Prince of Thieves

by Chuck Hogan

  As the courier approaches the can, a small playing-card-sized parabolic mirror mounted near the door handle gives him an eye line on anyone behind him moving into the ambush zone. Two knocks and the right rear door is unlocked. He pulls it open and promptly loads the white sacks into the hold. He stows the empty dolly and shuts the door.

  He walks to the passenger door, plucking out his ear wires. The side door is unlocked by the driver and the courier climbs inside. 11:46.

  The truck sits for four more minutes while the driver double-checks the deposit receipts, entering bar codes into Pinnacle's tracking system.

  You pull away during this time. Armored-truck guards are vigilant for tails, and a well-trained driver will spot your car driving away and make a mental note of its color and make.

  You drive to the bottom of Grandview and back along Forbes to the parking lot of the Sheraton Tara. There, you and your partner switch into a work car and wait.

  The can comes rolling along Forbes Road past you toward the mall. You see that the driver is a black man in his fifties. With no vehicle following him out of the parking lot of The Braintree 10, he starts to relax, falling in with the traffic, maintaining a safe and reasonable distance from the other vehicles. You pull out a few cars behind him.

  The interior of the armored-truck cab is wide but unremarkable, a cross between a police cruiser and a long-haul truck. Aside from the hypnotizing drone of the engine and the occasional radio chatter, the cab is essentially soundproof. Armoring and special glass make it like driving inside a vacuum. For such a boxy, bulky, dense vehicle-- armored trucks average between three and four miles to the gallon-- the suspension is exceptionally smooth, and driver and courier feel no bumps.

  Guards are often retirees from the MBTA or the Turnpike Authority, usually with a military background, earning between 65K and 90K per year. The shuttle between deliveries and pickups, or jumps, is the safest and least stressful part of their workday.

  You remain two or three car lengths back from the truck, in a different lane when possible. When the can pulls into a parking lot for another pickup, you radio your freckled friend, who has been circling you in another stolen work car, and who then enters the lot and eyeballs the can. One of his talents is pretending to be asleep.

  Then it is your turn to circle and wait. Your other partner, the one riding with you, unscrews the cap on the empty mayonnaise jar you brought for such eventualities and relieves himself into it. Part of you can't help but think how pleased he is at any excuse to whip out his dick in public, and how proud he must be at the duration of his piss, the singing sound it makes against the jar glass. You tolerate his satisfied sigh.

  Your remote friend radios you in code, giving you the direction of the can, and you resume the tail as before.

  Five more jumps. Some of them quick change orders, some pickups.

  Another dozen jumps. Working your way through Holbrook, into Brockton.

  Ten more. Almost four o'clock now. After a supermarket jump in downtown Brockton, the can rides west for a while, ten minutes without a stop, twenty. You know, because it is your job to know, that the Pinnacle armored-car facility is hidden behind double security fences in rural Easton up ahead. Your day's work is done. You pull off when the can gets close.

  * * *

  DEZ WASHED HIMSELF LIKE a marked bill in order to get free. He took a taxi from Sully Square out to Harvard Square in Cambridge, bought a ticket to a late-afternoon matinee at the Brattle Theater, sat for first fifteen minutes of a subtitled Hong Kong action movie, then carried his popcorn out through the curtained doorway at the front of the theater and exited into the side alley off Mifflin Place, sliding into Doug's waiting Caprice.

  Doug had tailed Dez's taxi over from Charlestown himself. No one else followed. He kept his eye on his mirrors now, making switchbacks and U-turns just in case.

  "Either they're off me," said Dez, "or they've got powers of invisibility."

  "You just keep cruising that bank in Chestnut Hill," Doug told him. "Go in whenever you can and make change."

  "I've eaten lunch in my truck across the street every day this week. How's the other thing coming?"

  "Good. Trying to figure out what weekend now, pick a movie. Going over Premiere magazine's 'Summer Movie Preview' issue like it's the Racing Form, trying to pick a winner."

  "Striptease," said Dez.

  "I know. Demi Moore. My dick already bought a ticket. But June twenty-eighth, that's not soon enough."

  "Mission: Impossible. Theme song remade by Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen."

  "Yeah, Tom Cruise got my vote. But that's Memorial Day weekend. Jem wants it now, now, now."

  "You don't need to rush it."

  "No. But it's coming together fast on its own."

  "As good as you thought?"

  "Check my math. Theater's main screens seat, say, five hundred capacity. Two good afternoon matinees, plus the seven and ten p.m. shows, that's two thousand Saturday and two thousand Sunday, plus another thou Friday night. Five thousand numb asses per theater, say there's four outta ten screens running the newest movies. Just four out of the ten screens-- twenty thousand asses and mouths. Eight bucks per ass at night, five seventy-five per in the day, and then there's the food. A popcorn, Pepsi, and Goobers alone will take you up over ten dollars, but then there's a Pizzeria Uno and Taco Bell in the lobby-- with no restaurants nearby. Half a mil, easy, that's our floor, Dez. With a quarter to you for just playing decoy."

