Deal Gone Bad - A Thriller (Frank Morrison Thriller Series Book 1)

by Tony Wiley

Three feet away, there was an open closet. He could squeeze in there to hide. But then what? He’d still have to get out.

  He heard the dead bolt slide open.

  He took another quick look around the room.

  A soft thumping sound accompanied by a metallic thud followed. Like someone was trying to push the front door open with the doorknob still locked.

  Morrison remembered he had locked both after his entry. This afforded him a few more precious moments.

  He looked around the bedroom again in desperation. What was he going to do?

  Then he noticed it.

  Right at the corner of his eye. A sight so familiar that you could easily see it without really noticing.

  The fire escape. Its black rusted structure snaked by the bedroom window.

  He aimed for it at once. Pulled the window open in one swift move. Then he strode into the opening and rushed down the wobbly metal stairs.

  When he was a few steps shy of ground level, he heard a scream.

  Loud.

  Piercing.

  Gut-wrenching.

  It came from a woman.

  Chapter 35

  Morrison drove out of the neighborhood as fast as he could without drawing attention to himself. While he pushed his way on, he kept scanning the three rear-view mirrors. His head was caught in a whirlwind, buzzing with a million worries.

  He needed to slow things down. He needed to start thinking.

  For one thing, he was pretty sure nobody had seen him leave the apartment building. After all, nobody had gone running after him on the sidewalk. Nobody had screamed at him. But then again, someone could have been at his window at the back of the apartment building as Morrison came rushing down the wobbly stairs. However unlikely, it was possible. Morrison frowned. There was also that young family he had run into on his way in. Their contact had lasted only the briefest moment. But these people had seen him. If pressed, they could offer a description. Theoretically. Because in practice, he knew that people were notoriously bad at providing physical descriptions, especially when it concerned someone they had seen only once. And very briefly at that. In these situations, Angelina Jolie could turn into Julia Roberts just like that, depending on who you asked.

  The next item worried him a lot more.

  His fingerprints. He realized that he had left them at the dead hacker’s place. On the doorknob. On the window frame out in the bedroom.

  Shit.

  He knew that in real life, getting prints that you could actually use was a lot trickier than it appeared—not like you saw in the movies or read in the mystery paperbacks, where the faintest thumb print led to an identified suspect in a matter of minutes. Reality didn’t work that way. Not at all.

  But still. He shifted in his big padded leather seat. Those items worried him big time, but not as much as thinking that there had been a leak. Somewhere, somehow, someone had learned about their hacking attempts. And whoever that was had acted on this information. In a quick, decisive operation. Up until then, Morrison had been absolutely confident that only he, Johnson and the poor dead hacker knew anything about this. But the circle had widened. It was obvious. He just didn’t see how that had happened. Where the breach had occurred.

  Morrison joined the main road and settled on an even cruise. By now, at least, he knew that nobody was following him.

  When he reached the outskirts of Acton, he was forced to slow down. There was some traffic near the Perkins Electronics compound. A steady stream of cars trickled out of the plant’s parking lot. Looked like a shift change was taking place. Pretty soon, the big black Navigator slowed down to a crawl as all these cars merged on the two-lane, in both directions. Morrison even had to stop for a few moments, long enough to look around and notice that some employees were putting the finishing touch to the installation of a giant banner high above the main building’s entrance. Perkins Electronics, 15 years of great success! was written in big bold red letters on a white background. Morrison got going again, but only to jerk forward slowly in a stop-and-go motion as the cars ahead crisscrossed one another.

  Once he got past the big plant, he was finally able to resume his progress at a steady pace.

  His phone buzzed in his pocket. A text message had arrived. He got the mobile, flipped it open and peered at the screen. It was Johnson. He was now holing up at a motel. He had typed the motel name along with the room number.

  And he was telling Morrison to get his ass over there ASAP.

  *

  A giant metal sign in the shape of a tree heralded the Blue Spruce Motel. Years ago, it must have looked smart, but now it looked cheap and dated. The blue paint in the background was flaking and the neon strip that had once delineated its contour had long since exploded, leaving only a few broken clips behind. Inside his big black Navigator, Morrison carefully nosed his way into the Blue Spruce parking lot.

