Gun Lake (7 page)

Kurt looked across the basement and noticed the small, square window for the first time. It was covered with a blackout shade, but a little bit of light leaked in around the edges. Kurt wondered if they could open it up and fit through it.

It was either that or stay down here until the couple left tomorrow morning. If they left.

“Let me check it out,” he said.

“Maybe I should,” Lonnie said. “I’m good at fitting through small spaces.”

“Maybe you should shut up and stay put,” Kurt said.

Another curse. Kurt ignored it as he walked across the cold concrete floor in the darkness. He knocked into something that slid over the floor like a broom—a fake-pine Christmas wreath. As he made it to the window, he raised the shade and studied the pane of glass to see if he could move it.

The window was maybe four feet high, four feet wide. It had two panes of glass and a lock in the center that Kurt turned. The bottom pane slid up over the top one; the sound of crickets filled the basement. The ground stood about three feet above the window, and a small grate separated the hollowed-out area in front of the window with the outside. Kurt put his arm out the window and prodded the grate. It was lightweight and easily moved.

They could fit through. And they could be outside in a matter of minutes, turn on the cell phone they’d taken from the house, and call Sean. They were already running late, so he wasn’t sure if Sean had gone ahead with the Steerhouse job by himself. At this point, Kurt didn’t care. He just wanted to get out of this suburban home without another death. And without anyone knowing the Stagworth Five had ventured into the grand state of Texas.

“Come on,” Kurt said.

“It’ll work?” Craig asked.

“Put that away,” Kurt said to Lonnie, who was waving around the Smith & Wesson.

“Afraid I’ll shoot you?”

“No,” Kurt said. “I’m afraid you’ll shoot some innocent bystander.”

Lonnie cursed again, telling Kurt to stop bringing up old news.

“I might need this for whatever’s out there.”

Kurt laughed. “Only thing out there is a lawn that’s probably in need of watering. Nothing more. Put it away.”

“You take your precautions, I’ll take mine.”

Kurt cursed at him. “I swear I have no clue why Sean brought you along.”

“I could say the same thing about you.”

With the gun still in his hand, Lonnie began to maneuver his skinny body up through the window. Kurt held his breath. If somebody was taking a night stroll, he’d be in for a surprise. Maybe something more.

“TURN IT UP!”

Sean laughed and obliged Wes. They’d found common ground on the Dodge’s radio stations: Led Zeppelin. “Kashmir” shook the speakers. Robert Plant sounded like a maniac, Jon Bonham’s pounding drums driving the song. Zeppelin had called it quits after Bonham killed himself with booze. They had realized they were a foursome and nothing more. Sean always admired this about Led Zeppelin. They’d never be The Doors, but he could still appreciate them for what they were. Vintage rock.

They pulled into the parking lot of the Steerhouse Restaurant just as the song ended. Sean turned off the stereo and the car, and they sat in silence, the music still echoing in Sean’s ears.

“You sure Rita knows what she was talking about?” Wes asked, vacant eyes staring off at the flat-roofed building fifty yards from them.

“She knows the owner,” Sean said. “In the biblical sense.”

“What?”

“She knows enough. Should be over fifty thousand in the safe. Cash.”

“If not?”

“We deal with it.” Sean lit up a cigarette. “But we need that
cash. Having thirty guns doesn’t mean a thing if we don’t have cash to live on.”

For a few minutes, they just sat there, Sean smoking his cigarette and thinking. He asked Wes to try Kurt again on the cell phone. Still no answer.

“You okay?”

“Oh yeah,” Wes said.

“Max is the owner and the manager. He’s a little guy. Just wave a gun and we’ll be fine.”

“I’ve got my forty-four magnum,” Wes said of the handpicked gun he had swiped at the Harman’s store.

The sight of it alone, with its Dirty Harry long barrel, was enough to scare the love of God into anybody who stared into it.

“Let’s try not to use that tonight,” Sean said. “Unless you need to shoot a buffalo or something.”

Wes laughed. They talked for a few more minutes about the plan, having to change a few things since the other guys weren’t there. It really was just a two-man job anyway. Sean hoped the others would show up right when they were exiting with cash and goods in hand.

