Prince of Thieves

by Chuck Hogan

  The bump shocked him back into himself. It was a professional bump, almost a cop's bump, making out Frawley's service piece on the shoulder rig beneath his jacket.

  Frawley looked up, met the bumper's eyes. They were bloodshot, the pupils a misty, near-white blue, close set. Those and the pronounced ridges beneath the bumper's nose stuck out in Frawley's mind: the memory of a face with a number board beneath it. A mug shot from the thick Charlestown files back at Lakeville.

  The stare went on, Frawley still digesting the pro bump as well as the mug, too stunned by it all even to begin competing with the bigger guy's prison-yard stare. Downstairs not a full two minutes, and already he was made.

  "Jem, you're up!" yelled someone-- the bartender, turning the bumper's head.

  The bumper grinned hard and angry. "Bathroom's that way," he said, shouldering hard past Frawley toward a quartet of beers opened and waiting on the bar.

  9

  The Garden in the Fens

  AFTER BREAKFAST OUTSIDE HIS mother's house on Sackville Street, Doug crossed the bridge into the city, bought a Herald and a Globe from a shaking, grizzled hawker outside the veteran's shelter on Causeway, then piloted the Caprice up onto the expressway, riding south against the morning traffic.

  He spent much of the morning cruising suburban banks, trying to work up some enthusiasm for a low-margin score. He was looking for something he could control, something he could get them into and out of quickly and that would show a decent payday for their efforts-- which was to say, the same thing any thief went looking for. Taking down scores was a game of momentum, and the Kenmore Square job had thrown them off their winning ways. They needed a nice medium-weight take to get back their confidence, and city banks were getting too complicated.

  He eyeballed a co-op in East Milton Square, a Bank of Boston on the Braintree-Quincy line, a credit union in Randolph-- but nothing that lit up his switchboard. He tried to figure out if it was the size of the scores or his mood that was putting him off. Cash was out there, everywhere he looked: the trick was finding enough of it concentrated in one place, however briefly, to make a job worth the risk.

  ATM machines were cropping up all over, in bars, gas stations, even all-night convenience stores. These droids were fed by armored-car couriers making as many as fifty stops per day, sowing cash around metro Boston like uniformed Johnny Appleseeds. Unlike bank runs, ATM couriers never picked up cash, they only distributed, starting at the beginning of the day with a full whack and dropping between fifty and eighty grand at each jump, returning at end of day with only printouts and receipts. These couriers therefore had to be hit early, within their first few stops, and this had worked for Doug before, but now contractors were getting hip to the routine. They were showing more care early in their daily runs-- using two-man deliveries, maintaining constant radio contact, even hiring out the occasional police escort-- then easing off coverage after lunch.

  Convenience stores and the like took only twenties, usually from commercial armored trucks like Loomis, Fargo, & Co. or Dunbar-- but their delivery times and routes varied due to demand, and there was no outside way for Doug to track that. Banks required tens as well as twenties-- some of the downtown machines even took neat stacks of hundreds-- distributed separately from branch deliveries, generally by unmarked armored vans with specially plated exteriors and bulletproof windows. But the bank bills were usually new and serialized-- and therefore highly traceable.

  It had gotten to the point where Doug was willing to look beyond banks, but businesses doing even half their sales in hard cash were getting harder and harder to find. There were nightclubs, but that was often goombah money, and stealing from the government was a lot safer than getting tangled up in a lot of spaghetti. Fenway Park had caught his eye during prep for the Kenmore job, but though he had enjoyed working out a scheme in his head, it was too much of a name job, "a marquee score" as Jem termed it, and good only for unending scrutiny and heat. Never mind being sacrilegious. Sometimes just knowing you can pull off a job is enough.

