Face value, p.5
Face Value, page 5
Pax was tempted to tell her that the only way she was going to contact her ex was with a Ouija board, but he bit his tongue.
“So you’re looking for a sort of finder’s fee, right?” he said.
She gave him a cagy smile. “If I help you get your cash back from Fitz, I’ll expect you to spot me a piece of the action” she said. “Why not? You’ve been going without the whole shooting works since Fitz fucked you over out on the Coast. Your choice is to ante up part of it to me and keep the lion’s share, or let Fitz have it all.”
She shrugged as if to say she’d come up aces whatever Eddie decided. “If you turn my offer down and Fitz holds onto the cash, I’ll find some way to get my cut anyway,” she said. “I’ll just scam it out of Fitz.”
Pax grinned at her. “I bet you would,” he said. “How big a slice do you think helping me is worth?’
“Let’s say ten percent,” she replied.
She gave him a smile she figured was worth a healthy chunk of change. The invitation was back in her eyes to let him know she wouldn’t just be helping him find his money.
“You realize that how much this ‘finder’s fee’ will come to depends on how much of my money Fitz still has?” he said, scratching his chin as if he was trying to calculate the possible bite he’d be giving up. “He might have put it up his nose already, or dropped a wad of it playing the ponies.”
“That’s my look-out, honey,” she said, playing with a button on his shirt but looking straight into his eyes. “He can’t have gone through five mill already. If he’s got squat, it’s on me; if he’s still carrying a chunk, I make out.”
There was something wrong about what she’d said, but whatever it was didn’t jump straight out at Pax. He figured he’d noodle it later. For the time being, her offer was the best thing he’d heard all day long.
“Sounds like a deal,” he said with a smile. “When can you deliver?”
“Give me a couple days to work on it,” she said with a coy smile. “That way, you and me can get to know each other better.”
Pax held up a twenty to catch the bartender’s eye.
“Cyrus, I’d like rye whisky, neat,” Eddie said. He turned to Annie: “What are you having?”
She glanced at the man on the floor, who hadn’t stirred since Eddie had smacked him. “Stoli on ice and make it a double,” she said. “But let’s drink fast and go to my place. When Junior here wakes up, I’d like to be long gone.”
SEVEN
ANNIE’S APARTMENT WAS ONLY a quarter mile or so from John Sutcliffe’s but Eddie didn’t let his memory of Sutcliffe sitting on the crapper with his brains spread all over the wall behind him keep him from enjoying his night with the dead man’s former girlfriend.
“Oh, God, honey!” she grunted when he pushed his way in. “I love it when a man knows how to get me off. I could fall for you in a big way, Georgie!”
They spent two and a half hours exploring each other’s bodies. The first time they fucked, they climaxed so close together that they might as well have been the same person. The second time, Eddie had his face buried in her quim while Annie, groaning, thrust her hips up rhythmically to make the most of his tongue.
By the third time they plowed he was too tired to pump. Just before he came, she fell on him with her lips and tongue until he filled her mouth.
“Oh, Georgie,” she muttered, wiping her lips with a tissue. “I think I’m in love, honey.”
Pax was breathless and drenched with sweat from banging her. “Uhhh,” he said, dreamily. “Me too, babe.”
Annie drifted off with her head on his chest a little after two. Eddie dozed a bit and then sprawled smoking and thinking until the sun was up, his right arm wrapped around her shoulders. At six thirty, he gently disentangled himself to use the toilet before dressing and slipping out of her apartment.
As he left, he remembered that she had said something at the bar that bothered him, but he couldn’t recall what it had been. He mulled it over as he got to the Ford then dropped it. Whatever it had been, if it was important it would come back to him eventually.
He’d followed Annie home in the rental Ford and left it parked on the street. The neighborhood she lived in seemed rougher than coarse sandpaper, so he was more than a little surprised to find it still had all four tires and the tape deck when he piled in, hung a U and parked a block further away to wait for her.
