The Freeport Robbery Page 10

  Sleeping with him had definitely been a mistake. It had been completely casual on her part—the word “love” had never slipped into their conversation—but he hadn’t been able to hide their relationship from his wife. It was pretty amazing that he was as good of an investigator as he was when he was such a poor liar. And now he was running this entire investigation on his own so that he wouldn’t have to share the credit, which meant he’d have no backup. He was entirely dependent on her help, and she couldn’t help him when his chances of success were so poor.

  Mosley unlocked the door to the condo, kicked off her shoes, and hung up her jacket in the closet. Clare would be off work in thirty minutes. Mosley went into the kitchenette and looked in the refrigerator. There was a package of pizza crusts in the freezer. She turned on the oven, got out a sauté pan, and sliced up some onion, mushroom, green pepper, and eggplant. She smeared some tomato sauce on a pizza crust while the vegetables cooked and added a teaspoon of garlic and some fresh basil to the pan as the peppers began to soften. Her phone rang. She took the pan off the heat and wiped her hands on the kitchen towel.

  The incoming call was from Philips. “Yeah?”

  “Got a call from your boy a little earlier.”

  “He told me.”

  “This foolishness has gone on long enough. You’re going to turn him over to my guys.”

  “Why don’t you just let me handle him? If you don’t show, and your guy doesn’t take the money, he’s going to be boxed in. He can’t go to the authorities without compromising himself—he stole the Cellini. Besides, the thieves he hired to steal the casket are snooping around. I’ve got them stealing it back from the buyer, so you won’t go away empty-handed.”

  “You’re not listening. Who do you work for?”

  “I work for you.”

  “You’re damn right you do. I shouldn’t have to explain myself to you. You want your kid in a retard group home getting fucked over the lunch table by some high school dropout?”

  “Mr. Philips, I…”

  “I didn’t think so. If you want her to stay at that country club for the developmentally disabled, you do what you’re told. Where’s he at?”

  “I’ve got him in a room at the casino hotel.”

  “Room number?”

  “703.”

  “I know you’ve been fooling around with him. You need some special time to say good-bye, you better get it done.”

  “Okay.”

  “And Grace, I like you. Please don’t fuck with me. We both know how that will work out.”

  Mosley put her phone down on the kitchen counter. Her hands trembled. That conversation had gone completely wrong. Why had she thought Philips would respond to reason? All she had done was create doubts about herself. Aaron had misjudged the stakes he was playing for and now he was going to die. Mosley laid her hands on the edge of the counter and inhaled and exhaled as slowly as she could: one, two, three times. Fear was not her friend. Fear would wreck her plans.

  She looked at the sautéed vegetables and the pizza crust. She needed to focus on that, regain her composure so that she could think clearly. She spooned the vegetables onto the crust, spread them out evenly, and sprinkled mozzarella cheese over them. She studied the finished pizza. That was better. She poured a glass of red wine from a bottle that was already open. She knew she was riding the tiger working for Philips. She’d always known she couldn’t trust him, but she’d thought their relationship was special—that she was in a different category from his other employees. Now she knew just how wrong she was.

  She sipped her wine. He could use her any way he saw fit, and there was nothing she could do about it. She’d already compromised herself by accepting his money. He could report her to the FBI, threaten Kelly, set his men on her. She had to find a way out. Being a courier was one thing; being an accessory to murder was unconscionable. When would he ask her to tamper with evidence? Or even commit murder herself?

  The pizza. She’d forgotten all about it. She opened the oven and slid it inside. She shut the oven door, picked up her wine glass, and took a big gulp. Aaron had made his own bed. She’d tried to warn him. She couldn’t think of any way she could still help him, but there had to be some way she could help herself. She couldn’t go to her supervisor. She would lose her job, maybe land in jail. She was on her own. She needed leverage to use against Philips to guarantee her safety and keep the money flowing. Getting that leverage—that had to be her priority.

