The Loot (Charlie McCabe Thriller)

by Craig Schaefer

  “It was over forty years ago, Leon—”

  He jabbed his finger at Sean’s chest. “You’re holding out on us.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Sally said. “Why are we wasting our time? This isn’t about money; it’s about getting justice for Kimberly. We all had to pay for what happened that morning. All of us except him.”

  Kinzman sighed. He pinched the bridge of his nose like he was fighting off a headache. “And we agreed, Ms. Weinstein, that payment in the form of financial reparations would be acceptable in lieu of his life. That was the plan, and we all agreed on it. Which is why we’ve so generously, so patiently encouraged him to cooperate up until now. Alas, it seems his reluctance demands that we take more severe measures.”

  The room was slipping out of control, fast. Charlie had to make a move. Time to set off a bomb of her own.

  “If the plan was to rip him off,” she asked, “then why did you try to kill him?”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  It was Charlie’s turn to be the center of attention. The table fell silent.

  “Excuse me?” Kinzman asked. “I told you, the gunfire at the parking garage—”

  “Not that. The bomb in his chair.”

  The professor waved a dismissive hand. “It was a warning, a feint. The explosives were real, but it never would have gone off.”

  “Yes,” Charlie said, “it would have.”

  He snorted at her, incredulous. “And you know that how?”

  Charlie locked eyes with Kinzman. She squared her shoulders and laid her palms flat on the table.

  “Because my name is Sergeant Charlene McCabe, United States Army. My military occupational specialty was explosive ordnance disposal. I spent eight years in Afghanistan handling everything from scrap-metal IEDs to sophisticated terrorist threats. I know my job. I’m pretty good at it. And I just came home last week, so I haven’t had time to get rusty yet.”

  She took a slow look around the room. Reading their faces, weighing their reactions. Slicing the data into bite-size pieces. Brock was impossible to read—he had one expression, mute and furious—but the others were open books. Kinzman was shocked. Leon didn’t believe her. And Sally looked like a kid who’d just been caught stealing gum from the corner store.

  “I was the person who disarmed the device in Sean’s chair,” Charlie said. “Not only was it a live bomb, it had a backup timer attached to the pressure switch, to make absolutely certain it would go off.”

  The professor gaped. “Sally?”

  “What?” she snapped. “Leon’s obsessed with those damn diamonds, you kept talking about his corporate assets, and it feels like nobody but me and Brock gives a damn about Kimberly.”

  “Kimberly,” Brock grunted in agreement.

  “This bastard murdered her,” Sally said. She brandished her gun and jammed it in Sean’s face. “He has to pay for it. I’m sick of waiting.”

  Sean cringed, pulling away as far as the ropes would let him. He tucked his chin against his chest and turned his face from the gun. Charlie tensed up, arms tight at her sides. She weighed her chances. She was close enough to jump Sally, not close enough to keep her from pulling that trigger.

  Kinzman got to his feet fast enough to knock his chair back. It fell to the dirty linoleum with a clatter.

  “I trusted you,” Kinzman said. “I brought you in on this. We had a plan. You agreed to it, same as the rest of us.”

  Sally shook her head wildly. The gun wavered in her hand.

  “You forgot where you came from, Professor. You forgot what you used to stand for. The revolution, remember? A new day, an equal and just society. A day when leeches like this”—she ground the gun’s muzzle against Sean’s cheekbone hard enough to make him yelp—“would be lined up against the wall and shot!”

  “Sally,” Charlie said, “he’s a bad guy, okay? Nobody’s denying that. But you spent decades, the prime of your life, behind bars. You don’t want to go back to prison. Nobody here does. There’s a better way. Let me help you find it. Let’s work this out before anybody gets hurt.”

  She punctuated her words with a look to Leon and Kinzman, driving the point home. And from the looks on their faces, she’d scored a direct hit. Charlie had divided the gang by bringing up the bomb, just as she’d hoped. Now she needed them working against each other.

