The Loot

by Schaefer, Craig

  FOURTEEN

  “No police,” Sean told them for the fifth time.

  Jake’s eyebrows tried to climb into his hair. “Excuse me?”

  They were back upstairs. Charlie listened from the other side of the open bathroom door. She knelt on the hard ivory porcelain as she stripped the chair and the bomb down into parts, like doing a jigsaw puzzle in reverse. Strips of wire, screws, washers, and metal rods sat in neat rows beside her, each stored in an individual plastic baggie, and she added to the pile with every twist of the screwdriver. Beckett stood at Jake’s shoulder, arms crossed and eyes hard.

  “Look,” Sean said, flustered, “we don’t want to embolden these people.”

  “But we do want to catch ‘these people,’ yes?” Jake demanded. “Mr. Ellis, our job is asset protection. We aren’t investigators; we don’t have police resources. We can’t go out there and—”

  “I’m not asking you to. Okay? That’s not even on the table. I just need you to keep on doing what you’re already doing.”

  The Mylar coating over the bricks of C-4 slowly peeled from the base of the chair, now detached and flipped onto its belly before her. Charlie worked the bricks back slowly. Her fingers massaged the adhesive, easing it away from the plastic base a fraction at a time. No tension in her tired muscles now, only eager curiosity. With the detonator safely removed, the explosives were about as dangerous as a newborn kitten.

  About as useless when it came to obvious clues too. After photographing the entire assembly—twenty shots, capturing the bomb rig from every angle before she started breaking it down and bagging the parts—she did a cursory check for fingerprints. The attackers had worn gloves and wiped their handiwork clean, just like she’d expected they would.

  She still would have left the rig intact and untouched, ready for the real detectives to come along and do their thing, but she understood Sean’s tone even if she couldn’t understand his reasoning. His heels were dug in, deep, and nobody in authority was going to take a closer look at this bomb if he had anything to say about it.

  Nobody but her. So she organized, and she bagged, and she documented every step along the way.

  “Mr. Ellis,” Jake said, “someone infiltrated your building and planted explosives in your office.”

  “And you stopped them. So . . . good job!” Sean paced the carpet, bottom lip trapped between his teeth.

  Charlie glanced up and caught a glimpse as he passed the bathroom doorway. She frowned. Something was wrong here, more wrong than the bomb.

  “And if my operatives hadn’t been here, things wouldn’t have worked out so good,” Jake told him. “We can’t guarantee what’ll happen next time.”

  “Next time? Who says there’ll be a next time? Maybe they’ll give up. Maybe they’ll go away.”

  Jake and Beckett shared a look. Beckett had his poker face on. Jake took a deep breath, rallied, and tried again.

  “In our experience, sir, assassins, and that’s exactly the type of personality we’re dealing with here, don’t just ‘go away.’ This attack took planning, skill, and dedication—”

  Charlie had found a big brown paper sack in the office supply room. She carefully stashed the bagged evidence, scrap by scrap, packaging it all up nice and neat.

  “Just keep doing what you’re doing,” Sean said. “I don’t think that’s unreasonable. I’m not an unreasonable man.”

  Jake held up his hands. He took a deep breath. Charlie watched his lips move as he silently counted to five.

  “Okay, okay, we’ve all had a long night; maybe we’ll all see a little clearer after some sleep, huh? Mr. Ellis, I strongly advise you to reconsider. Sleep on it, okay? I’ll call you in the morning.”

  “Good. Fine.” Sean’s eyes darted to the bathroom door. “Can you, um . . . get rid of that thing for me?”

  Charlie emerged, toting the paper bag in one hand and the Mylar-wrapped demolition block in the other. Jake’s eyes bulged at her. “Is that . . . is it safe to hold on to it like that?”

  Charlie shrugged. “It’s C-4. You can stomp on it, shoot it, light it on fire. Still won’t go off without an electrical det charge. Want to see?”

  Jake ran a finger along his buttoned collar. “I’ll take your word for it.”

  They left Sean standing in his office, the remnants of his chair scattered across the bathroom floor.

