A Plain-Dealing Villain Page 9

  “Catch us up,” Coop said. “What are we up against?”

  I brought up the shots of the storefront, taken as we cruised past in Stanwyck’s car. “Seismic alarms on the windows, motion detector on the ground floor, and he’s got a contract with Polymath Security. We can’t get to the second floor without beating the security in his shop. Second-floor windows are alarmed too, probably on the same circuit.”

  Coop whistled. “Well, that’s a pickle. We know anything about his safe?”

  I showed him the picture of the upstairs office and the black steel door poking out behind Ecko’s desk. He got closer, leaning in and squinting at the screen.

  “Can’t tell the make and model with that. We’ll just have to load for bear and expect the worst. Ain’t met a safe I couldn’t crack, but that assumes we get in and have plenty of time to work uninterrupted. Don’t suppose you got any friends at Polymath?”

  “Nobody has friends at Polymath,” I said. “They vet their employees harder than the Secret Service. No, our only option is to get in without triggering the alarm at all.”

  Augie sat on the edge of the bed, brow furrowed and lips slightly parted, like he was trying to do long division in his head.

  “If the alarm box is at the bottom of the window display,” he said slowly, “why not just cut the top of the glass away and not touch that part?”

  I shook my head. “Like I said, seismic alarm. It monitors the tension of the entire sheet of glass. Break it or cut it—anything that gets the glass vibrating too hard—and the alarm goes off.”

  I tabbed back to a photo of the storefront. Something was bugging me, something I should have caught. And a slow smile spread across my face as I realized what it was.

  “Good job, Augie. Didn’t think to look until you brought it up. See, the windows have seismic alarms,” I said, tapping the screen. “The glass on the door doesn’t. The alarm will catch anyone trying to jimmy the lock…so how about we break through the glass and leave the lock untouched?”

  “Looks like tempered double-pane.” Coop stroked his goatee while he thought out loud. “Smash-resistant. Not smash-proof, though, and I can get us in nice and quiet.”

  “How long?”

  “Five minutes buys us a hole we can wriggle through. What about that motion detector?”

  “Hold up,” Stanwyck said. “You want to bust through a jewelry-shop door in full view on a busy street? Totally exposed for at least five minutes? First cop to cruise by is gonna make us, and that’s assuming some helpful citizen doesn’t call it in first.”

  The first rule of camouflage is to conform to local expectations. What looks natural in the wilderness sticks out like a sore thumb in a city, and vice versa. I thought back to when I first arrived in Chicago, walking the streets, taking in the local color.

  “Construction.” I snapped my fingers. “Lot of street construction going on, right?”

  Stanwyck snorted. “Always. Always too much and always too slow. They stretch the jobs out until winter comes, then start all over again in the spring. I spent most of the day driving different routes, marking all the construction spots so they don’t trip us up on the way out.”

  “Any of that work get done at night? Third shift?”

  “Sure. Some.”

  “And if a local sees a couple of guys in reflector-tape vests hanging around a work site and taking a coffee break, do they think, ‘Looks like a burglary in progress’?”

  “Nope,” Stanwyck said. He shook his head and smiled, catching my angle. “They don’t even think twice.”

  I rifled the drawers until I found a flimsy notepad branded with the motel logo and a ballpoint pen. I sketched it out as I talked, working the problem.

  “We get a city truck and park it right here, directly opposite the door. Construction sawhorses here and here, cutting off the sidewalk. Best if we can get the kind with the blinking amber lights. They’re disorienting in the dark, and anyone who looks our way will focus on the lights instead of what’s happening behind them. Coop and I slice the glass. Stanwyck, you and Augie stand guard, and if anyone comes close, warn ’em off.”

  “That could work,” Stanwyck said, “but where do we get the gear?”

  “You already found it. Like you said, you drove around all day noting where the construction sites were. We hit the closest spots, find the ones that don’t have an overnight crew, and grab what we need. They won’t even notice anything’s missing until tomorrow morning, and we’ll be back in Nevada by then.”

