The Buffalo Job

by Mike Knowles

  I left the closet and walked out of the office, being careful to quietly close the door behind me. Below the balcony windows, I could see that the concert floor was dark. I paused at the top of the stairwell and listened — nothing. I took the steps at a brisk pace, not a run, just the walk of a busy man. If I bumped into anyone on the stairs, I would greet them like I belonged there and keep moving. No one came out of the second floor stairwell door to meet me on my way down. On the ground floor, I looked through the slim rectangular window to the foyer. There wasn’t anyone around. I opened the door and walked straight for the closest door. A janitor was down the hall mopping the floor with the bent posture of a man who had done the job ten thousand times before. The man had headphones on and he didn’t lift his head to acknowledge my wave. I hit the push bar and stepped into the heat.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “Where are you?”

  “At a bar,” Carl said. “Not far from where you are. You out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Give me five minutes.”

  “I’m not standing out front. I’ll start walking towards the city centre on Erie.”

  “On my way,” Carl said.

  I heard Miles yell shotgun before the call ended.

  Carl rolled up to the curb at close to exactly five minutes from when I started walking. Ilir was up front with him.

  “I thought you called shotgun,” I said.

  “Ilir said you could only call it when you can see the car. Carl agreed with him.”

  Miles saw the look on my face and spread his hands apologetically. “He was tricky about it. He called shotgun when he saw the car and then told me about the rule. But two guys said it was a rule, so there you go. You have to play by the rules.”

  “Rules? You’re a con man,” Ilir said.

  “The important rules, kid.”

  “Any luck?” Carl asked.

  “I pulled enough to get us started. I got my hands on a guest list, complete with addresses for the VIPs. I got an itinerary for the night, too.”

  “Ilir got a number,” Miles said. “Hey, kid, is she a VIP?”

  Ilir smiled. “She will be.”

  “Turns out our boy here is a stud.”

  “Shut up, Miles,” Carl said. “What’s our play, boss?”

  “It’s boss now?” Ilir said.

  I ignored Ilir. “We need to find a motel room. Somewhere that doesn’t ask questions and takes cash.”

  “I don’t know the area,” Carl said.

  “Go back towards the border,” I said. “There’s shopping there. Where there is shopping there will be motels.”

  “Got it.”

  “What? We’re staying the night?” Ilir asked.

  No one said anything.

  “Shouldn’t we have a vote or something?”

  This got a laugh out of Miles. “Is that how gangsters do it? Democratically?”

  “So he says we stay, and that’s how it goes?”

  “I just need Carl to agree,” I said. “He has the car. You want to get out and take the bus home, be my guest.”

  Ilir crossed his arms and shut his mouth.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Dinner was beer, roasted chicken, and fries from a Tops grocery store. Carl and Ilir had gone for the food while I was down the street using the free wifi in a Kinko’s where I printed what I took off the USB. I almost considered the food as a bit of a payback from Ilir for the way I handled him on the highway, but that idea ended when I saw the smile on his face. He lifted the plastic dome-shaped lid from the chicken container that he had repurposed as a bowl, and showed me the bounty inside with the excitement of a kid seeing his first swimsuit issue. I ate the chicken and ignored the rest, knowing I could find something else later.

  The room would have been cramped with one person in it — with four it was claustrophobic. Carl sat on the bed, propped up by the pillows, watching SportsCentre. Ilir, not wanting to lie beside Carl, took part in his own television vigil on the smallest corner of the bed that could still be considered on the bed. Miles walked a circuit from the bathroom, around the bed to the chair I sat in by the door, and back again.

  “So we here all night or not?” Ilir said when Sports­Centre went to baseball coverage.

  “Depends,” I said.

  “On what?”

  “On what we learn tonight.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “We need to learn everything we can about the hall, the violin, where it’s being kept, and the major players.”

  “We’re just taking a stupid violin,” Ilir said.

  “Do you have a plan?” I asked.

  “We wait on the widow to move it out of the vault, and then we take it on the way to the concert.”

  I flipped through the pages in my hand until I found the right one. I passed it to Miles as he neared me and he delivered it to Ilir on his way back to the bathroom. “Read it.”

  Ilir’s lips moved as he went over the itinerary for the night of the charity gala. When he finished, he looked at me and said, “So what?”

  “So, there’s a scheduled delivery of the violin at four in the afternoon.”

  “If they’re expecting delivery,” Carl said from his spot on the bed. “That means that someone is delivering it. Has to be some kind of security company.”

  “Why?”

  “Ooh, let me,” Miles said from inside the bathroom. “It’s a publicized event. Everyone knows that a priceless violin that is going to save the concert hall will be handed over. Everyone knows famed violinist David Lind will be playing there before the violin is officially considered sold. The Buffalo Met has no choice but to provide security. It will be in a contract somewhere.”

  “It is,” I said holding the document up.

