Rocks Beat Paper

by Mike Knowles

  I advanced and took the woman by the upper arm and dragged her to the door I had just walked through.

  “Incoming,” I called to Miles.

  “The more the merrier,” he said before starting to whistle the tune to Three’s Company.

  I turned and walked to the office door Donny had described. Inside the office were Donny and Tristan. Tristan was shocked; Donny wore another kind of expression.

  “What the hell is this?” Tristan demanded.

  “Open the safe,” I said.

  “You won’t get away with this,” he said.

  I shot Donny in the shoulder and pivoted the pistol so that Tristan could see the faint trail of smoke leaving the barrel.

  “Open the safe,” I said.

  He nodded and pushed his way around the desk towards the large safe in the corner.

  Donny moaned and the sound gained strength as it became a roar. “Fucking shot me!”

  “That’s what happens to innocent people in a robbery when people don’t listen,” I said.

  “I’m so sorry, Donny,” Tristan said. “It’ll be okay. I promise.”

  Donny might have nodded, but it was hard to tell. Shock was setting in and draining his colour.

  Tristan spun the safe dial one way and then another.

  “Shit.”

  He spun the dial a few times and started again.

  I put the gun to the back of his head. “Slow down.”

  Tristan’s hand froze. “Okay. Okay. It’s just hard to do when my hands are shaking.”

  “Or you’re trying to get in a few wrong combinations to engage a safety measure.”

  Tristan tensed. “What? No. No, I’m not doing that. I swear to God, I’m not doing that. I’m just nervous.”

  I took the gun away from the back of his head. “Take a breath.”

  Tristan pulled in a shaky lungful of air and let it out.

  “Take a couple more.”

  He did.

  “Better?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” I put the gun back to his head. “Do you know why I shot your boss?”

  Tristan shook his head.

  “I shot him to make things clear. I heard an expression once when I was inside. A guy said to me, actions speak louder than words. That action should be enough for you to understand who I am better than my first wife ever did. Do you understand me?”

  Tristan sobbed out the word, “Yes.”

  “Open the safe.”

  Violence and threats were tools I rarely employed if I could help it. More often than not, hurting people slowed things down instead of speeded them up. But I wanted the witness to the crime to walk away from the robbery feeling like he had dodged a bullet — literally dodged a bullet fired from the gun of an honest-to-God psycho. A psycho no one would think to connect to Donny. So I turned up the dial and talked just enough to leave Tristan with a story chock-full of vague go-nowhere details.

  Tristan opened the safe without making another mistake.

  I slid the bag off my shoulders and passed it to Tristan. “Everything into the bag.”

  Tristan busied himself while I checked my watch. We were coming up on four minutes. The assistant manager used the edge of his hand to wipe the contents of the safe into the bag. From over his shoulder, I could see that the diamonds inside the safe were nothing special. The stones were small and unimpressive; I imagined the police, and subsequent insurance claim, would see things differently.

  “Faster,” I said.

  I glanced at Donny. His hand was over the seeping hole in his shoulder, but his eyes were on me.

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  I pulled the bag away from Tristan and put it on my shoulder. “Your boss is bleeding profusely. My advice: keep pressure on it until the ambulance arrives. I’m talking serious pressure. You try to make a phone call with one hand and press on him with the other, he’ll bleed out. Do the right thing. One of the ladies up front can make the 9-1-1 call when we leave.”

  I called to Miles as I walked through the door to the showroom. “We good?”

  “Oh, sure,” Miles said. He was leaning against one of the glass display cases. His bag was on top of the glass. The three employees weren’t cowering in the corner; instead, they were on the opposite side of the cabinet leaning in towards Miles. Not one of the women looked distressed; one seemed unhappy to see me.

  “That was fast,” I said.

  Miles smiled wide. “Turns out, Darlene, Emma, and Valentina don’t care much for their boss. They were happy to help.”

  One of the women turned her head towards me. “You shoot him?” Her smile was devilish.

  “Yeah, but don’t get excited. He’ll live.”

  “Time to go,” Miles said. “Goodnight, ladies.” Miles picked up the backpack and put it over one shoulder. “Do me a favour. Count to one hundred and then call the cops.”

  “We’ll make it two hundred,” the woman with the devilish smile said. “You said he won’t die.”

  “Valentina, you are so bad,” Miles said. “Have fun at your daughter’s recital. I hope she remembers all of her solo. And if Hector doesn’t show, don’t let it ruin your time, or your daughter’s.”

  “Thanks, Lando.”

  We stepped onto the sidewalk at six minutes and fifty-two seconds. Monica was waiting with her foot on the brake.

  “Did she call you Lando?” I asked as I got into the back seat.

  Miles smiled. “She most certainly did.”

  The car was moving before Miles had shut the door.

  “Why?”

  “Lando Calrissian is the smoothest criminal in the galaxy. I felt I could pull it off in the mask because you can’t tell that I don’t have a mustache.”

