The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17

by Lisa Scottoline

  “Good old Lester,” Cory said again, grunting audibly. “Always picking a glamour job for himself and waiting tables for you.”

  Billie grunted back. “Tell me about it. Took me a while to tumble to that, but I finally got wise. Except by then I didn’t have no place to go, so I just hung with Lester.”

  “Too bad you and I don’t have that bank money. Make life a lot different for you.”

  Billie sat up and twisted around on the bed until she was facing him. “You always swing back to talking about the money, don’t you, honey? What’s on your mind, really?”

  Cory shrugged. “What difference does it make? You don’t know where the money is, right?”

  “Right. Don’t have a clue.”

  Cory fell silent for several moments, eyes downcast, staring at the beer bottle it was now his turn to hold, with Billie’s naked breasts prominent in his peripheral vision. His lips were pursed as he molded his thoughts for what he would say next. When he finally spoke, he looked back at Billie’s face without blinking and said, “How much do you think it would be worth to Lester if I could get him out of prison?”

  “Get him out when?” she asked, surprised.

  “Soon,” Cory told her. “Very soon.”

  The next morning Cory was back with the deputy warden and FBI agent Hardesty.

  “I don’t think the Neeley woman knows where the money is,” he told them, “but I think I can get Lester to lead you to it if you can find a way to spring him. She says he wants a transfer out of the laundry detail. I was thinking maybe—the dairy farm?”

  Hardesty and Duffy exchanged surprised looks. “You mean help him escape?” Duffy asked, aghast.

  “Why not?” Cory reasoned. “He would be taken right back into custody by Agent Hardesty and returned here before there was any record that he was ever out.”

  Hardesty rubbed his chin. “Not a bad idea,” he said.

  “But what if we can’t follow him once he’s out?” Duffy worried. “We could lose him.”

  “Not a problem,” Hardesty assured him. “If we provide a car for him, I’ll have a silent tracker signal unit attached to it that we can follow from our own car.”

  “How about using my car for Lester once he’s out?” Cory suggested. “The Neeley woman is familiar with it, she’ll be comfortable in it.”

  Hardesty shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

  Duffy grimaced, looking agitated.

  “Look, here’s how we can work it,” Cory said. “I tell the woman I can arrange to get Lester transferred to the dairy farm. It’s a job he can simply walk away from. I say that she and I can be parked in my car at a highway rest stop about a mile from the farm. I tell her I’ll do it for, say, a hundred thousand of the bank money. When Lester gets to the car, we pick him up and head for wherever the money is. Once we get there, you two show, make the collar, and it’s a done deal.”

  Hardesty was smiling, but Duffy was shaking his head. “I don’t know,” the deputy warden said. “It goes against my grain, letting a con walk away like that.”

  “Look,” Hardesty reasoned, “you won’t exactly be letting him walk away. You’re giving him a short furlough is all. And technically he’ll still be in custody, because Evans here is going to be with him all the time—and Evans is a corrections officer. See?” He turned to Cory. “I like it, Evans. I think it’ll work. But are you sure you can set it up?”

  “Positive. Actually, it was the Neeley woman’s idea. She started talking about getting Lester transferred out of the laundry, and I just took it from there. I didn’t even have to ask for a share of the bank money; she offered it.” Cory grinned. “She thinks I’m just a dumb prison guard out to make some easy money.”

  “Well, won’t she be surprised?” Hardesty said with a chuckle.

  Won’t a lot of people, Cory thought.

  At a prison visiting room table, Billie Neeley and Lester Dragg leaned forward on their elbows to converse privately.

  “You sure you can trust this dude?” Lester asked uneasily.

  “Sure as rain, baby,” Billie answered confidently. “The guy’s a big hick. You should have seen his eyes bulge when I offered him a hundred grand.”

  “Yeah, well, he ain’t gonna get no hunnerd grand,” Lester said, pouting. “Ten grand, maybe, if ever’thing goes smooth.” He paused, then frowned suspiciously. “You go to bed with this dude to get him to do this?”

