Die Laughing: 5 Comic Crime Novels

by Steve Brewer

  “My God,” Eve said. “Is that horse stuffed?”

  The woman laughed. “Yep. That’s Lucky, the pride of Rancho Palomino, the biggest casino down the way there. That idiot on his back is Big Jim Kelton. He owns Rancho Palomino and about half the town.”

  “Why’s he riding a stuffed horse?”

  “He always rides at the front of the parades.”

  “On a dead horse?”

  “Well, Lucky wasn’t dead at first. What a beautiful horse. He knew it, too. He’d prance down the middle of the street, showing off. But he got old and died, and Big Jim couldn’t bear it. So he had him stuffed. They keep Lucky in the lobby of the casino. He’s famous around these parts.”

  “Why didn’t he just get another horse?” Tony asked.

  “That’s what I would’ve done. But Big Jim thinks that horse is his good luck charm. Most people have heard of beating a dead horse, but only Big Jim would ride one.”

  The truck jerked forward, and Kelton nearly pitched off backward before he caught himself.

  “Careful, goddammit!” he shouted at the truck.

  The driver was a huge, dark-skinned guy, a Samoan or something, who barely fit behind the steering wheel. Tony saw him grin as the truck lurched up the street.

  “That’s the damnedest thing I ever saw,” Eve said.

  “Now aren’t you glad we stopped to watch the parade?”

  The rest was standard stuff – marching bands and rodeo queens, chicken-wire floats and rumbling hot rods. It was over within fifteen minutes.

  The old woman spotted some friends in the crowd, and went over to say “howdy.” Tony and Eve took the opportunity to slip off to the car. Eve said something, but her words were carried away on the snatching wind.

  “What was that?”

  “Hope there’s no parade when we try to make our getaway,” she said.

  “I’ll be sure to check first.”

  Chapter 9

  When Tony and Eve checked into Rancho Palomino’s six-story hotel, he requested a room on an upper floor, south side. The bored clerk didn’t bat an eye. Superstitious gamblers and their “lucky rooms.”

  When they got upstairs, Tony dumped their bags on the bed and checked the view. Their windows looked down on the Starlite Casino and its surrounding parking lots. Perfect.

  The wind had died and the sun was setting by the time they changed and walked to the Starlite. Eve wore a thick red wig she’d used on jobs before; it flipped up on the ends and made her resemble a young Ann-Margret. Tony wore a Greek fisherman’s cap that hid his curly hair and a fake mustache. He looked like Super Mario.

  As they reached the lobby, Eve said out of the side of her mouth, “Stop messing with your mustache. It’ll come unglued.”

  “It tickles my nose.”

  “Suffering makes you stronger.”

  “Right.”

  She pulled a pair of oversized glasses out of her purse and put them on. The rose-tinted lenses did a nice job of disguising her eyes.

  “Smile for the cameras,” he said as they entered the casino clamor.

  The casino was an open room holding a dozen rows of clanging slot machines and burbling video poker consoles. To the left were a few table games – poker, blackjack, craps – and to the right was a terraced bar with curving lounges and spaceship seats. The carpet was worn and stained, but still colorful, decorated with circles and arcs that suggested planets and shooting stars. The chandeliers were assemblages of skinny glass tubes.

  Tony leaned closer to Eve and said, “I can see why he wants to renovate the place. Feels like ‘Lost in Space’ in here.”

  “Danger, Will Robinson,” she muttered, then veered away from him, skirting the slot machines.

  Tony went to the bar and sat on a swivel stool. A hangdog bartender brought him a beer, and he faced the casino floor while he sipped it. Waitresses in “Barbarella” miniskirts carried watery drinks to the gamblers, but most of the customers were anchored in place. Tony spotted Eve’s red wig across the room as she fed money into a slot machine. The place wasn’t crowded. Maybe one out of five slot machines were occupied, and hardly anyone played the table games.