  Beckett gave her the side-eye as the three of them stepped onto the elevator. “You know, if he changes his mind about calling the cops, you just tampered with the evidence in the worst way.”

  “You heard him same as I did,” Charlie said. “You think there’s one chance in a million he’s going to change his mind?”

  “Wouldn’t even give it lottery odds.”

  Jake stood in front of them, his back turned, facing the elevator doors as their cage glided downward.

  “Doesn’t make any damn sense,” he muttered.

  Beckett and Charlie exchanged a glance and a nod. They shared a silent wavelength.

  “Cut him loose,” Beckett said.

  Jake looked back at him. “Huh?”

  “As a client. Do yourself and all of us a favor. Cut him loose; cancel his contract; give him a refund if you have to. Do it tonight.” Beckett pointed up at the bank of numbers over the elevator door, glowing lights shifting to track their downward glide. “Man’s got problems.”

  “All our clients have problems. That’s why they hire us. This is hardly the first issue we’ve shoved under the rug at a customer’s request.”

  Beckett didn’t have an answer for that. He tilted his head at Charlie.

  “Little Duck did good tonight.”

  “Damn right she did.” Jake looked over at her. “Talk about nailing your tryout and then some. You’ve definitely got the qualities we’re looking for in an operative: skills, instincts, initiative, and guts. That said, wouldn’t blame you if you walked out of here and never came back.”

  “You see me walking?” Charlie asked him.

  “Nope.” He rubbed his chin, studying her. “Guess I don’t. Let’s make this official, then.”

  He held out his hand. They shook on it.

  “Welcome aboard,” Jake said. “You are officially an employee of Boston Asset Protection.”

  “I won’t let you down,” Charlie said.

  “After tonight? I’m not worried. Normally I like to take new hires out for drinks, but—” Jake gave a vague, tired wave to the night sky.

  “It’s been a long night,” Charlie said.

  “It’s been a long night. Go home. Get some shut-eye. You earned it.”

  Jake left them at the curb outside the corporate tower, hopping into a waiting Lyft. Beckett nodded up the street.

  “C’mon,” he said, “I’ll walk you to your truck.”

  Normally Charlie might have rankled at that. It was a relatively safe neighborhood, a well-lit path to her father’s pickup, and she was hardly a wilting flower needing an escort. That said, she could read between the lines. He fell into step alongside her and waited until they were far out of anyone’s earshot before he opened his mouth again.

  “Only one reason,” he said. He didn’t need to elaborate.

  “Sean Ellis has some skeletons in his closet,” Charlie replied.

  “Kind he can’t afford uniforms sniffing at. Above and beyond the ones that already made front-page news.”

  “So what do we do about it?”

  “We? Nothing. I go talk to Jake again in the morning, one on one, and try to get him to cancel the contract. We can’t help a client who won’t help himself, and I don’t feel like getting blown up because some aspiring vigilante doesn’t care about collateral damage.”

  “Think it was our guy? From the party?”

  Beckett squinted up at the lamplight. It painted a pallid glow across the rust-spotted hood of Charlie’s ride.

  “Timetable works. He could have gotten turned away, driven to Deep Country, broken in, and rigged the chair before the p
arty let out. No problem.” He turned, scrutinizing her. “Now what’s wrong with this picture?”

  Charlie thought back, picturing the man in her mind. His razor-nicked cheeks, the fear in his eyes.

  “I told him he didn’t want to hurt anyone,” she said. “I wasn’t wrong. He wanted to be heard. He might have been planning on doing some damage, maybe even taking a shot at Sean Ellis, but he wasn’t a killer, not really. If he managed to slip past me, good chance he would have lost his nerve and left on his own.”

  “As opposed to,” Beckett said, leading her onward.

  “The bomber . . . he didn’t care. There wasn’t any note, no message taking responsibility, no signature. The explosive device was simple. Utilitarian. It was built for one purpose and one purpose only: to murder Sean Ellis, with no regard for anyone else who might have been in the room with him.”

  “We got crazies coming out of the woodwork.” Beckett gazed to the night sky and rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ll talk to Jake. See if we can wriggle out of this, make it somebody else’s problem. You did good today, Little Duck.”

