The Loot (Charlie McCabe Thriller)

by Craig Schaefer

  His tone made a liar out of him. Charlie wrestled with the sudden urge to grab him by the necktie, jerk it tighter than a noose, and pull until he coughed up a name. He knew exactly who was trying to kill him, and the longer this went on, the more likely it was they’d get their wish. She swallowed her frustration and waited, shifting her weight from foot to foot as the freight elevator continued its slug-slow descent.

  Her ears perked at a sound in the distance. An engine.

  “Coming or going?” she said.

  Dom tilted her head, eyes squinting. “Coming. Must have cleared the entrance.”

  Back the way they’d come, headlights strobed around the bend. It was a white, battered Ford panel van, built for hauling cargo, puttering slow as if the driver were looking for an open parking space.

  The Jetta’s driver had said he’d called for help. Not unreasonable to believe AAA had showed up right after Charlie had left. Still. The timing didn’t work. It had only been a few minutes, and the tow truck would have to reverse on a busy street, line up with the car, get it hitched up and loaded . . .

  Another possibility fit the timing just fine. A perfectly functional VW with a device under the hood, built to emit a harmless plume of smoke. And when they’d declined the detour, refusing to bring Sean Ellis out into the open, it would only have taken a matter of seconds to shut the hood, clear the way, and call for a change of plans.

  The van kept coming. And sped up. It turned, and the headlights hit Charlie right in the eyes.

  “It’s a setup!” she shouted. “Get Ellis out of here! Now!”

  The van roared up, lurched hard to one side, and screeched to a stop. The panel door rattled open. Three attackers boiled out like ants from a kicked-over hive, two men and a woman, their faces concealed under black knit ski masks. The woman had a rifle in her hands.

  “Everybody get on the—” one of the men roared. He didn’t have time to finish the sentence. A slim nine-millimeter pistol appeared in Beckett’s hand like a magic trick and roared with a cannon crack of thunder as he opened fire. The man fell back, yowling like he’d been hit, but Charlie didn’t see a mark on him.

  The rifle erupted, muzzle flash cutting the shadows, drawing white supernovas in Charlie’s vision. Dom threw herself onto Sean and hauled him to the dirty concrete as a three-round burst cut the air where they were standing. Bullets chewed into stone and sparked off the elevator door. Beckett darted behind a pillar; Charlie wasn’t sure if he’d been hit or not. She had her own problems. The second man came at her, faster than he looked, brandishing the slim black-and-hornet-yellow box of a stun gun in his beefy grip. He was a giant, even bigger than Beckett, glaring down at her with tiny, piggish eyes.

  He lunged, stun gun sparking. She crossed her arms at the wrists and drove them upward, hitting his forearm and shoving the weapon over her head. He staggered to one side, momentum off, but he rallied fast. He swung his other fist in a haymaker punch. It caught her across the temple and felt like she’d just been slammed in the head with a brick. Charlie kept her focus, her mind in the fight, and dropped low. She hurled a knuckle punch straight between the big man’s legs. He wheezed, almost dropping the stun gun, and grabbed his wounded groin as he listed back.

  Beckett stuck his gun hand around the pillar and pulled the trigger like he’d just won a lifetime supply of free bullets. Shots rained down on the van, blasting out a side window, blowing craters in the white paint. The freight-elevator door chimed, rattling open, and the backup man inside the cage didn’t hesitate to join in the fight. Charlie heard him open fire, using the elevator door for cover.

  “Jesus, abort!” screamed the wounded attacker. He fell onto his back inside the van, and the giant jumped in after him. “Go, go, go!”

  The van lurched around, tires squealing. The woman with the rifle clung one-handed to the edge of the open door, squeezing off wild bursts, trying to keep everyone’s heads down as they made their escape. Charlie dove for cover. She hit the floor hard and rolled behind a parked car, out of breath. Beckett stepped from cover, sighted down the barrel of his gun, and squeezed the trigger until his hammer snapped dry on an empty magazine. His last bullet gouged a rent in the van’s back bumper. It rounded the bend too hard and too fast, rocking on its tires, and vanished from sight.