  “So, we hold up a bunch of rental cops,” Ilir said. “There’s four of us.”

  “A downtown hold-up is tricky,” I said. “Trickier still when the thing you are after is on a timetable.”

  “But it could be done,” Ilir said.

  I pulled off another page from the stack and held it out. Miles picked it up on his way by and gave it to Ilir.

  “Pass it to Carl,” I said.

  “Why?”

  Carl took it off Ilir before I had to answer. We all watched Carl look at the map — everyone but Miles, who just kept pacing.

  “This is where she lives, hunh?”

  “First impressions,” I said.

  “Hitting an armoured car is already hard,” Carl said. “The trick is getting the damned thing stopped so you can get in. Usually, people stick up the driver or get at ’em when they open the doors. You see these lines here and that square?” he said holding the paper out to Ilir. Ilir glanced at it and nodded. “If I had to guess, those lines are fences around the community and the square is some kind of guard shack. Expensive, but judging from the size of the houses on this map, they can afford it.”

  “So? It’s probably just some fat retired cop,” Ilir said.

  Miles spoke as he passed. “Some fat retired cop with a phone.”

  “Exactly,” Carl said. “One call gets out and the guys loading the truck close the doors and start moving, or shove the violin back into the vault.”

  “So we get it coming out, or on the road.”

  “On the road is impossible. It’s not making stops. We don’t have the time or the manpower to set something up to stop an armoured truck. That leaves coming out of the gated community. They might have to stop at the guard booth, but maybe not. I’d have to see it.”

  “See,” Ilir said with a smug smirk on his face. “It can be done.”

  “He’s not done, gangster,” I said.

  Ilir looked at Carl, who was concentrating on the TV. Carl broke away after a few seconds. “Sorry, I just never get to
watch this at home.”

  “I got it,” Miles said. “Say it slows down. Hell, say it stops. What then? How are we getting into that truck? We have what —”

  “Five days,” I said.

  “Five days to get the right kind of gear to open up an armoured truck. And it has to be the right stuff because all of those guards will be sitting inside calling for help on their radios while you stand outside jimmying the lock.”

  “My uncle can get us what we need.”

  “Not this stuff,” Miles said. “It’s not like getting a gun. You need serious gear for this and serious gear means you need time to get it from places that don’t want you touching it.”

  “Can’t be done,” Carl said without taking his eyes off the screen.

  “Maybe not.”

  “Maybe?” Ilir said. “So you agree with me?”

  “No,” I said. “But I’m not ruling anything out, not until I see it. And we can’t see it until tonight. We need time to see all of the angles and we can’t do that in broad daylight, not if there is a guard shack there to stare back at us.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “Holy shit!” Miles said.

  We all nodded. House was the wrong word for what was a hundred metres up the road. Mansion didn’t seem to cut it either. Compound was closer. Palace was better.

  “Get out,” I said.

  Miles and Ilir got out of the back seat and walked off the road into Delaware Park. The park had enough trees near the side of the road to conceal the two men from anyone driving by. Carl drove up Nottingham Terrace to the gate and paused next to the shack fronting the private drive. I got out and walked over to the window. Inside, a guy in his sixties was sitting on a stool. The sports page was open on the desk next to him and I could hear a baseball game playing on a radio somewhere inside tuned to an AM station.

  “You in charge?” I asked.

  “Can I help you?” The question was asked with an air of authority. The small blue eyes hiding under the snowy brows squinted at me with the hard stare of a man who had seen it all and liked none of it — he had cop written all over him.

  “Don Ames,” I said. “Flushing Insurance. Our company insures Samuel Hall. Five days from now, a violin will be moving to Samuel Hall prior to its sale. The instrument in question is worth a lot of money and Flushing has been hired to provide extra security until the violin changes hands. I just wanted to let you know that you may be seeing us,” I gestured to the Jeep and Carl nodded. “Driving by throughout the night.”

  The security guard leaned out the window and took a look at the Jeep. I watched his eyes narrow on the plate we’d boosted from another Jeep in an outlet mall parking lot before we came.

  “You have any ID?”

  I went into my pocket and came out with a business card I had gone back to Kinko’s to have made. The card had all of the same information I had just communicated, but somehow seeing it on cardstock always made things more believable.

  “The first number is mine,” I said. “The second will get you my supervisor day or night.”

  The cop gave the card a long look before putting it down on the desk next to the newspaper.

  “I can’t let you in,” he said. “And any harassment of our residents will be reported to the police.”

  “Sounds good,” I said. I turned to leave, but came back after five steps. The guard was still staring at me. “Listen, if we go on a coffee run later — do you want anything?”

  The cop dropped the stare and smiled. “Large black.”

  “Done,” I said.

  I got back in the Jeep and we drove away. When we picked up Miles and Ilir I said, “He call yet?”