  Clare came in the door wearing her blackjack dealer’s uniform. “Hey, Grace.” She slipped off her fringed red vest and tossed it onto the back of a chair and unzipped her black skirt and stepped out of it. “What smells so good?”

  “I made a pizza. Thought you might like something to eat. It’ll be ready in a few minutes.”

  Clare unbuttoned her white shirt as she walked toward the kitchenette. “What a night. My field of vision is full of playing-card afterimages. Is there any wine open?”

  Mosley poured her a glass and handed it to her over the countertop. “There you are, sweets.” Mosley felt empty and alone. She needed to keep Aaron out of her mind. He wasn’t her responsibility, Kelly was. There had to be a way she could turn the tables on Philips. She tried to smile. She was so glad she would be snuggling with Clare tonight.

  6

  Cracking the Vault

  Ron and Nicole were eating a late breakfast at the same coffee shop they had eaten in yesterday. Their server, a young black woman with her hair in twists and a silver ring in her right nostril, had just refilled their coffee. Ron put his hands around his cup. “The toast here could be a little darker, and I don’t know what’s up with the aftertaste of the butter—I mean, it’s still edible, but it’s not quite right. The coffee, on the other hand, is perfect.”

  “You need to put some jelly on your toast,” Nicole replied. She picked up a piece of bacon with her fingers, took a bite, and set it back down on her plate next to a half-eaten omelet.

  Ron dabbed a corner of toast in the puddle of egg yolk on his plate and pushed it into his mouth. He washed it down with coffee and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “I won’t need to eat again until supper.”

  He looked across the table at Nicole. “So let’s go over last night one more time, just to be sure of the details. He couldn’t close the deal?”

  She smiled. “The equipment worked fine, but at the last minute guilt got the best of him. He cried; I helped him through his confession, held him like a baby until he fell asleep. Then I slipped out of there. Didn’t think I’d be able to search the room without waking him up. Left a little note with my phone number.”

  “You’re falling for him. I can tell.”

  “Look, I admit there’s some heat, but I’m not falling for him. I feel sorry for him, okay? The love of his life is more or less dead, and he’s taking it hard.”

  “Yeah, right. Are you sure he’s not playing you?”

  “There’s no game in him. You should have seen him in the bedroom. He was like a virgin on his wedding night. He didn’t even get me out of my underwear. If he told me he’d never slept with anyone other than his wife since they got married, I’d have believed him.”

  “But he does have feelings for you?”

  “You saw the text he left me asking me to dinner tonight. He definitely wants me; that’s why he’s so guilty and confused.”

  “You are an absolute magician.”

  “Come on, Ronny, a regular guy just isn’t a challenge. That’s why I think we’re wrong about him being a crook.”

  “He bought the jewelry box. Nobody made him. How much other stolen stuff has he bought over the years?”

  “I’m just saying that we want to be careful.”

  “Of course we want to be careful. But don’t let your emotions get the best of you. We’ve got to get the casket from Denison. It doesn’t matter if he thinks it’s stolen or not. We need to hand it over to Mosley and disappear. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be setting up so
mething for the future if we play it right.”

  “I just want to get out of here. There’s too much going on—the FBI and the mob crew—for us to get sidetracked.”

  “Well, Mosley’s off our backs for now. Why don’t you go back to the hotel and rest up for tonight. I’m going to try to find out where the mob guys are set up. We need to know more about them if we’re going to stay out of their way.”

  James Denison sat in a chrome-framed chair pulled up to the side of his wife’s bed at the Nohamay Alternative Medicine Hospital. A bank of medical machines, their sensors tethered to various places on her body, sat to the left of her bed. Two bags of liquid, one clear and one pale green, fed into the IV in her arm. He sat close enough to her to hold her boney, bruised hand while he watched her emaciated face for signs of consciousness. A red stocking cap covered her bald head. Her complexion had a yellowish tinge. Even though an oxygen tube was clipped to her nose, her breathing was ragged. Her eyelids fluttered, but her eyes didn’t open. He spoke to her anyway.

