No Safe House by Linwood Barclay
“You know what this is?” he asked.
“Oh, great. Yeah, that’s a Mixmaster.”
“Do you know what kind of gun it is, smart-ass?”
“No.”
“It’s a Glock 30.”
“Well,” I said. “So that’s the plan. That’s always been the plan. You’re going to shoot everybody.”
“No. At least, not at the beginning.” He leaned across the seat so the gun was no more than two feet from me. “You got any idea how to use one of these things?”
“Jesus, Vince.”
“Do you?”
“You pull on that thing there.” I pointed to the trigger.
He grasped the gun in his right hand, then with his left slid back the top. “That’s how you tell if there’s a round in the chamber. And this is how you remove the magazine, not that that matters.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Just shut up and listen. There’s no safety, you understand? Once you put your finger on the trigger, the safety is off, and once you squeeze, the goddamn thing goes off. If you can figure out how to use this one, you can figure out any one of them. It’s not brain surgery.”
“You’re giving that to me?”
“No.”
“If you’ve got a second one in there, I don’t want it.”
“I don’t,” Vince said. He held the gun on the top of his right leg.
“You’re going to walk into this meeting with a gun.”
“I am. I’ll have it tucked into my belt where they can see it.”
“They may not like that,” I offered.
“I ’spect they won’t.”
“If there’s more than one of them, they’ll just take it off you.”
“That’s what I’d do if I was them,” Vince said.
“You’re not Bruce Willis in Die Hard. You haven’t got another one taped to the back of your head.”
“I know.”
“And you haven’t got a gun for me. I’m not going to be hiding behind some tombstone covering your ass.”
“I know that,” Vince said.
“So you’re going to walk into this meeting knowing you haven’t emptied out all your houses yet, not knowing whether you’ve got what they want or not, and you’re going to let them take that gun off you?”
“I’m counting on it,” he said.
I kept my foot on the gas. I was starting to think Vince was the one Cynthia should have told not to do anything stupid.
“Vince, I swear, if—”
“You trust me?” he asked.
I laughed. “Seriously? You co-opt our cleaning lady, hide money in our house, won’t tell us what really happened to Stuart, and you’ve got the nerve to ask if I trust you?”
Vince went quiet briefly.
Then he said, “Like I told your kid, Stuart was killed in the house. By someone other than Grace. I had my guys text her today with Stuart’s phone, so you’d think he was still alive and back off. But you didn’t.”
“What did you do with him, Vince?”
Another pause, then, “After Grace phoned Jane, Jane phoned me, filled me in. Me and Gordie and Bert swooped in, found the kid. Took a bullet right about here.” He touched his left cheek, close to his nose. “Died quick, I’d guess. Wrapped the kid up in plastic, put him in the trunk. Cleaned the place up best we could, intending to go back, do an even better job, fix the window, which is still wide-open. House probably full of goddamn squirrels and God knows what else by now. We checked the attic, to see if the money and whatever was still there, and it wasn’t.”
Again, I asked, “What did you do with him?”
Vince looked my way. “We fed him to the hogs.”
That left me speechless.
Vince filled the void. “He’ll never be found.” There was sadness in his voice.
I managed to find some words. “And Eldon?”
“I killed him.”
For a second time within ten seconds I had nothing to say.
“He took the news badly,” Vince said. “I mean, who wouldn’t? I understood that. I expected that. But he started accusing me of doing it. Said he was going to the cops. He was out of his head.”
Long pause. Made me think I’d suggested for the last time going to the police.
“You said the future for me was bleak. You’re right. These assholes who left their stash with me, if it ends up I can’t get it all back, well, they’ll get over it. I don’t really give a shit about that. But Eldon”—he shook his head—“that was the end of the road for me, I think. I don’t know if I knew it at the time, but I do now. I’m done. I’ll get Jane back, and then, what happens happens.”
I still had nothing to say.
“You laughed when I asked if you trusted me. So I’m laying it all out there. That’s what’s going on—that’s what I did. You don’t have to like it. But it’s the truth. So when I tell you I’m going into this meet with a plan, I want you to trust me on that. So do you?”
My mouth was dry. “Yes,” I said.