  What he had been looking at more and more were movie theaters. The big ones, the multiscreens. Only a portion of the ticket sales were done by credit card, and all the concessions remained strictly cash. As with ballparks, theater profits weren't in their ticket prices. Food and drink were their main action. Theaters made most of their coin on the appetites of captive audiences, and big summer movies meant row after row of shiftless kids with nothing better to do than spend. The multiscreens lived off these opening weekends, and Monday mornings found them sitting as fat as a bank on Friday. Jump a can making a pickup, and maybe they'd have themselves something.

  But possibilities and probabilities, that was all he had. He scoped out a few movie houses on his way back into the city, just drive-bys, him trying to get his head together. Whether by accident or intent, his return route took him in past Fenway and over the turnpike bridge toward Kenmore Square.

  The Saturn was there in its regular space behind the bank, jumping out at him like something thrown at his windshield. The spike he felt in his chest was the same charge he got as a kid whenever he thought he spotted his mother in a crowd. For a year or more after she had disappeared, he'd faithfully cataloged his daily activities in a Scribble Pad, so that when she returned, he would be able to catch her up on everything about him she had missed.

  He banged a one-eighty around the bus station and cruised into the parking lot beneath the landmark Citgo sign, the same spot he had used to case the bank from, all the time wondering if there was a name for this virus he had. He thought he might just sit there awhile, watch the bank across the square.

  A minute later he was slamming the door of the Caprice and crossing the street. From Uno's, he told himself, he could get a better look. Then the Walk sign stayed white, and his feet carried him all the way across Brookline Avenue to the sidewalk outside the bank.

  One quick pass by the windows was all he could afford. The bank door opened as he approached it, him reaching out to hold the door for a black lady in a wheelchair-- and the next thing he knew, he was inside, telling himself to scrawl something on a deposit slip and get the fuck out.

  Then he was in line for a teller, smacking himself on the thigh with his rolled-up Herald. This was something a sweaty-eyed arsonist did, returning to the scene of the crime. A whiff of bleach hit him, even if it was present only in his mind.

  "Oh, hi." She made him right away, Jesus Christ, this skinny-necked black teller with her hair flour-sacked on top of her head, smiling. "Haven't seen you for a while. Meter change, right?"

  "Yeah, thanks." He pried a dollar bill off his damp fingers and pushed it through. He had the slimmest of angles on the hallway to the door of the manager's office from there. Someone was moving around.

  The teller leaned toward the perforated bulletproof partition. "Did you hear we got robbed?"

  "Yeah, was that this branch?" Cameras perched on the wall behind her like little one-eyed birds, him keeping his head down, making himself watch her hands. "Everybody okay?"

  "I'm fine, I wasn't here." She made a four-quarter stack with dry, delicate brown fingers and pushed them forward like casino chips, speaking low. "But our assistant manager was beaten. Badly-- he's still in the hospital. The manager was supposed to be back today-- you know the blond girl, carries her keys on a strap?"

  "Okay, maybe."

  "Not to open, just to be here-- her first day back. She never showed."

  The words actually rose in his throat, Doug almost informing her that the plum Saturn was parked out in back. A brain virus, it had to be. He choked on his swallowed words, scooping up his quarters and walking away, half-blind, not even trusting his mouth with a cordial Thank you.

  * * *

  DOUG WAS SAFELY BACK inside the Caprice when it hit him, his theory, and he would not sleep again unless he proved it right or wrong. That was what he told himself as he drove back over the short bridge toward Fenway, parking there and jogging a block under the
warming sun to Boylston, across Park Drive into the Back Bay Fens.

  The Fens was a park laid out around a dead-river pond, a city oasis glowing hormonally emerald in the full-on puberty of spring. Inside the bike paths along Park Drive were the Fenway Gardens, five hundred fenced lots staked along meandering dirt-and-pebble lanes. A couple of times in early April he had followed Claire Keesey here on her lunch hour, watching from a distance as she sat on a crumbling stone bench, picking through a Tupperware salad under the pale green fingers of a willow tree. She had sat with perfect posture, as though posed for one of the pictures in the thick fashion magazine open at her side. She usually embezzled a few extra minutes of lunch hour beyond her allotted sixty.

