Loot

by Jude Watson

  GOAWAY

  RED BRICK 107 BWAY CORNER

  “That doesn’t sound very welcoming,” Jules said.

  “With FX, that’s the best you’re going to get,” March answered.

  They stood outside a reddish-brown building on West 107 Street.

  “Nate ‘FX’ Spender,” March said. “He’s the best tipster in the business. They call him FX because he never looks the same way twice. As a matter of fact, nobody is quite sure what he looks like. He used to do movie makeup, and now he disguises himself and goes to auction houses all over the US and Europe if there’s a big sale of stuff like jewelry or art. He scopes out who’s buying. If this was a big jewelry sale in New York, I guarantee he was there. He moves from apartment to apartment, never stays in the same place long.”

  “So will he help us?”

  “If he’s in the mood. He’s kind of … eccentric.”

  “Like how?” Jules asked.

  “Hard to explain,” March said, and pushed the button marked U. GOAWAY. “Just be prepared.”

  He leaned into the intercom until he heard the steady fuzz that meant FX was listening. “It’s March. I’m with some friends.”

  A pause.

  “Look up!” March commanded the others.

  “Why?”

  “Just DO IT!”

  They turned their faces to the sky.

  “Just … don’t smile,” March said out of the corner of his mouth. He felt perspiration trickle down his sides.

  Then they heard the buzzer, and he dived for the door.

  “He looks out the window and studies you,” he explained. “Then he decides if he’s in the mood to let you in. I guess we passed inspection.”

  They took the elevator up to the fourth floor. March knocked on 4B.

  The door opened. The first thing they noticed was the blood. A river of it ran down the man’s face. One bloodshot eye hung out of its socket and rested on his cheek. Izzy let out a scream.

  “Control yourself, young person,” FX said. “The neighbors already think I’m weird.”

  They walked inside the sunny apartment. The only furniture was a wooden chair and a small table, as well as a flat-screen TV that took up most of a wall.

  FX turned to Izzy. “If the eye disturbs you, I can remove it.”

  “That’s okay,” Izzy said, looking everywhere but at FX.

  “March, I’ve been waiting for you to contact me. But let me remove my eye before we talk.”

  The man who returned a few minutes later looked nothing like the specter who had answered the door. He was a slender, tanned man with green eyes and red hair.

  If March hadn’t also met FX with curly hair, dark eyes, and glasses, and as a balding sixty-year-old, he might not suspect that he was wearing contacts and a wig.

  “Your father …” FX put his hand out for March to shake. “I’m sorry.”

  March shook his hand and felt the strength of his grip. To his horror, he felt tears spring up behind his eyes. The suddenness of grief was like running full tilt into a sliding glass door. One minute you were on your feet, the next, you were on the floor.

  He dropped FX’s hand and quickly introduced the other kids.

  FX looked at Jules with interest. “The missing daughter. Alfie spoke of you.”

  “He did?” Jules tried to keep the eagerness out of her voice.

  “Many, many times. Regret, loss, hope … that’s life. He said you were fearless. And yet …”

  “And yet?”

  “He was afraid for you.” He looked at her and March. “Both of you.” He paused. “The moonstones …”

  “That’s why we’re here,” March said. “We’re tracking them down.”

  “Are you sure that’s wise?” FX walked to the window and looked down at the street. “These are not ordinary gems.”

  “Do you believe …”

  “That they have magical powers? Do you?”

  A high-pitched scream came from the kitchen, ripping through the silence of the apartment. March and the gang jumped.

  FX didn’t flinch. “The kettle. I was making tea.”

  He disappeared into the kitchen.

  “He’s weird,” Izzy whispered.

  “Is he going to come out with a hatchet?” Darius murmured.

  “No,” FX said, reappearing with a tray. “Just ginger tea. I can see why the money is irresistible. Ten million, isn’t it?”

  “Seven.”

