Linwood Barclay - No Safe House

We were coming up on the cemetery entrance. I slowed, turned the wheel, drove slowly through the gates. Vince said, “They said look for a Beemer.”

We moved at about five miles per hour along the narrow paved roadway that wound its way through the gravestones. I looked off to the right and saw a car, and a woman standing by the driver’s door.

“Beemer,” I said.

“She looks familiar,” Vince said. “Her name — at least, the name she gave me — is Reggie.”

I looked for the next lane to the right, made a careful turn so as not to drive over the grass. A hundred feet up, the lane was blocked by the BMW.

“When you’re about five car lengths away, stop.”

And that’s what I did.

“Kill the engine,” Vince said.

I did that, too.

Reggie was slim, brown hair, about five-five, dressed in a black pullover tee and a pair of jeans that looked like they cost more than everything I was wearing, including my phone. She’d moved since I’d first spotted her, her butt perched on the hood, arms folded across her breasts. I thought I could see the outline of a cell phone in her right front pocket.

“I don’t see Jane in the car,” I said. “Unless she’s crouched in the back or in the trunk.”

“They won’t have brought her,” Vince said. “They got to know they got the money first.” He squinted. “This woman made a deposit with me a week ago.” Quiet for a moment. “Why go to all that trouble, then kidnap Jane?”

“Fishing,” I said.

“Huh?”

“They were dropping their line in, seeing where the fish were.”

He thought about that. “If the bags were baited with GPS... They were trying to figure out where I hid the stuff, but there were too many locations. That might be it.”

He slipped the Glock into the waistband of his pants, off to the side by his hip, where it would be in plain view. He opened the passenger door slowly, put one foot down on the ground.

“You coming?” he asked.

I hesitated.

“I’ll ask you again. You trust me?”

I nodded.

“Don’t worry. You just roll with things. Follow your instinct. When an opportunity presents itself, go for it.”

“What kind of—?”

“Let’s go.”

He got the other leg on the ground, kept the door open, and stepped out beyond it.

“Hey,” he said to the woman. “Nice to see you again, Reggie.”

She nodded, then tilted her head toward me, still behind the wheel, both hands gripped to it. “Who’s he?” she asked as I got out of the truck.

“He works for me,” Vince said.

“He a cop?”

Vince actually laughed. “Yeah, he’s with the FBI.”

“You bring it all?” Reggie asked.

Vince reached into the truck and brought out the Walgreens bags by the handles, three in one hand, four in the other.

“Where’s Jane?” he asked.

“She’s fine.”

“I didn’t ask how she was. I asked where she was. You need to open your fucking ears.”

She looked taken aback by that. She pushed herself off the car, but didn’t move any closer.

“We’ll release her when we’ve got what we want. Don’t even think of pulling that gun.”

“You never know what you’re walking into, dealing with the criminal element,” Vince said.

“You think I came here alone?”

“No.”

“You’re right. You’re being watched right now. You touch that piece and you’re dead and so’s your kid.”

I wanted to look around, see whether I could see who else was here, but resisted the temptation. I didn’t think she was lying.

“I understand,” Vince said.

She looked at me. “You carrying?”

“What?” I said.

“She wants to know if you have a gun,” Vince said.

“No,” I said.

Reggie kept her eyes on me for several seconds, then turned them back on Vince. “Bring it over.”

“Why don’t you come and get it?”

She stared at him. “Get your flunky to bring it to me.”

Vince looked my way. “Do it,” he said.

I came around the front of the truck, took the bags from him, walked them over to the woman, set them on the ground in front of her. Then I went back and took my post by the truck.

The woman glanced down into the bags, then back up at Vince.

“There’s something you need to know,” Vince said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s not all there.”

Reggie looked at him with stunned silence for a moment. “What?”

“I wasn’t able to collect everything. There wasn’t enough time. There’s one place remaining with a pretty fucking large sum. Maybe that’s the one you’re after. I don’t know. I get the idea maybe you’re not just looking for money. One of these bags, there’s a lot of crystal in it. That what you wanted?”

Reggie got down on her knees and started rooting around in the bags, one after another. When she’d searched the last one, she looked up and said, “Shit.”

“You don’t see anything you like?” Vince asked her, like she was looking at shoes.

“I see lots of money. That’s good. But there’s something in particular I’m looking for.”

“What?”

She hesitated. “It’s... a vase.”

Vince was thinking. “Yeah. A kid named Goemann left it with me. Kind of powder blue, about this high?” He held his hands almost a foot apart. “Wedgwood or something, with little cherubs or some shit on the side.”

“That’s it.”

“Along with a lot of cash.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“You’re in luck. That’s in the place I didn’t have time to get to. But I can still get it. So how do you want to handle this?”

“If there’s so much stashed there,” Reggie asked, “why didn’t you go there first?”

“The house wasn’t empty. But it is now. Woman who lives there works an afternoon nursing shift at Milford Hospital. Lives alone, no kids. House is safe to enter now. Have to get up into the attic. Tell you what. You wait here. We’ll be back in an hour or so.”

She stood up. “I’m not letting you out of my sight. Not now.”

“So where does that leave us?”

“We come with you,” Reggie said.

“I don’t know about that.”

“No, that’s what we’ll do. We come with you to the nurse’s house, get the last of it. Then we let Jane go.”

Vince let out a long sigh, looked at the ground, kicked a small pebble. “I don’t like it.”

“That’s the way it is.”

After a moment’s thought, Vince said, “Okay.”

“And you lose the gun,” she said.

“I don’t know about that.”

Reggie looked off to the right, beyond the truck. “Wyatt!”

Vince and I turned and saw a man step out from behind a broad-trunked oak. He had a gun in his hand that was pointed straight at Vince.

“I remember you, too,” Vince said. “You made a deposit as well. Quite a few, between you two, and the others. Let me guess — GPS?”

“Put your gun on the ground,” Wyatt told him.

Vince slowly took the gun out of his waistband, leaned over, and when the gun was a foot off the ground, he let it go. It dropped noiselessly into the soft grass. Wyatt motioned Vince to step away from the weapon, then leaned over and scooped it.

“You need to check him, too,” Reggie told him, indicating me. Wyatt handed her Vince’s Glock, which she trained on me while Wyatt patted me down.

“I told you I didn’t have one,” I said to Reggie after Wyatt backed away from me.

“Okay, then,” Reggie said. “Looks like we’re good to go. We’ll take my car.” She handed me the keys. “You drive.”

Wyatt told Reggie to get up front with me while he got in the back with Vince. They’d each be able to keep a gun pointed at us, he said.