Past Imperfect

by Remington Kane

  White came out of his office when he heard his children’s voices. He tousled Liam’s hair as Emma hugged him about the waist, and Samantha sent him a smile. As the children headed upstairs to change out of their school uniforms, Violet called to them.

  “The ice-skating rink at the park opens today.”

  The twins froze on the stairs and looked back at her. Even Samantha showed interest, as she liked to skate.

  “It’s open for real?” Emma asked.

  “If it’s all right with Father and Jessica, Brandon and I will take you guys skating after dinner.”

  “It’s fine with us,” Jessica said, and Mr. White nodded in agreement.

  Emma gave a little cry of joy and came back down the steps to hug her older sister and Brandon. Afterward, she went back up the stairs while talking excitedly to her brother.

  “Are you coming too, Samantha?” Violet asked.

  “Yes. I miss being able to ice-skate.”

  After the children were in their rooms, White turned to Jessica.

  “I’m going to work on a little project when Michael gets back from his honeymoon and can lend me a hand.”

  “What’s that?” Jessica asked.

  “Seeing how excited the kids were about going skating gave me an idea. I’ll build them their own ice-skating rink. We’ll siphon water off from the stream and build a small rink beside it.”

  “You can do something like that?” Brandon asked.

  “It’s not difficult, but it will take quite a bit of work. Along with the rink, I’ll install temporary lights and a bench or two to sit on. We’ll also be relying on the weather to keep the ice frozen. But that’s not usually a problem in the winter.”

  “Can I help you build it?” Brandon asked.

  White smiled. He couldn’t help but like the young man. Brandon was always offering to lend a hand whenever there was work to be done. He thought that Violet had chosen well when she decided to make Brandon her future husband.

  “I welcome your help, Brandon. If you’re free this weekend, we can take a trip to the store and buy supplies. By the time Michael gets back, we’ll be ready to build.”

  “Great,” Brandon said. “I’ve never built anything like an ice rink before. It will be fun to learn how.”

  “The key is to make its walls and surface waterproof. A good plastic liner will take care of that.”

  The children gobbled down their dinner because they were excited about going ice-skating. When White told them about his plans to build a rink, their excitement level climbed even higher.

  Jessica let Violet use her SUV. Violet’s sports car wasn’t made to carry more than two people. Also, Emma was still small enough to use a car seat. Her lanky brother had outgrown his just weeks earlier. After watching the kids drive off to the park with Violet and Brandon, Jessica and White settled on a sofa in the living room with a bottle of wine. They discussed the best way to track down Kent Ballou.

  “This will not be easy,” Jessica said. “The man doesn’t appear to have any close ties to anyone at all. He might even have left the country.”

  “Everyone has someone that they’re close to. Since he spent so many years in prison, I’m guessing that Ballou might have confided to someone there.”

  “Is that why you asked Thomas to send you that list of inmates who served time with Ballou?”

  “Yes, but I was more specific. I asked for the names of men who had been freed within a year of Ballou’s own release. I think there’s a chance that he might have made contact with one of them.”

  Jessica held up a piece of paper. It listed disciplinary incidents Ballou had been cited for while behind bars. They were all minor infractions except for the one that occurred after the prison riot, and the discovery of the makeshift blade in his cell. Jessica had noticed a pattern within the list.

  “Four times he was reprimanded while being in the company of another inmate. A man named Lee Kirkpatrick. One of those infractions took place shortly before Ballou was released from prison.”

  White checked his list for Kirkpatrick’s name and found it.

  “Lee Kirkpatrick is a former skinhead who served time for murdering two black men in 2002. He was only nineteen at the time. He was paroled five months after Ballou was released and was living in the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas.”

  Jessica looked through another report. “Kirkpatrick was questioned about Ballou only once. That occurred three days after Ballou killed Sienna’s husband. Kirkpatrick stated that he hadn’t seen Ballou since leaving prison but that he wished the man luck.”

  “Even if he doesn’t know where Ballou is, he could know more about him than anyone else. He might even be able to tell us where we could find him.”

  Jessica sighed. “I don’t like being involved in this without being part of an official investigation. That’s not our usual style.”

  “I’ll ask Thomas to get us assigned to the manhunt for Ballou as unpaid consultants.”

  “There is no real manhunt going on for Ballou anymore, not after two years.”

  “Then we’ll revive it, and we will find Ballou,” White said, as he gathered up the files and placed them back inside the large envelope they were delivered in. “That’s enough for tonight.”

  Jessica smiled. “I take it there’s something else you’d rather be doing?”

  White reached over and caressed his wife’s cheek. “With Michael away and the kids out of the house, I can think of better things to do.”

  Jessica stood. “I’ll race you to the bedroom.” She took off running while giggling. White reached her before she made it to the landing and scooped her up in his arms, to kiss her deeply on the mouth and carry her to their bed.

  Chapter 5

  When Ballou was released from prison at forty, he felt as if he had to make up for lost time. That meant he had to get his hands on a lot of money, and he had to do it fast. Since he hadn’t been paroled, he didn’t need to report to a parole officer.