  Monica checked her mirrors and changed lanes. “I like a man with a mustache.”

  “Lose the mask, Miles.”

  Miles pulled off his ski mask and smiled wide. “So how did we do?”

  “Went according to plan,” I said.

  “So you planned to shoot him?”

  “Shit,” Monica said. “We left a body?”

  Her surprise didn’t show in her driving. She kept the car moving with the pace of traffic using strategic lane changes and expert timing to slip through the traffic faster than everyone else.

  “The body is breathing,” I said.

  “He was our inside man,” Miles said. “He was on our side. Tell me why the hell you would shoot him?”

  Monica took her eyes off the road and looked at me in the rear-view mirror.

  “You worried about my judgment, Miles?”

  Miles shrugged. “People seem to have a habit of getting shot around you, and you are usually the one holding the gun.”

  What had gone down in Buffalo had never sat right with Miles. When we first met, the con man was still green and believed in ideas like honour among thieves. My beliefs were more primitive; I believed in an I for an I. When the Buffalo job went off the rails, Miles found himself a disciple in a land of nihilists. He had no choice but to follow me and bear the consequences of self-preservation at all costs; for some people, getting used to the weight takes time.

  “He was greedy,” I said.

  “That’s why you shot him?” Monica said.

  “You might want to keep your eyes on the road instead of on me,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about my job when we are talking about yours.” Monica took the next corner without slowing down. Somehow, a glance was all she needed to thread through an opening between pedestrians. “You some kind of head case?”

  “Am I, Miles?”

  Miles thought about it. “No. No, I don’t think you’re a head case. But that opinion is getting harder and harder to defend every time you shoot someone.”

  “When d
id greed become a reason to shoot someone?” Monica said.

  “When it threatens the job,” I said.

  “How did Donny threaten our job?” Miles asked.

  “Double-dipping wasn’t enough for Donny. He was looking at the insurance money and the fence on this job, and he still wanted a cut of our job. He’s desperate, and desperate men make mistakes. Cops can spot greed, and they sure as hell can spot mistakes. We need Donny to make it past the cops so that he can fence our score. A bullet in his arm gives him a better shot.”

  “Was that a joke?” Miles asked.

  “No.”

  Monica looked at me in the rear-view again. “You said we need Donny.”

  “We do.”

  “What are the chances he’s going to need us after you shot him?”

  “Good question,” Miles said.

  “I told you — he’s greedy. He’ll be mad, but it won’t change anything. He only cares about the money.”

  Miles snorted. “I doubt that will smooth things over with Jake.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “You want to tell me what the hell that was?” Jake was behind his desk, but he looked ready to come over it.

  I pointed at the backpacks on the desk. “The job was the stones in the safe and everything else. It’s all there. Less our cut.”

  Jake’s face twisted into an ugly snarl. “You fucking shot your inside man. There’s no rule book for what we do, but if there was, not shooting your inside man would be pretty close to the front cover.”

  “He was after his entire inventory, Jake. Not the pretty stuff or the real valuable stuff in the safe — he wanted everything. What are the cops going to make of that?”

  Jake sighed and the anger that had been filling his sails dissipated. “They’d start with a hard look at Donny.”

  “And how long would it take them to see what I saw? How long would it take for them to see Donny for the greedy little shit that he is?”

  Jake rubbed at the stubble on his chin. “That still doesn’t give you the right to shoot him.”

  “You never said I was wrong about Donny.”

  “What? About him being a greedy little shit. News flash, Wilson, he’s a criminal — we’re all greedy little shits. That’s why we don’t have jobs.”

  “This is my job,” I said. “And Donny is not like me. One thing drives him, and that thing would sell us out the second he’s in a pinch.”

  “So you did this to keep our names out of it?” Jake rolled his eyes. “Maybe I should be thanking you instead of yelling at you.”

  “I didn’t do this to keep Donny from squealing. I’m not worried about the law. Donny could tell the cops everything he knows about us and it wouldn’t get them anywhere, but it would screw up the job. I need Donny out of a cell and on the street so he can get me what I need.”

  “I don’t know if he’s interested in providing anything to you anymore.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He says you shot him and he wants his stones back.”

  I grinned. “If there were a rule book to what we do, do you know what would come before the part about not shooting the inside man?”

  “What?”

  “No refunds.”

  Jake rubbed at his chin again.

  “Donny is being greedy again,” I said. “Let him know where his greed will get him.”

  Jake sighed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “They don’t look like much,” Monica said. She was wearing a white sweater with prefabricated holes in the arms. I caught Miles staring at the holes twice.

  “They don’t, do they?” Miles picked up a stone and tossed it into the air.

  They were right. The small uncut diamond that landed in his palm didn’t look like much, but it didn’t need to.

  “Have you ever seen an uncut diamond before?” I asked.

  “Besides these? No.”

  Monica said, “Nuh-unh.”

  “The difference between the most and least expensive is difficult to determine if you don’t have the expertise.”