  His landmark for locating her plot was a rain-hatted scarecrow dwarf at the end of the row, fashioned out of basket wicker and tilted on a crucifix of broken ladder. Nothing else anywhere looked familiar to him. Spring had sprung and the gardens were completely transformed.

  He saw her kneeling on the ground, going at it hard with a hand fork, clawing the soil as though it were a memory that would not die. When she stopped and got to her feet for a water break, Doug saw that she was dressed not for gardening but for work-- a soft pink sweater-blouse over a long, muddied skirt, both ruined. She reached for a spading fork and pushed up her dirtied sleeves, resuming her all-out assault on the earth.

  People on bicycles or walking their dogs slowed as they passed her, one feisty little gay pug yapping at her with concern. Claire Keesey never looked up. A shirtless man eyed Doug from three plots down, and Doug bashed him with a look, starting back quickly to his car, the mystery of Claire Keesey clouding his mind.

  10

  Stained

  DUE TO A QUIRK OF either geography or city planning, the C branch of the MBTA Green Line subway made twelve stops along a three-mile straightaway between Boston's Kenmore Square and Boston's Cleveland Circle-- all of them in the town of Brookline. The old-fashioned trolleys ran aboveground there, on tracks that cleaved the length of Beacon Street. At the St. Paul stop stood a half-block-long, three-story Holiday Inn hotel with a glassy corporate atrium, where on four Tuesday mornings each year the Boston Bank Robbery Task Force and associated agencies assembled for a breakfast meeting.

  The BRTF was formed in late 1985, at a time when alliances of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies routinely failed due to conflicting mandates and general bad blood. It was a shotgun marriage: the Massachusetts region had seen fifteen of the nation's sixty-five total armored-car robberies in that year. By the early 1990s, the task force had halved that number-- significant progress, but not enough to shake Boston's title as the Armored Car Robbery Capital of America. Gains had also been made in reducing the number of bank robberies, pushing the regional total below two hundred per year, and showing a whopping 73 percent clearance rate, as compared to 49 percent nationwide.

  The full-time investigative arm of the BRTF, headquartered at Lakeville, was composed of five FBI agents, two Boston police detectives, and three Massachusetts state troopers. Today's informational meeting included associated members of the Massachusetts Department of Corrections, the Cambridge Police Department, a guest speaker from the Drug Enforcement Administration, liaisons from every major area bank chain and armored-transport company, and a representative from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston-- all sharing information and identifying trends over croissants and cranberry juice.

  That morning found Frawley unusually impatient. He had spent the entire day before in his Cavalier with Dino, shadowing a Northeast Armored Transport truck on a tip from the Organized Crime section. Fifty-four stops at super-markets, convenience stores, and nightclubs throughout Saugus and Revere, and they'd be back at it again tomorrow-- leaving him little time to pursue the Brown Bag Bandits from the Kenmore Square heist.

  Frawley was a doodler and a good one. As the suit from the Federal Reserve Bank outlined concerns regarding the Big Dig-- the Central Artery reconstruction project that included, as part of its ten-year overhaul of the city's crumbling highways and fallen arches, a major tunnel within a few dozen yards of his institution's gold bullion vaults-- Frawley added hash-mark scarring to the egg-eyed hockey masks lining the margins of his schedule memo. He did them mug-shot style, full-face and profile: two small bean holes for the nostrils, a flat, expressionless slot for the mouth, and the twin tribal triangles at the pits of the cheeks. Tracing the masks was a dead end: a visit to a Chinatown costume store showed him dozens of easily adaptable Friday the 13th party masks staring down from the walls.

  Hunting a disciplined crew was most difficult because it eliminated Frawley's two greatest advantages over bank robbers: their stupidity, and their greed. He could not rely on their compulsion to pull reckless jobs, leaving him fewer opportunites to capture them.

