The Box

by Jeremy Brown

  Razvan stepped close to the door, forcing the Sheriff to duck down and twist his head up.

  “Good morning, Sheriff.”

  “Razvan.”

  He pronounced it with no grace: Razz-Van.

  “Mind telling me what’s going on here?”

  “We’re looking for something.”

  Wern nodded.

  “I kinda figured that. Your armored truck is blocking the road under the tracks.”

  “Nobody needs that road but us.”

  Wern grimaced and looked past Razvan at nothing in particular.

  “Well, that’s not necessarily true.”

  “It is today,” Razvan said.

  “You can’t just stop the traffic like this.”

  “There’s been an accident. Or road work. Or a high school car wash. Traffic will adjust. And you need to tell the people in town to stay at home. Or at work, wherever they are. Stay put.”

  Wern looked up at him again. The angle made the fat rolls around his neck gleam in the morning sunshine.

  “What, like a curfew?”

  Razvan shrugged.

  “If that means they stay where they are. No cars moving on the side streets, they’ll only get in the way.”

  Wern shook his head and sighed while he looked at the mess piling up around him.

  Razvan didn’t care. If you accept the money, you have to earn it at some point.

  Wern said, “Are you going to let anyone through here?”

  “Eventually, yes. Luca here is going to check the drivers. When others arrive, they will help. Tell your men to do the same.”

  Wern shook his head.

  “Not everybody—”

  “The ones I pay. For the rest of them, whether I pay them or not, tell them if they locate the white truck I’m looking for, and the men inside it, I will reward them.”

  “White truck,” Wern said.

  Razvan nodded.

  “And the men inside it.”

  “Do you know these men?” Wern asked.

  “Not yet,” Razvan said.

  When the Sheriff drove away Razvan took his phone back out and called Chicago.

  The number rang inside a blank brick building on Halstead Street and was picked up on the second ring.

  An ancient male voice spoke in Romanian.

  “Yes?”

  Razvan also used Romanian, since the man on the other end was bad with English and the translation created one more step for anyone else who might be listening.

  “It’s me. The truck is down. The delivery was stolen.”

  The phone was silent.

  Then: “By who?”

  “I’m working on that part.”

  “This is a large delivery, my friend.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  The old man said, “Many people are expecting it. Here, and back home.”

  “Yes.”

  “You will get it back.”

  “As I said. I’m working on it.”

  “I’m sending more men.”

  Razvan had expected this.

  “It’s not necessary, I have enough.”

  Which wasn’t true—he needed more men—but the men from Chicago would have two jobs: Help Razvan and his crew find out who stole the money and how; and if that didn’t work, find out if Razvan and his crew had anything to do with it before executing them and burying them in a cornfield, then taking over the work in Iowa.

  “It’s done,” the old man said. “It won’t be the babysitters expecting you in Dubuque. They’ll drive, so expect them in seven or eight hours. If you resolve this before then, if you get the delivery back, just sit tight and wait for them. They will have some questions. Then they will bring the delivery to me.”

  “And if I find the people responsible?”

  The old man chuckled, which turned into a wet cough.

  Razvan waited until it was done.

  The old man said, “As I told you, the men from here will have some questions. Who they ask...now, that is up to you.”

  The sun stayed closer to the Iowa horizon this time of year, and Razvan watched it creep near its apex at about the same speed as the traffic going through the crossroads.

  The cars going north and west got waved through at a faster clip—there was almost zero chance the men in the white truck had somehow gotten south or east of town, and absolutely no chance they would come back through the crossroads if they had another option.

  Razvan checked his watch again.

  Two hours.

  Two hours of him and Benj and Luca and Costel checking cars and trucks at the intersection, with Claudiu, Grigore, Pavel and Mihail scouring the neighborhoods and homesteads and fields and two-tracks.

  There were some false alarms—apparently there was more than one white truck in the world—but so far the only real result was a snarl of traffic around town and a group of savages from Chicago getting two hours closer.

  Yes, Razvan needed more men, but not those men.

  He seethed when he sent the update to his crew via text, knowing they would see the message and look at each other, maybe even wonder out loud if he couldn’t handle what was happening.

  Of course he could handle it.

  But first…just what the hell was happening?

  He needed to know within six hours.

  It was almost eleven o’clock, time for the next round of twenty-minute check-ins.

  He called Grigore first and got the same answer he’d been getting all morning: “Nothing yet.”

  Grigore and Pavel were now in the southwestern quadrant, having swept the northeastern part of town with no results.

  Razvan said, “How is Pavel?”

  “Angry.”

  “Good.”

  “But his eyes are still glassy from the explosion. He needs to lay down for a while, I think. Drink some tea.”

  “He can sleep in the truck.”

  Razvan hung up and called Mihail, who’d set up a checkpoint west of town, out on the four-lane highway past Pine. He was working with one of the sheriff’s men to check the vehicles coming from town. The white truck might try to slip out that way from the side streets, but Razvan doubted it.

