The Loot (Charlie McCabe Thriller)

by Craig Schaefer

  Charlie was already halfway out of the back seat, with a beige folder filled with printouts from the library tucked tight under her arm. “We’ll get started on the hunt,” she replied.

  “Sure,” Dom said. “Still a needle in a haystack, though.”

  Charlie tugged out the photos they’d copied from the Modern Architect article. She held one up and to the side, comparing the black-and-white image of the abandoned, half-finished garage with the real thing, and tried to put herself in Kimberly’s shoes. The college student would have been running from the storm, half-frozen, in a mad panic and hearing police sirens closing in from every direction. She imagined her heart pounding as her wet shoes slapped across the fresh concrete, looking for a quick place to stash her share of the loot. Someplace secure but simple, where it could linger for a few days, a couple of weeks, until the heat died down and she could come back for the treasure.

  She walked along the half-empty parking rows, under hot white light bars, and drifted like a ghost between stout square pillars decorated with eggshell-white stucco paint.

  “Probably a lost cause,” Dom said, “but I’m going to see if I can get into the boiler room.”

  Dead end, Charlie thought. The skeleton of the HVAC system had been built by February of ’69, but the whole thing would have been gutted and replaced by now. Maybe two or three times over, the building adapting to changing times and growing needs as the condo flourished. If Kimberly had tossed the diamonds under the boiler or into the ductwork, they would have been found years ago.

  She looked back to the photographs. Workmen’s tools littered the empty gallery, the yellow parking lines only half–filled in, the shot ending in a span of open space and a pair of skeletal pillars shelled in white-spotted drywall.

  “What did you see?” she murmured to the silent cars, the ramp stained with old oil and time. “Show me.”

  Behind her, Beckett was on his back, halfway under the belly of the Skylark. The sounds of rustling and metallic clanking faded as she slipped into detail mode. The black-and-white photographs, locked in her memory, superimposed themselves onto her vision. She sliced the room into pie wedges and came at them one controlled and calculated step at a time.

  Where an SUV now parked, she saw a sawhorse and some dusty bags of concrete mix. In a pair of empty stalls, her gaze lingered over buckets of paint captured in black and white, a brush dangling precariously off one metal lid.

  “It’s a no-go,” Dom was saying, walking past her. “They’ve got a Selex lock on the utility room door. I’m good, but I’m not that good.”

  “Son of a—” Beckett said, his voice muffled by the underbelly of his car.

  He squirmed out from under the chassis and brandished his discovery. It was a tiny gadget cased in glossy black plastic, about the size of his thumb.

  “What am I looking at?” Dom asked him.

  “Found it under the wheel well. My guess?” He shoved himself to his feet, glaring daggers at the plastic box. “GPS tracker. That’s how he’s been tailing us. Probably got one on your daddy’s pickup, too, Little Duck. Explains how he ‘just happened’ to cross your path at the police station.”

  Charlie didn’t answer. She was lost in 1969, following a dead woman’s footsteps through a black-and-white world.

  “He slipped one under my ride, too, no doubt,” Dom said. “And good luck proving he put ’em there. Sneaky bastard. You want to do the honors, or can I?”

  Beckett shook his head. “I’d love to take a tire iron to this thing right here and now, but it might be better if he doesn’t know we’re onto him. Let’s keep it in play a little while longer, in case we need to lead him off our trail.”

  Charlie stood in the heart of the aisle. Part of her mind kept pulling her toward the police report. The discovery of Kimberly’s body. What they hadn’t found in her pockets, and what they had.

  “Tire iron,” she breathed. She looked back over her shoulder. “You have one?”

  “Sure.” Beckett nodded toward his trunk.

  Charlie bit her bottom lip. For the first time since they’d set out, she felt something new: a glimmer of hope. A tiny, crackling flame in the pit of her heart, aching to surge and blossom bright.

  “Grab it,” she said. “I know where Kimberly hid the diamonds.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Dom put her hands on her hips, skepticism warring with hunger behind her eyes.

  “Don’t keep us in suspense,” she said.

