The Loot (Charlie McCabe Thriller)

by Craig Schaefer

  “We did what we could,” Beckett said. He filled the doorway at Charlie’s side. “Want you two out of here. Fewer people on the scene, the easier dealing with the police is going to be.”

  “You going to make the call?” Dom asked him.

  “I’m calling Jake. I’ll brief him, and he can call the shots from there.”

  Dom stopped pacing. She turned and folded her arms. “Brief him on what, exactly?”

  Beckett encompassed the empty penthouse with a slow wave of his hand. “Only what happened here tonight. Everything we’ve done the last couple of days, everything we planned . . . well, it’s a moot point now. No reason Jake needs to know anything about it. That stays between us.”

  All the time they’d spent, the risks they’d taken, the secrets they’d unearthed. Charlie clenched her fists at her sides. Nothing. It had all been for nothing. If Sean Ellis wasn’t already dead, he would be soon enough. Her new employer was about to be out of business. And there she was, broke, unemployed, and her father was days away from being crippled or worse over $20,000 she couldn’t find a way to earn. She’d done everything perfectly wrong.

  Dom was talking to her. She shook her head, the words slipping past.

  “I said, did you need a lift?”

  Charlie shook her head.

  “Think I’m going to go for a walk,” she said. “Clear my head a little.”

  She rode the elevator down alone.

  She took off her lanyard as she trudged through the lobby and stuffed her laminated ID in a pocket of her cargo pants. Then she pushed through the doors and out into the hot summer-night air. She drifted across the street at the intersection, cast in headlights. She wandered the outskirts of Boston Common for a while, following the wrought iron fencing nowhere in particular. She didn’t want to be here, didn’t want to go back to her father’s house.

  The last time she’d felt like she belonged anywhere was in Afghanistan. Everyone told her she was “home” now, but she was a puzzle piece that just didn’t fit.

  Her phone rang. Call from a blocked number, but it was too late for telemarketers. Out of curiosity, she picked up.

  “Hello?”

  She recognized the voice on the other end in a heartbeat. She’d heard it for the first time yesterday morning, in the parking garage.

  “Ms. McCabe? My name is Gordon Kinzman. Please don’t hang up. This is extremely important.”

  The breath caught in her throat. She kept walking, inertia pushing her down the sidewalk.

  “I know who you are, Professor Kinzman.”

  “I thought you might by now,” he said. “I apologize for what happened yesterday. We didn’t intend to use our firearms. Just for show, you understand? But when your colleague opened fire, well, my people panicked. We’re a peaceful organization; we truly are.”

  “Those two police officers and the diamond-exchange manager you killed back in ’69 might say otherwise.”

  “An accident which I deeply regretted. And if you know about that, you also know I paid my debt to society for it. We all did. Except for one of us.”

  “And here you are,” Charlie said, “going right back to a life of crime. How’d you find out about me?”

  “The same way you found out about me,” he said with a faint, dry chuckle. “I admire your dogged perseverance, Ms. McCabe, but you did hand your full name and place of employment to an arms dealer. You weren’t difficult to track down.”

  Charlie cursed under her breath. So much for having his boys sit on him and calling her right away if Kinzman showed his face at Saint’s place again. He’d stabbed her in the back with a smile.

  “Please,” he added, “don’t be cross with our mutual friend. You were simply outbid. And he only surrendered your information after I assured him I meant you no harm. You see, we need help, and given the . . . messy nature of our present situation, you’re in a unique position to render it.”

  “Sure. Give our client back, and I’ll be happy to help. You know the police are about to get involved, right? People are going to notice when he doesn’t show up for work tomorrow morning.”

  “They will,” Kinzman said, “and the police will mobilize in, oh, forty-eight hours or so after that, the bare minimum for accepting a missing persons complaint. That gives us a very tight window to work in. You could speed things up by telling the authorities about us, and all you’ve doubtlessly learned about Mr. Ellis, but then we’d be left with no alternative but to kill him. I’d like to avoid that.”

  “So would I. What do you want?”

  “Your services as, well, a mediator, you could call it.”