  * * *

  JEM'S PART WAS THE supply: weapons, vests, clothes, masks.

  Gloansy's was the vehicles, the work cars and the switch cars.

  Doug was the planner, the architect, the author. He was also the worrier, the perfectionist, and the cautious one. The sober one, trusted for his sense of self-preservation.

  The next few days found him being super careful, spying the can guards on different routes, unrelated to the movie theater, just getting the nuances of their routine down. Also, he needed to satisfy himself that they were not plants, not FBI agents playing guards, paranoid as he was that the G was onto them. He needed to be certain that these were real wage earners with families to go home to at night. So he cooped down the road from Pinnacle's vault facility-- at a safe distance from their cameras and fences; it was not unknown for these depots to hold eight figures on an overnight-- and eyeballed the passing cars, looking for the guards heading home. A plum Saturn coupe stopped his heart once, but it wore no Breathe! bumper sticker.

  He spotted the guard with the white brush mustache behind the wheel of a blue Jeep Cherokee and fell in behind him, trailing the Jeep to Randolph, to a modest split-level near an elementary school. He watched the uniformed guard leaf through his mail in the driveway as a Toyota Camry pulled in behind, the wife returning home from work.

  Doug watched the guy with his happy, broad-hipped wife, walking to his aging house and overgrown lawn, and saw all the things this guy had to lose. Casing a life was different now, post-Claire Keesey. But these same pangs of guilt gave him an idea, and suddenly he knew exactly how they were going to pull this job.

  He got lost trying to get back out to I-93 and found himself stuck in downtown Canton, Claire Keesey's hometown. He drove past the high school, past leafy trees and widely spaced houses with pampered lawns, the evening becoming too pregnant with associations. He felt chased as he steered out fast for the highway, antsy about returning home. Instead, he detoured to The Braintree 10.

  He circled the bottom of the hill first, below the complex. The twin screens of an old drive-in theater remained there, decomposing, the property now split between a driving range and the parking lot for park-and-fly shuttle service to Logan Airport. Near a row of batting cages was a road barred by steel swing gates, secured by a key lock and chain. Doug drove back up to the theater parking lot, finding the outlet there, also gated and locked, the unused road winding down the weedy hillside to the batting cages in an S. Both Forbes and Grandview were narrow, twin-lane ro
ads, the parking lot a nightmare to get into or out of during weekend prime time, making the emergency road necessary. Its direct access set Doug's mind jumping again.

  He went inside and bought a ticket like a citizen, then laid out another fin for a personal pan pizza. He killed time wandering around the wide lobby, spotting an office door marked No Admittance half-hidden behind a three-part Independence Day cardboard display showing the White House being blown to smithereens. On one wall was a framed portrait of the young manager, Mr. Cidro Kosario, thin-necked and smiling in an ill-fitting suit, alongside his welcome message and his signature endorsing General Cinemas' "Commitment to Theater Excellence."

  An advance poster for The Rock-- an action movie about an old man who escaped from prison-- worked on Doug like an omen, scaring him into his theater. The last preview before Mulholland Falls was for Twister. When the audience cheered a cow flying across the screen and continued to chatter about it over the feature's opening credits, Doug saw a big opening weekend coming and smiled there in the dark.

  * * *

  NEW HAMPSHIRE WAS THE state where Massachusetts residents shopped to avoid paying a sales tax. It was also the state where Massachusetts car thieves went to steal cars.

  The reason for this was LoJack, the vehicle-recovery service, a transponder unit installed inside cars that pinged its location to police once the tracking service was activated. Not a problem for joyriders and chop shops with a couple of hours' turnover time, but if you needed work vehicles for anything longer than an overnight, no good. LoJack used no window decals to warn thieves, and the transponder and its battery backup together were about the size of a sardine tin, small enough to be hidden anywhere inside the car.

  Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut all used LoJack, but not New Hampshire or Vermont. So: boost the car in nearby New Hampshire, then slap on a pair of stolen Massachusetts plates.

  Doug drove Gloansy up-country. They needed three vehicles total for the job, and today's target was the work car. They were looking for a minivan with tinted windows, Gloansy favoring the Dodge Caravan, though he would settle for a Plymouth Voyager or similar. Even a Ford Windstar, though not the new 1996 model. Ford had begun embedding transponders in the plastic heads of ignition keys, meaning that, even with the steering wheel column punched, the starting system remained disabled without a corresponding key. Gloansy carried a volt meter to defeat the system, but measuring the resistance between wires under the dash and joining the matching resistors cost him an extra thirty seconds, a lifetime in daylight car theft.

  "Fucking with my livelihood," said Gloansy, working the Caprice's factory radio, the stations dying one by one as they pushed farther north. "Like when robots put guys out of work at the factory-- trying to make me obsolete."

  Doug said, "What's a car thief with a young family to support gonna do?"

  "Start hijacking, I guess. Keep the keys and roll the driver into the trunk. Then car owners'll be begging to get rid of these immobilizer systems."

