The Box

by Jeremy Brown

  Connelly turned and pulled a fist back, ready to pound it into the steel door, but kept himself under control. He sucked air in through his teeth and let it out in a low, seething growl.

  Kershaw told them, “AK is getting into the truck, passenger side. Backing up, turning around on the grass. At the road. Turning north.”

  Rison said, “North?”

  “Machine gunner is packing up,” Kershaw said. “He’s following them. They’re gone.”

  They waited a full minute, then Kershaw walked into the shed with the poncho over his shoulder. His face was sweaty and streaked with dirt.

  The four of them met in front of the combine.

  “We let them take her,” Connelly said.

  Everybody knew that already, so nobody responded.

  Rison said, “Why go north? There are other properties south of here.”

  “They don’t have to search anymore,” Bruder said, looking at Connelly. “They have the woman. They think we’ll come to them now.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Razvan drove with Nora wedged between him and Benj, who had his rifle butt-down between his knees. He was twisted to the left so he could look back at the house and barns.

  He frowned at them and breathed loudly through his mouth, blowing air against Nora’s right ear.

  She stared straight ahead through the windshield with her arms crossed, and Razvan thought she had the look of a long-suffering wife.

  Benj said in Romanian, “Something’s going on back there.”

  Razvan grunted and kept their native language going.

  “Oh, she’s up to something. We’ll get some details when her man calls us back.”

  “What if he doesn’t?”

  Razvan grinned and glanced over at Nora, who met his eyes for a moment then went back to scowling out the window. When he smiled, the thin flesh around his eyes piled up and made his sunken sockets look even deeper.

  “Then we’ll see what she knows. I suspect it’s nothing—she’s been a pawn for the thieves, I think—but maybe he’ll call us back if we leave him another message with some real motivation in it.”

  Benj nodded.

  Standard practice, about what he’d expected.

  He looked back at the woman’s place, becoming a group of boxes in the surrounding flatlands.

  “Why don’t you let me out here? I want to see what happens.”

  “Like what?”

  Benj shrugged.

  “Maybe they’re watching the place, and they come crawling out of their holes when they see us leaving. If I spot anything, I’ll call you back in.”

  Razvan thought about it, then shook his head.

  “Costel and Luca are at the intersection up here. Anyone comes or goes, they will see them. I need both you and Mihail at the compound.”

  “For her? She’ll be easy. The hard part will be making sure she doesn’t just die on you.”

  “Not for her,” Razvan said. “For the thieves, when they come with the money. And for the men from Chicago.”

  “Ah, shit. Them.”

  “Yes, you see? We’re going to be very busy soon.”

  He grinned at Nora again and pushed the truck faster.

  “Give me the phone,” Connelly said. “I’m calling her back.”

  “What for?” Bruder said.

  He didn’t reach for the pocket with the phone.

  Connelly’s mouth flapped.

  “Uh, to make sure she’s alive?”

  “And if she isn’t?”

  Rison and Kershaw watched the conversation, back and forth.

  “Then we go to war.”

  “And what if she just doesn’t answer? What if Razvan does?”

  “Okay, fine, calling is a bad idea. You got anything better?”

  “Yes,” Bruder said. “They’re distracted by the woman—they think they found something useful, a tool they can pry with. We have about two hours until the crew from Chicago gets here, probably less. Maybe it’s two guys, maybe it’s twenty. We pack the money into Nora’s car and take our chances with whoever they have between us and the highway.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Connelly said.

  Bruder ignored him.

  “I figure it’s two guys, three at the most if they dropped one off on the way out.”

  “What if it’s the machine gunner?” Kershaw said.

  “Like I said. We take our chances. It’s only going to get worse, and we have a short window to jump through.”

  Kershaw nodded.

  “Let’s get a look at that trunk.”

  Connelly took a step backward, putting himself between them and the shed’s opening and spreading his arms.

  “No.”

  Bruder checked his watch again, then kept it brief.

  “You want to go after her, that’s your call. We’ll hold your share until you reach out or we hear you’re dead.”

  “Hold up,” Rison said. “What if they get a hold of him and start asking questions about us?”

  “Oh, fuck you very much,” Connelly said.

  “Hey, I’m just being realistic.”

  They both looked at Bruder, who shrugged.

  “You know names. Or think you do. You don’t know how to get in touch with any of us except Rison, so that’s his problem.”

  Rison blinked.

  “Yeah, then they come after me.”

  “So, don’t get found,” Bruder said.

  Rison’s brow furrowed while he tried to make sense of it.

  “See how it feels?” Connelly asked him.

  Then, to Bruder: “What if they had one of us right now? Not a week from now, or a month. Right now, driving us away.”

  “That’s different.”

  “How?”

  Bruder didn’t know why he had to explain this.

  “We’re all still on the job.”

  “Exactly,” Connelly said. “And part of the job is we look out for each other. Right? There’s a principle involved. A code. Am I right or not?”

  Bruder shook his head.

  “There’s money involved. You helped us get the money. You earned a chance to spend your cut.”

  “Fine, that’s fucked up, but I’ll take it.”

