Cash Landing

by James Grippando

  “What?”

  “It was about money.”

  “You mean our money?”

  He didn’t answer. She looked at him with concern. “Ruban, are we in money trouble again?”

  The fear in her voice was eerily reminiscent of the bad old days of lying awake at night and wondering how much longer they’d be able to make their mortgage payments, wondering if the bank would work with them, if they could avoid foreclosure, if tomorrow would be the day that the MDPD officers would show up with a court-issued writ to haul them and their possessions out into the front yard. It was a journey they’d taken together, and he’d been honest with her every grim step of the way. This was different. Savannah wasn’t part of this.

  “Jeffrey messed up royally this time,” he said.

  “Does he need to borrow money? Don’t give him money to buy drugs.”

  “No. It’s not that.”

  Ruban reached for his smartphone on the nightstand, brought up the front page of the Miami Herald, and handed it to her. She read it to herself, her confused face aglow from the LCD screen.

  “Are you saying Jeffrey is involved in this?”

  “Yes,” said Ruban. “Jeffrey and your uncle.”

  “Oh, no. I swear, I wish my scumbag uncle had never gotten out of prison. There is not a member of my family that he hasn’t shamed or hurt. This has always been my biggest fear—that Jeffrey would get mixed up with him.”

  “He’s mixed up big-time.”

  She glanced at the display, her eyes widening. “It says here the heist could be in the millions of dollars. They stole all that?”

  “With some other guys.”

  “Who?”

  “One of Pinky’s friends,” he said, a half-truth. “They made off with nine-point-six million dollars.”

  “Where does it say that?” she asked, checking the article again.

  “It doesn’t say it.”

  “Then how do you know?”

  If he was going to tell her, this was his opportunity. But it was hard to come clean when part of him still couldn’t believe that he’d even attempted such a thing, let alone gotten away with it. Even after he’d held the money in his own hands, Ruban Betancourt as mastermind of Miami’s biggest heist in history didn’t feel at all like the truth.

  “That’s where I was all night,” he said. “I helped them hide their share of the money.”

  She sat up, practically jackknifing in the bed. “Ruban—no!”

  Her reaction made him jump, and it pushed him even farther toward the new truth. “What was I supposed to do, Savannah? The two of them showed up at our house with big bags of money, the cops were looking for them, and neither one of them had any idea what to do.”

  “They should turn it back in.”

  “You can’t just give back the money and make this go away. This is no different than robbing a bank, and your uncle had a gun. Using a firearm to steal this much money could land both of them in prison for the rest of their lives.”

  “Oh, my poor mother.”

  “We don’t have to tell your mother. We don’t have to tell anyone.”

  She fell back into the pillow. “What are we going to do?”

  “It’s under control for now. They promised not to spend the money and to keep it hidden until we figure out what to do.”

  “You can’t trust them to keep that promise!”

  They were on the same page, but he needed to allay her concerns. “It’s fine. The money is buried in sealed bags.”

  “All of it?”

  One more lie wouldn’t hurt. “Yes. All of it.”

  “But if you helped them hide the money, that makes us part of it.”

  He took her hand. “No. It makes me part of it. Not you.”

  Even in the darkness, he could see that he’d touched her heart. She sat right back up and held him tight.

  “Oh, honey. My family is so screwed up, and you spend so much of your life picking up the pieces. But this is way more than I can ask.”

  “No, we’re all family. I’ll make this right. Just don’t tell Jeffrey or your uncle that you know anything. They trust me on this. If they find out I told you, they will dig up that money and all hell will break loose.”

  “I won’t say a word. But please don’t let this drag on. We have to decide something quick.”

  She embraced him tightly. Ruban lay back into the pillow. Savannah nuzzled up against him and laid her head on his chest.

  “Do you really think you can fix this?”

  “Yes. We’ll be fine. Just remember: keep this between us. I’ll handle it.”

  “Okay. I promise.” She pulled away.

