Tanner- Year Two

by Remington Kane

  Luna stood. “How can I take the wheel?”

  Tanner patted his lap. “Have a seat.”

  Luna sat on his thigh and Tanner told her to grip the steering wheel. Once she had control of the vehicle, he eased out from beneath her, and she plopped into the seat. The armored car drifted out of its lane momentarily, then Luna righted it. The vehicle had an automatic transmission, just like a car.

  “When I tell you to, release the gas tank.”

  Tanner plucked Sofia from where she sat atop a bag and moved her away from the rear doors. Afterward, he reached into Ippolito’s bug-out bag and removed the grenade.

  “Get ready,” Tanner said. Then he watched as Luna flipped a switch in preparation to release the gas tank.

  He opened one of the rear doors and saw that Brandt and Piper had closed the distance between them considerably. They were a block and a half back.

  “Slow down a little,” Tanner told Luna. She did so, and their lead diminished rapidly. “Mash that button!” Tanner shouted.

  Luna hit the button. A twanging sound like a spring being released was heard, followed by a clunk as the gas tank fell onto the roadway. Tanner released the pin from the grenade, waited a beat, then lobbed it at the gas tank.

  Brandt saw Daisy’s arm extend past his shoulder. She was pointing at the object that had skidded out from beneath the armored car. When the rear door had opened, he expected they might be shot at, but Tanner had only watched them grow closer.

  When the object was nearer, Brandt could tell it was a metal cylinder of some sort. In the open doorway, Tanner tossed something. Brandt had no idea what it was, but he heard Piper’s exclamation of shock and fear even over the sound of the bikes.

  “Shit!”

  An instant later, light, sound, heat and pain all erupted at once. As Daisy screamed in his ear and blood gushed from his wounds, Brandt’s final thought was the realization that they were dying.

  “Wow!” Luna said. The fireball visible in the side view mirror seemed massive and lit up the night around them. After placing her eyes back on the road for an instant, she glanced at the mirror again. Although the fire was still going, it had diminished. Discernible in front of the fire lay two motorcycles on their sides, also aflame. Those who had ridden them were a part of the blaze. Piper was dead, and because he was dead, Luna was free.

  Tanner shut the door and returned up front. “Head onto the highway and let me out at the next town.”

  “Tanner.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thank you. You saved my life and now I don’t have to live in fear anymore.”

  “You’re welcome, and I hope you’re not planning on keeping this money. You’d be hunted the rest of your life.”

  Luna shook her head. “Steve was the crook, not me. I can’t wait to hand this cash over to the authorities.”

  “Maybe you’ll get a reward.”

  “I could use it; it looks like I’m out of a job again.”

  They reached the next town, which was larger than Delran. As Luna drove, Tanner had wiped down any surface he might have touched to obliterate his prints. After stopping the vehicle near the bus station, Luna leaned over and kissed Tanner.

  “I wish I had time to get to know you.”

  “Same here, but you can do me a favor and keep my name from the cops.”

  “Okay, but I’ll never forget you.”

  When Tanner patted Sofia on the head before getting out, the little girl giggled at him. He opened the door, being careful not to leave a print, and walked into the bus station. When Luna was gone, he left the building and roamed the streets.

  An hour later, he was in a stolen car and headed somewhere he could sleep, eat, and see to his shoulder. He didn’t know what he would eat, but it wouldn’t be pizza. After smelling it for weeks, he was sick of it.

  24

  Aftermath

  Luna drove up to a police station that was eleven blocks past the bus station. When she told the cop manning the night desk what she parked out front, he gave her a strange look. After another cop had gone out to verify her claims, she was taken seriously. A minute after that, the state highway patrol issued an alert from Delran. The officer who routinely stopped to talk to the cop killed in the diner had come upon what was left of the fire, and the bodies of Brandt, Daisy, and Piper.

  By the time she was allowed to leave and get some sleep, Luna was exhausted. They put her up in a hotel and an off-duty female officer watched Sofia while she slept.

  The following morning, the local paper declared Luna a hero and she was also being praised by the head of the armored car company. Not only did Luna get a healthy reward, but she was offered a job. She took the reward and declined the job offer. The sooner she put the town of Delran behind her, the better.

  Everything she told the cops about what had happened was true, except she never gave them Tanner’s real name or description. There was one more discrepancy in her statement that puzzled even Luna. When she told them how close she came to being strangled to death by Vic, she mentioned the sad fate of her benefactor, Henry. The only thing was, Henry’s body was never found.

  Henry paused in the middle of drilling to rest. He still became dizzy occasionally from the head wound he’d suffered. Piper’s round had placed a bloody crease across the right side of Henry’s scalp which had bled freely.

  When he awakened inside the motel room and found Luna gone, he’d staggered outside to find the night silent. As dizzy as he was, Henry still risked driving his car to head out of town. He crashed less than twenty minutes into his trip after feeling himself on the verge of passing out. He came to in a drainage ditch alongside the highway and found that the front end had suffered major damage. The vehicle would have to be towed. It was an old car he’d bought at a gas station, so it wasn’t worth worrying about.

  Henry walked away as the sun was coming up and came to a neighborhood of single-family homes. He stole jeans and a shirt from a backyard clothesline, then changed into the fresh clothing after washing himself in someone else’s pool. When he realized he still had his phone and that there was a signal, he tried calling his friends.

  No one answered. They were all dead.

  He hitchhiked and walked and even got a lift from a friendly cop which placed him back at the home he had shared with Sal, Julio, and Conleth. After eating until he was stuffed, Henry slept for fourteen hours. He felt better, but still had dizzy spells every now and then.

