The Box

by Jeremy Brown

  “That’s cold, man.”

  Bruder said, “We don’t even know if she’s worth talking to yet and you’re already working out a plan to save her. You going back there tomorrow is a mistake.”

  “No, no, it’s fine,” Connelly said. “I’m fine. I just don’t like the idea of our actions bringing shit down on other people’s heads.”

  “Except the Romanians,” Rison said.

  “Well, yeah, fuck those guys.”

  Bruder said, “Then be a professional. Be careful. Talk to Marie, or whoever, but don’t tip her off you’re pumping for information. Whoever we talk to, it should never cross their mind we might be connected to what happens five weeks from now.”

  Connelly nodded.

  “Yeah. Of course. I don’t know why I got off track like that, guys. I’m good to go.”

  He rolled around the door frame and went into his room, where the shifting light of the TV was the only illumination.

  Bruder looked at Rison, who knew what the look meant.

  “He’s good,” Rison said, quiet enough to almost be talking to himself. “He’ll do fine.”

  Bruder had his things in unit number three. Connelly’s room had originally been the empty buffer the motel manager included in his pitch, and Rison had let him know to request a room as close to the end as possible to get the adjoining door.

  Bruder used his key and hung up his suit and shirt in the bathroom while he took a hot shower, letting the steam work into the fabric. He ended the shower with a minute of cold water and shut it off.

  He put the pistol under the bed on the side away from the door. If somebody came in during the night, he’d roll that way and put the bed between them while he reached for the gun.

  He stretched out and thought about how likely something like that was.

  If the Romanians were into everything in town and everyone was either scared of them or under their so-called protection, the motel manager—Ed was his name, Bruder recalled—would give up the room numbers and extra keys of the two guys from Len’s.

  And Marie would fill them in on the rest.

  To the Romanians, Bruder and Rison were just two straight civilians killing time on a business trip, staying in rooms one and three at the motel.

  And two guys like that, if the thugs from Len’s wanted to have some fun with them—smack them around and take whatever they had—those kind of guys would call the police if they survived the ordeal.

  And if talking to the local police didn’t do any good because the cops were just like everybody else, scared or paid off, those kind of guys would call the state police.

  In short, they wouldn’t be smart enough to keep their mouths shut.

  They’d make noise.

  So it would be stupid for the Romanians to come in and shake them down for pocket change, or just for a laugh, when they had such a sweet deal going with the farm subsidies.

  In Bruder’s experience, most people were mostly stupid when it came to most things.

  The Romanians at Len’s hadn’t changed his mind so far.

  So he kept to the edge of the bed away from the door and thought about the spots he and Rison had scouted, and Connelly and his misplaced morals, and eventually he fell asleep waiting for the Romanians to do something dumb.

  Chapter Seven

  Five Weeks Earlier—Friday

  When Rison knocked on his door at 8:30 Bruder was already showered and dressed.

  “I got coffee and rolls in my room,” Rison said, and Bruder followed him.

  He scanned the parking lot and didn’t see any new vehicles or anyone parked along the horseshoe driveway, or stopped on the highway out there past the abandoned miniature golf course.

  Connelly’s door and curtains were closed, but he was standing in Rison’s room using the remote to flip through the channels.

  Bruder asked him, “Did you have any coffee yet?”

  “No, but I’m dying for some.”

  “Wait. Go down to the motel office and ask them where you can get breakfast. Then go back to your room and come in here for the coffee. Or go to wherever they suggest.”

  Connelly frowned at him, then got it.

  “Yeah, okay.”

  He tossed the remote onto the bed and went through the adjoining door. A few seconds later Bruder heard the door to unit two open and close, and Connelly went down to the office to provide more proof he was here on his own, just some guy with a guitar drifting around.

  Bruder took one of the mugs from the motel’s coffee maker set and filled it from a massive styrofoam cup full of hot coffee.

  Rison said, “The gas station didn’t have any to-go carafes, can you believe that?”

  “Yes.”

  There were three more of the cups, also full, nestled in a carrier on the dresser. A white cardboard box full of cinnamon rolls and donuts and mystery lumps wrapped in waxed paper was next to the carrier.

  “Those little things are breakfast sandwiches,” Rison said. “Not bad for a gas station. They had a little setup in there, some tables and a row of stools by a counter along the back windows. It looks like it’s for truck drivers, but there were a few old guys in there who seemed like regulars. Drinking coffee and talking about how bad this winter is supposed to be.”

  “Farmers?”

  Rison shrugged. “Everybody around here looks like a farmer to me.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” Bruder said. “Unless we see somebody holding a sign with ‘Fuck the Romanians’ on it, we can’t approach them. It’s too risky. The people we’ve seen so far are more scared than pissed.”

  “Marie seemed pretty pissed last night.”

  Bruder shook his head. “Connelly’s right about her.”

  Rison was surprised.

  Bruder said, “Not the guilty part. She’s rooted, she has three boys around here somewhere. She’s pissed, but she’s also too smart to run her mouth about it. She has too much to lose.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  Rison froze with his mug halfway to his face.

