The 500: A Novel

by Matthew Quirk

  “Why?” I sneered at Henry.

  “He was probably trying to protect his family,” Henry said. My father, in his cryptic explanation of that night, had said the same thing.

  “After all, Perry was fucking your mother,” Henry said. “And who could blame him?”

  I lunged across the table at Henry, and Marcus grabbed at my belt. I kicked him hard in the face. My heel connected with his eyebrow. As I was looking back at Marcus, I saw a blur out of the corner of my eye. The edge of Henry’s hand came down on my throat like a steel bar.

  I hadn’t expected it, hadn’t figured him to get his hands dirty. The blow choked me instantly. Marcus dragged me back, wrenched my shoulders up, and threw me in a chair.

  The pain in my throat wasn’t too bad at first, but something felt off, loose. Like he’d popped some of the cartilage around my windpipe. I could feel it swelling.

  “I guess you and I both know there’s no statute of limitations on murder,” Henry said, standing over me

  “I’m not telling you a goddamned thing,” I said. A wheeze started creeping into my voice. The slow, silent swelling of my throat was the worst part. It was as if Henry, without lifting a finger, were choking me tighter and tighter.

  “That’s going to close up your trachea, Mike.”

  “Compromise and coercion,” I croaked, and smiled. “It’s not going to work, Henry. Blowback. It always returns to bite you in the ass. I’m going to get you.”

  Henry laughed to Marcus. “Everything you know, we taught you, Mike. We’ve been saving one lesson. It’s true that coercion—blackmail, extortion, whatever you want to call it—gets a bad reputation.”

  I felt my windpipe narrowing down to a pinhole, felt the lightness creep through my brain.

  “But that’s only because so few people really have the necessary resolve,” he said. “You have to be willing to take it all the way, to violence, to killing.”

  The room seemed to slip away. I was starting to black out.

  “Your father had it, Mike. I just don’t think you do.”

  Henry dumped the ice from my glass into his handkerchief, pulled my head back by the hair, and pressed the freezing bundle on my throat. I wavered on the edge of unconsciousness, half suffocated. After a moment that felt like forever, I finally pulled air into my desperate lungs.

  “Take him downstairs,” Henry said. “Then tell Maggie to send in my five o’clock.”

  They locked me in an empty office with an ice pack for the swelling. I lay on the ground, trying not to move, hoping my throat would get better before it got worse. It did. After an hour, I could take small breaths without too much trouble.

  A guard was posted outside the door, and I knew that Gerald was on the other side of the ceiling-mounted camera, watching me.

  As I surveyed the office, I pressed my hand against the wall and felt the slightest give. Most of the Davies Group mansion was lath and plaster and brick. For my purposes, it might as well have been reinforced concrete. When they chopped the building into interior offices, however, they must have used the usual shoddy modern construction: drywall over steel studs. A shame, architecturally, but good for me. I used to see this all the time, especially in commercial break-ins. Somebody would spend two thousand dollars on a security door and lock, then mount it in a wall you could punch through.

  It took me a few minutes to size up the wall, looking over the doorways and switches to determine what lay inside. I had done some carpentry during college, framing houses under the brutal Florida sun.

  I was buying time, waiting for the swelling in my throat to go down. There was no point in running if I was going to pass out as soon as I started breathing hard.

  Finally, I put my back to the wall beside the door frame and broke through the drywall with my elbow. I was a few inches off, but still close enough to yank the Romex out of the junction box. I wanted the black wire; black’s always hot. I shoved it into the keyhole of the door handle. I didn’t need the other wire for a ground, because I was going to use the guard outside.

  The noise must have gotten the guard’s attention, which had been my goal, and hopefully had made him sweat a little. That would increase the current through his body. The door handle jiggled, then a scream came from the hallway outside.

  I knocked away the black wire, then shouldered through the door, knocking the guard’s still-shaking body to the ground. I considered it fair payback for when Marcus had zapped me at the museum. I held the guard’s arms behind him and searched his pockets, coming up with flex-cuffs and a set of keys. I cinched his wrists up and pulled the baton from his belt.

