Magic Line (20 page)

‘Let's see.' Sarah's smart phone had a small flashlight that made Ray mutter, ‘Cool.' She held it above the jar's mouth, looked inside, moved the light a little and looked some more. ‘I can't believe—' She turned an incandescent smile toward Ray and said, ‘Can you say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?'

‘No. What is it?'

‘I think we just found a little cut-out.'

‘Oh, you mean for . . .'

‘Yeah. Somebody's been skimming.'

She plunged her hand inside. When she pulled it out it was holding a heavy royal-blue plastic bank bag, stuffed full and zippered along the top. The legend on the side read, ‘First National Bank of Baltimore, Maryland.'

Ray opened the zipper halfway, said, ‘Oh,
yes
,' and closed it back up fast.

‘Wait,' she said, and reached again. The second bag was gray, equally fat, and read, ‘Farmer's State Bank of Ames, Iowa.'

‘These people get around.'

‘More,' she said, and brought out a bulging green one that said, ‘Miners' Union Bank, Butte, Montana.' She felt around inside the jar. ‘That's it.'

‘OK,' Ray said, screwing the cap back on. ‘Now can we grab my radio and get the hell out of here? Because I'm getting a dark brown feeling in the back of my throat.'

‘Damn straight,' Sarah said, slamming the lid in place. ‘I think I can get all three of these money sacks in my brief case. Oy vey, heavy now. Smile pretty when you wave to Josephina, please. Look as if you never heard the word money.'

‘What kind of a look is that?'

‘You know, light-hearted.'

‘I'm a police detective. If I look light-hearted I'll get fired.'

At the front door, nervously jingling the house keys, she said, ‘Show me how fast you can get a radio.' She felt as if every house in the block had a gun pointed at her.

He was back in thirty seconds that felt like half an hour, saying, ‘You don't need the keys.' He set the lock from the inside and pulled the door shut. ‘Let's go.'

In the car, halfway to the station, he said, ‘I thought finding buried treasure was supposed to be fun. Why am I not having fun?'

‘Because we're humble working folk and driving around with this much cash makes us feel guilty and furtive and threatened. Are you actually checking your weapon?'

‘Yes, I am. Because when I feel guilty and furtive and threatened I like to make sure I'm carrying a full clip. Why are you driving five miles under the speed limit?'

‘Because I've started to imagine we will have a traffic accident and the newspaper headline will read, “Two Tucson detectives found with hoard of cash in car.”'

‘Please, Sarah, speed up the damn car. It already feels like downtown got moved forty miles farther north of Midvale Park.'

‘I know. But here's the bridge and South Stone is right over there – I'm starting to think this is going to be fun in just a few more minutes.'

‘Curb your enthusiasm. Remember we work for a bureaucracy.'

Delaney was waiting for them as they came off the elevator. Ray had phoned him on the way back so he would hear from them first that the fugitive got away. ‘I heard part of the chase. You're pretty sure you were after Robin Brady?'

‘We know he was at the house when we were there. We think we almost caught him in a white Taurus, but— Can we go in your office, please? And close the door?'

Delaney looked at her as if she'd said something indecent but he walked into his office. They followed him in and closed the door.

‘What, for God's sake?' he said. ‘Did you wreck the car?'

‘Boss, just . . . please. We . . . I need to sit.'

He made a despairing gesture. ‘Who's stopping you? Sit.'

They all sat down and Sarah pulled the royal-blue bank sack out of her briefcase and laid it in front of him. ‘Look.'

He picked it up and unzipped the top. The funky smell of cigarette smoke, marijuana, liquor and grease, ink and sweat, came out with the money. It was very dirty money, its filth redeemed entirely by the fact that there was such a lot of it.

‘Oh, my Christ, you found more?' Delaney said, lining up the stacks in front of him. ‘Where?' And then, because the money itself was more interesting than anything she could say about it, he lost interest in her answer. ‘A lot of these are fifties, you know that? And hundreds. Wow. Lot of money.'