  One more thing to add to the list on an unbelievable day: she’d bought it.

  Ruban was dead tired, but he couldn’t close his eyes. As he lay staring at the ceiling, the truth started to replay in his mind. He and Pinky rushing into the warehouse. The money grab. The getaway. He shook off those unforgettable images and glanced over at his wife. The curve of Savannah’s body beneath the bedsheet. She was right beside him, as close as ever—as close as the bag of money, the two million dollars that he’d dropped and left lying on the warehouse floor.

  Don’t think about that.

  He reached over and rested his hand gently on her hip. “Are you okay now?” he asked.

  “I’m much better.”

  Ruban took a deep breath and let it out. The air conditioning cycled off. The bedroom fell quiet.

  “Me, too,” he said into the darkness.

  Chapter 5

  On Monday morning Andie and Agent Littleford paid a visit to Braxton Security. A fleet of armored trucks was stationed less than two miles from the Miami Fed, the vaults of which were officially short 9.6 million dollars. Andie wondered if the crooks might be right across the street at Doral Country Club, smoking cigars and thumbing their noses at law enforcement from the manicured greens of the “Blue Monster,” one of the most famous golf courses in the world.

  “You golf, Andie?” asked Littleford.

  Andie glanced out the passenger-side window as they cruised past the groomed fairways. “Nope.”

  “If you ever want to drop four hundred bucks for five hours of aggravation and eighteen reasons to swear your head off, this is the place.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Littleford looked ready for a round of golf, his khaki pants and short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt not just for weekends. Sunday afternoon’s interviews at the airport warehouse had gone as expected. No one had broken down, confessed, and pleaded for mercy. Two of the guards were targeted for a follow-up. Alvarez in particular. Andie and her supervisory agent met with him in a conference room at the office suite. The assistant general counsel for Braxton was also in the room, along with a junior member of the in-house legal staff. Andie did the interviews. Each took about an hour. They called Alvarez back for a short but to-the-point follow-up. The Braxton lawyers gave the FBI the green light to turn up the heat. Andie ran with it.

  “Mr. Alvarez, let me spell this out for you: We think you’re holding back.”

  “Me? No. Nothing to hold back.”

  Andie allowed the blanket of silence to settle over them. It was amazing what a nervous target might say when left to stew, no question pending.

  Alvarez had lived in Miami for almost fifteen years, having come to Florida just six months after graduation from high school in Havana. It was impossible to land a job at Braxton with a criminal record, and his was clean, at least since coming to this country. Andie wondered about the inaccessible juvenile record he may have left behind in a country that shared nothing with the United States.

  She leaned closer, resting her crossed forearms on the table. “One of the warehouse workers says he saw you using a cell phone before the heist.”

  It was a bluff, but the FBI was convinced that someone from inside the warehouse had signaled the robbers. The guy remained cool.

  “That’s a lie,” said Alvarez. �
�I never use my cell on duty.”

  Andie didn’t miss a beat. “Let me be clear, Mr. Alvarez. We are going to turn that warehouse upside down and inside out. Maybe you cloned somebody’s cell so it couldn’t be traced to you. Maybe you used your sister’s cell. Maybe it’s a disposable. Whatever phone you used, you had to ditch it somewhere in that warehouse. We are going to find it. I’m giving you a chance to tell me now, before all bets are off.”

  “Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time,” he said, not the slightest quake in his voice. “I never use a cell on the job.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Andie. “But remember what I tell you today. Count One: Octavio Alvarez did conspire to obstruct commerce by robbery by taking approximately nine-point-six million dollars in United States currency by actual and threatened force and violence. Count Two: Octavio Alvarez and his coconspirators did knowingly commit such crime of violence through the use of a firearm. I’m guessing fifteen years in federal prison on count one. Another ten to fifteen on count two. Those are just the obvious charges. I’m sure the U.S. attorney will tack on two or three more, including an order of restitution in the full amount of the heist that will follow you around for the rest of your life. My guess is that you’ll be a sixty-year-old man wishing he could afford his prescription for Viagra by the time you get out of prison and make love to a woman again. Have a nice day, Mr. Alvarez.”

