The Getaway (Sam Archer 2) (16 page)

The guy on the front desk
had been
sizing Archer up from the moment he walked in. He was in his mid-twenties, gelled-back hair, a diamond earring in his right earlobe and a tan that looked a little too golden to be real. He was wearing a white vest that was a size too small, making a statement, trying to show off the endeavours of his work in the room next door. He flashed a customary smile as Archer approached the desk
, showing polished white teeth.

‘Looking to join?’ he asked.

Archer shook his head.

‘I’m looking for Farrell.’

The guy’s eyes narrowed. Hi
s courteous manner disappeared.

‘Who are you?’

‘A friend.’

Before the man could reply, Farrell appeared at the top of the stairs from the cardio room. He whistled down to the guy behind the counter and nodded. The guy with the earring saw this and pressed a button, looking back at Archer suspiciously. The turnstile to Archer’s right clicked, unlocking, and ignoring the guy behind the desk, Archer turned and passed through the turnstile, walking up the stairs to the second floor. When he reached the top of the stairs, Farrell didn’t bother with a greeting. He just turned, and walked off, Archer following him.

‘Gimme five more minutes,’ Farrell said, turning to him. ‘We’re just finishing up her workout.’

Looking around the level, Archer had guessed right. Up here there were lines of cycling and elliptical machines and stair-climbers, people in sports-wear on a few of them, working hard as they watched televisions mounted on the wall ahead. The air-conditioning was on full blast up here too, keeping the temperature nice and cool.

Past the lines of exercise equipment, Archer saw a martial arts cage had been set up across the level towards the wall. He saw Ortiz inside, gasping for air, drenched in sweat, her hands on her hips as she prowled around the black-fenced cage like an animal in captivity. She was
wearing
a black t-shirt, the sleeves jaggedly cut off, and white shorts, her feet bare, black four-ounce gloves on her hands. She paced around in large circles, recovering, but Archer saw her stop and stare at him when she realised he was here. Her face was cold. Another corner-man was standing beside her, an older guy with grey hair, grizzled and sinewy, looking like a former fighter who had been defeated by Father Time and had stepped outside the ring to corner up-and-comers instead. He was holding a bottle of water and he lifted it, Ortiz tipping her head to take a drink. She swilled and spat the liquid back out to the floor, still glaring
at Archer. He got the message.

Farrell may have extended trust towards him, but she sure as hell hadn’t yet.

Farrell stepped back inside the cage, scooping up some red striking pads that had been left on the ground and hooking them over his forearms. The older guy with the water stepped outside the cage and moved to a timer, pressing a button. It beeped.

‘Let’s go!’ he said.

Farrell had the pads up, and Ortiz went to work.

Archer was expecting a spectacle, but she was truly vicious. From where he was standing he was surprised the pads didn’t burst considering the force she was hitting them with. She was exhaling sharply with every shot, so each strike was accompanied with a yell that made it more intimidating.
Bambambam
. She was working combos, firing elbows and kicks and fast punch sequences that were crisp
,
technical
and
brutally powerful. Farrell was knocked back every now and then by a blow that was really clean, especially her kicks where she torqued her hip and her shin crushed into the pad. Archer watched her work, and his memory flashed back to the street-fight on Monday night. He wondered if the guy she’d clinched and kneed in the face had woken up yet. He was probably still unconscious.

The workout upped in intensity as the five minutes went on, Ortiz’s stamina not dropping at all. She was in impressive shape. If anything, she actually gained momentum, her yells growing louder as she hammered violent combo after combo, strike after strike, into the pads Farrell had strapped to his arms. On the exercise equipment behind them, Archer noticed a couple of people turning at the noise, then looking away in the next instant, not wanting the woman in the cage to see them staring. After another minute or so, the buzzer sounded and the round ended.

‘
Good job!’
the old guy outside called.

Farrell and Ortiz bumped fists, and she hunched over, catching her breath, drenched with sweat. Farrell nodded approvingly and stepped outside, pulling off the work-mitts and heading over to Archer.

‘She’s got a fight coming up?’
Archer
asked, watching her recover from the workout.

Farrell shook his head. ‘No. Just staying sharp.’

Archer nodded, looking over at her inside the cage. She leaned back, hands on her hips, and glared over at him again, her chest heaving as she sucked in oxygen and as her body recovered from the exertion. She walked out of the side entrance to the cage which Farrell had opened, and the other trainer started pulling her gloves off. Farrell beckoned Archer to follow him and the two men walked over as the grey-haired corner-man pulled off the second glove. Ortiz grabbed the bottle of water resting on a chair with her white-wrapped hands and unscrewed the cap, drinking from it and sucking in gulps of oxygen.

‘What’s he doing here?’ she asked, panting, glaring at Archer, her accent Hispanic.

‘Both of you, come with me,’ Farrell said, headed for a side door and ignori
ng her question.

Archer didn’t move.

‘Ladies first,’ he said.

Ortiz stared at him, hostile, sweat dripping down her brow, the odd strand of hair from her corn-rows twisted and frizzed up in the air from the workout. Then she grabbed a white towel from a bench and wrapping it around her glistening shoulders, she followed her boyfriend towards the doorway,
her t-shirt soaked with sweat.

Archer followed, but made sure to keep his distance.

The door
opened on
to a flight of stairs that led down through the back of the building. Farrell pushed open another door on the floor below, an
d
walked ahead of them
into a storage room.

