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  Eddie mulled it over. “How do you know all this stuff about the estate sale and the inventory and all?” he asked. “You got somebody inside?”

  Fitz grinned. “One of the floorwalkers is a chum,” he said. “He filled me in. He’s the one who told me about the staffing, too.”

  “So what’s his cut?”

  “I figure a third,” Callahan said. “He tipped us the wink and gave us the floor plan. We wouldn’t even know about the job without him.”

  Eddie smiled. A quarter mill was a hell of a lot more than the take from the mom and pops he’d been hitting down in Inglewood and as far east as Fontana.

  “That’s still two fifty each,” Pax said. “I’m not greedy. But I’d like to get to meet the inside man before we do the job. Can you arrange it?”

  Callahan gave him the thumbs up. “Consider it done, mate,” he said.

  THREE

  CALLAHAN’S “CHUM,” Frank Costanza, even looked like a salesman for a wholesale jewelry business: he wore a cheap black suit and a white shirt with a striped necktie knotted snugly underneath one of the biggest Adam’s apples Pax had ever seen.

  Even though it was more than 80 degrees outside, Costanza had a gray cable knit sleeveless cardigan between his jacket and Van Heusen. His mousy brown hair was glassy with Vitalis and slicked down as tightly as a woman’s bathing cap. The perfect finishing touch was the round, gold-rimmed glasses he wore; all he needed were button-up shoes to look like an extra in a black and white flick from the thirties.

  “You certain there’s going to be nobody there but you, the boss and the security guard?” Pax asked when they met the next evening at The Trip Hammer.

  “Dead cert,” Costanza said, nursing a light beer. “I’ve been working there for six years. The routine’s always the same.”

  “The estate’s making the delivery at 8 a.m.?” Callahan asked.

  Costanza nodded. “I was there listening when the boss made the arrangements.”

  “Not too obviously, I hope,” Pax said. “Don’t want to attract the boss’s attention—particularly if you are planning to keep working there. Do these guys ever hang around the place after a delivery?”

  Costanza shook his head.

  Pax looked at Callahan. “It would be just our luck to have them make themselves at home,” he said.

  Costanza chuckled. “No chance, pal,” he said. “These guys are an outside courier company. It’s like an independent armored car outfit. They have a whole schedule of security deliveries and pick-ups to make. Do twenty or thirty drops a day. They get off schedule, there’s hell to pay. Trust me: they’ll come in, drop the goods and split immediately afterward.”

  “Are the couriers armed?” Callahan asked.

  Costanza nodded. “Yeah, one guy has a shotgun and covers the two in the back of the truck who actually cart the stuff up to our offices. The bagmen carry those black automatics that are mostly plastic.

  “Glocks,” Eddie said. “Cops love the fuckers. Probably the Model 21—thirteen rounds of .45-caliber knock-down power.”

  Costanza smiled. “You won’t need to worry about them. They’ll leave as soon as they make the transfer.”

  Pax took a sip of his Wild Turkey. “You jokers are on the second floor of the building, right?”

  Costanza nodded again.

  “What’s on the ground floor?” Callahan asked.

  “It’s vacant right now,” Costanza said. “The stairs run up alongside it with a wall in between the two. There won’t be anybody there.”

  Callahan grinned at Pax. “Sounds like a piece of cake,” he said.

  Pax said nothing. He liked to work by himself because he’d found that partners always fucked something up. He was a firm believer in Murphy’s law: if something can go wrong, it will.

  • • •

  On the jewel robbery, things started going wrong right away.

  To begin with, when they pulled up outside, the “vacant” offices on the ground floor had people inside them: there was a company car parked in the yellow zone in front with signs that said it belonged to a large commercial real estate outfit. A broker seemed to be showing the place off to a potential lessor.

  Pax was ready to pack it in on the spot: he hated surprises, especially when he was doing something that involved guns; but when he said so, Callahan told him he’d have to take a bus back to The Trip Hammer: he was going through with the job even if Pax backed out.

  Eddie reluctantly agreed to go along. The way Costanza had described it, it sounded like an easy lift. What’s the worst that could happen? he thought.

