The Freeport Robbery Read online

  Mosley smiled. “Kelly’s talking in sentences now.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. The teachers at Clear Skies are amazing. It’s been less than a year, and you wouldn’t believe the change. At her old school—don’t get me started. Every year she fell farther behind.”

  “Must cost a fortune.”

  “One-on-one tutoring isn’t cheap. Even with the scholarship, money is tight.”

  “Is Kelly’s father helping?”

  “That rat bastard? He fell out of the picture a long time ago. You don’t want to be that asshole, Aaron. You’ve got to make time for your kids.”

  He nodded. Then he reached over and fingered the gold cross hanging at her throat. She leaned forward to kiss him, but he let go of the necklace and shifted his head. “I thought you were going to spend the night,” she said.

  “I have to catch the red-eye.”

  “It’s not because your wife found out about us?”

  “Is that what you think?” He took her chin in his hand and gave her a quick kiss before he stood up. “I don’t blame you. I’m the one who cheated on my wife. My timeline is just too tight tonight.”

  “The one thing I feel bad about is you losing your kids.”

  “Don’t. Everything will be fixed up before you know it. Ten days, max. When you swoop in for the arrest, it’ll more than make things right.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go.”

  Mosley walked him to the door. They kissed again. “Be careful,” she said, “and if things go sideways, don’t try to fix it yourself. Call me right away.”

  Back at their apartment, Ron turned on the late news on the TV in their bedroom while hanging up his clothes. “Breaking news. Robbery at Premium Security Transit,” the newscaster said.

  Ron stepped out of the closet in his underwear and his unbuttoned shirt, picked up the remote, and turned up the volume. “Nicki.”

  Nicole came into the bedroom wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts, her toothbrush in her mouth. The newscaster continued, “Police and FBI responded to gunfire at the Charles Bay Freeport this evening, where at least one item, a rare art object in transit to the Peter Damascus Sculpture Museum in Los Angeles, was stolen. There will be more information after an inventory of Premium Security Transit is completed.”

  Ron turned off the TV and threw the remote down on the bed. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  Nicole went into the bathroom, rinsed her mouth, and came back. “So Aaron really did screw us.”

  Ron picked up his smartphone and redialed Rickover. The call rolled over to voice mail. “Still no answer. I’m going to kill him in so many ways,” Ron said. “Stealing back something that was stolen is one thing, but we would never take a straight-up job stealing art, and Aaron knows it. You can’t sell the stuff. There’s too much notoriety. With the media coverage, the Feds are going to be all over this. This is exactly why we don’t steal from civilians. And then sending that crew to rob us so he wouldn’t have to pay us.”

  “Let’s get out of town. Deal with Aaron later.”

  “And run where? We’re bound to be on surveillance footage somewhere. Did you always have your mask down? What about driving across the tarmac? What about after we ditched the shirts? And let’s not forget about the mechanic we met at the gate area. The FBI is going to put everything under a microscope. As soon as they get our pictures, they’ll be plastered all over the country. We won’t be able to work anywhere. Our only chance is to get the casket back before the Feds settle on us. Once the casket is returned, there’ll be no incentive for them to keep working the case, and they’ll need to move on to something hot.”

  “Okay,” Nicole said, “so we pack a bag tonight in case the whole thing blows up, and we find Aaron and squeeze him.”

  Mosley locked her front door and wandered back into the living room, trying to decide what she should do about Aaron. She looked at his wine glass sitting next to hers on the coffee table, and she saw him sitting there on her sofa. He talked a good game, but he was grasping at straws. The idea that he would make supervisor even if he arrested Philips was ludicrous. She couldn’t think of a single supervisor at Metropolitan Assurance Company who didn’t have a management degree of some kind. And he didn’t have the slightest idea of what was really going on. He’d have a coronary if he found out that Philips was the source of the money she used to pay her daughter’s tuition at Clear Skies. She picked up his wine glass and drank off the last of his wine. Maybe she’d be able to help Aaron from the periphery, keep him from getting himself killed or arrested or fired. They were friends, after all. And his kids and his ex were counting on him. She set his glass down. That’s what she would do. Her daughter had to come first, but she’d help him as best she could.