No one was inside. The place was
dimly
lit
,
filled with brown boxes
, some of them opened, containing
white towels and t-shirts with the gym logo on the front. Farrell walked on, and pushed a stack of boxes out of the way at the end of the room on the right. He reached forward and pulled a second panel open on the wall, leading to another level. It was well-camouflaged, painted cream like the rest of the wall. Archer would
never
have guessed it was there. Farrell led the other two down the steps. Turning, Archer realised the older man, the corner-man, had followed them to the storage room, and had shut the secret door behind them. He heard the slide of the boxes being pushed back across the
doorway, hiding it once again.

All three of them
stood
there in the red-brick tunnel, momentarily still, just a solitary light-bulb hanging from the ceiling providing light, the place old and damp
and covered
with cobwebs.
Ahead of them Archer could see
a thick metal door with a spin-dial lock, the kind seen on a bank vault. Farrell worked the dial three times. It clicked, and he reached for the handle, but suddenly turned, looking
past his girlfriend at Archer.

‘You say a word to anyone about what you see in here, I’ll kill you. They’ll never find the body. Clear?’

Archer
nodded, looking him in the eye.

Farrell looked back at him for a moment, t
hen turned and opened the door.

This room was a basement, but unlike the storage room it wasn’t empty. There were a series of tables and chairs in the room, light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, the place gloomy and starkly lit. Across the room Regan and Tate were
sitting
at two tables in front of sewing machines, each machine purring as the men fed some dark fabric underneath, the needles hammering up and down the lengths of cloth. The two of them looked up as the trio entered, and Archer saw Regan glower under the white light from the bulb above.

‘What the hell is he doing here?’ he asked Farrell.

‘He’s joining us,’ Farrell said.

‘What? Are you crazy? Why?’

‘We went for a drive yesterday. He’s ten times better than Brown ever was. He’s solid.’

‘Who’s Brown?’ Archer asked, interrupting.

‘Our old driver,’ Farrell explained. ‘Unfortunately he had a medical condition.’

‘What?’

‘He couldn’t keep his mouth shut,’ Farrell sai
d. ‘So Carmen shut it for him.’

Across the room, Regan went to
argue but Farrell cut him off.

‘Save it, Bill. I don’t want to hear about it,’ he said.

Archer felt Regan’s gaze burning into him as the trio approached him and Tate. Up close, he saw that the cloth under the needle of each sewing machine belonged to two black jackets. Both of them were full
y
intact, no tears, no rips. It looked
as if
they were stitching something inside the cloth instead of mending it.

‘How’s i
t looking?’ Farrell asked Tate.

Tate paused in his work and lifted the black jacket from the machine, raising it upright on the table and grunting from the effort. It seemed heavy. He tapped the front twice with his free hand, and it gave two metallic
thunks
.

‘Solid,’ Tate said.

Farrell turned to
Archer, pointing at the jacket.

‘Aramid and steel plates,’ he explained. ‘Body armour. That thing will stop a twelve gauge round, easy. Put that shit on with a bullet-proof helmet and no cop is ever going to stop you, not with their firepower. You ever see the
North Hollywood
shootout?’

Archer nodded. ‘I remember. 1997, right?’

‘That’s right. Two guys took on the entire Los Angeles Police Department outside a bank wearing that shit. The pigs shot over six hundred rounds at the
m and couldn’t put them down.’

‘What the hell do you need it for?’

Farrell paused a moment, t
hen beckoned to his right.

‘Follow me,’ he said.

He moved to a door across the room, Ortiz following, the towel wrapped around her shoulders,
taking mouthfuls of water from the plastic bottle as she walked
.
While
Tate got back to work with the sewing machine, Regan was still glaring at Archer, contempt and a sneer on his face.

‘Asshole,’ he said.

‘Go for a nice walk yesterday
?’ Archer replied, with a grin.

He saw the other man’s eyes narrow
as he turned to
follow Farrell and Ortiz i
nto the side room to the right.

There w
as
just a single table and four chairs under a light hanging from the ceiling in here, the walls and ceilings unadorned and unpainted, all dusty red brick and grey cement. There were a series of wide sheets of paper on the desk, harshly
illuminated
by the naked bul
b above.

‘Shut the door,’ Farrell said.

Archer did so and glanced down at the shee
ts. He realised what they were.

Blueprints.

He looked closer. They were extensive floor plans, four pages stacked on top of each other which would mean four levels or floors. He examined the uppermost sheet. He saw designated seating areas, the boxes numbered from 1 to 428, around a central rectangular area. He saw four
towers, A to D, on each corner.

And he saw the name of the building in the top right corner of the page. Gerry’s voice echoed in his head, three words, match
ing the three on the blueprint.

Madison
Square
Garden
.

‘Take a seat,’ Farrell said.

NINE

‘It was Carmen’s idea,’ Farrell said. Archer was
sitting
across from him, Ortiz
was
leaning against the wall. ‘We were making shit from fighting, and this place isn’t gonna make us rich any time soon. So we started casing houses over in
Long Island
. It was easy. The owners are hardly ever there, always on vacation in the
Hamptons
or stuck in some office in the city. Bypass the alarms, avoid the places with guard-dogs and it’s Christmas. We hit four of them in a row. Take the stolen goods and valuables and trade them for cash and you’re laughing. Just like that, we made close to half a mil, easy.’

Archer nodded, glancing up at Ortiz. She sipped her water whil
st
watching him closely. The harsh naked light from above was accentuating her rock-hard cheekbones and the muscles on her arms. Her dark eyes were expressionless under her brow as she stared down at him.