Face value, p.7
Face Value, page 7
He looked cagy. “I’m not a fuckin’ idjit,” he said. “I’m bringing them to the bank to put in a safety box. She can’t shoot me with all kinds of people standing around. I was going to sign all the paperwork, proper-like. There’d only be one key for the box, mate. She’d have to keep me alive to nick the goods.”
“But you knew she was a hustler who was after the dough,” Eddie said. “I just don’t understand why you didn’t kill her after she whacked your partner.”
Callahan looked scandalized by the suggestion. “I may be a yobbo but I don’t scrag women. Not those I can still get some use out of, anyway. I figured I’d best wait until I had the bonds put away. There’d be ample time to cap her after the safety box was set.”
Eddie thought about it. Fitz wasn’t as dumb as he let on.
“Good thinking,” he said.
Then he shot Callahan between the eyes.
ELEVEN
EDDIE WANTED TO CATCH ANNIE while she was in the sack so he took his time at Callahan’s, snapping pictures of Fitz’s bloody corpse on the sofa with his phone, sending them to his private email account and rummaging through drawers and closets to make sure the Australian hadn’t lied and squirreled some of the bonds away in his house. It was close to midnight when he used a Slim Jim to force the lock on Annie’s apartment building and creep up the inside stair well.
The unit she lived in had been built less than thirty years ago but it was cheap and shoddy despite its newness. The door to her flat didn’t even have a deadbolt or peephole. Pax rapped on it quietly and waited for the metallic sound of the latch.
“Fitz? Is that you, honey?” Annie said as she turned the knob.
Eddie slammed into the door with his shoulder, knocking Annie backwards as it crashed into her face. He was in the room before she could recover, closing the door and latching it as he moved.
She glared at him from the floor, a trickle of bright red blood beginning to slide from under her bangs and work its way into her right eyebrow.
“You told me you had a headache when you called me at the bar tonight,” he said matter-of-factly. “You were lying then, but I bet you have one now, don’t you?”
She wiped away the wet trail before it dripped into her eyes and looked at her fingers, blinking with surprise. “What’d you do that for?” she said angrily, wiping the red from her fingertips on her beige night gown. “I would have let you in if you’d just knocked.”
Eddie sneered. “Yeah, I’m sure you would have shown me the same courtesy you did Oscar Johnson,” he said. “Where are the rest of the bonds?”
His question obviously startled her. She looked more than a little frightened.
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
Pax pulled Callahan’s revolver out of his waistband and pointed it at her.
“Can the bullshit, sister,” he said. “I just left Fitz on the sofa at his house. He won’t be feeling well enough to meet you at the bank tomorrow. He came down with a bad case of lead poisoning.”
He thumbed back the Wesson’s hammer. “If you don’t want to end up the same way, I’d advise you to talk fast. Where are the bearer bonds?”
She bit her lower lip, then jerked a thumb at a valise leaning against her couch. “There’s 98 of them in there,” she said. “Fitz and I converted two of them to cash. Nearly all of that’s in there, too. Fitz has the rest of the bonds. He’s supposed to fetch them from wherever he’s hiding them tomorrow morning and bring them to the bank.”
Pax waved the revolver at her. “That’s all of them he gave to you?” he asked.
She sighed. “He gave me a million worth,” she said. “I have most of the cash from the two I cashed in there, too. How much more he’s got, I don’t know. I don’t know where they are, either.”
“Don’t worry,” Eddie said. “I already found them. They’re being delivered to my boss in Chicago.”
Eddie circled her and picked up the valise, keeping the pistol trained on her the whole time. Inside was a sheaf of paper around an inch thick with a rubber band wrapped around it: the last of the Combine’s stolen bonds. Alongside them was a sizeable bankroll of twenties and fifties.
“Fitz told me your real name is Pax,” she said, tearing off a swatch of satin from her negligee and using it to blot blood from her forehead. “He thought you were looking for him because he screwed you out of a bunch of money from a jewel robbery in L.A.”