  Callahan circled the block, hoping the real estate dealer would leave. The car was still there when he got back, however. With a sigh, he pulled into the yellow right behind it.

  The real estate broker had Eddie worried, but things soon got worse: the jewelry courier was more than a half hour late showing up. Pax kept checking the side and rear-view mirrors. Callahan’s Chevy lacked commercial plates, so parking in the yellow zone was a violation of the vehicle code. He was beginning to worry that a meter maid would come along and write them a ticket or order them to move on, throwing their timing even further off.

  When the armored car finally arrived, it seemed to take another half hour for its crew to cart the goods up to Costanza’s workplace. As the robbers sat in the Chev and watched the couriers unload, it was clear the man with the shotgun didn’t like them hanging around: he kept a close watch while his colleagues carried bags filled with gold and gems up the side stairs.

  Minutes ticked by slowly. Eddie was getting nervous himself. He could only imagine how Costanza felt upstairs, trying to remain calm while sweat soaked through his dark suit. All they needed was for their inside man to go hinky on them.

  The armored truck crew finally finished up and drove away, the shotgun guard giving Callahan and Pax a hard, final look.

  Upstairs is where things really went to shit.

  “This is a robbery,” Callahan shouted, pointing his gun at the security guard. “Everybody freeze. Give us the jewels and gold and nobody gets hurt.”

  Both bandits had nylon stockings pulled down over their heads, but Pax winced at Fitz’s down-under accent; it was just the kind of thing a witness would remember and mention to the cops. It made Eddie wonder how many Aussies there were in the Southland. More to the point, he wondered how many had the kind of felony jacket Fitz bragged about.

  He glanced at Callahan’s weapon. It was the Dan Wesson Pax had taken off the gunman in The Trip Hammer.

  Callahan nodded at the security guard. “Take care of this clown, mate,” he said, keeping his gun on Costanza and the man who had to be his boss.

  Pax tucked his .38-special in his waistband and relieved the guard of his Army issue Colt. He pulled a roll of duct tape from his jacket pocket and spent a couple of minutes trussing the guard up like a turkey and sealing his mouth. Shoving the man into a chair, he used more tape to immobilize him.

  Callahan gestured at the boss with the barrel of his gun. “You get into the vault and start cleaning out the gems and gold. Put it all in here,” he said, holding out a gray plastic suitcase.

  The boss scurried to the safe, a huge steel job that was at least two feet deep, three feet wide and five feet high. He put the suitcase on a desk next to the safe and emptied tray after tray of glittering treasure into it. When he had picked the trays inside the box clean, he shut the case and handed it to Fitz.

  “Over there,” he said, gesturing at a chair next to the guard with his gun.

  The boss sat down and Eddie used tape to tie him and seal his mouth.

  He scooted another chair over for Costanza, but didn’t get a chance to use the tape on him.

  Fitz pointed the gun at Costanza’s forehead and pulled the trigger, spraying the wall with most of the back of his head.

  Pax was stunned.

  “What the fuck did you do that for?” he hissed, watching Costanza’s corpse fold to the floor.

&
nbsp; Fitz grunted. “He’s the only one who knows who we are,” he said, hefting the suitcase. “Also, it’s one less person in on the split.”

  Eddie suddenly realized the heist was a set-up: Fitz had been so quick to eliminate one of his partners, Pax figured he would waste no time scragging the other—which happened to be Eddie. Unfortunately, it was too late to do anything about it.

  One thing was clear: Callahan didn’t intend to divide the take at all.

  Fitz quickly confirmed his suspicions. Moving faster than Eddie would have thought possible for an out-of-shape Aussie with the muscles you build lifting big cans of Foster’s, Fitz snatched at Pax’s waistband, grabbing his gun and that of the guard.

  “You take the jewels in the bag.” Callahan said. “You won’t be able to handle a gun with your hands full, so I’ll hold onto the weapons.”

  The Aussie waved Eddie in front of him with the barrel of his revolver and followed him to the stairs. Pax took a last look at the two men taped to the chairs and left, shaking his head with disbelief.

