The Loot (Charlie McCabe Thriller)

by Craig Schaefer

  “Let’s start with a name,” she said.

  “Don’t have one.” He took another step back, three glares hitting him like heat lamps on full blast now. “Hey, everything but! I’ve got everything you need, swear it. C’mon, my feet hurt, and I’m starving. Supper’s on me.”

  Considering they’d picked a chicken joint as their stakeout spot—everybody behind the counter knew Saint, greeting him with a shout as he came in, and Charlie suspected he might own a piece of the place—they only had to go as far as the front counter. The four conspirators camped out in a side booth with a feast spread out on greasy plastic plates: smoked chicken, crispy and black, smothered in rich spices, along with buckets of sweet plantains, mac and cheese, coconut rice and beans, and “island slaw”—coleslaw made from green and purple cabbage, tossed in cool dijon vinaigrette instead of mayo.

  “You got yourself a posse now,” Saint said to Charlie.

  “A posse that landed on the wrong end of a rifle this morning,” she replied. “Did you only sell the C-4 to these people, or did you forget to mention throwing some guns into the mix?”

  “Person.” He speared a chunk of blackened chicken on his white plastic fork. “I only had contact with one person. But he did mention not being alone. And yeah, might have let go of a few extra goodies.”

  “Be very specific,” Dom said.

  He chewed, talking with his mouth full as he thought back to the sale. “Just some treats from a shipment that walked off Fort Dawes about a month ago. One M4 carbine—”

  “An M4, or an M4A1?” Dom asked.

  He quirked a smile. “You single?”

  She stared at him in stony silence until he answered the question.

  “M4,” he said. “Army’s phasing ’em out for the new models; they’re easier to lay hands on right now. Gave the buyers one of those, a couple of Beretta M9 pistols. They wanted Tasers too. Like, four if I could get ’em. Surprisingly tricky. They’re illegal in Massachusetts, but my regular clientele want more permanent solutions to their problems, so I don’t normally keep that kind of thing in stock. Best I could do on short notice was round up a couple of Vipertek stun guns. You gotta press them right against the target’s skin to work; they don’t shoot barbs out like actual Tasers. On the plus side, you can’t miss.”

  Charlie remembered the giant coming after her, black plastic box clutched in his beefy fist. If they’d wanted four of the things, it just confirmed that they were out to kidnap Ellis, not kill him, and that had been the plan from the very start.

  All except the one person in their crew who had built that chair bomb.

  “Anything else?” she asked.

  “That’s the whole goody bag.” Saint paused. He nodded at his chest. “I’m gonna reach into my hoodie right now, pull out something to show you. Cool?”

  As he sat in the booth next to him, Beckett’s eyes were hard as flint.

  “Cool,” Beckett said.

  Saint slid out his cell phone and laid it on the table, shoving aside the basket of plantains to make room.

  “I’ve got a webcam set up in my office, up in the rafters. I don’t record audio or video . . . don’t want anything that’d incriminate me, if the wrong people got hold of it . . . but I like to take glamour shots of the folks who grace my doorstep.”

  He tapped the phone and called up a photograph. Saint was smart: the hidden camera was angled high and back, perfectly poised to give a full-face shot of his visitors while keeping him, so long as he stayed on his beanbag throne, just outside of the black-and-white image.

  “Son of a bitch,” Dom breathed, leaning close. Charlie nodded in grim agreement.

  It was the driver of the broken-down Jetta. The elderly man sat, placid, eyes earnest, his panama hat perched on his lap.

  “You know him?” Saint asked.

  “Not by name,” Charlie said. “Tell us about him.”

  “We met twice, once to set up the deal, once to make the handoff. His accent was local, but I’d never seen the man before. I asked him for a reference, how he knew about me. He gave me a name: Seth MacIntyre, who used to be a regular of mine.”

  “Used to be?” Beckett asked.

  “Liquor-store holdup went bad. Seth’s doing a twenty-year stretch at Souza-Baranowski.”

  “So this guy”—Charlie tapped the photo on the screen—“he was incarcerated with him?”