  He figured the thieves had found a place to hide and were waiting for things to die down.

  They might even be getting updates from someone local, which irked Razvan.

  Not the betrayal aspect—just the idea of someone not being afraid of what he would do when he found out.

  Mihail answered.

  “No sign of them.”

  “Be ready. They might not wait in line. They might just try to smash their way through along the shoulder or median.”

  “Right. We’re ready.”

  Razvan knew Mihail had an M249 light machine gun in the passenger seat of his truck.

  “What does the cop have?”

  Mihail said something away from the phone, then came back.

  “He says he has a shotgun and a semi-automatic rifle. I’m guessing it’s an AR-15. He—hold on. Hah?”

  Razvan heard someone else talking in the background.

  Mihail said, “He also has his sidearm. Which, you know…big deal. And he was in Iraq, and he shot enough people over there and he’s not going to shoot anyone here. This one has a lot to say.”

  Razvan said, “So it’s up to you. If you have to shoot, leave at least one of them alive.”

  “Yes, you told me.”

  “And if you spot them, call and we’ll come in from behind. So don’t shoot us.”

  “Yes, Raz. I got it.”

  Razvan ended the call and dialed Claudiu’s phone.

  Claudiu was searching the northwest quadrant, which had the fewest places to hide.

  Ideally Claudiu should have another man with him and a second or third vehicle in the area, but Razvan couldn’t move anyone from what they were already doing.

  He took solace in the fact that if the thieves were there, they were trapped.

  All Claudiu had to
do was spot them—or anything close to something looking like them—and call it in.

  The man was excited by the idea of interrogating the thieves, and Razvan had made a promise: If he found them, Claudiu could do whatever he wanted to them as long as they didn’t die.

  As long as he got his answers, the ones expected by the man in Chicago, Razvan didn’t care about anything else.

  But one thing was starting to edge to the forefront of his concerns.

  Claudiu’s phone was still ringing, and he wasn’t answering.

  Razvan called Mihail back.

  “Have you seen Claudiu?”

  “No, not since this morning at the compound, before all of this happened. Why?”

  “He’s somewhere out by you, north of the highway. He’s not answering his phone.”

  Mihail said, “Is he pouting?”

  “I don’t give a shit if he’s pouting, screaming, or being stabbed. When I call, he answers.”

  Razvan took the phone away from his ear and fought the urge to hurl it at the side of the building.

  Why would Mihail even ask that question?

  What, now it was okay for Claudiu to do his job based on how he was feeling?

  And everyone knew it?

  “Fuck!”

  The outburst startled a woman sitting in her car in the northbound lanes with her window cracked. She had two children in the back seat who gaped out at Razvan and glanced at their mother to see what she was going to do.

  She looked away from him, this tower of a man with skin stretched taut across his face like rubber over a skull and put the window up.

  Razvan told Mihail, “Just watch for him. If you see him, tell him to call me.”

  “Sure, Raz. You got it.”

  Razvan killed the call and stalked toward the car, alarming the woman and children inside, and turned left to walk toward the crossroads only when he felt satisfied by their level of terror.

  Another twenty minutes, then thirty, then close to forty minutes.

  Nearly two cycles of missed check-ins, with a dozen unanswered calls in the meantime.

  Razvan’s anger grew.

  His main concern was Claudiu had found the thieves and was already going to work on them, sneaking in some personal time with them before he reported back.

  What Claudiu never seemed to understand was that people will tell you anything if you hurt them too much, too quickly.

  Razvan needed truths, not just confessions.

  If—when Claudiu finally called back—if he summoned Razvan to a slaughterhouse, with these men from the white truck spread out all over the walls and floor and begging for death, Razvan decided he might just add Claudiu to the pile.

  It was clear his men needed a prompt, a reminder, about who Razvan from Lehliu Gară was.

  He was thinking about this when Benj shouted something from up on the roof of the building on the northwest corner.

  Razvan looked up at him, then shielded his eyes to look down the four lanes stretching to the west, where Benj was pointing.

  And he saw it.

  A flash of white, a large crew-cab truck with a cap over the bed, coming toward the crossroads and turning right down one of the side streets, the first one, Dolan.

  “Shoot them!” Razvan screamed.

  Benj fired his rifle once, being too careful about the other cars.

  “Keep shooting, you idiot!”

  But the truck was gone, around the corner and out of sight.

  Razvan ran to his truck, an awkward lope as he tried to call Grigore at the same time.

  “Yeah?”

  “They’re coming your way, they just turned on Dolan from the highway.”

  “You saw them?”

  “Yes! We’ll block them from coming back this way. Where are you?”

  Grigore said, “Out in the farms, I’m turning around now.”

  Razvan heard the other truck’s engine open up.

  “There aren’t many roads they can take, find an intersection and wait there. You’ll spot them. Hold them and call me back.”

  “Okay, right.”

  He called Mihail next, who said, “We heard a shot.”