  • • •

  Callahan stood behind Eddie while he opened the back and stowed the suitcase full of jewelry. With Pax behind the wheel, they were on 101 in ten minutes, heading south toward Sherman Oaks. Eddie knew what was coming next, but there was nothing he could do about it. Without a piece, Fitz had all the advantages. The only question was when Callahan planned to drop the hammer.

  Pax didn’t have to wait long to find out.

  “Take the off-ramp ahead and turn right,” Fitz said. “In about a half mile there’s an intersection with a light. Just before you get there, there’s a dead-end street with warehouses on both sides. Turn into the dead-end and pull over to the side of the road.”

  Pax glanced at Fitz. The Australian had his gun up tight against his belly. Apparently he had learned from the guy who tried to stick up the bar that it was a poor idea to hold a weapon out where somebody big and fast could take it away from you and use it to beat your head into paste.

  Eddie, frustrated at being scammed by an asshole as bush league as Callahan, ground his teeth as he drove.

  “Keep both hands on the wheel, mate,” Callahan said, reading his mind. “You’ll be getting out shortly. There’s no sense in trying something stupid. I’d rather not get blood all over the inside of the van.”

  Eddie nodded to show he understood. “Word gets around that you bump off your partners, you’re going to end up working solo all the time,” he said.

  Callahan looked out the window as they reached the dead-end, but he kept his gun on Eddie’s midsection.

  “Pull your head in, you dumb fuck,” he said irritably. “With three quarters of a million in stones, I’m not planning to do any more robberies—with or without a partner.”

  Pax had been trying to come up with an escape plan since Callahan shot Costanza. He had one in mind, although the chances it would work were somewhere between slim and nonexistent.

  The speedometer read a little more than 25 miles per hour when Pax started into the dead end. As he turned, he stomped the Chevy’s gas pedal to the floor and aimed for a utility pole alongside the street, hitting it hard enough to slam Fitz face-first on the dashboard.

  The airbags ballooned with a blast and Pax threw his door open and scrambled out as Fitz fired a shot that turned the tinted safety glass in the side window into light blue pebbles. By the time Callahan got out of the car and fired a second shot, Pax was all the way across the street, heading up an alley at a dead run.

  He couldn’t outrun Fitz’s bullet, though: the slug hit him on the left side of his back, piercing the muscle called latissimus dorsi and pitching him into the front of a dumpster. He rolled over and managed to get up, limping in a crouch as a third bullet ricocheted off the garbage container.

  His last glimpse of the Australian was over his shoulder as he headed toward Burbank, feet flying.

  • • •

  Pax had his bullet wound tended by a retired veterinarian he knew in Long Beach. He spent a week looking for the Australian, but Fitz never returned to The Trip Hammer and he didn’t even bother to clear his stuff out of his apartment in Agoura Hills.

  Eddie wasn’t surprised. He figured with three-quarters of a million in jewelry, Callahan could replace everything he owned and have enough left for a couple of Porsche 911s as bookends.

  Callahan had fucked him out of his share of the jewels, made him a suspect in a special circumstances homicide and missed putting a pill in his ticker by a little more than an inch. It was the kind of double cross that demanded serious payback. Unfortunately, Eddie and Callahan hadn’t crossed paths since.

  Eddie did only one more job after he and Callahan parted company: a million-dollar armored car robbery. It went badly; two security guards died in a shootout during the heist.

  Pax’s partners in the heist split with the money but set him up to take the fall. They even told the cops where and when they could pick him up. Pax ended up in county jail with a drunken public defender as his attorney and a 25-to-life sentence staring him in the face.

  Fortunately for Eddie, the money stolen belonged to The Combine. The syndicate was more interested in recovering the loot than seeing somebody go to prison for lifting it, so it made him a deal: he’d be sprung from jail on a surety bond; if he tracked down his ex-partners and got back most of the money, his role in the robbery would be forgotten. He could walk away from the whole mess—and The Combine would eat the cost of the bail it had fronted to put him back on the street.

