The Getaway (Sam Archer 2)

by Barber, Tom

  The workout upped in intensity as the five minutes went on, Ortiz’s stamina not dropping at all. She was in impressive shape. If anything, she actually gained momentum, her yells growing louder as she hammered violent combo after combo, strike after strike, into the pads Farrell had strapped to his arms. On the exercise equipment behind them, Archer noticed a couple of people turning at the noise, then looking away in the next instant, not wanting the woman in the cage to see them staring. After another minute or so, the buzzer sounded and the round ended.

  ‘Good job!’ the old guy outside called.

  Farrell and Ortiz bumped fists, and she hunched over, catching her breath, drenched with sweat. Farrell nodded approvingly and stepped outside, pulling off the work-mitts and heading over to Archer.

  ‘She’s got a fight coming up?’ Archer asked, watching her recover from the workout.

  Farrell shook his head. ‘No. Just staying sharp.’

  Archer nodded, looking over at her inside the cage. She leaned back, hands on her hips, and glared over at him again, her chest heaving as she sucked in oxygen and as her body recovered from the exertion. She walked out of the side entrance to the cage which Farrell had opened, and the other trainer started pulling her gloves off. Farrell beckoned Archer to follow him and the two men walked over as the grey-haired corner-man pulled off the second glove. Ortiz grabbed the bottle of water resting on a chair with her white-wrapped hands and unscrewed the cap, drinking from it and sucking in gulps of oxygen.

  ‘What’s he doing here?’ she asked, panting, glaring at Archer, her accent Hispanic.

  ‘Both of you, come with me,’ Farrell said, headed for a side door and ignoring her question.

  Archer didn’t move.

  ‘Ladies first,’ he said.

  Ortiz stared at him, hostile, sweat dripping down her brow, the odd strand of hair from her corn-rows twisted and frizzed up in the air from the workout. Then she grabbed a white towel from a bench and wrapping it around her glistening shoulders, she followed her boyfriend towards the doorway, her t-shirt soaked with sweat.

  Archer followed, but made sure to keep his distance.

  The door opened onto a flight of stairs that led down through the back of the building. Farrell pushed open another door on the floor below, and walked ahead of them into a storage room.

  No one was inside. The place was dimly lit, filled with brown boxes, some of them opened, containing white towels and t-shirts with the gym logo on the front. Farrell walked on, and pushed a stack of boxes out of the way at the end of the room on the right. He reached forward and pulled a second panel open on the wall, leading to another level. It was well-camouflaged, painted cream like the rest of the wall. Archer would never have guessed it was there. Farrell led the other two down the steps. Turning, Archer realised the older man, the corner-man, had followed them to the storage room, and had shut the secret door behind them. He heard the slide of the boxes being pushed back across the doorway, hiding it once again.

  All three of them stood there in the red-brick tunnel, momentarily still, just a solitary light-bulb hanging from the ceiling providing light, the place old and damp and covered with cobwebs. Ahead of them Archer could see a thick metal door with a spin-dial lock, the kind seen on a bank vault. Farrell worked the dial three times. It clicked, and he reached for the handle, but suddenly turned, looking past his girlfriend at Archer.

  ‘You say a word to anyone about what you see in here, I’ll kill you. They’ll never find the body. Clear?’

  Archer nodded, looking him in the eye.

  Farrell looked back at him for a moment, then turned and opened the door.

  This room was a basement, but unlike the storage room it wasn’t empty. There were a series of tables and chairs in the room, light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, the place gloomy and starkly lit. Across the room Regan and Tate were sitting at two tables in front of sewing machines, each machine purring as the men fed some dark fabric underneath, the needles hammering up and down the lengths of cloth. The two of them looked up as the trio entered, and Archer saw Regan glower under the white light from the bulb above.

  ‘What the hell is he doing here?’ he asked Farrell.

  ‘He’s joining us,’ Farrell said.

  ‘What? Are you crazy? Why?’

  ‘We went for a drive yesterday. He’s ten times better than Brown ever was. He’s solid.’

  ‘Who’s Brown?’ Archer asked, interrupting.