  Later, while approaching Ippolito’s compound cautiously, he became convinced there was no one in it. As he got closer, he knew that wasn’t true. The dead were there, some rotting in the sun.

  Henry braved the cloying odor of decomposition and entered the house. It took him over two hours to find the hidden safe, and then he went to work on it.

  He knew nothing about safecracking but had heard they were sometimes opened by drilling the lock. When he’d drilled a fifth hole in the lock something gave way.

  He didn’t know how much cash he would find, but he thought it would be a hell of a lot more than the sixteen thousand he discovered inside a brown envelope. Then, Henry came across the bag of diamonds.

  He left the compound while driving away in Daisy’s yellow 1969 Beetle. Taped to the dash was a photo of a smiling Daisy in the arms of her love, Raul.

  Monica returned home to her grandmother’s house after working a double shift at the restaurant. Her grandmother had already put Tommy to bed, and Monica hated that she had barely spent any time with him at all before leaving for work.

  She kissed Tommy as he slept then took a long shower. As her grandmother headed off to bed, she remembered to tell Monica something.

  “That young man you’ve been seeing stopped by. He left a package for you, and there’s a card taped to it.”

  “Steve Gordon was here, when?”

  “Around dinnertime.”

  Monica looked over at the package on the coffee table. It was wrapped in plain white paper, along with a whit
e envelope. She kissed her grandmother goodnight and took the package up to her room. When she opened the card, she wondered what it meant.

  ONLY OPEN THE PACKAGE WHEN YOU’RE ALONE.

  Monica frowned at the parcel, wondering what it could contain. With curiosity growing within her, she tore at the paper. There was another note. It was taped to the box and this time it was signed.

  FOR A BETTER LIFE,

  STEVE

  Monica opened the box and her breath caught in her throat. Inside was the hundred thousand dollars Tanner had found in Ippolito’s bug-out bag.

  In the fall, Monica entered college with the goal of becoming a lawyer. The only time she stepped into a restaurant was when she wanted a meal and didn’t feel like cooking.

  25

  The Second Time

  Tanner met with Russo at the bowling alley and received his own hundred thousand dollars. It was payment for completing the contract.

  “You’re the real deal, kid. Don’t be surprised if we give you a call again.”

  “You know how to get in touch,” Tanner told him.

  When his flight arrived back in New York, Tanner gave Pullo a call. They agreed to meet at the diner near Pullo’s apartment.

  Pullo wore a glum expression. When Tanner asked him what was wrong, he told him that he was thinking of asking Gracie to marry him.

  “What’s the problem, you think she’ll turn you down?”

  “I don’t know. I know she loves me, but I can’t see her moving to New York. She says the city is too busy for her; she’d rather keep living out in the sticks.”

  “Maybe you should try living in Pennsylvania; you might grow to like it.”

  Pullo shook his head. “That’s too much quiet for me. But damn it, I want Gracie, and not just sometimes like the way it’s been.”

  Tanner considered Joe’s emotional predicament, then thought about Luna’s disaster of a marriage and Monica’s bereavement and sorrow over the loss of her husband.

  “Love always brings heartache.”

  “Are you speaking from experience?” Joe asked.

  Tanner hesitated in answering, then nodded. “I was in love once. To say it ended badly would be an understatement.”

  Pullo pointed at Tanner’s shirt. “I guess you had trouble while you were in California.”

  Tanner looked down and saw a spot of dark red marring his blue shirt. The wound on his chest was bleeding yet again.

  “It’s a deep cut that I should have had stitched. I worked out with weights before coming here and it must have opened up again. I’ll see a doctor when I leave here.”

  “Do you have a doctor?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll take you to see one. Sam keeps an underground clinic in the city. If a guy gets shot on a job, he can’t go to the emergency room without it getting reported to the cops.”

  “Thanks, Joe. I could see where having something like that might come in handy.”

  “They’ve stitched me up a time or two.”

  After eating lunch, Pullo and Tanner took a cab to the corner of West 26th and 10th Avenue, where there was a fenced-in parking lot. A camera was over the gate and razor wire at the top of the fence. Pullo pushed a button beside the gate and a few moments later a voice came through a speaker.

  “Yes?”

  Pullo said his name, followed by a few words spoken in Italian that were apparently a password. Tanner understood the words and smiled. They had been a line from a Godfather movie, as spoken by the character Don Corleone. How did things ever get so far?

  That was another reason Tanner liked Sam Giacconi. The man had a sense of humor.

  Inside the clinic, a woman in a nurse’s uniform escorted Tanner to a treatment room the size of an office cubicle. On his way there, as he passed another treatment room, he saw a guy lying on a table who had a cut on his arm. The doctor, a blonde woman in a white lab coat, was seated near the man. She was stitching the arm and talking to the guy in a soft voice that revealed she was from the south. Tanner didn’t see her face because her back was to the door.

  The nurse told him to take off his shirt. When he did, she pursed her lips as she looked at the wound.

  “That definitely needs seeing to. The doctor will be in to examine you in a few minutes.”

  Tanner thanked her and sat on the treatment table. If he didn’t know better, he would have said he was in an emergency room at a hospital.

  As the nurse stated, the doctor appeared a few minutes later. She walked in with her head down as she looked at the nurse’s notes on a clipboard. When she glanced up and saw Tanner, her mouth parted as if in surprise, as her eyes roamed over him.

  “Um, Mr. Tanner?”

  “It’s just Tanner, no mister.”

  “All right, and I’m Doctor Ivy, Laurel Ivy.”

  Tanner felt something stir within him he thought and prayed he would never feel again. It was love. It took hold of the doors of his heart and flung them wide open.

  Tanner grinned, then laughed, as Laurel did the same, and once again, he was falling in love.

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  TANNER: YEAR TWO

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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