The Town: A Novel (51 page)

“We’re running twelve-hour revolving shifts here with a pair from the DEA,” said Grantin, pulling off the glasses and the soul patch, his masterful disguise. “I was going through some of their cuts from the past few days—and that time you came down to ask about the Florist, those pictures you brought, your bank jackers? I think we got them.”

He handed over four time-coded video captures printed on photo paper.
The first one Frawley recognized immediately as Magloan, in profile, entering the front door with a second man wearing a hooded sweatshirt, his face bandaged.

“It’s them,” Frawley said, passing the picture to Dino.

The next image was from two minutes later: Elden wearing a ballcap, one hand in his pocket, the other on the doorknob, turning to check the street behind him.

The last one was of MacRay, six minutes after Elden, a one-quarter profile of him entering the store. Just enough of his face was visible for grand jury identification.

“A sit with the Florist,” said Frawley. “For how long?”

“Twenty minutes or so. They all left separately—it’s on tape somewhere but I didn’t have time to hard-copy it.”

Dino handed the cuts back to Frawley. “Bandage man?” Dino said.

“Coughlin, must be,” said Frawley, remembering MacRay’s swollen hands, but unable to share this insight with Dino. He sorted through some other captures of unsuspecting shoppers. “How well are you guys in his shop?”

“Not good. We’re there, but he runs this Irish music nonstop. Picked up nothing on your team but the bell jingling over the door and
Heyhowyadoing
. I was hoping maybe you were on them better, could help us.”

Frawley nodded. “We’re on their vehicles. Eyes, but not ears. This town—it’s impossible.”

“Yeah,” said Drift, motioning to the window and their panorama of the Boston face of Charlestown. “Look at us up here.”

“We got bumper beacons on all four of their cars, sparing the special-ops guys tails and survs. We did manage to wire up a T-4 in Magloan’s car, but he rides alone and plays that JAM’N 94.5 crap all day.”

“Worse than that,” said Dino, “he sings along.”

“We’re on their phones, but they don’t use them for anything. They’re wise because one of them works for Nynex—though we did stick a transponder beacon on his phone company truck.”

“Well,” said Grantin, looking out over the Town, “something’s up.”

Frawley pulled out a cut showing Krista Coughlin in shorts, a strap-shouldered tank, and flip-flops, pushing her canopied stroller into the shop. “What’s the Florist been up to recently?”

“The usual. He keeps hanging in there. The whole diva gangster thing.”

“When are you guys going to take him down?”

Grantin shrugged. “When someone in his organization cracks. He’s the only one of the old guard left. Guy’s a full-time freak. DEA wants him even worse than we do.”

Frawley held up the photos. “Can I keep these?”

“Hey, with our compliments.”

F
RAWLEY HAD TO GO
to the Boston Field Office at One Center Plaza to find out that the judge had thrown out his second request, made through the U.S. attorney’s Major Crime Unit, for Title Three taps and surv warrants on Claire Keesey’s Charlestown condominium. The judge cited insufficient evidence, ruling again that she could not be reasonably considered a suspect in the Kenmore Square armed robbery.

Back inside the tech room, Frawley waited with Dino while a computer program swallowed up longitude and latitude GPS coordinates from the bumper beacon transponders and spit the information back out to them in the form of street addresses and connect-the-dots grid maps.

“What’s this?” said Dino. “MacRay actually went to work two days ago?”

At least he had driven up to the Bonafide Demolition site in Billerica and parked there for eight hours. Then that night, and the next morning and again in the evening, he did circuits around the shark fin of Allston, parking for long stretches in the vicinity of Cambridge Street, near the Conrail yards. Crosschecking showed Magloan spending time in that area as well, and Elden’s work truck cooping there for an hour or so at midday.

Dino said, “Cambridge Street? Christ. What is that, Dunbar?”

“Nope,” said Frawley, reaching for his jacket. “Magellan.”

