Forty Thieves (28 page)

“Which house?”

“
The
house.”

“Fifty-nine eighty,” she said. “How many in the car?”

“Two. Both of them men,” he said. “I wish I knew where they’re going.”

“They’re probably out looking for us,” she said. “They still want to kill us.”

“Can you get on your phone and check the traffic apps?”

“It only tells how the traffic is right now.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“I thought we were going to take our time. We were going to plan every detail.”

Ed handed her the binoculars. “Look at the house. The back window on the right.”

“I see him. He’s cooking something on the stove. It looks like soup.”

“He’s alone,” said Ed. “That’s my point. The others left that house already.”

“Are you kidding?” she said. “We’re not ready for this.”

“By the time we get ready, this guy’s friends will come home.”

“I know, I know,” she said. “It could be a long time before there’s another one by himself. I just …”

“Come on,” he said.

“Never mind. Nothing,” she said. “You’re right. We’ve got to do it. But we’re not ready. Just take a minute and help me understand the plan.”

“There is no plan,” Ed said. “He’s there, he’s alone right now, and that means right now is when we have to do it. No choice.” He got out from behind the boat on the trailer and began to move, staying as low as he could in the tallest vegetation—goldenrods, some relative of dandelions that had tall, woody stalks, thistles.

Nicole sat still for a moment, and then followed. They came to the fence and climbed over it. After that there was an apron of cleared land, a manicured strip of domesticated grass before the back garden began, and they moved laterally to stay off it until they reached the back of the house.

Ed pulled his MP5 rifle out of his shoulder bag, inserted a magazine, and racked the first round into the chamber. He left the telescoping stock collapsed to keep the weapon short. Nicole took out her MP5 too and loaded it, her eyes always on the rear window of the house, trying to find the man again from her new angle.

As Nicole looked, she noticed something surprising about her feelings. If she just had to step into the house and kill the man, it would have been much easier for her. What they were doing now seemed less impersonal. She would have to endure far more involvement.

Nicole’s mind kept running in one direction after another. There was the immediate question of whether the man in the kitchen had already noticed them and called his friends on his phone, or maybe turned around and walked out his front door, or even taken one of those nasty little machine
guns out of a closet and crouched down to wait. There was the question of what she and Ed would do afterward, during the next few minutes, if they got him. Their car was parked on the next street, too far to even run to if somebody chased them. And then there was the step after that. What in the world was that going to be? The seconds were passing, and her mind was like a person in a burning house, running to each door or window, looking for a way out, and finding one after another blocked.

And Ed was already beginning to move again. For a second, a part of her felt itself tugged in the other direction, wanting to run back to the fence before Ed brought death down on them both. But something—maybe only the fear of being alone—made her stand up and go after him. She knew that having her with him kept his survival from being impossible, but it didn’t make it likely. He was betting on getting through this on sheer audacity.

Ed and Nicole trotted along the back of the house and stopped on either side of the kitchen steps. At the top was the kitchen door, a white wooden door with four small panes of glass on the upper half. Ed was tall enough so he could look in the lowest pane at the place in front of the stove where they had first seen the man.

Ed shook his head at her and moved on to the next window, and then the next, heading along the side of the house now. Finally he looked in and nodded, then came back along the house. When he reached her, he whispered, “He’s in the living room. He’s watching a soccer game on TV.”

Nicole allowed herself to feel his hope. The television’s sound would help cover any noise they would have to make. She followed him to the kitchen door and watched him flick
open his knife and slip the blade into the slit between the door and the jamb to depress the plunger. He leaned into it, and shouldered the door open. Nicole came in and closed the door quietly so the change in the air and the miscellaneous sounds of the outdoors wouldn’t reach the man.

She took in the house. She could smell the soup, a mixture of odors with onions, garlic, and chicken competing for her attention. She saw it simmering in a covered pot. It occurred to her that she didn’t want the man to turn the boiling soup into a weapon, so she turned off the heat.

