Easy Death
Page 1
Contents
Cover
Also by Daniel Boyd
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Before we get started…
Chapter 1: The Night Before the Robbery
Chapter 2: One Hour and Forty Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 3: Ninety Minutes Before the Robbery
Chapter 4: Two Hours After the Robbery
Chapter 5: Thirty-Five Minutes Before the Robbery
Chapter 6: Ten Minutes Before the Robbery
Chapter 7: Two Hours and Fifteen Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 8: The Robbery
Chapter 9: Two Hours and Twenty Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 10: The Robbery
Chapter 11: Thirty Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 12: Two Hours and Fifty Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 13
Chapter 14: The Getaway
Chapter 15: Three Hours and Thirty Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 16: Ninety Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 17: Three Hours and Twenty-Five Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 18: Thirty Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 19: Three Hours and Fifteen Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 20: The Getaway
Chapter 21: Three Hours and Forty-Five Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 22: Three Hours and Fifty-Five Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 23: Three Hours and Fifty-Eight Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 24: Four Hours and Twelve Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 25: Six Hours After the Robbery
Chapter 26: Four Hours and Twenty Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 27: Four Hours and Thirty Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 28: Four Hours and Thirty-Eight Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 29: Four Hours and Fifty Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 30: Five Hours and Twelve Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 31: Five Hours and Twenty Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 32: Five Hours and Thirty-Two Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 33: Five Hours and Forty-Seven Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 34: Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 35: Seven Hours After the Robbery
Chapter 36: Seven Hours and Thirty Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 37: Eight Hours and Thirty Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 38: Eight Hours and Forty-Five Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 39: Nine Hours After the Robbery
Chapter 40: Nine Hours and Twenty Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 41: Ten Hours After the Robbery
Chapter 42: Ten Hours After the Robbery
Chapter 43: Ten Hours and Thirty Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 44: Ten Hours and Thirty-Five Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 45: Ten Hours and Thirty-Five Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 46: Ten Hours and Forty-Eight Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 47: Ten Hours and Fifty Minutes After the Robbery
Chapter 48: Thirty Years After the Robbery
Also Available from Titan Books
She hugged him, strong and soft at the same time, and tried to will some heat from her body into his. “Can you get up?”
“Got to—” He struggled. Got one cold, unfeeling leg under him and made it push. Helen steadied him and he got the other one where he wanted it. She pulled and steadied him some more till he was something like standing up.
“—got to kill that bastard Healey,” he finished.
“Don’t talk crazy,” Helen said, “you’re going to the hospital.”
“Can’t afford no hospital,” he said. “Got to kill him.”
“We’ll go to the clinic on Fourth.” She was motherly again. “We want to get you well. For Christmas. For the kids.”
“Ain’t going to Christmas.” His voice was flat and cold now, almost as cold as his hands. “Just don’t plan on going that far. And I ain’t going to no clinic. Gonna get me a gun and kill him…”
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A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK
(HCC-117)
First Hard Case Crime edition: November 2014
Published by
Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street
London SE1 0UP
in collaboration with Winterfall LLC
Copyright © 2014 by Daniel Boyd
Cover painting copyright © 2014 by Glen Orbik
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Print Edition ISBN 978-0-85768-579-7
E-book ISBN 978-0-85768-739-5
Design direction by Max Phillips
www.maxphillips.net
The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.
Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com
For Kathy
Before we get started…
This could be true for all I know.
A few years back I was cleaning out some old newspapers from the back room of a dead business—one of those mom-and-pop places that stays there for years, more from force of habit than for any profit involved. The newspapers were all from some small town I never heard of, and they dated back to when every little burg had its own newspaper, a radio station, two movie houses and a big marble Carnegie Library.
All of these papers were from right after Christmas of 1951, and they featured articles about the big blizzard of that year, the one that dumped a ton of snow all across the Northeast U.S., some places more than three feet in a single day. The paper said it hadn’t kept Santa from coming, and the local businesses were doing all right, but Bud Sweeney’s Used Cars was closed till New Year’s in observance of the holidays.
> There was also an article about putting up a monument to honor a park ranger who was killed in the line of duty—the editor seemed to think it was a great notion.
And down at the bottom of the page was a short piece that said the police had issued warrants for two local men in the armored car robbery of almost a week ago. There were pictures of them that looked like mug shots, one of them African American (but that’s not what the paper called him, not back in 1951) and the other white, and the headline said SALT-AND-PEPPER TEAM SOUGHT IN ROBBERY.