“He was partly right,” Eddie said, closing the valise and setting it on a coffee table. “I was tracking him down over something he stole, but I was sent to do it by my employers in Chicago. The fact he’d fucked me over in California was just an extra incentive to find him quickly.”
“Fitz is such a fuck up, I figured something like this might happen,” she added, a disgusted look on her face. “I didn’t realize it could happen to me, too. Where did I screw up?”
“For one thing, you led me to him tonight,” Eddie told her. “I figured that if I followed you around, sooner or later you would make contact with him. Tonight, after you called off our date, it looked to me like you two were getting ready to go underground. I waited for you outside that bank where you work. Bingo. You took me right to his front door.”
She looked surprised. “You knew I was hooked up with Fitz?” she said with exasperation. “Damn, I did my best to keep my distance from him. How did you figure it out?”
“I pegged you for a scam artist from the jump, but I didn’t have any proof,” Pax said. “Then I met you at the bar. It was the night I knocked out that asshole who was hanging on you. You remember? His name was Peppers or something.”
“Capers,” she said. “Yeah, I remember. Go on.”
“I told you Fitz owed me a big part of $700,000 he’d screwed me out of in Cali,” Pax said. “That was the only figure I mentioned. But later, when you offered to help me find him, you mentioned five million. The only way you could have known about the bonds was if Fitz told you—that or you’d seen them yourself.”
She spent a few seconds silently thinking about the meeting. “Shit,” she eventually said with a frown. “That was pretty dumb of me, wasn’t it? Typical. Whenever I fuck up a con it’s because I say more than is necessary. Bites me in the ass every single time.”
Pax smiled. He wouldn’t mind biting her ass himself. He’d enjoyed it last night.
“I didn’t notice your slip of the tongue at the time,” he said. “If I had, I would have found some way to get you alone so I could use a pair of vice grip pliers to loosen your tongue. I’d already be long gone with the money and you and Fitz would be fertilizing petunias in some hick’s back yard.”
He shifted the gun from one hand to the other. “Did Callahan show you the money or did you just stumble onto it yourself and cut yourself in for a share?”
“Fitz never showed me Jack shit,” she said sourly. “He was smart enough to know if he waved a bundle under my nose, I would walk away with it in my purse. Johnny introduced us because he knew I was a scammer and had a banking gig. When the heat from the robbery cooled off, I was supposed to set up the channel for Johnny, Oscar and Fitz to get access to the money they’d stolen.”
“I never saw most of the score,” she said. “But Fitz told me plenty about it. You know how he liked to run his mouth.”
Pax nodded. “And you figured you could use the dough, so you cooked up a scheme for getting it away from Fitz and Johnson.”
She smiled slightly. “A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do,” she said.
Pax furrowed his brow. “What I don’t get is what they needed a banker for in the first place,” he said. “Those are bearer bonds. Any asshole who finds one can cash it in.”
She smirked. “Ever hear of a CTR, honey?” she asked.
“No. What’s that?”
“A currency transaction report,” she said. “You have to file one each time you use cash totaling ten grand or more. The feds see ’em all, so every time you do a big cash deal, the G-men know about it.”
“Those bonds are worth ten thousand each,” she added. “If you cash one out, a CTR is required.”
Pax frowned. “So how do you get around them?”
She shrugged. “I don’t report the transaction,” she said. “I’m the bank employee that’s handling it. It’s my discretion whether I blow the whistle or not.”
“Originally, I was just acting as the go-fer,” she said, anger flashing in her eyes. “Fitz and Oscar had their little partnership and they were going to pay me $20,000—chump change—for laundering the bonds they stole. Bullshit! I was the one taken the risk of getting caught while cashing the bonds, sitting on the CTRs and hoping nobody noticed. I knew I was worth more than twenty grand.”