  He smiled. “She offered Alfie ten. Desperate people make desperate deals. There is a story….” He began to pour tea. “Fifteen years ago, Carlotta Grimstone was scheduled to leave on a charter flight to Paris. The plane crashed on takeoff. In the confusion she was reported dead. Turns out she did not board at all. A year or so before that, a canyon fire in California destroyed the Grimstone lodge in the spring, a time when Carlotta would traditionally have been there.” FX passed around the tea in tiny cups. “She has cheated death at least twice while holding those stones. There are countless ways to live in this world and countless ways to die. If we knew what lay ahead, could we avoid our fate?” He sipped his tea. “Apparently so.”

  “But if there’s a way, why didn’t Alfie know about it?” March asked.

  “He didn’t, not for a long time. But then … I found something for him.”

  He sipped his tea, watching them over the rim. “But before we begin, I need to say that, unlike most thieves, I believe one should take curses seriously. If I were you, I’d wait out the birthday. Stay grounded.”

  “We already have five moonstones,” March said.

  “You have?” FX looked worried, not impressed. “The power is said to increase with each stone. And the dread.”

  March knew that. The burden of them was pulling at him all the time now. He hadn’t been able to put a name to it until now. Dread.

  “And if you steal two more, you’ll gain a fortune. But what if you fail? What if you fall?”

  “You know about the prophecy?” Jules asked.

  “I know everything. Enough to say, you kids are in over your heads.”

  “When you’re in over your head, you’ve got two options — sink or swim,” March said.

  “Alfie’s saying?”

  “No. Mine. I’d rather swim. I think my dad would agree.”

  FX nodded slowly, taking in their defiance, their determination. “Fair enough. Wait here.” He looked at March and Jules. “And stay away from open windows.”

  He walked past them to another room. In a moment he returned, holding a large, ancient leather book. He put the book on the table, and March peered at the gold letters stamped on the front. The Secrets of Merlin.

  “I got this at a rare-book auction. Supposed to be a copy of a copy of a copy, etc…. going back to the earliest oral legends. Alfie asked me to keep a lookout for it. Nine months ago he flew here so he could read it for himself.”

  When he opened the book, the odor of a musty distant age rose from it. “There’s an anticurse. Something that’s supposed to reverse the prophecy.” FX put his finger on the page.

  Fortune’s wheel reverses,

  Thus fortune’s child must bide

  Till the night of rare moon rising.

  The portal opens, eventide.

  Time reverses by your hand.

  The captured lights returning,

  Fate’s wheel stops — then begins anew,

  Your fate annulled, your future earning.

  “Well, that explains everything,” Darius said as Jules took a picture of the page with her phone.

  “Alfie said he had finally found a way to keep you safe. The trick of it is, though, you need all seven moonstones. He was on his way to getting them when Oscar showed up. It didn’t matter that Alfie had placed half of what he originally got for the stones in a Swiss account for Oscar. Oscar wanted in on the new Grimstone deal. So Alfie said yes … but only if he could be alone with the stones on the night of the blue moon. He still feared that something could hap
pen, even at the very last minute.”

  “So he could do both,” March said. “Reverse the curse and get the money.”

  “That was the plan. Risky. He would not want you involved in this.”

  “I think he’d want us to try. Here’s the list we have,” he said, pushing it toward FX. “We only need to locate number one and now number seven. Number two was the Amsterdam job. He left me that stone.”

  “What about number seven — Renee Rooter?” Jules asked. “She just sold all her jewelry at auction.”

  “I know. I was there.”

  “So you know who bought the ring.”

  “There were a few minor celebrities sprinkled among the crowd. The successful bidder was some sort of television host of a crime show.”

  March had a sudden sinking feeling. “Do you know who it was?”

  “A burly gentleman with capped teeth named Shannon. Mike Shannon.”

  That night the dream was an exercise in terror. The night was darker, the cliff turned to sheer ice. Now he could see Jules’s face, her terrified gray eyes, her hand reaching, straining to grasp his. He felt his foot slip as he grabbed at air. He tumbled down and saw her falling, too.