Further down in that stack of papers was another paper, from a few months later, with the same picture and a headline, PAIR FOUND DEAD.
Just thought I’d mention it.
Chapter 1
The Night Before the Robbery
December 19, 1951
11:12 PM
Walter and Eddie
“The way I see it,” Eddie looked out the passenger window into the night and took a last drag on his cigarette, exhaling smoke not much whiter than his too-pale face, “a job like this one tomorrow, you either go in and kill everybody first thing, or else you gotta sell them the idea of getting robbed.”
“Yeah?” The man driving the ice truck shifted his big black hands easily on the steering wheel.
“Yup, and this what we’re doing now is softening up what they call the sales resistance.”
Behind the wheel, Walter peered out into the uncertain dark beyond his headlights, not really listening. “You figure?”
“Yeah, same as Mort and Slimmy on the tree tomorrow. Just doing our best to make for an easy sale.”
Walter wanted to say something in polite agreement, but all he could think of was, “You know, I kind of wish I brought my gun.”
Eddie crushed out a cigarette in the ashtray and looked at him with the edgy patience the State gives free to its long-term guests in recognition of their achievements. “You don’t got one?”
“Brother Sweetie said he ain’t for anybody to get killed this close to Christmas. Said it’s bad for the job coming down, somebody get shot.”
“Brother Sweetie, he thinks things a long ways out.” Eddie looked out at the dim-lit streets as they passed. “Someone gets shot tonight, then tomorrow it’s all over the news and everybody gets to looking over his shoulder and watching things close, and maybe they look twice at something more than it’s good for us.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Walter sounded unconvinced. “I figured he just thought it was bad luck to kill somebody this close to Christmas.”
“Could be it is,” Eddie reflected, “but it’s for sure bad luck to get yourself took dead this close to Christmas too, and you got a right to be worried about traveling light.” He reached into his jacket and got the comfortable feel you can only get from having a Colt .38 Police Special tucked inside. “Does somebody see you out here this late, they see you driving this truck, maybe they figure you to be carrying money; they could stick a gun in your ribs, and that wouldn’t do us no good either.”
“That’s facts.”
“So I figure Brother Sweetie, he’s a selfish sunuvabitch sending you out with no heat on a night like this.”
“And that’s facts too.” The black man turned the truck carefully into an alley, looking to each side and checking his mirrors for any sign of something moving.
Nothing.
“You know he’s got two cars?” he asked. “What’s a man want with two cars when you can’t drive only one at a time?”
“I better know it,” Eddie said, “he puts me to greasing one or the other does he see me slow down at the garage any. And one of them a brand-new Hudson Hornet. Put him back more than a grand-and-a-half, he said.” He looked out his own window as he spoke, scanning the streets on that side.
Nothing.
“Well you done good with this here truck,” Walter said. “Can’t nobody hear us coming nohow.”
“Maybe too good.” Eddie felt in his shirt pocket for a cigarette, remembered he didn’t have time for it and fingered the top of the pack wistfully. “It don’t really sound like a ’36 Harvester oughta sound. Maybe just too quiet. Somebody sees an old piece like this moving so quiet, maybe gets to thinking about it too much.”
“Could be you’re just worrying yourself at it.” The driver wrinkled his heavy brow thoughtfully. “Me, I like to drive quiet like this. You getting out here?”
“Yeah, but listen, Walter.” Eddie rolled down the window, wincing as cold winter air flooded in, and he shifted in his seat. “You just ain’t safe in this neighborhood at night.” He slipped the Colt .38 from under his war-surplus Army jacket and passed it over to the driver. “You better keep this.”
“You won’t need it?” Walter slowed the truck as they approached a high chain-link fence next to a building with a picture of a Greek warrior holding up a sword and shield and under that a sign that read
AJAX ARMORED CAR
- Safe - Secure - Dependable -
“Not like you do.” Eddie flexed his fingers inside dark gloves. “Just don’t lose it or nothing.”
“Well thanks, Eddie.” Walter tucked the revolver under one leg, pinning it to the seat, and slowed the truck a little more, feeling the long gearshift lever slide easily as he worked the clutch. “See you later?”