  “Oh, hold on. What if…Hold on, I’m trying to decide if this idea is terrible or brilliant…”

  Bruder waited.

  Rison said, “Ah, fuck it. What if we’re undercover? What if we confide in her, or whoever, that we’re on some organized crime task force and we’re here to take the Romanians down? That way, they’ll figure the gang’s done for, they’ll go all-in on helping us out.”

  Bruder chewed and drank coffee and thought it over.

  Finally, he shook his head again.

  “It could work. It could. But it’s too overt. Too loud. If we go that route, everyone will know it was us who pulled the job off when it’s done. The town, and the Romanians. Better to leave everybody guessing, if we can.”

  “Yeah,” Rison said. “Not a bad option to keep in our back pockets though, just in case.”

  “Not bad,” Bruder agreed.

  They stood there thinking about it, then Rison said, “Are we sure we still need somebody local? I mean, we found some good spots to hunker down if necessary, we know the route they’re going to take out of town, thanks to Tug. The only thing we don’t know for sure is when they’re going to make the rounds. If we come back when I was supposed to meet up with him, and we keep our eyes open…”

  Bruder said, “We won’t know when they’re going to make the collections until they start, and even then we could miss it. We have an idea of where they’re coming from once they have all the cash, and where they’re going, but not when. We’ll either be too early or too late. If we’re going to do it, we need more information.”

  “I know, dammit. It’s just…people screw everything up, you know?”

  Bruder knew but didn’t need to say anything about it.

  They heard the door to unit two open and close, then Connelly cruised through the opening and went straight for the spread and drank from the open styrofoam cup.

  “Poor Ed. Barbara’s on duty in the office, and m
an, I totally get why he’s cheating on her with that TV show. She’s a real piece of work.”

  Bruder looked at Rison to see if it made any sense to him. Rison shrugged.

  Bruder said, “We’re going to drive around, maybe browse some of the shops along the main drag and see if anyone catches our eye. Then we’ll hit Len’s one more time for lunch, and that’s it for us. We stay here any longer and we’ll draw more attention.”

  “Aw, you’re gonna miss my show tonight,” Connelly said.

  Rison asked him, “You got a setlist?”

  “I’m getting a strong John Cougar Mellencamp vibe. Maybe pre-Mellencamp, so just John Cougar.”

  Rison made a face.

  “Hey,” Connelly said, “this is the heartland. These are his people. Is Kershaw coming in today?”

  “Saturday,” Bruder said.

  “I’ll have the whole town singing the chorus to Jack and Diane by then.”

  “Have some goddam dignity,” Rison said.

  Connelly started singing with his mouth full of chocolate glazed donut, so Bruder grabbed the car keys and left the room.

  Bruder and Rison drove around town watching the traffic flow.

  They spent some time going north and south from the main intersection, and while there were some cars and trucks and rigs, the east-west roads were much busier. Whenever they cut around on side streets the smaller roads seemed deserted in comparison.

  They stopped at the gas station and Bruder went inside to check out the seating area Rison had noticed. He found two white-haired men in battered trucker hats, sitting apart but watching the same cable news show on a TV mounted in the corner.

  There was a small section in the gas station dedicated to cheap souvenirs—toy trucks and combines and water pistols—and Bruder saw a rack of pamphlets with information about the train depot and some handmade flyers advertising a local cider mill with hay rides and, starting after Thanksgiving, hot chocolate and sleigh rides.

  He took a copy of everything and got two more cups of coffee, since they’d left the first batch in the motel room with Connelly.

  He had a story ready about a nephew who loved trains, possibly an opener to feel out the cashier for any information about the Romanians. But she didn’t look up from her phone or notice or care about the stack of literature he’d amassed, so Bruder wrote her off and didn’t say anything and paid and left.

  Rison took the highway west, their rental car getting knocked around by the wind and passing of big rigs on their way to wherever.

  A few miles out of town they made the right turn onto the two lanes shooting straight northwest. The street sign said Pine, but Bruder didn’t see any pine trees.

  It was their third time checking the road, and after a minute or so of nothing but corn stubs and the occasional distant tractor sitting idle, Bruder said, “You’re sure this is it?”

  It was the third time he’d asked it, once on every trip, and Rison tried to sound confident for the third time.

  “It has to be, right?”

  “Go through it again.”

  Rison sighed.

  “The way Tug told it, they make their rounds, collect the cash, and meet up at the family compound, some farm out here they bought legally. Then they count it all and pack it up in the armored car and drive it through town like a one-truck Romanian pride parade.”

  Bruder looked out his window at the lunar landscape. There was nowhere to hide out there, no corners to duck around or doorways to slip into. Not even a pine tree to stand behind.

  “And he told you it was northwest of town?”

  Rison nodded.

  “He said it was a road like a runway, nothing but crops all around, and the armored car would rumble down it to the highway. So if they were coming toward us from their farm out here, they’d be going down, like southeast, right?”

  “Is that how Romanians talk about directions? Up is north, down is south?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  Rison was getting snappy, tired of the questions he didn’t have straight answers for.

