The Loot (Charlie McCabe Thriller)

  ALSO BY CRAIG SCHAEFER

  THE DANIEL FAUST SERIES

  The Long Way Down

  Redemption Song

  The Living End

  A Plain-Dealing Villain

  The Killing Floor Blues

  The Castle Doctrine

  Double or Nothing

  The Neon Boneyard

  THE REVANCHE CYCLE

  Winter’s Reach

  The Instruments of Control

  Terms of Surrender

  Queen of the Night

  THE HARMONY BLACK SERIES

  Harmony Black

  Red Knight Falling

  Glass Predator

  Cold Spectrum

  THE WISDOM’S GRAVE TRILOGY

  Sworn to the Night

  Detonation Boulevard

  Bring the Fire

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Craig Schaefer

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542042697

  ISBN-10: 1542042690

  Cover design by Kaitlin Kall

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ONE

  Between Logan International Airport and Spencer, Massachusetts, most of it on an old warhorse of a Greyhound bus that stank of diesel and midsummer sweat, three people eyed her olive fatigues and thanked Charlie McCabe for her service. The last was a little boy, couldn’t have been older than five, who dutifully recited the words he’d been taught while his parents looked on with expectant pride from two rows down. The adults who said it got a polite and perfunctory “You’re welcome.” The child, she was more patient with.

  “Do you want to be a soldier when you grow up?” she asked him.

  He stared at his shoes. “I dunno.”

  “It’s not for everybody,” she said.

  Charlie was never sure what to say when strangers thanked her. She had a vague suspicion, more often than not, that the person offering thanks was doing so out of some reflexive and imagined duty. Like she was an object on a pedestal, a symbol, not just a person who had volunteered for a tough job. Still, they meant well, and that was enough to buy a smile even if it didn’t always reach her eyes.

  She’d gone halfway across the world to do a job. Now it was eight years later, she was eight years older, the job was done, and the future yawned out ahead of her like a storm front rolling over a gray and endless plain. Big and empty, no signposts to mark her way. She’d become a creature of regimen, discipline, structure. Now she had absolute freedom, same as any other civilian, and no idea what to do with it.

  She decided to go home. It was just a place she knew.

  The bus dropped her off at the edge of nowhere. A cab took her all the way to the middle, carving a winding path through the hilly Massachusetts countryside. Big woolly elms shrouded the road, and October Glory maples spread their scarlet boughs, red as pomegranates under a darkening sky. It had been ten minutes since they’d left the highway and another ten since they’d seen any other cars on this stretch of road.

  The cabbie nodded up at the gray clouds. “They say we might get a nor’easter.”

  “Wrong time of year,” Charlie said.

  He glanced at her in the rearview. He took in her neatly pressed cammies, the wispy blonde bangs poking out from under the brim of her cap.

  “Nothing happens when it’s supposed to anymore. Rains when it should snow, snows when it oughta rain, hot when it’s supposed to be cold. Y’know what I think? The weather got weird when we started messing with the crops. The bees eat that GMO stuff; they get all confused. It’s the, what do you call it, the butterfly effect.” He took another look at her. “Thanks for your service.”

  “Uh-huh.” She stared out the window.

  He dropped her off on the outskirts of Spencer, on a one-house dirt road at the bottom of a tall forested hill. A crude dugout ran along the base of the hill like a World War I trench, built to catch rainfall instead of bodies. She stood at the end of a stubby gravel driveway with her olive duffel bag heavy on her left shoulder. A humid summer breeze kissed her tanned cheek, carrying the smells of cedar and fresh-cut grass. She breathed it in.

  Charlie hadn’t seen her father in three years.

  The loose gravel crunched under her boots. Up ahead, the doorknob rattled, and the front door swung wide. She braced herself for her father’s face, not sure what she’d see in his eyes. He had company, instead, letting themselves out. Two men she didn’t recognize, not locals. Boston men, with scornful eyes and jackets too heavy for the summer wind. One wore a knit cap, and his red and puffy face bore a hairline scar along the stubble of his jaw. He was built like a steel piston, short and squat and hard. His partner was all gristle, tall and lumpy, like life had chewed on him for a while before spitting him back out again.

  The man with the scar stared Charlie up and down, lingering longer than he had to. “Ma’am,” he politely said, only meeting her eyes in passing. The other didn’t say a thing, ghosting past her on the way to their car. They’d parked at the driveway’s edge, arriving in a sleek black Mercedes E-Class. They left the same way. Charlie watched them drive off, her brow furrowed, until their car was a purring phantom on the dirt road’s horizon. She turned back to the house.

  Her father’s ranch house was a mirror of the man who lived inside. It had been new once, young, proud. Now the weathered eaves were sagging, stoop shouldered, and the ivory plastic siding had faded to dirty gray. The only other car in the driveway was her dad’s beater, a ’93 Ford pickup with an Easter-egg pastel paint job and a back bumper held on by spools of knotted twine.

