by Mike Cooper
For one perfect, crystal moment, Jake confronted his choice.
Then he ducked, punched the brake, and swung wildly sideways, trying to knock the handgun away.
“Nooo!”
BLAAAM!
Jake’s window shattered. For a second, he and Wes struggled, sliding around the bench seat, the truck going out of control as the steering wheel spun.
Another gunshot. Reflexively, Jake shoved his feet down, trying to leap away, and slammed the accelerator. The truck slewed again, then picked up speed.
“Motherfu—!”
Jake swung again, clouting Wes by pure accident. For a moment, he was free, and he looked up to see the black van looming in front of them.
The soldiers began to fire.
Jake glimpsed the muzzle flashes, everywhere, an instant gauntlet. He even thought he could see the bullets. Wes screamed.
Then the window glass exploded all around them.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
“We were completely screwed over,” Nicola said, arms crossed and glaring at nobody. “And the worst part is, I still don’t understand why.”
They were in the same salvage yard they’d used two months earlier, before the job even started. The same guy let them in, gave them the same warning about the Dobermans, and left them to it. A cold wind nipped through the metal walls. Nine p.m. and the yard was mostly quiet, just an occasional truck growling past.
Asher slumped in a brokeback chair he’d pulled from the day office. Corman stood impassively near the door. Nicola sat on the same crate she’d used last time, back straight.
One man missing, though.
Finn leaned against a stack of pipes strapped to a pallet, under the weak overhead light.
“It’s confusing,” he said. “Took me about ten tries to really get it.”
Jake and Wes were dead. The official story was they had tried to break through a police line, refusing to stop, and force was required to keep the semi from hurting anyone. Maybe it was true. All the rhodium and gold they’d extracted with such backbreaking labor was in the trailer, and the truck-inside-a-truck-inside-a-truck images had elevated the story to peak viral.
Finn and his companions had nothing.
“Wes planned to betray us all along,” he said.
“But why?”
“His story about the counterfeit ingots was true enough. In fact, I think most of his stock was fake. He’d gotten swindled but good.”
“Yeah, and fuck him.” Asher, not in a forgiving mood.
“So it was plausible that he’d want us to switch his bad metal with good ingots from his neighbor in the vault. Meanwhile, his business elsewhere began to implode. Remember, he’d been betting big on all that rhodium. So big that his other investments were hurt. And when other investors—hedge-fund managers, bankers, the usual bastards—started to hear rumors, they went after him hard. He was in a serious cash crunch.”
“Makes you wonder how he planned to pay us,” Nicola muttered.
“He didn’t, of course. More to the point, Emily looked through the records later and discovered that he’d stopped paying premiums for the insurance on his holdings.”
Finn paused. Nicola got it first.
“That’s why he didn’t want us to simply take everything out!”
“Exactly. From his side of the table, if we just stole it all, he’d lose twice. The metal itself would be valueless, and he’d get exactly zero from the insurance company. Forget the cash crunch, he’d be instantly and utterly bankrupt. And facing civil suits for the next ten years, too. Wes was acting as fiduciary for his investors, and getting scammed by shady African commodities dealers is a big no-no.”
“So, the swap.” Nicola frowned. “But you said … ?”
“Yeah.” Finn nodded. “Here’s where Wes got too clever. Remember, he told us that if the counterfeits are discovered, rhodium’s value plummets. Everybody gets worried about their own inventory, panic selling starts, the price drops through the floor. That’s bad, right?”
“Um … right?”
“Bad for most people, at least if they own rhodium. But not for everybody.”
Corman grunted in annoyance.
Finn acknowledged him. “You ever heard of selling short? No? Emily had to explain it to me, too. What you do is, you sell something before you buy it from somebody else. Only on Wall Street can you do shit like that, I guess. But the point is, if you sell short, then you actually make money when the price falls—not when it goes up.”
Maybe Nicola read the Wall Street Journal every day. Or maybe being fifteen years younger meant she’d gotten a better education. Or maybe she was just smarter. “The cash crunch,” she said. “It wasn’t just his investments going bad.”
Finn smiled. “That’s right. He took every single dollar he could get his hands on—including our front money—and bought rhodium puts.”
“Going short, you mean.”
“In the biggest, riskiest way possible. Yes. Everything he had, and a lot of his investors’ money, too, on one last gamble.”
Asher scrunched his face, trying to make sense of the story. “So even though he got nothing from us, even though he lost everything in the vault—the motherfucker still would have come out ahead?”
“Depending on how far rhodium’s price fell, he could have made fifty million dollars.”
Shocked silence.
“Wow.”