  “What about the second floor?” Coop said. “Any other security up there?”

  My gaze flicked to the screen. I kept seeing the other photos, the ones I couldn’t show them, fresh in my mind’s eye.

  “Yeah. But that’s my job. Weird stuff.”

  “Weird stuff?” Augie asked.

  “Kid,” Coop told him, “something you gotta learn about livin’ the life. Every once in a while, on certain special jobs, a guy like Dan here will say the words ‘weird stuff.’ It’s…sort of a secret code. You know what you do when you hear those words?”

  Augie tilted his head. “What?”

  “You stand aside, you let him go in first and do what he’s gotta do, and you don’t ask questions. Trust me, your life will be a lot happier that way.”

  * * *

  Pulling a heist is like going on vacation: you’re never ready when you think you are, there’s always one last thing to pack, and there’s always something you forgot. If you’re lucky, you remember it at the last minute. If not…well, you’re either in for a bad vacation, or you’re going to jail.

  We used more of my cash envelope for a quick shopping run, buying bits and pieces from stores all over the suburbs. Thin leather driving gloves for me and Coop and sturdier workman’s gloves for Stanwyck and Augie since they didn’t have to do any delicate work. Next, masks. Ski masks might be traditional attire for a burglary, but buying four of them when there was no snow on the ground was a great way to stand out like a sore thumb. Believe it or not, cops follow up on that kind of thing, and cashiers remember it.

  Fortunately, we were cruising into autumn and Halloween wasn’t too far away. Seasonal party suppliers had already sprouted up like weeds in vacant strip malls, renting out empty stores for a few months before they would vanish again. We split our purchase between three different shops, picking up a few latex monster masks. Coop and Augie were zombies, and Stanwyck wanted to be a werewolf.

  I considered my mask carefully, knowing Ecko would eventually see it on the playback from his security cameras. I ended up going with the Mummy.

  We picked up prepaid phones for everybody. We used my burner as the master phone, punching its number into the other three. If we got separated for any reason during the getaway, it’d be my job to change the plan up and set a new rendezvous point on the fly. Of course, that meant something had gone horribly wrong, so hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.

  Our shopping spree ended at a Home Depot, where I picked up the last tools we’d need: some construction vests lined with reflective tape, orange hard hats, and duct tape. A lot of duct tape.

  There was only one thing left to do. We needed an empty building, which meant we needed Ecko gone.

  I called his shop. He picked up on the third ring.

  “Ecko and Company,” said a sonorous, cultured voice. I couldn’t place the accent. South African? “How may I help you today?”

  “Damien Ecko, please.”

  “Speaking.”

  “Mr. Ecko, call me Greyson. I’m new in the city, and some friends told me you’re the man to see about certain short-term financial services.”

  “I’m not certain I know what you mean.” He kept his tone polite and even, carefully enunciating every word. “I’m a jeweler. Who are these…friends of yours, please?”

  “I’m hesitant to speak their names over the phone, but I can say they recently left a piece of collateral with you. An obsidian Aztec knife.”

  He d
idn’t answer right away. I could hear the wheels in his head turning as he tried to decide if I was a cop.

  “We can meet,” he said. “But not at my shop. There’s an all-night diner on LaSalle Street. Be there tonight, at ten sharp.”

  “I’ll be—” I started to say, but he’d already hung up.

  The store closed at seven. I figured he wanted the extra time to call his current clients and ask if they’d sent any new business his way. That could go one of two ways: either they had and he’d assume that was who he was going to meet, or they hadn’t and he’d assume I was an undercover cop trying to set him up—in which case he’d want to make this look like a big misunderstanding and plead his ignorance. Either way he’d show for the meet, and while he was waiting at the diner we’d be cracking his castle walls. I had one more call to make before we left.

  “Hey, Cait.”

  “Daniel.” She sounded tired but pleased. “Are you back already?”

  “Tonight. We’re about to head out and get things done.”

  “Have everything you need?”

