Tales of Chills and Thrills: The Mystery Thriller Horror Box Set (7 Mystery Thriller Horror Novels) (123 page)

Her new friend whispered hoarsely, “That’s right, Daisy, my
little sweet pea. Man knows when he’s met his match.”

Kora smiled, teeth gleaming from the refracted light coming
from the party next door. She looked magnificently evil.

“Sorry,” she said, “but a girl’s gotta do…and don’t worry,
this is going to be a win-win situation. We’re all going to get what we want.
Isn’t that right, baby?”

“That’s right, Daisy, win-win. Let’s go get into Tricky
Dick’s bank and see what’s for Christmas.”

Sydney now began to see a different picture. This wasn’t
Thorp. This was the two of
them
!

She sensed Marco wanted to make a move but now wasn’t the
time. She gave him a look.

“Do everything nice and slow and careful,” Kora said,
apparently seeing what Sydney was seeing in Marco. “We don’t want to kill you,
right Leon?”

“That’s right, we don’t want to kill the golden goose who’s
gonna bring us the golden eggs,” Leon muttered. “They make any moves, they’ll
die, and that’ll be too bad. I see your shoulders getting tight, which means you
got some Rambo shit in your brain. Best back down. Daisy sweet, if he makes some
dead-hero move, I’ll do him and you do his lady.”

“Be my sad pleasure,” Kora said, bringing her weapon to bear
on Sydney’s face. “But they’re gonna see the smart thing to do. We’re not here
to shoot you guys. We have a proposition you can’t refuse, believe me. My good
friend Leon has decided that it’s time make a change. A little revolution in
which the workers take over and the rich assholes get what they got coming to
them, right baby?”

“Socialism for two.”

Kora chuckled. This was fun and games to her.

Marco said, “Sounds like it should be for four.”

“It will be, if you play along,” Kora said with a smile.

“Now that we all understand each other,” the guy she’d
called Leon said, “let’s remove weapons. Then we can take a look at the office.”

They stood there for a tense moment.

“How many weapons you got between you?” Leon asked. “Be
honest. I hate people lying to me. Makes me do bad things.”

With great reluctance in his voice, Marco said, “Three.”

“Well, let’s get you disarmed. We don’t want any failure to
communicate, as Newman put it in
Cool Hand Luke
.”

Sydney didn’t know what the hell the deal was, but obviously
these two had formed some sort of sociopathic bond. They were working like a
couple with a very good sense of each other. How in hell had that happened?

Leon told Kora how he wanted her to remove their weapons. He
made them get down on their knees, hands behind their heads.

Marco had his gun belt-holstered in the front under his
shirt. Kora reached around and took it, and in the process felt him up,
chuckling like a kid. She took his two, then came over and removed Sydney’s.
“We’ll work this out,” she said.

Then Kora, having removed all three weapons, went through
the bags looking for more weapons. She didn’t find any. “They’re clean,” she
said. Then she turned to Sydney. “You brought what I wanted?”

“Yes.”

Leon said, “Let’s go, folks, we have work to do. Money to
make. Places to go. Right, sweet pea?”

“You are right, old sport.”

57

“Leon isn’t a break-in artist on your level,” Kora said to
Marco. “He might get into the office, but no way could he get into that safe.
Isn’t that right, Leon?”

“That’s right.”

“Leon isn’t his real name,” Kora said. “He took that from a
movie. I’m thinking of changing my name as well.”

“I think she should call herself Xenia,” the masked killer
said.

Chatty couple. Having fun.
Who’s really running the show?
Sydney wondered. They had really underestimated and misread Kora North.

They were ushered at gunpoint into the vastness of the great
room. She feared the killer wanted his revenge, and might take it at any moment,
but was forced to delay until he had what they came for. At least it might buy
them some time.

They paused under the vaulted ceilings, moon shadows
spilling across the tiled floor, a cut of light on the grand piano. The rooms of
the house had low nightlights. Statues from Asia and some Italian stuff.
Paintings looked like they belonged in a museum. Stuffed animals in the
adjoining room.

“Here’s how this works,” the smothered voice from the mask
said. “Kora here has convinced me of a new plan. See, the thing is, I’m not all
that fond of my clients. Right, Kora?”

“That’s right, baby. Leon doesn’t like Thorp or his lawyer
much at all.”

“So,” Leon said with muffled exuberance that resembled a
cartoon character, “we’re going to work something out. I wanted to kill the two
of you for breaking my face, but Kora came up with a way you can pay me back.
And pay me big time, right Kora?”

“That’s right,” Kora affirmed. “That’s exactly right.”

Aren’t they the cutest couple outside of a fucking asylum?
Sydney thought.

“Turns out,” Leon said, “we’re all on the same side of
this.”

A strung-out killer and whacked-out hooker taking over the
world. Gonna pull off the robbery of the century.

Sydney said, “How is it we come out ahead?”

Kora said, “Relax. We get the money and enough dirt on these
guys to protect us, and you get enough to destroy them. That’s your end.
Everybody gets what they want. Everyone goes home happy. So let’s quit wasting
time and get in that office and see what we have.”

Kora North was definitely running the show, Sydney decided.

