The Downside

by Mike Cooper

  Staffing was bare bones for similar reasons. Maybe they’d have a civilian receptionist during the day, but for now, a woman with a headset sat behind a monitor in back of the counter.

  “May we help you?” She was probably the dispatcher. Town this small, she might handle fire and EMS, too.

  “I was hoping to talk with one of your officers?” Nonthreatening and polite.

  “Could be.” She twisted to look into the other bullpen. Finn could see one uniform and one guy in a sweatshirt and jeans talking to each other at the coffee machine. “What’s it about?”

  “A courtesy call.” Finn pulled the envelope from his jacket. “Doing a repo in the county, just wanted to let you know first.”

  She called back, and the two men looked at her. “Go on around,” she said to Finn.

  The uniformed officer had his gun belt in one hand and a worn leather folder in the other, so Finn didn’t offer to shake.

  “George Hayduke,” he said. “Line Drive Recovery, up from Bridgeport?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Order of attachment.” He unfolded a set of papers from the envelope and held it out. “We’re repoing some cars tonight.”

  The man glanced at the document. “ID?”

  “Sure.” Finn extracted another paper from his wallet, this one creased and worn at the edges. “State license. You want to see a bond certificate?”

  “Nah.” The man skimmed down. “Nine vehicles?”

  “Yes.” Finn grinned. “Nice, huh? Normally, I’d have to drive all over the state for that many. It’s like a whole week’s worth of work in one night.”

  “Hall’s Pond Road.”

  “That storage place,” said the other man, listening in. “You know, out past the Agway.”

  “That’s right.” Finn nodded. “Guy keeps them on ice there. Like a collection.”

  “‘Ex parte order … property we have rights to, in a nonresidential facility secured by a lock susceptible to blah blah …’” He flipped to the end. “‘Authorized by … Judge Willis’? When did you get to him?”

  And that was the crux. Anyone could forge up legal documents nowadays. Nicola had found boilerplate language, along with color templates for the PI license, right on the Internet. The actual authorization, though—Finn was willing to try and dupe a couple of rural cops, but a state judge was a different matter. No way was he willing to walk into a court office under feloniously false pretenses. Conveniently, however, Connecticut had begun putting judicial opinions online as PDFs. With a little searching—Nicola again—and some careful copying, they’d forged a signature almost as authentic as the judge’s own.

  And at seven p.m., Finn hoped the policeman wouldn’t actually try to call the judge to confirm it.

  “This afternoon,” he said. “After midday sessions.”

  “Nine vehicles.” The officer whistled. “A Lamborghini. A Bugatti—jeez. What’d he do?”

  “Dunno.” Finn raised his hand, like, Who knows? “Get behind with somebody, though, they’ll come after anything you got. Guy I know specializes in boats—collects them right out of the marinas. Being rich doesn’t stop people from being stupid.”

  The man laughed. “Goes the other way, too.”

  “If that was true, I’d be driving a Lambo myself.”

  The cop going off duty lost interest. “Normally, we’d send a duty officer with you,” he said, and looked at the other man. “Hank?”

  “Been quiet tonight?”

  “Usual.”

  “Well—no, I guess not. I got paperwork.”

  The first officer handed back Finn’s papers. “Okay then. Know where you’re going?”

  “Yeah. We checked it out before we got the order.”

  “And the alarms. Hank, don’t they have a silent?”

  “Yup. We get a false call every couple months. Chipmunk runs past the electric eye or whatever.”

  The officer looked at Finn. “It rings, we have to drive out there. Write up a report.”

  “Yeah, I—”

  “Which is at least an hour of plain wasted time.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Finn tucked the papers away. “We got the panel code.”

  “Really?” He looked surprised.

  “Research. Makes everything easier, you know?” In fact, Emily had seen the alarm company’s reminder card, with the codes written right on it, in the same folder as the storage unit’s insurance information. “It shouldn’t go off, but if it does, you know it’s us. No need for lights and sirens and guns.”

  “No.”