  “She’s right,” Leon said. “C’mon, Sally, I’m not going back to prison. Not for this slug, not for anybody. We were just supposed to scare him a little and get the money, that’s all. Nobody was going to die.”

  Sally turned her glare on him, a spotlight of malice. “The professor, I know he’s a sellout. But you disappoint me, Leon. You used to be just like me.”

  “The sixties are over, Sally. The revolution is over. We lost—deal with it.”

  “No,” she spat. “Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit.”

  Kinzman shook his head. His voice was dry as a desert. “So you can quote Abbie Hoffman. The devil can quote scripture, too, I’m told.”

  The pistol swung around in her hand. “You sanctimonious piece of—”

  Kinzman lunged for his gun. He snatched it up from the card table—and Sally pulled her trigger first. And again, and again, driving the professor backward as three shots peppered his chest and tore out a chunk of his throat, spattering scarlet and flesh across the wall behind him. He pitched over and hit the floor, stone dead, eyes wide open in eternal shock.

  Everyone froze, like a roomful of statues, as the sounds of gunfire faded into reverberating echoes. Then silence.

  “Jesus, Sally,” Leon breathed.

  “He went for his gun,” she said.

  Brock’s perpetually furious expression twisted into odd confusion. “Didn’t have to do that.”

  “He was going to shoot me.”

  “You pointed your pistol at him; what did you think he was going to do?” Leon said.

  “I was just trying to . . . I mean, I wasn’t really going to . . .” She shook her head. “He shouldn’t have gone for his gun.”

  Leon got out of his chair. He crouched next to the professor’s body and pressed two fingers to his neck, feeling for a pulse.

  “Well,” Leon said, “he’s pretty dead.”

  Sally stepped backward until her shoulders bumped the wall. The blood drained from her face, and she clutched her weapon in a white-knuckle grip.

  “I didn’t mean to,” she said.

  “You didn’t shoot harsh language at him, Sal. You can’t exactly take it back.” Still crouched, Leon waved a hand at Sean and Charlie. “What now?”

  “They’re witnesses.” A little of Sally’s fear faded, her bloodthirstiness flooding back in to fill the empty space it left behind. “They need to die. Both of them. We bury all three bodies and get out of here. Out of Boston. No one will ever know.”

  Charlie’s chest tightened. Brock wasn’t going to argue with her, and Leon might be looking to cut his losses; he’d been on Kinzman’s side, out for a payday, but Sean’s revelation that he didn’t have any money to offer the gang might have written a death sentence for him and Charlie both.

  Leon rose, dusting his hands off on his jeans. “I’m not looking to kill anybody,” he said. “I thought you weren’t either.”

  “You heard her,” Sally said. Charlie tried not to flinch as the barrel of Sally’s gun swung her way. “Do you want to go back to prison?”

  Charlie hated it when people threw her words back at her. Especially when they were heavily armed. Sally couldn’t be reasoned with. She needed to focus on Leon, to find something she could offer him that would outweigh the risk he’d be taking by letting her and Sean live.

  She thought back, focusing on his words, his deeds, everything she knew about the man. She knew from his voice that he’d been the one making the phone calls to Sean; he was all about the money, just like the dead man on the floor. He’d
also spent a decade behind bars, and from the way he tensed up at the very mention of the subject, he’d die before he ever went back again. Getting past that fear would take the kind of treasure Charlie didn’t—

  Treasure. Before either of them could say another word, she blurted her offer.

  “I’ll find the diamonds.”

  Leon and Sally both stared at her. “Bull,” Sally said.

  “Give me two days. Keep Sean here as collateral—alive—and let me go. I’ll find the diamonds for you.”

  “Leon’s been looking for years,” Sally said, waving the muzzle of her gun at the maps on the table. “Years. And you think you can do it in two days?”

  “You’ve been looking alone, and I’m guessing on a shoestring budget. I have no-questions access to an entire modern security company. We’ve got scanners, infrared scopes, topographic imaging. The best and most advanced technology on the market.”