  He woke up shaking and drenched in sweat. He looked around the train car. Darius was snoring, Izzy curled next to him. Jules’s blanket was tossed aside.

  He left the train car and found her on the platform, sitting cross-legged and watching a train loiter at the platform far down the station. He sat down.

  “Bad dream?” she asked. At his nod, she said, “Me, too.”

  “Alfie would say that you look as wrung out as a washcloth in a miner’s camp.”

  She gave a brief smile. “Tonight it was different. I saw your face. There was ice and rain….”

  “Yes! And I had you by the hand. You were dangling … and we both fell together.”

  “We had the exact same dream. People would say it’s a coincidence,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Power of suggestion.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But it’s not.”

  “No.”

  March felt a breeze stir from somewhere down the tunnel. It flickered along the wet ends of his hair. He shivered.

  “And Friday is the blue moon. It’s two a.m. Today is Thursday. We’re almost out of time.”

  “FX will do some digging for us on the Particle Zoo stone. If anyone can track it down, he can. Tomorrow we’ll figure out the Mike Shannon heist. I’m sure he’s using it for leverage to get in on the deal.”

  “Izzy did some research. He lives in a fancy, tech-crazy house about forty minutes north of the city. Security cameras all over.”

  “Yeah. Not easy. Alfie didn’t case this job. He always knew if something was doable. He never took a job that he didn’t know he could do.”

  “So?”

  “So … I don’t know; it made me think I could do it, too. It sort of … carried me along. Now I don’t know.”

  “So don’t do it like Alfie this time.” She cocked her head and smiled at him. “Do it like March.”

  Sometimes when you need inspiration, you’ve got to reach for cupcakes. March passed around the box for breakfast the next morning.

  Something had changed. A sense of gloom had invaded the train car. Time pressed against their backs. Nabbing a collar off a dog had been fun. Breaking into a domestic fortress was a whole other thing. Even the cupcakes didn’t help.

  Izzy put down hers, half-eaten. “Tomorrow is the blue moon. What if we can’t steal the rest of the moonstones and break the curse?”

  “I know one thing. We won’t have to buy March and Jules a birthday present,” Darius joked.

  No one laughed.

  “Come on. You don’t believe in all this stuff, do you?” Darius asked. “Magic moonstones? Merlin? Let’s stay real.”

  March didn’t know what “real” was anymore. He felt his fate rushing at him, felt the drag of the stones in his pocket, along with the drumbeat of harsh belief that tomorrow night he could fall to his death.

  He cleared his throat. “We need time to plan, time to set it up. We won’t be able to hit Shannon until tomorrow. I know it’s cutting it close, but it’s the day he films his show. He goes in at three p.m. and doesn’t get home until eleven. While we plan the heist today, FX will be working on finding the other moonstone.”

  “I think Shannon’s system is hackable,” Izzy said. “He controls everything from his smart phone. If you can get me inside, I can access the security system on his computer and set off some little alarm. Something easy, like a rise in temp that will send off an alert but won’t look suspicious. If he checks the system, everything will look okay — I just have to stay out of camera range, but that’s not a problem. Then, when he resets, I can copy his code and open the doors.”

  She picked up her tablet. “Listen to this. Shannon was interviewed by a design magazine. Shannon is particularly fond of his ability to monitor temperature and humidity, set alarms, turn off lights — even start the dishwasher — from his smart phone. ‘I’m now a brand,’ Shannon declared with his usual aplomb, leaning back in his Eames recliner, custom upholstered in pony hide. ‘TV star/writer/producer/personality. Anything that saves time is no longer a luxury, but a necessity.’ ”

  “Superhurl,” Darius said.

  “Okay, so if Izzy can get us in and if we find the moonstone, then what?” Jules asked.

  “Then we’re stuck up in Snootville with a bunch of local cops looking for us,” Darius said.