“I know what you think of me. I know you think you’re better than me, and maybe you’re right. You think I’m this unfeeling piece of shit, that I got no heart, and you might be right about that, too. You want the truth? I wish I was a better man.” He paused. “Like you. But I’m not. This is what I am. I can’t pretend to be anything else. But it doesn’t mean I don’t give a shit. I do. About Jane. Pull in here.”
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
“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.
As we were taking the few steps to the car, Vince caught my eye and smiled.
FIFTY-EIGHT
TERRY
ONCE we were all in the car and Wyatt had put into the trunk all the bags of money and other assorted items that had been recovered from the homes Vince had used as safe-deposit boxes, Vince tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Get us out of here and go left on Cherry. When you get to Prospect, go left.”
I did as I was told.
“So, I’m curious,” Reggie said. “How do you do this? You hide the money in regular people’s homes, right? But is it without their consent, or are they in on it?”
“They don’t know,” Vince said.
“Brilliant. But then how do you keep them from stumbling onto it? If you put it in the walls, between the studs, you’d have to cut into drywall, do all kinds of repair, paint, that kind of thing. I mean, if you were going to leave something there for ten years, that’d be okay, but it’s not like that, right?”
“Attic,” Vince said. “Under the insulation, usually.”
We no longer had a ladder with us. I hoped, whatever house we were going to, the attic was going to be easily accessible.
“Two men, brothers,” Vince said. “Logan and Joseph. They’re with you.”
“Yeah,” Reggie said. “We all left some money with you to see where it would end up. And you’re right about the GPS. Every time we gave you money, we watched it go to a different place. But we had no idea how many spots there are. If it was just one, we could have handled this some other way. In the end, it made more sense to grab your kid and get you to bring it all to us.”
Was Vince thinking what I was thinking? If they knew where some of the money had been stashed, maybe they’d been the ones who’d hit the Cummings house last night. They’d scored there, but it wasn’t as big a score as they’d thought it would be.
“How’d you hear about me?” Vince asked.
“One of your other customers. Goemann. He was hiding some things that didn’t belong to him. Took them from my uncle. Couple hundred thousand, and the vase. Said he entrusted them to you, couple of weeks ago, because he figured my uncle would come after him before he could sell them to another interested party. How would Goemann have heard about you?”
“He been staying with some girl whose biker boyfriend mentioned me to him. At least that’s what he said.”
“Go on with your story.”
“So, Goemann fills us in on this unique banking service you offer. We asked him which house the stuff was hidden in, figuring maybe you told your depositors that, but he said he didn’t know. Me and Wyatt pressed him on that, and he came up with this house where a couple of old retired teachers lived. Turns out Goemann just pulled the address out of his ass, because we searched that house from top to bottom. Attic, too.”
The Bradleys. These two had murdered Richard and Esther Bradley. Reggie and Wyatt were more than a couple of crooks trying to rip off another crook. They were stone-cold killers.
Vince said, “Hang a right here.”
I did. Now we were driving through the old downtown, along Broad Street. A minute later, we were on Golden Hill.
“Left up here,” Vince said, “and then stay on Bridgeport.” To Reggie, he said, “Now I’ve got a question for you.”
“Go ahead. We’re all friends here.”
“That was a lot of seed money you put in. Maybe not the biggest deposits I ever had, but cumulatively that was a chunk of change.”
“Well, first of all, we’re getting it all back, aren’t we?” she said. “But even if we didn’t, we did have some money to throw around. Ever heard of filing bogus returns to the IRS?”
“Let me guess,” he said. “Rip off identities, file returns in their name that claim decent refunds, have them sent to a PO box.”
“More or less. Wyatt here—he’s my husband—is the brains behind that.” I glanced in the mirror, saw the man smile.
Reggie continued. “We got refund checks coming in pretty steadily. Great line of work. Not like robbing a bank. You don’t get hurt. Maybe some RSI, all that time you have to spend at the computer, but other than that, it’s great. That’s Wyatt’s baby. I take on other jobs that are more physically demanding.”
“Like killing people?”
“Whatever.”
“So why this, then?” Vince said.
“Hmm?” Reggie said.
“Ripping off what’s in my houses, all this bullshit, when all you want is what Eli left with me.”
“Like I said, it’s a favor for my uncle. Getting back what belongs to him. But you can see how this has turned into a golden opportunity. It’s like fishing with nets. Maybe you’re just out for salmon, but if you end up with a ton of lobster, you don’t throw it back into the ocean.”