Miami Heist

by Van Allen Plexico

  “After all,” Salsa went on saying casually, as he walked his fingers along rows of binders, reading the spines, “I just need a map or two. It’s not like I’m robbing their cash register or anything.” He wrinkled his brow at that and glanced back at her. “Come to think of it, they don’t even have a cash register, do they?” He looked up and down the counter quickly. “I mean—where else would it be?”

  It was obvious the woman didn’t know what to make of him, so she went back to her makeup.

  Putting all thoughts of a cash register aside, Salsa kept digging through the binders. Knowing what he knew now, he would’ve had Lois come in ahead of him and send the kid on a wild goose chase back in the back, just like was happening now. But he hadn’t known what to expect in terms of office personnel. Fortunately, it was all working out just fine on its own, thanks to his unwitting accomplice.

  He was there because Harper had suggested that the photographs he and Lois had gone to such pains to take might not be enough.

  “What else can we do?” he’d asked.

  “There have to be maps somewhere. Overviews. Plans of the island. Not just of the mansion but the outbuildings, other structures...”

  “Plans.” Salsa had pursed his lips. “Wait—yeah.” He’d snapped his fingers. “Sanborn.”

  “What?”

  “The fire people.”

  Harper had raised one eyebrow at him. “Fire people?”

  Salsa had waved his hand airily. “You know, Harper. The Sanborn maps. The insurance companies buy them up. They use them for setting premiums and whatnot for fire insurance for businesses and homes. Came in pretty handy in a few of my legal cases.” He’d smirked. “They gave people a decent idea of how much their businesses would be worth when they burned them down.”

  Harper had just looked at him, patient as ever.

  “I forget sometimes that you’ve always been an honest thief,” Salsa had noted, “robbing people’s businesses rather than stealing from them in court.”

  “So,” Harper had said after a second, getting them back on topic, “these Sanborn people. They have maps of Ruby Island?”

  “I don’t see why not. Probably pretty good ones, given the value of that real estate.”

  Harper had nodded brusquely. “Fine. Where can we get these maps?”

  “They’re kept under wraps, so as not to fall into the hands of people of ill repute,” Salsa had replied. “But I think I know where some might be had.”

  Salsa had hopped into the car and driven to the Dade County government building, and had made his way up to the third floor. And now here he was, in the Planning office—where he’d encountered the little old lady who was currently enabling his life of crime.

  Locating the binder he wanted at last, he slid it off the shelf. It was big; nearly two feet square, with thick metal rings. He wrestled it over to the counter, plopped it down, and opened it.

  “Excuse me, sir,” came a rather squeaky and rather outraged voice from behind him. “You can’t be back here.”

  Salsa turned and saw the employee returning, two big binders under one arm, a set of map tubes under the other, looking as if he could drop everything at any moment.

  “No, no—it’s fine,” he called to the kid. “I’m all good here. You can attend to the nice lady.”

  The older woman smiled warmly at Salsa and nodded. “Such a gentleman.”

  Salsa grinned and nodded back at her.

  The kid dithered for a moment, his face moving through several different and generally contradictory expressions, one after the other. “But—but,” he finally decided to attempt to say, “you can’t just come back here.”

  Salsa regarded him with puzzlement for a second, then allowed the appearance of sudden enlightenment to show through. “Ah, yes,” he said with a broad smile. “I’m encroaching on your space, aren’t I?” He slid his binder down the granite countertop to the end. Keeping his right index finger on the cover, he passed smoothly around to the other side of the counter, so that he was back out in the public area, with the book still in front of him.

  “Yes, sir,” the kid said, still wrestling to hang onto the items he’d brought out of storage and not having noticed Salsa’s binder yet. “It’s employees only behind the counter. We have very strict rules about that.”

  “Right, right,” Salsa replied with a winning smile. “I suppose you have to, don’t you?” He shook his head sadly. “It’s truly unfortunate, what some people will try to get away with these days.”

