by John Griffin
“What about the old man?” Vince asked.
“Outta town,” Sham said.
The man moved to the next picture: Arthur packing his car and leaving the house. “Sol and Sham observed Arthur leaving town, as scheduled. He is on his way to Martinique for a month. You will have the house to yourselves.”
“How do we get in?” Vince asked.
The man advanced to the next picture. It was himself in a gray uniform, with blonde hair and a mustache. “You’d think I paid you to toss me these softball questions. Here I am installing the alarm system required by the insurance company as a condition of covering Mr. Delacroix’s possessions. It is how we came by the codes for the safes, and it is also how Sol knows the code to disarm the alarm.”
“Why can’t we all know the code? What if something happens to Sol?” Vince asked.
“If something happens to Sol, or any of you, the job is called off.”
“Why? Just give me the code, and we can do this. It’s easy. It’s called a backup plan.”
“Never give the asshole the code,” the man said. The group, including Vince, laughed. “And easy is how our enterprise works. We do easy jobs. We plan them well in advance — this has been four months in the planning. We do them in a small window of time. There is one plan. There is no backup plan. If a piece of the plan becomes impossible, we walk and we cancel. We walk away when they are complete, and the people who performed one job never work together again. No one gets hurt. No connections are made. Police don’t care — especially when they find out that Arthur’s going to net ten million from the transaction himself. They won’t even bother looking into this. He’s eighty-four, rich, and he is going to be reimbursed handsomely for whatever he has lost. This is hardly a crime at all.”
“So who gets what?” Sham asked.
“It’s color-coded,” Vince said.
The man looked at Sham and Reginald. “You two should be embarrassed,” he said. “The asshole shouldn’t be out-thinking two Ivy-Leaguers. And he is right. It is color-coded. Sol’s red duffle bag for the red chest in the basement. Sham’s brown bag for the brown credenza. Reggie’s black bag for the black leather chest. And Vince’s blue bag for the wall safe in the bedroom. We make this deathly simple.”
“Why do you need four of us?” Reginald asked.
“You want out?” Solomon asked.
“No,” Reginald replied. “Just doesn’t look like we are needed. Nothing here is all that heavy. Seems like everything is set up simply. It just feels like we aren’t being told something. I don’t like that.”
“Now that is impressive,” the man said, turning from his presentation for the first time since the slideshow began. “It is easy. Too easy. And good on you for being suspicious. So why four people when two would do? Why four when maybe even one would be fine? This is our employer’s insurance: diffuse responsibility.
“Make no mistake, these heists go badly, and often. It is an occupational risk. You might laugh to hear that in our annual projections we plan that thirty percent of these opportunities will fail and count those investments as losses against the corporation’s other, successful opportunities. But these heists do fail. People return from trips unexpectedly. Children change passcodes. People move expensive items. Some do so idiosyncratically. Sometimes this can be observed and predicted and can even be a help — it is very hard to track or even prove something has been stolen when the owner moves the items around often and forgets where they are. But I digress. No, gentlemen, this is far simpler. This is not a job one person could do in its entirety. It is a job one person can perform on the night of the robbery. But one person could not install or infiltrate an alarm system, which the police will realize has happened. One person could not get the codes, which, again, the police will figure out was key to the theft. One person could not get into the house, figure out where everything is, and then get out. It takes people — and they will be looking for people, so we give them people. Four people. Make no mistake, if this goes badly, the evidence will point to all of you, and you will take the fall, or our employer will kill you. Maybe he will kill you even if you do take the fall.
“No, sometimes it is important to give the police what they are looking for: a team of professional thieves, well organized, who are caught only by misfortune.”
“Well, that fucking sucks. If the cops show up, I’m going to shit my pants. Can you pack some extra undies in my duffle bag for the night of?”
Everyone ignored Sham.
“Why, though?” Vince asked. “Why set it all up like this?”
“Why do you always find your keys in the last place you look for them?” the man asked in response.
“Because you stop looking when you find them,” Vince said.
“Precisely. We give police what they are looking for, because when police find what they are looking for, they stop looking. And you — all four of you — can tell them anything you want about me or our employer, but they’re not going to believe you, not when it is so clear you had the motive and capabilities to do all this by yourself. A couple smart, thrill-seeking kids. A former detective down on his luck. A driver with a long rap sheet and nothing to lose. No. The case would simply be closed.
“But this is all very much beside the point. The risk of this heist going badly is very, very low — one of the lowest on the roster for our corporation this year. You will do fine, gentlemen.”
“Okay. One question,” Sham said. “Are you licensed to sell insurance?”
The man laughed. It was a deep, genuine laugh. He turned his gaze down while laughing and put his hand over his mouth. “I am, believe it or not. In fact, that’s my cut in the whole affair.”
“Your cut?” Vince asked.
“The commission on that sale was tremendous.”
“Insurance salesmen,” Solomon said. “The real thieves.”
After the meeting, Vince and Solomon got onto the subway together and headed downtown. The subway was busy, and the two had been quiet until they got on the train. “You busy?” Vince asked.