  “And the thieves who are going to hit Saul’s place aren’t experts are they?” Miles said.

  “Not according to the police,” I said.

  “There aren’t exactly a lot of diamonds here.”

  “According to David, Saul’s personal safe has uncut diamonds in it. He said the only one who knows what is in there is Saul. That means the thieves can’t know, either. They’ll take what they find and assume the small number of stones means they’re high quality and worth a large amount of money.”

  “But our thieves are supposed to work inside the store right?” Monica said. “Won’t they be after all of the jewellery in the cases?”

  Miles laughed and fished into a pocket of his jeans and came out with a diamond ring. “You mean jewellery like this?”

  Monica’s eyes widened at the sight of the ring.

  “I didn’t want to ask you with Wilson here, but will you marry me, Monica?”

  She extended her finger and said, “No.”

  Miles chuckled and slid the ring on her finger.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “It’s New York City and I’m a con man. Finding fake diamonds is not exactly an impossible feat. I used the pictures David gave us to get these made. They’re cubic zirconia and not really that close to what’s in Mendelson’s display cases, but they’ll pass just fine in a robbery in the dark.”

  “It looks real,” Monica said.

  “I know. I ordered an extra of that one. I got plans for that thing.”

  Monica took it off and handed it back to Miles. “I don’t want to know. So why go to the trouble of getting the real stuff? Why not just use fake all the way?”

  “Saul’s on our side right now, but soon we’re going to ask him to make a hell of a leap of faith. Jumping will be a hell of a lot easier if he’s convinced we’re committed. If we tell him that those diamonds came out of police evidence and that we are willing to risk using them in the sting, he’ll take us seriously. And that is what we need him to do.”

  Monica nodded. “But are we just expecting Saul to let somebody break open his safes? Those things are expensive. He won’t go for that.”

  Miles laughed again. “The risk is worth it. To Saul, this is about more than money — it’s about getting justice for David. And speaking of David, don’t forget he told the police that our thieves are technical wizards who can open the safes without leaving a trace, so Saul really has nothing to worry about.”

  “But we need him worried,” I said, looking at Monica. “How did the tail go last night?”

  Monica picked at what was left of her hamburger until she found a pickle hiding between the remaining bun. She ate the pickle and spoke while she chewed. “I kept back most of the way home, but I made it real obvious when we got close to his place. He saw me and panicked. He sped up and took a corner without stopping at the stop sign.”

  “You spooked him,” I said. “He left a message on my phone around nine.”

  “That must have been just after he got home,” Monica said.

  “We’ll pay him a visit tomorrow morning.”

  “Detectives Lock and Croft on the case,” Miles said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  We were waiting for Saul outside of his parking garage. “Mr. Mendelson,” I said.

  He stopped in his tracks and lifted a hand towards the inside of his coat. “Who wants to know?”

  “Sir,” Miles said. “We’re the police. We spoke the other day. Do you remember?”

  Saul’s eyes hardened. “Of course I remember. You’re detective Lock,” he said. “The other one is Croft.”

  “Actually,” Miles said, “I’m detective Croft.”

  “That’s w
hat I said.”

  Miles smiled. “Of course. Sorry, sir. I haven’t had my coffee yet. I’m still in a fog.”

  Saul pointed a finger at me. “I called that number you gave me and you didn’t pick up. You show up, tell me someone murdered David, tell me my store is going to be robbed, and then you don’t answer your phone. What kind of policeman are you?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Mendelson. We were interviewing a suspect last night. It took all night. I just got the message a few hours ago and I thought it best that we come to you in person.”

  Saul clicked his tongue. “Likely story.” He didn’t remember our names, but he remembered that he didn’t like me just fine.

  “Why did you call?”

  “Someone was following me last night. It wasn’t the first time. The other day the same blue car followed me home. I thought it was a little strange the first time, but the car didn’t stay with me, so I didn’t really think anything of it.” His eyes went wide. “Then, last night, the blue car was back. It followed me home.”

  I opened my pad and began scribbling notes. “Did you get the license plate?”

  Saul glared at me. “License plate. Did you hear me? I was trying to get away from the car. I didn’t have time to read the plate.”

  “Sorry, sir, I had to ask. It’s procedure.”

  “You said it was a blue car?” Miles asked.

  “Yes, that’s what I said. I think I saw it again this morning.”

  “You think?” I asked.

  “You think I’m making this up?”

  I knew he was. Monica hadn’t followed Saul this morning. David had told us that the old man suffered from paranoia. The blue car that he saw this morning was just something his mind fixated on and attached meaning to.

  Miles stepped in front of me and entered Saul’s personal space. “They’re likely trying to find a pattern to your movements.”

  “Arrest them,” Saul yelled.

  Some people on the sidewalk turned to look at us. I put up my hands and shrugged in a gesture that said, what can you do? The gesture seemed to please most of the people who had looked at us. I guessed that they had elderly people in their own lives who yelled at them on the street.