  “That’s right, and—” The kid had just begun setting all the things he was carrying on the far end of the counter. That was when he noticed the binder Salsa already had out on the countertop. “Say—!”

  Salsa opened the cover and turned to the table of contents, then began to move his finger down the listings.

  The kid was growing apoplectic again. “Where did you get that?”

  “Hmm?” Salsa didn’t look up from the binder. He pointed in the direction of the shelves behind the counter. “Right over there. I think.”

  “But you—but that—”

  Salsa found the listing he wanted and started turning pages.

  “Young man,” the older lady interrupted, looking even more miffed than before. “Could I please have the items I requested?”

  “What? Oh—yes ma’am,” the kid replied. He carried the binders and map tubes over to a table for customers, situated about halfway between the counter and the front door.

  “Thank you,” the older lady said, clearly put out, and with little sincerity in her tone. She flipped open the cover of the nearest binder, licked her fingertips and began to flip rapidly through it, bending low over the pages to read the fine print.

  Having relieved himself of the burden of those items, the kid nodded to the lady, then turned back to Salsa—and yelped.

  Salsa had found the pages he wanted and was in the process of unfastening the metal rings holding the binder together.

  The kid hurried back over. “Sir!” he called. ‘Sir! You can’t just—”

  “What’s that?” Salsa said, pulling two large, folded papers out of the binder and snapping the big metal rings closed again. He glanced over at the older lady, but she was now utterly engrossed in whatever she was doing and wasn’t paying any attention to anyone or anything else.

  “Sir—people aren’t allowed to just take...”

  “I’m sure they’re not,” Salsa interrupted, nodding. “Why, if you let every Tom, Dick and Harry who walked in here off the street take maps and pages from these binders, I dare say there wouldn’t be much left here, before long!” He held the big book out for the kid to take. “You’d have nothing but a bunch of empty binders.”

  The kid automatically accepted it, nodding, seemingly uncertain as to the actual progress of their conversation.

  “Well, you can file that away, then. I’m done with it. I think these two are all I need.” He nodded to the binder the kid was holding now. “I’ll let you do it, so I don’t encroach on your space again.”

  The kid stood there holding the book, his eyes wide, opening and closing his mouth silently.

  Salsa unfolded the two pages and looked them over carefully. They were each twenty-one by twenty-five inches and comprised two aerial views of Ruby Island, with the big mansion highlighted in the center and a number of other structures very clearly depicted around it, as well as other outbuildings and the shoreline. “This is all you have on Ruby Island, right? Hello?” he added, as the kid had become unresponsive.

  The kid snapped out of it. Clearly still not quite sure what was happening or how to deal with it, he nonetheless approached the maps and looked them over quickly. “Yes,” he said, “these are the most recent ones. Updated in 1957, during the International Geophysical Year.”

  “Right,” Salsa replied, clueless. “Exactly. So these are the ones I’ll be needing, then. Thanks!”

  He started for the exit.

  “Wait!” called the kid,
now almost frantic. “You can’t just take them!”

  “I can’t? Why not?”

  “I—I’ll call the police!”

  Now the lady did look up. Salsa laughed and flashed her another disarming smile.

  “Clearly a misunderstanding,” he said to her. “This young man is nothing if not officious!”

  The lady smiled back at him, gave the kid a scornful glance, and returned her attention to her papers.

  Salsa walked back over to the kid. “The cops?” he asked in a low voice, just above a whisper. “Sure, sure, you could call them. Absolutely. I definitely see why you might want to call them.”

  The kid stared back at him blankly.

  “But if you did that—and, hear me out here, for just a second, if you don’t mind—if you did that, you probably wouldn’t get to keep this.”

  Salsa had the maps in his left hand. He gestured with his right and, poof, a ten-dollar bill was suddenly in it.

  The kid gawked at the ten.

  “Not a bad deal, eh? Two maps—maps that don’t even belong to you—for ten bucks.”