  Charlie waved the folder in her hand. “Kimberly was a pacifist. We know, both from the police reports and from Leon’s write-up, that she didn’t carry a gun on the heist. She didn’t want anything to do with weapons.”

  “Sure,” Beckett said. He glanced over his shoulder as he reached into the front seat of his car. The trunk popped with a dull clunk.

  “But when they found her body,” Charlie said, “she had a knife in her pocket.”

  “Self-defense?” Dom asked. “I’ve always got a knife on me.”

  Beckett gave her a sidelong glance. “You’ve always got a gun on you too.”

  “At least one. But point taken, I’m not exactly the poster child for peace, love, and hugging trees. So . . . what’s a knife got to do with the diamonds?”

  Charlie took out the spread of photos from Modern Architect and fanned them out like a winning poker hand. She darted across the aisle and rapped her knuckles against a stucco pillar. They rang solid against the stone under the swirling, textured paint.

  “Okay, by the time construction stalled out in ’69, they were halfway done. Look at these photographs. Here, here, here, bare concrete and rebar. These are load-bearing pillars.”

  “With you so far,” Beckett said.

  She sprinted across the gallery and held up the final photograph.

  “The ones in the middle? These aren’t. They’re drywall shells. Decorative.”

  Her knuckles rapped against the stucco with a deep thumping sound.

  “Hollow,” Charlie said.

  “But the knife . . . ,” Dom started to ask.

  “According to the police report, it was a knife for cutting drywall. It wasn’t meant to be a weapon, and she didn’t have it on the heist. She took it from here. After she cut a hole in one of these pillars, stashed the diamonds, and sealed it up again.”

  Beckett swung his tire iron with both fists, putting his back and his shoulders into it. The rod smashed against a pillar and powdered the stucco. A cloud of white particles flooded the air as the drywall beneath crumbled. From her guard post at the far end of the parking gallery, Charlie’s shoulders tensed at the gun crack sound of impact. Just like they had for the last three he’d cracked open. Dom covered the opposite end, shouting back warnings every time footsteps echoed along the gallery or a car’s engine purred to life.

  Three pillars, and nothing inside but dust. She felt like a kid on an Easter egg hunt that had turned into a cruel practical joke. The pillars were a mad gamble, her last chance. Last chance to save the client, the company, and their jobs. Last chance to save her father’s life. If she was wrong, if she’d wasted an entire day on a wild-goose chase while Sean Ellis’s hourglass was running down—

  “Think we’ve got something,” Beckett said.

  She was at his shoulder in a shot. Dom, too, brandishing her cell phone and flipping on the light app. She strobed a beam into the dusty depths of the cracked pillar. There was something inside, nestled low, a shapeless lump in the dark.

  “Do the honors,” Beckett told Charlie.

  She got down on one knee, shoved her sleeve up, and gritted her teeth as she reached into the darkness. Her fingers stretched out, straining . . . and brushed faded leather. She shoved herself closer against the pillar. The jagged drywall scraped against her shoulder as she made a grab, snatched the prize, and hauled it out into the light.

  It was a pouch in golden-brown calfskin, sealed with a black drawstring thread. She tugged it open, her fingers trembling, heart hammerin
g a staccato beat. The pouch was almost weightless. Thick but light, airy, about as fat as a couple of walnuts.

  She didn’t dare to hope, didn’t dare to think or do anything but breathe, as she tipped the pouch over.

  A cascade of pinpoint diamonds spilled into the palm of her hand.

  It was a waterfall of dreams, catching the overhead lights and blazing like dozens upon dozens of tiny suns. A supernova explosion glimmering in Charlie’s open palm. Dom and Beckett leaned in close at her shoulders.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Dom said. “They’re beautiful. How much do you think they’re worth?”

  “Enough.” Charlie barely even breathed now, whispering like the diamonds had swallowed her voice in their white-hot glow. “Enough for all of us.”

  Enough to save her father. Enough to fix Dom’s divorce. Enough to save their jobs and the client’s life, if they made all the right moves.

  If.