“Can I order a beer?” Wes asked.

“You can order anything you want.”

“How about we take some bottles with us?”

“Take whatever you want.”

Sean felt like a father telling his son which Christmas present he could open. The thought amused him.

Sitting at the bar with Wes, Sean could see only three people in the restaurant. The bartender was a type his mother had always called “healthy looking,” which meant the guy was fat, with ruddy cheeks and a moist forehead that probably stayed that way all the time. He had a dumb grin on his face and crooked teeth that flashed in the dimly lit room. Sean wondered if he’d managed to slip a drink here and there during his shift or if that slightly giddy expression was just the Texan coming out in him. Sean thought Texans were their own breed, their own culture and mind-set. He just couldn’t exactly pinpoint what that culture and mind-set was.

An older man, maybe in his sixties, sat at the end of the bar talking to the chunky bartender. He was almost bald, the skin so tight and leathery on his face that his eyes bulged out. He wore a heavy checkered shirt and jeans even though it was around eighty degrees outside. No sweat on his forehead. He looked totally out of it, not even worth thinking about.

The man polishing off a steak at the corner table was the one that worried Sean. He was another stocky fellow, but solid-looking instead of flabby. His arms didn’t bulge with muscle the way Wes’s did, but Sean wouldn’t want to arm wrestle the guy or get in a fight with him. He had a clean-shaven square face and his hair was cut short.

I gotta do that
. Sean thought of his long locks pulled back in a ponytail.

The guy looked to be having his dinner after getting off work. Probably shift work, this late at night. Was he carrying? Sean glanced over casually, checking to make sure the guy didn’t have a piece against his thigh. He didn’t think so.

The steak eater just worked on his dinner and ignored Wes and Sean as they sat and nursed their beers for five minutes more. Then Sean looked at Wes and finally gave him a nod.

“Now?”

“Just stay put,” Sean said, taking out his Glock 31 pistol.

“Hey, buddy,” he said to the bartender.

The guy walked over with an empty glass in his hand. “Want another one?”

“No,” Sean said calmly, shaking his head. He pointed the gun at the bartender’s substantial abdomen. “All right, look. We’re going to rob you guys, and if you don’t do anything stupid, you’ll live to see tomorrow. Got it?”

The bartender froze and his mouth hung open. Wes stood up and waved his handgun in the air.

“Pops,” he said, “you over there, come here.”

The old guy at the bar just looked down at them and acted like he was seeing a mirage.

“Wes, hold on,” Sean said as he stood.

The big guy at the corner table was looking at them with full attention, lockjawed and ready for something.

“You, come here,” Sean told him.

The guy at first didn’t move, so Sean walked over toward him and put the gun in his face.

“We don’t want anyone getting hurt. So just stand up and walk over to the bar.”

The man stood up but didn’t appear scared. He kept his arms in close and moved slowly toward where Sean told him. “Sit down—yeah, that’s it.”

They finally got the old guy to amble over toward them. He didn’t have a clue what was happening. He took a seat next to the big guy.

“Watch them,” Sean told Wes, going behind the bar. “Where’s your boss?” he asked the bartender.

“He’s out.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“He left an hour ago. Check the back.”

“Yeah, but why don’t you come with me? And first, give me everything in that drawer. And I know you got a lot. I’ve seen it—looks pretty full.”

The bartender seemed to pause for a moment and Sean aimed the gun at his head. It was amazing the power you had wielding a weapon. If the bartender knew deep down that Sean had no intention of killing any of them, he’d have probably relaxed and stopped sweating like a pig. But that was the thing—a stranger points a gun at your face and you’ll do anything, absolutely anything, because you have no idea who the guy is and what he is capable of.

Capability. That was the underlying factor.

“All right,” Sean said, “now let’s go to the back.”

“What for?”

“So you can show me the safe.”

“There’s no safe,” the bartender said.

“That’s cute. Now go. Wes?”

“Everything’s fine here,” Wes said.

He was holding his handgun too casually. Sean scrutinized
the stocky customer for a moment, then decided everything was all right. He nudged the bartender with the pistol and motioned with his head toward in the back.

“Look, I don’t know the combination, and I don’t know—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Sean told him. “Just show me where it is.”