  Finn put his hat back on. “Thanks, guys, I appreciate it.”

  “There’s any kind of a problem, you just turn around and leave, okay? We don’t need more to do tonight. You can work it out in daylight.”

  “Absolutely.” Finn smiled. “I’m sure there won’t be any problems at all.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “Do you know what your lunatics are up to?”

  Nicola was the first one Finn saw as he bumped the Kei truck through the bay door, and she seemed upset. He rolled down his window.

  “Not exactly—”

  “It’s not like anyone here can file for workers’ comp.” Hands on her wide hips. “Not that they’d be filing anything anyway—they’d be dead.”

  Morning at the warehouse, a damp cold and gray light filtering from the windows high above. Finn parked the truck just inside the bay, got out, and pulled the door back down with a resounding crash. He looked past Nicola, who’d been working her laptop at the folding table.

  “Hey, they got the excavator.” He paused. “Why is it so dark in here?”

  “There’s no power.” Nicola gestured at the wall, where a gray metal box hung wrecked, door sagging open, all shattered plastic and torn wire.

  “Uh-oh.” Finn squinted, picking out the cable running along the floor to the excavator. “Blew it out?”

  “Of course. The problem is, they’re fixing it.”

  Finn was still groggy, insufficiently caffeinated. Working off Gil’s list, it had taken Corman and himself two hours to load the cars the night before, even though Emily had told them exactly where the key box was. On the way out, he’d reset the alarm and secured the fifteen-foot sliding doors with a duplicate ABUS padlock. The original had resisted Corman’s plasma torch for nearly five minutes. There were scorch marks on the metal now, but he’d smudged them up. The new lock looked the same, just shinier.

  With luck, whoever next showed up would merely assume that something was wrong with it, or that he had the wrong key.

  After that, another two hours to Gil’s transfer point, a truck stop on I-95. Well lit and busy, its tarmac filled with rigs hauling in and out of the city, the parking area was safe and discreet for both sides of the transaction. Like the entire job, it had gone smooth and easy.

  “Why is it a problem if they’re fixing it?” Finn said now, still trying to catch up. He held a black nylon duffel in each hand.

  “Take a look.” She flicked her head toward the back, where a second door led to the rear of the building. “I’m not going anywhere near them.”

  He dropped the bags by the table and walked out. Behind the warehouse, a fifteen-foot strip of old pavement filled in the property, up to the chain-link-and-razor-wire fence of the adjacent lot. Finn thought their neighbor did forwarding or something—trucks came and went irregularly. In the early morning, the lot was empty, the docks shuttered.

  Jake was up a utility pole at the fence, working inside its drum transformer. The cowling was open, a heavy cable dangling. Below him, Asher looked up, hands shading his eyes.

  “Uh, Jake?” Finn kept his voice quiet, not wanting to startle him in the slightest way.

  “Oh, hey, Finn.”

  “What the fuck are you doing up there?”
>
  “We need power. Got barely enough to run Nicola’s computer, let alone the TBM.”

  Finn had done just enough electrical to know that he didn’t want to be anywhere near a live transmission line. “Didn’t know you had a linesman’s rating, Jake.”

  “Nope. Helped a buddy out some though.”

  He was wearing safety goggles, a hard hat, and heavy black rubber gloves that went almost to his elbows. His jacket was fully zipped, tucked out of the way. He looked as professional as any other pole monkey Finn had worked with.

  “What is it carrying?”

  “We’ll tap it for eighty amps. More than enough.”

  “Isn’t the utility going to notice?”

  “Fuck no. We could power half of Newark before they woke up over there.”

  “Uh-huh.” Finn watched him work for a minute. Jake pulled the cable through a spare bushing on the drum while Asher fed him some slack and then began tying it off inside. “You sure about this?”

  “It ain’t rocket science.” He tipped his head toward the neighboring warehouse. “My first thought was we could just tap it out of their junction box, but I didn’t want to go climbing over that riot wire.”