  Pax, righteously pissed about being left holding the bag, took the deal. It took him only a couple days to find the members of his former crew and recover the cash they’d stolen.

  One thing led to another and Eddie ended up on The Combine’s payroll. He didn’t really have a lot of choice in the matter: the last two jobs he’d done had gone sour and he was beginning to think he was jinxed. Besides, it turned out he had more of an aptitude for tracking crooks and putting them on a slab than he did for garden-variety crime.

  He even liked the job. Somebody else did all the shitwork, arranging transportation, renting motel rooms, keeping track of his expenses, providing him with weapons and getting rid of them after they were used. The Combine even did most of the gumshoeing, using its resources and databases to locate the people he was trying to find.

  It was interesting, too. Chance called the assets that Eddie recovered “wet money” because most of it came from crimes in which somebody got shot, stabbed or beat to a paste. Figuring out where it was stashed was challenging, like solving a hard crossword puzzle or decoding a newspaper cryptogram to learn what famous quote it concealed.

  Tracking down thieves and putting a bullet in them was the dull part: Eddie got no thrill out of eliminating the shitbirds who had stolen The Combine’s “wet money,” even though he was good at it. Doing wet work over “wet money” just came with the job.

  At least it had until this assignment came up.

  All he had to do was find Callahan; the Combine had already issued a warrant for his death.

  Pax smiled at the thought. It would be the first time in the ten years he’d be able to mix business with pleasure.

  FOUR

  PAX CHECKED INTO A MOTEL that allowed smoking in Topeka’s north area, grabbed Salisbury steak, a tossed green, with mash and peas from a restaurant a half mile away, and then went looking for $5 million in bearer bonds and a pair of numbnuts stupid enough to try to steal them from the most dangerous gang of crooks in the U.S.

  The address he had been given by Chance made finding Oscar Johnson’s apartment building easy. He sat across the street in his Ford and watched the place until the sun went down and the street lights came on. With darkness on his side, he parked in the alley, pulled on a pair of blue nitrile gloves and climbed the stairway to the second floor.

  The only sound he could hear was a woman speaking Spanish to a crying baby someplace downstairs and a TV in the room across the alley. He put his ear
to the door and listened. It was silent inside Johnson’s flat. He took the strip of plastic out of his map pocket and slipped it down behind the bolt, levering it to push the steel rod of the latch back inside the strike plate. It only took one pass to pop the pin into the mortise and slowly open the door without making a squeak.

  The lights were out and the large window on the opposite wall made two dim rectangles against the blackness. He crossed the room and pulled the roller blind closed before using the tiny Mag-lite on his key chain.

  Johnson’s apartment was dirty but tidy. Magazines were piled on a coffee table that separated the couch from a clunky big-screen television that looked like it dated back to the first Bush administration. An ashtray was filled almost to overflowing on the table and a cheap bedspread from Pier One had been thrown over the sofa, probably to cover cigarette burns and stains.

  A small kitchenette adjoined the room to the left. The appliances looked Korean War vintage and dirty plates were piled in the sink. Judging by the smell, they’d been stacked there a while.

  On the opposite side, a pass-through bathroom housed a shower, sink and toilet. The flashlight illuminated dark stains on a hand towel hanging next to the medicine cabinet. Pax caught a whiff of mildew and something a lot less wholesome—like rotting meat.

  The furnishings in the bedroom were unremarkable, but what was lying on the rumpled covers caught Eddie’s attention immediately: the body of a man in his late 30s dressed in ox blood loafers, a brown tweed suit, a dark blue shirt and a red necktie.

  The halo of hair that circled his shiny pate was going gray and his dark brown eyes seemed thoughtful as he stared sightlessly at the light fixture hanging over his bed. There was a bullet hole in the middle of his sternum and it looked like most of the blood in his body had soaked into the bedding underneath him.

  The man looked familiar because Pax had seen pictures of him in Chance’s office. Eddie felt inside the dead man’s coat and found a billfold. The Kansas driver’s license inside it confirmed the corpse had been Johnson.