“Fuck.”
Finn nodded. “Exactly.”
“And we’re digging tunnels and getting shot at and having fucking trains fall on us? For fucking pocket change?” Asher shook his head. “I gotta get an MBA.”
“Wait.” Nicola was still following the thought. “Sure, he makes a fortune, but only if the price actually falls. What if it doesn’t change? Or goes up?”
“Then he’s done, and probably in jail, too.”
“So he has to make the price drop.” She uncrossed her arms. “The fakes—he was counting on them being discovered. But not in his vault. In the other guy’s!”
“Yes.”
Corman rumbled out a long, angry growl, but Asher was still paddling. “Wait, what? Then why did he … Wes was going to call the cops while we were still inside?”
“After we swapped the metal, anyway. We’d spill everything, news of the counterfeits would put rhodium into free fall, and Wes would walk away with fifty million dollars.”
What really galled Finn was that Wes had used the exact same strategy in New Mexico: set up the caper, tip off the authorities, watch everyone get arrested—and laugh all the way to the bank with profits from Wall Street’s bizarro-world derivatives.
“That … that …” For the first time Finn had ever seen, words failed Asher.
“No,” Nicola said. “We’d spill everything, like you say—including Wes’s involvement!”
Finn shrugged. “He’d deny it all, and he was careful to allow nothing that could connect him. Who’d believe us? The story’s preposterous. Anyway, fifty mil buys you the best lawyers in the world—or at least a very nice retirement in some tropical country with lax extradition laws.”
“The news didn’t have any of this shit,” Asher said. “Counterfeit metal, Wes—none of it.” All of them had been following the reporting very, very closely. “Just said they killed the ringleaders in a shootout and recovered everything that was stolen.”
“Yes.”
“That was ours.”
“Well …”
Nicola stirred. “What happened to the price? The rhodium?”
“Ah.” Finn felt a small smile begin to form. They were getting to the important part. “Wes was so focused on the counterfeits that he didn’t really consider the other option. What happens when the theft is discovered—but the fakes aren’t?”
“I think I just asked
you that.”
“The answer is that the price goes up. Maybe not up as much as Wes was hoping it would go down, but any hint of an interruption in supply—say, by an entire vault being frozen during a forensic investigation—gets people worried. Manufacturers order ahead of their usual pattern, just to be safe. Speculators close down short bets, which are apparently far more risky than the reverse, and that puts more upward pressure on. Other speculators see the price rising and jump on the bandwagon. Computers, watching for trends, do the exact same thing. Emily said it’s all technical trading, whatever that means, but the result is the same. The price goes up.”
“So Wes’s inventory actually ended up being worth more?” Asher was incredulous.
“Sure. If he’d lived, he might have been able to pay the lawyer’s fees out of it.”
“Fuck that. We put in damn near months of hard labor and what did we get? Jack shit.”
“Not exactly. Wes gave us eighteen to start, remember? And we got another two forty for his cars. Some expenses, but we really did this on the cheap. Close to a quarter million dollars, free and clear.”
Asher snorted. “Divided five ways, that’s nothing. Fucking minimum wage.”
“Actually, I gave it all to Emily.”
“What?”
Grunt—more than annoyed, this time.
“Fuck, did you just say—”
Finn, with a flourish: “When Wes was out buying all those puts, who do you think was selling?”
A long, gratifying moment.
“Ohhh.” Nicola’s acknowledgment was almost a sigh.
“And then—remember, unlike Wes, we had a pretty good idea where the price was going to go afterward. Namely, up. Emily took everything, including the seed money, and put it all into a, um, heavily leveraged long position.” Repeating her words.
“Huh?” Asher’s mouth was open.
“Like, Emily went into the casino and put every single chip she had onto double zero.”
Nicola cut to the chase. “How much?”
“What?”
“The croupier hit double zero, right? How much did Emily win?”
“I don’t think she’d say she won it.” Finn looked at each of them, slowly. “We all earned it.”
And then he told them the number.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
“Were they happy?” Emily asked.
Sleet lashed the tall glass windows next to their table, but the interior of the café was warm and smelled of bread and chocolate. The place was actually a gallery, down on Twenty-Fourth Street. Maybe the art wasn’t selling well. The owners had gradually expanded the coffee bar into a full-service dining area, and young people with odd clothing filled the sleek wooden chairs.
In other words, the kind of place that an earlier Finn wouldn’t have entered in a million years.
“Seven hundred and forty-three thousand each? Yeah, I’d say they were happy.” He considered a moment. “Always hard to tell with Corman, of course.”
“They didn’t mind that you gave me a share?”