W
HERE DO ARMORED TRUCKS
go at night, and where do they issue from in the morning? Unassuming buildings tucked behind high-security fences and electronic gates, deep inside industrial parks or hidden among office-building complexes—the locations of which are the most closely guarded secrets in the armored-carrier industry. Inside, under video-surveillance systems that rival those of most casinos, cashiers in pocketless smocks work in glass-walled counting rooms, tallying, sorting by denomination, stacking, and strapping hundreds of thousands of dollars each night, in currency notes and coins.

For example, on December 27, 1992, thieves looted a windowless office building in an industrial section of Brooklyn, New York, making off with $8.2 million—and leaving behind $24 million they were physically unable to carry.

Set back from the southern side of Cambridge Street before the road crossed the Charles River into Cambridge, in the shadow of the elevated Mass Turnpike, stood a two-story building with no name, surrounded by twin twelve-foot-high chain-link fences topped with concertina wire. That side of the road was barren, lacking even a sidewalk, and the building looked like a modest storage facility gone belly-up.

The electronic gate at the rear of the armored-truck depot was hidden from the street. Frawley could just see it from the dusty lot, holding down his tie as cars whipped past.

“Not one exit,” said Dino, pointing his clipboard at the Pike. “Not two exits. Three big exits, all within an eighth of a mile of where we stand.”

Frawley squinted, blasted by sand and grit. “Firepower needed for this. Stepping out of profile.”

“So is going to the Florist though. Must have somebody on the inside.”

“That’s an angle for us. But I don’t want to tip our hand either.” Frawley looked at the cameras on the corners of the roof. “You said MacRay went to work, right?”

“You think explosives? Think they’re going to blow their way in?”

“Or else put up a hell of a diversion.”

Frawley had not filed a 302 summarizing his meeting with MacRay. He didn’t want that part of the official record, at least not yet. He had, however, filed a Confidential Informant report, Form 209, on Krista Coughlin, getting her assigned a six-digit snitch code in order to cover himself and the investigation, in case she did come through with anything. Such as, when exactly MacRay and company were planning on taking down the Magellan Armored Depot.

A black 4X4 ran up on the shoulder, Frawley and Dino stepping back, squinting into the dust cloud as a cop-type in a security uniform climbed out. He wore a badge and an ID tag, but nothing that read Magellan.

“Guys lost?” he said, coming up on them cordial but firm. “Help you with something?”

Frawley didn’t badge him. He had no way of knowing who might be the inside man. “No thanks,” he said. “We were just on our way.”

M
OST PEOPLE—INCLUDING MOST
bank robbers—think that getting at the money is the toughest part of heisting, when in fact it is the getaway that separates the pros from the cons.

Doug climbed inside the Nynex truck at the corner of Boylston and Park, wearing a work shirt of Dez’s, rapping fists with the Monsignor.

“Got the hotel room?” said Dez.

“It’s a palace.”

“How long you gonna stay?”

“Long as it takes. Registered under ‘Charles.’”

“‘Charles?’”

“As in ‘Charles Town’”

“Ah.”

Doug checked the mirrors for tails. “You put in for next Tuesday off?”

“Personal day, all set. But this decoy shit’s a lot of work.”

“Tell that to the G. You switched trucks, I hope.”

“Bleeding radiator—damn the luck. Here. Buckle this on.”

Doug clasped around his waist a leather lineman’s belt just like Dez’s, with a red-orange plastic phone-company handset on a wire holster loop.

Dez double-parked prominently on Yawkey Way, right across from the Gate D entrance, stepping out with his work-order clipboard and yanking open the back of the truck. He loaded Doug up with a pile of equipment, then they crossed the road and commiserated with the red-shirted gate girl about the heat. She consulted her clipboard. “Are you on the work list?”

“Should be,” said Dez. “I know you’re on mine. I just go where I’m told.”

Her red shirt meant ballpark staff, not security. “This is about the… ?”

