The Buffalo Job

by Mike Knowles

  “Something we bought second-hand.”

  “Right. We needed something that had the right feel to buy us a few minutes. Someone else had the same idea in mind, but they didn’t go second-hand. Why would someone else swap the Randall violin with another Stradivarius? It was old, had to be less expensive than the one we were after, but it was still a Stradivarius. They don’t grow on trees.”

  “They sort of used to,” Miles said.

  I was doing the thinking, so I guess he was doing his part.

  “Think about it, Miles. When the cops opened that case we left behind, was there a chance they could have traced our violin to the seller?”

  Miles shook his head. “There have to be a million just like it.”

  “Same question with the one we pulled.”

  “The odds would be better.”

  “Right, so why use it?”

  Miles thought it over. “I don’t know.”

  “Think about the method. The guy took the violin off the guards and then shot into the air. He didn’t shoot first — he shot after he had the violin. He put the whole place into a panic. Everyone ran for the door.”

  “Us included.”

  I nodded. “Using the gun alerted everyone in Samuel Hall. It gave security time to get in place at the exits. Our way, no one would have known there was a problem until the musician opened the case. When Lind saw the generic violin and sounded the alarm, the real Stradivarius would already have been on the street, and both you and me on our way out the door. There would be no chance for security to set up a perimeter.”

  Miles stared at me. “Agreed.”

  “So we have a rare decoy violin that the cops could surely track to an owner and a thief who purposely brings attention to the crime.”

  “This is all shit I knew, Wilson. I gave you the coke so you could tell me what I don’t know.”

  “You know who owns Stradivarius violins?”

  “Rich people and more recently Albanians from Buffalo.”

  “Musicians do. They are the best instruments, so the best players in the world use them.”

  “So?”

  “So, one of the concert musicians stole the case and fired the gun.”

  “A classical musician?” Miles was skeptical.

  I nodded. “He took it and walked out the door with it in his hands.”

  “Right into security.”

  “You said it yourself the instrument would be easy to trace back to the owner. The thief was counting on that. He stole his own violin.”

  “Why the hell would he do that?”

  “Because the real Stradivarius never left the vault.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  “The widow?”

  I nodded. “It’s the only way it works. She and one of the violinists are in on it together. It adds up if you think it through. Two people are needed for the plan to work: someone to supply and steal a Stradivarius and someone to pass the fake off to the security guards. The widow and a musician are the only two who could make that work.”

  “So why are you so sure that the violin is still in the vault? It could be anywhere.”

  I shook my head. “No, the widow would leave it in the vault in case someone realized it was the wrong Stradivarius. That way she could just claim a mix-up. There would be no harm and no foul after that. And after the theft, no one would think to look in the vault again. If the cops believed the theft was real, they also had to believe the violin was the correct Stradivarius. The widow would be under scrutiny after that. Routine questions from police and insurance. She wouldn’t have time to move the violin. Besides, why should she? It’s in a safe that no one has a chance of getting into. Who’s going to find it?”

  “Us,” Miles said. “But, maybe, just me.”

  Miles had a gun in his hand, and it was pointed at my head.

  “Why did you kill the kid, Wilson?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “You see why I have to ask. You and I are going to go and get that violin from the widow. If you’re planning on killing me too, I think I have a right to know. So dish. Why kill the kid? He was a little obnoxious, but he wasn’t that bad. Truth be told, he was growing on me.”

  “You think I’m bloodthirsty or psychotic?”

  Miles shrugged. “I’ve met guys who are both.”

  “Replay the situation in your head. Carl was walking Ilir into the kitchen. Packing a nice tight enclosed space with another warm body. You and I were bunched together and Ilir obscured any view of Carl we were going to get. Tell me how it would have played out?”

  It was Miles’ turn to be quiet.

  “He would have used Ilir’s body as a shield while he shot you and then me,” I said. “After that, Ilir would have gone next. I shot the kid because he gave Carl an advantage. It was an advantage I couldn’t let him keep. The bullet wounds slowed me down, and I needed the extra seconds the confusion bought me to stay alive.”

  “So you shot him to save your own skin?”

  “You wish it could have gone another way. Some outcome that would have made everyone happy?”

  Miles was looking more at the gun in his hand than at me.

  “Grow up, Miles. You might spend most of your time fleecing old women out of their pensions, but you’re a criminal just like the rest of us, and this is not a business that makes people happy. It makes two things: money and dead people.”

  “It wasn’t right. It wasn’t what he deserved.”

  “Did you think about what I deserved when you said no to coming back for me?”

  Miles didn’t have an answer.

  “No one gets what they deserve. If they did, there would be no one like us in the world.”

  I pulled my sweat-soaked clothes off the floor and transferred everything in the pockets to the new pants I was wearing. When I finished, I looked at Miles. He still had the gun in his hand. “You need to make a decision about that gun, Miles. In or out?”

  Miles turned the pistol and looked at it in his hand. He tucked the gun behind his back. “How do we get at the widow?”