  “It’s a good crew,” I said. “They know their jobs.”

  “And yet.”

  She always could read me like a book.

  “The occult security,” I admitted, “is a little tougher than I’d bargained for.”

  “You can still back out.”

  “No, I can’t. You take a job, you do the job.”

  “I’m making preparations for my trip,” she said. “Leaving Emma in charge while I’m gone. She should be able to keep the wolves at bay for a few days.”

  “Can’t you stay home and send Emma instead?”

  “I am my prince’s hound. As you so aptly noted, you take a job, you do the job. Even when the job is to stand beside his throne at a gala and look vaguely menacing.”

  “You’re good at that,” I said.

  “Yes, but the specific and targeted sort of menacing is much more fun.”

  “On that note,” I said, “I ran into my old buddies Mack and Zeke at the airport. Gave ’em the slip, but they know I’m in town. Do I need to be worried? Not about those two, I mean, but Chicago is Night-Blooming Flowers territory.”

  “Probably not. A move against you is tantamount to a move against me, and after their failure with Pinfeather and the Redemption Choir, they’re not eager to earn another spanking so quickly. Don’t be surprised if they watch you from a safe distance, but as soon as they understand you’re not in town on hell’s business, I expect they’ll lose interest. Just to be safe, I’ll give Naavarasi a call and ask her to keep an ear out. She’s eager to be helpful.”

  Never for free, I thought.

  “All right,” I said, “time to gear up and get this over with. I’ll call you as soon as I touch down in Vegas.”

  A familiar feeling sank its claws into me, like a vulture perched on my shoulder. A current of tension ran down my spine and brought back old memories. The last time I’d felt like this was a couple of nights ago, on the edge of the Laramie Brothers parking lot. Just before the feds swooped in.

  The time before that had been the night of the last job I ever pulled for Nicky Agnelli.

  False positive, I told myself. You’re rebounding from a bad break, you’re rusty, and you’re working in a strange city. Of course you’re nervous. You’d be stupid not to be.

  There were nerves, and there were nerves. This felt like my sixth sense twitching its nose, catching the scent of a thunderstorm in the air, but all I could see was a cloudless blue sky. I knew I should walk away, right then and there, before things had a chance to go bad.

  And then what? I thought. Then you get a little uneasy and walk away from the next job, and the one after that? If you don’t get back on that horse tonight, you might as well turn in your riding boots.

  There are three key ingredients to any crime: means, motive, and opportunity.

  I had all three.

  I bundled up my gear and headed out to the parking lot. Time to go to work.

  14.

  We loaded up the trunk of Stanwyck’s rental car with all of Coop’s gear and rode downtown. The first handover spot was over in Lincoln Park, where his stolen ride—a Lincoln Town Car with mud-smeared license plates—waited for us on a strip of metered parking outside a row of brownstone apartment buildings. We pumped as many quarters into the meter as it’d swallow and quickly swapped the sacks of gear, leaving the rental behind. We drove over to a parking garage one block away from Jewelers Row.

  “Coop and I will head over and check out the storefront,” I told Stanwyck. “Get the utility truck and meet us there. Take Augie with you.”

  Stanwyck gave Augie a dubious glance and shrugged. He didn’t argue, though. Puppy-dog eyes run in Coop’s family.

  Ten after seven and the downtown traffic slowly eased up. The daily commuters were back home already, snug behind their suburban picket fences, and the party crowds didn’t come out on Wednesday nights. Coop and I did a casual walk-by, checking out the darkened storefront and the tone of the street.

  “I like it,” he told me. “Damn shame we can only hit the loft, though. Hate the idea of breaking into a jewelry store and not coming home with something shiny for the missus.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t like leaving money on the table, but unless you can figure out a way to crack those glass cases without setting off the alarm in the next ten minutes, we don’t have much of a choice.”

  “More like five,” he said, nodding up the street. “I think our cover’s here.”