  It sounded like a stampede was coming down the hall. The corridor, lined with empty, windowless offices, was a dead end. I slammed shut every office door and holed up in the last one on the right. I picked it because behind the walls I could hear the faint throb of a generator, which gave me a rough sense of where I was.

  Sure, I was trapped, but I’ve never been one to let a floor plan stand in my way. I stabbed the tip of the baton through the office wallboard and levered it down, tearing a three-foot-tall hole. I ran a second down, in parallel, a foot away, then stomped through, breaking a small passage through the wall. It was a firefighter’s trick.

  I crawled through it into the hallway that Marcus had dragged me along when I first arrived, then raced through the door, back into the underground garage. After running for a minute, I could barely get enough air through the crumpled straw of my throat. I clicked the unlock button on the guard’s keys and followed the chirp to a late-model Volvo wagon. Not bad for a goon. Henry clearly paid for the best when it came to security.

  The rolling steel door blocked the exit, but I had more pressing problems. Marcus and his men would be here any second. I threw the car into reverse and sped backward, hitting a railing beside the door I had just exited. I rammed it with the rear bumper a second and third time, until it was finally mangled enough for my purposes. Faces appeared in the glass window of the security door, but with the railing jammed against it, they couldn’t get out.

  Glass tinkled. I saw the barrel of a gun slide through the window in the door.

  I looked at the steel door. The fundamentals of breaking out are the same as for breaking in. There are real-life jewel thieves running around; one group in particular, called the Pink Panthers, has made off with loot worth more than five hundred million dollars from stores in twenty countries. They don’t fire grappling hooks, slink through AC ducts, or crack safes, however. They prefer to drive high-powered cars through the doors of luxury malls and crash them into jewelers’ windows. Ugly, but effective.

  My rolling door looked formidable. I didn’t like what I was planning, but really, how fucked up can you get in a Volvo?

  I floored it and got up to forty-five miles an hour before I crashed. It felt like my stomach was going to tear through the front of my torso and like I’d been smacked in the face with a board. A cloud of dust filled the car. It smelled awful. I fell coughing from the car and crawled along the concrete. My nose was bleeding, and the friction with the air bag had burned the skin on my face.

  The steel door had fared a lot better. So much for my easy escape. Bullets skipped off the car not far from my head. A shaft of sunlight lit up the dust. I had succeeded in wrenching the rolling door back far enough to clear a foot-high space along the ground under the car’s buckled fender. I crawled through it, dragging my flank along a jagged piece of steel.

  Adams Morgan was only a couple blocks away, and, as always, full of Ethiopian cabbies. I looked like hell on a holiday, but a second twenty-dollar bill was enough to convince the driver to get me as far from Davies as fast as he could.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  HENRY HAD NEARLY broken me back at his office: Annie betrayed me, Rivera sold me out, my mother was unfaithful, and my father a murderer. He’d also done me a favor in a way, proving beyond any doubt that my dream of a legit life was dead. I could now let that dream go without a secon
d thought. Haskins was right: Henry owned the law, so I would just have to go outside it. Being a born criminal helped.

  My first stop was home. There is a certain perverse thrill to robbing your own house, especially with a cop car parked out front. I had Henry Davies trying to torture me back into the fold with his creepy father-figure act and Rado Dragović hankering to eat my heart; the police were the least of my worries.

  Like most untrustworthy people, I had a hard time trusting the banks, so I kept about six thousand dollars in hundreds interleaved in my old red-and-gold criminal-law casebook. After I escaped from Henry, I grabbed the money, a change of clothes, a suit, and my beat-to-shit pre–Davies Group laptop from my house and made it out without getting pinched.

  I knew that using any of my credit cards or bank accounts would lead Henry and the police to me. I would have to steal to get by. It was a practical matter, sure, but there was more to it than that. I felt the sweet relief only someone who’s been on the wagon for twelve years can feel as I dove back into crime.