  “But,” Bruder cut him off, “when the job’s done, it’s done. You go off trying to rescue your woman, you’re on your own.”

  “Yes, of course,” Connelly said. “But they have Nora, and the job’s not done. She helped us get the money. She earned a chance to spend her cut.”

  Everyone paused to dwell on that.

  “She’s not on the roster,” Bruder said.

  “Yes she is. As soon as we started using her, she was part of it.”

  “You mean as soon as you fell for her,” Kershaw said.

  “Doesn’t matter. She’s part of it. I made her part of it.”

  “You did,” Bruder agreed. “It’s called the chump. Chumps don’t get shares.”

  “Don’t call her that.”

  “We’re wasting time,” Bruder said. “Let’s get moving.”

  He stepped toward Connelly, who didn’t budge.

  Instead, he said, “You know what? You’re so damn busy looking for a way out of this you haven’t thought about what you’re leaving behind.”

  “I already told you, she’s your problem.”

  “Not her,” Connelly said. “The Romanians. Razvan. The crew from Chicago.”

  “They won’t matter once they’re in the rear view mirror.”

  “But you’ll matter to them. We just talked about it. They go to work on Nora, then me, then Rison. You want to walk around the rest of your life double-checking every guy with a beard?”

  Bruder shook his head again.

  He thought about some of the people who’d like to find him, lay hands on him if they could.

  Too many to remember, let alone count.

  The most recent were Howell and McIntyre in New York, men he maybe should have killed, but they’d never find him u
nless they passed each other on the street.

  And he hated New York, so the chances were slim.

  He told Connelly, “This loose end doesn’t lead to me. Or Kershaw. Or Rison, if you stay careful and keep your mouth shut. But if you’re saying you won’t do that, you might even help them find us…”

  “I never said that,” Connelly told him.

  “…Then the safest thing would be to kill you right here. That cuts the loose end off before it starts.”

  “I never said that,” Connelly repeated.

  They stared at each other.

  Before Bruder could decide what to do, Rison said, “Ah, shit. Hold on, hold on. I been thinking about it while you two hens clucked at each other, and I think he’s right.”

  Connelly looked at him.

  “Who?”

  “You, dummy. I mean, she helped with the setup, yeah, but she didn’t know what she was doing. Doesn’t count in my book. But after we got here, she found us a place to stash the money, she told us how deep the pond was—she could have lied about that and said it wouldn’t hide the truck—she covered our tracks with the mower…so, yeah. I flip it around, if I was on a job and reached out to someone I knew, and they did all that for me, I’d cut them in.”

  Bruder studied him for a moment, then looked at Kershaw, who said, “Makes sense to me. Plus the fact she could have told Razvan where we were hiding, and didn’t.”

  “Good one,” Rison said.

  They all looked at Bruder, Connelly with that hopeful face again.

  Bruder wasn’t happy about it, but they were right.

  He hadn’t taken the time to consider what Nora had done for them.

  And it didn’t matter if he was happy or not, things needed to get done.

  “Her share comes out of yours,” Bruder said.

  “Of course, fine.”

  Connelly’s head dipped forward, waiting for more stipulations he’d agree to.

  “We have two hours to get her,” Bruder said. “Two hours. After that, the Chicago crew gets here, and it’s every man and woman for themselves.”

  Connelly backed Nora’s Lexus out of the garage and up to the shed door, and they made another fire brigade line, with Kershaw tossing the duffels of cash down from the hopper to Rison, and eventually into the trunk and back seat of the car.

  Rison kept shucking bags when he asked, “Should we do the split now? Before shit gets hairy?”

  “No time,” Bruder said.

  “Besides,” Kershaw added, “what’s the point of splitting it four ways when there might not be four of us left?”

  “You’re a real ray of sunshine,” Rison said.

  Bruder moved bags and said, “If anyone gets snatched, assume the hotel room in Minnesota is burned. Whoever gets out of here with the money—if any of us do—leave a message with Lola. Everybody else, check in with her when you can. She knows how to make sure you don’t have the phone in one ear and a Romanian gun in the other.”

  “Pause,” Kershaw said. “I’m down to the charges.”

  “You want help?” Connelly said.

  “Nah.” He toggled the receivers on the charges off and eased the bundles down with the two remotes he’d carried.

  When it got to Bruder he added his remote and handed all of it to Connelly, who put it in the passenger seat.

  Kershaw pulled the rest of the bags out of the hopper, and when they got to Bruder he set them on the stones next to the car instead of inside.

  When they were done Rison eyeballed those bags, then the space left in the trunk and back seat.

  “Draw straws to see who rides on the roof?”

  Bruder said, “Only Connelly’s in this car.”

  Connelly looked at him.

  “This sounds like the start of a plan.”

  “I wouldn’t call it a plan. Not yet.”

  “Well, step one is I get in the car. Step two?”

  “You call Nora back.”

  Connelly paused.

  “Do I want to hear step three?”

  “You agree to drive yourself and the money out to the Romanian compound. With one of the explosive charges in with the cash, just in case.”

  “Fuck me. Okay, then what?”