  The motel consisted of a single-story, white, U-shaped, cinder-block structure. When it had been erected in the fifties, it must have been located at the edge of town. Probably surrounded by thick stands of spruce as its name implied. But since then, the town had expanded and crept up all around. As a result, it had become a half-urban kind of motel. Cheap but not dingy. Not yet invaded by the monthly-residents crowd, but lying dangerously close. If the owners decided to pimp it up, it could become another one of these vintage places where people purposely go to experience the good old fifties. But if they just let it slide, it could soon become another haven of crack addicts.

  Morrison looked at the room numbers inside the U and continued. Johnson had asked for a room at the back. That was smart. Typical of him.

  He found the room. There was no car parked in front. He looked around. Johnson must have left his ride somewhere in the shopping center’s parking lot across the street. Another smart move. Morrison decided to ape him. He pushed his way on, left the Navigator in an empty spot by a gray minivan and walked back to the motel. Then he knocked on the door and Johnson ushered him in.

  The hacker looked tired and nervous. His face bore a severe expression.

  “What’s happening, man? What’s all this about?” he asked.

  Morrison shook his head. “I’m sorry, man. I’m so sorry.”

  Johnson egged him on. “Sorry for what? Morrison, you said it was a matter of life and death.”

  Morrison let out a big sigh. Remained silent for a beat. Then he said, “Your guy is dead. His kid too.”

  Johnson went pale. “How … how did it happen?” he asked.

  “It was a professional job,” Morrison said. “The work of a hitman.”

  Johnson’s eyes went wide. He shook his head. “What kind of a jam have you put me into, Morrison?”

  “I’m not sure, but you have to help me out. We’re only going to get out of this thing together.”

  Johnson began pacing the dirty carpeting. “How long will I have to stay here?” he said. “Morrison, this is insane.”

  “Look, until we sort this out, you can’t go back to your place. It’s too dangerous. I have no idea how they made it to your guy, but if they got him they could get you too.”

  “I covered my tracks,” Johnson said. “Nobody can get to me.”

  Morrison shrugged. “Your guy probably did that too, and look at him now.”

  He dug in his pocket for the piece of paper he’d taken from the dead hacker’s scratch pad and unfolded it. There were drops of blood all over it. Back at the apartment, he hadn’t really noticed them. Compared with the rest of the table surface, it had looked clean enough. He slipped the paper into Johnson’s hand. “He had that on his table. Does that make any sense to you?”

  Johnson looked at the document. He grimaced as he took in the bloodstains. Then he examined the scribblings carefully.

  “He was probably very close to getting what you’d asked for,” he said. And then he sat down on the bedspread with his laptop and the piece of paper, and he started to hammer away at the keyboard.

  He typed
feverishly. Like he was in a trance.

  Morrison knew better than to intrude, so he just sat down in a cheap orange Solair chair and watched him work.

  After roughly a half-hour, Johnson shook his head and said, “Man, he was almost there. With his stuff, it was nothing to get the data.”

  Morrison leaned forward in his chair.

  He couldn’t wait to know if Cowgirl had robbed him blind or not. But at the same time, he was apprehensive. “So what’s in there?” he asked.

  “She boarded the plane,” Johnson said. “She was on the final passenger list after boarding. At security, she showed her passport. I’ve got all the details right here. In the plane, she sat in seat 16A. It’s clean. A perfect match with all the details you had on her.”

  Morrison sat back in his cheap plastic chair.

  At least, amid all that trouble, he could see a ray of light. A thin one.

  That confirmation meant that Cowgirl had not betrayed him. She had not acted on his carefully prepared plan and robbed him blind after his arrest.

  That was a relief.

  He would have hated it if Cowgirl had played him for a fool.

  But for all his relief at Cowgirl’s innocence, this meant that there remained only one logical conclusion: Roger Harris was the culprit.

  Chapter 36

  So Harris was the one. Had to be. Because if it wasn’t Mike, Tommy or Cowgirl who had pumped the money from the other banks after Morrison’s arrest, then it had to be Harris. A simple deduction. Nobody but them knew anything about their skimming operation.