He looked up. Their faces blazed at him like two suns. He said, ‘What?'

Sarah took two more bank sacks out of her briefcase and passed them across the desk. He unzipped them with his mouth open, too awestruck to say any more.

‘I got my radio back, too,' Ray Menendez said.

SEVENTEEN

R
obin drove south to Valencia and turned left, for no reason except it was a big, busy street with many cars. The next major stoplight was showing a green left-turn arrow as he approached it, so he turned left again into a residential neighborhood. When he saw an empty carport next to a house with the blinds closed, he pulled into it, turned off the motor and sat in shady silence, listening to the engine cool.

He knew the two detectives from the house had chased him – he'd seen the female running for her car. Probably they'd called for help. Nobody had been close enough to get his license number but they were good car-spotters so by now they'd have all the patrol cars in town looking for a white Taurus with new Michelins. They'd look in the streets, though, he reasoned – not in carports yet – and he needed a few minutes to decide on his next moves.

Nobody came out of the house to run him off so he sat in the vine-shaded space and sorted through his most urgent problems. This car, first. He had counted on having nine hours before the owner found it missing – plenty of time to get out of town. Now he needed to ditch it as soon as possible.

Or else . . . maybe he should run with it, right now. That could work – he was only a few blocks from the highway. He could be on I-19, headed for I-10 west, before they got everybody looking for him. And without a license number the highway patrol was not going to stop every white Taurus out there.

But he couldn't make LA on one tank of gas, and he wasn't carrying enough money to fill up again. He had a stolen credit card that he'd picked up in the Target checkout line while a distracted shopper argued with her child, but he'd had it since last week – it would almost certainly have been cancelled by now. He had a little money back in his pad on MacArthur Street but the question was did the police have his identity yet? If they did they might have his address and they'd be watching for him now. If they could spare somebody for the job – he'd heard about all the budget cuts.

So many ifs. He had not worried about any of them before because he was sure he was going to have the money from the stash house . . . his brain hit a little glitch there, like a washboard road under tires. Those words,
the money from the stash house,
set off a firestorm of screaming rage in his mind, so hot he couldn't think.

That money,
shit shit shit!
was supposed to be his by now. He'd been thinking of it as his money, feeling a fierce joy of ownership about it for close to three months. He had planned it so carefully for so long, done all the smaller jobs – boosted a car, run a box of guns to the butt-puckery-dangerous rendezvous south of Sonoita – to keep himself in funds while he watched the house, planned the heist, assembled the weapons and crew.
And now it was gone in a blink?
No! Shit shit shit!

But he didn't have time now to let rage take over – he had to think! While he was still in Wilmot, Owen Chu had taught him some words that were supposed to calm you down, help you think under stress. He said they were called mantras.

‘Isn't that what monks use?' Robin said. ‘I thought you said you weren't a mystic.'

‘I'm not,' Owen said. ‘I just know some words that work if you say them over and over. Or sometimes just a sound will do it.'

Robin remembered one sound Owen recommended, and tried it now: ‘Om om om.' He felt silly saying it so it didn't calm him down, and pretty soon it turned into, ‘Om om om fucking shitface cops—' And then his gut was burning again. So he started over with the mantra he'd made up for himself, ‘I am strong, I am great, I am golden, I will win.'

He said
that
ten times and was himself again: rational, cool. To test it, he let himself remember that first night, after he'd started watching the house with the heavy door, when he'd seen the black-haired man come out in the yard, take the cover off the jar that was buried out there, and add more money to the jar. And the feeling he got, right then, everything in him saying yes, I can do it. That money is
mine.

His instincts had been right, though, that what he was seeing in the yard was just the skim; the main stash of money had to be in the house, where the people who set up this operation would have put it.