“System upgrades. All I’m here for now is to check things out, save us time on job day by making sure we bring everything we need. Something about everything having to be done over the next West Coast road trip. Twenty minutes, tops.”

“Could I just see your work ID?”

Dez showed her. She looked it over and filled out a work pass for him.

Doug made a show of struggling under his load as she finished. “My trainee,” said Dez.

“That’s okay,” she said, filling out a second pass without asking for Doug’s ID.

The caves and tunnels beneath the Fenway stands, the concession area, was where the oldest park in Major League Baseball showed its age. Food-service workers wheeled racks of bagged hot-dog rolls to the stalls, already loading up for that night’s game. A blue shirt met them at the doors to an elevator, a recent college graduate, his security ID hanging on a shoelace around his neck, handset radio on his belt. He was short, wide with machine-pumped muscle, and Dez flashed him the passes.

“Where to, guys?”

Dez said, “Ah, press box, I’m told.”

The blue shirt stepped aboard the elevator and pressed five. Doug stood between black-and-white photographs of prewar Ted Williams leaning on a bat and a beaming, Triple Crown–winning Carl Yastrzemski.

Dez said, “Guess this ain’t gonna be the year, huh?”

Blue shirt said, “Nope, doesn’t look like it.”

When the elevator stopped, Dez said, “Anyone ever ridden in this thing with you and not said those basic words?”

Blue shirt said, “You pretty much nailed it.”

The doors opened on the sunny flat of an outdoor pedestrian ramp, the blue shirt leading them inside glass doors past an unmanned security desk, past back-to-back cafeterias—one for park employees, one for media—and down along a white hallway of doors open to broadcast booths. The end of the hall doglegged wide into two tiers of long counters, both of them print-media booths, resembling nothing so much as the old grandstand at Suffolk Downs. The glass wall looked out from just left of home plate, over the infield diamond of June-green grass, the cocoa base paths and warning track, thirty-four thousand tiny-ass seats, and the city of glass and steel beyond.

“Field of screams,” said Dez, unloading Doug.

They made a show of walking around and plugging things in, thumping on walls, the blue shirt lasting maybe three minutes. “Say, you guys good here for a while?”

“Yeah, sure,” said Dez, busy.

“I’ll be back, couple of minutes.”

Dez waved without looking. “Take your time.”

When the footsteps faded, Dez slipped a radio wire into his ear, scanning for ballpark security frequencies. Doug affixed his work pass to his
sweat-dampened shirt and nodded to Dez, starting quickly back out to the hallway, holding down his flopping telephone handset as he returned to the outdoor ramp.

Doug walked down one floor, nodding to the white-aproned food service workers on their break, entering the first open door and finding himself inside the glass-enclosed 600 Club. He strode through it like he owned the place, passing only a carpet cleaner and a bar back, crossing behind the stadium seats and their fishbowl view of the park. An escalator brought him down one more floor to a concourse running high above the third-base seats, and he made his way down through the grandstand and loge boxes, ducking into the first ramp.

Busy red-shirted Fenway employees passed him underneath the stands without much of a look. With the ballpark quiet and the concessions shuttered, Doug felt like he was back in his demo crew days—doing a basement sweep of a condemned building ahead of the wrecking ball. The angled stone floor was a skateboarder’s wet dream, the iron stanchions hoisting up the park like the corroding girders boosting the interstate over the Town.

Doug passed behind Gate D, the red-shirted gate girl sitting out on the sidewalk, drinking from a bottle of water with her back to him. He passed a broad souvenir booth locked up like an old newspaper stand, eyeing the open red door beyond it. A sign on the inside face said Employees Only. Doug passed it with a long, careful glance, seeing a short hallway inside, leading to a second door with a square, one-way window.

This was the money room. Game time always found a member of Boston’s finest working a detail outside it, but right now there were only cameras. According to the Florist’s inside squeal, the security work scheduled for the long road trip included surveillance upgrades, meaning the park’s central monitoring network would be dark for a few days. This was the reason for the job’s narrow timeline.