C Box - Blue Heaven

Villatoro found himself looking over.

Newkirk curled his lip. “It’s not like that, man. It was just a conversation. You know how cops do it all the time, try to figure out how bad guys would do a job, so they can prevent it, you know? Sometimes you’ve got to think like a criminal to stop a criminal. Besides, it wasn’t like it was real money out there, like people needed it to feed their families. It was gambling losses. The idiots had already lost it, so it couldn’t have been all that important to them. Gambling money, you know, like all of that cash the state collects from lotteries and shit like that.”

“But it belonged to someone,” Villatoro heard himself say. “It belonged to the owners of the track.”

Newkirk laughed. “Like they didn’t have insurance? You expect me to give a shit about an insurance company? Everybody hates those guys. Turn here.”

“Where are we going?” Villatoro asked, taking another dark two-lane highway.

“Just driving. I told you that.”

Villatoro tried not to sigh, tried not to show that he was beginning to get a bad feeling about this.

Newkirk drank. Then: “Nobody was supposed to get hurt. Shit. That wasn’t the plan.”

At last, Villatoro thought. Newkirk had admitted being involved. This is what he had worked years to hear.

“Me and Rodale figured out the part about putting the gas canisters in the money bags. That way, they could be set off by remote control when the truck stopped at the intersection.

“To start out, we had this big idea that Gonzo and Singer would bust into the counting room wearing masks and make everybody get on the floor. Shit, we had even worked out a deal where Gonzo would pistol-whip Rodale or me to make it look real. But the chances of them driving off after doing that and not being seen by someone or getting caught weren’t good. So Swann thought of the idea of waiting until the security truck was off the park, robbing it there away from everything. It was the best idea, and we went with it.”

“So it was Singer’s idea in the first place?” Villatoro asked.

“Shit, I don’t know whether it was Singer or Gonzo. It didn’t matter. But Singer was in charge, thank God. He wasn’t the kind of guy to rush into anything, either. We talked about the robbery and planned it for a year and a half. We had meetings where we went over everything and tried to shoot parts down. We did a couple of run-throughs at night so we could walk the route and time everything. Once we decided on the perfect plan, it was still another four or five months before we decided to do it. Singer didn’t even want to try it until he could figure out how to launder the money. I hadn’t even thought about it, but Singer was so fucking smart. He said the only thing worse than robbing a place these days was figuring out what to do with all of the cash, because nobody uses cash anymore. That’s when he came up with the idea to create a foundation and to make all of us officers in it. We’d hide the cash and dribble it into legit accounts, not deposit it all at once. Pay ourselves in officer’s salaries and big bonuses. It was fucking brilliant.”

Villatoro wished he was wearing a wire. But if nothing else, even if he never gained Newkirk’s trust, even if the ex-cop later denied everything, Villatoro would know how the robbery happened, who had been involved, where the money was.

“Also,” Newkirk said, tapping the dashboard with the mouth of the bottle, “we had to wait until all of the stars lined up perfectly. A big cash day at the track, me and Rodale on security, Singer and Gonzo off duty so they could trigger the gas and rush the truck, Swann on patrol so he could escort the getaway vehicle to the auto salvage yard, where it was crushed. Remember, no one ever found a car?”

“I remember.”

Newkirk chuckled. “Swann drove Singer and Gonzo and $13.5 million in cash back to L.A. in a police van we took the seats out of and dropped them off at their houses. Imagine that.”

Villatoro whistled. “But a security guard got killed.”

Newkirk seemed to darken. “Yeah, that still pisses me off. Some yahoo tried to be a cowboy. Gonzo had to take him out.”

“His name was Steve Nichols,” Villatoro said. “He had a wife and two children.”

Newkirk didn’t respond at first, just stared out the windshield. “That wasn’t supposed to happen,” he said.

The ex-cop remained silent while Villatoro drove. Finally, Villatoro said, “What about the guy, the employee, who fingered the other employees in the counting room? Why did he do that if he wasn’t involved?”

Newkirk shrugged. He seemed to be losing enthusiasm for telling the rest of the story. “Singer’s boy,” he said. “The lieutenant had something really incriminating on the guy-totally unrelated to the track. Pictures of him dealing drugs, or with boy prostitutes or something. I never did know what it was exactly, but it was bad enough that the guy did what Singer told him.”

“But the employee died before he had a chance to testify in court,” Villatoro said.

“Yeah, wasn’t that convenient?” Newkirk said darkly. “He gets caught in a cross fire while he’s buying a pack of cigarettes at a 7-Eleven. The clerk gets popped, the witness gets popped, and the robber empties the cash drawer and escapes scot-free. All they can see on the security tape is a big masked guy in black walking in and blasting away.”

Villatoro let it sink in. “Gonzalez?” he asked.

Newkirk nodded slightly. “And Swann was the investigating officer.”

Jesus , Villatoro thought. It’s worse than I imagined.

“Creating the charity was a master stroke, I agree,” Villatoro said. “Making small deposits in a bank in northern Idaho never attracted any attention at all for years. The only problem was tracing a few of the hundred-dollar bills back to here. You must not have realized that some of them could be traced to the robbery.”

Newkirk turned, his face screwed up in contempt. “ Of course we knew about the serial numbers on some of the hundreds. Me and Rodale were in the counting room, remember? We knew about that. Do you think we’re stupid?”

“No,” Villatoro said, feeling outright fear rise up in his chest. He tried not to show it.

“That’s where Tony Rodale screwed the pooch,” Newkirk said, his voice rising, his eyes flashing with either anger or tears, Villatoro couldn’t tell which. “He was the treasurer. He made the deposits. Singer had it all worked out. On a schedule, Tony made a cash deposit supposedly collected from random cops in L.A. and other places. But we knew about the hundreds, how a few of ’em were marked. So Tony’s job was to get in his car and drive all around the country to break the hundred-dollar bills in restaurants, or gas stations, or bars, or wherever. He told his wife he was going fishing, but his job was to cash the hundreds and deposit the change later. That’s all he fucking had to do.”

Now, Villatoro started to understand. He thought of the mounted steelhead on Rodale’s wall, thought of the years Rodale had deceived his wife about his absences. Thought of the places of origin from some of the marked bills that had been identified, California, Nevada, Nebraska. All within a day or two driving distance of Kootenai Bay, but far enough from each other that no pattern could be established.

“But the asshole got greedy,” Newkirk said. “Singer noticed that some of the deposits were off, and figured Tony was skimming, which he was. The idiot was using some of the hundreds to bet on football, of all things, with some lowlife bookie in Coeur d’Alene. Tony wouldn’t admit it, of course, but Singer found the bookie and shook him down and proved it to us.”