  Slowly, reluctantly, almost against his will, even, the kid took the bill from Salsa. It crinkled in his suddenly moist hand. He glanced over at the old lady, saw her staring at both of them now and frowning, and he broke out in a cold sweat.

  Salsa followed his eyes and noticed the lady watching them. He turned back to the kid, flashed another smile, and said, “A pleasure doing business with you.” Then he headed for the door again, but paused as he passed by the old lady standing at the table. She had never stopped looking at him the entire time. He moved in close to her, whispering a few words the kid couldn’t make out. Then he bent down and appeared to be picking something up off the floor—even though the kid was sure nothing had been there a second earlier. “I believe you dropped this, madame,” he told her.

  The older lady accepted what he handed her, and the kid could see now that it just might be another bit of cash.

  With that, Salsa exited the office and strolled back to his car, the maps tucked away safely in a folder under his arm.

  Having watched him leave, the kid turned to the older lady. She had already quit watching Salsa and was now back to intently studying her documents. Now she looked up and her eyes met his. Her expression was a challenging one.

  The kid blanched. He felt oddly as if his mother had caught him with his hand in the cookie jar. But—wait—hadn’t she ended up with some cookies, too?

  “Did you—did you happen to hear any of that?” he asked her in a weak voice.

  She frowned at him, then reached for her big brown purse, set it on top of her documents, and opened it. “Any of what?” she asked, as she stuffed something into the purse and clasped it shut. Then she returned her attention to her papers.

  10

  Thursday evening, two days before the heist:

  “We have the truck and the boat,” Salsa was saying to the others gathered there in the living room of the run-down and mildewy little house in a run-down and mildewy little neighborhood of North Miami. “And plans of the island. And I’ve already taken lots of pictures of the shoreline.”

  The rain was back, and with a vengeance. It beat down hard on the roof, and the wind outside had picked up in intensity just since Harper and Salsa had arrived. Storm clouds completely filled the sky and blocked the sun. It was only about four in the afternoon but it looked to be much later.

  Salsa and Harper had come to Bigelow’s house for one final briefing and discussion before the plans were agreed upon. There they’d found not only Bigelow but also the three men who had worked with him on the island the previous weekend—the guys who had been posing as waiters. After introductions, the handing out of cold cans of Budweiser and the lighting of cigarettes all around, the group seated themselves in the living room in various chairs around a rectangular coffee table.

  “So, first things first,” Bigelow said. “You’ve got a truck. What kind?”

  “Army surplus,” Harper replied.

  “An old one?”

  Harper didn’t answer, but Salsa barked a laugh. “Let’s just say if it wasn’t at Normandy, it was probably in Korea,” he said.

  Big Bob got a laugh out of that.

  “Okay, fine,” he said. “And the boat. You say you’ve got one that can carry a load of gold, yeah? And, is there somewhere it can land on the island without being seen?”

  “We have a boat,” Harper said. “As to landing…” He glanced at Salsa.

  Salsa nodded and held up a manilla envelope. “Let me show you some pictures.”

  Shrugging, Bigelow swept the things that had been atop the table out of the way. He moved the almost-overflowing ceramic ashtray last, setting it on the floor next to his foot. He gestured to the now-empty tabletop. “She’s all yours.”

  Salsa drew from the envelope a stack of black and white photos. He laid them out on the table and the others leaned in to look.

  What they saw was a series of pictures taken from Lois’s new boat, showing different views of the shoreline of Ruby Island—most of which consisted of huge rocks piled up along the water’s edge.

  “This ain’t really exciting me,” Bigelow said. “Not much in the way of places to land a boat here. But we already knew that.”

  “It’s true, there aren’t many,” Harper agreed. “But we only need one spot.”

  “As long as it’s a spot that’s out of sight of the guards and the other people around the big house,” Bigelow said. “And it also needs to be pretty close to the house, since we’ll be carrying the loot by hand to the boat, and it’s heavy.”

  “Never fear,” Salsa said with a grin. “I think I found just the spot.”

  He set down the final photograph with a flourish, tossed the envelope aside and stood back, allowing the others to appreciate his work.

