Meaner Things (28 page)

*

The room seemed to grow even warmer and my clothes were now sticking to my body. Fearing the onset of muscle cramps, I decided to flex my arm and legs in the tight nook under the desk. I managed a couple of centimetres of movement; any more risked making a noise and that would really give the game away. I daren’t bring my arm all the way up to look at my watch but I reckoned that another twenty minutes or so had passed since Jeff D. had switched off the video screen and begun his snooze time.

My thoughts went again and again to Emma and Charlie waiting down in the garage. They must be getting frantic by now, especially Emma, but they couldn’t wait forever. Before dawn broke they’d have to leave for their own safety. I couldn’t expect anything else. I estimated that it must now be coming up to five o’clock, which gave me a maximum of an hour to get out of here, probably less if I was honest.

I considered making a run for it while Jeff was asleep. The risk of waking him was hard to assess; he’d drunk a lot of liquor, but that didn’t mean he’d gone deaf. This was my biggest problem – there was no way that I could get out of the security room quietly. Even if I abandoned the two heavy canvas bags of loot, which I was loathe to do having lugged them this far, I still had to shift them out of my way. Being full of loose stones and jewellery, it was impossible to do that silently. And I would have to take the videotapes, which rattled around in my backpack when I moved. Then I would have to crawl across the floor right past Jeff, get to the door, and open and close it silently in the dark.

No problem doing any of that if I was Brad Pitt in
Ocean’s
Eleven
, but complete folly to attempt it in the real world.

I listened intently for the slightest sound of snoring coming from Jeff, which might indicate deep sleep, but he was silent. For all I knew he was simply resting his eyes and might get up at any moment. I’d long since run out of new silent insults for the man, but I repeated some just to pass the time.

More precious minutes passed and I began to despair. This was a pathetic way for it to end: stuck under a desk whilst a drunken security guard, who was nevertheless surely destined to nab me, snoozed across the room. By now my mind was beginning to swoon from utter fatigue and nervous exhaustion, and my body was so stiff and rigid that I didn’t think I could uncurl myself, even if Jeff D. were to magically vanish in a puff of smoke.

A cell phone rang, cleaving the still air like a knife. At first nothing happened.
Answer
it
,
you
drunken
bastard
,
answer
it
. My mind flung the words at Jeff D. like mental daggers. Without opening his eyes, he stirred slightly and rubbed his face with his hand, the phone still ringing. Its volume seemed pathetically low.

His hand left his face and crept to his pants pocket where there was a slim rectangular bulge. My heart soared.

The ringing stopped. Jeff’s hand came back up to belly and rested there. The room was silent again. I wanted to scream in sheer frustration, blow him away with a banshee wail. If I’d still had the crowbar I might have used it.

I made myself calm down and started counting seconds in my head. The phone would ring again, I told myself. The phone
had
to ring again. Whoever it was would call back. It had to be so. It would be so.

I counted thirty seconds and began to despair. How long does it take for someone to redial? Thirty-five seconds? Forty?

The cell phone rang again. This time Jeff stirred immediately, fumbled the phone out of his pocket and held it to his ear, his eyes still shut.

“Waa . . . Oh, it’s you.” His eyes finally opened. “What you mean snuck out? You know I have patrols to do, check the floors, that takes time . . . I’m on the main floor right now . . . No, ’course I didn’t doze off again . . . Don’t be a baby, what could happen up there? . . . ’Course I’m coming back up, I’m working my way there right now . . .”

The call ended abruptly. Jeff muttered an obscenity and glared at the phone for a moment before slipping it back into his pocket. He took his feet down off the desk and sat up straight. His hand went to the monitor switch, then paused half way as if he were reconsidering. He looked at his watch and shook his head slightly.

At long, long last he stood up, stretched, and walked to the door. I heard it noisily open and close. He was gone; my ordeal was over. I moved my stiff, aching legs forward and pushed the canvas bags away with my arms, making some space to ease myself slowly out. My clothes were moist with perspiration and I longed for a drink of water, but the plastic bottles in my backpack were completely empty. I slumped forward on my hands and knees and began to crawl out from under the desk.

The door opened again and I froze.

Footsteps hurried towards me. I had no time to do anything other than turn my head in the direction of the sound.

Jeff D. strode to his desk with a bunch of keys in his hand. He stooped down, locked the bottom drawer with the liquor flask in it, and put the keys in his pocket. Without pausing he turned on his heel and walked away. Once again I heard the door close behind him.

Okay
,
that
has
to
be
it
.
That
really
has
to
be
it
. I gave him another minute to get in the elevator, then emerged from beneath the desk. I couldn’t even straighten up. Like an old man I had to stretch my limbs in slow motion until the stiffness went away. Gradually my muscles softened. Blood flow restored, I was able to move reasonably freely. I pushed the bags ahead of me and crawled all the way to the door.