  “Hell, no!” Billie declared. “Didn’t have to. Oh, I let him cop a few feels, so he prob’ly thinks he’s got something going, but he’s wrong.” Reaching over, she took one of Lester’s hands. “You’re the only one for me, sugar. Always have been.”

  “Well, all right then,” Lester said triumphantly. “I’m counting on you, babe. Don’t you let me down, hear?”

  “I’d never let you down, sugar. You mean the world to me, you know that.”

  She squeezed his hand for emphasis.

  In Cory’s apartment, where Billie Sue had been spending the nights, she and Cory sat across from each other at his little dinette table.

  “Okay, listen up,” Cory said solemnly. “This situation is coming down to the wire. We’ve got to put all our cards on the table.” He locked eyes with her. “I think it’s about time you tell me where the money is.”

  Billie stiffened, biting her lower lip. Their eyes were like riveted bolts; neither of them even blinked. After a heavy moment, Billie took a deep, almost tortured breath.

  “It’s in a public storage facility down in Modesto, where the bank was robbed.”

  Cory frowned. “Why haven’t you already grabbed it? Or told me about it earlier so we could grab it together? You still hung up on Lester, is that it?”

  “No, damn it to hell!” She began blurting words like machine gun rounds. “Lester says the storage facility has a cyclone fence around it that’s wired to a twenty-four-hour security company. There’s a keyboard on the gate with a six-digit code for people to get in after hours, and Lester never told me the code. It’s a great big place and I don’t even know which unit he rented, and anyway he said he put this big combination padlock on the door, and Lester didn’t tell me the combination either, so I couldn’t get into the damned locker even if I did know which one it was.”

  She was crying now and pounding the table with both fists, so Cory had to reach out and grab her wrists to stop her. “Okay, okay, okay! It’s okay! Calm down...”

  It took a couple of minutes, but he managed to get her calm and got her some tissues to dry her eyes. But even so, she was still agitated, exuding a high-strung energy he had never seen in her before.

  “I didn’t know what to do.” She seemed to be arguing with herself. “Tell you, don’t tell you, lie to Lester, don’t lie to Lester, try to keep all my stories straight—”

  “Listen to me.” He held her hands firmly across the table. “You do know where this storage place is, right?”

  “Sure I do,” she said irritably. “I been sending a thirty-dollar money order there every month for two damn years! I ought to know where it is! Let go of my hands, you’re hurting me.”

  Cory released her, rose, and came around the table to kneel beside her. “Listen to me.” He reached up to stroke her hair. “Everything’s going to be okay. I’m going to arrange to get Lester out and the three of us are going to Modesto and get that money. And when we do get it, we’re going to leave old Lester high and dry, and you and I are going to disappear together, how does that sound?”

  Billie Sue sputtered a little. “Well—can we do that—I mean, can we get away with it—I mean, what about that warden and that FBI guy—and what about Lester—do we have to kill him?”

  “Hell, no, baby. We’re not killers. We’ll just leave Lester locked in his own storage locker. Somebody will find him the next day when he makes enough noise. But we’ll be long gone by then.”

  Gently Cory pulled her head down and kissed her tenderly on the lips, tasting the salt from her tears. He continued to stroke he
r hair.

  “This is going to work for us, baby. I’ve got it all figured out.”

  In Duffy’s office the next morning, the deputy warden and Agent Hardesty told Cory the plan was ready to be put into operation. Inmate Lester Dragg had been transferred outside the walls to the prison dairy farm.

  “It’s an honor assignment,” Duffy reminded them. “No walls, just a cyclone fence with no razor wire across the top, and the last head count of the day is at six o’clock. Escape can be effected by going to some remote corner of the pasture, climbing over the fence, and simply walking away. Since the inmates assigned there are nonviolent first offenders with only a short time to serve, no one has ever taken advantage of that easy way out. Lester Dragg will be the first.”