  The idea of getting a regular job and walking the straight and narrow held no appeal for him. Any job he could get as an ex-con with murder and kidnapping on his record wouldn’t pay much more than minimum wage.

  Crime was the answer, and he’d had years to consider his options. Bank robbery had seemed appealing, even though he had met a number of failed bank robbers serving time in prison. When he researched it, he discovered that the average bank robber got away with less than five thousand dollars and that sixty percent of them were caught. The odds of getting caught didn’t dissuade him, but at five grand a robbery he would need to do too many of them to get the kind of money he wanted.

  Armored car robberies were a different story altogether. They were rarer than bank robberies and much more profitable. The average take of an armored car could result in a score of more than a quarter of a million dollars. Once Ballou read that stat, he was convinced that stealing from armored cars were the way to go.

  And yet, there was a problem. Most armored car heists were committed by crews consisting of three or more members. It was difficult for a lone man to watch his own back, deal with the armored car’s personnel, and make a successful escape. Add to that the proliferation of traffic cameras and cell phone videos and it was likely that the robber’s face would wind up on the news.

  There were ways around such things, Ballou knew. The key was to plan meticulously before acting. He still prided himself on his success as a burglar. Although he’d been caught and sentenced, none of that had been his fault. No. That wasn’t true. He had made an error. He’d left witnesses behind who could identify him. He decided that he would never make that mistake again.

  It would take time to do proper research, and while that was taking place Ballou would need money to live on. In order to get the cash he needed, he became a mugger. He’d come out of prison loaded with muscle and able to run for miles. He attacked his victims from behind outside of bars, restaurants, and after they’d taken money out of bank machines. Over a two-day
period, he committed eleven robberies, then stopped. His reasoning was that if he struck quickly and gathered enough cash over a short period of time, that he could get away with it before the cops could organize against him and set up decoys or increase surveillance at bank machines. The plan worked. After his mugging spree ended, he had enough to live on for months. He used that time wisely.

  The rooming house Ballou stayed at offered little privacy, but he only used it to sleep in. Most of the time he was doing research.

  He planned to rob armored cars by himself. These were vehicles that contained two to three men with guns. That being the case, he needed a strategy if he was to be successful and not get himself killed. He would also need to avoid being filmed or followed once he had the money. To accomplish that, he taught himself how to make homemade smoke grenades. He made them by using materials bought at a supermarket. They were items such as crayons, sugar, aluminum foil, and a container of stump remover.

  The crayons determined what color the smoke would be. After several experiments performed out in the woods, Ballou decided that he liked the yellow smoke the best. He made more than a dozen grenades that would spew thick yellow smoke when activated.

  Those experiments were carried out in the evening. During the day he watched and followed armored cars as they went on their routes. The vehicles left from a warehouse that looked like nothing special. The fence around the building had razor wire at its top, but it was still just a normal chain-link fence. You could slice through the links with a wire cutter.

  He’d considered robbing the warehouse until he learned that if the security guards hit a panic button it would bring the cops on the run. The nearest police station was less than a mile from the warehouse. By the time he secured the guards the cops would be pulling into the parking lot. If he could have gotten a job as a security guard that would have worked. He’d read where a guard in a similar armored car warehouse had attacked his partner, tied the man up, then proceeded to load a van with over six million dollars. That happened three years earlier and the authorities were still searching for the guy.

  With his record he’d never get hired on as a security guard. He’d have to settle for robbing their trucks. Certain vehicles left the warehouse with the body of the armored car almost scraping the ground. Ballou figured that meant that they were hauling coins. The weight of the bags could drag even an armored car down since they totaled thousands of pounds. He ignored those vehicles. He was after folding money.

  Seven weeks after he’d begun, he had identified sixteen locations that would be workable. They were all at banks. Sometimes the guards delivered money to the bank or did a pickup. At other times they stopped there to fill up a busy automatic teller machine.

  Ballou wouldn’t need to hit all sixteen locations if his take from each robbery was decent. He would also let a period of time pass between robberies. Despite being anxious to make up for the years he’d lost being locked up behind bars, Ballou was patient. He was willing to spend a year or more doing the robberies in order to have enough to retire on. Once he had a successful score under his belt, being patient would come easily.

  He returned to the rooming house one evening to find that a note had been slipped under his door. It was from the building’s owner, Mr. Kiley. Ballou had only seen the old man once. Mr. Kiley lived at the other end of the state and hired people to care for his properties. The note stated that Kiley wanted to meet the next morning, if possible, and included a phone number.

  Ballou wondered what it was about. He was up to date on his rent and hadn’t caused any trouble. It was just the opposite. When he had come home a few weeks earlier and heard that there was a leaking pipe in one of the tenant’s rooms, he’d located the elusive cut-off valve hidden inside a broom closet and shut off the water to stop the leak. Since he had nothing else to do, he’d helped the building’s resident manager repair the leak and patch the damaged ceiling.

  It turned out that Mr. Kiley had been told of his assistance and wanted to offer him a job as the building’s new manager.

