Miami Heist

by Van Allen Plexico

  They continued up until they had passed through a stand of trees and emerged into the grassy back area of the mansion. Harper directed the other two up the steps he’d come down earlier. The entire area was still deserted. They passed through the outside doorway and crossed the enclosed deck, coming to the massive double doors.

  As they opened the door on the right and started inside, they almost ran headlong into a big, hulking, masked form coming the other way. The figure carried a Colt in one hand.

  “There you fellas are,” said a muffled voice from under the mask. He tucked away the pistol, reached up and pulled the mask up to expose his face. Big Bob Bigelow grinned at them.

  “Any trouble?” Harper asked as they all moved inside together, water streaming off three of them. “We heard a shot.”

  “Nah, no trouble at all,” Big Bob said with a snort. “That’s just what we’d call an attention-getter. The boys have the crowd on ice just fine up there. Already started relieving them of their valuables.”

  “Too soon,” Harper said flatly.

  Bigelow’s smile faded a bit. “What’s that?”

  “You moved too soon. They weren’t doing any damage just playing cards and drinking. Now you’ve got to keep them locked down the entire time we move the gold.”

  Bigelow appeared troubled for a second but shrugged it off. “The fellas were getting antsy, just playing waiters all night. They wanted to get going on this. Don’t worry—they’ll be fine.”

  Harper started to say something else, then shook his head once and walked past Bigelow into the mansion. He passed out into the hallway and headed for the stairs to the basement. Bigelow, frowning now, moved up beside him.

  “Relax, Harper,” he said. “I’ll help move the gold, and we’ll be done and out of here in no time.”

  “I want you up with the other two, keeping an eye on the crowd,” Harper said. “Two isn’t enough.”

  “So you two can slip away once you’ve got all the gold on the boat?” He said it in a joking manner, but it was clear to everyone that the good humor of the question was scarcely a millimeter deep.

  Harper just regarded him flatly.

  Bigelow reddened. “I told you,” he said, growing belligerent now. “Chris and Danny have things under control.”

  “Maybe they do, for now,” Harper said back. “But for how long? We still have a lot of work ahead of us.”

  Bigelow stopped and stood there at the top of the stairs, watching, as Harper and Salsa quickly descended into the basement. Diaz followed them part of the way, hesitated, looked back at Big Bob, then continued on after them.

  Harper glanced back once before the stairs turned. He saw Bigelow still standing there, indecisive. Finally, the big man cursed once before stomping off for the main hall.

  22

  Bigelow remembered to pull his mask back down over his face before reentering the hall.

  The guests and employees were lying face-down on the floor. The masked form of Mike Wilson stood at one end of the room, gun at the ready, while Danny Goggans went from person to person, relieving each of them in turn of any valuables they missed the first time around, and placing them in a sack. Their faces were covered but Bigelow knew them easily enough from their builds and their mannerisms. Wilson was more laconic, while Goggans was practically hyperactive.

  Wilson saw Bigelow enter and nodded once to him. Apparently all was well, so far.

  At least, Wilson must have thought so. But Bigelow was rapidly reassessing the situation in his own mind. Though he didn’t want to admit it, he understood immediately what Harper had meant. There were simply too many people here for two men to control for very long. All it would take would be one little thing setting somebody off, and it would get ugly.

  He moved up alongside Wilson and leaned in. “The others are here,” he said, “and heading down now. We just have to hold these people a little longer.”

  “Right,” the other man said. He kept both eyes on the guests and staff, whose prone bodies covered most of the floor of the great hall. “They’re not going anywhere.”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Goggans was shouting at a man in a dark suit who had curled up into the fetal position. “Face down, and hand over your wallet. Now!”

  The man whimpered but didn’t otherwise move.

  Bigelow worked his way around the bodies until he was standing over the man Goggans had taken exception to. He squatted down on the other side of him and patted him gently on the shoulder.