  They all peered down at the last picture, then up at Salsa.

  “That’s it?” Bigelow asked, frowning.

  Harper looked at Salsa, also beginning to frown slightly.

  Salsa blinked, added his frown to the collection and leaned over the picture, looking down at it as if seeing it for the first time himself.

  “Well,” he said after a moment, “it is murky, I’ll give you that.”

  “Murky? It’s just a gray smudge,” Bigelow said.

  Salsa appeared wounded, but he summoned his energy up again and gestured airily. “It shows a good spot to land,” he said. He jabbed a finger at a lighter-colored area on the rectangle of gray. “Right there. I saw it with my own eyes. It should work. It will work.”

  The others all looked at him dubiously.

  “If Salsa says he can land the boat there, he can land the boat there,” Harper intervened at last.

  Bigelow frowned but then shrugged. “Fine,” he said.

  Salsa nodded at Harper, then reached for the envelope again. “I used the pictures and what I saw cruising around out there, as well as what we saw when we visited, to make a few additions to the existing map,” he said. He unfolded a larger piece of paper and set it on top of the photos. It was the Sanborn Fire Insurance map of Ruby Island he’d taken from the city planning office, and Salsa had used a pen to sketch in additional details.

  “We’ve all been out there on it before, so we know the general lay of the land, particularly around Lansdale’s mansion and the docks,” Salsa said. “But what I was going for here was a general sort of overview of the whole place, y’know?”

  “Maybe we should’ve just rented a helicopter and gotten a real overview,” Bigelow said.

  “No,” Harper said. “They would’ve noticed that and it might have put them on edge. We want them relaxed. Confident nobody can touch them, and nobody would try.”

  Bigelow nodded. He sat back and took in the room, then said, “So it’s just the six of us in on this, right?”

  Harper shrugged. “Many more than that and things start getting hard to manage.”

  “Our women will hav
e roles, too,” Salsa noted. “Helping with crowd control.” He briefly sketched out what they would be doing, keeping the guests calm during what they were calling the diversion robbery upstairs. “So—try not to shoot them, huh?”

  “Let’s go through it again,” Harper said. He held up his hands and ticked off fingers. “Salsa brings the boat up to the island and lands it. I’m there playing cards or gambling, and I slide away a few minutes early and cut the phone lines, take care of a couple of other things, then go down and meet Salsa. I’ll have already seen to the ferry boat.” He nodded to Bigelow. “You four are there as caterers again. Lansdale’s people should be comfortable around you since it’s not your first time there. Two of you slip down and help with the gold. One maybe gets to the landing spot a little early, to help Salsa, in case I’m not there yet.”

  “That’s you, Oscar,” Bigelow said, pointing to one of his men.

  “That leaves two of you to do the diversion robbery on the main floor.” He thought for a moment. “Maybe you need one more guy for that part of it.”

  “Mike and Danny can handle it,” Bigelow said, gesturing to two more of his men—a redhead and a bald guy.

  Harper was frowning. “It could be a big crowd to corral, and not just for a couple of minutes.” He looked the two guys over. “Are you two good with what you have to do?”

  “Rob them?” The redhead snorted. He was a scrawny guy with a bad complexion and short, spiky hair that had introduced himself as Danny Goggans. “I think we can do that.”

  “No,” Harper said, annoyed. “Robbing them is just a cover. The main thing you need to do is keep the crowd pinned down there. One thing I noticed before is, they don’t allow any guests up the stairs. It’s all private offices and the owner’s residence up there, I think. So you’ll only have to keep track of people on the main level.”

  “Very cool,” Goggans said, nodding.

  “Make them all get down on the floor,” Harper went on. “Take your time collecting their goods. Remember—we’ll be on an island, so even if the Law does find out something’s going on—and I don’t know how they would—it’ll still take them some time to get out there. Keep those people under wraps until we get the gold loaded on the boat. Then come down to the houseboat and we’ll all leave together.”