“So I sounded out Sutcliffe on screwing Fitz and Johnson—eliminating them from the picture and splitting the take between us. But the dumb bastard wouldn’t bite; he wanted to stick with the original deal they’d worked out.”
“So I shot him,” she said, raising her shoulders slightly. She made committing murder sound routine, like taking her car in for a lube.
Eddie was impressed. Cold hearted bitch, he thought.
“So then you tried the same thing with Johnson, right?” he asked.
“Nah,” she said. “Fitz found Johnny’s body in Sutcliffe’s apartment and figured out that I’d killed him; Johnson and Sutcliffe had done time together in Illinois. So I explained what I had in mind to Fitz. He got aboard so fast it was clear he’d been thinking of doing the same thing himself. He’d just be switching two partners for one—while increasing his cut by nearly a million bucks.”
“Oscar was a thief who might put a bullet in somebody during a robbery, but he wasn’t a cold-blooded killer,” she said. “Fitz tried the plan out on Oscar, but the dumb sonofabitch turned him down. So Fitz shot his own partner.”
She gave Pax a cruel smile. “Fitz didn’t have as many scruples as Johnny,” she said quietly.
Neither do you, kiddo, Pax thought.
“Fitz and I had it all worked out: I was going to set up an offshore account in a week or so when I could clear all the hurdles where I work,” she said. “Then we could withdraw money using checks, just like anybody else: no CTRs, no Suspicious Activity Reports.”
Pax nodded. “Did you seriously think Fitz would split those securities with you? If you do, you’re pretty naïve. He would have whacked you in a heartbeat.”
She sighed. “That’s the chance I had to take,” she said. “I would have just grabbed the bonds myself, but I didn’t know where they were. Fitz stashed them someplace. Until tonight, I never saw any of them except the two they had me cash out.”
“Things didn’t quite turn out the way I thought they would,” she said. Then she gave him a wicked smile. “They still could, though. Why don’t you throw in with me, honey?”
If he hadn’t been watching for it, he might not have noticed the way her face changed: now she had an edgy, calculating look and he could almost hear the gears in her head turn over as she tried to think her way out of her jam.
“What do you mean?” Eddie asked.
She climbed up off the floor and sat on the bed next to her shoulder bag. “There’s nearly a million worth of bonds in that valise. We could split them and go our separate ways.”
Pax laughed out loud. “You must think I’m as dumb an asshole as Fitz, Oscar or Johnny,” he said. “I have no doubt you were going to cap Fitz as soon as you got your hands on the bonds. If I hooked up with you, it would only be a matter of time before you did me, too. Sorry, sugar. You just don’t strike me as the sharing type.”
“Besides,” he added, “do you have any idea where those bonds came from?”
She furrowed her brow. Obviously, she hadn’t given it much thought up to that point. “A bank somewhere, I guess,” she said.
Pax chuckled. “Not even close,” he said. “I’m not going to waste your time with a long, drawn-out explanation, but they were stolen from some of the toughest guys in the world, killers who keep strong boys like me around just to park cars, polish doorknobs and scrub toilets.”
She smiled at him, turning on the charm. “But you’re smart,” she said. “Surely there’s someplace we could go? A million would take us a long way from here.”
Eddie slowly shook his head. “That million dollars would take us just about as far as a slab in the coroner’s office,” he said. “You don’t know these people: it’s the way they do business. You’d have to leave the planet to get beyond their reach. No matter where on earth you went, there always would be some badass like me waiting for you.”
She looked defeated. “I need a cigarette,” she said finally, fumbling in her purse with her right hand. “Do you have a lighter?”
Eddie, still smiling, dropped his hand on hers inside her handbag, twisting it to the side. There was a muffled bang and a ragged hole appeared in the corner of the purse that was pointed away from him.
He hit her with a hard right to her nose, making a wet snapping sound as the cartilage broke. The punch knocked her back onto the mattress as she struggled to pull a dark automatic pistol out of her handbag, but Eddie twisted it out of her hand and slapped her so hard with the barrel that she had to turn her head.