  “What happened to all of the information we took off Dickens?” I asked.

  “It was in the house. We were going to throw it all out on our way to the game.”

  I rubbed my chin. “Then we need to come at it another way.” I looked at the unconscious body on the floor. “We’re going to need him awake, and I’m going to need my gun.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  “Wake up,” I said.

  Tony didn’t stir, so I kicked him in the ribs. “Get up.”

  I got a moan, but that was it.

  I took a half-empty bottle of beer off an end table and turned it enough to let a thick stream of beer fall onto the unconscious man’s face. Alcohol soaked his dreadlocks and the neck of his shirt. Some of the liquid found its way up his nose and it started Tony coughing. He rolled onto his side and brought a hand up to his head.

  “Oh, God.”

  “Get up,” I said.

  The dealer gave me a look that started with confusion, but quickly morphed into something darker.

  “You hit me with a bottle, dude.”

  Suddenly he realized what he had said. He started probing his nose and teeth for damage.

  “You shot me full of cocaine — I’d say we’re even, but I’d be lying.”

  “Fuck, my head hurts.”

  “Physician, heal thyself,” I said.

  Tony ran his fingers over his teeth again. Satisfied they were all still there, he said, “Bert, grab me a bud off my night table, dude.”

  Miles nodded and left the room. I waited for the con man to come back and then for the dealer to light up.

  “You got a computer?”

  Tony nodded.

  “Get it and log on.”

 
“Why, man?”

  “Because I asked you nicely,” I said. I held out the Glock. “Want to see me ask mean?”

  “What? No. I’ll do it, man. I’ll do it.”

  Tony reached under the sofa he was sitting on and slid out a thin, sleek laptop. He logged on and passed the unit to me. I walked into the kitchen and put the laptop on the counter. Both Miles and Tony followed me. While I went through the results of a Google search, I asked, “How long will whatever you dosed me with take to wear off?”

  “You a user?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Three hours, maybe. I dunno, you’re pretty banged up, and you lost a lot of blood, so it’s hard to say.”

  “You got more?”

  Tony looked at me with a grin on his face. “You got money?”

  “I have a gun.”

  “Store credit it is, then.”

  “You want to let me in on the plan?” Miles said.

  I turned the laptop so that he could see the screen. It was the homepage for Samuel Hall. Miles followed the cursor as I dragged it to a link marked Orchestra. The link opened a new page. I scrolled down until I found the violin section, which included press photos of the musicians.

  “The violin we took wasn’t the one we were looking for, but it was still a Stradivarius. You don’t find every Tom, Dick, and Harry carrying one of those around. Usually, it’s just the premier players.”

  “So our thief must be pretty good.”

  I nodded. “This is a list of the people in the first chair position. Since it was a man in the mask, we can discount the female names right away. Now we’re down to four possibilities. Our guy wasn’t fat, so we can eliminate another name.”

  “That leaves three,” Miles said.

  There were three pictures on the screen. Two of the men were in their late forties. One was black, the other two were white. The black guy had a salt and pepper moustache and heavy bags under his eyes. The white guy in the next picture over had jowls and acne scars across both of his cheeks. The third man was in his early thirties and looked like something out of a Dockers commercial.

  We both spoke at the same time. “That’s our guy.”

  I clicked on Thomas Delgado’s head shot and the site sent us to a brief bio page. There was nothing but information about the musician’s education and experience.

  I opened a new window in the browser and used the online phone book to find an address for Thomas Delgado in Buffalo, N.Y. There were four names.

  “You really think he’s in the phone book?” Miles asked.

  “I doubt he has any reason not to be. Unlisted numbers cost extra and usually people don’t spend extra unless they have to. He’s handsome, but I doubt there are groupies calling his house at all hours.”

  “So do we call all of them and ask if they like to fuck hot trophy wives and play the violin?”

  “I’m down for the first part,” Tony said.

  I ignored the dealer. “He’s in his thirties. We find him on Facebook and check out his pictures. Most people put up personal images. There might be something there that we can use to pin down a location.”

  “If he’s on Facebook,” Miles said.

  “Dude, everybody is on Facebook,” Tony said. “Even me.”

  We both looked at the dealer.

  “What? It’s all about networking, dudes.”

  In the end it took five minutes to find Thomas Delgado on Facebook and another two minutes to use a picture taken in a coffee shop to identify a neighbourhood associated with one of the Delgados from the phone book.

  “I’ll be damned,” Miles said. “He’s local. Not even that far away. We can be there in ten minutes.”