  She studied the truck. She studied the house. She stalled until she couldn’t pretend she wasn’t stalling.

  Charlie rang the bell. No answer, but she could hear footsteps shuffling around inside and the muffled blare of the television set. She pushed the button again.

  The door groaned op
en. “I told you people—” the man behind the door snapped. Then he saw her face and froze like a kid caught stealing from a cookie jar. “Oh. Charlie.”

  “Hey, Dad.”

  It had been three years since her last visit stateside, but it felt more like thirty. Her father had a greasy paunch, sunken eyes, a head with more brow wrinkles than hair. He squinted at her like he’d just woken up and wasn’t sure if he was still dreaming.

  “Didn’t know you were on leave.”

  She turned her ankle, boot toe rubbing on the welcome mat. “I’m, uh, not. I’m out.”

  “Out-out? For good?”

  She lifted one hand in an awkward wave. “Charlene McCabe, newly minted civilian.”

  He fell silent, not sure what to say to that. Then, “How long are you gonna be around this time?”

  “Just a few days,” she said. “While I get my feet back under me. Look, I don’t want to impose—I mean, I can go to a motel—”

  He stepped aside and nodded her in. “Guest room’s still yours.”

  He shut the door behind her, sealing her in the dusty mustiness of the ranch house’s living room. She could barely see the space for all the ghosts. There was the line of pictures on the flagstone mantel, vacation photos of her, her father, her mother, one smiling and still-breathing family. Another picture of her mother, framed in an oval of brass, stood propped up on the end table next to her dad’s recliner chair. Dad kept the drapes half-pulled and the lights down low, abandoning the day’s potential for a tired, empty twilight.

  “Who were those men?” she asked.

  He sagged into his recliner. He had a tremor in his hand as he scooped up an open can of Bud Light.

  “Salesmen,” he said.

  “What were they selling?”

  “Don’t know,” he said. “I wasn’t buying.”

  She let the lie drift to the floor between them, where it nestled on the shabby rug, untouched.

  “I’m gonna unpack,” she said.

  He answered with the remote control, taking aim at the television and firing. The crowd roared for a touchdown pass.

  Charlie’s room—the “guest room,” they’d dubbed it after she’d left home, though nothing had changed and they never had guests—was a time capsule. The dresser was occasionally dusted, the hardwood floor was occasionally swept, but it was like she’d never left. Her old clothes still lined the dresser drawers, and a scattering of outfits hung in the half-open closet, draped in plastic dry cleaners’ sheaths.

  She tossed her duffel onto the single bed. Then she stared at herself in the mirror and took her cap off, running fingers through her short sandy-blonde hair. The cap went on the dresser, transformed from a piece of uniform to a memento in the space of a breath.

  It wasn’t like she didn’t have civvy clothes, most of them rolled up and filling space in her bag. She just wanted . . . she wasn’t sure what she wanted. She’d done the exit interviews, the mandatory counseling, all the programs and regs intended to ease her transition back into the civilian world. It still didn’t feel real, not until she took her cammies off one last time.

  She hadn’t been expecting fireworks and a parade, but Charlie had always thought her moment of homecoming would be bigger than this, somehow. Instead, she just rummaged through the closet until she found something she liked—a well-worn chambray blouse and a sturdy pair of khaki cargo pants—and got changed. It was just another day. She traded her boots for dusty white sneakers. Her old clothes landed in the laundry hamper. Her boots went in the closet, neatly lined up against the baseboard.

  “All right,” she told her reflection. “I can make this work.”

  She stood on the edge of the living room. Her father didn’t look at her, lost in the television’s glow. She couldn’t stop seeing the faces of the men on her father’s doorstep. They weren’t salesmen.

  “Dad? If . . . if you were having trouble with anything, with anybody, you’d tell me, right?”

  “Mm-hmm.” He sipped his beer. “So. When you got discharged, they do anything for you? Help you find a job or something?”

  She held up her phone. Not sure why. He wasn’t even looking at her. “I have to go talk to some people. I’ve got interviews. I’m gonna go outside, see if I can get a cab out here or a Lyft or something.”

  “Take the truck,” he said. “Keys are in the bowl on the kitchen counter. There’s a spare set of house keys on the ring too.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not going anywhere. Stop at the packie on your way home, pick me up some Bud? I’m running low.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Anything else? You need food, groceries?”

  “I got food.”

  Charlie glanced through the open archway into the kitchen. Pizza boxes, smeared with cold grease, formed a leaning tower beside a sink filled with unwashed dishes.

  “Sure, Dad. Thanks.”

  She scooped up the keys, cold and hard against her hand, and left.