  Harris.

  Morrison pictured the old, wily, mustachioed, tanned son of a bitch. How he must have been laughing his head off when they had met yesterday.

  Morrison was lounging in the orange plastic chair in the motel room. He had his feet up on the chest of drawers and was staring vacantly at the ceiling.

  A few feet away, Johnson had fallen asleep in one of the two double beds. In his clothes. Right on top of the bedspread.

  The hacker was exhausted. After having given Morrison confirmation of Cowgirl’s boarding that plane to LAX three years ago, he had crashed into bed and dozed off almost instantly. Morrison was fine with that. He had told Johnson his audit work on banks number four and five could wait a few hours. Anyway, at this point, he fully expected that these banks had been skimmed as well for a full two million each.

  So Harris had put his hands on eight million dollars.

  Morrison whistled.

  Eight million dollars. That was a lot of money for just one man. A whole pile of money.

  Old Harris. Wily scumbag. And greedy at that. Because those eight million dollars hadn’t been enough. Morrison kept thinking about Harris’s clunky scheme that he had unwittingly crashed into. What a strange move, he thought. Harris pulled that stunning eight-million-dollar coup, then three years later, he bothered to set up a low-flying basic ATM-skimming operation right here in town. For a net payoff of a hundred thousand dollars. Maybe two if he was lucky. Morrison shook his head. A whole lot of trouble for such a small payoff.

  Another thing puzzled him—how Harris had made the connection with Johnson’s hacker. That, he didn’t understand. Didn’t see the link. But the hacker was dead, so there was a link.

  Think, Morrison. Think hard. There’s something you’re missing. There has to be.

  *

  Roger Harris was sweating profusely. After a long afternoon of hard work under the blazing sun, his white shirt with rolled-up sleeves clung to his torso like a wetsuit, and a ribbon of salt circled his baseball cap. He stood in the shadow of a giant maple tree, one of the dozens that lined up along the long driveway leading to his house. He’d just finished trimming dead branches from that tree and he decided to call it a day. He removed his cap to wipe the sweat off his face with a damp elbow. Then he went foraging in the glove compartment of his ATV and emerged with a cigar as thick as his thumb. He lit it up and took a few good pulls. All the while, his weathered tan face stared at the mouth of the driveway. His guy was due back anytime now.

  Sure enough, ten minutes later, the white van slowed down on the main road, veered in his direction and crunched its way over the packed gravel to where he stood.

  The white van must have traveled at a good speed. Harris could hear the engine oil ticking in the pan when it stopped.

  The driver’s door opened and Harris’s employee came out. He was six feet tall, one hundred eighty pounds. Reasonably fit. In his mid-twenties. Head all dark hair and angry eyes. He was coming back from Brooklyn.

  Just by looking at his face, Harris knew the news was not good. But he asked anyway. “So, how did it go?”

  Angry Eyes shook his head. “Bad. Real bad. A complete disaster,” he said.

  “How much were you able to get?” Harris asked.

  The employee joined the tip of his thumb and index finger. “Nothing,” he said. “At our first try, the ATM gobbled up the card. We drove to another ATM, tried a second card but got the same result. Then we tried three other cards in three other ATMs, but they kept swallowing the cards. After that, it was too risky. I called the whole thing off, paid the guys and sent them away. And then I drove straight here.”

  Harris nodded his approval and added a question. “Did you destroy all the material?”

  “Yeah. It’s done. I knew you’d want to get rid of it so I dumped it before I left Brooklyn.”

  Harris blew a thick cloud of blue smoke. He was pissed. Mighty pissed. Not only had the operation not brought him the modest profit he had expected, but they were now in the red. The dumped equipment amounted to a couple tens of thousand dollars.

  While he ruminated on this, his employee asked, “Do you still need me?”

  Angry Eyes seemed tired and anxious to leave. Unfortunately for him, the boss’s answer was not the one he’d hoped for.

  “Yes, I do,” Harris said. “I’ve got this fundraiser to attend in town. I’d like you to stick around.”