  How could such a limited clientele of truckers and senior citizens produce so much income? A hundred grand a day? Even if five hundred people passed through here every day, they’d each have to lose two hundred bucks to get to that total. Somebody had to win once in a while to keep them coming back, so the average loss was even worse.

  He couldn’t imagine dropping two hundred bucks into a slot machine, but then he’d never understood the thrill of gambling. He knew a few crooks who blew their loot on cards and horses, and they always talked about “easy come, easy go,” but Tony didn’t consider crime an easy way to make a living. Risk your life for that money, then give it away? Not him.

  He touched his mustache, making sure it hadn’t come unglued. Then he focused on the casino’s security.

  Two gray-uniformed guards loitered in the lobby, pistols on their hips, and a couple of meatheads in blue blazers roamed the casino floor, keeping an eye on the gamblers and the dealers. A dozen black-glass hemispheres dotted the high ceiling, and Tony figured each one contained a remote-control swivel camera. Other cameras hung on the walls, openly aimed at the casino floor and the carpeted walkways. At the back of the room, as far from the entrance as possible, stood the booths where players could cash out their winnings or get change. The cashiers were behind steel bars and what looked to be bulletproof glass, and the only door into that area was manned by another armed guard.

  Above the cashier cages, a mezzanine level jutted out, and a wall of black glass looked down on the casino floor. Tony wondered if Nick Papadopoulos was behind one of those smoked-glass windows right now, looking down at him.

  It was just as he’d feared. Security was tight enough to make a heist extremely difficult. Even if a crew was willing to take out the security guards, there was no way to get to the cashiers before they could set off alarms. If robbers did somehow get into the cashiers booth or the counting room beyond, how would they get out again? By the time they could gather the loot and make for an exit, the parking lot would be swarming with cops. And, if they somehow got past those local cops, there were miles and miles of empty highway in either direction, which would make it easy for the state police to set up roadblocks or fly over with a helicopter—

  “Looks bad, doesn’t it?”

  Eve was at his elbow. Tony had been so caught up in his thoughts, he hadn’t seen her coming.

  “Yeah, it does. Let’s get out of here.”

  She clutched his arm as they strolled to the lobby. They both looked around some more on the way, but the only evident public exit was through the front doors. The place was a box canyon, a cul de sac, a freaking trap.

  One of the uniformed guards nodded at them as they departed. Eve, still wearing her tinted glasses, gave him a big smile.

  Then they were outside, where the temperature was dropping rapidly. The night air felt soft and thin as they walked across the parking lot toward Rancho Palomino.

  Eve checked over her shoulder, then said, “Can the inside man do anything about the security arrangements?”

  “Not without jeopardizing his whole plan,” Tony said. “The insurance company will give him a hard look before they pay off. Any change in security routines would be suspect.”

  “Sure,” she said, “but maybe there’s some other way—”

  “I don’t know, Eve. We may be better off dropping it.”

  “Okay. Let’s get some dinner sent up to the room. It’s been a long day.”

  “You want to turn in early, eh?” He waggled his eyebrows at her.

  “I was talking about sleep, but I guess there’s no sense wasting a perfectly good hotel room.”

  “Maybe you can leave the wig on. It’s been years since I slept with a redhead—”

  She jabbed an elbow in his ribs, but she was smiling.

  Chapter 10

/>   The next morning, Tony was standing at the window, sipping room-service coffee and staring down at the Starlite, when an armored car lumbered into the parking lot. The boxy brown truck drove around to the back of the casino. On its side was painted, in chunky gold letters: “Universal Security.”

  “Eve,” he called. “Come look at this.”

  She came out of the bathroom, wearing jeans and a black bra, a hairbrush in her hand. “What?”

  “Down there.”

  They stood shoulder to shoulder at the window and watched the armored truck stop at a white guard shack behind the Starlite. The wooden shack stood next to the gate of a fenced service area the size of a baseball infield. Tony had been studying that asphalt lot, with its ten-foot wire fence, still hoping he’d see a way to pull off the heist.