The bartender led him into a little cave of an office. The safe sat in the back corner, a massive, refrigerator-sized chunk of steel that looked like it could survive a nuclear blast. It looked shiny, as if the owner actually polished the outside, and it had a fancy round knob, sort of like the steering wheel of an expensive yacht.

“Look, man,” the bartender was saying, “I don’t know how to get that thing—”

Sean interrupted. “See that chair?”

“Yeah.”

“Have a seat in it.”

The leather seat squeaked as the desperate-looking man sat back in it. Sean took a sheet of paper out of his shirt pocket and then went to work. He occasionally glanced over at the sweaty bartender but didn’t worry much.

When the safe finally swung open, it was just as Rita had told him.

And then some
.

There were several rifles and at least one handgun that he could see. A box contained a stack of cash, more than Rita had figured would be in there. Even the bartender looked amazed at the amount of cash.

“All right,” Sean told the bartender. “I want you to carry this box out there.”

Sean grabbed a couple of the rifles and stuck the automatic handgun under his belt. He still gripped the Glock in his right hand, and he kept it at the bartender’s back as they walked back out to the restaurant floor.

This is easier than I thought it’d be
.

THE MAN TOOK ONE LAST DRAG of his cigarette, then flicked it out into the full parking lot. He scanned the sea of cars like a father searching for his lost child but saw nothing unusual, then looked down along the Fox River waterfront. No watching eyes, not that Paul could see.
Just give it time
, he thought. Somebody would show up eventually.

Paul Hedges walked the gangplank up to the loud, colorful riverboat and passed through the ornate front entrance into the casino. He could coast through the huge room blindfolded, but it looked different through the eyes of someone who was leaving for good.

He saw his usual post over past the blackjack tables, a small bar that both waitresses and customers used. That area always had a sour smell to it, the result of too much liquor and beer spilled over the years—a stench you could try to scrub away but would linger until the day they trashed the room for good.

The door marked “Employees Only” opened onto a dim, musty hallway that led down to Mike’s office. Paul knew his manager would be there. They had talked on the phone half an hour ago.

The door was half-open. Paul knocked.

“Yeah?”

“Hi, Mike,” Paul said.

The short, round guy with slicked-back hair held a cordless phone in his hand. He gestured with his head for Paul to come in and continued talking.

“I gotta go. I’ll call you in a couple of hours. Just be up. Don’t fall asleep. Okay baby?”

He clicked the phone shut. “So you’re pretty serious about this, huh?”

Paul nodded. He sat in the chair next to the desk. The gray-walled room felt claustrophobic. No pictures on the walls, not even a window for some sense of life outside.

“There’s nothing I can say, huh?” Mike said.

“No.”

“Everything all right? Anything I can do?”

Paul shook his head. He knew the guy across from him, younger by about twenty years, meant well but wouldn’t have been able to do anything for him if he asked. Wouldn’t really have wanted to, either. It was just a canned response, but it did its job. It made this moment easier on both of them.

“I could use my check,” he told Mike.

“You leaving soon?”

“Pretty soon,” Paul said.

He had finally figured out the smell in the office. Onions and ketchup from some burger joint. Maybe the Wendy’s down the road. Funny. Paul had always assumed the onboard restaurant comped meals for management.

“I can give you the cash.” Mike studied him for a minute. “You in trouble?”

“No,” Paul lied.

“So how much you got coming?” He didn’t ask to see his time card. He knew Paul never cheated on such things.

“Twenty-eight hours. At sixteen bucks an hour.”

Mike reached for the oversized calculator on his desk and rubbed his mouth as he figured out the pay. He reached down and pulled a wad of money from his pocket. Mike always had a pocket full of cash.

“There,” he said. “That’s four hundred fifty bucks. A couple of bucks over.”

“Thanks,” Paul said.

“You’re not drinking, are you?”

The question surprised Paul. In another time, another life, he might have reached over and grabbed the pudgy guy by his thick neck and squeezed the life out of him. Whether he was drinking or not was his business and his alone—at least as long as he got his work done. But the years mellowed you out. At least they’d mellowed him. That and being sober for eight years now. And Grace.