  “Then we’re all set,” Cory said. “The Neeley woman is convinced that she got me to arrange his transfer to the farm for a hundred grand cut of the bank money. When she sees him tomorrow, she’ll tell him it’s all arranged for that night. He’ll walk over to the highway and the Neeley woman and I will pick him up in my car.” He looked at Hardesty. “You have that tracking transmitter?”

  “I’ve got it in my car in the visitors’ parking lot.”

  “Good. I’ll pull my car around from the staff lot and you can put it on. You need tools?”

  “No, it’s magnetic. I just clamp it to anything metal on the undercarriage. The GPTS receiver sits on my dashboard.”

  “What’s GPTS?” the deputy warden asked, frowning. Cory and Hardesty exchanged disdainful glances.

  “Global Positioning Tracking System,” Hardesty said. “I’ll explain how it works when we’re following them.”

  The deputy warden shook his head doubtfully. “I don’t know. This thing is getting pretty involved. I mean, transferring him outside the walls with no notice, then having him just walk away—suppose somebody catches him? And this business of following him with some kind of gadget stuck to the bottom of a car—I just don’t know...”

  Hardesty rose and leaned over Duffy’s desk, both hands planted palms down. “Look,” he said, calmly but firmly. “This is going to work. All we have to do is stick to the plan, see? It’s that simple. Relax and stick to the plan. Nothing will go wrong. Okay?”

  The way Hardesty was leaning over the desk, Deputy Warden Duffy could see under his open coat front the service revolver the FBI agent carried. It was an intimidating sight. “Okay,” he blurted. “Okay. We’ll just stick to the plan.”

  “Fine.” Hardesty straightened, and to Cory said, “Let’s go get your car set up.”

  After Cory and Hardesty left his office, Deputy Warden Duffy unlocked a bottom desk drawer and removed his old service revolver, a .38 S&W Special. In case anything did go wrong, he didn’t want Hardesty to be the only one there with a gun.

  Outside the prison, when Cory and Hardesty had their cars parked alongside each other, Hardesty opened a small box about the size of a deck of playing cards and began unwrapping its contents. As he did so, he asked casually, “What’s your opinion of Duffy?”

  “In what way?” Cory asked back.

  “You think he’s up for this? He seems kind of shaky to me.”

  “I noticed that,” Cory agreed.

  “How do you feel about it? The plan, I mean.”

  “I think it’s good. I think it’ll work. There’s only one thing that bothers me.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “The cut. I think I deserve a cut. All I’ve been promised out of this is a future promotion to sergeant. While you and Duffy divide a million two in cash. After all I’ve done to move this plan along, that doesn’t seem quite fair.”

  Hardesty paused in what he was doing and fixed Cory in a flat stare. “Well, tell me, Officer Evans, what do you think would be fair?”

  “If you and Duffy are splitting the money evenly, that’s six hundred thousand apiece. If each of you kicked in a hundred grand for me, you’d both still have half a mil left—”

  “And you’d have two hundred thou—”

  “Plus those sergeant’s stripes.”

  Hardesty smiled, not his professional FBI smile but a George Bush kinder, gentler smile. “I’ve been wondering when you’d make your pitch, Evans. I’ve been expecting it. You’re smart. And you’re reliable. Two things that Duffy isn’t. How would you feel about an even fifty-fifty split between you and me?”

  “How could you do that?” Cory asked with obvious interest.

  “Easy. The two of us take the money and hit the road. We lock the deputy warden, the escaped convict, and his slut girlfriend in the storage garage with a new lock I’ll bring with me.”

  Hardesty’s smile now morphed into one of almost evil delight. “How Duffy will explain things when they’re found will be his problem. You and I will be, as the old chain-gang song goes, long gone to Bowling Green.”

  “How can you manage that? You’d be a missing FBI agent.”

  Now Hardesty chuckled. “I resigned from the Bureau a year ago, when I first started working on this plan. I just never got around to telling Duffy about it. So nobody’ll be looking for me. And if you’re smart, you’ll drop off your resignation at the prison’s administrative office in the morning, effective immediately, so nobody’ll be looking for you either. We just go our separate ways, me in my car, you in yours.”