  An armed guard in a brown uniform and visored cap got out of the passenger side of the armored car and walked around to the shack, carrying a clipboard. The gate slowly slid open, and the truck drove into the lot.

  At the shack, the two men chatted while the truck backed up to a concrete loading dock sheltered by a rectangle of flat aluminum roof.

  The back door of the armored car opened and another guard emerged, carrying a pump shotgun. He stood watch while the first one climbed three steps up onto the loading dock and disappeared into the shade under the jutting roof. A few seconds later, he reappeared, carrying a large canvas sack in either hand. The bags looked heavy. He put the bags of money into the back of the truck, then made another trip and returned with two more.

  Under her breath, Eve said, “Holy shit.”

  The guard with the shotgun ducked back into the cargo hold. The other one shut the doors, then went around to his side and climbed into the cab. A few seconds later, the truck lurched forward, turning tightly to line up with the gate. The entire efficient operation had taken maybe three minutes.

  Tony didn’t say anything until the truck had retraced its route to the highway.

  “That’s how we do it,” he said. “We never go into the casino. We pull the job out back there.”

  “Didn’t you see those guards?” Eve said. “Those guns? There’s no percentage in hitting armored cars. Those guys are trained to—”

  “No, no. We don’t hit the armored car. We drive right in and load up the money and drive away again.”

  “While the guy in the guard shack stands by and watches.”

  “Sure.”

  “And the people inside the casino, the ones we can’t even see from this angle, they just hand it over.”

  “That’s right.”

  Eve looked like she was ready to brain him with the hairbrush.

  “Wait,” he said. “You’re leaving out a step. First, we’ve got to get our own armored car.”

  Chapter 11

  Eve Michaels often played chef when the crew got together, and she didn’t mind a bit. If she left it up to the boys, they’d consume nothing but beer and pizza, and pretty soon they’d all be as hefty as Angie Hernandez. Somebody had to look after them.

  Tonight, she’d cooked outside on the fire escape, using a hibachi to grill chicken satay with a Thai peanut sauce. The skewered meat turned out perfectly tender and juicy, and the men grunted their appreciation as they ate them like lollipops. Angie clutched half a dozen skewers in one huge paw; Eve always made extra whenever Angie was among the guests.

  “Damn, Eve,” said Don Cooper through a mouthful. “You ought to open a restaurant.”

  Ross nodded his agreement, but was too busy chewing to say anything. Eve considered that a coup.

  “Charge restaurant prices for plain old chicken?” she said. “I’m not that big a crook.”

  They all laughed. Tony came out of the apartment’s tiny kitchen, carrying fresh Heinekens. He handed an open green bottle to each man, checked Eve’s wine glass to make sure she had plenty, then sat beside her. They had enough comfy furniture in the living room for five normal-sized people, but Angie filled up nearly the entire sofa by himself and nobody wanted to squeeze in next to his hot bulk. The Coopers sat in matching armchairs and Eve and Tony perched on kitchen chairs dragged into the room earlier. In the center, covered in plates and bottles and napkins, sat a coffee table fashioned from an antique steamer trunk.

  The living room was large by San Francisco standards, with a wall of windows on the west side. On fog-free days, the windows offered a view over the rooftops to the broad green stripe of Golden Gate Park and the blue ocean beyond. At night, the windows were big black squares, the darkness outside interrupted only by a single tall streetlight on the corner.

  The building was constructed in the 1920s, and it was a chunk of heavy-duty concrete rooted in bedrock. The city’s feared earthquakes had never damaged the stout old building, and Eve no longer worried about them as she had when she first moved here from Omaha.

  She’d come to San Francisco after finishing college, figuring the foggy, romantic city would be the perfect place for an English major to try her hand at a novel. But she never quite got started on a manuscript, always too busy waiting tables and sightseeing and partying with new friends. Then, nearly three years ago, she met Tony Zinn, who introduced her to a life of crime, and the notion of sweating over metaphors lost its allure. Hard for fiction to compete with the real world of heists and holdups.

