Forty Thieves

by Thomas Perry

  There was a wail and then the whoop of a siren at the far end of Quillivray Way. The two people in the pickup truck ducked their heads below the windows. Two of the panthers’ SUVs at the curb pulled out, swung around, and roared off. The first three police cars to reach 2995 kept going, speeding after them.

  When he’d ducked down, the man in the black pickup truck seemed to have noticed the popped lock and loose wires on the steering column. The starter motor kicked in, the engine started, and he sat up and pulled out of the driveway. He turned the first corner as though he were trying to chase the police cars, and disappeared.

  Sid and Ronnie hurried toward the first of the men lying on the front lawn. Sid knelt beside him to see if he was alive while Ronnie stepped to the next person. Another group of police cars arrived, lighting up the houses along the street with flashing red and blue lights and glaring white spotlights.

  It was in that second that the explosives in the house went off. Even as Ronnie was thrown off her feet to the ground, she knew that Nicole had done this. Nicole had come out of the basement first so she would have a moment while Ronnie could not see her. She had turned right toward the kitchen.

  As Ronnie sat up, she saw that a fire had begun behind the open windows, and watched it rapidly flare up and begin to devour the house. The kitchen, Ronnie reminded herself. Nicole had probably pulled a pipe bomb out of her ammo bag and placed it behind the stove, where the gas would catch and help the fire spread quickly. This had been Nicole’s house, and she’d known exactly how to obliterate it.

  “Are you okay?” It was Sid.

  She nodded and got up on one knee. Sid waved his arm at the paramedics, pointed, and called out, “This man is alive.”

  He said to Ronnie, “Come on. We should give the paramedics room to work.” He helped Ronnie up and began to guide her toward the street.

  Ronnie said, “I know what happened to him.”

  “Who?”

  “Ballantine. Mira killed him. Tomorrow we can write our report and get paid. Then I want to go and see Janice, and then Mitch. When that’s done, I don’t know. I guess we can go rent a house while we rebuild ours. I’m sick of hotels.”

  33

  Outside the suite at Many Glacier Hotel in Glacier National Park in Montana, Nicole Hoyt sat on the balcony and looked at Swiftcurrent Lake and beyond it, at the jagged mountain peaks and pine forests. It all looked to her like a picture puzzle, the thousand-piece kind she had loved as a kid. It occurred to her it was possible that she’d seen exactly what she was looking at now in one of the puzzles. Just north of here was Waterton Lakes National Park, and that was in Canada, but looking out at a stretch of woods in a bunch of mountains didn’t tell her where the line was. She supposed that was the point of being here.

  Ed came out of the shower and tromped around the room with his towel hanging from his neck.

  “I might remind you that the drapes are open.”

  “I don’t mind,” he said. “I’m not shy.”

  “Walking around naked like that, people might think you’re a bear and take a shot at you.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time, and won’t be the last.”

  “If they hit your fat ass, that would be a first,” she said.

  Ed went back into the bathroom.

  Nicole came inside and slid the curtains across the window, then followed him in. She watched him unscrew the top of her lotion bottle and pour a pile of loose diamonds out onto the counter.

  “Stop playing with those things,” she said. “You lose one in the room, and we’ll have FBI agents following us forever.”

  “I keep looking at them because I still can’t believe we did it. If we got this many, just think how many there must have been,” he said. “And these are good ones, the big kind, the best.”

  “Right,” said Nicole. “We’re really, really rich. Before, we were just rich.”

  “It’s not like I’m having one made into a diamond pinky ring.”

  “No,” she said. “We’re going to put them all in safe-deposit boxes for the next few years, remember?”

  “Right,” he said.

  “Maybe the next hundred years.”

  “Nice to know we have them, though.”

  She nodded. “And I’m done.”

  “What?” He looked at her in the mirror.

  “I’m giving you notice, Ed. I quit.”

  “Quit what? Me?”

  Nicole stared into the mirror at him. “No, dumbhead. I want to have babies, and I need you for that. We’ve pushed our luck way beyond the limit. I don’t want to do this stuff anymore. From now on if I hear a sound in the night, I want to be pretty sure it’s not somebody coming to kill me because of something I did. It’ll take me years, but I’ll wait it out.”

  Ed’s brow furrowed. He stared into the bathroom mirror into her eyes, but he didn’t speak. She waited, thinking of all of the possible things that could happen in another second, feeling the time going by, bringing something hurtling toward her that was now beyond her control.

  “Spit it out,” she said.

  “Where do you think we should live?”

  “Anyplace where I’ll never run into Ronnie Abel again.”

  Todor stood beside Anica and Dragan at the rail of the cruise ship Empress of the Waves while crew members in crisp white uniforms scurried along the walkways preparing the ship to dock at the port of Cartagena. He looked past them at the other passengers along the railing staring down at the dock or gazing out at the city. He could see Marija, Anton, Sonja, and at least twenty members of their circle without even trying. He said in Serbian, “Well, now we’ll have another try in a new country. It’s amazing that so many made it out of that place. I’m never going back there. The whole country is inhabited by criminals.” Anica and Dragan looked at each other for a second, but said nothing to contradict him.