After he confirmed there was big money involved he had been totally systematic about making the heist work. Learned which days they made deliveries, which nights they got resupply. The money transfer took place every other Tuesday, he learned by careful watching. A man in a nice business suit came to the house, carrying a briefcase. It took a lot more watching and listening, and patience, patience, to figure out that the funny
clunk
he heard every time the suit man came was the table being tipped over. The second
clunk
and then a
scree-scree-scree
was the table being set back up and moved into place. When he was sure they were consistent he knew that the day to do it was the second Monday, the last day before the collector came again.

After that it was a matter of putting the crew together – three stupid guys who would be cannon fodder but not know it – and the just-crazy-enough plan to steal a service van at the last minute for cover. For the last month, all the time he wasn't watching the house he watched service vans around town, mapping their routes, where they were likely to be. And then, on that last day he'd found one he'd never watched! That was part of his method – you had to have a plan and then be willing to be flexible, make changes if something else worked better.

You couldn't be afraid to take chances. His mantras made him strong enough to take the last terrible chance, going in through the window with all the guns firing . . . walking right up to the back of the man firing an AK47 – how many guys could do that?

Now he had to do the next hard thing, which was kiss that money goodbye. He didn't want to believe it but he had to – the money was gone. Those two cops would go back there after they gave up on chasing him and figure out why he had the cover off the control box for the watering system, wouldn't they? He made himself say it out loud, softly, ‘Yes, they would.' They would do that because that was what cops did – follow the evidence, figure out what was going on, decide what to do to get it stopped. Cops only ever had one basic thing they wanted – to get on top of the situation, whatever it was, and take control. Oh, yeah. Take control. Fucking shitface cops.

So he was not going to be the idiot who went back to make sure. He had escaped that bloody death house three days ago, survived those terrible nights in the parking garage. Escaped the damn place again today when he went for the money and those detectives were somehow right there where they had no business being.
How many times do I have to escape that one stupid house? Hell with it. Not the only money in the damn world. I'll get out of here and get some more.

He had just over two hundred dollars in his squat on MacArthur in a bag that was packed, ready to go. The money was ridiculous compared to what he had expected to have when he left here, but it would get him to LA. There was no better answer to his problems. And his problems would get worse with every minute he hesitated. So he was going to go there right now and get that bag.
I am strong, I am great
. . . and I am in a white Taurus like a hundred others in this vicinity. He started the motor, backed out and headed for the Rodeo Grounds.

He'd been staying in a bed, bath and hotplate on MacArthur Street that he sometimes referred to, when he was far enough away from it, as ‘my flat.' It was in a row of others just like it, in a converted ten-unit motel, squalid and scarred by generations of abuse. Old enough to have totally outmoded plumbing and light fixtures, it was on its second or third set of hollow-core doors. Nothing in the building was new, or was ever going to survive long enough to become antique.

Management always occupied the end unit, and changed every few months. The clientele was even more temporary – they left as soon as they could afford something better, or when they couldn't pay at all and got evicted.

Robin had lived there, off and on, since he got out of Wilmot prison. He moved out to live with women, moved back in when he tired of them. It suited him well enough – the management dealt in cash and did not ask for a deposit; it was cheap and the other tenants were so scruffy they made him feel successful. He was seldom home anyway, and always thought of himself as moving on, moving up, getting out of this dump any day. As soon as he made the big score, he had been telling himself.

Now he knew he had to go without his big score, just grab his bag and be gone. He had always hated losing and this loss was the bitterest since he got out of prison. His big chance to become a real player, and he had been working on it in secret so long – the disappointment burned in his gut.
I am strong, I am great
. . . He could handle it.

He had three or four favorite bars in the area – not to drink much, he was careful about that, but as adjunct living rooms. He cooled off or warmed up in them, met people and made deals. He lived by selling items for which there was no firm price, often to people with no fixed address. Their conversations were usually short, with an emphasis on body language, and ended when cash slid across the table to Robin. Robin never paid. Buying merchandise was for chumps, he believed. He stole to restock.