  Charlie wrestled with the pickup’s door. It chunked open, drizzling flakes of rust onto the pavement at her feet. She set her paper bag on the passenger seat. The edge of the demolition block’s glossy wrapper poked out between the flaps.

  “Yeah? So you’re gonna stop calling me that?”

  Beckett chuckled and turned his back on her, strolling down the sidewalk.

  “I said you did good, not that you were done learning the ropes. See you tomorrow.”

  Charlie drove home.

  She let herself into her father’s house, stepping lightly across the living room to turn off the television set. The sounds of the Home Shopping Network faded, and a gulf of silence flooded in. Her father slept in his reclining chair, slumped back, one corner of his mouth sticky with drool. His black eye had faded to an ugly purple splotch, like a birthmark splashed across half his face. Empty beer cans littered his side table.

  She clicked off the lamp and let him sleep.

  She couldn’t look at him without seeing the ticking clock. His deadline—ten days, now nine and counting—before Jimmy Lassiter stopped pretending to be a gentleman and came looking for his money. She wasn’t any closer to finding a way out. Her father, as far as she could tell, wasn’t even looking for one. The invisible hourglass strapped to Charlie’s shoulders weighed her down as she trudged into her bedroom, stashed the bag with the disassembled bomb in the closet, and fell onto the bed. Her feet and her knees were having a contest, seeing who could ache harder.

  Charlie’s body lay leaden while her brain tossed and turned. She thought about her father. She thought about Jimmy Lassiter. She thought about the bag in the closet.

  It wouldn’t be hard.

  She knew what booth the bookie sat in, his personal “office.” It wouldn’t be hard to slip in after closing hours and recreate the bomber’s handiwork, rigging his seat to blow. She was trained to dismantle explosive devices; that meant she could build them too. Part of her realized how far from normal this was—that she was lying awake in the dark and contemplating a cold-blooded murder—but all alone, in the dark, she could be honest with herself.

  It wouldn’t be the first time she’d killed a man. She knew it was different, pulling the trigger with a uniform on. War wasn’t murder; at least that was what polite society had agreed to believe. And both times she’d fired her gun in Afghanistan and connected with a target, it had been a kill-or-be-killed situation. No one in the world could point a finger of shame at her for defending herself. She was blameless. This was different.

  Was it, though? Over there, she’d been fighting to stay alive. Here, she’d be protecting her father from being crippled, or worse. Protecting her family. Wasn’t that justified?

  Too messy. Too much risk. Charlie was pretty sure she could bury Jimmy Lassiter without losing too much sleep, but he wouldn’t be the only man in that bar. The bartender, delivery people, early-morning drinkers looking to get a head start on killing their livers—they’d all be in range of the blast. That, she couldn’t live with. Of course, she didn’t have to use his chair. She could find out what he drove, attach the demolition block to the undercarriage and rig up a radio trigger. Charlie had spent nearly a decade learning every dirty trick of the bomber’s trade. She’d just never thought she’d use them.

  Then she thought about the blowback. Men like Jimmy were connected with a capital C—you couldn’t do that kind of business in Boston without powerful friends—and those friends would come looking for answers. Anyone in the red in Jimmy’s books would be a top suspect. It wouldn’t take long to spot her father’s name on that list, number one with a bullet, and even less time to find out his daughter was a freshly returned EOD specialist. A rookie cop could make that case.

  Dead end. The idea of taking Lassiter out was a fantasy. Simple and reassuring, but it would only make things worse in the long run. She had to find a better way.

  She wouldn’t get any answers tonight. She eventually fell into a fitful sleep, with a new day hot on her aching heels.

  FIFTEEN

  The sunrise found Charlie back on her feet. Her hoodie dripped with icy sweat as she took her morning run. Forcing her aching feet into trainers and hitting the pavement was masochism bordering on self-destruction, she knew, but there was no better cure for a clogged-up brain. Pounding up the hill, racing between a ribbon of backwoods road and the fog-drenched forest, her heart jackhammered in a strong and strident rhythm. All her worries faded, scrubbed clean by the endorphins and the pain.