  She got out her extra phone. “Mr. Philips? It’s me. Rickover is setting a trap for you.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m on it. I’m trying to keep you in the clear.”

  “He’s dealt me in—wants me to make the arrests.”

  “Is that right?” The line was quiet.

  “Mr. Philips?”

  “I’m here. Give me a second.” The line was quiet for a few more minutes. “This is what I want you to do. Go to Nohamay City. Do your normal thing. Check in with Clare.”

  “He’s got the casket, so we can probably get your money.”

  “Let me worry about my business. Some of my guys are going to clean up this mess. You just go there and be ready. When we need you, we’ll be in touch.”

  The line went dead. She looked at the screen on her phone. How did everything get so complicated? She felt guilty about Aaron. She’d made friends with him because Philips had asked her to find out what he knew, but she’d started sleeping with him by accident. On the day she took Kelly to live at Clear Skies, Kelly had started wailing and banging her head against the wall in the lobby when she left her with her new resident counselor. Her old school, where they didn’t have enough staff to help her, was the only home Kelly had ever known. She loved her caregivers. So even though Mosley knew she was doing the right thing, she felt like a traitor to her daughter. Driving back into town, she couldn’t face being alone in her condo.

  She called Aaron, who met her at Davy’s Bar and Grill to talk shop, and they started pounding down drinks. She didn’t remember coming home that night. She woke up at dawn snuggled up against Aaron on the living room carpet with her blouse unbuttoned and her underwear missing. Of course, she hadn’t forced him to cheat on his wife. But she should have cut off the sex before it became a crutch in their relationship and Melody became suspicious. That had been a mistake. He’d screwed up his marriage, and now she was his closest friend. Poor bastard didn’t stand a chance. If only her insurance provided coverage for private residential programs. Or she really did have a scholarship. Still, she had to stick with the choice she had made. Kelly was doing so much better. She couldn’t send her back to that overcrowded public facility.

  Ron and Nicole parked on the street in front of Rickover’s apartment building, a five-story in a run-down apartment complex. Rickover lived in a studio apartment on the first floor. Kids’ bikes were chained to the rusty wrought-iron fence that ran along the sidewalks, and trash bags were piled up on top of the steel trash cans that were set out at the curb. One of the outside lights was broken, and the building door was slightly ajar. Ron went in ahead of Nicole, his hand around the .38 he carried in the flap pocket of his sports coat. The hall was deserted. The carpet was worn and stained, but the hall smelled of fresh paint. “So, what’s it going to be?” Ron whispered. “Good cop, bad cop? Gun to the head? Empty his pockets?”

  Nicole shrugged. “We’ll just have to see where he’s at. If he’ll play straight, we can play straight.”

  “I think you’re a little optimistic, but I’ll follow your lead.”

  They counted off the apartment numbers until they came to Rickover’s apartment. Ron pressed the doorbell, waited, then pressed again. No footsteps. He knocked. Waited. No
footsteps. Nicole looked down the hall. “All clear.”

  Ron picked the deadbolt. It was surprisingly simple, considering Rickover’s profession. He opened the door slowly. “Aaron,” he said.

  He stuck his head in and turned on the light. The place was a pigsty. The bed was unmade. Dirty clothes littered the floor. Old newspapers, pizza boxes, and soft drink and beer cans were strewn across the sofa and coffee table. The kitchenette counter was completely covered in dirty dishes. Nicole looked in the closet. Shoes on the floor, clothes hanging on hangers. Ron looked in the bathroom. Clutter on the counters. Dry bath towel on the rack. He came back into the living area. “Nothing here.”

  “It would take an anthropologist to figure out what normal was in this mess.” Nicole picked up a cereal bowl off the counter and set it back down.