  “We need to go.” Beckett rested his tire iron against his shoulder like a batter heading to the dugout. “That tracker is still live. Only a matter of time before Malloy traces us here, and I don’t want this to be the end of the road. That’ll just make him wonder why. Figure we’ll drive around, park at a few more random spots, see if we can’t confuse him a little.”

  They rolled out of the parking garage and into a Boston sunset. Traffic thickened in the streets like molasses as the sky shifted to azure blue. While Beckett drove, taking a random rat-maze wander down side roads to throw Malloy off the trail, Charlie and Dom sat side by side in the back seat. Dom had her laptop out; she powered it up and opened Skype, while Charlie read off the throwaway address Sally had given her. The speakers let out a watery electronic bloop as they connected.

  We have the diamonds, Dom typed.

  The response barely took five seconds: Bullshit.

  Charlie poured the mound of pinpoint stars into her hand and snapped a photograph. This time, they got nothing but silence for a good ten minutes. She imagined Sally and Leon arguing, debating their next move, while the mammoth Brock Kozlowski sat there and stared with his quietly furious, piggish eyes.

  You give us the diamonds, we tell you where to find Ellis. Deal?

  “Uh-uh,” Charlie said. Dom was a step ahead of her, eyes narrowed to gunport slits as she typed.

  Same time or no deal. And we want proof of life before we go one step further.

  They sent over a photograph. Sean, still cuffed to his chair, sporting a black eye but otherwise not looking much worse for wear.

  “They could have taken that five minutes after I left,” Charlie said. “And shot him six minutes after.”

  You can do better than that, Dom typed.

  The kidnappers went silent. Beckett turned at an intersection, the shark car humming along the streets of Boston’s Back Bay with no particular destination in mind, as they waited for a reply.

  The response came in the form of a video attachment. The camera focused on Sean Ellis, with a man’s hand—Leon’s, Charlie assumed—holding the front page of today’s newspaper next to his face with the date on full display.

  “Charlie,” Sean said, sounding weak, “this is the proof of life you asked for. It’s me, okay? I’m fine. For now, I’m fine. Just . . . do whatever they tell you. Give them what they want, and nobody will get hurt.”

  She wished she could believe that, but Sally had already tried to murder him once. Leon wanted the money. Sally only wanted blood.

  Which meant, at the end of this dance, Sally was going to have to be dealt with. Charlie had been trying not to think about that part too hard. But the closer they got to their final stand, the less she could pretend it wasn’t a problem that needed a permanent fix.

  “How do you want to play it?” Dom asked her. The kidnappers were waiting.

  The ideal solution, the only one that scanned, was to take off with Sean Ellis and the diamonds. They could strong-arm Sally and her gang, ambush them at the meeting point and force them to walk away empty handed, but that still left Sally—and to a lesser extent, Brock, her mad-dog buddy—free and able to come after their client again and again.

  “You remember what I said.” Beckett caught her gaze in the rearview mirror. “This could get messy.”

  Six-foot-deep-holes kind of messy. The fastest, easiest way to get rid of the problem was to get rid of Sally Weinstein. Charlie even had the revolver she’d stolen off Lassiter’s leg breakers. An unlicensed gun with someone else’s crimes attached to the ballistics.

  It wasn’t a question of could she pull the trigger. Charlie knew she could. She’d done it before. Never in cold blood, but hot and cold didn’t feel like too much of a difference from where she was standing. All the same, she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life with a murder rap chasing her heels, making her keep one eye over her shoulder while she waited for the hammer to come down. She didn’t want to live like Sally Weinstein.

  That was it. The solution she’d been looking for, right under her nose.

  “Sally,” Charlie said. “When we do the handoff, she’s going to come armed.”

  Dom shrugged. “Figure all three of them will. They’d be stupid not to.”

  “It’d be natural for us to want to make the exchange in a public place. Safer for us. Safer for them too. Nothing suspicious about that.”

  “Where are you going with this?” Dom asked.

  “What if,” Charlie said, “a well-timed anonymous call alerted the police to some suspicious activity in the area?”