  Stanwyck came tooling up behind the wheel of a big blue utility truck, the back loaded with orange construction cones and sawhorses and the City of Chicago seal stamped on its door. Augie hopped out when he pulled up to the curb, already wearing his hard hat and safety vest.

  “Somebody call for a little urban camouflage?” Stanwyck asked as he got out. He tugged his own vest on over his gray flannel sweatshirt, and I walked around back to help unload the truck. In three minutes, we had the sidewalk cordoned off and amber lights strobing against the darkness.

  Time wasn’t on our side. We’d rehearsed as best we could, making sure everyone knew their jobs and when to do them, but I felt the pressure building. My watch read 7:27 when we hauled Coop’s sacks off the truck. Ecko’s “meeting” at the diner was at ten, and it wouldn’t take him too long to figure out he’d been stood up. I figured we had three hours, three and a half at most, to get the job done and get out of town. When you’re facing the threat of prison time or worse, two and a half hours flies by faster than you’d think.

  Coop took two rolls of duct tape from a sack and handed me one. We pulled on our masks. Then we crouched down on the sidewalk side by side, layering the bottom half of the shop door with strips of tape until it was one solid silver blob. Then we cross-layered it, building a fluffy tape blanket. Stanwyck and Augie kept a lookout, loitering around the truck and acting like a couple of bored Teamsters on a never-ending coffee break.

  Coop brandished a rubber-headed mallet and squinted at the taped-over glass like he was Michaelangelo with a fresh block of marble. I gave him some room. He tapped, softly but quickly, following an invisible path across the glass with the hammer. When an “L” train rumbled by overhead, steel wheels screeching against the tracks, the staccato thumps became sharp, full-swinging thuds swallowed up by the noise of the train.

  He swapped his hammer for a short chisel and forced it in at the upper corner of the pane, wriggling it firmly from side to side. I heard a soft crackling sound as he pulled the sheet of duct tape backward—and with it the two dozen broken chunks of glass on the other side. A few pieces had fallen loose, tumbling to the cornflower-blue carpet inside the door, but most of the glass peeled away clean. A few taps of the hammer to clear the odd jagged edge, and now the bottom half of the front door was nothing but an empty hole surrounded by a brushed metal frame.

  “My turn,” I said.

  The stairs up to Ecko’s loft were on the far side of
the store. The only thing standing between us and the prize was the white plastic face of a motion detector. The box sat high in the back corner of the shop, tilted downward to keep a watchful eye over the glass cases.

  Most modern high-end security systems run on passive infrared. They pick up temperature fluctuations, and they’re a hell of a lot harder to beat than the old ultrasonic or microwave systems. You can’t hide your body heat behind a wall or a counter. Ecko apparently wasn’t big on modern science: his detector was an old Sakamoto model. Seventies-era tech, big and boxy, bouncing microwaves across the room like a traffic cop’s radar gun.

  He’s got a monster upstairs, I thought, shooting an anxious glance up toward the second-floor windows. Means he can cut costs a little.

  No matter the method, motion detectors are aimed to leave a little wiggle room near a store’s front door. If they didn’t, they’d go off the second a legitimate employee walked in and tried to shut off the alarm in the morning. I adjusted my mask, got down on all fours, and crawled through the broken door, then stood straight and pressed my back to the wall on the other side.

  Maybe twenty feet of open space stood between me and the motion detector. With my palms pressed flush to the wall and my head turned to one side, making myself as flat as I could, I edged my way in. Microwave detectors only trigger at a certain threshold of movement. My job was to stay under that threshold.

  “Slow” didn’t begin to define it. I moved like an ice statue, melting droplet by droplet on a mild afternoon. Minutes rolled by as I crept along the wall, eyes fixed on the unblinking LED under the detector’s face. One misstep, the tiniest involuntary flinch, and I’d set it off.

  Ten minutes later I was almost halfway across the room, and my nose started to itch. The heavy latex mask heated my face up, coaxing beads of sweat on my brow that trickled their way down my cheeks, like tiny tickling feathers teasing the curve of my chin.