Ed was moving along the hallway to the other part of the house still half crouching with his rifle at his shoulder. He had reached the side of the stairway leading up to the second floor. He paused and stepped to the side to let her catch up with him.

They pivoted around the foot of the staircase together, their rifles trained on the man.

He was sallow-skinned and about thirty, his hair cut with an electric shaver that made his hair and beard the same length. He had a sloping forehead and a sharp nose, but his head protruded in the back, so it seemed to be in balance. He turned his head to face them, and Nicole saw the close-set black eyes widen in surprise, and then narrow again. The man raised his hands slowly, as though he had been trained to do it exactly this way, showing the palms of his hands right away, but otherwise moving slowly so he didn’t alarm a nervous opponent into shooting him. She noticed that he didn’t raise them too much, so he would still have a chance to use them if the opportunity came.

“Higher,” she said, and the man raised them a bit higher.

“Who are you—
polizei
?” He waited. “Cops?”

“You wish,” Ed said.

The man’s eyes were on Ed, and he looked as though he felt a bit more confident, as though Ed were a presence he had seen before. Ed was big and strong and violent, and for some reason, that made the man more comfortable. “What do you want?”

“What I want for now is that you keep your hands up and shut your mouth until I ask you a question. Are you alone in the house?”

“Yes. My friends are out, but they’ll be back.”

Ed said to Nicole, “Keep him in your sights for a minute.” She aimed at the man, so he had to stare up the rifle barrel while Ed put his rifle into his shoulder bag and took out his .45 pistol with the silencer already attached.

The man in front of the television set didn’t like the implication. “Hey,” he said. “I’m not causing you any trouble. There’s no reason to shoot me. Take what you want.”

Ed made sure he didn’t step in front of Nicole as he set his gun on the table behind the couch and moved closer to the man. He took a set of plastic restraints from his bag, pulled the man’s right hand behind his back, and then the left, and tightened the restraint around his wrists. He knelt in front of him and put another restraint around his ankles. Then he stepped back, picked up his silenced pistol, and held it in front of the man, aiming it at his head. “Tell us who you’re working for.”

“Working for?” the man said. “Nobody.”

Ed punched the man on the side of the head above the ear, and then backhanded him so his nose began to bleed, the blood streaming down from his nose around his mouth and dripping from his chin.

The man said, “Wait, stop the hitting. I didn’t understand what you meant. Tell me what you want to know.”

“Somebody hired a bunch of you people to drive to our house to kill us in the middle of the night. We killed three of you instead. Does that sound familiar to you?”

The man seemed to be calculating what would happen if he said no. He could see Ed squaring his body and clenching his fist. “Yes,” he said. “I do know about that.”

“Who hired you to do it?”

“Please listen to me,” the man said. “I didn’t understand what you want at first. A group of eight men went out to find you. Your name is White.”

“Hoyt,” Ed said.

“Yes. White. We hired you. We paid you to take care of some private detectives through a middleman named Boyland. Isn’t that so?”

“Boylan. Yes.”

“And you killed Mr. Boyland instead. Am I wrong?”

“No. We did kill him. He came to our house late at night with a gun, and shot at me. So I killed him.”

“I’m sorry if I have a poor understanding. But didn’t he get killed at his house? And his wife too? Was she at your house?”

“No,” said Nicole. “We killed him at our house because he came after us. We took his body to his house in his car and left it in his garage. We didn’t know he had a wife. I had to kill her because she came at me with a gun.”

Ed stepped closer to the man, looming over him. “Time to quit stalling. We want to know who is trying to kill us. Who paid you? Who ordered you to do it?”

The man seemed to be struggling. “I don’t know how to say. We all decided. When Boyland died we knew we should never have hired anybody to protect us. So we decided to do it ourselves.”

“What the hell did you have to protect yourselves from?”

“First there was a man. He got involved with a woman. She’s one of us. She didn’t tell anybody at first, just started going out to meet him on dates. Then pretty soon she was staying at his apartment all night, and letting him stay at her house.” He looked at Nicole, as though appealing to her. “You know how this goes.”