  “That’s as far as I got,” Bruder said. “Anybody has any ideas, speak up.”

  Luca perked up when he saw Razvan’s F-250 and Mihail’s Tacoma coming from the south, and when Luca’s phone buzzed with a call from Razvan he answered with, “You get the money? The thieves?”

  “One step closer,” Razvan said in Romanian. This didn’t tell Luca anything and was irritating, based on how long they’d been sitting there waiting for something to happen.

  He was in the driver’s seat with the heat on, listening to a story on public radio about the best way to slice a Thanksgiving turkey.

  He asked Razvan, “One step? What’s that mean?”

  “You’ll see when we drive past you.”

  “Past? We’re not following you?”

  By then Razvan was a few hundred yards away and had hung up.

  Luca rolled his window down and told Costel, “They’re coming. Raz is being cryptic.”

  Costel grunted, unsurprised. He was splayed out in the bed of the truck, enjoying the warm sunshine with the bite of cold wind blowing above him.

  They were parked in the dead center of the first intersection coming up from the south, through which anyone trying to get back into town would have to pass.

  No one had tried to get through for hours.

  Everyone in town knew by now to stay at home, or wherever they were.

  Luca and Costel had moved the truck steadily further south and west as Razvan, Benj, and Mihail cleared properties, looking for the white truck and the men from it, but mainly heading to the woman’s house because they knew her boyfriend, the Hungary fan, was involved somehow.

  When they found Pavel’s truck in the ditch, stalled out with both him and Grigore shot to death, Benj and Mihail suggested they start executing locals until someone came forward with information about the thieves, even though they already had the information about the woman.

  Luca nodded along with their rage, ready to follow, and Razvan seemed to be warming to the idea.

  Finally.

  Luca’s hatred for the sheep in this cowshit town grew with every person he passed while he sped Pavel’s truck back to the compound, the two bodies in the back covered by a flapping tarp anchored by spare tires.

  Mihail followed dangerously close to his rear bumper to keep anyone else from getting a good look at the two pairs of boots flashing out inside the missing tailgate.

  Luca parked the truck—now a hearse, he supposed—next to the wheelless armored car, squatting on the ground like a garbage bin, hauled there from the tunnel by a wrecker who took his cash payment and knew better than to show any curiosity about the situation.

  On the way south again, riding with Mihail, the two of them stoked each other about how they were going to execute a scorched earth policy upon the masses here, an ethnic cleansing on a people who didn’t seem to have any ethnicity, but still…

  But when they reunited with the rest of the men, the fury that had been building behind Razvan’s sunken eyes was gone, replaced by the simmering patience they all knew could erupt at any moment, but it was not the rage felt by Luca and Mihail and Benj.

  Costel…he was just an ox, satisfied to pull whatever wagon Razvan hitched him to.

  And Razvan told them all, “There’s no need for a massacre, boys. We know who is involved, or at least who is associated with those involved.”

  The woman.

  Her boyfriend.

  Luca had been with Grigore during the incident at Len’s, and he’d noticed how the shitty guitar player moved when he attacked Grigore. It hadn’t meant anything at the time—the singer knew how to fight a little, so what?—but when they all heard what the farmer said about him being in the white truck, Luca wasn’t shocked.

  Maybe surpr
ised, but not shocked.

  He looked forward to seeing the singing Hungary fan again. He had some things to share with him in return for the sucker punch at Len’s, and for killing Grigore and Pavel.

  And probably Claudiu, though they didn’t know for sure yet.

  And for taking away the widespread bloodletting he and Mihail considered their right.

  And for being a Hungary fan.

  The turkey carving story on the radio was actually interesting when Luca substituted the thief for the turkey, but he turned it down as Razvan slowed his truck and angled as he approached the intersection so his side would be closest to Luca’s door.

  The driver’s window came down and Razvan leaned out, his gaunt face grinning at them like he had a secret.

  Luca saw the woman crammed between him and Benj, wearing a face like she was on her way to a firing squad.

  “So she knows?” Luca said.

  “Maybe. We’ll find out. We left her boyfriend a message.”

  “What if he doesn’t care?”

  Razvan shrugged.

  “Then we push further out and flush them.”

  Costel sat up in the truck bed and said, “Why not do that now? We’re already here.”

  Razvan turned and muttered something to Benj, something about how it was easy for them to suggest such a thing, then told them, “Three men isn’t enough. The further out we go, the easier it will be to see us coming. They’ll be waiting for us.”

  Luca picked something up in his tone, in the way he squinted through the windshield instead of looking over at them.

  He was trying to save face while admitting he needed the men from Chicago.

  Luca nodded, helping him.

  “Hey, if anyone else has to get shot, it might as well be a city boy.”

  Razvan smiled again, liking the idea, and said, “You two stay here in case they come chasing after us or try to slip out. They probably don’t even know we have her yet, but they will as soon as he calls back.”

  “Hundred bucks says he doesn’t,” Costel said, and dropped back into the bed.

  Luca said, “Give us Mihail and the machine gun.”

  Razvan shook his head.

  “I need them. I’ll check in every twenty minutes. You see anything, call me.”