“It was only fair.” Finn sipped his hot cider. “For a while, they all thought they were getting nothing.”
Ice rapped at the windows. Conversation burbled from the people around them. Finn could see into the better-lit gallery area from his seat, a rather stark room of bare white walls and a plain wooden floor. A series of dark red panels, slashed open with strips of shredded cotton dangling, occupied one wall. Opposite were a half dozen paintings of lily pads and watercress.
Finn assumed they were by two different artists, but he was no critic.
“Actually, Corman,” he added. “It’s not for me to say or anything, but …”
“What?”
“When we’re all done, we leave, right? Asher gets in his piece-of-shit truck, drives away. And that’s when I notice there are only two other vehicles. One is mine.”
He stopped, didn’t have to wait long.
“No way.”
“Yup. Him and Nicola. The same car. She kind of waved at me when they got in.”
Emily started to grin. “Good for them.”
“My thought exactly.”
The waitress passed by, checked in, moved on. Emily added more cream to her complicated coffee drink.
“Kind of ironic,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“You kept telling me how you were the last of the cowboys—the rangelands are all fenced, the gunslingers all dead.” She caught his look. “Like, only dinosaurs are still out there stealing physical, tangible things. Today’s thieves are online, millions of dollars with a few taps on the keyboard.”
His own words coming back.
“And in the end, that’s how we make our haul.” Finn smiled and shook his head. “Yeah, yeah, I got it.”
“On the other hand, you’re still alive. Unlike the gunslingers and dinosaurs.”
“Good point.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Do?”
“With the rest of your life.”
“Yeah.” He finished the mug. “Been considering that.”
“And?”
“I think I might settle on a business.”
“Oh?” Her tone was hard to read.
“It turns out,” he said, “there’s this machine shop in New Jersey that might be for sale.”
“Ah.”
“Seems the owner died, and the estate’s a little confused, but if someone’s willing to move quick? They might get it for a good price.”
Emily considered. “Didn’t you say he couldn’t make a go of it? Which is why he went to Wes in the first place?”
“Jake.” Finn sighed. “Jake was clever, and he could mill steel better than anyone I ever knew, but you know … he wasn’t very smart.”
“And you are?”
“Smart enough not to take dumb jobs anymore.” He turned the question away. “What about you?”
“I quit.”
“I know.”
“But the attorneys taking Heart Pine apart, they’re paying me as a consultant. Wes wasn’t exactly good with the paperwork. So I’ve got a few months there, helping them figure out the records.”
“What about the government?”
She shrugged. “The lawyers say the SEC has made some calls, but no one seems too concerned. Wes lost a barrel of money, but it was mostly his. No widows and orphans in sight.”
“That’s good.” And it was. “I’m glad it’s all working out.”
“Hmm.” Emily withdrew her hand and sat a little straighter, studying Finn’s face. “Is it?”
For the first time in a long while, Finn felt good.
“Yeah,” he said, and took her hand back. “I’d say that it is.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Despite what I may have told our children a few times, I don’t know everything. Neither, surprisingly, does Google. So I needed advice on any number of technical questions—and fortunately, people were willing to help out. Aaron Pickarski convinced me a tunnel-boring machine could do the job. Josh Larson explained how to surreptitiously tap high-voltage power lines. Pete Horstmann helped steal all those cars. Michael Mathison described dubious Wall Street maneuvers. Claudia Ramirez got some wording right. Joel Johnson shared all kinds of inside information about vault security.
Lynne Heitman, Kim Ablon Whitney, and Samantha Cameron were unfailingly supportive, and back when our writers’ group actually talked about, you know, writing, provided ever useful feedback. My sisters, Sophie Littlefield and Kristen Wiecek, continue to offer advice, encouragement, and first-reader services. I couldn’t have done it without all of you.
Of course, nothing would have seen the light of day without the hard work of Janet Reid. Super thanks to Otto Penzler, Rob Hart, and the team at Myste
rious Press for knocking the manuscript into form—not to mention establishing the contest in the first place.
Finally, Lisa, Sonia, and Elliot: This wouldn’t have been any fun at all without you.
About the Author
Mike Cooper is the pseudonym of Michael Wiecek, a former jack-of-all-trades whose jobs have included stints with Boston’s transit agency, on an ambulance, and at a food co-op, capped off by a graduate degree from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a job with Fidelity Investments. Wiecek’s work has received wide recognition, including a Shamus Award, an International Thriller Writers Award nomination, and inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2010. He lives with his family outside of Boston.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Mike Cooper
Cover design by Drew Padrutt
978-1-5040-4460-8
Published in 2017 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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