  My favorite approach to boosting cars was to just cruise past a valet box. Those guys were always sprinting off to fetch another car. I’d pull a set from a nice marque, then take a leisurely stroll, blipping the keyless entry and looking for my new ride. People who used valets tended to have pretty upscale wheels; I made off with a V8 Infiniti from outside the Arts Club of Washington.

  DC is now riddled with red-light cameras and new police cruisers that scan every license plate they pass. Both can spot stolen cars, so I had to ditch the Infiniti as soon as possible. I needed a clean car, a clean cell phone, a clean gun, and a few other essentials. Basically, I needed a Walmart for bad guys, and I knew just where to go.

  I drove forty minutes out to a swampy section of Manassas near the Occoquan Reservoir. I parked around the corner from an aluminum Quonset hut set back in a ratty patch of woods, checked for police, and then, finding none, headed for a rear door secured by a Yale bump-proof padlock. I knew that lock well, though it still took me about two minutes to get it open.

  Inside was a thieves’ paradise. Hanging neatly on the walls was every burglary tool imaginable—cylinder pulls, pick sets, even hydraulic shears and gas-powered circular saws that could cut a hole through a concrete wall in under a minute. In the cabinets I found a half a dozen prepaid cell phones, and took two.

  Opening the locked gun safe, about as big as a closet, took me longer than I would have liked. But given the inventory of tools I had to choose from in that warehouse, it was only a matter of time before I got it open. There were a dozen long guns inside, even two AR-15 assault rifles with the sears swapped out for full auto; a little too Charles Bronson for my taste. I grabbed a pair of nine-millimeter Berettas like the ones I’d trained on in the navy.

  “Why don’t you take one of those forty-five HKs too,” said a voice behind me. “The nine doesn’t really get the job done.”

  I turned, gun by my thigh and hand tight on the grip. And there was Cartwright, smiling. He pointed to the far corner of the garage: a motion detector and camera, well hidden, that I’d missed.

  “Silent alarm,” he said. “It wasn’t here the last time you pulled this.”

  “Sorry. I was worried they’d be watching you, watching my father.”

  “They’re watching him. Not me. Is that your car out back?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Well, not mine, exactly.”

  “I can swap you a ten-year-old Honda Civic with clean plates.”

  “Thanks,” I said. It wasn’t much of a trade, but I was desperate. Cartwright was always there when you needed him and always exploited the situation to the hilt.

  The whole scene was eerily similar to the first time I had faced down Cartwright. This was the second time he’d caught me breaking into this garage; the first, I was sixteen. For my brother and his delinquent friends back then, Cartwright’s garage was a mythical place, like Aladdin’s cave. One day, my brother asked me about the lock securing the garage—the Yale bump-proof. I said that, given enough time, I could probably pick it. My brother dared me to do it. Of course I said yes. He and his friends, Cartwright’s son Charlie included, drove me over and egged me on. The lock took only a minute.

  They all peeled away when Cartwright showed up, leaving me alone inside the garage. The first thing Cartwright did when he caught me was slap me, hard, across the face. No one knew how Cartwright made his money, but everyone knew not to cross him. And there I was, trapped in his storehouse of sharp things and guns and very much on his bad side.

  “Do you know what it would do to your father to see you taking stupid risks like this, running around with these fucking morons?” he asked me that day.

  I just looked down and shook my head, embarrassed.

  “How’d you get in here?” he asked.

  I held out the lock, open and undamaged. “I didn’t break it. I didn’t take anything. I just wanted to see if I could.”

  “You picked this?” he asked. After a moment, he seemed less angry, even a little impressed. “Who showed you how?”

  “Nobody. I just like taking them apart. For fun,” I said.