  “You mean a hostage negotiator?”

  “If you like,” Kinzman replied. “In any case, we need a bit of help to ensure everyone gets what they deserve. I’d like to resolve this situation without bloodshed, and as I said, we have a tight window of opportunity.”

  Charlie’s mind raced, gears turning as she put together a plan. She could use this. Find out where they’re keeping Ellis, call up Dom and Beckett, swoop in, and save the day. One way or another, they could have this handled by sunrise.

  “Deal,” she said. “Tell me where to meet you.”

  “Saint also told me about your intrepid friends. No, Ms. McCabe, three is definitely a crowd, and I can’t have you inviting guests along. Just keep walking along Tremont Street, exactly as you’re doing now.”

  “How did you know—”

  “My people have been following you since you left the Grandview. I could have simply had them swoop in, but I wanted to talk to you first. To show my good faith and avoid any risk of gunplay, like in the parking garage.”

  “I’m not carrying a gun,” Charlie said.

  The muzzle of a pistol jabbed against the small of her back.

  “I am,” said the woman behind her. She nudged Charlie forward with the barrel. “Keep walking. Don’t look behind you. Don’t make a scene. Do exactly what I tell you, and you get to live through this.”

  “It sounds like you just met Sally,” Kinzman said, his voice mild. “I’ll see you directly, then. Looking forward to it.”

  He hung up the phone. Charlie held it, useless in her hand, as she walked.

  “Gonna put this in my pocket,” she said. “That okay with you?”

  “As long as your hand comes out empty,” Sally Weinstein told her. She gave her another nudge with the gun. “Up here. The green SUV idling at the curb. Get in the back seat.”

  As Charlie clambered into the vehicle, she got her first clear look at her captors. Leon Guster sat behind the wheel, his pretty-boy looks gone to seed, wearing a polo shirt tugged over a beer gut. Sally got in back, close, holding her pistol—one of the stolen army Berettas they’d bought off Saint—tight against Charlie’s ribs. Her hair had gone silver gray, aging with feline grace, and her eyes were every bit as fervent as they were in her 1969 mug shot.

  Fervent felt like a safer word than crazy.

  She reached down with her free hand, scooped a burlap sack off the floor, and handed it to Charlie. “Put it on.”

  Charlie lifted an eyebrow at her. “I already know who you are and what you look like.”

  “Maybe we don’t want you knowing where we rest our heads and leading the pigs back to us later. So unless you want this to be a one-way ride, put the damn hood on.”

  Made sense, even if her “hood” was a repurposed grocery sack. Charlie tugged it over her head, blocking out the world in a scratchy burlap haze. The inside of the fabric smelled like raw potatoes.

  Sally and Leon weren’t inclined to make small talk, and that was fine with Charlie. It let her concentrate on what was really important: focusing on all her senses but sight and trying to draw a mental map. The SUV took a left, then a right. They idled at a stoplight, then turned, and Charlie realized Leon was doubling back. He’d anticipated she’d do exactly what she was doing, and he was muddying the trail. She listened for unfamiliar sounds, anything that might give the game away, bu
t all she could hear was the grinding din of city traffic all around them.

  She took slow, deep breaths. She knew she needed to keep her wits sharp and be ready for anything. Professor Kinzman had said he didn’t mean her any harm, and she believed him. But Kinzman didn’t know one of his own people was a killer.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The traffic sounds faded as the SUV rolled on. The wheels rumbled, going from paved road to gravel, and Charlie’s ears perked under the burlap hood. Eventually they stopped. Sally holstered her gun and tugged Charlie’s arm, easing her out of the back seat. Loose stones crunched under her running shoes.

  “This way,” Sally said, giving her arm a tug. Charlie walked along with her, careful of her footing. Fresh smells drifted under the hood: something moldering, like compost or old garbage. Metal clanged just up ahead, maybe a steel door swinging open.

  The air suddenly went humid, stagnant, and the ground under her feet turned flat and hard. Maybe linoleum, she thought, too much give to be tile, but it’s not groaning like wood. Sally turned her by the arm, and they made a hard left. Another door rattled open on loose hinges.