“Does everything go right,” Eddie said, and he reached out the window with both hands and drew his lanky frame onto the roof of the cab, then crawled up onto the square metal roof at the back.
The truck was down to a slow walk now, and crouching on top, Eddie looked down at the fence. Eight feet tall, with a strand of barbed wire running across the top, and a sign:
DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE
And right beyond that, just inside the Ajax parking lot, the six squat, heavy-steel armored trucks parked in a neat row close to the fence.
He breathed in deeply, holding the air in his lungs, feeling the chilly small-town quiet like a cloak around him. Looked at the tight-coiled strand of barbed wire running the top of the fence and wondered if it really was electrified. It didn’t look like it could carry anything more deadly than pigeon droppings, but… His hands shook a little and he looked down at them, wondering if the faint tremor was nerves or the seeping cold. He willed his hands to quit shaking, let his breath out slowly.
He looked at the fence again.
Then he rose and casually stepped over it, from the roof of the truck to the roof of the armored car on the other side. Slipped quickly down to the asphalt parking lot and crouched in the shadows to see if the noise of his entry had caught anyone’s attention.
In a minute or so he decided it hadn’t. He pulled a flashlight from the pocket of his olive-drab jacket and switched it on. The lens had been covered with windings of electrical tape until just a narrow sliver of light stabbed out in front of him, and he used this to check the numbers on the armored cars. Found the one he wanted, took a screwdriver from his pocket and set to work.
* * *
Five minutes later, he climbed to the top of the truck closest to the fence and jumped over, rolling with the eight-foot fall when he landed. Two minutes after that, he was walking casually past a radio repair shop at the edge of downtown, heading toward the gas station where Walter should be with the ice truck about now. A cigarette would be nice, he thought, only this is maybe too close. Wait just a little….
He passed the radio repair shop, hearing-without-hearing the music from inside that kept playing all night:
…To save us all from Satan’s power
When we were gone astray,
O-oh ti-i-dings of co-omfort and joy
Comfort-and-joy,
Ohooo ti-dings…
He caught the tune and hummed softly as he moved through the shadows. Two blocks farther he put a cigarette between his lips and got a Zippo lighter from his pocket.
A single snowflake touched his nose as he lit the cigarette.
Chapter 2
One Hour and Forty Minutes After the Robbery
December
20, 1951
10:40 AM
Officer Drapp
That damned snow kept hitting the windshield like it had a special grudge against anyone dumb enough to drive in weather like this—maybe something against dumb folks as a general rule and me for certain—but I guess I was doing all right, considering the mess I was in. I took one hand off the wheel long enough to blow on it, pretending I could feel the warmth from my breath through the heavy leather glove and the knit-wool glove liner underneath.
And just kept driving.
I was piloting a pre-war Ford pick-up, and to judge by the dirt and manure caked on the sides, this was the first time it ever got off the farm since they shipped it down from Detroit. When I tried to push it over 30, the engine squealed like a pig in a sausage grinder, and the heater was just a tired old joke, but it was better for driving in this godawfulness than any police car I was ever in; the tread on those wide tires was sharp and deep, and six bales of wet straw in the back nailed it tight to the road. Even this road.
Yeah, this road.
It was the road they call the Willisburg Cut-off: all backwoods two-lane packed-down gravel, and there looked to be a foot of snow on it, and more coming down and coming down like God’s judgment on this miserable sinner. Up ahead, I could see maybe twenty yards. Beyond that, everything just milk-white and blurry.
I looked down past the badge on my chest to the old radio bolted on the dash that kept fading in and out. I had it on looking to hear something about the robbery, but all I got so far was
I’m dreaming,
Of a wh-i-i-ite Christmas,
Just like the ones I uuuused to knoooow.
Where treeee tops glisten
And chil-dren listen….
No news reports on this station yet, and I didn’t like to take my hand off the wheel again or my mind off the road to turn the dial.
And a good thing, too. I came up on a curve. Not a serious curve, but bad enough in this weather. I pushed in the clutch, hoping to coast slow enough so I wouldn’t have to touch the brake and end up in a ditch on one side or the other.
It worked.
I down-shifted to second at the apex and let the clutch back out, pulling me around the bend and back in control. The road straightened out, I put her back in third while Bing was still crooning about every Christmas card he writes, and I looked ahead.