  Tony now was the one who told people he was a writer, when the longest item he’d ever written was a note that said, “I’ve got a gun. Give me all the money.” His creative genius lay in other areas.

  Eve sometimes thought he could’ve been an engineer or an architect, if he hadn’t grown up in a family of felons. Tony had the type of mind that breaks problems down into bite-sized obstacles, then solves them one by one. Just the guy to have around if you wanted to assemble a piece of furniture or tackle a jigsaw puzzle. Or plan a heist.

  Ross and Don Cooper had native intelligence, too, particularly when it came to cars or tools or gizmos of any kind. And Angie was a big old bear who kept the world at bay with his physical presence. She’d seen a grown man faint dead away when Angie scowled at him. That sort of looming menace often came in handy.

  They all treated her like a kid sister, protecting her, trying to keep her out of trouble whenever they were on a job. She’d proven herself time and again, but finally accepted that the crew always wanted her one step removed from the action – driver, schemer, nurse, mother hen.

  Mostly, she was the voice in Tony’s ear, helping him find solutions, slipping him an encouraging word. The rest of the crew might not be aware of those contributions, but Tony knew, and that was what mattered.

  She and Tony had hashed out this new job in the car all the way back from Fowler, and she thought they’d put together a good plan. The crew looked eagerly at him now, waiting to hear it. Tony chugged his beer, then set the bottle on the coffee table. He was ready.

  Eve always loved this part.

  “So,” he said, “what we have is a small casino with all the usual security features – cameras, armed guards, locked doors, cashier cages. Normally, I’d say ‘no way’ to something like this. Too many other places much easier to hit. But they’ve got a chink in their armor. They hand over their cash to an armored truck at a loading dock behind the building. In plain sight.”

  He paused to let that soak in. Ross said, “That’s stupid.”

  “Yes, it is,” Tony said. “They’ve gotten sloppy. It’s a small town, only one highway in and out. None of the casinos have ever been robbed. They think they’re immune.”

  The others nodded and smiled. Nothing made them happier than smug carelessness.

  “The way I’ve got it figured is we’ll show up in our own armored car ten minutes before the regular pickup. We’ll load the money and be gone before the real security truck arrives.”

  “Our inside man can grease the rails,” Eve said. “Make sure that nobody questions why there’s a new team picking up the money.”

  “Right,” Tony said. “So we need an armo
red car. We need uniforms. And we need to get them quickly. Ideas?”

  Ross’ face split into a big grin.

  “I’ve got just the thing,” he said. “There’s a lot down in San Jose. Peerless Armored Services. They only have one guard on duty at night.”

  They all looked at him. Tony cocked an eyebrow.

  “I heard about it from Bill Randles,” Ross said. “Remember Bill?”

  “Bill the Balloon Man?” Don said. “Everybody remembers him.”

  “I don’t,” Eve said.

  “The man’s a legend,” Don said. “He carried a backpack into a Bank of America branch in Oakland and told the tellers it was a bomb. They handed over the money, and he split, leaving the backpack just inside the branch’s front door.”

  “We’ve all heard this story,” Ross said.

  “Shut up. I’m talking to Eve.”

  The brothers glared at each other, then Don continued.

  “The bank employees call the cops, then run out a fire door in the back. The bomb squad shows up. They put on the padded suits and the helmets and they oh-so-carefully go into the bank. They decided to open the backpack right there rather than take a chance on moving it. One of them slowly unzips the top of it. As he pulls it open, a helium balloon – a big yellow smiley face – pops out of the backpack, nearly gives them all heart attacks.”

  Eve laughed. She glanced around the room. The others might’ve heard the story before, but they were all smiling.

  “Nothing else in the backpack but a brick the balloon was tied to,” Don said. “Bill Randles had knocked over a bank using a brick, a balloon and a backpack. And he got away clean.”

  “That’s so cool,” she said.

  Tony said, “If Bill knows about this armored car lot, how come he hasn’t stolen one himself?”

  “Aw, he’s getting out of the business,” Ross said.

  “How come?”

  “He got religion.”