  Dom’s lips curled into a mean little smile. “Like three ex-cons, who legally can’t carry firearms, walking around in a busy public place with concealed and extremely stolen guns.”

  “Bingo,” Charlie said. “All we have to do is stall and keep them occupied until the cops show up. The police swarm in, they grab Sally and her crew—grab ’em red handed with illegal weapons, and that’s a felony beef. They go right back to prison, and by the time they get out, Sean Ellis probably won’t be our problem anymore. At the very least it buys him a few years of peace and quiet.”

  “And the diamonds?” Beckett asked.

  “We never hand them over. Oh, we’ll show them off, just to buy a little time and make sure we have eyes on Sean before the fireworks start, but they stay in our hands. Who’s going to say a word to the police? Sally and company will already be facing gun charges; what are they going to say? ‘Oh, we were actually here to get those stolen diamonds in exchange for our hostage?’ Last thing they’ll want is a kidnapping rap on top of everything else. And we know the client’s going to keep his mouth shut.”

  “Especially once we take him aside and teach him the facts of life,” Dom said. “He keeps his mouth shut, so do we, and nobody ever has to know that he was once a budding jewel thief. Then we hit up Saint’s list of friendly under-the-table fences, find one to turn those diamonds into cash money, and it is payday. I don’t know about you two, but I’m feeling pretty good right now.”

  Beckett gave a tiny shake of his head. He flicked his turn signal.

  “Don’t feel too good just yet. Lot can go wrong between here and the finish line.”

  “Then let’s keep running.” Charlie nodded to the laptop screen. A cursor flashed in quiet anticipation. “Set up the meet.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  After some back and forth, tiny arguments over when and where as both sides jockeyed for a better position, the meet was set. Tomorrow morning, one hour after sunrise. Nothing to do now but try to get a few hours’ sleep and brace for the dawn.

  Almost nothing to do. Charlie argued with herself over whether or not to go to the hospital and see her father. She argued all the way to the admissions desk, and all the way to the elevator at the end of the sterile beige hallway. She argued on the ride up to the second floor, the cage smelling like someone had spilled an entire bottle of mouthwash on the spotless flecked-tile floor, and right up to the door of his room.

  Then she took a deep breath and let herself in.

>   Two beds, separated by a paper curtain, lay as silent as the twin television sets mounted to opposite corners on steel brackets. The lamps were doused, the only light coming from the soft neon glow of the monitors flanking her father’s bed. He was out cold, flat on his back, half his face wrapped in gauze. The half that wasn’t wrapped looked like he’d gone ten rounds with a heavyweight boxer. He breathed in and out through cracked, puffy lips. One leg was elevated, wrapped in a cast.

  Charlie sat in the chair beside his bed and stared at him. At the ruin of his body, at the slow rise and fall of his chest under the paper-thin sheet. She listened to the steady, faint beep of the monitors and the bustle of nurses in the corridor outside, on the move at all hours of the night.

  Grillo and Reyburn couldn’t get revenge on her, so they’d settled for the next best thing. He wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for her. He was right. She’d come home, where nobody wanted her, and only managed to make things worse.

  No, she thought.

  A slow coil of anger unspooled inside her chest, where it had been wound up all this time. Sleeping, cold and dormant, like a rattlesnake. Now, waking, it shook its tail in warning and glowed white hot.

  Sure, some of the blame was on her shoulders. She’d started a fight, and she hadn’t finished it. But her fists hadn’t done the beating. And Grillo and Reyburn wouldn’t have been around in the first place if her father had gotten his demons under control.

  Which brought the spotlight of guilt full circle back onto her. Because she hadn’t been there when he’d needed her most.

  “Charlie,” he croaked.

  She wasn’t sure how long he’d been awake. Lost in the maze of her thoughts, she hadn’t noticed his good eye opening up, his head tilting on the pillow.

  “Yeah, Dad. I’m here.”

  He took a deep breath and let it out in a wheezing sigh. “What I said, when you found me—”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “It wasn’t true,” he told her. “I’m . . . I’m not good at showing it. But I’m glad you’re home. You’re a good kid, Charlie.”