  “Or he works there, guard or an admin or something. Kind of hard to have a candid conversation with my former client at the moment. I did manage to smuggle word in and out, grapevine kind of thing, but it just boiled down to a vague thumbs-up. Guy checked out, as much as anybody in this trade checks out.”

  Charlie frowned. She stared at the photograph and matched it up with her memory. “Did he say what he wanted this stuff for?”

  “Hey, I operate on a strict don’t-ask-don’t-tell basis with my clientele. None of my business, don’t want it to be my business. I can tell you this, though: man wasn’t looking to start a war. He specifically asked for guns for crowd control.”

  “Like for an armed robbery,” Dom said.

  “Right. In, out, and bloodless. Also, he wanted his crew to carry concealed. See, I tried selling him on shotguns. You want somebody to hit the floor and stay there, sticking a shotgun barrel in their face gets the job done every time. We waffled back and forth, I showed him all his options, and he ended up going for the brace of M9s and the one rifle.”

  Beckett leaned back in the booth. Dark lines creased across his brow as he thought it over.

  “It fits this morning,” he said to Charlie and Dom. “Detour us toward the building’s front entrance, nice and open, wave guns around to get everybody down, stun Ellis, and grab him. If it went right, they’d have been in and out in less than a minute.”

  “I’ve seen worse attempts,” Dom said.

  “One last detail,” Saint said. “You might find this interesting. He didn’t pay cash.”

  “I doubt you take IOUs,” Charlie replied.

  He chuckled and shook his head. “Not even from my own mother.”

  He put the phone back in his hoodie. His hand came back out with his fingers curled over his palm. He held his hand out over the table, turned it upward, and opened it.

  A tiny stone glinted in the middle of his palm, catching the light and scattering it, dazzling in Charlie’s eyes.

  “Man paid me in diamonds,” Saint said. “Tiny ones, like this. Ranging from zero-point-zero-three carat weight to point twenty-five, which is about four millimeters diameter. Not going to pretend I knew any of that; I had to bring in a specialty fence and get myself an education. Already turned ’em into ready cash. This one, I saved as a souvenir. Might get an earring made.”

  “Did he say why?” Charlie asked.

  “Said it was all he had to barter with. Not only that, he asked if I knew anybody who might convert the rest of his stash into spendable green. He didn’t say how many rocks he had, and I didn’t press him.”

  Saint made the diamond disappear. This time, his hand came out with a scrap of paper. He set it on the table and shoved it an inch toward Charlie.

  “I gave him a list of locals who might be willing to make a deal. This list. Follow up, find the fence he ended up doing business with—you might find the man himself.” Saint paused, meeting Charlie’s gaze. “That’s all I’ve got. Every last bit of info on your mystery man in the panama hat. So. We good?”

  “If he shows up again,” Charlie said, “you’ll let us know?”

  “If he shows up again, I’ll have my boys sit on him until you get there.”

  Beckett didn’t budge from his seat, keeping Saint penned in without a word. Charlie looked his way. She gave him a tiny nod.

  Beckett rose. He stepped aside, and Saint slid out, his overlong hoodie ruffling behind him. He flashed a smile at her.

  “See you around, Charlie McCabe.”

  Beckett sat down again as Saint pushed through the chicken joint’s doors a
nd out into the bustling dark. The trio fell into a contemplative silence.

  “You’re all thinking what I’m thinking,” Dom said.

  “He met Saint’s former client in prison,” Charlie said, her voice slow and careful as she put the pieces together. “He looks like he’s in his seventies, maybe ten years older than Sean Ellis. Gets out of the joint and immediately goes looking for guns. He doesn’t have cash, but he does have diamonds stashed away. He’s angry at Ellis about a past injustice, and he wants ‘Kimberly’s share.’”

  “Mr. Ellis has been a very naughty boy,” Beckett said.

  Charlie swirled her plastic fork in the last remnants of her mac and cheese, dragging trails of cold sauce around the plate.

  “Sure sounds like he screwed the wrong person, back in the day,” she said, “and now that skeleton buried at the back of his closet is clawing its way out. We need to dig into his past. Way past, like, before he was the head honcho of Deep Country.”