“Who was this man?” she asked.

“He was a black man, named Ballantine. She said he was very nice to her at first. And she tried to be careful. Then he wasn’t very nice to her anymore. But by then she couldn’t just break up with him and hope he would never tell anybody about her. So she killed him. A few of us—her friends—came over and got rid of his body for her. There was an open storm sewer in a street a few blocks from the woman’s house. It was a rainy night and water was rushing into that big pipe. We put him inside and let the water take him. That was a year ago.”

“Then what?”

“A couple of weeks ago there was an offer of a reward for whoever had killed this man. It was from a private detective agency. One of our friends knew Boyland. He went to ask him what people do in such situations in this country. Boyland said he would take care of the detectives for a little money. A good deal. So he hired you, isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” said Ed. “Why are you the one asking questions?”

The man shrugged. “‘Isn’t that right’ is a figure of speech. I know he hired you.”

Ed said, “I’m going to ask you one more time. Who is the one who sent men after us when Boylan was dead?”

“We did. All of us.”

“So we should kill all of you, right?”

“No,” the man said. “You get nothing by killing any of us.”

“Why not?” said Nicole, who was becoming indignant.

“We’re—” and then he said two words that sounded like “
panda lopova
.”

“What the hell is that?”

“Thieves. Just thieves. We came here to California about three years ago because we wanted to retire here. It’s warm and sunny. We go to the beach, we play golf, and go to each other’s houses to play cards. We haven’t done anything bad here. We don’t have anything you want.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Nicole said. “I want not to be dead. I don’t mind killing as many as it takes to keep from being dead. Starting with you right now.”

“I can fix this,” the man said. “I can!” He was sweating, and his breathing accelerated, but he was intent, not scared.

“How?”

“You have nothing to gain by killing us, but neither do we, by killing you. All we want is to be left alone. So do you.”

“That’s true. So?”

“So you haven’t lost anything yet. You’ve already made your money. We’ve lost three men, and we’ve lost the money we spent just keeping people away from us.” He leaned forward now, his eyes intense and unmoving. “But we don’t need revenge or repayment.”

“What do you want from us?” asked Nicole.

“Nothing. You go away right now, before somebody else shows up here. I tell my friends about our deal, and you go on with your life. You don’t bother us. We don’t bother you.”

Nicole looked at Ed for a few seconds. Ed was one of those men who made thinking look like hard work. Finally, she saw him turn to glance at her. She shrugged, knowing that he would like the decision only if he thought he was the one to make it.

He said, “All right.”

The man grinned, his teeth giving him a discomfortingly canine expression. Nicole wondered if she had made a mistake.

“You’re being smart,” he said, as though he’d read her mind. “You can go, and you won’t have to worry about being dead next week, next month, next year. We won’t come after you again.” He seemed so happy that Nicole almost began to feel worse. She told herself it was just his teeth. He had come from some country where people didn’t have a lot of use for dentists.

She took a step backward, and Ed took one too.

The man said, “Wait. Don’t forget to free my hands.”

Ed stepped toward the man, and flicked open his knife.

Nicole said, “No. Don’t cut him loose. Leaving him will give us another few seconds to get going.”

As they backed up toward the staircase, Nicole heard the sound of a car pulling into the driveway. She heard a car door slam, then another. She spun on her heel and ran toward the kitchen door at the back of the house. She felt rather than heard Ed’s big, heavy feet running on the floor behind her, vibrating the boards and making them sink and spring upward as he came. She flung the door open and turned to
aim her rifle back up the hallway in the direction of the front door while Ed got outside. She heard the front door swing open, and then the bound man’s voice.

He shouted in some other language, calling out to his friends as they came in the door. She could tell it was at least two men, from their overlapping voices and the noise of their feet as they entered and ran to cut him loose. She stepped out, shut the kitchen door, leapt to the ground, and ran after Ed across the backyard to the fence.