“Why?” Solomon said.
“I’m wondering if you’d like to go someplace,” Vince said, looking over his shoulder.
“Where? Hungry?” Solomon asked.
“No, 132 Coolidge Ave, Short Hills, New Jersey,” Vince said.
“Don’t say that again,” Solomon said.
“Why are we waiting?”
“That’s the plan.”
“You’ve got the code. Nobody is home. There’s enough there for us to walk away. Instead of one small grab, we make one big play.”
“Are you fucking kidding me right now?” Solomon said, stepping away from Vince.
“I don’t get why we don’t just do this.”
“This isn’t our job.”
“So we disappear.”
“Are you a fucking idiot?”
“I’m the asshole.”
“Don’t fucking talk to me about this. Who is going to fence this stuff? You? Not me. I can’t.” Solomon stepped back toward Vince and said in a low voice, “We get a million for twenty minutes work and a fuck-ton of risk.”
“We could have five, each,” Vince said.
“That’s not how this works.”
“How does it work, then?”
“For one, you can’t buy a house with diamonds. We need to sell them. And our employer has a detailed list with pictures of every item, from the insurance. Think that was a mistake? We show up anywhere with the stuff, trying to sell it, and we are caught. For another, you know that guy we just met?”
“Skinny dickhead?”
“Yeah,” Solomon said. “Skinny dickhead dressed in black. You know what he does?”
“Sells insurance. Installs alarms.”
“He does whatever our employer needs done. He’s the guy that gets called to do t
he things that real bad guys won’t do. You cross him on one of these jobs, and you’re over in this business, and you can’t get away. They don’t even look for you. They send this guy to find your family, your friends, your fucking favorite barista, and he tortures them until you come back. And when you come back, he kills you and your family and probably even the first girl you kissed. This isn’t a fucking joke, Vince. You can make a lot of money with this, but you can’t do what you’re thinking.”
Vince said nothing as the train rolled to a stop. He stepped out of the train onto the platform. Before the doors closed, he asked, “Are you going to tell?”
“Just fucking be there,” Solomon said as the doors closed.
Solomon continued on down the line and exited near the YMCA where he was staying. The sun outside was bright. He put on his sunglasses as he came out of the subway. He went into the building, found his room, and lay down on the bed, still dressed.
Chapter Eleven:
Reg
Reg was watching the latest video from Psycho — the one that Kevin had slipped to him, decoded from the audio of the latest posting to that gore site Psycho used. He felt guilty watching it, felt worse knowing that he was not even a cop yet, but he had to see it for himself. He watched Greg burn to death again and felt a surreal sense of loss. He had never met the man. He was graduating from Columbia Law about the time Greg was killed. But Reg had read his notes on Psycho’s crimes and had grown a fondness for the detective, Greg’s clearly protective stance with his partner, and his unbridled desire to see Justin Graham brought to justice.
That was clear, Reg thought. Where Sol wanted to kill Justin, Greg wanted to bring him in. Sol may not have known. Shortly after Sol was taken off the case and transferred to the negotiator’s role, Greg wrote that he was concerned that Psycho’s obsession with involving Sol would lead eventually to Sol catching up with him, and that one of them would die in the encounter. He needed to get to Psycho first, and urgently, as much to save his former partner from death as to save him from becoming a killer.
Everyone else wanted Justin dead. Especially Lisa and Clive. And probably Kevin, too. He had given these things to Reg and probably hoped that Reg would pass them on to Sol with the analysis — everything Kevin could figure out about Justin’s timeline while away from home. Kevin and Lisa could not be seen with Sol, though Reg was not sure why. Something had happened, and only recently, that put Sol even more on the outs than usual. But Reg could. He was expected to be. So he could pass these along.
Reg did not want to do that until he knew a little more about what he was passing on. He turned off the video Kevin had decoded of Greg’s death and went instead to a photo of the note fished out of Vera Glenn’s throat. It was a picture of a sheep, a lump of iron and an eye. Ewe ore eye. You or I. A cheeky pun. Reg hated puns, particularly ones by serial killers to coax a cop to either kill himself or play some stupid game to find and kill him.
There was not much more analysis to be done. Reg felt like he was wasting time, not adding any value. He hated that. He hated empty moments and spinning his wheels. He knew how much he could accomplish when he applied hard work. He could climb mountains. He could sail through one of the toughest law programs in the world while training for ultra marathons.
He went back one video further and saw the message Justin had sent directly to Sol. It was a picture of Rainard Friederick, famous in NYC for running one of several Ponzi schemes that targeted wealthy people and broke during the 2008 market crash. Sol’s own family had been caught up in it. His father lost almost every liquid asset he had and was forced to sell almost everything else to pay the debts — which were modest when compared with what his wealth should have been.