  “Yeah. Seems like a fun guy.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I let Ilir talk to him.”

  I turned in my seat and looked at Miles.

  “Jesus, Wilson, I told him everything we talked about. It was fine.”

  “Why is letting me talk a bad thing?” Ilir said.

  No one answered.

  “Seriously, what is wrong with how I talk?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  We rolled past the guard shack on fifteen-minute intervals. The huge black fence sprouting from either side of the small building that stood sentry at the mouth of the private road labelled Sherwood Avenue surrounded seven properties and hundreds of acres. The Randall place was the crown jewel of the bunch. The huge estate stood out amidst the other mansions like the Taj Mahal with its manicured lawn and architectural opulence. By our fifth circle, the guard didn’t even look up from his newspaper. On the seventh, we parked down the street in a spot that gave us a sightline on the property.

  “Anyone still think working here is a good idea?” Miles said. “Bad enough they own their own watchdog that can walk on two legs. You know they are running top-of-the-line security systems in those places. I’m guessing the response time is under five minutes.”

  “That’s if the alarm goes off. If it doesn’t, there is no response time,” Ilir said.

  “Anybody in here up to date on the latest alarm technology?” Miles asked. “No?”

  “We’d need another man,” I said.

  Carl nodded. “Do we have the time to pick up another body? Figure we’d waste a day getting word out, another sifting through the names we got. That would leave three days for this guy to get down here, source out the security system, and find a way around it. And then there’s the vault to deal with.”

  I didn’t say anything. Instead, I stared at the house. Minutes went by and they slowly stretched into hours. I ruled out the idea of bringing someone else in. If we did it right, we could bypass the house altogether. The violin had to leave the front door to get into the back door of the van. There would be a thirty-second window when the expensive alarm wouldn’t mean a thing — we just had to be in exactly the right place. I grinned when a thought came to me. There would be a time when the guard in the small shack would let us through — four o’clock on the day of the event. With the right vehicle, uniforms, and paperwork, the guard would wave us up to the house towards a woman waiting to hand over her violin to a uniformed security guard. The idea had legs, but it also had a long list of gets that I would have to secure in under a week.

  “He looked at us again,” Carl said.

  I took my eyes off the house and looked at the guard shack. The former cop had put his newspaper down and was now looking at the Jeep.

  “Don’t move yet,” I said. “If he thinks he spooked us, his wheels will start spinning. Better to stay put for a few more minutes.

  I rolled down my window and felt the hot humid air rush into the car. I held up a hand and gave a slow wave. A few seconds later, I got a similar motion back. Then the older man resumed reading his paper. “There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts five minutes south of us. Let’s get him that coffee we mentioned. If he brings up anything about us being parked on the shoulder, we’ll just say we were on the phone with the office.”

  Carl eased away from the curb and started down the road. We drove to the end of Nottingham Terrace and took a left onto Loxley Drive. The turn would take us along the side of the fence protecting the huge homes from the other millionaires in the neighbourhood. As we turned the corner, I noticed something. There was a dark blue panel van parked against the curb under the wooden fingers of a branch extending from a large tree. The windows were tinted and no one could be seen inside save for the driver, who was smoking a cigarette behind the wheel. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the small burning circle of tobacco glow orange as we rode past. I turned my head as soon as we cleared the driver side door and took a look at the back of the van. The rear windows and doors had no markings of any kind, and someone had done a poor self-tint job on the glass. Bubbles along the edges of both windows had crept inward leaving pockmarks on the glass. I looked down from the dark glass to
the rear wheels. The shocks on the van were compressed under a heavy load. Something was in the back of the van.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “Forget the coffee,” I said. “Do another loop.”

  “What’s going on?” Ilir asked. Carl and Miles didn’t ask anything. Carl glanced at the rear-view and Miles craned his head to look behind us.

  “Got it,” Carl said when he had gotten a good enough look at what was behind us.

  Carl eased the Jeep around the crooked circle we had been driving all night another time. When we turned the corner towards the van, he clicked on the high-beams before the Jeep completed the turn. We passed the van again; this time the driver was illuminated by the headlights. He was white, middle aged, and dark haired; so was one of the men behind him in the rear of the van.

  “How many heads did you count?” Miles asked.

  “Three for sure,” I said.

  “I got four,” Carl said.

  “Four sounds right. Three wouldn’t be enough.”

  “What the hell are we talking about? That van?” Ilir said finally catching on.

  “Whose name is the Jeep under?” I asked.

  “Mine,” Carl said. “Why?”

  “If the four guys in that van manage to get the violin out of that house, we need to get it out of that van. We don’t have any guns, and I doubt harsh language is going to do the job, so all we have left is two tons of Jeep to throw at them.”

  Carl sighed. “It’s in my name, Wilson. If it gets totalled over here, so do I.”

  I nodded. “Ilir, your uncle has connections over here.”