  TWENTY-NINE

  “Anybody hit?” Charlie shouted. The aftermath of the gunfire still reverberated in her ears, the world around her sounding swimmy and distant. She shoved herself up on wobbly, adrenaline-shocked legs, clinging to the hood of the car.

  “Clear,” Dom shouted back.

  “Clear,” Beckett said. He pointed to Ellis. “Dom, get him on board. I’m calling 911. Charlie, you get a plate number on the van?”

  Charlie tapped her temple, still aching from the big man’s fist, with a wobbly finger.

  “Every digit,” she said.

  Beckett holstered his gun and tugged a slim phone from his breast pocket. “Good girl.”

  “No cops,” Sean gasped. He was on his knees, shaking, as Dom half helped and half pulled him to his feet.

  “Sir,” Beckett said, “at this point we have a legal obligation—”

  “Your obligation is doing what I tell you to do. You work for me.” Sean got to his feet, pale and shaking like a leaf as Dom eased him toward the open elevator door. “Don’t worry about the damage here. You know how much we pay in rent? I’ll make a few calls; the building owners will clean this up for us. They won’t say a word.”

  “Sir, the damage isn’t the point. We wounded at least one of them. The police have access to information we don’t: if someone shows up at a hospital with a gunshot injury, the doctors are legally bound to notify them about it. If we pass on the intel, they can use that to find your attackers.”

  Ellis staggered into the elevator. He pointed a shaky finger at Beckett. “I swear to God, you make that call, and I terminate our contract on the spot. Not only that, and not only will I sue you and your company into oblivion, I’ll make sure nobody in this town touches Boston Asset Protection with a twenty-foot pole ever again.”

  Charlie watched the war raging behind Beckett’s steel-hard eyes. He had a duty to report the gunfight. He also had a duty, in his eyes, to Jake and Sofia and the company that had given him a home. She knew which one would win, even before he answered Sean with a gruff nod and put the phone back in his pocket. He looked to the bodyguard on the elevator.

  “Please,” Beckett said, every word bound behind a wall of barely restrained fury, “see that Mr. Ellis is taken safely to his office on twenty-two. We’ll discuss this later.”

  The elevator door rumbled shut. The garage fell silent. Dom, Charlie, and Beckett looked to one another, alone in the aftermath.

  “Y’all okay?” Beckett asked.

  Dom leaned forward as she stood, legs apart, shoulders hunched, poised like a lioness on the prowl.

  “No,” she said. “I’m pretty damn far from okay.”

  “Same,” Charlie said.

  Beckett turned to stare at the bullet craters in the elevator door, buckling the brushed steel.

  “Man’s going to get us killed,” he said.

  “Unless we do something about it,” Charlie replied.

  He touched a finger to his chin and nodded, slow.

  “The three of us, we’re taking the afternoon off. I’ll clear it with Jake.” He nodded toward the exit. “Saw a coffee shop, just up the street. Looked cozy.”

  Charlie wanted something stronger than coffee. They all did. What they needed more, at the moment, were clear heads and a solid plan. They camped in the back-corner table of an indie coffee house, the Magic Bean, and tried to find their footing over three white porcelain mugs of dark roast. Charlie ripped open a single-serve tub of half-and-half, watching the cream spiral into the depths of her mug. She felt like she could follow it down. Just dive on in and let the steaming darkness swallow her whole.

  It wasn’t her first gunfight. The aftermath was always t
he same. Muscles fueled by a surge of adrenaline became twitchy, achy, like rubber shot through with sewing needles. Her stomach was a knotted fist. She could tell Beckett and Dom were feeling the same way. The truth was in the eyes, but they both tried to mask it. Beckett was hard, stoic. Dom was seething.

  “We could jump his ass,” Dom hissed. “Get our own ski masks, corner Ellis, and go to work on him with a sack of oranges. He’ll tell us who these people are. Give me fifteen minutes; I guarantee he’ll tell us.”

  “Considering our own company is providing him with round-the-clock protection,” Beckett said, eyeing her over his mug, “that’d be a little hard to orchestrate.”

  Dom jabbed her finger at him. “I am not letting this asshole turn my kid into an orphan.”

