Prince of Thieves

by Chuck Hogan

  "Was he the driver?"

  "I don't... no, I don't think he was. He wasn't-- because I was on the left, and his voice came from the right front."

  "Would you say he was in charge?"

  "I don't know. I know he did the talking then."

  "What about the one next to you?"

  She lifted the lap of her skirt to cross her legs, and Frawley noticed that her shoes were gone, just dirty stockinged feet. "I think there might have been tension."

  "Between them? How so?"

  "The angry one, he was the one who wanted to take me."

  "From the bank. And the others?"

  "One of them questioned him-- I'm not sure, it happened so fast. I think it was the one who sat next to me."

  "So the angry one, as you call him, he takes your license."

  "And then the side door opened. The one next to me helped me out."

  "Door slid open or opened out?"

  "I... I don't remember."

  "And the one next to you-- you say he 'helped you out'?"

  "Just that-- I was afraid of falling. I was afraid of everything. But he didn't let me fall."

  "So he didn't pull you from the van?"

  "No. He grabbed my arm and I went. It didn't feel like I had a choice."

  "Did he lift you down, walk you down?"

  "I wasn't-- I mean, of course I was scared, I was very scared, terrified." She uncrossed her legs, sitting still. "But it wasn't, like... I didn't think he was... maybe I was naive. If it was the angry one taking me, I would never have left the van on my own. I wouldn't have been able to walk."

  "Okay, slow down. Did you get a sense of his size?"

  "Yes. He was big."

  "Big as in strong?"

  "As in strong, tall."

  "Would you say he was friendly?"

  She picked up on Frawley's implication. "No. Impersonal. Just, not angry."

  "Okay. So you're out of the van."

  "I'm out of the van, and we're walking fast. He's got me by the arm. The ocean stunk, really foul, and the wind was hard. I thought I was at the airport-- I heard planes-- but it wasn't a runway because the ground was sand around my feet. It was a beach. And basically he told me to walk to the water until I felt it on my toes, and not to take off the blindfold until then. It was so windy, and the sand was blowing up, airplanes screaming overhead-- I could barely hear him. But then suddenly my arm was free and I was on my own. I know I stood there for like a minute, idiotically, until I realized I had to be walking. I took very short steps-- not even steps really, dragging my feet through the cold sand, arms out in front of me, because I had this image of myself stepping off a cliff. It took, literally, forever. The longest walk of my life. Another plane roared overhead, a rising roaring, a terrible noise, like pulling all the air up with it-- and then the sand was different and I felt water washing around my heels. I pushed off the blindfold and I was alone. And I had only walked maybe, thirty feet." The toes of one foot rubbed the heel of the other as she looked at her ruined stockings. "Why did they take away my shoes in the first place?"

  "To keep you from kicking or running, don't you think?"

  She reached for the water and swallowed some down, her hand shaking more now. "My first day of kindergarten, I pitched a fit when my mother tried to leave, and Mrs. Webly took away my new patent leather shoes as punishment. And just like that, I stopped crying." She rubbed at her stained fingers.

  Frawley let her burn off more residual adrenaline, then focused her on the robbery itself. She took him through it with mixed results, returning again and again to the garish black stitches on their masks. Tears pushed to her eyes but did not spill as she recounted Davis Bearns's beating at the hands of the "angry" bandit. "He had fallen... he was just sagging off the chair... and that one just kept hitting him..."

  "Did you see Mr. Bearns activate the alarm?"

  She reached for her Poland Spring again but held the bottle without opening it, watching water slosh around inside. Car-wreck eyes. Something was up, but he couldn't tell if it was her account or just trauma bleeding through.

  "No," she answered softly.

  The foot traffic outside the break-room door had quieted. "Ms. Keesey, are you sure you don't want to go somewhere and get checked out?"

  "I'm sure. I'm fine."

  "It was a long ride. And you said yourself, you can't really account for the entire trip."

  "I just... spaced. I shut down, that's all."

  "It's available to you now. It couldn't hurt."

  Her eyes came up on him, cooler, assertive. "Nothing happened."

  Frawley nodded. "Okay."

  "But that's what everyone's going to think, isn't it?"

  He tried to distract her. "Is someone coming here to-- "

  "He rubbed his gun against my butt." She blinked a few times, fighting back tears and exhaustion. "The angry one. While we were standing at the vault. He said some things, told me what he wanted to do to me. That is all."

  Frawley started off shaking his head, shrugging, searching for something to say, then ended up just nodding. "Do you want to tell me what he said?"

  Her smile was fierce and cutting. "Not particularly."

  "Okay," said Frawley. "Okay."

  "Now you're looking at me like I'm some stupid..."

  "No, no, no."

  "Like I'd jump in a van with anybody."

  "No. Look-- "

  He reached over for his tape recorder. In fact he had nothing to say to her. He only hoped the act of pressing STOP would provide a distraction.

  She sat there breathing deeply, thinking deeply. "When I was walking to the ocean... I thought of nothing. Nothing, no one. But in the van, driving, blindfolded like that-- I saw my life. I saw myself as I was, as I am, my life up until this day. Today-- it's my birthday."