  Now it was Cory who smiled. “Only problem with that is, you can follow me with your GPTS tracker. That would make me a little nervous.”

  “Hell, I’ll give you the monitor,” Hardesty said, shrugging. “Look, kid, we’ve got to trust each other to make this work. I’m not greedy. I’ll settle for six hundred thou if you will. Have we got a deal?”

  Cory thought about Billie Sue sitting in his apartment, and Duffy sitting back in his deputy warden’s office, and Lester Dragg who had been sitting in his prison cell for two years, and all that money lying in a storage unit a hundred and twenty miles away in Modesto...

  “Yeah,” he told Hardesty, “we’ve got a deal.”

  Hardesty finished unwrapping the item he had taken from the small box and showed it to Cory. It was slightly smaller than the box, made of metal, bluish in color, and was completely covered all the way around except for a small indented switch on one edge. “This side is magnetized,” he told Cory, demonstrating by laying it gently on the side of a car door, to which it attached without falling off. “The magnetized side has an ultra-high field strength which gives it a very strong resistivity once attached, so that even if your car should hit a large bump, the device will not fall off.”

  Hardesty got a rolled-up blanket from the back seat of his car and unrolled it under the rear of Cory’s Buick. Removing his coat, he handed it to Cory to hold for him while he lay down and scooted well under the car so that only his feet remained extended. Very carefully he placed the tracking device on the side of the vehicle’s muffler and switched it on.

  “Go look at the monitor on the dashboard of my car,” he called to Cory. “Tell me if the screen has turned from black to blue.”

  Hardesty watched Cory’s feet at he walked round to Hardesty’s car. While Cory was so occupied, Hardesty removed a second tracker, already unwrapped, from his trouser pocket, switched that one on also, and attached it to the opposite side of the muffler from the first one.

  “The screen is blue,” Cory called over.

  “Okay, good.” Hardesty scooted back out from under Cory’s car and pulled the blanket out, rolling it back up and tossing it into his car again. With his coat back on, he showed Cory how the tracking monitor on his dashboard worked. It was about the size of a paperback book, with most of its front being taken up by a small screen. Slowly turning a global-assist dial, he had Cory watch while a map materialized and a white blip blinked on and off, indicating exactly where Cory’s Buick was parked—right next to them. “Now I’ll always know where you are until this thing we’re doing is over,” he said with a wink. Unless, he thought, Cory double-crossed him and removed the first tracker. I
n which case, he would still know where Cory was, by simply changing the monitor’s frequency to the second tracker. As a former longtime FBI agent, Hardesty knew that a man couldn’t be too careful when dealing with dishonest people.

  Billie Sue Neeley was not, as Cory imagined, sitting in Cory’s apartment waiting for him, but instead was in her own shabby little Motel 7 room preparing for her part in the escape from prison of Lester Dragg.

  One of the main things in her preparation was to count how much money she had left of the $20,000 Lester had given her to subsist on in the event that after the bank robbery that had gone so badly they did not successfully escape to Mexico. Immediately following his getaway with the two canvas sacks of cash, Lester had marshaled up a rare presence of mind and located a storage facility in which to conceal the loot, even purchasing a heavy-duty combination padlock from a selection on sale in the rental office.

  In the garage-size unit, he had used a pocket knife he habitually carried to cut open one of the locked canvas money bags and remove $20,000 in mixed unmarked currency, which he subsequently boxed up at a nearby private post office and mailed to Billie Sue Neeley care of General Delivery in Modesto. All this was accomplished in one hour immediately following his getaway from the bank. His hastily formed plan was to escape to Mexico, lie low for a while on several hundred dollars he had taken for expenses, then when things cooled down following the holdup send Billie Sue back to Modesto to pick up the package at General Delivery. They would then go somewhere and live off that money until it was safe enough to retrieve the bulk of the loot from the rental facility.