After a few seconds on Friederick’s face came Juanita, the young girl he had kidnapped. At the end was the live feed address on www.goregoregore.com, the gore site that Justin enjoyed using toward the end of his victim’s lives. Reg knew how that ended — Friederick falls to his death, coaxed, some say, by Sol. He had even seen the video. It went viral. It was hilarious, in another world, before Reg became so personally involved. Cop plays “Jump” by Van Halen when trying to talk a suicidal man off the ledge? That’s dark humor, sure, but it was also genuinely funny.
And Juanita? Undead. Found. Sol watches Friederick die, gets texted the address where Juanita is being held, and then gets there as fast as he can. Justin was sitting there, according to Greg’s report. But it was too late.
Reg stood up and called Sol. “Hey, buddy,” he said as Sol answered. “Want to grab a beer?”
Sol obliged and met him at The Dog and Duck. Reg hated the place, but so did almost everyone else, so it was rarely busy. Sol was waiting when Reg came in. He was not sure what he was going to say.
Sol had a beer waiting for him. Reg took it, not sure what kind of beer it was — it had a 50 on the label, and he had never had one before. It was terrible. “So what’s up?” Sol asked.
Reg put a USB key containing everything Kevin had given him on the table. “I’m pretty sure Kevin wanted you to have this.”
“Yeah?” Sol said, not reaching for the key.
“Yeah.” Reg said. “It contains…”
Sol interrupted. “I know what’s on there. I have what’s on there. I’ve got friends, too.”
“Like Kevin?”
“Just like Kevin. And you, too, from the looks of it. I didn’t realize you would get mixed up in this bit.”
“Lisa gave us the file. Said it was important to know this was what drove you out of the force.”
“And into a life of crime, as she calls it,” Sol said, dripping with sarcasm.
“Yeah. You know. Informed consent for a dangerous gig.”
“I get it, kid. And I’d want to know that too, in your shoes.”
“So are you looking for him?” Reg asked, instinctively taking a sip of his beer and then remembering why he avoided it.
“Nah,” Sol said. “That’s for Roger and Thomas, two other guys on the force. Me? I’m just focused on the heist. I can’t chase ghosts.”
“But he clearly wants you involved. Sent you this message.”
“That’s exactly why I can’t be involved. I’m too close to it. And it feeds right into what he is looking for.”
Reg nodded, not pressing the issue. He finished his beer in companionable silence and then got up to go home. “Can I just ask one more question?” he said, pausing and turning.
“Sure thing, Columbo,” Sol responded.
Reg did not understand the reference. “Why won’t Lisa or Kevin meet with you anymore?”
“Not allowed right now. I’m avoiding cops. Probably being followed, you know.”
“No, that’s not it,” Reg responded.
Sol nodded. “Okay, so I saved a few lives and went pretty far off script, and now they’re not allowed to come out and play with me.”
Reg nodded and went home, leaving the USB key behind.
Chapter Twelve:
Solomon
Solomon watched Reginald leave and finished his beer, taking the USB key and walking out without paying. Sean threw a beernut at him as he slipped out the door and yelled something incomprehensible but very likely foul.
The conversation with Reginald and the friendly violence from Sean reminded him of the first time he had been to The Dog and Duck. He had been sitting at the bar eating nuts and drinking beer. He was staring at the television watching highlights from the Knicks game that night. When he finished his beer, he waved a finger at Sean, who poured another and brought it to him. “Good game tonight,” Sean said.
“Great game. Keeps playoffs hope alive,” Solomon said.
“All hope’s false hope with the Knicks,” Sean replied.
“You can’t say that,” Solomon said. His phone rang.
“Why not?” Sean asked.
Solomon took out
the phone and looked at it. “Because you’re from fucking Boston, you asshole.” He answered the phone.
“Still true,” Sean said, walking down the empty bar and continuing to clean.
“Roud,” Solomon said.
“Let’s play a game,” a voice said.
“Fuck you,” Solomon said, hanging up. He ate a handful of nuts as his phone rang again. He hung up on the caller, mouthing “creep” under his breath. He took a sip of beer, and his phone buzzed. He swiped the screen and saw that it was a text. He opened it, and there was an image of Juanita in a room with plastic sheeting covering the walls. She was panicked. The text said, Let’s talk.
His phone rang again. Solomon threw a twenty onto the bar and answered his phone, rushing out the door. “Don’t forget your change, you cheap bastard,” Sean called after him.
“That was very rude, Detective Roud. Forgive the pun,” Psycho said.
“Had I known it was you…” Solomon responded.
“You would have left the bar, like you did. And you would have gone to your car, where you’re going. And you would have gotten in, which you will. And you would have driven to the station and found Kevin or some other kid to help you find me.”
“Not you,” Solomon said.
“Keeping your eye on the prize?” Psycho said. “I like it. Helps the game. Open to playing?”
“I am playing,” Solomon said. “I haven’t stopped playing. I’ve been looking for her. But you know that.”
“I know a lot.”
Solomon sat in his car. “Don’t start the engine,” Psycho said. Solomon froze, his hands on the keys in the ignition. “And don’t leave your seat.” Solomon shifted uneasily. “And don’t shift too much weight.”