  “We won’t let that happen. As it stands, though, keeping his secrets secret is more important to the man than living. And normally I’d respect that, except it’s us and ours in the cross fire right next to him. No. If Ellis wouldn’t talk after what just happened, he’s not going to talk at all. How about the tap on his phone? He get any follow-up calls?”

  “I just checked, and no. Looks like they’re done negotiating.”

  Charlie stirred her coffee. It gave her hand something to do while her thoughts bounced around in a jumble, trying to sort themselves into order.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

  “Sure it does,” Dom said. “He’s a reckless, rich idiot who thinks he can just keep throwing money around until his problems go away.”

  “No. Look. They weren’t there to kill him.”

  Dom lifted an eyebrow at her. “You think that rifle was firing blanks? One of those shots almost parted my hair.”

  “Yeah, she opened fire, after Beckett did. But I think the guy was shouting for us to get on the ground. The other man, the big one, he only had a stun gun on him. And they kept their faces covered; if they were planning to kill us all, why bother? There weren’t any witnesses around.”

  Beckett followed her train of thought. He steepled his fingers. “It was an abduction attempt.”

  “Which holds with the phone call. They want something from him. ‘Kimberly’s share.’”

  “Since he won’t hand it over,” Dom mused, “they want to snatch him and make him give it up. But that brings us right back to the part that doesn’t fit.”

  “The bomb,” Charlie said. “We’ve got three kidnappers, plus whoever was driving the van—”

  “Plus the old man with the VW, if that wasn’t the same person,” Beckett added. “Given the timing, the breakdown had to be a decoy, trying to force us out into the open. The van was probably waiting right by the lobby doors to snatch Ellis up. When we didn’t change course, they came in after us.”

  Charlie sipped her coffee. The caffeine kicked her brain into gear, chasing off the postbattle lethargy. “At least one of these people wants Ellis dead,” she said. “And the others, or at least the person who made that phone call, have no idea. They want him kidnapped instead. So we’ve got two different angles of attack to watch for.”

  The three of them fell into a contemplative silence. They drank their coffee and worked the problem from three directions, each walking their own psychic maze. For Charlie, it was a maze with no exits, a blind wall behind every turn in the labyrinth. She kept doubling back and finding her own footprints in the dust, marking ideas tried and thrown away.

  They had one avenue of information left. The gunrunner, Saint, and his open offer to trade a favor for a favor. They’d just have to murder his competition to get it. The last couple of days had pushed Charlie to the breaking point, but she still wasn’t going to kill a man in cold blood, a criminal or not, to get what she needed. That wasn’t who she was. Beckett and Dom might be less reluctant—she wasn’t sure and didn’t want to ask, didn’t even want to step onto that path—but she still couldn’t be a party to murder.

  Maybe I don’t have to, she thought. An idea sparked in the back of her mind.

  “Dom,” she said, “question about your family.”

  “I reserve the right not to incriminate myself or others,” Dom replied with a practiced blandness suggesting she’d said those words plenty of times before.

  “Are the Accardos on good terms with the Patriarca family?”

  She answered with her hand, resting it on the table while Charlie watched. Her index and middle fingers curled together, snug and tight.

  “Another question,” Charlie said, “at the risk of being racially insensitive.”

  Dom pursed her lips in a tight smile as she lifted her mug. “Oh, lay it on me.”

  “Would these people ever recruit Haitians?”

  She almost spat out her coffee. “Say what now?”

  “When we found the man who sold the C-4 for that bomb in Ellis’s office,” Beckett told her, “he mentioned trouble with a new competitor. A Haitian claiming to be tight with the Patriarcas. Tight enough that Saint, our gunrunning friend, was afraid to move on him.”

  “Bull. Shit.” Dom snorted. “That’s not how things are done. Old-school families, old-school rules, and ethnicity is something they have very firm opinions about; my relatives won’t even do business with the Irish if they don’t have to.”

  “So if they found out this guy was working the black market in Boston and claiming to be under their banner, what would happen to him?” Charlie asked. “Would they kill him?”