  ‘Our old driver,’ Farrell explained. ‘Unfortunately he had a medical condition.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He couldn’t keep his mouth shut,’ Farrell said. ‘So Carmen shut it for him.’

  Across the room, Regan went to argue but Farrell cut him off.

  ‘Save it, Bill. I don’t want to hear about it,’ he said.

  Archer felt Regan’s gaze burning into him as the trio approached him and Tate. Up close, he saw that the cloth under the needle of each sewing machine belonged to two black jackets. Both of them were fully intact, no tears, no rips. It looked as if they were stitching something inside the cloth instead of mending it.

  ‘How’s it looking?’ Farrell asked Tate.

  Tate paused in his work and lifted the black jacket from the machine, raising it upright on the table and grunting from the effort. It seemed heavy. He tapped the front twice with his free hand, and it gave two metallic thunks.

  ‘Solid,’ Tate said.

  Farrell turned to Archer, pointing at the jacket.

  ‘Aramid and steel plates,’ he explained. ‘Body armour. That thing will stop a twelve gauge round, easy. Put that shit on with a bullet-proof helmet and no cop is ever going to stop you, not with their firepower. You ever see the North Hollywood shootout?’

  Archer nodded. ‘I remember. 1997, right?’

  ‘That’s right. Two guys took on the entire Los Angeles Police Department outside a bank wearing that shit. The pigs shot over six hundred rounds at them and couldn’t put them down.’

  ‘What the hell do you need it for?’

  Farrell paused a moment, then beckoned to his right.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said.

  He moved to a door across the room, Ortiz following, the towel wrapped around her shoulders, taking mouthfuls of water from the plastic bottle as she walked. While Tate got back to work with the sewing machine, Regan was still glaring at Archer, contempt and a sneer on his face.

  ‘Asshole,’ he said.

  ‘Go for a nice walk yesterday?’ Archer replied, with a grin.

  He saw the other man’s eyes narrow as he turned to follow Farrell and Ortiz into the side room to the right.

  There was just a single table and four chairs under a light hanging from the ceiling in here, the walls and ceilings unadorned and unpainted, all dusty red brick and grey cement. There were a series of wide sheets of paper on the desk, harshly illuminated by the naked bulb above.

  ‘Shut the door,’ Farrell said.

  Archer did so and glanced down at the sheets. He realised what they were.

  Blueprints.

  He looked closer. They were extensive floor plans, four pages stacked on top of each other which would mean four levels or floors. He examined the uppermost sheet. He saw designated seating areas, the boxes numbered from 1 to 428, around a central rectangular area. He saw four towers, A to D, on each corner.

  And he saw the name of the building in the top right corner of the page. Gerry’s voice echoed in his head, three words, matching the three on the blueprint.

  Madison Square Garden.

  ‘Take a seat,’ Farrell said.

  NINE

  ‘It was Carmen’s idea,’ Farrell said. Archer was sitting across from him, Ortiz was leaning against the wall. ‘We were making shit from fighting, and this place isn’t gonna make us rich any time soon. So we started casing houses over in Long Island. It was easy. The owners are hardly ever there, always on vacation in the Hamptons or stuck in some office in the city. Bypass the alarms, avo
id the places with guard-dogs and it’s Christmas. We hit four of them in a row. Take the stolen goods and valuables and trade them for cash and you’re laughing. Just like that, we made close to half a mil, easy.’

  Archer nodded, glancing up at Ortiz. She sipped her water whilst watching him closely. The harsh naked light from above was accentuating her rock-hard cheekbones and the muscles on her arms. Her dark eyes were expressionless under her brow as she stared down at him.

  ‘That was so easy that we decided to step it up,’ Farrell continued. ‘Armoured trucks, on their way to the city, running through Long Island on the I-495. Pay off someone on the inside to give you the rotas and personal info on the guards and hit them out there on the road, in the countryside, all alone. Pull up a road-block, take out the tyres, threaten their families, use their names to show you know who they are. All it takes is a bit of background work, planning and some balls and the stash is yours. Doesn’t matter how secure that truck is, you tell the guy inside you’ll kill his family if he doesn’t open up, you bet your ass he’ll open that door.’