  None of that was true, and Charlie wasn’t even sure how infrared scopes would help her find diamonds, but it sounded good in the heat of the moment. Right now, all that mattered was keeping them talking and staying alive long enough to come up with a better plan. Leon and Sally looked to one another. Sally stood her ground, but Charlie could see Leon starting to slide her way.

  “If there’s a chance we could still get what we came for—” Leon said.

  “She’s just trying to save her own hide.”

  “Of course I am,” Charlie said. “And if saving my own hide means we all get what we want, what’s the problem? Calling the police won’t do me any good: I came in here with a bag over my head, and I assume I’ll leave the same way, so there’s nothing useful I can tell them.”

  “She’s got a point,” Leon said.

  Charlie talked fast, not giving Sally a chance to rebut. “You went to so much trouble setting this up. You spent so much time and money. Why walk away empty handed if you don’t have to? And then there’s me. You’re not bad people. I know this. You know I didn’t do anything to you, and you’ve got no good reason to kill me.”

  She directed that entirely at Leon, watching his face soften. Charlie knew perfectly well that Sally had absolutely no problem with collateral damage, given her stunt with the chair bomb, and Brock was an attack dog on her leash. Leon was the only path to survival now.

  “Let me help you get what you deserve,” Charlie said. “Forty-eight hours. If I fail, you’ve still got Sean, and you can do whatever you want to him. If I succeed, we trade Sean for the diamonds. No matter what happens, you win. How often do you get a deal like that?”

  Even Sally nodded, just a little bit. They shared another glance.

  “One other thing,” Charlie added. She pointed to the body on the floor. “Let’s face it: you’re going to have to deal with this. That means covering it up, or it means running, or both. So ask yourself this: Do you want to run with nothing but the shirt on your back, or with diamonds in your pocket?”

  Sally folded in on herself. The gun drooped in her hand, giving away her defeat. Charlie’s logic was an iron wall; she couldn’t batter it down with slogans and ideology. Couldn’t shoot it, either, as much as she clearly still wanted to.

  “Sal?” Leon asked.

  She waved the pistol’s barrel at the table.

  “Gather up the maps and notes,” she said. “You’ve got two days. We’ll give you a throwaway Skype address to contact us with. Don’t bother taking it to the cops; they won’t be able to find us with it.”

  “I’m not going to the cops,” Charlie said. “My job is keeping Sean Ellis alive. I won’t do anything to jeopardize that.”

  Sally gave her a long, hard look.

  “I hope you’re right. I really do. Because if I don’t have those diamonds in my hand in forty-eight hours, you can go pick him up at the bottom of the Charles River.”

  They dropped Charlie off with a burlap potato sack over her head and a stack of maps and notepads in her arms. She took the sack off, saw she was on a street corner in a neighborhood she didn’t recognize, and called for a ride.

  It was past one in the morning by the time the cab dropped her off at her father’s house. Too late to do anything but sleep, and her exhausted legs trudged up to the stoop by sheer momentum. With an hourglass dangling over her client’s head, sleep felt like a betrayal, but she knew she’d be useless without it. Six hours, she thought. Six hours and a cold shower, and I’ll be back in fighting shape.

  Her key rattled in the lock. She opened the door slowly, trying not to wake her father up.

  His body was a lump on the living room floor, silhouetted in the skewed light of a fallen lamp.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Charlie raced to her father’s side. The living room looked like a whirlwind had hit it. Or his body had, bounced off every wall and every piece of broken furniture. He lay, limbs skewed and unmoving, in a clutter of shattered wood and glass. She fell to her knees, gently rolled him over, and put her fingers to his throat. A pulse beat under the skin, weak and slow. His head lolled in the fallen lamplight and showed her a face pounded to raw hamburger. One of his eyes was too swollen to open, the other locked in a razor-thin squint.

  “Charlie,” he croaked.

  “Stay still.” She already had her phone out, dialing 911. “I’m calling for help. It’s going to be okay. You’re going to be okay.”

  “Charlie—”

  “Don’t try to talk. It’s going to be okay.”

  “Why did you come home?” he breathed.

  Her lips tightened. She stared down at him.

