The Shell Game: A Fox and O'Hare Short Story (Kindle Single) (4 page)

“Robbery in progress on the northbound 405 freeway at the Marina Freeway interchange. Suspects are driving three armored trucks.”

A fourth armored truck sped onto the freeway from the eastbound Marina Freeway on-ramp and joined the armored truck herd.

“Make that four,” Kate said to dispatch. “Agent in pursuit.”

Nick and the drivers of the three other armored trucks began to weave so that they straddled multiple lanes, creating a traffic blockade. It was a carefully choreographed maneuver. In a quarter mile, or about sixteen seconds, they would hit the Culver Boulevard exit, and then in another three-quarters of a mile, or about fifty seconds, they would hit the Washington Boulevard exit. And then it would all be over.

Nick called the other drivers.

“Give me smoke,” he said.

Wendy, Artie, Evaristo, and Nick flipped the switches that had been installed the night before, and thick billows of gray smoke poured out from beneath the four armored trucks.

Blinded by the smoke, Kate reflexively hit her brakes for fear of rear-ending the armored truck in front of her. She could hear cars all around her coming to screeching halts and the metallic crunch of multiple fender benders.

She lifted her foot off the brake and moved forward cautiously. There were flows to the smoke, which briefly cleared in spots and gave her fleeting, hazy glimpses of the armored trucks and the road ahead. The armored trucks were weaving, switching lanes with one another.

The shell game had begun.

An armored truck broke from behind the cloud and took the Culver Boulevard exit, but Kate ignored it. It wasn’t the armored truck marked by her bullets. Drake’s armored truck was still on the freeway. The three remaining armored trucks continued weaving and putting out smoke, but Kate continued to dog the truck driven by Drake. Even with the smoke hanging over the road, she could pick out the truck with the broken taillight.

Nick had a fix on Kate in his side mirror. He suspected he’d underestimated the junior agent. He’d know for sure in thirty seconds if she followed him off the freeway at the Washington Boulevard exit. If that happened, he had a backup plan. He always did.

He called Artie. “Are you in position?”

“Almost,” Artie said. “Are you gonna need me?”

“I think so,” Nick said. “But be gentle.”

Kate watched as two of the armored trucks abruptly peeled off the 405 freeway at the Washington Boulevard exit. One of them was Drake’s. She followed him, letting the third armored truck go because she knew it was a decoy.

When the two armored trucks hit Sepulveda, they split up. One armored truck went north toward Venice Boulevard and Drake’s went south, toward Washington Boulevard.

Kate stayed on Drake’s tail and called in her new location to dispatch, all the time listening for sirens or a chopper. She should have backup soon, but she’d take Drake or Fox or whoever down without assistance if it was necessary. She didn’t want to fail on her very first assignment.

The armored truck carrying the antiquities sped south to Washington Boulevard, made a sharp right, and continued west underneath the freeway overpass. Kate followed
it, closing in, feeling confident she could catch it. Her Crown Vic was a piece of junk, but it could still outrun an armored truck.

Her attention was so focused on the armored truck that she didn’t see the
other
armored truck that burst out of a cross street. She caught movement in her peripheral vision seconds before she was T-boned on her passenger side. The force of the impact rolled her car over, shattered the windows, and exploded the airbags.

Nick pulled over in front of a panel van that he’d parked on the street the day before. He swung out of the armored truck and ran back to Kate’s overturned Crown Vic. He’d needed Artie to disable the car, not kill the driver. The thought that Kate might be hurt gave him a pain in his heart.

“That’s what I call perfect timing,” Artie said, climbing out of his armored truck.

“I told you to be gentle,” Nick said.

“That’s gentle in New York,” Artie said.

Nick rushed to the driver’s side of Kate’s car, and looked inside. Kate was hanging upside down, strapped in place by her seat belt. Her nose was bleeding from the impact of the airbag and she was dazed, but otherwise she appeared to be fine.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Peachy,” she said, blinking hard in an attempt to clear her vision. “You’re under arrest.”

Nick glanced back at his armored truck. His crew was just about done unloading the collection into the paneled van. “I don’t think so, Kate. Not today.”

“I just wanted you to hear your future, whoever the heck you are. I guarantee you I’ll be the one who takes you down.”

He grinned. “I’m Nick Fox, and if I ever get taken down by someone … I hope it’s you.”

Three hours later Kate was in Jessup’s office. She had a Band-Aid across her nose and an ice pack in her hand. She’d just given Jessup her full report on the robbery, and she was wishing she’d taken the painkiller the EMS guy had offered her. She had a massive headache, not from the crash, but because she’d just totally screwed up her first real assignment. Her career was in the toilet. She’d be stuck in her cubicle, doing clearance reports, for the rest of her life. She thought the best she could hope for was to eventually graduate to doing Starbucks runs for the other special agents.

“I’m impressed with how you reacted to the situation,” Jessup said.

Kate blinked her left eye. Her right eye was swollen shut. “You are?”

“Hell yes. It’s when things go bad that you see what an agent is really capable of doing. You stayed cool, you improvised, and, most important of all, you didn’t let up.”

“So you’re not going to transfer me to clerical duty in the FBI field office in Guam?”

“Why would I? This is on me, not you,” he said. “I assigned you to work with him. He fooled me first. Your career won’t take the hit.”

“But he got away from
me
.”

“That happens,” Jessup said. “You’ll have better luck next time.”

Kate was dizzy with relief. There was going to be a next time. She wasn’t getting kicked out of the Bureau.

“We didn’t know who Nicolas Fox was before this,” Jessup said. “Now we do. As long as I’m SAC here, catching Fox is going to be your primary case.”

Crap on a cracker, Kate thought. He was giving her Fox. She could barely breathe.

“There isn’t another agent in the Bureau who knows him better than you do or has a stronger motivation to hunt him down,” Jessup said. “That makes you uniquely qualified.”

“Thank you, sir.” She rotated her head slightly so she could see him with her one good eye. “You won’t have any regrets.”

Kate left his office and rushed to the ladies’ room. She pressed the ice pack to her eye and sucked in air. She told herself she was a tough FBI agent and she wasn’t going to throw up or faint. She took the ice pack off her eye and looked at herself in the mirror. It
wasn’t her first black eye, and probably not her last, but it was ugly all the same. And it was all because of Nick Fox. And she was going to make him pay. She wanted to punch him in the face and kick him down a flight of stairs. She wouldn’t do that, of course, because she was a professional. She was a special agent. She would simply track him to the ends of the earth, arrest him, and see him rot in jail.

She pulled herself up tall, and sashayed out of the ladies’ room and down the hall to her cubicle.

Cosmo was looking over the partition at her. “Boy, you look terrible,” he said. “Did Nick Fox do that to you? I heard he got away with the Klepper collection. I heard he’s real slick. I guess you must feel pretty dumb, huh? Is that why someone sent you the gift basket? Is it so you won’t feel so dumb? Or is it some special occasion? I know it’s not your birthday because I know your birthday and it’s not today.”

Kate looked at her desk. Cosmo was right. Someone had left a gift basket there. It was stuffed with packages of Oreos.

“It was delivered to the reception desk for you,” Cosmo said. “It’s been x-rayed, sniffed for explosives by dogs, and sampled for poison.”

“Sampled?” Kate focused her eye on a package that was open and missing a few cookies. “You had some of my cookies?”