  "I see," said Frawley.

  "Sounds crazy. Just another day, I know. I don't know why it matters." She crossed her arms, her stockinged foot bobbing. "It doesn't matter."

  A quick thank-you and a handshake could have ended it there if she weren't still wearing his coat.

  "Look," Frawley said. "I've seen people-- bank customers standing in line to cash their check when a two-time loser comes through the door and announces a robbery-- who come away never looking at life the same. People think of bank robbing as a victimless crime, an insured crime, but when a teller gets a gun pointed in her face-- that can change a person's life forever. I'm only telling you this so you can prepare yourself."

  "I haven't even cried yet-- "

  "The adrenaline's fading, you're probably going to feel a little depressed for a while. Sort of like mourning-- just let it happen. It's normal. Some people bottom out all at once, others just gradually get better until one day they don't wake up thinking about it. For a little while, you'll see these guys behind every closed door. But you will get better."

  She was staring at him, rapt, as though he were turning over tarot cards. He knew he had to watch himself here. A pretty girl, hurt, vulnerable. Taking advantage of that would have been like pocketing the bait bills from the vault. She was his vault now, his vic.

  "And stay off the Diet Coke," he added. "No caffeine or alcohol, that's key. Stick with water. In the breast pocket of my jacket, you'll find my card."

  She fished one out as he stood. "What about my car?"

  "You should be able to pick it up whenever. It'll take a hand-washing to get all the fingerprint dust off. If you don't have spare keys, you should be able to get them from your dealer."

  She curled her toes. "And my shoes?"

  "Those, we'll have to hold on to for a while. Crime lab people, that's how they are. If they could wrap you up in a paper bag and put you on a shelf for a few weeks, they would."

  "Might not be such a bad idea." She slipped out of his jacket as she stood, smoothing the sleeves before returning it to him. "Thank you." She read his card. "Agent Frawley."

  "No problem." He dropped it over his arm, its tempti
ng warmth. "And don't worry about those threats. Just focus on yourself."

  She nodded, looking at the door, not yet moving. "Actually, my license-- it had my old address anyway."

  No point in telling her that the bandits had likely been following her for weeks before that morning. Frawley felt up his jacket for a pen. "Let me get your current."

  * * *

  FRAWLEY WATCHED HER HUG a pink-faced, white-haired man in a pin-striped suit inside the door fan.

  "Seemed like a good wit," said Dino. "You want to handle the summary narrative?"

  Frawley shook his head, still watching her. "Gotta do my 430 case-initiation form for D.C."

  "Uh-oh," said Dino, coming up closer to Frawley. "That look in his eyes."

  Frawley shook his head, watching daughter and father walk past the front windows and away. "I was ready to write her off completely, except..."

  "C'mon. I can take it."

  "Except that she moved about a year ago. The address we had is out-of-date."

  "So she has a new address. And?"

  Frawley turned back, watching the wise smile dawn on Dino's seen-it-all face.

  "Nah," Dino said, playing at disbelief. "Can't be."

  Frawley nodded. "Charlestown."

  3

  The Split

  DOUG CARRIED A HAM and cheese sub from the Foodmaster out across Austin Street and up Old Rutherford Avenue to the O'Neil Memorial Ice Skating Rink.

  "Hey, hon," said the oaken woman smoking behind the rentals counter, and Doug waved hello with a genial smile that belied his down mood. Nailed to the wall behind her was a yellowed newspaper photo of Doug in his Charlestown High hockey uniform, which he took care to ignore.

  The rink inside was only half-lit, Boston Bruins and Charlestown Youth Hockey rafter flags hanging high over the day-care kids leaning on milk crates and chop-stepping their way around the overweight instructor in a slow parade. Two teachers stood outside the boards, sloppy, elephant-legged neighborhood girls in long shirts and stretch pants who checked out Doug as he passed them for the skate-scored bleachers.

  Jem and Gloansy were halfway up the risers where the bleachers ended at center ice, splitting a sausage-and-burger pizza and drinking out of paper-bagged bottles of beer the shape of artillery shells.

  "What are you two pedophiles up to?" said Doug, rapping their fists and sitting one row above them.

  Freddy "Gloansy" Magloan of the Mead Street Magloans wore the same splotchy freckles that were the birthright of his seven brothers and sisters. His face was jaw-heavy, jocular and dumb, his ears so mottled they were tan. His pale hands were tarnished with the same sun rust.

  Jimmy "Jem" Coughlin of the Pearl Street Coughlins was all shoulders and arms, his head a small squash under swept-back hair that was thick and old-penny brown. The pronounced ridge beneath his nose didn't help, and then there were those blue-white snowflake eyes. The Jem machine operated at two speeds: Mirth or Menace. The gang of knuckles around his emerald-studded gold Claddagh ring were still purple and swollen from his tune-up of the assistant manager.

  "Here's the criminal mastermind now," said Jem. "Where's the Monsignor?"