He looked at her weapon, a Glock 17. It was a police standard that fired a 9-millimeter bullet, light, lethal and efficient—not exactly a lady’s piece.
“Ah!” he said, holding up the automatic. “The gun that killed Johnny Sutcliffe. I was wondering when it would turn up.”
Blood ran freely from Annie’s nostrils as she forced herself up into a sitting position on the bed.
“Now what?” she asked, gingerly touching the gash where the gun had raked her cheek. The tremor in her voice was apparently as close as she would come to asking for mercy.
Eddie pointed the gun between her breasts and pulled the trigger.
Annie didn’t attempt to get up this time. She coughed twice as bloody foam formed at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were wide and unbelieving.
“I thought we had something special,” she rasped in a voice that was barely audible.
“Yeah. It was so special you just tried to shoot me,” Eddie said brandishing her Glock. “The only thing special you had for me was one of these nine-millimeter slugs.”
“What you really thought was that you could sucker me like you did Sutcliffe, Johnson and Callahan,” he said. “But those guys did all their thinking with their glands. It’s clear to me you intended to split with those bonds from the start.”
“How could you think that?” she whispered, her breath sucking air through the half-inch hole in her sternum. “Last night it was clear we were made for each other. You even said you loved me.”
“I lied to you,” Eddie said. “I do that a lot. It’s in my job description. But even if we did happen to be in love, there are some things I love more.”
She coughed more blood. “Like what?” she gasped.
“Like breathing,” he said. “Like sleeping through the night. Like not having to look over my shoulder all the time to make sure the people I work for aren’t closing in on me.”
Then he put the gun against her forehead and squeezed its trigger one last time.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Most of what I know about crime and criminals I picked up during nearly 40 years as a reporter, weeding through Title III wiretap transcripts and carrying on long conversations with career criminals and organized crime associates such as Art Beltran, Art Serrato, and Jerry Van Hoorelbeke. I also had the assistance of prosecutors such as former Assistant U. S. Attorney Steve Gruel, private investigators like Graham Desvernine and Pierre Merkl, FBI Agents like Tom Griffin and Jim Wedick of the Sacramento bureau office, and state and local investigators like Agent Ignatius Chinn, California Department of Justice. For the education I received at their hands, I owe these folks a debt of gratitude.
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WILLIAM E. WALLACE, 68, has been a private eye, house painter, cook, dishwasher, newspaper and magazine writer, journalism professor and award-winning investigative reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle.
His short stories have been published in All Due Respect, Shotgun Honey, Out of the Gutter Online, Crime Factory, Dark Corners Pulp, Spinetingler, Dead Guns, Near to the Knuckle, Over my Dead Body and Plan B. A Dead Heat with the Reaper, his book of two noir novellas, was published by All Due Respect books in August 2015, and Hangman’s Dozen, thirteen noir short stories, also was published by All Due Respect in January 2016.
In addition, Wallace has self-published three novels: Tamer (a western thriller set during the California gold rush), The Judas Hunter and The Jade Bone Jar, and a novella, I Wait to Die!
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BOOKS BY WILLIAM E. WALLACE
Hangman’s Dozen
I Wait To Die!
Dead Heat with the Reaper
The Judas Hunter
The Jade Bone Jar
Face Value
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OTHER TITLES FROM DOWN & OUT BOOKS
AND ITS IMPRINTS
See DownAndOutBooks.com for a complete list
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Catching Water in a Net
Clutching at Straws
Counting to Infinity
Gravesend
Chasing Charlie Chan
Circling the Runway
Brooklyn Justice
Coney Island Avenue
By Anonymous-9
Hard Bite
Bite Harder
By Jonathan Ashley
South of Cincinnati
The Cost of Doing Business
By Trey R. Barker
2,000 Miles to Open Road
Road Gig: A Novella
Exit Blood
Death is Not Forever
No Harder Prison
When the Lonesome Dog Barks