  “You should have stayed away,” he told her. “You made everything worse.”

  The ambulance came and went, carrying out their delicate cargo on a stretcher, leaving the debris behind. Charlie sat out on the front stoop. A county sheriff came over to talk. Most of his words washed over her, around her, like numbness had become an invisible shield in the air between them.

  “So you don’t have any idea who might have wanted to hurt your father?”

  “No,” she said.

  Of course she did. She even knew their names. Grillo and Reyburn. Jimmy Lassiter’s debt collectors had mean streaks a mile wide and egos made of spun glass. She’d scared them off her father’s land last time, but she’d also humiliated them, the thugs scurrying off more angry than afraid.

  They couldn’t get at her, so they’d taken out their anger on the next best target. Charlie’s father was on his way to the ER, strapped to a stretcher with an oxygen mask over his face, and it was her fault.

  “Sometimes,” the sheriff was saying, “local feuds tend to . . . escalate. That’s something we don’t want to see, you understand?”

  Grillo’s pistol was still sitting in the glove compartment of her father’s dead truck. Charlie thought about heading over to Lassiter’s bar. Three men, three bullets. She wouldn’t say a word before she pulled the trigger. After all, like Saint and Beckett had told her, only amateurs talked first.

  “I don’t know who did it,” she told the sheriff.

  Her voice rang as hollow as she felt. There was nothing inside of her now, nothing but a slow and simmering core of molten anger, and it took everything she had to keep it under control.

  The sheriff didn’t believe her, so he asked her the same question four more times, four more ways. She bounced his words off her shield until he gave up and went away. The last car pulled out and left her sitting alone on her father’s porch with nothing but an upset stomach and a broken heart.

  She’d gone past the border of being too tired to think. She trudged through the wreckage of the living room and up the hall and fell onto her mattress with her clothes on. She barely remembered to kick off her shoes before sleep took her, roaring up to grab hold and drag her down into a dreamless abyss.

  Come sunrise, Charlie ran. A quick sprint up the hill and back again, just far enough to flood her aching body with endorphins and coat her skin in a sheen of cold sweat. She scrubbed it off under the shower’s harsh sp
ray, changed into a T-shirt and cargo pants, and laced up her boots. She made two phone calls and headed into town.

  Over at the library, Mrs. Frinkle guided Charlie to a study room off the first floor. Just a little nook with a wooden table and a scattering of low chairs, a place for her to lay out the notes and maps she’d taken from the kidnappers. She read Kimberly Hutchens’s final epitaph, the grainy black-and-white copy of the police report, for the fifth time. It didn’t yield any fresh clues. She only saw the stark facts, just like Leon had: Kimberly had been found dead of hypothermia, buried in a snowbank, wearing nothing but a light windbreaker over her thin blouse and jeans. Not even a pair of gloves. And while everyone agreed she’d fled the heist with a big share of the diamonds, there had been nothing in her pockets but a wallet, twenty bucks in rumpled, small bills, and a knife intended for cutting drywall. She hadn’t even carried a gun.

  Beckett arrived first, with Dom close on his heels.

  “Jake was up all night doing some soul-searching,” Beckett told them. “Decided not to call the cops. Hard choice, but I don’t blame him.”

  “So he’s just going to pretend Ellis didn’t get jacked last night?” Dom asked.

  “He’s going to pretend we don’t know what happened to him, and those ops guarding his front door were never there. It’s a lose-lose situation. We file a formal report and the cops find the client dead, the company loses everything. The cops find him alive, Ellis fires us because we called the cops, and the company loses everything. Right now, Boston Asset Protection has one chance to survive this mess: we find Ellis ourselves and get him back, safe and sound, without anybody on the outside knowing about it.”

  “I’ve got good news and bad news,” Charlie said.

  She started with the call from Kinzman and the gun against her spine. She ended it with Kinzman’s dead body on the floor and the deal that kept her from joining him.

  “She shot him?” Dom said, clearly trying to lower her voice. “Jesus.”

  “Leon wasn’t happy about it, for what it’s worth.”