opened the glovebox, hoping the old man had aspirin or something. No aspirin, but there was a hipflask two-thirds full. Gage popped the cap and sniffed it. Bourbon. He took a gulp, hoping it would help the dull pain in his arm, and looked at his phone. Up to eighteen missed calls now. That told him they were more than just pissed. It told him they needed him. The phone rang for a nineteenth time as he watched. He let it ring while he thought it over, taking another sip.
Start with Walter’s call yesterday in Quarter. Walter had stood him down for a reason. That could only be that they had found another way to get to Freel. Something that was an absolute sure thing, otherwise they wouldn’t have called Gage off. Did they have someone else in Quarter already? Could Blake be working for them too? He didn’t think so. Blake was only interested in finding Carol, he was convinced of that.
Anyway, a few hours on from Walter’s last call, and Freel shows up dead. All of a sudden they needed to talk to him in a hurry. Again, there was a good reason for that, and this one was much clearer. With Freel taking his secrets to the grave, their only hope was that he had passed some of them on to Gage.
He thought it over for another minute as he finished the contents of the flask. It would take some careful maneuvering, but if luck was on his side, he might just be able to use Walter and his men to lead him right to the diamonds.
He called the number back.
The call was answered on the first ring. There was no preamble, no pleasantries.
“What happened in Arizona?” Walter’s voice, this time. Not too busy to speak anymore.
Gage took his time responding. He could feel the tension on the other end of the line, and it amused him. “I guess you know what happened in Arizona.”
“I told you the job was over. We didn’t need him anymore.”
“Well, it just seemed a shame to go all that way for nothing.”
Walter’s voice lost its composure. “We told you we wanted him alive. You were supposed to fucking call us.”
“I remember that. Unfortunately, Freel forced the issue. He didn’t give me a choice.”
Gage didn’t say anything else. He sure as hell wasn’t going to apologize for defending himself, but he wanted to see what their next move would be. He was under no illusions that they still wanted to pay him the balance of his fee, so why did they want to talk to him so badly? There was only one reason
.
“Did you talk to him before it happened?”
“Some words were exchanged,” Gage admitted.
There was a longer pause. “Did he ... did he say anything?”
“Like what?”
“Anything. It could be important.”
Gage paused, as if to consider. “He did say one thing that interested me.”
“Yes?” the voice betrayed desperation. Gage enjoyed toying with the man for another second.
“He said he would make it worth my while, if I let him go.”
“And ...?”
“And that’s it. He pulled a gun on me, I had to put him down or get shot myself.”
“So it was you who killed him.”
“You worked that out all by yourself, huh?”
Walter was too preoccupied to respond to that. “And you have no idea what he was talking about. How he was going to pay you off.”
Gage took his time. The bourbon had already dulled the ache from his arm, and created a pleasing haze in his head, but nothing to stop him from thinking clearly. He had to play this just the right way. Say he knew nothing, and he would never hear from them again. Admit everything he knew, and they might decide he was another problem to be solved.
“I have no idea, no.”
An exasperated sigh on the other end of the line. Before Walter could say anything else, Gage spoke again.
“But I think maybe his wife might.”
51
PHOENIX SKY HARBOR THURSDAY, 22:55
Sarah made the gate with five minutes to spare. She boarded, navigated down the aisle and found her seat at the middle of the plane. There was a big, stocky guy in a business suit squeezed into the window seat, and spreading over into Sarah’s. She nudged him aside and he grunted and moved over as she strapped herself in. As she was about to turn her phone off, it rang. Costigane’s number again. She thought about ignoring it again, but decided to pick up.
The gruff voice got straight to the point, as usual. No pleasantries, no apologies for the lateness of the hour.
“I’m just checking in to see if you had heard anything from your neighbor.”
“No, not at all. I told you I’ll call as soon as I hear anything.”
Costigane grunted. “I’m starting to be a little concerned about your safety. If the people involved in this think you may know something ... You’re sure you can’t be back here any earlier than tomorrow evening?”
“I’ll come straight there as soon as I get back into town, I promise.”
There was a long pause. “All right, Sarah. I suppose that will have to do. We’ll see you at six o’clock tomorrow. And if you should hear anything ...”
“If I hear anything I’ll let you know right away.”
“Thank you. Have a good trip back from San Francisco.”
“Los Angeles. I’m in L.A., remember?”
“Of course.”
Sarah hung up and stared at the phone as though it was conspiring against her. Every time she spoke to Costigane, she couldn’t shake the feeling he knew a lot more than he was letting on. But perhaps that was just the usual cop sleight of hand. Most likely he only suspected she knew something, and wanted to intimidate her into blurting it out. She hoped she didn’t have to speak to him until their meeting at six o’clock. By six o’clock, all being well, this would all be resolved. She didn’t know whether they could persuade Carol to cut her losses and run, but with any luck they would get the chance to try.
A kid in the seat in front, maybe five or six years old and up way past his bedtime, had turned around and was staring at her through the gap. She smiled at him. He stared back at her until his mother pulled him back around and told him to sit straight.
She was grateful that they would only be in the air about an hour. The cabin crew began running through the standard spiel, including the part about “the unlikely event we are forced to land on water,” which would be unlikely indeed over the desert. Sarah used the last few moments before the instruction to switch off cell phones and devices to download a series of news articles to her tablet. They were all on the one subject: the Ellison heist.