  He wandered back to the raided vault in his mind. The yawning cabinet, the plundered cash drawers: he tried to let that feeling of violation wash over him again. He remembered the bait bills and dye packs left behind, untouched. Pro bank bandits, like practitioners of any arcane craft, were a superstitious bunch. Frawley hadn't touched them either, being superstitious in his own way, himself the student of a dying art. He was the last in the long line of bank detectives. The bloodline traced directly from the first stagecoach Pinkertons to himself. If he couldn't be there at the beginning, he figured the second-best place to be was right where he was, at the tail end. Credit cards, debit cards, smart cards, the Internet: the dawn of the cashless society meant the twilight of the modern bank bandit, and the coming of a new breed. Identity theft and electronic embezzlement were the future of financial crime. The next Adam Frawley would be a pale, deskbound Net-head hunting cyber-thieves with a mouse and a keyboard instead of an Olympus Pearlcorder and a blue Form FD-430. Adam Frawley would soon become obsolete. The techniques, the tradecraft, everything he knew about banks and vaults and the men who robbed them, and all he had yet to learn-- it would die with him, the last bank robbery agent.

  Below the cartoon masks, he sketched the handset of a telephone and connected the two by a coiled wire. This wire was his only tangible lead now. It was the phone company tech the Brown Bag Bandits exhibited, in the Kenmore Square job as well as the others the task force now suspected them of: credit unions in Winchester and Dedham; the Milk Street Pawn cut-in; ATM jobs in Cambridge and Burlington; a co-op in Watertown; two banks just over the New Hampshire border; last September's weekend spree of three Providence storage facilities, for which they had disabled the ADT Security System network across most of eastern Rhode Island; and the nontech armored-car heists Frawley hunched them for, in Melrose, Weymouth, and Braintree. All three-and four-man crew jobs, all of them spread out over the past thirty months.

  Frawley had found fresh wounds running up a telephone pole around the corner from the BayBanks, left there by a lineman's spikes. A Nynex crew in a cherry picker worked for three hours to diagnose and repair the junction-box reroute.

  No one Frawley had talked to inside the Monopoly game that was the booming telecom industry could satisfactorily explain how a thief could locate the particular cellular antenna-- disabled one and a half miles away, on the roof of a Veterans Administration Hospital on Roxbury's Mission Hill-- responsible for bouncing the bank's backup alarm signal to the Area D-4 police station.

  He sketched a cell tower with suturelike antennas, then fleshed out the tower, letting it grow into the Bunker Hill Monument.

  The bleached crime scene, stolen surveillance tapes, and torched work van left them with no physical evidence at all. Frawley's only hope now was that the subpoena would prove out, this one seeking not just Nynex service logs but employee records and home addresses. He would run down any leads involving phone company employees residing in the Town-- possibly opening up the case to a "Charlestown witch hunt" defense at trial, but right now it was all he had.

  On top of all this was the phone call he had received just prior to the start of this meeting, informing him that Cl
aire Keesey had yet again failed to return to work.

  His felt pen moved incessantly, all these things playing inside his head, finding expression here and there in automatic writing: gloved hands aiming BANG! cartoon guns; fat moonshine jugs labeled BLEACH; dollar signs hash-marked with stitching scars.

  He willed himself not to check his wristwatch again as an enormously pregnant DEA agent outlined the positive impact that falling heroin prices might have on note-passers. Apparently a price-and-purity war was raging between the Colombian cartels and the traditional Asian heroin producers, the Colombians gaining East Coast market share by wooing needle-wary smokers and snorters. At $5 per thumbnail-sized bag, street H was now stronger than coke and cheaper than beer.

  Heroin use was also rising in Charlestown, but along with the institutional anachronism of the neighborhood, Townie drug addicts retained their affinity for the bad-boy drug of the late 1970s, angel dust. Dust came sold in small packets, or "tea bags," the powder acting as an anesthetic, a stimulant, a depressant, and a hallucinogen-- all at the same time. Its status as the outlaw drug of all drugs surely accounted for its special appeal within the Town.