Even though I was sick to the teeth of this room, and wanted out of it at all costs, I fought back the urge to get up, open the door and leg it out to the garage. I still had to be careful. By now Jeff D. was probably back up on the third floor with his cutie-cum-harridan, whispering all kinds of pacifying sweet nothings in her shell-like ear. On the other hand, he might have another hipflask stashed somewhere else and be making his way to it.

I peeped out the corner of the window and checked that the coast was clear. The foyer was deserted, but I made myself count to thirty before I stood up. My hand was on the door and I was about to leave when something nagged at the back of my mind and made me hesitate. Was I forgetting something? I thought hard and it came to me. The video recorder was back on and would catch my image as soon as I exited this room. I hobbled over to the equipment and switched it off again.

The crowbar was still propped up against the wall. Somehow, Jeff D. had missed it every time. Seeing it gave me one last, capricious idea. I picked it up with my still-gloved hand and carried it to his desk, carefully placing it in front of the video monitor. As an afterthought I positioned a white plastic ruler and a pencil exactly parallel to the crowbar, one on each side of it. They would give Jeff something mysterious, but meaningless, to think about when he discovered them. Hopefully he’d pester the detectives about it.

Back at the door I took one more careful look around, hoisted the straps of the bags over my shoulders, then threw caution to the winds and hoofed it down the hallway.

*

I made it across the foyer to the connecting door into the back corridor. So far, so good. I dived through, caught one of the heavy bags in the door and nearly fell over. Urging myself to one last monumental effort, I wrenched the bag free and shuffled my way down the narrow, gloomy passageway.

Halfway down, I heard something behind me. With a bag on each shoulder I would have to stop and unload to look back to see who it was. There was no way that I wanted to do that. I decided it had to be the bane of my existence, that dozy, drunken ape Jeff D., exercising his psychic sixth sense again, twitching his nostrils and muttering, “I smell the blood of a diamond heister.” Who else could it be?

The urge to pause and look back suddenly became overwhelming. Now that I’d left the main building it was pitch black here in the corridor, but I thought I might see the fire door slowly closing on its spring hinges. Nothing doing; I couldn’t see anyone, but I might have looked too late. I hefted the bags again. The straps cut deeply into my aching shoulders as I stumbled forward, but there was no way that I was going to abandon this much loot now. Jeff would have to catch me up and wrench the bags from my cold, dead hands.

Of course, he might be about to do just that. With my head down I hoofed it even harder, sweat trickling down my forehead and into my eyes. I hurried on, certain now that he was coming after me. Rapid footsteps echoed around the walls. He was getting faster too, running, catching me up.

I broke into a run myself and pelted down the dark corridor towards the garage, ignoring the weight I was carrying and the exhaustion of my body. A couple more minutes and this would all be over.

Something touched my back near my neck. A hand? Jeff’s? I swear it burned like a hot iron. I felt him right behind me, heard the heaving of his lungs, smelt his sweat . . .

He mustn’t catch me. No-one had ever caught me. My leaden legs ached and my heart pounded in my eardrums, but somehow I kept running.

Faster
,
faster
,
I’m
almost
there
.

Suddenly the floor disappeared from under me and I hurtled forward into emptiness. My skull smashed into something very, very hard. For an instant there was incredible pain.

Then the lights inside my head went out.

27.

THE GREAT ESCAPE

The flight attendant left the plastic tumbler of white wine on my tray. I picked it up and downed half of it at a gulp, the sharp grape aftertaste pinging on my tongue. I craved something stronger – two fingers of Black Bush whiskey would have done the job nicely – but nursey sitting beside me insisted that I had to keep off hard liquor for now. After we landed I could indulge in anything I liked, she promised, including the local rum. I intended to keep her to that promise.

“Head still sore?”

I turned and gave nursey, also known as Emma, my best attempt at a smile. “Still throbbing quite a bit. I’m just glad to be this far. Feel stupid in this hat though.”

“Take some more Tylenol if you need to.” She looked out the window at the clouds, then back at me. “Anyway, the hat suits you.”

As the hat I was wearing was a silk lined fedora, something I’d never worn in my life before, I begged to disagree. But my head ached too much to argue, and at least the hat hid the shaved bit of my scalp and the half dozen stitches.

“A couple more hours and we’ll be in Barbados,” she said.

“You’ve always wanted to go there, haven’t you?”

She smiled wryly. “Actually, I’ve been here once before. This time will be different though.” She gave my hand a tight squeeze. “Still don’t remember anything?”

I knew what she was referring to and grimaced. “No, nothing. I remember running down the corridor in the pitch dark with Jeff D. hard on my heels. I think I tripped or something. Then nothing.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, like I told you, you tripped on thin air. You forgot about the half dozen concrete steps at the end of the corridor.”