  Rough hands shoved her down. Charlie’s heart jumped into her throat for a dizzying second as she free-fell, and then she landed in a hard-backed chair. The sack was ripped from her head. She squinted against sudden hard light shining in her eyes.

  The glare from the overhead lamp, a single bulb dangling under a bare aluminum hood, slowly faded, and her vision swam into clear focus. She sat at a folding card table in a spare room with rusting sheet-metal walls. The only decor was a dead clock under a dusty plastic bubble, the hands stuck at five minutes to midnight, and a tacked-up calendar advertising motor oil. The calendar’s pages hadn’t turned since May of 1996.

  Maps littered the table, foldout atlases of Boston’s streets, festooned with splashes of red ink and angry arrows. A couple of ashtrays collected dead cigarettes, and the air was stale with faded smoke.

  Sean Ellis sat on her right. He was tied to his chair, arms behind his back, and his sweaty face sported fresh bruises on his eye and chin. Dried blood clung to a split lip. On her left, Brock “the Brick” Kozlowski hunched against the table and stared daggers at her with his tiny hateful eyes. She guessed the big man remembered how she’d punched him between the legs, back at the parking garage, and he was hoping for some payback.

  Charlie stared straight ahead. Professor Gordon Kinzman looked exactly as he had in the parking garage, waving his panama hat at the fake steam spewing from his car. The hat sat to his left, a gun to his right. Too far for Charlie to grab. As if reading her thoughts, he pulled the weapon a little closer to his edge of the table.

  “I’m sorry for the circumstances,” he told her. “Funny way to word it, hmm? ‘Circumstances.’”

  “Giant mess is what it is,” Sally said. She pulled over a folding chair and dropped down next to Charlie, keeping her own pistol loosely pointed at her. Leon dragged over a second chair and sat close to Sean.

  “A mess we’re hoping you can help fix,” Kinzman said to Charlie. “You know who we are, and you mentioned the unfortunate incident back in 1969. Is it safe to assume, then, that you know exactly why we’ve abducted your client?”

  Charlie turned her head and locked eyes with Sean. She felt a twinge of empathy for him, bound and beaten . . . and then she remembered what he’d done to earn it.

  “Sean was another member of the Students for Peace and Democracy,” she said. “And he was in on your heist. The only one who got away clean. When the alarm went off at the diamond exchange and the shooting started, he ran with another one of your students, a woman named Kimberly Hutchens. Sean lived. Kimberly didn’t.”

  Sean didn’t say a word. He didn’t need to. He flinched like Charlie had just slapped him across the face. The man wore his guilt like a cattle brand, scarred deep and permanent.

  “You should have been the one who died,” Sally told him. His gaze dropped to the table.

  “Regardless,” the professor said, “if he’d merely escaped justice, I’d have been happy for him. The problem is that he took the lion’s share of proceeds from our . . . political action. Over four decades, Mr. Ellis. Four decades, and you’ve done nothing to offer reparations. Nothing to contact any of us, to aid us in our times of need, to make things right.”

  Charlie couldn’t believe she was arguing on Sean’s behalf, but just like a defense lawyer with a guilty client, somebody had to do the job. Besides, she was still his bodyguard. Protecting him, whether he deserved it or not, was still her job.

  “He can’t change the past,” she said. “I’m not defending what he did. I don’t think anybody can. But you have to decide what you want more: Do you want revenge or the money?”

  “We want justice,” Sally snapped. Leon nodded in grim agreement. Brock just kept staring at Charlie like he was imagining her head on a stick.

  “The money,” Kinzman said, “will be sufficient.”

  Just like that, Charlie saw the invisible lines dividing the room. Everything teetered on an axis between Sally and her former professor. Once you stripped him of his political trappings, Kinzman was nothing but a thief and an extortionist. He was only here for the cash.

  Sally was out for blood. And she couldn’t prove it yet, but Charlie strongly suspected she was the one who had put that bomb in Sean’s office chair.