  “So all we know is we can’t find Aaron. Either he’s selling the casket, or that rip-off crew dumped him in a hole somewhere before they came for us.”

  Nicole opened the refrigerator. “Milk is still good for another week.”

  “Meaning what? The only other lead we have is eagle tattoo guy. We’ve got to find him. And we won’t be able to do that tonight.” Ron frowned. “The next two days are crucial. I wish we had more to go on, but this is all we’ve got.”

  They walked back out onto the sidewalk. The street was quiet. “Going to be hard to find eagle tattoo guy,” Nicole said. “All we know is he has red hair, a beard long enough to stick out of his mask, and an eagle tattoo on the back of his hand.”

  Ron used the fob to open the car. “We know he’s a big guy in good shape, military-trained, who’s an armed robber who hangs out with a crew of armed robbers.”

  Nicole glanced over her shoulder as she opened the car door. “Check out sporting goods guy in your rearview mirror.”

  Ron adjusted his mirror to look. A good-looking black guy with a conservative haircut, dressed in chinos and a red golf shirt, was standing at the bus stop. “Okay.”

  “Doesn’t quite fit in around here, does he? Now look at his brother sitting on the stoop, one, two, three houses up the street, yellow siding with white trim. Big guy, black-framed glasses, khakis, and a green and blue-striped shirt.”

  Ron readjusted his mirror for driving and glanced toward the house that Nicole had indicated. “If I see one more, I’m going to think I’m in a sci-fi movie. We must not be the only ones checking up on Aaron. Let’s get out of here before they take notice of us.”

  3

  On the Run

  Nicole came into the living room dressed for the day while Ron was loading his breakfast dishes into the dishwasher. Outside, the occasional beeping of a garbage truck backing into an alley interrupted the low hum of neighborhood traffic. “Good morning, sweetie.”

  She sat on a stool at the counter. Ron shut the dishwasher, poured coffee into two cups, and set one cup in front of her. “How was your sleep?” he asked.

  “Slept great. Not even stiff this morning.”

  “I’m still creaking a little bit, but I’m getting there.”

  “Any new thoughts on today’s program?”

  He shook his head. “We’ve got to just start at the beginning. Make this as simple as possible. Find the casket. Change our luck.”

  She sipped her coffee. “Got your phone?”

  He dug his smartphone out of his pants pocket and passed it to her. She called Rickover’s phone. No answer; no voice mail. She called Rickover’s office.

  “Metropolitan Assurance Company.”

  “Aaron Rickover, please.”

  “One moment.”

  The phone rang. No one answered. She let it ring. Finally the call transferred to voice mail. She hung up. “He’s not answering his phone, and he’s not at work.”

  “Let’s take one more look at his apartment.”

  The on-street parking was still full on both sides of the street in front of their apartment. Across the street, two moms—one white and one black—sat on a porch drinking coffee while their toddlers rode identical tricycles up and down the sidewalk. A contractor’s truck was already in the driveway of the white house halfway up the block. Builder making an early start. Then Nicole noticed a hard-muscled blond man, dressed in chinos and a blue golf shirt, standing at the corner as if he were waiting for a taxi. “Don’t look, but there’s another sporting goods guy.”

  “You know him?” Ron asked.

  “Never seen him before.”

  They got into their car and circled around the block. There was another white man—brown hair, beer belly, and a red and blue rugby shirt—walking down the alley behind their apartment building.

  Ron shook his head. “There’s no way we were followed back from Aaron’s.”

  “Let’s get out of here. See if they follow us.”

  Ron drove into the downtown business district. The traffic was stop and go. Crowds of pedestrians crossed at the corners when the lights changed. Nicole looked up from the map on her phone. “Take a right into the alley halfway up the next block.”

  The light changed. Ron drove up into the next block, saw the alley, and turned. It was one-way, with dumpsters and cars parked along the edges on both sides, but there was enough room for them to squeeze through. Nicole was watching out the back window. Ron pulled up to the next street. “Take a left,” she said.