  “What about Felix?” Ballou asked, referring to the current manager.

  “Felix is moving to New Mexico to live with his brother. If you want the position, it’s yours.”

  It was a crappy job that paid damn little. Along with collecting the rent once a month, Ballou would be on call day and night to fix anything that went wrong. To off-set the low pay it came with free living quarters in the basement. Normally, Ballou would have turned the job down, but being gainfully employed would look good if the cops ever came by to question him. He took the job and moved down into the dank basement. His living quarters was a partitioned area with a small bathroom and a tiny kitchen. It would do until he accumulated his fortune.

  He made his first robbery attempt on a sunny Tuesday morning. The air was chilled and there had been a dusting of snow overnight. The long coat and hood he was wearing didn’t make him noticeable. Because it was a sunny day, the mirrored sunglasses didn’t attract undue notice either. Beneath that coat was a sawed-off shotgun. As two armored car guards were headed toward the bank entrance with bags of money, Ballou brought out the shotgun and unloaded on each of the guards. Being outnumbered became less of a problem if you were the first to fire.

  One of the guards was writhing on the ground in agony and screaming in pain. The other was silent, having already died. Ballou was grabbing up one of the bags of money they had dropped when a bank guard burst forth from the entrance. He was an older man whom Ballou knew was named Jenkins. He’d heard someone call to the guard while he’d been doing his homework before the robbery. Ballou had been expecting the guard to try and play hero and fired the shotgun again. Pellets ripped through the guard’s knees before he could fire. After Jenkins had fallen to the ground, Ballou shot the man again. The guard had gotten a good look at him.

  He released the first smoke grenade after he had the money. Seeing the smoke rise up around him made him smile. So far, everything was going as planned.

  When the smoke was thick about him, he removed his long coat and tossed it on the ground. Underneath it he wore a pair of well-worn overalls. If stopped, he had a fake driver’s license that would pass a casual inspection. It identified him as Bill Draper. He also had business cards with the Draper name on them that branded him as a handyman.

  He emptied the cash from the bank bags into a sack and took off the sunglasses. Before moving on, he released two more smoke grenades. They blinded him as much as they did anyone else in the area, but Ballou knew exactly how many steps it took to reach his getaway vehicle. It was a van with the handyman logo on it. He had parked it in an alleyway. In the rear of the van, beneath the floor, was a hidden compartment.

  As Ballou entered the alley, he left the edge of the smoke field behind. His vehicle was at the far end of the alleyway, at the other side of a long city block. After opening the van, he stuffed the sack inside it. The bag had a comforting amount of weight to it.

  Before leaving the van, he grabbed up a tool belt and checked himself for signs of blood. There was no one else in the alley and it had no cameras. Both sides were bordered by the rear of small shops. Ballou went to a door that identified the shop as an antique store and knocked loudly on it.

  An older woman opened the door and smiled at him. “Hi, Bill. You’re right on time.”

  “I try to be punctual,” Ballou told her. He had advertised his handyman services a week earlier by walking into the shops and asking if the owners needed anything fixed. His rate was so reasonable that he got two nibbles. He’d repaired a sticky door at one shop before robbing the armored car. The antique shop had a leaky faucet in its bathroom.

  “Why didn’t you come in the front way?” the old woman asked.

  “I didn’t want to disturb any customers you might have. I also just came from doing a little work at the hobby shop a few doors down.”

  As he spoke, Ballou became aware of the sound of sirens. Since they were coming from the other sid
e of the block, the sound wasn’t piercing.

  He remained calm and went to work. The store was quiet, and the old lady hung around to watch him fix the faucet. He mentioned the sticky door he had fixed at the hobby shop and the old woman said that reminded her that the door leading to the back room wasn’t closing properly. Ballou had the door off its hinges and was filing down its bottom edge when a police officer came calling.

  The cop was young and couldn’t have been long out of the academy. The officer informed them about the armored car robbery that had gone down and asked them if they had seen anything.

  “Gracious no,” the old lady said. If she had been wearing pearls, she would have clutched them.

  Ballou just shook his head. The cop might have been young, but he didn’t look stupid. Ballou figured the less he said the better off he’d be.

  “The robbery occurred about forty-five minutes ago. Where were you at that time, sir?”

  “I was here. Well, not here exactly. But I was doing some work at the hobby shop.”

  The cop looked him over. Ballou had spent a good chunk of his life behind bars. Maybe the cop was catching that vibe.

  “Can I see some ID, sir?”

  Ballou looked puzzled by the request but shrugged and reached for his wallet. He made a point of letting one of the business cards flutter to the floor as he handed over the phony license. The cop stared down at the card, then simply gave the license a quick glance before handing it back. He thanked Ballou and the old lady for their time and moved on.

  Ballou saw the cop again as the officer walked back past the shop ten minutes later. When the old lady asked if he would like to have a cup of coffee, Ballou accepted. They made small talk for twenty minutes as Ballou told her about a fictitious wife. He was wearing a wedding ring he’d taken off a mugging victim because he thought it made him seem less like a guy who would rob an armored car.