  The truck seat’s springs groaned under her, jutting against the sun-bleached vinyl bench, and the door rattled like it might fall off. Rust flakes showered down onto the gravel drive. She held her breath, said a prayer, and cranked the engine. It coughed to life on the third try. The truck lurched backward, out onto the dirt road, and jolted her hard against the seat belt as she shifted into drive.

  Charlie sat there a moment, out on the open road with the truck wheezing, as she realized she didn’t have anywhere to go.

  That wasn’t true, though. She needed cash, and she needed to find out what kind of trouble had been hanging out on her father’s doorstep while she’d been gone. She thought back to her CO’s advice, the last thing he’d said to her before she’d gotten onto the plane.

  “Don’t get slow, McCabe. Don’t get lazy. I’m gonna check on your ass next time I’m stateside, and you’d better believe you’ll catch ten shades of hell if I think you got lazy.”

  “Yes, sir,” she’d said, holding his steel gaze.

  “I want you to remember something: no matter what they tell you, you might stop wearing the uniform, but you never stop being a soldier. And a soldier needs a mission.”

  “Sir?” she’d said.

  “This mission is over,” he’d told her. “Go find a new one. Dismissed.”

  TWO

  The Crab Walk wasn’t anyone’s idea of paradise, not even for the handful of regular barflies who dutifully bellied up by noon and stayed around until half past closing time. It was just an all-American back-roads dive bar, a low-slung shack where the eaves were draped with boat netting and petrified starfish. The vintage Seeburg jukebox was stocked with seventies classic rock, a rotation that never changed and never would, and the humid air smelled like stale beer and oversalted peanuts.

  It was already dark when Charlie’s pickup rumbled into the parking lot, finding an open spot at the end of a row of beaters and rust buckets. As she jumped down onto the asphalt, Charlie cast a gimlet eye at a shiny new Escalade straddling a pair of parking spots, one of them marked as a handicapped space. Definitely not a regular. She saw that someone had already done the sacred duty of scraping a key along the paint on the driver’s side door. She nodded in approval at the display of street justice and pushed through the tavern doors like a gunfighter.

  Lynyrd Skynyrd blared on the jukebox, and a well-worn cue cracked against the break, sending colored balls scattering across the scuffed green felt of the Crab Walk’s single pool table. Half the chairs were full—half was a good night for this place—and nobody gave her a second glance as she made her way over to the bar. Nobody but the bartender, who nearly dropped a plastic pitcher of beer when he caught a glimpse of her face under the dim electric light. He slapped the pitcher down and waved her over.

  “Ho-lee—fuck,” Dutch shouted over the music. “Charlie Mac, in the flesh.”

  “Alive and kicking,” she said.

  Dutch stood six feet five in his steel-toed boots and wore every hard year
on his deep-lined face. He sported muscles like iron cables under his gray tank top, faded tattoos standing out on his weathered skin: a snarling devil dog on one bicep and a globe, anchor, and eagle on the other. He came out from around the bar and swept her into a bone crusher of a bear hug.

  “How long you back for, anyway?”

  “How long’s forever?” she asked.

  He stared at her with new eyes. Nodding, slow.

  “You’re out, huh?”

  “Just like you taught me.” Charlie steepled her fingers and narrowed her eyes. “I entered the suck. I embraced the suck. I allowed the suck to pass through me and became one with it.”

  He put a fatherly hand on her shoulder. “And now, you have transcended the suck. Well done, my Padawan apprentice.”

  Dutch turned and snapped his fingers at a barfly perched on the closest stool.

  “Hey, Lester. Make way for a homecoming vet, huh?”

  The barfly gestured at his pint glass. “I ain’t done.”

  “I ain’t asking. Take it over to the cheap seats.”

  He cleared off. Charlie slid onto the stool while Dutch stepped back behind the bar.

  “Beer me,” Charlie said. “Something homegrown. I haven’t had anything local since . . .”

  She trailed off, counting the days, and he picked up the slack. “Three years, two months, and change. And put your damn wallet away—you know the house rules. You don’t pay the night before you ship out; you don’t pay the night you come home.”

  “All others pay cash at all times,” she recited. He gave an approving nod and reached under the bar. A peal of crowing, drunken laughter rang out over the guitar riffs of “Sweet Home Alabama.” Charlie glanced over her shoulder. College kids, townies with trust funds, crowded around a table and compared credit cards. She’d identified the occupants of the double-parked Escalade.

  “Tourists,” Dutch muttered. He popped the cap on a bottle of Mean Old Tom and slid the stout her way. “Here, this’ll put hair on your chest. So what are you doing back here? I mean, what’d they do, give you a plane ticket and kick you to the curb?”

  Charlie tossed back a swig, half smiling and half wincing at the bitter taste. “Nah, the army’s really good about that. I had to do this career-counseling track, all this postmilitary planning. They actually had job fairs. Like, at the base, civvies coming around to pass out business cards and brochures.”