  She doubled back and had just enough time for a brisk shower before heading out again. Her father was awake, back in his chair and his tattered bathrobe, eating microwaved pancakes soggy with cheap syrup.

  “I’m off to work,” she told him.

  “Mm-hmm,” he said.

  “Yesterday was my first day on the job,” she said. “It went good. They seem to like me. I think I like the job.”

  “That’s good.”

  She stood by the door, waiting to see if he had anything else to say. He reached for the remote, changed the channel, and filled the awkward silence with the replay from a Bruins game.

  “All right.” Charlie nodded, to herself as much as to him. “I’m out.”

  “Stop off on the way home, pick up some Bud for me?”

  “Sure, Dad.”

  She drove to Cambridge, to the big industrial box at the edge of the corporate park. The receptionist was on a call, but she pressed her palm against the receiver as Charlie walked into the stripped-down lobby. “Oh, hey,” she chirped, “you’re Charlene, right? I’m Francesca. Beckett had to go off site with Mr. Esposito. He said you should go see Dom; she’s expecting you.”

  “Great,” Charlie said. “Where’s Dom?”

  “Last I checked, firing range. Up the hall, hook a right, second door. I’d say you can’t miss it, but . . .” She shrugged, waving a helpless hand at the office around her.

  “But nothing here is labeled, there aren’t any signs, and the place is built like a maze.”

  The receptionist gave her a perky thumbs-up. Charlie let her get back to her phone call. She went hunting.

  A plain white door opened onto a narrow vestibule. A plywood rack hung on one wall, a relic salvaged from a garage and lined with utility hooks. A half dozen pairs of hearing protectors dangled from the hooks. Charlie picked up a pair; the orange plastic bubbles nestled over her head like bulky earmuffs. On the opposite wall, a range-reservation schedule had been scribbled in a rainbow of erasable markers across a scuffed whiteboard. Furious, jagged lines drew Charlie’s eye to a note scrawled in the bottom left corner.

  Police your brass. All of it. Every time you use the range. Without exception. THIS MEANS YOU, ASSHOLE.

  Love, Dom.

  Charlie pressed through the next doorway. It opened up onto an alley of water-stained concrete, where three beige plywood booths stood at the
far ends of firing lanes. Opposite the booths, steel lockers with wire-grille covers dominated the wall from floor to ceiling. Just like everything else around here, Jake had spent money for effect, not looks; acoustic tiles layered every inch of open space, muffling the sound of gunfire. Downrange, where a trio of fresh paper targets were humming backward on motorized tracks, each of the three lanes ended in reinforced, commercial-grade bullet traps.

  Dom stood alone on the range, perched in the center booth as she cradled her weapon of choice: a storm-gray Remington 700 rifle fitted with a long-range scope. She worked the bolt action, loading a fresh round, and nodded over at Charlie.

  “Damn, just when I was getting warmed up. Looks like I have to do some actual work today.”

  “Don’t let me stop you,” Charlie said.

  Dom turned back to the range and shouldered her rifle. She smiled, tight lipped, as she sighted down the scope.

  “This’ll just take a second,” she said.

  Dom took a half breath and held it. Her finger caressed the trigger.

  The rifle cracked like steel thunder, and she was already working the bolt, slamming a fresh round home as her shoulders swiveled two inches to the left. Her finger never left the trigger, squeezing off a second shot, layering thunder upon thunder. Then she swung right and slapped the bolt action, snapping off a third round before the echoes of her first bullet had faded.

  The steel storm settled, reverberating into the stone at their feet. The echo drifted into silence.

  Dom lowered the rifle and punched the three target-return buttons, one after another. The paper targets hummed toward them on a softly buzzing track. A trio of human silhouettes, each with a perfect hole punched through its forehead.

  “That’s . . . impressive,” Charlie said.

  Dom took her rifle to a workbench by the lockers. She looked back at Charlie over her shoulder.

  “I’m a strong believer in sending bad news via long-distance courier. How about you? Jake says you’re ex-military.”

  “I’m capable with the M4,” Charlie said. “Never claimed to be Annie Oakley, but I know which end of the weapon goes bang. Technically I can handle a fifty.”