I blushed under the hat and tried to defend myself. “Yeah, that was pretty stupid; I can’t believe I did that. But stupid can happen when you have the hound of hell on your heels.”

She put her hand over her mouth, but I still saw the grin behind it. “Once again, Mike, there was nobody there.”

I frowned. “So you keep saying, but I’m sure there was. Jeff D. was after me.”

“See him?”

I had to be honest. “No, but I heard him.”

She stopped grinning, twisted around and touched my cheek with her hand. I liked all this tactile stuff. “You poor boy. You finally lost it right at the end, didn’t you? Your mind started playing tricks on you.”

I was about to protest again, then recalled how completely stressed out and exhausted I’d been by the time I’d started off down that dark hallway. Instead of arguing I simply nodded to her in reluctant agreement. “So you’re saying I imagined it?”

“’Fraid so.”

“Least I held on to the swag,” I protested.

“Yup, I hauled the bags to the car first, then came back for you.” She gave me a coy look. “Just kidding,” she added.

I thought about it for a minute. Try as I might, I still couldn’t remember a thing after I’d launched myself into space over the concrete steps.

“Was there a lot of blood?” I asked, lowering my voice.

“You got it all over one of the bags.” She leaned close to my ear. “Ruined one of them. Had to burn it. All of them in fact.”

“Well, at least you got some blood diamonds.” It was a feeble joke, even by my standards.

“How did you know I was there?” I asked.

“I was standing on the other side of the door, out of camera range,” she said, “Waiting for you; worried sick if you have to know. You’d been gone so long I was frantic by then. I’d thought a million times about going back to find you.”

“I can understand that, but I’m glad you stayed where you were.”

“I actually was about to go back in when suddenly there was an enormous
thunk
on the other side of the door and I nearly jumped out of my skin. When I tried to open the door your body was blocking it – you were lying in a heap, out cold – and I had to push as hard as I could to squeeze through. One look at your head and I figured out you must have tumbled down the steps and head butted the door. I got Charlie over and we bundled you into the car, with the bags in the back seat beside you.”

“Bags in the back seat? Wasn’t that a bit casual?”

“No room in the trunk; too stuffed already.”

“I’m sorry I ruined our grand exit.”

“It was still pretty cool. You weren’t bleeding so much by then and had begun to come around, so I knew you’d be OK. It felt like a mountain falling from my shoulders when we pulled out of the garage and roared down the street.” She paused. “Well, actually we didn’t exactly roar much. The old Toyota was sagging quite a bit on its suspension, with all those heavy rocks and gold weighing us down.”

“Did Charlie say much?”

“Not a lot. He just beamed like a Cheshire cat. Kept going on and on about how we’d just pulled off” – she whispered the last bit in my ear – “the crime of the century.”

“He’s right about that. Biggest ever in Canada, I believe.”

“The whole of North America, I would think.”

We were quiet for a while, Emma content to look out the window while I finished the wine.

“Did they believe you in Emergency?” I said.

She grinned again. “I didn’t give them a chance to discuss it. It was true though, sort of; I mean you really did fall down the stairs, just not at home.”

“They probably thought it was domestic violence, that you’d attacked me with a baseball bat.”

“More like a smashed liquor bottle.”

“So while you were watching them sewing me up in Emergency, Charlie was sorting the goodies and distributing them as planned?”

“That’s right. It’s all safely hidden away in various locations, as agreed.”

“Where no would-be heisters will break in and steal it.”

“We’ll talk to him about it later. He’s promised to keep two deck chairs for us on the beach.”

“Can’t wait.”

“In the meantime, read this.” She reached into the bag at her feet and pulled out a two-day-old copy of the
Vancouver
Province
newspaper. I took it and read the front page headline:

‘
Downtown
Diamond
Centre
Robbed
of
Millions
:
Super
Thieves
Bust
Impregnable
Vault’
.

*

“You must have felt like a kid in a toyshop,” I said.

Charlie leaned back in his deckchair and laughed. “You bet. It was like every Christmas and birthday I’ve ever had, multiplied about a million times, except better.”

“Tell me about it.” I peered through Ray-Bans at Emma paddling in foamy waves at the water’s edge, her black one-piece swimsuit perfectly emphasising endlessly long legs and slim arms. The blood-red orb of the setting sun sank low on the horizon behind her. Charlie and I were far back on the beach, a giant parasol spread over us, purposely situated well away from others so as not to have to worry about eavesdroppers.

I was content to let him talk and eager to hear about the things I’d missed while lying in a cheap motel room waiting for the pain in my head to go away. The gap in my memory wasn’t very long – I remembered everything after arriving at the hospital – but going over immediately succeeding events helped chip away at the short, annoying blank space preceding them.