  “Depends on who found out and what they thought they could get out of the guy. I mean, there’d be one vicious ass kicking, that’s for certain. Most of the guys I know would put the squeeze on him instead of killing him; after all, he’s been claiming protection from on high.” Dom rubbed her thumb against her fingertips. “That kind of protection doesn’t come for free. He’d have to pay up if he wanted to stay aboveground. Retroactively, in full, and with excessive damages attached. Why?”

  “Saint’s terrified of the Patriarcas.” Beckett’s voice was an amused rumble. “He knows he’s a small fish in a big pond. He was pretty sure his competition was lying about their alleged family ties, but he still didn’t want to chance making a move, just to be safe. Tried to get us to do it for him.”

  “And he can tell us who bought the C-4,” Charlie added.

  Dom rapped her fingernails on the table. They were short and shiny and red as blood. The tiny smile on her lips grew wider. She eased her chair back a few inches.

  “Drink your coffee,” she told them. “I’ll be right back. Need to make a couple of phone calls.”

  THIRTY

  Sunset fell across a Mattapan backstreet, casting broken concrete and a stray, overturned shopping cart in shades of russet and tarnished brass. Traffic was backed up, rush hour hitting the city like a key twisting in a lock, jamming everything to a sudden halt. A row of cars, battered sedans and SUVs wearing skirts of dried mud, slowly inched its way toward the intersection on the corner.

  Charlie stood behind the smudged plate glass window of a jerk-chicken joint and watched and waited. The air was thick with the mingled aromas of charred meat and burning spices. The last rays of the sun slipped behind the Boston skyline, leaving the starless azure sky streaked in long shadows. The traffic eased up, moving faster, growing sparse. Charlie’s eyes were on the sidewalk.

  “There he is, right on time,” Saint said. He peered out from under the cowl of a long white hoodie, draping him like a trench coat. Charlie followed his gaze to the man casually sauntering up the street, moving like he owned the pavement.

  On her other side, Dom tapped a speed dial button and said a few quick words into her cell phone. “Eastbound. Cornrows, olive jacket, jeans, looks like he’s packing a sidearm in a shoulder holster on his left side.”

  Saint looked her way. He nodded, appreciative. “Good eye.”

  “It’s what we do,” Beckett said, looming behind them.

  “He thinks he’s coming to see me about a buyout. I leave town; he stays; nobody gets hurt.”

  “S
light change in plans,” Dom said.

  Her eyes twinkled as she cradled her phone against her chest and watched. A sedan with tinted windows purred up the block. It pulled curbside a few feet behind the Haitian man. Two bruisers, with bar bouncers’ builds and low-slung hats, jumped out and converged on him. He didn’t even know they were there, not before one clamped down on his arm and the other, turning his body to keep anyone from noticing, snaked the pistol from under his jacket. They wheeled him around, talking in soft voices, and marched him toward the waiting car.

  Charlie flicked a glance at Dom. “They’re not going to kill him, right?”

  “Nah. Cousin Lou is just going to have a nice long talk with him about why lying is bad. Basic Goofus-and-Gallant-type stuff he should have learned in kindergarten. I told them to go easy on him.”

  Charlie winced as they bounced the man’s head off the roof of the car, then shoved him in back.

  “Not that easy,” Dom said. “Anyway, they’ll slap him around a little, take every last penny he’s got plus his entire stock of contraband, and put him on a train out of town. He’s lost his Boston privileges. Cousin Lou makes some fast cash; our problem is resolved; everybody’s happy.”

  Saint folded his arms. His mood shifted, growing taciturn. Charlie could read him like a book: he’d just been handed everything he wanted, and now he was thinking he might get out of his end of the bargain.

  “I wanted him dead.”

  “You wanted him gone,” Charlie told him. She rounded on him, going toe to toe and fixing him with a hard glare. “He’s gone. You’re a smart guy, Saint. You’re not bloodthirsty. You might sell the tools of the trade, but you know that murder brings heat. We didn’t just solve your problem; we solved it the best possible way for you. No cops, no commotion, nobody looking for payback, and your name never came into play.”

  He took a step back, smiling now, holding up his open palms.

  “Okay, okay, Charlie McCabe.” He was still using her full name like a talisman, ever since she’d shown him her ID card. “Point taken. You held up your end; I’ll hold up mine.”