Her car, a Honda Accord the color of lemon curd, was easy to spot when it emerged from the parking area under her apartment just before eight. Pax gave her some space then pulled out to follow her. The tail job was uneventful: she stopped at a mom and pop where he watched through the Ford’s passenger window as she bought a newspaper and a carton of Benson & Hedges menthols; he sat outside a fast food joint sipping drive-through coffee while she read the paper and ate a breakfast that looked like mostly greasy carbs; then he stayed just out of sight while she parked in the employee section of a nearby branch bank, rapped her keys on the window for a security guard to unlock the door and went inside.
He glanced at his watch and saw that it was nearly nine o’clock. The sign on the door said the branch opened at nine and closed at six, so he concluded that she worked inside. That came as a surprise. He’d assumed she was a cocktail waitress given that her boyfriend owned a bar, but he realized he hadn’t asked anybody her place of employment. Making that kind of assumption was stupid. If she was keeping banker’s hours, it would explain why she didn’t show up at Lowery’s until after sundown.
It became obvious she would be at the bank the entire day after he’d spent two hours moving the rental from one side of the street to the other to avoid a parking tag. Pax was starting to get hungry so he stepped into a burger joint for coffee, a patty melt and fries, taking a seat so he could watch the place where Annie worked, just in case she suddenly left.
She didn’t. This was shaping up like any other surveillance job he’d ever done: hours of waiting for something to happen broken by a few minutes of action when—and if—it did.
He ate slowly, working on chewing each bite one hundred times, then had the waitress box what was left of his fries and give him coffee in a cardboard cup with a plastic cap. Despite taking his time, he was surprised to see that it was still only a few minutes after two when he pushed his plate back. He wasn’t supposed to meet Annie at Lowery’s until six thirty that night and he needed something to keep him busy until then.
The waitress who had served him had a nametag on her apron that said “Sue.” As Eddie settled his tab, he pulled out the business card he’d found in Sutcliffe’s billfold and showed it to her.
“Sue, a friend of mine asked me to get something for him from his unit at this storage locker,” he said. “He gave me their business card, but I’m not familiar with Topeka. Can you tell me how to get there?”
She glanced at the card and pulled out one of the paper placemats the diner used in place of industrial linen. With a ballpoint pen she quickly sketched a clear, legible map with the major avenues marked.
“When you leave the parking lot, take this street east,” she said, tapping a major thoroughfare on the drawing. “Go four lights down and take a right. Turn left at the next corner after that. It’ll put you in a light industrial mall. There’s a mechanic there, a body and fender shop and the headquarters for a painting contractor.”
She pointed with the pen to a spot where she’d made an “X.” “The last building on your right is going to be this storage locker outfit,” she said. “You can’t miss it.”
Pax folded the paper and stuck it in his map pocket. “Thanks,” he said, pushing a Lincoln across the counter to her. “You probably just saved me an hour of looking for it. I’d have eventually been forced to stop at a gas station for directions.”
She grinned. “That probably wouldn’t have done you much good, anyway,” she said. “Most of the filling stations around here are owned by people from India, Iraq and Syria who haven’t been here long enough to know any streets more than a mile outside Holiday Park. I’m just glad I was able to help.”
“How do you know so much about the place?” Pax asked.
She shrugged. “I use it myself. That’s where I store all my old books—the ones I can’t sell, anyway.”
“Are you a librarian?”
“Do I look like one?” she asked.
He looked at her. She didn’t fit the stereotype that popped into his head when he heard the word librarian: an older woman in glasses and a spinster dress with gray hair knotted in a tight bun. She was in her early 20s, trim, nice figure, with auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wasn’t exactly Eddie’s type, but she was actually cute in a school-girlish way.
She suddenly realized that he seemed to be taking her half-joking question seriously. Her stereotype of a librarian must have been similar to Eddie’s because she hastily added, “Don’t answer that!”
“Well, OK,” he said. “Why do you store books there?”