  “It’s gonna be alright,” he said in a kind voice. “You’ll all be off this island and back home before you know it. Just do what the man here says.” He leaned down and whispered the last part. “Or else I’ll drag you out of here myself and put a bullet in your head and throw your body into the bay.”

  The man whimpered even louder, but now he managed to get a hand back into his pocket and produced his wallet.

  “That’s more like it,” Goggans exclaimed, taking it and dropping it into his sack. “You got a way with words, my friend.”

  Bigelow found he was surprised Goggans hadn’t inadvertently spoken his name aloud just then. He surveyed the room one more time before deciding Wilson and Goggans could be left on their own a bit longer.

  “I’m gonna go help them with the… the you know,” he said to Goggans. “Gonna hurry them along a little bit.”

  The hyperactive man was busy commanding a middle-aged woman in pearls to hand her necklace over. He didn’t look up at Bigelow. “Yeah—go, go,” he said. “We’re fine.”

  Bigelow gave the room one last look, concluded that things were going his way this evening, tucked his Colt Commander into his waistband, and made his way back to the basement stairs.

  Halfway down, Bigelow passed Salsa coming up. The guy was carrying a canvas bag in both arms; clearly it was very heavy. Presumably it was a couple of small stacks of gold bricks. He hesitated, wanting to stop the other man and pull the bag open and look and see it for himself. But he resisted the impulse and continued on down.

  Reaching the bottom, he peered into the gloom and saw Harper at the far wall, a crowbar in hand. He was prying bricks out and stacking them up on the floor behind him. At first glance, most of them appeared to be standard bricks, if somewhat smaller than average in size. Then he realized they looked normal only because they had been painted gray.

  Harper looked at him as he approached. “I thought you were going to help the guys upstairs,” he said.

  “They’re okay,” Bigelow said. “Let's just get these loaded on the boat as quick as we can.”

  Reaching down, Bigelow wrapped his arms around two small stacks and lifted. They were heavy, all right.

  “Might be easier to use one of the bags Salsa brought,” Harper said.

  Bigelow eyed the small pile of canvas bags sitting on a table to one side and shrugged. “I’m fine,” he said. Turning, he headed for the stairs and climbed up and out of the basement. He had made it all the way across the enclosed deck and through the exterior door, out into the rain, when he encountered Diaz returning for more. They nodded to one another but said nothing.

  Across the grass he went and through the small stand of trees, and there the thickest part of the lawn ended. Three steps later and the muddy footing got him. His feet went out from under him and he fell, hard, on his backside, then slid a short distance down the hill. The gray bricks he had been carrying, meanwhile, flew every which way, partially embedding themselves in the rain-soaked ground with muffled thuds.

  Cursing a blue streak, Bigelow carefully regained his footing, then bent over and started picking up the bricks. They were as mud-covered as he was. The rainfall was so heavy now, though, he figured he and the bricks would be clean again before they reached the boat.

  He’d barely taken a dozen steps more and he encountered Salsa coming back from the shore.

  Several thoughts went through Bigelow’s mind at that moment, and he thought about reaching for the Colt. This was a per
fect opportunity to eliminate part of the competition with no one else around to see. But he hesitated. It was too early in the operation. Too many of these bars still needed carrying to the boat, and then from there to the truck. Plus, at the moment, his hands were full and Salsa’s were empty. So instead he looked up at the black sky and said, “Great night for this, huh?”

  “Sure,” Salsa said, distractedly, his face grim under the drizzle, and continued on past him to the mansion.

  Bigelow frowned and looked back at him for a moment. That seemed unlike the man. The Salsa he’d been around up until now has been gregarious, a jokester. He’d fully expected to be teased about the layer of mud that covered him. But the man seemed distracted, upset about something. Bigelow wondered what it could be. Maybe this was just his normal demeanor on a job. And maybe, he thought with a grim foreboding, it was how he acted before he and his partner pulled some kind of betrayal of their own.