  Chapter 37

  Johnson had a bad case of snoring. It was loud, deep and frankly disgusting, Morrison thought. From time to time, his breathing almost stopped, only to resume with a sudden cackling burst, as if he suffered from some sort of sleep apnea. Morrison had spent the whole afternoon at his side in the motel room and could barely stand it anymore. No wonder his hacker friend was single. No woman could ever put up with that.

  But however bad Johnson’s snoring was, it hadn’t prevented Morrison from thinking. In the relative calm of the room, he had come to a conclusion. He could use some help. Especially now that he knew Cowgirl was the real deal. That she’d had nothing to do with the stolen eight million dollars. Morrison rang her number.

  “Can I drop by your place?” he asked when she picked up the phone. “I need to talk to you about something.”

  “I can’t right now. I have to go,” she said.

  “Where you going?”

  “To Flanagan’s for a fundraiser.”

  “Lucky you,” he said.

  Cowgirl giggled. “Yeah. Those are always such bores,” she said. “But if you want to talk, why don’t you just meet me there? I’ll be more than happy to step away from the crowd once I’ve put in some face time.”

  He thought about the events of the early afternoon, when he had stumbled upon the two bodies at the dead hacker’s place. He’d have to make a few checks before he ventured out in public.

  “I’ll try to make it,” he said. “When will you be there?”

  “Between six and eight o’clock.”

  He made a mental note of the hour before he hung up.

  After that, he connected his phone to the motel’s router and launched the browser. Searched for local media websites. Went through a couple of them. They all reported on the double murder but there wasn’t too much detail—only factual reports that gave the number of victims along with the street name of the apartment building where they were found. The victims’ names weren’t even mentioned. Nor was there an
y suspect identified. No official description. Nothing that could single him out. He relaxed, at least for now. The last thing he needed was to become a suspect in a double murder case and have his face plastered all over the county.

  He looked at his watch. It was 5:30 p.m.

  He decided it was safe to leave the motel, so he broke off the Wi-Fi connection, got up on his feet and left the room, making sure the doorknob was locked before he closed the dull blue door behind him.

  Across the street, the shopping center parking lot had thinned out. Most of the shoppers had gone home for supper. His big black Navigator now stood alone in one corner, not too far from Johnson’s little old lady’s car. Morrison made his way to the SUV, got it going and rejoined the main road. He would only be meeting Cowgirl at Flanagan’s around seven. In the interval, he decided to go sniffing around Harris.

  He drove cautiously to the northern edge of town, to Chambers Road, where Harris Corporation was located. When he came within sight of the standalone fabricated steel-paneled building, he pulled up to the curb and killed the engine.

  On this, an early Saturday night, all the machinery was huddled in the yard behind the light gray and blue building: the eighteen-wheelers with their trailers, the tractors, the pickups, the diggers, the dump trucks and the snowplow attachments discarded until next December. There was even more machinery than when he’d driven by the place yesterday. That was normal. On a weekend night, there was no outgoing job. The workers were at home until early Monday morning, when the place would turn into a beehive again and foremen would send them out in all directions.

  He stared at the unsightly building. There they were, his eight million dollars. Metaphorically, of course. He was sure that after he snatched up the money, old wily Harris promptly laundered it through his company’s accounting system. Nice and clean. Even paid a bit of taxes on it. Not much, but just enough. So the dirty stolen money harbored the same appearance as the legit stuff.

  He looked carefully around the building. There were no cars in the parking lot. No guard or foot patrol of any kind. The cash from those eight million dollars wouldn’t be there, of course. But he bet there were still traces of them in the accounting system. He bet that if he could have a look at the books, he could spot the trickle of fresh cash infused in them during the months that had followed the theft. For a moment, he was furiously tempted to go have a peek. Only a lock or two stood between him and the proof that Harris had robbed him blind. Picking locks was nothing for Morrison. He’d done it so many times he could do it blindfolded. But again, there was no rush to do it right now. And there probably was an alarm system of some kind in the building. This wasn’t a big problem either. He could handle them. But not right away. Not without a minimum of preparation.