She blushed. “I’m going to college off and on,” she said. “I’m trying to get a degree. Some of the texts I have to buy for classes are worth keeping, but a lot of them are fat clunky books that are worthless for anything but class. I try to sell back the ones I don’t want to keep, but new editions come out every other year or so and nobody wants the old ones. I end up keeping them sealed up in cardboard boxes out there.”
“A woman of letters,” Eddie said.
She drew up her mouth ruefully. “Sort of,” she said. “Problem is, it takes six years to get four years of education anymore. I should have gone right out of high school and stuck with it. Instead I diddled around and have to do it in chunks now.”
“Sounds tough.”
“That’s for sure,” she said. “Seems like every time I get enrolled, they aren’t offering the classes I need. I have to take some elective, instead. Then, when I find out the units I need are going to be offered again I’m broke and have to drop out and go back to work.”
She held up her left hand and made a gesture using her forefinger to saw her thumb then saw the puzzled look on Eddie’s face and gave a weak smile. “That’s the world’s smallest violin playing a sad tune,” she said. “Sorry. It’s something my mom used to do.”
Eddie grinned. “If school doesn’t work out maybe you can try doing stand-up comedy,” he said.
“As if!” she said.
“Just kidding,” he said. “If I had half a brain, I would have gone to school myself. Education is a good thing to have. What are you studying, anyway?”
She looked embarrassed. “You’ll laugh,” she said.
“Not likely.”
She cleared her throat. “Criminology,” she said, looking around to see if any of her co-workers had overheard. “I did two years of police science in junior college. I want to get my bachelors in Crime.”
“Why? You want to be a cop?” Eddie said, surprised.
She shrugged. “Why not? It’s a good career. Great pay and benefits, lots of promotional opportunities. You can retire while you’re still young enough to do another job, too. When you decide to pack it in, your retirement is a big percentage of your top pay.”
Pax thought about the hidden benefits of the job: sleeping in a prowl car on the graveyard shift, free food and booze in local bars and restaurants, being cut loose when a patrol unit stops you for DUI and augmenting your base pay with bribes from dope dealers and other crooks. Wearing a badge gave you a chance to push people around; sometimes you even got to shoot someone for no reason at all.
Eddie shook his head. “I guess I was misinformed, then,” he said.
“Yeah?” she said. “What do you mean?”
Eddie stood up to leave. “I was always told crime doesn’t pay,” he said. “I guess it does if you approach it from the right angle.”
EIGHT
ONE OF THE KEYS ON SUTCLIFFE’S RING turned on the elevator on the ground floor of the storage building. Following the number on the business card, Eddie found the unit without difficulty and discovered that the National key on the ring opened the padlock that secured the roll-up door.
Inside the storage space boxes were heaped so snugly that a visitor had to slide sideways to get between them. Eddie had plenty of time, so he cleared some space on the left and moved each box he checked to that side of the unit.
Finding a relatively small bundle of securities in a storage unit jammed with yard sale fodder is no easy task. From Chance’s description, the bearer’s bonds would weigh only a couple pounds and comfortably fit in the same space as a high school kid’s three-ring binder.
It took him about 90 minutes to locate the stash and when he did, he was disappointed: the bonds were stuffed into one of those plastic accordion files with a latching top and a handle. He’d been expecting something more impressive; the money he’d scored from the savings and loan in the San Fernando Valley was only $3,980, but the wad of bills was nearly the same thickness.
But the real disappointment came when he toted up the number of bonds in the file container: there were only 400 of them, not the 500 Chance said had been stolen.
He chewed the inside of his lower lip while he counted the bonds more carefully. When he’d done riffling through them two more times, there was no way to get around it: a million dollars’ worth of the stolen securities were missing.
Pax spent another half hour digging through bags of old clothing and crates of dishes and household goods, just to make sure there weren’t any more securities hidden in the locker.
There weren’t. He swore bitterly.
