Rick Mofina - Perfect Grave

“Come on!”

Brady glanced behind them at the two figures gaining on them, then back at Sperbeck, who yanked on his arm. Brady saw the gun in his hand and struggled. They splashed across a creek, the cold water reaching up to Brady’s thighs.

They scrambled up the meadow, up a hill toward a clearing.

Brady’s legs ached. His ears roared from the blood rush.

The men were getting closer.

Cresting a hill, they’d come to a cliff and a dead drop of some two hundred feet. Sperbeck turned. The men were thirty yards away.

Sperbeck had nowhere to go.

He pulled Brady closer to him, edging back to within ten feet of the cliff.

The men were twenty yards away and separating. One going left. One going right.

Sperbeck used Brady as a shield and placed his gun to the boy’s head.

“You’re going to give me your keys and let me walk out of here.”

Henry Wade leveled his Glock at Sperbeck.

“It’s over, Leon. Put your gun down and release the boy.”

“I’m taking this pup to hell with me to meet his old man and his girlfriend!”

They could hear the distant thud of a helicopter.

“It’s over.”

“It’s not over! The bitch nun stole from me! She knew this pup’s father was holding the rest of my money. I FUCKING WANT IT! I paid for it with twenty-five years of my life!”

“We all paid!” Henry inched closer, lifted his safety, his gun never wavering from Sperbeck’s head. “We all paid for what happened that day!”

Henry met Brady’s eyes, wild with fear, his heart thumping in time with the distant chopper. Brady struggled against Sperbeck, only to feel his hold tighten into a crushing death grip, forcing Brady to freeze in order to breathe.

“Leon, let him go! Don’t make the same mistake again!”

“I’m not going back to prison! I’m not going back into my coffin!”

Jason rolled two rocks at Sperbeck’s gun side, distracting him as Brady suddenly squirmed free, scrambled two, three, five, seven steps. Henry Wade, in the stance, waved him to the ground, Brady dove, hitting the ground hard.

Two shots split the air.

Sperbeck spun, stumbled back, collapsed at the cliff, slid over completely. He screamed as he stopped himself at the final moment with one hand gripping a sharp edge of rock as his gun tumbled two hundred feet to the bottom.

The rock was cutting into him, blood webbed down his arm.

“Help me!”

A shadow blocked the sun above him.

“Who shot the boy that day, Leon?”

“Please.”

“Who shot the boy?”

“You-”

“I want the truth.”

“You, you missed. It was me.”

“I want the truth!”

“It’s true! They were going to execute me!”

“Jay, help me get him up!”

Henry Wade got on his knees, gripped Sperbeck’s arm, and reached for his shoulder. Suddenly, Sperbeck looked into the sun.

“No, I can’t go back! I can’t! Let me go!”

With his free hand Sperbeck pulled out his knife and slashed at their hands. They fended him off, while struggling to pull him up, but he drove his feet against the rock. Their grip grew slippery as blood gushed from their wounds.

“Let me go!”

Sperbeck continued stabbing at them until he broke free.

As he fell he extended his arms, plummeting fifty, seventy, one hundred feet before his body dropped into the yawning mouth of a jagged open crack. As he plunged deeper into its narrowing darkness, sharp rock walls peeled off his clothes and skin, transforming him into a lifeless, bleeding mass entombed in granite.

A perfect grave.

Henry looked into the black hole that had swallowed his demon.

Then he turned to Brady, who was standing in the light. The boy had started to cry. Henry held him as the helicopter approached. Bloodied and exhausted, Henry felt Jason’s arm around his shoulder.

“I heard what he said, Dad. It’s over. It’s all over.”

Henry nodded and pulled them both tighter.

I n the days that followed, Rhonda and Brady Boland were questioned.

They were investigated by Grace Garner, Dominic Perelli, FBI agents, and lawyers from the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and detectives from several other agencies.

The case had so many emerging complexities no one was quick to sign off.

After interviews and analysis of the new evidence on the histories of Jack Boland, Leon Sperbeck, and Anne Braxton, investigators concluded that Rhonda Boland had zero involvement with the original heist and its outcome.

Rhonda Boland was never aware of the stolen money, nor did she gain from it. In fact, she and her son were victimized because of it.

These were the new facts: Some twenty-five years ago in Seattle, Washington, Russell Scott Schallert, of Newark, New Jersey, alias Jack Boland, his girlfriend, Chantal Louise Segretti, of Montreal, Canada, and Leon Dean Sperbeck, of Wichita, Kansas, while disguised with ski masks, committed the armed robbery of $3.3 million from an armored car operated by a small subsidiary of U.S. Forged Armored Inc.

After shooting and wounding the armored-car guards, the suspects separated and fled. Schallert and Segretti absconded with the cash. Seattle police officers Vernon Pearce and Henry Wade, among the first to respond, encountered Sperbeck, who took a hostage, Timothy Robert Hope, aged eight, of Seattle, Washington.

Sperbeck fired upon Pearce, then at Wade, who returned fire. Hope was killed in the crossfire by Sperbeck.

After Sperbeck’s arrest and trial, he refused to identify his accomplices and avoided the death penalty by admitting that his actions contributed to Hope’s death. No evidence emerged to identify the other suspects and none of the stolen cash was located, until now.

During an interview with Brady, Grace Garner twigged on something he’d said about his father always digging deep to add nutrients.

“Did you ever see what was in those plastic-wrapped bricks?”

“No. He had them wrapped pretty good.”

Upon further study of the old landscaping records, Brady was able to lead police to a dozen locations of former clients where, after securing warrants, they unearthed scores of plastic-wrapped bricks. The bricks were bundles of cash. Serial numbers confirmed they were from the old heist.

The total: $894,380.

Since the story broke with Sister Anne’s murder, it never moved from the front page of Seattle’s big dailies.

And the Seattle Mirror owned it.

Jason Wade scored exclusive after exclusive and the paper’s circulation climbed. In the wake of Sperbeck’s death, it remained Seattle’s lead story for weeks. It led to others.

After reading about Rhonda and Brady Boland’s hard life, a lawyer, a single mom herself, from a high-powered firm stepped forward to represent her and Brady pro bono. She made convincing closed-door arguments to several parties that Rhonda and Brady had a strong case for civil action.

Without assigning blame, it was agreed that authorities should have been suspicious of Sperbeck’s activities upon his release. It was also agreed that information provided by Rhonda and Brady Boland was critical to closing the case. Therefore, they qualified for the standing reward which amounted to a percentage of the recovered funds.

“Rhonda and Brady Boland almost lost their lives helping clear this case,” the lawyer said.

American Eagle Federated Insurance, in cooperation with state and federal officials, provided Rhonda Boland with $250,000; in addition, the insurance company agreed to provide the Bolands with full medical coverage for life.

Brady underwent the risky surgery to remove his tumor. The operation was successful, and before long he was back at the park playing basketball with Justin and Ryan.