  Bigelow snapped himself out of his contemplation and hurried on down the slope toward the boat, his shoes sloshing with every step. He tried to refocus himself on the job at hand, but he made a mental note of the fact that Harper and Salsa would have to be eliminated even sooner than he had been planning.

  Reaching the boat, he waded out to its side and tossed the bricks over the edge. He had no intention of climbing aboard to stack them properly. The others could do that. And he was getting well and truly sick of being wet, so standing in the water wasn’t improving his disposition any. He turned and fought his way back up onto the land and from there made a beeline back toward the mansion.

  A few moments later, in almost the same location they’d passed one another before, he saw Salsa approaching again. This time it was Salsa whose arms were full carrying a bag of gold bricks, and Bigelow who was empty-handed. He brushed his fingertips on the SIG at his waist and thought about going ahead and taking care of this part of things immediately.

  Before he could make up his mind to say or do anything, however, there came a sharp report from some distance away; possibly from the other side of the island. He and Salsa both froze and looked up, wide-eyed. It had been too loud, too big to be a gunshot. Was it the Law? Was it the guests, fighting back? Did some of them have weapons? Maybe a hand grenade? Because that’s what it had sounded like.

  Bigelow and Salsa met each other’s eyes and fear was evident in both of their expressions. But then Salsa looked at his watch, exhaled and even managed a weak half-smile.

  Bigelow just stared back at him uncomprehendingly.

  “The ferry,” Salsa said by way of explanation.

  “What?”

  “That was Harper’s bomb he set on the ferry. Now we have the only way off this island tonight.”

  Bigelow blinked his eyes once, twice, and then relaxed. “Right,” he said. “Of course. The ferry bomb. Good.”

  The two men continued on in opposite directions. Only when he had reached the back door of the mansion did it occur to Bigelow that the explosion had distracted him. He had been about to kill Salsa.

  “Oh well,” he muttered to himself. “I’ll take care of it next time.”

  But then he passed through the second set of doors into the mansion and realized that all hell had broken loose.

  23

  Connie Perrigen lay on her stomach on the cold tile floor of the great hall. She held her head up at such an angle that she could see quite a few of the people in a broad arc around her. She had already made one important decision on her own this evening, and she was increasingly confident that it had been the right one.

  “My lord, my lord,” the older woman directly to her right kept whispering over and over. “Will they kill us all?”

  Connie evoked as reassuring a tone as she could manage. “No, Mrs. Worthington. They’re just robbers. I’m sure they’ll leave as soon as they have everyone’s money and jewelry. And then they’ll be caught before they’ve taken three steps onto the mainland.”

  The older woman turned her head so she could see Connie better, and said, “I hope you’re right, my dear. Yes, I do. But I think these are desperate men. They worry me.”

  Connie made soothing sounds to the lady, but in truth Bigelow’s two men worried her, too. She wondered if the appropriate term wasn’t desperate but incompetent. Nor did they come across as the most stable lot. She wondered where Harper and Salsa had found them. And if they couldn’t have found someone better.

  Harper had assigned her the job of mingling with the crowd so that, when the robbery began, she would be in their midst as just another victim, but in prime position to try to keep them calm and under the control of the robbers. Lois was supposed to be in there with her, giving them double the coverage of the crowd. But Lois hadn’t shown up for the rendezvous, so the entirety of the task had fallen to Connie.

  She had been doing the best she could, but now an additional concern was creeping in. This was all going on too long. From what Harper had explained to her beforehand, it should have been over by now. This very visible upstairs robbery—the distraction and the locking down of the guests and the island staff— wasn’t supposed to begin until the guys in the basement were ready to start bringing out the gold. How long could that possibly take? Why were they still here?