“It was like Monopoly,” Charlie said. “There was so much cash piled on the carpet. I sorted it and counted the stacks. Most of it’s American hundred-dollar bills.”

“That’s ’cause diamond prices are set in U.S. dollars the world over,” I said.

“Right. There are plenty of euros too, also Swiss francs, British hundred-pound notes, Aussie dollars and even Israeli sheqalim.”

“I’m impressed, Charlie; never knew you were such a currency buff.”

“Never needed to be before now. Anyway, I split it three ways.”

“You sure about that?”

He raised his hands in mock protest. “Emma checked it later. Hell of a lot of stuff, as you know. We tried to make the bags less bulky, but the diamonds in blister packs took up a lot of space.”

“You could have popped them out.”

“Too slow. Anyway, it’s best to keep them in the packs. Proves authenticity.”

He was right; I’d forgotten about that. “You’re an old hand at this game, Charlie.” I was glad that he was, as otherwise it would have taken me years to offload so much high end stuff. “How will you dispose of the jewellery?” I asked him.

“They’re too distinct to risk selling directly,” he replied. “I’ll need to work on them first, remove the gemstones from their settings and melt the gold down.”

I thought of all the beautiful, unique pieces that Charlie was planning to destroy. But that was the point: they were
unique
. In other words, every single one of them could get us caught and sent away for a long stretch. “Seems a shame, but there’s no other way,” I agreed. “What sort of equipment will you need for that?”

“Just a small high-temperature furnace,” he replied. “I have one in the garage already.”

“I’ve never seen it.”

“For obvious reasons, I keep it out of sight. Somebody called round one day when I was using it and I nearly dropped an open container of molten lead on my feet. Could have got burned to the bone.”

I imagined Charlie busy smelting million-dollar jewellery settings in his over-stuffed garage and accidently setting his whole house on fire. “What about the watches?”

“I kept them in their boxes with all the original packaging material. Same principle as the diamond packs – makes them easier to sell on. Proves authenticity and makes them less suspect down the line.”

“I’m keeping the Patek Philippe. Call it my planning fee.”

Charlie shrugged. “OK, but it’s a bit dangerous. Too distinctive. I have a well-trusted fence down in the States if you need him?”

My beautiful Patek Philippe wristwatch was currently wrapped in thick plastic and sitting at the bottom of a bag of frozen peas in the small fridge in my hotel room. I pictured the roman numerals on the sublime blue face, the expertly engraved white gold casing. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep it out of sight,” I replied. My thoughts went back to the sheer quantity of diamonds we’d acquired. “We have so many stones,” I said, “We could flood the market.”

“Nah,” Charlie shook his head, “They’re the easiest of all to get rid of. Unless it’s off the Crown Jewels nobody can identify a piece of rock. Plenty of dealers out there will lap up the cheap bargains.”

He was right, of course. Human nature was on our side. “They can always shave a tiny bit off the biggest ones,” I agreed. “Once that’s been done, it’s a different diamond. But they probably won’t even have to bother.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t forget how Zheng acquired many of those diamonds in the first place,” I replied. “There’s no way he’ll ever circulate a list of stolen stones, so honest merchants won’t know what to look for anyway.”

Charlie nodded. “True enough. That just leaves the ‘pieces of rough’, the uncut ones. They’re totally untraceable.”

I sat back and considered what we’d achieved. “You know the most satisfying thing about this whole business?” I said.

“What’s that?”

I grinned. “Eventually, most of our diamonds will probably end up back in the Zheng vault. So we’ll get to ding the old bastard twice over.”

*

I had almost dozed off in the heat when a thought popped into my head. “You got rid of the clothes and equipment?”

“Of course,” Charlie replied. “Our clothes went into an incinerator belonging to a friend of mine. There wasn’t much equipment, but anything in my house that could be linked to the heist went in there too.”

“Good. Can’t be too careful. No stray diamonds spilled on the carpet?”

He snorted. “Actually, I did spill a big packet of tiny emerald pointers. Scores of them, all marquise cut, four or five hundredths of a carat each. The buggers popped out of my hand and went all over the floor.”

I frowned. “But you picked them all up?”

“Most of them. A few probably got lost in the rug. But don’t worry; we did the sorting in another motel room, well away from ours.”

“And the three lots of goodies?”

“Stored in various deposit boxes in several locations. Don’t you remember Emma and me telling you that when we left you on your own for most of a day?”

“I still don’t remember everything; there are gaps.”

“You poor sod. We drove around all day, stashing the stuff away under various names. You and I figured all that out before hand.”

“You don’t have to remind me about that, Charlie. I
do
remember that much. It’s only the day or so after the job that’s still a bit murky.” I pondered quietly for a minute. “Do you think we wiped out Zheng’s business?”

Charlie stared at the waves before replying. “Probably. I hope so anyway, from what you and Emma have told me about him.”