  “No shit,” Asher said, but he kept his eyes on Jake. The electricians’ union had rules requiring two men for high-voltage work: the second there only to watch the first, helping avoid fatal errors. Asher was doing his job.

  “Okay then.” Finn nodded, more to himself. “I’ll leave you all to it.”

  Inside, he found Nicola back at work on her laptop. She had a cup of take-out coffee, a Tip Top box open next to it. The table was crowded with other odds and ends as well: gloves, tools, a four-foot pry bar.

  Now that he noticed, the air still smelled slightly of burnt plastic and ozone.

  “They know what they’re doing,” Finn said. “And we do need the lights back on.”

  “If you say so.”

  “How’s it going? Are you in Penn Southern’s systems yet?”

  She gave him a mouth-turned-down, exasperated look. “Of course. Took about two minutes. We’re not hacking missile silos here.”

  Finn paused. “Nuclear missiles? How long does that take?”

  “Depends. The USAF is easier than Britain.”

  “Are you serious?”

  She looked up. “Don’t worry. Occasionally, the missile crews have some basic internet, but it’s always air-gapped from anything real. It’s impossible to get near the launch sequence.”

  “That’s … good to know, I guess.”

  Finn examined the acid-etched gridlines in the floor. The cuts were narrow and jagged but deep. He retrieved the pry bar, glanced over Nicola’s shoulder, saw her screen deep with code, and walked back. The concrete resisted, then broke a little, the foot-square block shifting in place. Rocking the bar back and forth, he was able to loosen it up.

  Good enough. The excavator would have little difficulty. He dropped the bar on the floor.

  Ten minutes later, Jake came in, pulling off the high-voltage gloves.

  “Done,” he said. “Asher’s going to bring the line in.”

  “Those breakers are beyond salvage, aren’t they?”

  Jake looked at the wreckage on the wall. “You think?”

  “I really hope you’re not planning to end it off right in the middle of the floor.”

  “I got a new box in the truck. We’ll hook it up.”

  Jake hollered back at Asher, who responded with some muffled swearing, and started yanking the cable through the same supply conduit. Nicola frowned at them, then went back to work. The room fell quiet, apart from the frequent, steady rumble of trains nearby and Asher’s nonstop mutter of complaint.

  Finn added Radio to his mental to-do list.

  What else? He looked around. Plywood, two-by-fours, and framing screws for the curtain wall. Power drills. The skate-wheel conveyor—forty segments, each ten feet long. They might need two trucks. Battery lanterns. Welding kit and bar stock to refit the Kei truck.

  Water, oranges, chips. Jake liked granola bars. Asher needed beer. A lot to remember.

  Finn was measuring the Kei truck’s chassis when Corman came in. He’d slept and changed, it looked like. He identified the doughnut box immediately.

  “Morning, big guy.” Nicola was about half Corman’s mass, a difference all the more obvious when he stood over her at the table, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Try the strawberry cream. I like those.”

  “Yo.” Finn waved Jake and Asher over. “Team meeting.”

  They stood around. Nicola clicked some keys and her screen went blank. She leaned back in the chair.

  “It’s December third,” Finn said. “That means we have exactly four weeks. There’s a lot to do. I think the plan is sound, but you know how it goes—we’re going to hit snags. Problems will occur. If anything happens, anything that increases the chances of getting caught, we drop it and walk away.”

  He looked around. “I’ve said this to each of you, and I want to say it once more. I just got out of jail. I did not enjoy my time inside. And I’m not going back.”

  Asher nodded, like, Yeah, yeah. Nicola had a small smile. Corman and Jake just watched.

  “With that in mind”—Finn reached down and retrieved one of the two black duffels—“let’s take a look at this.”

  He unzipped the bag with a somewhat self-consciously dramatic flourish.

  Nicola leaned forward to look inside. “What?”

  “Oops, wrong one.” Finn dropped it on the cluttered tabletop. “That’s the laser. I meant this one.” He grabbed the other duffel, no ceremony this time, and opened it up.

  A respectful silence. They all stared at the money.