  Minutes earlier, she had been forced to expend considerable effort dissuading the two professional football players to her left from taking any rash actions. The two big Dolphins had been extremely unwilling to just go along with the orders of the robbers. Such a thing violated their sense of manly courage and duty, especially in front of so many other people. Only Connie’s quick intervention— “Let’s don’t do anything that could cause bloodshed, fellas” —had kept the situation under control.

  But now, as this robbery wore on and on, the two big men were at it again. Conversing with each other in hushed but urgent tones from where they lay sprawled side-by-side on the floor, they were egging each other on, convincing one another, “We can take these guys.” And, Connie thought, maybe they were right. But that didn’t matter, because her job was to make sure they didn’t try. To help the robbers get away safe and clean.

  Looking over that way again, Connie could see that the two big athletes were psyching one another up to make a move. Quickly she wormed herself a little closer in their direction and said quietly, “Remember, guys—we don’t want to cause anyone to get hurt. There are a lot of elderly folks here. Let’s just stay calm until this is over.” But they were growing less and less inclined to listen.

  “If all they were planning to do was take our money,” one of the Dolphins said, “they would’ve been gone by now.”

  “That’s right,” said the other one. “They’re up to something else. Maybe nerving themselves up to try to kill us all. You know—no witnesses.”

  “But we haven’t seen their faces or heard their names,” Connie reminded them for at least the third time. She was very grateful that the two idiots robbing them had managed to remember not to give those things away, at least. Once this was over, she planned to have a long conversation with Harper about personnel choices. If this was the kind of people he generally worked with, she was shocked he hadn’t wound up dead or in prison.

  “They’re not even looking this way half the time,” the first Dolphin hissed. “I say we go for it, as soon as that guy there comes just a little bit closer.

  “No!” Connie exclaimed, saying it so loudly that Wilson actually heard her and turned around, Sten gun at the ready. His eyes behind his mask softened a tad when he saw who had made the noise. After another couple of seconds, he turned away again.

  The football player glared at her. “Stupid woman! You could’ve gotten us killed!”

  “You’re the ones trying to get us killed,” she retorted. “I’m trying to keep us all alive!”

  Before either of the Dolphins could say another word, the sound of a small explosion echoed up from somewhere in the direction of the pier.

  Immediately the hall was filled with the sounds of th
e guests and the staff members buzzing to one another. They had been on edge before and now they were terrified.

  It had to be the bomb Harper had planted on the ferry. But the timing was all wrong. It was too soon. No, Connie realized, peeking at her watch, it was right on time. The robbery definitely should’ve been over by then. The bomb was supposed to go off after Harper’s team had left in their own boat, but before people could make their way down to the pier and aboard the ferry.

  “Everybody shut up,” shouted the robber nearer to Connie.

  But they weren’t listening now. Having their wallets and purses taken was one thing, but an explosion for them represented violence on a completely different scale than they were used to or had been expecting. The majority of the crowd was coming unnerved. Connie could sense it; could feel it in the air around her. There was no doubt about it now: something was about to happen. Something bad.

  Predictably, it was the two football players who precipitated it. They were up before she could say another word to them. Up and moving, angling for the nearest bandit. Perhaps involuntarily, Connie cried out. Wilson turned just as the first of them slammed into him and drove him down into the floor. The Sten gun went off, rattling bullets up at the ceiling, narrowly missing actually hitting the player or anyone else.

  Screams erupted. Terrified people scrambled on their hands and knees in every direction.

  The other robber—Connie somehow remembered his name was Goggans—spun around at the sound of the gunfire and saw the second Dolphin charging towards him.

  “Oh, hell no!” Goggans hollered. In a blind panic he pulled the trigger, spraying bullets in a wide arc.

  The player went down, either hit or diving for cover; Connie couldn’t immediately tell which. There was just too much chaos now. She pressed herself down harder, wanting to melt right into the floor.

  Then, a second after that, Goggans also went down. At first, she wasn’t clear what had happened, but then she realized there had been another gunshot, a single shot. But from where? Connie lifted her head up just enough to try to see.