Jeffery Deaver - Double Cross

Sweet.

It was going to be so sweet.

Things started out just fine and everybody was going to be really rich and I mean really. And then the problem.

Usually life’s been like it was in high school ten years ago with me and the guys humping and sweating and doing jobs that work out pretty good and pretty much nobody gets hurt too bad and we score some cash here and get truckloads of something there. But every once and a while something big shows up you don’t expect it and the world opens up. Like you’re in a bar downtown near the Renaissance Center and this blond girl all top heavy and in black stockings and sprayed up comes on to you even when you’re not exactly the tallest guy in the room or the richest and you think it’s a joke but it isn’t and you wake up together the next morning and she hasn’t copped your wallet or anything.

I mean things like that do happen.

So here it is. A month ago Marco who’s Papa’s nephew and me snatched this guy and drove him to a forest preserve outside Detroit. Where Papa was. Marco called this guy Trunk Man because of where we tossed him when he got drove to the preserve and we all laughed at that. Marco is funny. He has a good mind. Quick, I mean.

Trunk Man owed Papa large and hadn’t paid for a while. Standing in his socks because we kept his shoes he kept crying saying he couldn’t come up with the vig let alone the repay and “was totally up against it.” Which nobody knew or cared what it meant.

Anyway we were in the forest near this barbecue thing made out of brick. The whole place was empty being early in the morning and it was a Tuesday. Papa wasn’t saying threatening crap to Trunk Man. He’s not that way but Dave who we also work with was there too. Dave is blond and big and a former soldier and Marco is dark and big not black but just dark. Dave and Marco moved up close and were looking at Trunk Man and then at the barbecue like we could start a fire and burn off his hair or feet or something if he didn’t hop to with the money. Which I don’t know if Papa would do but it got Trunk Man’s attention. And me, I just kept staring at him and that maybe freaked him out too because I have a face that’s like a wolf sort of with narrow eyes and long hair that’s blond and people’ve said I look scary.

But before it came to burning anything Trunk Man stopped crying and told Papa he had an idea. He worked in a brokerage firm and he said in the firm safe file, which they don’t have cash in like you’d think, they just got in some things called bearer bonds, which mean they’re like cash. Now, I’m a Mastercard and Visa and Andrew Jackson kind of guy so I don’t know bonds from squat but Papa was interested and it turned out you could sell them like anywhere and even better they earn interest up until you sell them. The interest isn’t like vig but it’s not bad, Trunk Man said.

Trunk Man told us he could perp about a million in these bonds. A million dollars! And the best part was that they didn’t mature for three months, which meant that we could boost ’em now and nobody would even go looking for them in the safe until August. Trunk Man would cover our tracks doing stuff with computers or whatever.

Papa is about sixty and round and has a chest like a beer keg and he walked up to Trunk Man looking scared like a scared puppy and he ought to be and Papa leaned close and asked some questions about finance stuff I don’t understand and then he nodded and Marco and Dave got him back into the trunk and drove him home.

We three of us got together and talked about it over coffee that afternoon with Papa and his lawyer. The lawyer would find a buyer on the Q.T. Papa’d get the biggest cut because he was Papa but Marco and me and Dave would split three hundred K. Oh and Marco and Dave made plans to wait till closer to August and then pitch Trunk Man off a roof somewhere and make it seem he’d stole the bonds for himself because there was no way for Trunk Man to use a computer to hide a missing million and even I knew that. Marco said without smiling, which he does, “He’s not gonna cover any tracks. He’s gonna cover the sidewalk.”

Marco, hilarious. I was saying.

The next Sunday Trunk Man went into work at the brokerage place. It was empty. Marco came to pick me up in wheels he’d boosted from the airport, which is a lot easier than people think. I like Marco. He’s only a couple years older than me but being Papa’s nephew and with good connections in the organization he’s like a way older brother. He’s tall and works out and takes his time answering questions and is just cool. I wish I was him. I try to do that exercise stuff and boxing but I’m not really into it. I’m good at video games though. And I know sports. A teacher once said when it comes to some things not everything I excel.

He showed up in the perped wheels, a Nissan, a few years old. My father, rest his soul, told me that it used to be driving a Jap car on the streets of Detroit you might expect a rock in the windshield or at least get some fingers lifted your way. Not anymore. Half of this car was probably built here. Or somewhere in the US. Things change.

I got in and we drove downtown and it was pretty deserted, being the weekend.

We parked a couple blocks from the brokerage house and waited till Trunk Man called. He was pretty low level at the company and didn’t have the code to the safe file but that’s one of Marco’s talents. He can get into anything or almost anything. Marco and me were in suits and ties, which was funny ’cause we never wear them except for weddings and funerals, and sunglasses too. We wore golf hats, which was what businessmen might do planning to play some links or whatever they call it after working on Sunday morning. So it’d be hard to recognize us.

Trunk man was a nervous little shit though not really little. He was six inches taller than me but weighs like 140 or something.

We went right to the safe file and I kept a lookout in the hall. The place was pretty stupid with posters up that said things like “Teamwork” and “Achieve” above pictures of sunsets and surf. Don’t ask me. Marco opened the safe in all of five minutes. Trunk Man found the bonds and Marco took pictures, which he sent to Papa and his lawyer. They texted back that they were good.

Marco and me left in our hats and keeping our heads down.

The building had CCTV in the lobby but Trunk Man has checked and the video was overwritten every week. Because the brokerage place wouldn’t know they’d been robbed for three months there wouldn’t be any evidence of Marco and me being there.

There were cameras on the streets of course because we’re talking Detroit and we know for a fact that those tapes are never rewritten. You could’ve asked my father. So yeah in three months when Trunk Man’s covering the sidewalk and the bonds are found missing the gold shields from Detroit PD’ll look at the tapes but all they’ll see is two guys they can’t see clear and a car a couple blocks away. They’ll check the tags and see it’s stolen and long gone. And just give up and the insurance company’ll pay the million and that’ll be it.

So there we were driving back home with a million dollars!

Which would’ve been so sweet.

But then the problem happened.

All of a sudden there was a ton of traffic and we saw the streets were closed. I panicked and was thinking it was a roadblock because there were a lot and lot of cops. But then we saw it was just a rally with hundreds of people holding signs and singing or chanting. Something about black rights and gay rights and trans rights and brown rights, which I guess are Hispanics, I don’t know. I relaxed but Marco said rule number one is don’t hang around a place with a million cops in a stolen Nissan with a Meijer shopping bag full of a million dollars in stolen bonds.