  He knew, between my father being in jail, my sick mother working two jobs, and my fuckup brother and his friends serving as my main role models, that I’d probably end up dead or in prison soon enough. There was no way he was going to stop me, though; I needed the money to help pay the medical bills. He made a deal with me that day: he’d teach me the trade—locks and picks to start—if I stopped pulling stupid bush-league juvenile-delinquent stuff with my brother’s crew. He must have felt bad for me. Maybe he knew he couldn’t keep me out of trouble, so he at least wanted to teach me not to get caught. Maybe he just recognized a precocious talent that he could exploit. Whatever it was, he showed me how to work like a professional, and taught me everything I knew. I did jobs for him and stayed away from tempting fate with the older kids for the most part. Though I could never say no to my brother, and ultimately that was my downfall.

  Now, twelve years later, after I’d sworn off that life, I was back in his garage, caught red-handed once more.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “What else do you need?”

  I looked over to the wall, the racks of burglary tools, and then pointed high, to a steel bar that ended in a claw. I hadn’t touched one in years, not since the night I got arrested, the last break-in I’d pulled.

  It’s called a Halligan, a fireman’s tool, essentially a hopped-up crowbar. It has a thick, slightly offset forked wedge on one end that you can ram between any door and jamb and pry easily. There’s a pick and adze at the other. The New York Fire Department designed it, but the basic idea they stole from thieves. The story goes that some firefighters in the 1920s or 1930s were sorting through the ash and rubble of a bank in Lower Manhattan that had just been robbed and then torched to hide the evidence. The thieves had left behind a custom-forged pry bar with a claw. The smoke eaters copied it, passed it around to different firehouses, and over the decades improved on it to the point where it could gain entry against almost any door in less than a minute.

  Then thieves like me, true to form, stole it back.

  Cartwright passed it down. God, it felt good in my hands.

  He looked me over. “It’s nice to have you back, Mike.”

  “Tell my dad that I’m okay.”

  “Sure,” he said. “And don’t worry. You can pay me for the guns later.”

  After I left Cartwright, I stopped by the local Greyhound station to plant some red herrings. I bought a ticket to Florida on my corporate AmEx and one to San Francisco on my personal card. Then I walked through the station like Robin Hood, handing my credit and debit cards out to the folks in the waiting room—a dreadlocked white dude wearing patchwork pants, a shell-shocked-looking teenage couple, and a guy with one arm who was sipping on a bottle of grape Robitussin—after which they scattered to the four corners.

  Now that I’d given up
on help from the police, the murder evidence against Henry that Haskins had pointed me toward was my only hope. I had to assume that Haskins wouldn’t have died trying to tip me off to this guy Langford if Langford were really dead.

  I needed to dig into Langford’s affairs, and after five hours at the Reston Regional Library (looking and smelling about on par with the other bums who populated the place; I hadn’t had time to change), I pieced together a few glimmers of hope.

  Langford’s lawyer was a man named Lawrence Catena. Catena appeared to be working out of his house in Great Falls, Virginia, another high-end suburb of DC, and he specialized in living trusts and Delaware corporations. Delaware allows people (even if they’re from out of state) to incorporate there anonymously, without listing the names of any of the owners or managers of the company, and so it attracts a lot of shell corporations and the bottom-feeding lawyers who specialize in them. Trusts and Delaware LLCs are perfect for hiding assets, ducking taxes, and so on. A corporation has the legal rights of a person, and some rights that people don’t. Against a well-paid money-hider like Catena, I had no chance of prying into Langford’s affairs—unless some local clerk made a mistake, as clerks sometimes do, and put down some information on the articles of incorporation or a chain of title that linked the dummy companies to the people they were shielding.

  Enter my iron ass. I was nearly blind from reading small type on my computer, but just before they shut the library down and sent me back onto the streets I found it: a transfer of a vacation property in St. Augustine from Langford to an inter vivos trust.

  It could have been simply that Langford knew his health was going downhill in the years before he died and wanted to keep Uncle Sam from fleecing the inheritance. But I was starting to get a distinct feeling (probably fueled by the fact that it was my one lead and I was supremely desperate) that Langford was among the walking dead. Most people think plane crashes or staged suicides are good ways to fake your way out of this life. Too many questions, though, as I’m sure a good lawyer like Catena could tell you. No, better to go down quietly in Florida and have a simple cremation as Langford did.