  "All of us," said Doug, "getting outmoded. These wires." Old telegraph poles spaced the country road, phone wires running taut. "Money juicing through them as we speak, right there over our heads. Credit card money, dollar signs flowing like electricity. Gotta be some way to tap into that. Turn all this one-zero-zero bullshit into actual cash."

  Gloansy had bought a couple of sour pickles at a country store and was chomping them like bananas, wiping his fingers on the Caprice's blue velour seats. "Like how?"

  "You got me. When it comes to that, then I'll know I'm done."

  They found what they needed in a parking lot outside a stadium-sized Wal-Mart. A dull green Caravan with tinted back windows, parked a quarter mile from the store. The new Caravans had sliding doors on both sides, as well as removable rear seats, which was better than perfect.

  A child's car seat in back was considered bad luck by many boosters, but not Gloansy. He whistled his way across the lot to the Caravan's door, working with dried Krazy Glue on his fingers to queer his prints. It was too warm for gloves. A baseball jacket in early May was suspect enough, but he needed the bulky sleeves for his tools.

  Gloansy was at the door only a few seconds before popping the handle. He was a good minute behind the wheel before the engine started up, long for Gloansy, but then Doug saw him toss a red Club steering-wheel lock in back and understood. The Club itself was basically impervious, but the steering wheel owners clamped it to was made of soft rubber tubing, so Gloansy left the Club intact and cut through the wheel around it. Then he punched the ignition barrel on the steering with a slide hammer, started up the Caravan, and rolled past Doug without a wave, only the merest hint of a froglike smile.

  Gloansy: A good enough guy, and yet there was something slick and sweaty about him that threatened to rub off, his surface eagerness masking something cold and reptilian beneath, an interior life just smart enough to keep itself hidden from view. It was no surprise to Doug that Gloansy had been the first of them to father a kid, but Monsignor Dez would have been Doug's money pick as the first one to get married.

  * * *

  DOUG STOOD TWISTED OFF the curb, leaning across Shyne's doll legs, trying to get the frayed blue Caprice seat-belt strap fed through the back of the car seat so that he could secure the clasp. He tried hard not to curse, ignoring the little girl's unwavering gaze and her sour breath, ignoring even her hand rubbing his cheek, his neck, his hair-- all of it infuriating as he tried to make this fucking thing fit.

  Krista turned around in the front seat. "Sometimes you gotta kneel on the thing. Kneel on it."

  He was a fucking centimeter away from catching the lock when Shyne slipped her finger inside his ear, and in shaking her off, he whacked his head on the car ceiling and roared like he was going to explode. She didn't cry, nothing, her face still, her skin waxy like pesticide-glazed fruit. There was a slight odor of spoil about her, of sour juice, of urine.

  Not his child. Not his problem.

  He dropped all his weight on the sides of the seat and with one final effort made the clasp bite, then ducked out fast and arched his back, feeling those red arrows of pain from the TV commercials. Shyne looked at him the same way she looked at everything: as though for the first time. He swung the car door shut on her and she didn't jump.

  "Hell is Jem?"

  Krista looked out her open window. "No idea."

  Doug went around to his side, scanning the street as he went, then climbed in, slowly rebending his back.

  "I really appreciate this, Duggy," Krista said, sitting next to him like she belonged there. "Shyne's had this cough, and the only appointment they could give me was right away. I felt funny asking."

  Right. "How's she doing on those other things?" he ventured, starting up the engine. "You were going to get her checked out."

  "She's doing great now, she's really starting to come along. Out of her shell. She's just shy. Like her mother, right?"

  Doug nodded at the attempted joke, pulling out past Jem's blue Flamer parked curbside. "There's his car."

  "Yeah," she said. "I don't know. He's probably hungover anyway."

  "I thought you said he wasn't home."

  "If he was, I mean." She looked out her window, close-bitten fingers at her worm-thin lips. "He's not reliable. Not like you."

  Doug dropped fast to Medford Street, still hoping to sit out the morning in the parking lot of The Braintree 10. Shyne watched him through his rearview with that same passive, sad-eyed gaze.

  "Gloansy's wedding's coming up, huh?" said Krista.

  Doug understood now the nature of this medical emergency. He turned out along the wharves, pissed, pushing the Caprice.

  "Nice, you being Nicky's godfather." She flicked at the musky orange Hooters deodorizer swaying from the cigarette lighter. "Jem says you might be going alone."

  "Did he."

  "Joanie said we bridesmaids can wear whatever we want, except white. So I bought this new dress I saw downtown, dripping off a manne
quin. Backless, black. Comes down like this." Her hands were moving low over her chest, but he didn't turn to look. "Rides up high on the sides of each leg. Like a dancing dress, but formal. Sexy."

  He rolled under the highway past the Neck, crossing into Somerville toward the free clinic, trying to be impervious. There is no way to compromise the hulk of an armored vehicle without at the same time destroying its contents.

  "A cocktail dress," she went on. "Which is funny, because I won't be drinking any cocktails in it. I gave up drinking, Duggy." She was watching him, her body shuddering with the potholes. "This time for good."

  Doug thinking, The can is only vulnerable through its human operators...

  22

  The Visit