Face Value Read online

  FACE VALUE

  An Eddie Pax Novella

  William E. Wallace

  PRAISE FOR WILLIAM E. WALLACE

  “A master at building scenes, characters, layering dialogue and description, and filling in back-story with no interruption to the momentum of the story.”—Greg Barth, author of Selena and Diesel Therapy

  “The best of William E. Wallace’s work revolves around the concept of justice…I’m talking the big, broader cosmic sense. Judgment. Reckoning. Down in the filth and garbage of the street, it’s all street justice.”—Joe Clifford, author of December Boys and Lamentation

  “It is not easy to combine humor, characterization, and persuasive action but here it’s done well. These stories will make you a Wallace fan.”—Patti Abbott, author of Shot in Detroit and Concrete Angel

  “Wallace is quite simply a brilliant writer.”—Will Viharo, author of Love Stories Are Too Violent for Me

  “William Wallace is next in line for ‘Best of the Year’ lists.”—Anonymous-9, author of Hard Bite and Bite Harder

  Copyright © 2016, 2017 by William E. Wallace

  All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover design by Bad Fido

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Face Value

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Other Titles from Down & Out Books and its Imprints

  Preview from Dead Clown Blues by R. Daniel Lester

  Preview from Knuckledragger by Rusty Barnes

  Preview from Accidental Outlaws by Matt Phillips

  This book is dedicated to the memory of my younger brother, Tony Wallace.

  The worst criminals often don’t commit the worst crimes;

  sometimes they just aren’t very good at being criminals.

  ONE

  WHEN POLICE ARRIVED at Oscar Johnson’s apartment in Topeka, they found Johnson’s corpse sprawled on his bed and Eddie Pax in the living room forty feet away.

  The juxtaposition wasn’t surprising: Pax had murdered a dozen people in ten years collecting debts for the biggest crime syndicate in the U.S.

  What was a surprise in this case was the fact that Pax didn’t kill Johnson.

  Even more surprising: Pax didn’t have the five million in securities that Johnson took from Eddie’s employers.

  “Jesus Fucking Christ!” Eddie muttered as cops piled into the room with guns pointed at his head.

  His voice had the irritated edge of a workman interrupted before he’d finished the job he’d been hired to do.

  • • •

  Two days earlier Pax’s boss Frank Chance summoned him to his office in Chicago.

  “What’s up?” Eddie said taking a seat next to Chance’s desk.

  His boss sat back and folded his hands in his lap.

  “You know about Hurricane Sandy?” Chance asked.

  “I read the papers. It was the big storm in the Northeast last week, wasn’t it?”

  Chance nodded. “Sandy flooded a vault in the basement of a building off Wall Street,” he said. “Covered everything with four feet of water.”

  “I heard about that,” Pax said. “I remember the owner was Depository Trust and Clearing. There were a lot of bearer bonds in that vault—maybe billions worth. I don’t think I ever saw any public accounting of the notes lost.”

  Chance shook his head. “The building I’m talking about wasn’t the one owned by Depository Trust: This one belonged to the Combine.”

  Eddie whistled.

  The Combine was the outfit he worked for, a multinational corporation that had the most powerful criminals in the world on its board of directors. Pax called it “a Kickstarter for gangsters,” but only in private. The Combine made the old-line Mafia look like a badly stocked 7-Eleven: it held paper on 27 Indian casinos, 567 massage parlors, a nationwide chain of lap-dancing joints, a cable television production outfit that made hard-core porn, and enough ships, planes and small boats to transport three-quarters of the dope in North America.

  Which it did. Regularly.

  “Holy shit,” Eddie said. “What happened?”

  “Nearly $2 billion of our bonds got flooded,” Chance said.

  “So where do I enter the picture?” Pax asked. “I’m not a skin diver. I recover the outfit’s property from people, not flooded vaults or sunken ships.”

  “What we want you to recover isn’t in the vault,” Chance said. “It was stolen. When we got inside, drained the water and freeze-dried the bonds, we found out that the flooding wasn’t because of Sandy: it was just supposed to look like it. The actual reason the vault filled with water was because somebody shut off the alarms and turned on the sprinkler system.”

  Pax was surprised. He didn’t know anybody in the Combine dumb enough to let something like that happen. He knew it wouldn’t have if Chance had been in charge of security instead of recovery.

  “Before they flooded the vault, they took $5 million worth of the bonds out of it,” Chance said. “We spent the last week figuring out what happened.”

  Pax allowed himself a smile. “So this time the ‘wet money’ really was wet money,” he said. “That’s a first. How difficult would it be to unload these bonds?”

  “Not difficult at all,” Chance said, folding his hands across his belly. “Each bond is worth ten grand, letter-sized, a bit thicker than a sheet of printer paper. There’s a total of 500 of the damned things. Put a rubber band around ’em to hold them together and you could walk around all day long with them tucked under your arm; nobody’d give you a second look.”