  “Going to be a bitch,” he replied. A produce truck rolled by. He saw a gap between a minivan and a red Camry, stepped on the gas, shot across the oncoming lane, and hit the brakes while the Caddie was at an angle in the stopped traffic in the right lane.

  “Good job,” Nicole said. “Didn’t see anyone, but if they were behind us, they’re screwed now.”

  They drove north until the businesses began to have their own parking lots, pulled into a Caffeination coffee shop, and parked facing the street. “Okay,” Ron said, “let’s think this through. Were those guys really watching our apartment?”

  “The black guys at Aaron’s were definitely on stake-out.”

  “Yeah.”

  Nicole continued. “If I hadn’t seen them, I wouldn’t have noticed the white guys. Might have thought they were apartment-hunting or something.”

  “Maybe they were.”

  “The way our luck has been running? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “If they were set up on our apartment, how did they find us? They didn’t follow us from Aaron’s, and they weren’t cops.”

  “Nobody was following us from the airport, right?”

  Ron nodded. “There’s no way anyone could find the taxi. And the homeless guy got the clothes. If those guys belonged to Aaron, we would have been ambushed as soon as we got home.”

  “Aaron…” Nicole’s eyes lit up. “The phone. Where’s the burner Aaron gave us? The one with his phone number on it?”

  “The phone? Jesus. You think they’re tracking it? I’m sorry, Nicole. This is on me. The phone’s up in our apartment on the table by the door, along with the all access IDs for the employee-only areas of the airport.”

  “So we know how, but we don’t know who. What do you want to do?”

  “We could scoop up one of the sporting goods guys, but that’s just going to show our hand. We need to get back into our apartment before we leave town, so we’re just going to have to wait them out. In the meantime, we stick with the program. Aaron’s place is probably a dead end. So we’ve got to find Eagle Tattoo, and get the casket back to the museum before the Feds get active. Who knows? Maybe Eagle Tattoo knows our guys.”

  “Okay,” Nicole said. “Might as well set up in a corner booth here.”

  “You’re reading my mind. Large coffee, good Internet connection to get some research done—got a lot of phone calls to make.”

  Grace Mosley sat at a computer monitor in the security center at the Charles Bay Freeport offices going through the video surveillance footage from last night, running the footage at triple speed. The security manager, a sandy-haired man with a jowly, retired-cop face, sat i
n the chair next to her, stroking his red-and-blue-striped necktie. “See? What did I tell you? Nothing on the main cameras. Caught two of them on the right loading dock camera behind Premium Security Transit, but they’re wearing masks. I’m going to say it’s the same two at the perimeter fence, but it’s too far away to be sure.”

  “Anyone else have a look at these?”

  “You’re the first.”

  “Could you queue up the loading dock for me?”

  She rolled her chair back. He reached in front of her to the keyboard, found the file, and opened it. She watched two grainy figures, a man and a woman, come out of the back door carrying a duffel bag, move out of the camera’s sightline, and then reappear behind the utility vehicle. They drew their sidearms. Bullets rained in around them and ricocheted off the concrete wall behind them.

  “That’s some firepower.”

  “Got to be at least three shooters. Assault rifles, judging by the caliber.”

  The firing stopped. They moved out of the sightline again, and then the vehicle disappeared. “But there were no bodies?”

  “None left. Detectives found blood. The truck was up the alley around the corner, all shot to hell. It’s still being processed. Surprised you guys aren’t in charge.”

  “Freeport is a Customs responsibility, so Homeland Security is running the show. We don’t want to get involved if we don’t have to.”

  The manager smiled. “Look, you don’t have to spin me a story. We’re happy to cooperate.”

  “Just trying to avoid a pissing contest.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Mosley stood up and grabbed the back of her chair to roll it up to the desk. “What’s on the fence footage?”

  “Two people moving along the fence that separates the freeport from the private airfield.”

  “But they’re too far away to see clearly. They carrying anything?”