  Archer nodded.

  ‘So then we stepped it up again. We started hitting banks.’

  ‘In the city?’

  He smiled and nodded.

  ‘Not around here. Not our own neighbourhood. But let me tell you, taking a bank, that shit’s harder. But it’s possible. Managers and tellers are ordered by their bosses to comply with any thieves’ demands, which gives us an edge. We know co-operation will happen. Make sure we’re tooled up, disguised, get the bank when the lock on the vault is off, avoid the dye packs and bait money, take the security tapes and we’re home free.’

  ‘What about the getaway car? Surely you have to ditch it? That’ll leave tracks?’

  ‘Once we get the money out and into a switch car, Tate takes the bent one over to JFK and parks it in the long-stay parking spots. Right now, there are eight of them in there, all over the lot, amongst all the other vehicles. No one’s gonna find them for months, and there’s no DNA inside that could lead back to us. We make sure of it.’

  Archer nodded.

  ‘How do you clean the money? Surely it’s still traceable?’

  ‘Once he ditches the car, Tate meets back up with us then does a trip down to Atlantic City with the stash. He stays there for a couple days, trades the money for chips in the different casinos, plays the table for peanuts, then cashes out. Untraceable. The feds and cops figure the money will reappear somewhere and they can trace it back to us. But if they try to track any of the bait money, they’ll end up tailing some fat housewife from New Jersey or some asshole with a gambling problem living in a motel on the A.C water-front.’

  Archer nodded.

  ‘Clever. So how many jobs have you pulled in total?’

  ‘Thirteen. Four houses, five trucks, four banks. We’ve made almost five million.’

  ‘I’m impressed.’

  Farrell nodded.

  ‘But we’re running out of time,’ he said. ‘There’s a shitload of heat coming in from the FBI. They’ve taken us all in, trying to work us over, find a weak link, something they can use. The lead agent is a guy called Gerrard. He’s a real asshole. Sooner or later, they’ll be waiting for us or he’ll find something to pin on me.’

  Archer glanced up at Ortiz, who was still staring down at him, her face expressionless. He pictured her striking the pads upstairs, and shifted his gaze back to Farrell.

  ‘So why not cut your losses? Get out while you’re still ahead,’ Archer said.

  ‘That’s exactly what we’re doing,’ Farrell said. ‘Come Sunday night, we’re leaving this city forever and never coming back.’

  He paused.

  ‘But we’ve got a big weekend coming up first. This one will go down in the record books. It’ll be legendary. Saturday is fight night at the Garden. There’s some big concert going on the night before. We’re gonna take the joint just before the fight and clean the place out.’

  ‘The Garden? As in Madison Square Garden?’

  ‘The very same.’

  Pause.

  ‘And you know what Sunday is?’ Farrell added.

  Archer shrugged. ‘What?’

  ‘End of the first week’s play at the U.S Open. The tennis tournament, over in Flushing Meadows on the other side of Queens. At 7 pm, an armoured truck is headed for Long Island with the takings from the first week’s play. Millions and millions of dollars. And we’re going to be waiting for them.’

  Archer looked at him, genuinely surprised.

  ‘Are you serious? Two jobs in two days?’

  ‘Dead serious. The moment after we hit the truck, we’re out of here. We’ll head down to A.C, clean the cash, then we’re going straight to Florida. Get a private jet off-radar to the Dominican, then leapfrog our way all the way to Mexico. Spend the rest of our lives sipping cocktails, living the dream on a beach somewhere, far away from here and the FBI.’

  He paused, seeing the look on Archer’s face.

  ‘You think it can’t be done?’

  ‘It sounds like a good plan. I hate to be a downer but these aren’t just liquor store hold-ups or house burglaries. You know how many cops are going to be down there at the Garden?’

  ‘Thirty five. But that works in our favour. We’ll go in as cops. We’ll blend right in.’

  ‘After you hit the tennis truck, you can’t just drive away. The NYPD and feds will put up roadblocks. They’ll comb the entire State looking for you.’