  "Coming," said Doug, setting his bag down over some ancient racist knife-scratchings.

  "Cheryl, man," said Gloansy, crooking his head at the teacher with the dark, frizzy hair squeezed off in a leopard-print scrunchy. "Ever I see her, I think of third-grade class picture-- Duggy, right? Front row and center. Little House on the Prairie dress with ruffles, pink plastic shoes. Hands folded, legs crossed tight at the ankles."

  "Last time that happened," chewed Jem.

  Doug remembered one day in fourth grade, coming out of school to find Cheryl waiting. To kiss him, she said, which she did-- before shoving him backward off a curb and running home laughing, leaving him scratching his head about girls for the next few years. Home for her, then as now, was the town-within-a-town of the Bunker Hill Projects, a brick maze of boxy welfare apartments whose architects had taken the word bunker to heart. A couple of years ago her younger brother, known around Town as Dingo, got dusted and leaped off the Mystic River Bridge, catching a good shore breeze and only missing his mother's gravel roof by two buildings. One of the black kids tripping over the ice out there now was Cheryl's.

  "Think about her mouth and where it's been," said Jem.

  "Don't," said Gloansy, his own mouth full.

  "That girl could give a plastic soup spoon gonorrhea."

  Gloansy said, garbled, "Let me swallow first, for fuck's sake."

  "You know she had to take a Breathalyzer once, came back blue-line pregnant?" Jem took a mouthful of beer and gargled it. "Think of Gloansy's shower drain trap, all gooey and hairy-- that's Cheryl's tonsils."

  "For Christ!" protested Gloansy, choking down his food.

  Desmond Elden entered the rink, muscled though not to the extent of Jem or Doug, but with an added bookishness, thanks to his thick-rimmed Buddy Holly eyeglasses. He wore lineman's boots, fading jeans, and a denim work shirt with the Nynex logo over the pocket, his fair hair matted down from wearing a phone company helmet all morning.

  Dez gave Cheryl and her posse the courtesy of a Howzitgoin' before mounting the bleachers, his insulated lunch sack in hand.

  Jem said, "I should dock you just for being polite."

  Dez sat down one riser below them. "What, you didn't even say hello?"

  "Fuckin' softie," said Jem. "Anything with chicks."

  Doug said, "Where'd you put the truck?"

  "Foodmaster parking lot. Cruiser there, so I walked the long way around, just in case." Dez unzipped the nylon bag between his knees and pulled out a thick sandwich wrapped in wax paper, smiling. "Ma made meat loaf last night," he said, then bit in big. "Gotta snap to. I'm due in Belmont in like forty minutes, install a ISDN line."

  Jem took a long pull on his beer and pointed at Dez. "That's why I hadda swear off work. Too many commitments."

  Gloansy toasted that. "Amen, brother."

  Doug cracked open his Mountain Dew. "So let's do this."

  Jem ripped a burp and none of the kids on the ice even turned their heads. Doug liked the rink for its awful acoustics. He was worried more and more about surveillance around Town, but no bug could outwit those rumbling refrigerators.

  "Not much to say," said Jem. "Looks like we're out clean. Newspapers got everything wrong, as usual. Nothing went sour until the end, when everything did."

  Gloansy said, "Duggy, man, you said banks train their people not to hit any alarms until after."

  "They do. It's a safety issue. Plus banks carry kidnap and extortion insurance, and shit like that voids it."

  Jem shrugged. "So the homo pissed himself. Thing is, it shouldn't of happened. Could of been real fucking bad. Time to settle up now, and these things get counted. Gloansy, my friend, it's time to pay the piper. You're docked."

  Gloansy's face fell, his open mouth full, looking at Jem. "What the fuck?"

  "It was your watch. You knew Monsignor Dez had to leave the vault and teller bells hardwired."

  "I'm getting fucking docked? Me?"

  "All you had to do. Keep the citizens down on the floor and away from the bells."

  "Fuck you." Gloansy was teary, he was so shocked. "Fuck you, all I had to do? Who boosted the work van? You think you fuckin'... think you walked to and from this job? And who torched the rides after the delayed switch?"

  "Who was watching that kid at the ATM instead of the bankers at his feet?"

  "Fuckin'... so who delayed the switch? You're the one that brought the manager along. Why'n't you dock yourself?"

  "Plan to. Same as you. A hundred-dollar whack to the each of us."

  "A hundred-- " Gloansy's face relaxed, pulling back into a fuck-you frown. He punched Jem's left triceps hard, saying, "Fuckin' ass munch."

  Jem smiled tongue-out and slapped Gloansy's cheek. "Fuckin' this close to bawling, Shirley Temple."

  "Fuck you," said Gloansy, shaking it off, all bett
er now, taco-ing another sloppy slice into his freckled mouth.

  Doug took a bite out of his sandwich, so fucking tired of the whole fucking thing.

  "So, the magic number," said Jem, tearing open packets of salt over the closed pizza box. "This is per, now, and net expenses." With his finger he traced out a five-digit sum: 76750.