  “Come into town, I need you to block the neighborhood streets going south off the highway.”

  “You found them?”

  “Yes, move your ass!”

  Razvan got into his truck and started it, then Luca was at the window.

  “What about this?”

  He swept a hand across the lanes of backed-up traffic.

  “Let them all go through. We block just the southwest quadrant, nobody in or out. I don’t care about the highways anymore.”

  “Thank Christ,” Luca said.

  “Now move! I have to go!”

  Luca jogged away, waving at Benj and Costel, yelling at them to come down from the rooftops.

  Razvan pulled his truck through a tight U-turn and raced south on the highway, peering west down the side streets, waiting for another glimpse of the truck.

  Praying to see it coming toward him, the thieves trying to slip out of town and get south.

  He didn’t see them and knew they hadn’t turned around to go north again.

  So they were in this corner, somewhere, heading toward Grigore, or Mihail, or himself.

  Razvan could not wait.

  Chapter Fourteen

  When Bruder said, “Go,” Rison went, and the modifications to the truck worked.

  The Vegas garage Rison had used was discreet, cash only, and kept no memory or records about the vehicles they worked on. Bruder, Rison and Kershaw had tested the mods out in the desert before driving to Iowa, and everyone agreed: They’d be able to outrun anything except a radio.

  When Rison hit the gas the truck jumped forward, all four wheels digging into the asphalt, and fans and blowers and belts kicked in beneath the hood to make a spinning-up sound like they were about to take flight.

  Rison took the first right, then the first left with everyone inside tilting to counter the vehicle’s sway.

  Kershaw gripped the handle above the door with his left hand and kept the AR in his right and asked Rison, “How’s it feel?”

  “Heavy. We should have tested it with a full bed.”

  He took another right, another left, and continued that pattern to stair-step away from their last known position.

  Bruder looked through Kershaw’s window and watched for any Romanians roaring down Spruce, which was now four blocks to the east, then out his own window when Rison came to an intersection and turned left.

  The northbound road out there didn’t go all the way to the highway, so anyone following them would have to start from the same entry point, or close to it.

  Rison said, “Keep going or find a place to hole up?”

  “Keep going until we can’t,” Bruder said.

  Connelly said, “You think they’re calling everybody in? If the checkpoints get sucked in to trap us, we can loop around and get the hell out of here.”

  Bruder shook his head.

  “Not if they’re smart. They know where we are now, still inside their bubble. It’s just a matter of time before they see us again. How do we get to Nora’s from here?”

  “Uhh…”

  “Don’t bullshit.”

  “I’m not, I’m trying to figure it out!”

  Connelly looked around.

  “She’s southwest of here, I know that…Turn left there, right there, and keep going south, I think…yeah, this road gets us out of the neighborhoods.”

  Bruder said, “Does it intersect with anything coming from the north-south highway?”

  He was thinking about Romanians coming from that direction and cutting them off.

  “No, uh…No. Once we get out of these blocks, there’s nothing that connects to the highways. It’s all just the crazy farm road loops.”

  “Is this the only road that gets us out of downtown?”

  Connelly was quiet for a moment.

  “I don’t
know, man. Shit. Sorry.”

  Bruder was also thinking about their back trail. If this was the only road out of the neighborhoods, the Romanians would know for sure they’d used it.

  Everyone else in the truck was thinking the same thing.

  Rison got onto the straightway and pushed the truck past one hundred miles an hour. A woman standing in her driveway holding a folded newspaper watched them blow past with her mouth hanging open.

  “At least one eyewitness,” Kershaw said.

  They cleared the residential blocks and got into farmland, which still had some of the larger, newer houses and of course the farm spreads, and Bruder saw one of the loops coming in from the west.

  Rison jammed the brakes and the truck responded with rubber squawking on the asphalt.

  “What are you doing?” Bruder said, pushing against the back of Connelly’s seat.

  “Leaving some false footprints.”

  Rison glanced at his side mirror and grinned, then stomped the gas again and whipped past the road on the right.

  Bruder stuck his head out the window and saw the black marks in the road behind them, looking like they’d braked in order to make the turn.

  Rison shrugged at him in the rear-view.

  “Might help, can’t hurt.”

  He was right, so Bruder just nodded and watched the road.

  No other vehicles in front or behind.

  The Romanians were either very slow to respond after the single shot they’d taken, or they knew there wasn’t any reason to hurry.

  They knew the white truck was in the southwest quadrant somewhere, and it wasn’t getting out without somehow getting back onto the west- or southbound highways.

  So why hurry?

  Then Rison said, “Ah, fuck me.”

  They all looked through the windshield and spotted the vehicle coming at them.

  The vehicle was still a mile away, but there were no other intersecting roads within view.

  No turnoffs or two-tracks, nothing except the flat fields stretching off to the left and right.

  “Another farmer?” Connelly said.

  Rison shook his head.

  “They’re coming on fast. And look, they’re straddling the centerline.”