  “Two hundred forty thousand dollars,” Finn said. “Hundreds and fifties, which seems to be how Gil does business.”

  “He liked the cars,” said Nicola.

  “And paid what we agreed.” Finn nodded. “Always nice to find a man who keeps his word.”

  “That’s great,” said Jake. “Now we don’t have to steal everything else, too.”

  “It should more than cover the entire budget.”

  “Awesome.” Asher reached out, drawn like a magnet to the cash. “So how about we get a decent dinner tonight? At least once?”

  Only Corman didn’t say anything, but he caught Finn’s eye with a questioning look.

  “Right.” Finn zipped the duffel shut again, nearly catching Asher’s fingers. “Almost a quarter mil. We can spend it all on this project … or we could divide it up now and go our separate ways. That’s forty-five, fifty each, right? Risk free. Right here.”

  “That’s almost half what Wes is paying us,” said Nicola.

  “Yes.”

  “But what about the rhodium?” Jake said. “I thought we were going for the haul. That’s nothing, there.” He flicked one hand at the bag. “We go in and get the metal, we make twenty times that.”

  “Against the risk of getting caught.” Finn put his hands in his pockets. “I know I’m a broken record here, but you have to be sure. Are we committed to the job?”

  “Wes thinks you’re just going in to make a mess and pull the alarm,” said Nicola. “Doesn’t he? Have you told him the plan’s a little bigger now?”

  “Not necessary,” Finn said.

  “He’s paying us to rob him?” Asher grinned. “Man might be a little upset about that.”

  “Could be.”

  “Well, fuck yeah, I’m committed. I’m in. I want a million dollars!”

  “Me, too,” said Nicola. Jake nodded and Corman grunted.

  “Excellent.”

  They started talking details. Where to get the jacking pipe, how to move the metal through it, timing.

  “What about noise?” Nicola asked.

  “It’s
underground.” Asher was dismissive. “Nobody’ll hear anything.”

  “I looked it up online. There’s video. Didn’t seem that quiet to me.”

  “It shouldn’t be a problem until we get close,” Finn said. “And at that point, we can stop and start, save the noisiest periods for when a train is passing.”

  “We need semtex.” Asher, coming in from left field.

  “What?” Nicola said.

  “Plastic explosive.”

  “I know what it is—”

  “Just in case.”

  “In case what?”

  “It’s like duct tape. A million uses.”

  An argument started. Finn let it run a minute then shut them down. “No explosives,” he said firmly. “We’re digging our way in. This isn’t Hollywood. We’re not blowing shit up just for fun.”

  Asher took the last doughnut. Nicola flicked on her screen. Jake went back to the breaker box, which he and Asher had mounted on the wall and were now wiring up.

  Finn handed the duffel to Corman. “When Jake’s done,” he said, “how about you two go rent us a tunnel-boring machine?”

  An hour later, the door closed behind Corman and Jake. Nicola continued to mutter at her laptop. Finn and Asher were studying the Kei truck’s undercarriage, lying on the floor underneath it, discussing how to reinforce the suspension.

  “Gonna need solid tires, too,” Asher said. “If you want to drive faster than two miles an hour.”

  “I thought we could just let out some air. So the extra weight doesn’t pop them.”

  “No, the heavier it is, the more pressure you need. But these are too small for that.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Big trucks, big tires.”

  “Uh-huh.” Finn thought about the massive wheels on the equipment in, say, open pit mines. “If that’s true, why doesn’t everyone use solid rubber? Never get a flat tire for any reason that way.”

  “They overheat too fast. Melt right off the rims. But we can probably find a specialty wheel somewhere.” Asher patted the truck. “Might look funny, but on this vehicle, who’ll notice?”

  Finn stood and stretched. Asher dusted his pants and headed for the bathroom in the building’s rear. With the lights on, and the day lightening in late morning, the warehouse interior was now almost brightly illuminated. Dirt and clutter were much more apparent. Finn added a trash barrel and a second broom to the list.