  A shape appeared in the road ahead. It turned into a flashing stop sign, and beyond that was the berm and railroad overpass with the one-lane passage beneath.

  Rison stopped at the sign and made a show of looking left, right, behind, and ahead. Nothing else was moving except a gaggle of geese hunkered out in the corn stumps.

  Rison pulled forward, and right before they slipped into the mouth of the tunnel Bruder said, “Stop.”

  He looked at the concrete retaining walls and the overpass and the way it all funneled into a man-made chokepoint. He got out and took some photos of it with a small digital camera, then took a short video, turning a full 360 degrees.

  He walked through the tunnel taking more photos, then did the same routine on the northwest side of the tracks.

  Rison idled behind him, watching for any inbound traffic, and when Bruder got back into the car Rison said, “You like this spot?”

  “It has potential.”

  Rison nodded, happy about anything that looked remotely like progress, and picked up speed as they moved away from the overpass.

  Bruder watched the scene shrink in his side mirror.

  If Rison was right, and this was the road the Romanians used…

  “We’re going to need some explosives.”

  Rison glanced over, alarmed.

  “You want to blow the bridge?”

  “Not quite.”

  The endless fields of harvested corn and soybeans were eventually broken by a dirt road angling off to the west.

  The sign called it 64th Street, not even important enough to get a real name.

  Bruder could see a tree line down that way, and beyond it the tops of what looked to be silos with grain elevators.

  Rison coasted to a stop but didn’t turn. He looked off to the left toward the silos.

  “Might be the Romanian compound.”

  Bruder checked straight ahead, then looked to the right.

  Nothing but more fields and tree lines off in the distance. The field outside his window had been left to grow wild and was ragged with tall grass and fading yellow wildflowers.

  Rison hit the left turn signal, then looked at Bruder with raised eyebrows.

  Bruder shook his head.

  “Look around. If it is them, we’d be the only car to drive past all day. And if any of the muscle from Len’s is standing around outside, and they recognize us, we’re blown. Let’s see what’s further down this road.”

  Rison killed the blinker and pushed the car forward.

  “I’m gonna take a wild guess and say corn.”

  They drove for five more miles and saw one other farm, sitting right on the stretch of two-lane road they were on.

  It had a tall white square of a house surrounded by a few mature trees. Massive barns sheathed in ribbed sheet metal loomed behind the house, in the middle of an immaculate lake of crushed concrete.

  Three men stood outside one of the barns next to a machine that looked to Bruder like it belonged on the surface of Mars. It dwarfed the men, who turned from looking up at the cockpit and studied the lone car going by.

  “That’s a sprayer,” Rison said.

  The three men stared, and Bruder raised a hand to the window.

  The three men waved back, an automatic response, but they seemed unsure about who they were waving at.

  “That’s not the Romanians,” Bruder said.

  “No beards?”

  “That yard and the equipment are pristine. The Romanians aren’t here to farm, they’re here to steal and intimidate. I bet they don’t even mow their lawn.”

  He looked through the windshield and saw more fields. There weren’t even any power lines along the side of the road.

  “Go another mile or so, then turn around. Let’s head back to town.”

  “If those farmers are still out there they’ll see us go by. Might be weird. Even more weird than you waving at them.”


  Bruder shrugged.

  “We’re two packaging equipment guys from Jersey who got lost driving around while waiting for lunch time.”

  “Oh, it’s lunch time?”

  “It will be by the time we get back.”

  “More like dinner time,” Rison said, grousing. “I need to look at this road on a map, see where it goes.”

  “Northwest.”

  “No, I mean how far. Because if it goes all the way to South Dakota, or Minnesota maybe, we could use it to get away after the job. Straight shot, right outta Dodge.”

  He chopped the air with a hand and left his fingers pointing through the windshield to demonstrate.

  Bruder said, “I don’t like it.”

  “Why not? If this is the right road, and the Romanians are back there somewhere and they try to take their damn armored car through town, we hit them before they get there and take their back trail all the way here and keep going.”

  “What if they have a chase car?”

  Rison frowned.

  “Tug didn’t say anything about other vehicles behind the armored car.”

  “What if they catch on somehow, the guys with the cash get a distress call out? Even if we make it past the Romanian compound, wherever that is, we’re stuck on this one road. Unless you see us on snowmobiles or ATVs.”

  Rison seemed to be considering that, so Bruder said, “No. If this is the right road, we hit them and go the other way. Into town. More options.”

  Rison found a spot on the shoulder with a little more gravel and used it to swing the car around. The scenery going southeast was exactly the same, but now they had the sun in their eyes.

  They went past the immaculate farm and the three men were still out there, now looking even more concerned about the same car going by, but they waved again when Rison gave them a thumbs-up.

  After another mile he said, “Okay, so where do we hit them?”

  “Let’s see how that tunnel looks coming from this way.”

  The tunnel looked good.

  Bruder took a few more photos and some video, and jotted down some cryptic notes, then Rison drove them back into town where they parked behind Len’s and went inside.