  ‘We won’t drive. We’ll fly. We’ve got a helicopter at Flushing Airport, hidden in one of the old hangars. We bought it with some of our stolen cash, and Bill’s taken lessons on how to fly it. The place is deserted. No one ever goes in there. We’ll take that down to AC and over any roadblocks, high up in the sky, undetected, right over their heads.’

  Archer looked at him, then Ortiz, who sipped her water, looking into his eyes.

  ‘Check these out,’ Farrell said, indicating to the blueprints on the table. Archer pulled his gaze from Ortiz, and looked at the sheets on the table-top. Each page was a layout of the lower levels of Madison Square Garden. The background was blue, everything on top white, and they were extensively detailed, showing every room, every area. He saw the two changing rooms, the trophy room, corporate areas, concessions stands.

  ‘Where the hell did you get these?’

  ‘Public Library.’

  Archer looked up at him. ‘You’re kidding?’

  Farrell shook his head.

  ‘New York Public Library. Withdrawn under a false name so they won’t lead back to us. These are the latest prints too. They were drawn up three months ago.’

  Archer looked at the maps. They were forensically detailed and precise, showing every nook and cranny, every side room, every exit.

  ‘The biggest fight of the year,’ Farrell continued. ‘Not in Vegas. Here. The Mecca of boxing. 20,000 seats, and not a single one of them empty. It’s going to be so busy down there that it’ll work perfectly in our favour. Like I said, we’re going in as cops, blending into the crowd. The plan is me, Carmen and Regan go-’

  ‘What about Tate?’ Archer interrupted.

  ‘He’ll be down in AC cleaning the cash we’ve got piled up. You saw the boxes upstairs?’

  Archer nodded.

  ‘Let’s just say not all of them are filled with t-shirts. All that money is backing up and we need to get that shit out of here. Tate’ll do it and get back on Sunday for the tennis truck.’

  He pointed to the highest blueprint on the table.

  ‘Anyway, me, Carmen and Regan will go in. You’ll be parked on the kerb on 33rd Street, facing east in a cop car, in uniform,’ he continued. ‘Carmen and Bill will come out first. They’ll load the first batch. They’ll come back and help me with the second load. We take the holdings, throw in the bags, then walk straight out. You get us over the water, we switch the car and get away clean and lay low.’

  ‘Alibis?’

  ‘Bought and paid for
. We’re all going to be at a fight in East Rutherford. At least ten people saw all of us there. Tate’ll make himself visible in the casinos in AC that night, so his story will check out.’

  ‘You can’t just walk into the place and take the cash. What’s your plan when you get inside?’

  ‘Never mind about that. You just worry about getting us out of there.’

  Archer thought for a moment.

  ‘And what about the Flushing job?’ he asked.

  Farrell shook his head.

  ‘Don’t worry about that either. We need you for the Garden, and that’s it.’

  Pause.

  ‘So are you in?’ Farrell said. ‘If you do this, you can either disappear or head straight back to the U.K. You can get your money out through an off-shore bank account, or stay in the country and spend it all. I don’t care.’

  ‘What’s my cut?’

  ‘Fifty thousand.’

  Archer looked at him. ‘That’s it? Two jobs, and that’s my cut?’

  ‘I need you for one job. Take it or leave it. I recommend you take it.’ Archer looked at him. Then at Ortiz, whose face hadn’t softened an inch, glaring down at him. ‘We need you pal.’

  Archer paused a suitably long time, seemingly making up his mind.

  ‘OK. I’m in.’

  Farrell nodded.

  ‘Good.’

  He rose.

  ‘You got a phone?’ he asked.

  Archer nodded and gave him the number.

  ‘I’ll be in touch,’ Farrell said. Archer got the message. The meeting was over. Without a word, he rose and moved to the door.

  ‘One more thing. I meant what I said,’ Farrell said from behind him. ‘You say a word to anyone about this, I’ll kill you myself. You’ll join that asshole Brown and that fed from D.C who got his head blown off.’

  Archer kept staring at the door.