  Alvarez addressed the company lawyers. “Is that all?”

  “Yes, Mr. Alvarez. You’re excused.”

  He rose, the junior lawyer escorted him to the door, and Alvarez left the room.

  “You think he’s our man?” asked the general counsel.

  “Hard to say,” said Littleford. “If he is, we know he didn’t use a cell phone registered under his own name.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Andie explained. “We don’t need a warrant to get the transactional details from a person’s cell. That includes time and date of phone calls, the GPS coordinates of the caller’s location, and the numbers dialed. Alvarez’s cell is clean all yesterday afternoon. No calls. Same with all the Braxton guards.”

  “As they should be,” said the lawyer. “Guards can’t talk on their cell while on duty.”

  “Which is why we think our insider used a phone that’s not registered in his name and ditched it somewhere in that warehouse,” said Littleford.

  “Or it could be in a thousand tiny pieces and flushed down the toilet,” said Andie.

  “So what’s next?” the lawyer asked. “Will you wiretap his phone? Follow him?”

  “We’ll let you know,” said Littleford.

  “There’s one other thing we should discuss,” said Andie. “The reward.”

  “We’re on that,” the lawyer said. “Braxton will offer two hundred fifty thousand dollars for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible and the return of the money.”

  “I got a problem with that,” said Littleford.

  “That’s a big reward. What’s the problem?”

  “Don’t make the reward conditional on return of the money.”

  The lawyer smiled a little, but it wasn’t a friendly smile. “No offense, but it’s the FBI’s job to catch the crooks. Braxton’s primary interest here is the return of the money.”

  “You’re asking someone to risk his life by coming forward and fingering the guys who did this. Arrest and conviction is enough. Don’t be a prick who says, ‘Sorry, we only recovered nine million of the nine-point-six million, so no reward.’ That makes you no better than those car ads that offer a top-of-the-line luxury sedan for ninety-nine dollars a month, but the fine print requires you put twenty-nine thousand down on signing.”

  “I disagree. Thankfully, no one was injured here. All we’re talking about is money, so the reward is conditioned on its return.”

  “You’re not seeing the big picture,” said Littleford.

  “I assure you, a lot of careful thought and consideration goes into the formulation of our rewards.”

  Littleford nodded, as if to acknowledge the party line. “Let me give you and your company a little different perspective. Everyone remembers the big Lufthansa heist at JFK in December 1978 because Martin Scorcese made a movie out of it.”

  “Goodfellas. I know. It’s practically required viewing in our line of work.”

  “See, that’s the problem. People forget all the other heists, all the other robberies in New York. But I remember because my old man was with NYPD when I was a kid. A big hit puts ideas in crooks’ heads. A few months after JFK, New York had eighteen bank robberies—eighteen in three days. Five on Monday, ten on Tuesday, and three more on Wednesday. Two of them were big hits over a million dollars, like JFK. Mayor Koch went nuts, warning these guys in the newspapers and on TV to remember what happened to Dillinger.”

  “That’s a nice history lesson, but we have an excellent safety record.”

  “History repeats itself. You have a lot of armored trucks out on the streets of Miami every day. Hundreds of gangbangers and small-time crooks with big ideas saw the news reports of this multimillion-dollar job at the airport. A quick tip is the fastest way to solve this case. It’s your best shot at recovering your money. And catching these crooks is the best way to make sure we don’t see eighteen armored truck heists in the next week.”

  The lawyer thought about it for a moment. “I see your point. I’ll recommend to headquarters that we go with arrest and conviction in the reward. No condition that the money be returned.”

  “Good call,” said Littleford. “Follow up with Andie on this. She’ll be taking a major role in this investigation.”

  “Will do.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” said Andie.

  The agents left the building and walked to their car. “Nice work in there,” said Andie.