She looked up and gazed past the snoring businessman to watch takeoff, and then she settled back in her seat to read the articles. Within minutes, she was so absorbed she barely noticed the snoring anymore.
The heist had been professionally executed. It had clearly been planned in advance by people who knew what they were doing. Taking advantage of the priorities of policing in the twenty-first century, a bomb threat had been called in to a casino across town. With that section of the city on lockdown, the real attack had taken place fourteen blocks south. Three masked men had entered the Ellison Jewelry Company and immediately taken control of the building. An inside man on the security detail—Rayner Deakins—locked the other two guards up while the four men looted the displays and the vault, completing their work in under four minutes.
The three men plus the guard went outside and got into a black SUV driven by a fifth person. They were clear of the scene a full minute before the first police arrived. No shots fired, not a scratch on any of the customers.
For four days it looked like the perfect crime. The national media reported on it with barely concealed admiration. Nobody had been seriously hurt in the operation, so there was a certain Robin Hood cachet to the Ellison raiders. They had vanished with over twenty million in jewelry. The pundits speculated that it wouldn’t all be plain sailing for them: much of the merchandise was identifiable and traceable to that store. There were some loose stones, but that only represented a tenth of the haul. So they would have to deal with a specialist to extract the raw materials, wait until the heat died down, or smuggle them overseas.
Sarah’s background let her read between the lines of the story with ease. She could translate the euphemisms the police had tossed out at the briefing, make educated guesses at the gaps in what was being reported. Her reporter’s nose told her the police really did have a live line of inquiry in those early days. Although the focus was on the brazen criminals getting away without a trace, she could see that it was a different story on the inside. It was easy to tell when an investigation was stalling, and she didn’t get that impression from the quotes from the investigating officers over those first three days.
And then on the fourth day, the investigation bore fruit. Following a tip-off, Deakins was tracked down and killed in an exchange of gunfire with police at a house in Boulder City, twenty-five miles southeast of Vegas. They found the bulk of the haul at the house, concealed beneath the floorboards. Still missing were the loose diamonds, about two million dollars’ worth. And now Sarah knew exactly what had happened to those stones. As Blake had said, in contrast to the identifiable jewelry, the stones would be the easiest part of the haul to fence. Such a large haul could not be disposed of for maximum return anytime soon, which was no doubt why Freel and Carol had been sitting tight in Summerlin. She thought about their pleasant three-bedroom house on a quiet cul-de-sac, and knew that they had been smart. It just wasn’t the kind of place you would go to look for a fugitive. But somebody had found out enough to look there, and it hadn’t been the police.
She looked up as the seatbelt lights went on with the familiar chime, and the cabin crew started advancing down the aisle, gently reprimanding people to close their devices and return tables to the upright position for landing. The other passengers craned toward the windows to get a glimpse of the neon sprawl below. Sarah looked down at the clusters of multi-colored towers and the brightly-lit boulevards. From up here, the city looked like a garish pinball machine. She sat back in her seat, closing her eyes as she felt the aircraft start to descend to Las Vegas.
All that time. All the time she and the woman she had known as Rebecca had been waving to each other, chatting over coffee, discussing the mundanities of life. Considering taking in a show, where to try for lunch, the new Netflix show that had started. All that time, her neighbor had been sitting on top of a
secret. A big one. And Sarah had never once suspected. Had anything about the period been real? Or had Sarah just been one more part of a convincing cover? Window dressing for the life of Rebecca and Dominic Smith: two people who didn’t really exist. She wondered if they were even married. She remembered she had forgotten to ask Blake if he knew Carol’s real last name.
On wheels down, Sarah reached for her phone and switched it back on. There was a message from Greg Kubler: Call me.
The kid staring through the gap in the seats in front scowled.
“You’re not ‘sposed to have your phone on.”
She frowned. “You’re not ‘sposed to be out of your seatbelt either, kid.”
He mirrored her frown and his head disappeared from the gap.
Five minutes later, Sarah walked briskly down the stairs into the warm Vegas night. When she stepped onto the tarmac, she called Kubler.
“Looks like your lucky day.”
“You could have fooled me,” she said, though she felt a charge of anticipation.
“The Chrysler was found abandoned in Flagstaff an hour ago.”
Sarah paused as she entered the terminal, oriented herself, and headed for the taxi stand. A notification chimed in her ear. It could wait until she had finished speaking to Kubler.
“Flagstaff, an hour ago,” she repeated, trying to work out if the time fit. She thought that it did.
“Sarah?” Kubler’s question reminded her she hadn’t said anything for a few moments.
“Sorry, yeah, got it. Any other details? How did they know it was abandoned?”
“I took a little shortcut, I’m afraid.”
“I forgive you,” she deadpanned.
“We ran the plate and it came up as a Hertz rental. I called them and they used their tracking gizmo to find it for us, then I made a call to the Flagstaff PD and they sent a uniform to have a look. It was right where Hertz said it would be. The doors were unlocked, keys in the ignition. I called Hertz back, and they said it was rented in Phoenix. In the name ...”
Kubler stopped and Sarah knew why.