  “We’re doing everything we can do. I know this is hard—harder than anything you’ve ever had to do—but the docs say there’s still hope, so you’ve just got to hold on.” He patted the back of her hand. “I talked to the kids this morning. Skip is angrier than Bell. He told me I was just being selfish bringing you here. That I needed to make my peace with the truth and let you go, just like he had. You know how he can get. He ambushed me with the ‘I love you, Dad, but’ thing like he was staging an intervention.”

  His eyes teared up. “It’s hard seeing you like this, honey. I understand why it was too hard for the kids to go on. They can’t imagine how you could possibly get better. But after you’re well and back at home, they’ll thank me for not giving up.” The tears started down his face. “You’re going to love the Cellini casket I got you. It’s an amazing piece of work. I almost brought it with me just in case your eyes were open. But it’s here at the locker, so you’ll be able to see it first thing. I know you always wanted a Cellini. I wish I had got you one for your birthday last year. I don’t know what I was thinking. But, anyway, I’ve got you one now. Just keep getting better.”

  Ron walked Nicole back to their hotel and watched her go inside to the elevators. The afternoon was heating up. His shirt was already wet where the Glock sat against his back under his sports coat, but he was happy to be carrying the gun. They hadn’t seen any of Philips’s crew since yesterday morning, and the only one they’d actually seen then had been outside the warehouse where they’d found Aaron, so Ron decided that was as good a place to start as any.

  He moved quietly down the street between the warehouses. The only sounds were the laughing, yelling, and whooshing of water carried on the breeze from the Rising Rapids Waterpark across the boulevard. When he reached the Crenshaw Industries warehouse, he looked in through the window in the door. There was no one in sight. He picked the lock, cracked open the door and listened. Nothing. He slipped inside and walked around the pallets of boxes stacked in the middle of the room. The green metal locker stood open. He looked inside. It was clean: no personal effects, no scraps of paper, not even any dust. He examined the boxes on the pallets. They were supposed to contain computer monitors. He went back into the gap in the pallets where he and Nicole had hidden yesterday, pulled down a box, and opened it. Inside was a computer monitor. So this appeared to be a legitimate warehouse. Maybe it was part of a money-laundering scheme, but there was no obvious contraband here now. He closed the box and set it back in the stack with another box on top of it.

  He left the warehouse, locking the door behind him, and walked down the street toward the airfield. Six airplane hangars stood in a row, their back ends facing the cluster of warehouses. Ron walked nonchalantly up the far side of the western-most hangar. To his right, a few hundred yards away, on the other side of a chain-link fence, was the public airport. He peeked around the front of the hangar. The overhead doors were closed. Looking down the row, he saw that only two hangars were open, with private jets parked in front of them. The nearer one had a Crenshaw Industries logo painted on its side. Two men, one white and one black, came down the steps from the private jet parked in front of that hangar, struggling with the weight of a long, heavy crate they were carrying between them. They lugged it into the hangar. Then the hangar’s door rolled down.

  Ron trotted back to the warehouses and turned down an alley to come up behind the Crenshaw Industries hangar. He slipped up along the side of the hangar until he reached the closest window and peered inside. The two men were opening the crate. Three other men, two black and one white, watched as they unpacked machine pistols, shotguns, and ammunition boxes onto a long table. The men were talking, but the noisy air conditioner hanging in a window at the back of the hangar drowned out their voices. Ron crept up to the next window in hopes of hearing what they were saying. The men were choosing weapons and opening ammunition boxes, but Ron still couldn’t hear them clearly. The rumbling from the air conditioner was still too loud. He glanced down the side of the hangar; there was nowhere closer for him to listen.