  I had been awake on coke for half an hour. In that time, my heart hadn’t slowed down one bit. The drugs in my system were running my damaged body at full throttle. Although I was standing and thinking more clearly, I could feel the speed ripping me apart like a meteor on re-entry. For a second, I wondered if there would be anything left by the time I hit the ground. The thought lasted only a second — I was on a timer, and I didn’t have time to waste. Miles had been right: I needed a doctor and that wasn’t going to happen without the violin. The only conduits I had to a cross-border physician who would work on the likes of me were Ox and Pyrros. Contacting Pyrros now meant having to deal with the fallout over what happened to Ilir, or at least what we would tell him happened to Ilir. Pyrros would have questions and he would hold back doing me any favours until I provided answers he liked. That left Ox. The broker could find me a doctor, but he wouldn’t keep the information to himself if push came to Albanian shove. Having the violin would keep Pyrros on hold, and away from Ox, long enough for me to get patched up.

  “Tony,” I said. “We’re going to work. I need you to pack me a lunch.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  “Dudes, this isn’t necessary. We’re cool.”

  I was leaning against the door while Miles set everything up in front of Tony. While the dealer put together another loaded syringe for me, Miles concocted a sleeping potion out of Tony’s cache of drugs.

  “I’m serious. We’re cool. I’m not even mad about you hitting me. I get it. And whatever you two are into —” He zipped his lips closed with his thumb and forefinger. “Your secret is safe with me.”

  “Tell him what will happen if he doesn’t make the smart choice,” I said.

  Miles looked at Tony and there was no humour and no sarcasm. “He’ll put a pillow over your face and put a bullet in your head.”

  Tony looked at me. “Dude?”

  “Do people always have to argue this much to get you high?”

  Tony laughed. “When you put it that way.”

  Tony injected what Miles had prepared. The junkie alchemy was potent; Tony drifted farther and farther away from us without ever leaving our sight. After three minutes, he was talking to someone who wasn’t us. We walked out of the room with the dealer’s car keys and drove across the city to another suburb, this one closer to the water.

  Thomas Delgado lived in a bungalow that looked to be something built just after World War Two. The landscaping out front showed a deft hand and a sense of style; so did the twenty-year-old Range Rover in the driveway. The car looked like the kind of thing photographers for National Geographic drove around the base of the Himalayas. Except this car had been repainted something metallic and the factory rims had been replaced with something contemporary.

  Miles walked at a regular pace, which meant he was much faster than me. He stepped up onto the porch and waited for me to catch up. He raised his hand to the door, but before he knocked, he asked, “Are you okay?”

  My heart had slowed in the car, but it was still beating twice as fast as it should have. I could feel my armpits getting damp and the nausea was waking up. I had just under two hours left on the dealer’s cocaine estimate. “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look it,” Miles said. “You look like shit.”

  “Do I look like a cop? Because that’s what we need right now.”

  Miles took a step back from me to look at my clothes. He was still in the creased suit he had been wearing on the job — he fit the part. I didn’t — I was in jeans and a blue unbuttoned Oxford. Both were tight on my frame.

  “You look like the construction worker in the Village People.”

  I took a step back so that Miles’ body would obscure me from the door. We didn’t need Thomas Delgado to believe we were cops; we just needed him to think we were long enough to open the door.

  “You knock,” I said. “And remember everything we talked about in the car.”

  Miles nodded and said, “I got it.” He then furrowed his brow. His handsome face was showing signs of being tired, but he made it even more apparent by subtly drooping his eyelids and letting his jaw sit crooked.

  It was ten
minutes to six in the morning. The neighbourhood was quiet, with only birds breaking the silence. Miles, now playing the part of the exhausted cop, hit the door with the side of his fist. The sound was a loud thump instead of a knock. I had to admit it was a smart choice. The sound would echo through the house more than through the neighbourhood.

  We waited a long thirty seconds and then Miles pounded on the door again. Another thirty went by before we got a “Who is it?” through the door.

  “Police, Mr. Delgado. We have some things we would like to discuss with you. Could you open the door, please?”

  The door opened a crack and revealed a safety chain. From where I stood, I couldn’t see Thomas’ face.

  “Sorry for the early hour, Mr. Delgado. We just have some routine questions to run by you.”

  The door closed and I heard the chain slip off. The door opened and I heard a familiar voice. “That’s good, officer, be­cause I have a question for you. Where the hell is my violin?”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Carl was standing back from the door with a gun in his hand.

  “You’re not going to shoot me, are you?”

  “Not yet,” Carl said.

  “I meant him,” Miles said gesturing over his shoulder. “He’s got sort of a track record.”

  “I want both of you to step inside slowly. Anything stupid from either of you and I’ll gutshot Miles here on the porch.”

  “Easy, easy, Carl,” Miles said. “We’re coming inside.” He looked over his shoulder at me. “Right?”

  I doubted I could have made a move if I wanted to. The cocaine was wearing off and I was starting to feel the effects of trauma and blood loss.

  I made it into the house behind Miles and shut the door. Carl had us face the wall with our arms and legs spread. He did two quick and dirty searches and relieved us of our two guns. Had the search been more thorough, he would have found more, but he was probably worried about one of us making a move on him while his hands were busy. He pocketed my gun, put Miles’ revolver into his belt, and then prodded the two of us down the hallway with his own weapon.