  “I’ve been thinking about the getaway,” March said. “One of Alfie’s favorite heists used a sweet trick. A thief goes on Craigslist, and under Help Wanted he posts a job for a road crew. Tells everyone to wear one of those orange safety vests and a blue shirt and show up on a street with a bank that just happens to have an armored-car scheduled delivery. So, about fifty guys show up. The thief is dressed just like them. He steals the cash and melts away into the crowd, looking like every other guy in a blue shirt and an orange vest. Pretty smooth, if you don’t count the fact that he ended up getting caught.”

  Darius frowned. “Nobody’s going to mistake us for a road crew. And I look all washed out in orange.”

  March took a swig of juice. “I was thinking purple Lycra.”

  The village of Fair Corners was a town just forty minutes north of New York City. The superwealthy who lived there liked to use words like charming and quaint to describe it. Ordinary folks got in their ordinary cars and drove for hours in order to clip the shrubs and clean the tubs in mansions pretending to be farmhouses.

  The gang wheeled their rented bikes down the sidewalks toward the road that would take them to Shannon’s house. Nerves were stretched tight, and they hadn’t said much on the train ride out.

  March had looked up “evening events” in the surrounding area. The County Bike Club was holding their annual Start of Summer Evening Meet-up.

  “The bike meet-up starts at six, and the route takes the cyclists about a quarter mile from Shannon’s house at around seven,” March explained. “So if we can get in and out by then, we’ll get camouflage when we join the group.”

  Darius looked down at his bike shorts and bright purple top. “Camouflage? I look like a gigantic grape.”

  They mounted the bikes and took off. It was a pleasant ride along a curving country road to the address. Shannon’s house was concrete and steel, built by a famous architect who had set out to make a “statement about the arrangement of domestic space within intersecting planes.” It looked like a bunker on Mars.

  “Double-height living area, wine cellar, infinity pool, lap pool, outdoor kitchen, media center, indoor kitchen the size of a soccer field, master bedroom in turret,” Izzy said. “Nine thousand square feet.”

  “Pig big,” Darius said. “It’s one person in a freaking hotel, that’s what it is.”

  “It doesn’t matter how big it is,” March said. “There’s only a few places people keep jewelry.
”

  “So how long do we have before he figures out that you took over his main computer?” Jules asked Izzy.

  “Depends on how smart he is. Or how paranoid he is, which is worse. If he checks his phone, his spyware might tell him that the main computer was hacked.”

  “This one might be tricky,” March admitted. His fear had been growing since he’d first heard that Mike Shannon had bought the moonstone ring. He was pitted against a former cop, a guy with a grudge who was expecting Oscar Ford to come after him. Had he bought the moonstone as a taunt? If he let them, March’s teeth would chatter with nerves. “Let’s go over it … one more time.”

  They cycled past slowly. Only one car was in the driveway, a Toyota.

  “Housekeeper,” Izzy said. “She leaves at six.”

  “She’s expecting the package?”

  Jules nodded. “Izzy was brilliant — she set up my number as Capehart Repair. I told her there’s a recall on a water-heater sensor and we were delivering new parts.”

  The property was encircled by a low stone wall. It was easy to lift the bikes over and stash them in a stand of trees near a meadow. Darius pulled on the coveralls over his bike shorts and shirt. Using duct tape, Jules and March quickly taped the box together, then used a screwdriver to punch some discreet holes in it. They unpacked the Bubble Wrap and lined it.

  Izzy eyed it fearfully.

  Darius took her hands. “Look at that nice little nest March and Jules made. If you get scared or something happens to me, you can always get out. You have a box cutter in your pocket. You hear me, Izzy? You can always get out. Nobody’s locking you up. Not ever again.”

  Izzy swallowed. She nodded.

  “Okay, then,” Darius said. “Time to climb in.”

  Izzy slipped inside the box and folded herself up, hugging her knees and tucking her head down. When she looked up, her face looked tiny and pale.

  “It’s only March and Jules’s possible death and seven million dollars,” Darius said. “And it’s all up to you. So chill.”