He’d expected Fitz and his partner to cash a couple of the bonds for walking around money—hell, he would have done the same thing in their place. But a million dollars’ worth? That was way beyond the pale.
There was no way Pax could go back to Chicago with only four million. Chance might have been okay with him turning in a bundle that was one or two bonds short, but the outfit would never stand by and let a thief get away with glomming more than a million bucks. Eddie had killed half a dozen men to recover sums a lot smaller than that.
Pax sighed wearily. He hoped Callahan had the notes in his apartment. If the bastard had squirreled the loot away someplace, Pax would simply have to stay in Topeka and keep looking until he found it. That plan didn’t sound so good: Eddie was already getting bored with the place and the longer he hung around, the more likely he was to run into the cops again.
He stopped in a mini-mart to use the John, fill the tank and call Chance in Chicago.
“Hey, boss,” he said when Karen put Chance came on the line. “I’m making progress. I’ve found most of the money, but we’re short a mill. Also, I still haven’t cancelled Callahan’s ticket.”
“You have any leads on the rest of it?” Chance asked.
“Fitz probably has it,” Pax said. “His partner’s already croaked. There’s no way he’d leave that much dough with a dead man.”
“What about Callahan? You know where he is?”
Pax shook a cigarette out of the packet in his coat and lit it with a throwaway. “Nope,” he said, exhaling smoke. “He’s been hanging with this chick at that bar, Lowery’s though. She’s willing to help me track him down—for a price.”
Chance was silent for a moment. “You trust her?” he asked, finally.
Eddie laughed. “Fuck no,” he said. “She’s a grifter. I figure Fitz has been throwing around some of that cash while she was looking on and she hopes to get a piece of it. She told me herself she’s been trying to score off the guy.”
Pax took a drag. “I figured I’d string her along and see it she can help me put hands on Fitz. If that works out, I may hook up with the rest of the bonds at the same time.”
Chance was thinking. Eddie could almost imagine him pulling his lower lip the way he usually did when large amounts of cash were involved.
“Okay,” he said finally. “But keep me caught up on this, okay? And Eddie? When you finally do Callahan, I don’t want you to just grab the money, scrag the guy and come back to Chicago, okay? Take some pictures of the bastard when you’re done with him, the grislier the better. Murchison is going to want proof he’s dead. Also, he’ll put them around to let people know not to fuck with the Combine.”
Eddie nodded. That sounded like Murchison. For a Harvard law grad, he was the most coldblooded sonofabitch Eddie’d ever met.
“No problem,” Pax said. “I’ll call you as soon as I find him. In the meantime, I’m going to give your local lawyer what I’ve already recovered and have him ship it back to you folks in Chicago.”
He smiled to himself. “I don’t figure it will be long until Fitz shows up. If I had nearly four million stashed in a storage locker and it suddenly disappeared, I’d be frantic. When Fitz finds out it’s gone, he’ll come looking for it. I’ll be waiting.”
• • •
Pax had arranged to meet with Annie at the bar that night and he drove to Lowery’s directly after dropping the securities he’d recovered at LeFleur’s office. His watch told him it was a little after five when he arrived, so he ordered a beer while he waited for Annie to show up.
“Hey, that was a hell of a hurt you put on Charlie Capers last night,” Cyrus said as he put a can of Tallgrass and a mug in front of Eddie. “I had to call the paramedics to get his sorry ass out of here.”
“Sorry I punched one of your customers, but the asshole was beginning to annoy me,” Pax said, pouring the beer.
Emily sipped at her longneck. “I’d hate to see you really get pissed off,” she said, cackling like Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz. “Clarence Severens rode to the emergency room with him in the meat wagon. The docs there had to wire his jaw back together.”
“So, how’d you do with Annie?” Cyrus asked, raising an eyebrow at him.
Eddie gave him an embarrassed smile. “You’re going to have to ask her,” he said. “All I can tell you is she wasn’t complaining when I left this morning.”