  “I’ve got a friend at my old precinct who doesn’t mind slipping me the occasional low-key favor,” Dom said. “Give me the number you took off that van’s plate, and I’ll have him run it through LexisNexis. I’m positive the van was stolen—they couldn’t be dumb enough to bring their own wheels to a kidnapping—but it’s worth making sure.”

  Beckett reached over and plucked Saint’s scrap of paper off the table. “While you’re doing that, I’ll run down the list of fences who handle loose diamonds.”

  “By yourself?” Charlie asked. “Could get dangerous.”

  He favored her with a thin, eager smile.

  “It’s been a long day,” he said. “Maybe I need to blow off a little steam.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  Charlie’s father was sound asleep, in his bed for once, not the recliner, by the time she made her way back home. Part of her wanted a chance to talk to him, another stab at détente. Part of her was just exhausted and relieved to be done with the day. She trudged into her bedroom and collapsed onto the stiff mattress. For the first time since her homecoming, despite the oppressive silence of the countryside, she drifted off in no time.

  She woke with the dawn, took a shower, changed into her gray sweats and running shoes, and hit the open road on foot. Her destination was a little over a mile away: the Richard Sugden Library, in the heart of Spencer. The big redbrick building was nestled on a quiet residential street in the town’s historic district, and the sight of it greeted her with memories of childhood. She jogged up the front steps, catching her breath, and stepped inside.

  More memories were waiting for her amid the crisp, clean air and warm scent of old books. Charlie had been a library rat from the time she was old enough to read, spending hours wandering the tight aisles and exploring the stacks, discovering the big wide world outside her tiny town through the pages all around her. Familiar as this place was, she needed a guide in the wilderness. She made her way to the reference desk.

  The woman behind the desk, reviewing library records through steel-rimmed bifocals, was an unexpected sight. “Mrs. Frinkle?” Charlie asked.

  The elderly woman looked up, blinked, squinted at her . . . then her eyes went wide. “Oh, my stars. Charlene?”

  She gave her an awkward smile. “In the flesh.”

  Mrs. Frinkle rose up, skirting the desk’s edge, and pulled her into a frail hug. She stepped back, clutching Charlie’s forearms, and looked her up and down.

  “Well, isn’t this a lovely surprise. I haven’t seen you since the week you shipped out. Are you home on leave?”

  “Home to stay,” she said. “Why are you working here, though? I thought you’d be teaching history class until . . . well, forever.”

  “Oh, the school offered me an ‘early retirement’ package—early, my left foot—and I know a good deal when I see one. Still, you know me, never been a homebody, have to stay busy. So here I am. And what brings my favorite student to the library?”

  “I need to do some research,” Charlie told her. “Problem is I don’t know where to start.”

  She gave her former history teacher a quick rundown of what she was looking for, omitting the bloody details. Frinkle was curious, still sharp eyed, and a bloodhound to the core, but she graciously allowed Charlie to dance around her more probing questions. Twenty minutes later Charlie sat ensconced in front of a reference computer, with a low stack of reference books on finance at her left-hand side. The monitor lit up, the long rectangle of the screen flickering to life and displaying a twenty-year-old issue of the Boston Globe, digitized from the library archives. As Charlie’s search got underway, Frinkle regularly walked by and added fresh handpicked books to the growing stack.

  Charlie went on the hunt. She had brought a legal pad and a pen, and she jotted notes as she cross-referenced names and dates. She pursued Sean Ellis back through time, a silent predator on his trail. The trail led her back to Deep Country’s inception back in 1971 and to the gaping mystery of Sean Ellis’s past.

  A mystery she slowly pieced together, dragging the bones out of his closet one by one and building a skeleton.

  Someone pulled a chair up beside her. Not Mrs. Frinkle. Dom leaned in and squinted at the computer screen.

  “You’ve been staring at this all morning?” she whispered. “God, the eyestrain. Could they have made the print any smaller?”

  “Worth it,” Charlie whispered back. “Check this out: Sean Ellis dropped out of college at Boston University back in 1970. In ’71, he started Deep Country with a single coal mine. Still, beaucoup cash to get it up and running.”