  Pax thought about it. There was a sort of rough justice to someone stealing a small fortune from the start-up bank for criminals; particularly when that fortune consists of bonds that could be transferred freely, payable on demand to whoever happened to hold them. They’d be virtually impossible to trace and there was no way to stop them from being cashed.

  Worst of all, the organization couldn’t just call the police or FBI to help track them down: neither even knew the Combine existed.

  Five million was chicken feed—the kind of money you could find under the seat cushions in Chance’s waiting room. But once independents learned they could take that much from the outfit, none of the biggest crime syndicates would ever trust the Combine to handle their money again.

  “Pretty slick,” Pax said.

  Chance tossed him a manila envelope.

  “Read that,” he said. “It’s got all the details in it: the robbery, the perps, the works. Skip the stuff about what we’re doing to keep it from happening again—that really doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

  “Memorize anything you need: names, addresses, all that stuff. You can use the small conference room behind Karen’s desk if it’s going to take you a while. When you’re done, l
eave the envelope with Karen—and put back everything you take out of it, even a wad of lint.”

  He fixed Pax with an eye like an eagle. “Don’t take any notes, okay?”

  “What’s the short version?” Eddie asked.

  Chance leaned back in his chair and folded his hands into a tent. “Our sources tell us that the organizer of the heist was a small-timer out of Topeka named Oscar L. Johnson. He’s mostly a bank robber but he’s done a couple armored car jobs, too.”

  Chance gestured at the folder in Pax’s hands. “His last known address is in the file,” he said.

  Pax frowned. “If you have a name and an address, it sounds like any ham-and-egger can make the recovery,” he said. “Why me?”

  Chance smiled coldly. “It’s the second name we got that told us you were the man for the job,” he said.

  Pax waited for it.

  “The other thief is your old buddy, Fitz Callahan,” Chance said.

  TWO

  THE DOSSIER WAS COMPLETE, right down to booking mug shots and a set of surveillance photos a cop somewhere had taken of Callahan and Johnson.

  His hair was thinner and he weighed about ten pounds more, but Fitz looked pretty much the same as he had when Pax last saw him. Johnson was a stranger, so Eddie concentrated on his photos.

  The heist artist was five eleven and 175, solidly built but not ripped. He had a salt and pepper fringe around a hairless crown, dark brown eyes set deep under a heavy brow ridge, and a nose offset to the left so far it had obviously been broken by someone’s fist.

  Eddie studied Johnson’s rap sheet. Oscar’d been busted a dozen times but convicted only twice. One fall earned him two years of free room and board at Joliet. The other collars resulted in county jail sentences—time served plus six months in one case, three in the other.

  The arrest to prison ratio told Pax that Johnson was either a snitch or a careful pro who didn’t take risks and plotted out his jobs carefully. Eddie wondered how he had found out about the Combine’s Manhattan repository. There was nothing about that in the law enforcement paperwork or the stuff Chance’s assistant Karen skimmed from databases and phone calls.

  As he tucked the documents back in the envelope, Pax wondered who Chance had bribed for access to the confidential arrest records and stakeout pix. Some cop’s kid would be attending Harvard on a Combine scholarship as a result.

  Pax swapped the dossier to Karen for a throwaway cell phone, ID, Amex and a voucher for a 2012 Ford Taurus at the Hertz counter in O’Hare. The Combine likes to save money where it can, but Eddie was six five and weighed 250 pounds; his long legs and bulk made him way too big to be comfortable in anything smaller than a full-sized Ford, Cadillac or Chevy sedan.

  Instead of flying to the city where the address in the envelope was located, he drove south on 55, stayed overnight at a chain motel in Kansas City, then drove due West on 70 to Topeka. It took nearly two days to get there but it gave him plenty of time to think how he’d met Fitz Callahan.

  • • •

  Eddie had been sticking up mom-and-pops and taking down the occasional bank in Southern California at the time. It was kid stuff: the most he ever scored was just under four grand at a savings and loan in the San Fernando Valley. Despite this, the Cub Scout stick-ups kept him in beer and Big Macs while he honed his skill behind a gun and waited for the main chance.

  His favorite SoCal watering hole was The Trip Hammer, a shack on 101 a couple miles outside Sherman Oaks. Eddie liked the joint because it was quiet: nobody ever drank there but a handful of aging bikers and an old sot who liked to sit in the corner and argue with himself.

  They say saloons are such sure money makers that only an asshole can go broke running one; apparently the owner of The Trip Hammer was a prize asshole: the first clue was the fact that he had a till tapper like Fitz standing behind the plank. Callahan was stealing with both hands; Eddie had watched him do it while he sat drinking rye whiskey and Pabst.

  Fitz was an overweight, red-faced Australian who called everyone “mate.” He ran his mouth like a sweat shop sewing machine: everything he said was stitched together from whole cloth and he never took his foot off the treadle. He told Pax that he had a piece of The Trip Hammer, but Eddie knew he was lying; Fitz was such a loser it had probably been years since he’d had a piece of ass, let alone a piece of a business.