  “None of us want this to get out of control,” Charlie said. She tried to keep her voice steady, soft, simmering down the tension before it could reach a boiling point. “Not any more than it already has, anyway. As it stands, Sean isn’t even officially a missing person yet. We can find a solution and put him back, safe and sound, before the police get involved. We can all win here.”

  “Mr. Ellis has unfortunately been recalcitrant about revealing the location of our missing goods,” Kinzman told her.

  “Those diamonds are gone, Professor. I know that’s not what you want to hear, but it’s true. Look at the timing: the heist was in ’69. Sean dropped out of college and started Deep Country in ’71. He fenced the loot and used it for start-up capital. There’s no other explanation.”

  Sean shook his head and slumped against his ropes. His voice was weak. “No, I didn’t. I told you—”

  “Shut up,” Sally snapped.

  Charlie held up a finger. “The good news is, well, today he runs a pretty big corporation with closed books. He doesn’t have diamonds, but he does have cash, and there’s a hundred ways we can disguise those reparations you want. He can probably hire you all as ‘consultants’ and just cut a paycheck, legal and everything. So let’s try this: We’ll settle on a dollar amount. You keep Sean here while I go and get the money, however we decide to make it work. You can even send Leon or Sally with me to make sure I don’t call the police. Then we’ll meet up again at a neutral location to make a trade. Everybody walks away happy.”

  “That,” Kinzman said with a smile, “is exactly why I brought you here. You see, Mr. Ellis? Cooperation doesn’t have to be so difficult.”

  “There’s no dollar amount that can bring Kimberly back,” Sally said. “And it’s not just about money. She was a soldier. She died trying to deliver those diamonds to the revolutionary cause.”

  “The revolutionary cause,” the professor said, “can benefit from ready cash much more easily than it can from illegal, difficult-to-fence diamonds. I suggest we graciously allow Mr. Ellis to get his checkbook out and make things right, while we still have time.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Sean said. He let out a faint, bitter laugh. “I don’t have cash or the diamonds.”

  Every face at the table swung his way.

  “Do you people even understand how screwed I am?” he said. “Thirty miners died when that gas line ruptured. That’s thirty families bringing civil suits against Deep Country. And I’ve got an eight-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer telling me that with the evidence on hand, there’s no way they can lose. The Kentucky licensing board is tearing
into my business, and the feds are right behind them. I’m ruined.”

  “That’s not our problem,” Leon said. It was the first time he’d spoken up, and Charlie recognized him as the angry voice on Sean’s intercepted phone message.

  “Yeah, it is. Because you’re looking for liquid assets, and I don’t have any. What do you think, I’ve got a big safe in my office stacked with hundred-dollar bills? That’s not how corporations work. All of my operating capital is tied up in this legal fight. And when the fight’s over, I’m not going to have any capital, period.”

  “The diamonds, then,” Sally said.

  Sean threw his head back and let out an exasperated groan.

  “There. Are. No. Diamonds. Charlie’s half-right. I took the ones I pocketed on my way out of the exchange and fenced them a year later, once the heat died down. Kimberly was carrying the lion’s share. I never laid hands on them.”

  “You were with her,” Leon said.

  “No. I wasn’t. We got separated a block outside the exchange. Don’t you remember what it was like out there? The snow was coming down like a monsoon. You couldn’t see three feet in front of your face; every step sucked you deeper as it piled up around you. I lost her.”

  Sean’s eyes squeezed shut. A single tear blossomed and rolled down his cheek, glistening against the bruise on his chin.

  “I lost her,” he whispered. “She was my friend, too, you know. And I lost her.”

  Leon leaned toward him, sitting on the edge of his chair. “You lying sack. I saw the pictures they took, when the rescuers hauled her body out of that snowbank. I read the reports. She didn’t have the diamonds on her.”

  “Then she stashed them before she died.”

  “No.” Leon jumped up and slammed his fist down on the table. The ashtrays rattled and jumped. He swept his hand across the marker-littered maps. “I’ve spent years on this. I’ve gone over every possible route she could have taken between the diamond exchange and the spot where she died. There’s no place she could have hidden them that I haven’t checked.”