  Dom frowned at her. “Who gave start-up capital to a dropout?”

  “According to his official bio, an anonymous angel investor. Any luck running the van plates?”

  “Nada. As expected, it was reported stolen from a parking lot about three blocks from Deep Country’s corporate HQ. Police found it dumped curbside around two this morning. Nothing left behind, no prints, no leads. So, this ‘anonymous’ angel investor . . .”

  Charlie hooked her fingers in the air, drawing quotes. “‘Anonymous,’ right. Ellis never took the company public. Still hasn’t, to this day, even though he could make crazy retirement money off a stock offering.”

  “Public companies have to file public financial reports,” Dom said.

  “Bingo. He’d still have to square things with the government, but there’re loopholes inside loopholes on that end. Important thing is he’s never allowed his records or his past to come under serious scrutiny. His official bio is nothing but vague hand waving and PR talk.”

  “Then the man in the panama hat comes around, after being locked away for who knows how long,” Dom said. “With a stash of diamonds and wanting a missing share. You connecting those dots?”

  Charlie nodded. “There was no angel investor.”

  “Our client is a jewel thief,” Dom said.

  “He ripped off his partner, walked on the crime, and laundered the loot. Then he turned it into start-up capital.”

  Mrs. Frinkle set Dom up with a second reference computer, in the booth next to Charlie’s, and they took a new tack. Moving from the financial section to the front page news, they probed through the annals of Boston starting in 1971 and waded their way backward, week by week, month by month. The hours stretched on. Charlie felt like she was inches from cracking the case, mouth watering as she closed in on their quarry. Then . . .

  “Gotcha,” she breathed.

  Dom scooted her chair over. Charlie pointed to a grainy headline from February of 1969. Diamond-Exchange Robbery Leaves Four Dead, More Missing.

  “We got our guy?” Dom asked her.

  Charlie scrolled the page down, and a black-and-white photograph slid up on the monitor. He was over forty years younger, but the man being frog-marched in handcuffs down a snowy flight of granite stairs had the same face, the same eyes. They’d found the man in the panama hat.

  Professor Gordon Kinzman, the caption read, arrested Tuesday evening in connection with the
violent robbery.

  “I’m gonna call Beckett,” Dom told her. She patted Charlie’s shoulder as she got up. “See if you can make some copies of this stuff. Print everything.”

  Beckett rode into town in his shark car. The muscle-bound Skylark prowled into the parking lot across the street from the library. He kept the engine and the air-conditioning on as Dom and Charlie—Charlie clutching a manila folder stuffed with fresh printouts to her chest—bundled into the car.

  “Check it out,” Charlie said. She passed a couple of key news clippings across to the front seat. “Kinzman was an economics professor at Boston University—”

  “Same school Sean Ellis attended,” Dom said, “and dropped out of.”

  “The professor also headed up an unofficial student union, the SPD—Students for Peace and Democracy. It was the late sixties, and they were heavy into protesting the Vietnam War. Kinzman had a reputation as a Svengali. The SPD only had a few members, but the parents, after . . . well, after what happened that February . . . said none of their kids had a history of being political radicals until they fell into the professor’s orbit. After the Manson murders in the early seventies, more than a couple of news outlets compared Kinzman to Charles Manson himself.”

  “I take it they didn’t stick to the ‘peace’ part of their name,” Beckett said.

  Charlie passed him another clipping. “They did not. They needed operating capital to fight the power, and campus bake sales weren’t cutting it. In 1969, Kinzman organized a heist. They knew a winter storm was coming in, a bad one, and he figured they’d raid the Washington Street Diamond Exchange using the weather as a cover. The plan was to hit early in the morning just as the storms were coming in, rob the place blind, and slip out under snow cover before the authorities—who would be swamped with emergency calls—could catch up with them.”

  “Great plan, except they screwed up,” Dom said. “One of their members was a janitor at the exchange; he said he could get them in, and that’s why they chose the exchange in the first place. They didn’t figure a manager would show up early, or that a pair of cops were getting their morning coffee right next door.”