  Even though Callahan was full of shit, Eddie got a kick out of hanging at The Hammer: it was a little like sitting through “Crocodile Dundee” while you ate chips, drank beer and smoked cigarettes.

  First of all, Fitz was the kind of story-teller who embellished his tales with humorous details that were probably fabrications. Somehow, Callahan never spun a yarn that didn’t make him look smarter, funnier and tougher than everybody else.

  Second, Callahan had a strong “down under” accent and peppered his conversation with home-grown obscenities. Pax almost needed a translator to follow some of the things that came out of the Aussie’s mouth, but he always grinned at the way Fitz said “shite” and “fook.” Callahan’s accent cracked Pax up so often he had to struggle to keep from laughing in the Aussie’s face.

  He didn’t even mind the fact that Callahan talked shit constantly and gossiped about people when they weren’t around; Eddie didn’t know any of the people Callahan mentioned, anyway. He had no idea what Fitz thought about him, but Eddie found the Australian amusing and at least his gab was free.

  While Pax sat at the bar one night, nursing Austin Nichols and listening to Fitz run his yap, a guy walked in with a ski mask pulled over his head and a handful of Dan Wesson Model 15. The gunman held the pistol out in front of him gingerly, like a pecker so swollen with the clap it hurt to piss. Pax figured it was the first time he’d used the gun for anything but a prop while reciting lines from Taxi Driver to a mirror.

  “Hands on the bar,” the masked man said, speaking hoarsely to disguise that fact he was about to unload in his pants. “This is a stick-up.”

  Eddie didn’t even put his whisky down. He reached out with his left, snatched the six-shooter and drove its butt into the little space between the robber’s eyes backhanded.

  The wannabe went down like a streetwalker at a bankers’ convention. He pulled a bar stool over onto himself trying to get up and then tried again, managing to get both hands on the plank this time.

  Eddie shifted the pistol to his right and used it to waffle the masked man’s nose. Putting the revolver and glass on the counter, Pax pulled the robber up by the nape of the neck and slammed the man’s face against the edge of the bar before punching him at least six times, pounding him down as if he was driving a fence post with a pile-driver.

  Then he sat down, drained the last of his Turkey and tapped the glass on the bar top for a refill.

  For a minute, the tavern was as quiet as a mausoleum. Fitz stood, mouth agape, staring at the man on the floor. The would-be robber was breathing so shallowly he looked like he was dead. The lower part of his ski mask was soaked in bright red blood that continued to gush from the wreckage of the face it concealed.

  “Bloody hell!” Callahan said finally. It was the first time he had breathed since the masked man had brandished his gun.

  • • •

  That was the night that Callahan found out Pax was a real badass and not some beer-joint smoke blower. He began sucking up to Eddie, telling him wild tales about tramping the outback like a latter-day Ned Kelly, robbing banks, bars, convenience stores, blah, blah, blah. He even called himself a bush ranger, although Pax figured the only time he had ever been outside Sydney was during a bus trip to Ayers Rock with a bunch of Japanese tourists.

  Most of his bop sounded like a crock but every so often Fitz spun a yarn that had a thread of truth.

  Eddie responded in kind. He wasn’t the kind of crook who goes around shooting off his mouth about every crime he’s committed, but Callahan managed to get him to admit he’d been doing heists in the L.A. area for most of a year.

  Call
ahan made himself sound like a master criminal, which Pax found ludicrous. He did, however, seem like a pro. So when Fitz told Eddie he had a job with a big payday the two of them could share, Eddie’s ears pricked up.

  “What’s the deal?” Pax asked.

  “It’s a jewelry outlet. They handle wholesale.”

  Eddie scratched his chin. “I dunno, man,” he said. “That sounds more like burglary. I’m a stickup kind of guy.”

  “This is a stickup, mate,” Callahan said. “The company’s operators keep most of the good shit on trays locked up in a safe. You have to have one of the supervisors around to open it—either that or punch a hole in the wall and have a fucking crane lift the safe out. The main boss comes in at 8 a.m. weekdays to pop the can and when he does, the only other people in the place are a rent-a-cop and one of the floor walkers.”

  “Is the guard packing?”

  “Yeah, but he’s basically a doorknob shaker, Eddie, a fucking geriatric case. He’s there to supplement his rocking chair money, not shoot it out with armed robbers.”

  “What value we talking about here?” Pax asked.

  “Normally it would be about fifty to a hundred grand, mate, but if we do it next Thursday, it’s seven-fifty, right out the door. They’re receiving a shit pile of stones from an estate sale. They’re going to recut some of the rocks and put ’em in new gold settings that are already on order.

  “They’ll be keeping the merchandise in the box and taking the pieces out to work on one piece at a time. But immediately after the goods are delivered, they plan to do a complete inventory to make sure what they receive matches the list they’re getting from the estate. Everything will be out of the safe until that inventory’s done.”