  “Thanks.”

  They got inside and closed the doors. The sun was blazing, and the temperature had climbed at least ten degrees since their arrival, well into the eighties. It was legitimately beach weather. Littleford cranked the A/C. “Ah, November in Miami,” he said. “Not like Seattle, is it?”

  “No. It sure isn’t.”

  He put the car in gear, but kept his foot on the brake. “Hey, I know you didn’t transfer here to be assigned to my unit, but we do good work here.”

  “I see that.”

  “A lot of young agents think they want the undercover assignments, the stuff movies are made of. I’m just saying: I like what I see in you. Keep an open mind.”

  She smiled a little. Strokes were hard to come by in the Bureau. Especially for the Andie-come-lately. “Thanks. I will.”

  Littleford pulled out of the parking lot and onto the street. They passed a long line of armored trucks that were parked on the other side of the chain-link fence. Dozens of trucks. Maybe a hundred. As they passed, Andie was thinking of Littleford’s history lesson on the spate of robberies in New York, and she found herself counting the trucks lined up in the nearest row.

  She stopped at eighteen.

  Chapter 6

  Ruban stuck to the plan and went to work, just another week on the job.

  Monday through Wednesday brought no surprises. Thursday was his monthly meeting with a Nicaraguan seafood supplier who, as usual, wanted to jack up the price on the shrimp that went into Ruban’s signature dish: Russian borscht with grilled camarones in a Cuban marinade. They met at eight a.m. and haggled, over steaming cups of coffee, in the empty dining room at Café Ruban.

  Café Ruban was Ruban’s brainchild, a combination of Russian and Cuban cuisine that made for unique dishes, from the appetizer of caramelized yucca with caviar, to Russian pastries that made for a divine dessert when soaked in Cuban coffee. The café had originally opened in Miami’s Little Havana, where it was a complete disaster. Hardline expats vehemently opposed the notion that anything positive, much less edible, could come out of a Soviet-dominated Cuba. Ultimately, that mind-set worked to Ruban’s advantag
e. As far as he could tell, his nearest competition was O! Cuba in St. Petersburg—Russia, not Florida. He moved his restaurant north to “Little Moscow” in Sunny Isles, where it was just starting to flourish when his and Savannah’s financial world blew up.

  “Come on, Ruban,” his supplier pleaded. “Another nickel a pound. You can afford it.”

  Little does he know. “No,” said Ruban. “Nyet.”

  Not that Ruban cared about a few pennies here or there. It was all about keeping his boss happy, who insisted on a hard line with suppliers.

  Café Ruban bore his name, but Ruban didn’t own it. Not anymore. It was a great concept, and one wealthy Russian customer had loved it so much that he offered to buy it. Ruban wasn’t selling. Then he and Savannah fell behind on their home mortgage. Seriously behind. Their banker promised that if they brought the payments current, the bank would rework their loan to something they could afford. Ruban went to his Russian friend and borrowed $20,000, secured by the restaurant. He paid the bank, which then flatly refused to renegotiate the loan. The promised “work-out” was a lie, of course, the same lie that thousands of distressed homeowners heard at the height of the mortgage crisis. Their adjustable-rate mortgage skyrocketed, putting them even deeper into default. The bank foreclosed on the house. Café Ruban had a new Russian owner, who was smart enough, and lucky enough, to keep Ruban as a salaried manager.

  Ruban couldn’t wait to buy the place back.

  His supplier agreed to another month of shrimp at the current price. Ruban got a high five from his chef.

  “Boss man will be very happy,” she said.

  “Hope so,” said Ruban. “He seems pissed that I’m not doing Savannah’s birthday party here.”

  “I think he understands.”

  Chef Claudia had known Savannah since high school, and Savannah had been the one to suggest that she and Ruban pair up to open a restaurant. The foreclosure, however, had killed the restaurant’s positive vibe, at least from Savannah’s standpoint.

  “You’re coming Saturday, right? Club Media Noche.”