  He jogged back into the cluster of warehouses and made his way to the front gate and across the boulevard to the water park. Families were on the sidewalk, and he felt much safer mixed in with them. What were Philips’s guys up to? They weren’t here to rob the casino or the vault at the freeport. Those were fools’ errands. Were they planning to reacquire Aaron? Did they think they were up against a rival crew? They had staked out the Charles Bay apartment when they were looking for Aaron, so Philips must have thought he and Nicole were connected with the casket, but it seemed like Philips’s guys didn’t know he and Nicole were here, and he needed to make sure it stayed that way. Time was running short. He fell in behind a family of four going back to their hotel in their swimsuits—mom in a beach cover-up, dad wearing a T-shirt, two boys with towels around their necks and flip-flops slapping the sidewalk. Ron got out his phone to call Nicole.

  “Hey, honey. I found our friends. They came in on a private plane.”

  “So they’re loaded up?”

  “Yeah. And they look like they’re going on a hunting party.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Get our business done and stay out of their way.”

  “You sure?”

  He slowed down and let the family get farther ahead of him. “I don’t think they’re looking for us. We’re not that hard to find. I just wonder if they’re willing to kill a Fed to take Aaron back.”

  Nicole and James Denison sat at a small table in the far corner of the dimly lit dining room of the Captain’s Table Bistro, a small, dark wood and stained glass restaurant on the mezzanine floor of the casino hotel. The candle in the center of the white tablecloth cast a flickering light over their dinner dishes. “I thought I owed you an apology,” Denison said. “I acted inappropriately last night.” He rolled his eyes. “I’m sure I made quite a scene. I wanted to thank you for being so understanding.”

  “You don’t have anything to apologize for. You’re going through a difficult time. I looked up the hospital here online. This is your last resort, isn’t it?”

  “Mayo said there was nothing else to be done. But the docs here have an experimental treatment that helps about half the time, and they say Stacey is responding to treatment, so I’m still holding out hope.”

  “What else can you do? You can’t give up.”

  “That’s exactly what I think.” He smiled a crumpled smile. “You’re a very easy person to talk to. I just met you yesterday, and I feel like I’ve known you for years.”

  “Thanks for dinner.”

  “Do you have to go? Do you want to have a drink at the bar? Or would you like dessert?”

  “I know what you’re up to.”

  “What? No, I told you, yesterday was a mistake. I assure you, I—”

  She cut in. “You don’t want to be alone. When you’re by yourself, you can’t stop thinking about the worst. It’s cycling throu
gh your mind, making you crazy. You’re using me as a distraction.”

  He sighed and looked down at the tablecloth. “I must seem so obvious to you. Sometimes all of this is just a little overwhelming.”

  “So let’s go to the bar.”

  When they got up, their server appeared. Denison handed him a credit card and told him to bring the bill into the bar. They went into the adjoining barroom. A few people sat at the dark oak bar near the TV behind the counter, watching a boxing match. The sound was turned down. Soft jazz floated out of the sound system. Most of the booths were empty. They sat away from the TV. The bartender came over. He was a thin, narrow-faced man with steel gray hair. His white shirtsleeves were rolled up to his biceps. Denison looked at Nicole. “Drambuie, neat,” she said.

  “Make mine on the rocks,” Denison said.

  The bartender nodded and left.

  Their server came in from the dining room with their bill, the credit card, and the credit card slip on a tray. Denison glanced at the bill, wrote in the tip on the credit card slip, and signed it. The bartender brought their drinks.

  “Nature calls,” Denison said. He got up and headed toward the restroom. Nicole reached her hand into her handbag, unscrewed the cap on a tiny bottle, looked over to see that the bartender was busy with another customer, slid Denison’s highball glass into the middle of the table, and poured a clear liquid into his glass. Then she pushed his glass back to where it had been. A few minutes later he was back in his seat.

  “Yesterday, when I asked if you were on vacation, you said you were drifting.”

  “Guess I should share a little honesty. Two months ago I got divorced. I was blindsided. Didn’t know it was coming.”

  “That must have been hard.”

  “I have a gambling problem. My ex started running around on me while I was at the casino.” She sipped her drink.