Marco answered Leon’s garbled questions as he went along.
How he used the density meter, and then methodically studied the framing. Leon
kept back so Marco would have no chance if he decided to try something.

At the safe, it was quickly clear that the door, covered in
a fine mahogany veneer, had beneath it high-grade plated steels with “engineer
only” removable fixings. The locking mechanism had a punch-code lock. That was
definitely the way to go.

“The lawyer isn’t big on trust,” Marco said.

He went into his bag, showed Leon the sequencer and the
black light. “This code sequencer should give the numbers up pretty quick. Runs
a thousand a second.”

“I’ve seen that in a movie,” Kora said. “He doesn’t have the
iris reader or a fingerprint thingy.”

“Not on this door,” Marco said. “You said this was just the
outside door, right?”

“Yeah, there’s a big metal door to the main office door.”

Marco studied the keys with the light and then went about
fixing the box over the keypad.

“Here we go.” He pushed the ON button on the sequencer.

Leon, showing student-like curiosity, fired questions at him
the whole time he worked. Like he was learning for future reference. Sydney
appreciated how Marco entertained the guy, getting him involved, telling him all
about the design, how they got ahold of it through a contact in the high-tech
security world, keeping him focused and distracted. She wondered if he had a
plan or if he was just trying to keep the guy interested.

“It’s designed to fit the universal punch codes. It could be
set to any three, four, or five keys. It should find the unlocking sequence in
about one to three minutes.”

“You got that from Dutch?” Kora asked.

“He’s a man with resources. If Rouse had a retina or
fingerprint scan, we’d have no choice but to do a hot caesarian.”

“Which is?” Kora asked.

“Torch cut.”

The outer door opened with no problem. But that was just the
veneer. The real door was next, down a short hall. Marco grabbed his bag and
Leon moved back. They reset their physical relationship, but Marco kept right on
talking.

“Acetylene torches only reach six thousand degrees, and when
you were working steel-reinforced concrete and solid-steel fixtures, you need
thermic power in the eight-thousand-degree range. You need to handle different
consistencies in the pour matter.”

“Why would they be so different?” the killer asked. “It’s
cement.”

“Cement mixture is vibrated to get rid of air pockets to
create a zero slump,” Marco said. “The only effective and fast way to get around
dual-control and time locks is with a combination of torch and blast. But this
locking mechanism doesn’t need a blast. It’s not that heavy. You’re always
dealing with the endless escalation of technology. A thief has to be on the
cutting edge. Crime is an arms race.”

Leon emitted a chuckle.

Marco, working intently, talked nonstop, telling Leon that
it started during the Gold Rush days, all that robbing going on. Banks started
using safes and then the robbers brought in the pickaxe and hammer to break in
at night and steal the safes, taking them somewhere in the hills to break them
open.

“So the banks built bigger and heavier safes with heavy
doors that had to be blasted open. That proved easy enough to do, so the
combination lock was invented to thwart blasting. So the robbers developed the
technique of drilling and using a mirror shoved inside to see the slots on the
combination wheel.”

“It’s nice to see you boys enjoying your work,” Kora said,
“but let’s get this done.”

“He’s doing his job,” Leon said. “Let the man work. He can
talk while he works, can’t he?”

“He can, but not if it slows him down. Which he might do
purposely.”

“I can only go as fast as the technology allows,” Marco
said. Then he added, “The next escalation of defense was time locks.” He drew
cut lines on the wall. “That led to kidnapping bank employees. They always tried
to keep a step ahead. Now it’s all about using the Internet. The only people
going directly after banks are bankers getting rich off toxic assets.”

Sydney tried to catch Marco’s eye, to see if he had
something else behind all the chatter, but he didn’t look her way.

“There,” Marco said. “The cut line is prepped.”

Marco donned welding glasses, still talking nonstop about
the changes while he prepared the torch.

“Got to hit this hard with the gas-axe,” Marco said. “Best
stand back a little.”

Sydney noticed how Leon seemed to like Marco’s knowledge,
his attitude, which is what Marco appeared to be after. A little bonding between
criminals. At some point Sydney figured she’d have to find a way to do with same
with Kora.

He fired the torch and they all took another step back.

Marco directed it at the surface of the cut. “Got to get the
iron oxide moving, knock slag aside, and get the heat through the cherry red to
the white heat.”

He quickly burned his way through, and it wasn’t long before
he had the door open and they were inside Tricky Dick’s inner sanctum.

“You’re good,” the killer said. “Damn good. You ever find
any box you couldn’t open?”

Marco removed the welding glasses. “Well, there was this
really cute little lesbian…”

Leon broke out in a stammered, bizarre laugh so abrupt and
hard it appeared to hurt him, and he stopped as fast as it had come.

Sydney now saw how Marco was going to work this guy. Become
his friend. Bond. Wait until the moment was right.

58

Sydney, excited, followed the men through the door. The
lawyer had a massive executive teak desk behind which sat this cushy,
red-leather chair. He had some really expensive-looking artwork on the walls.
Plants, exotic fish in a massive tank. File cabinets, computers, a wall of TV
screens displaying every inch of the house inside and out. And a five-foot-high
safe taking up most of the far wall.

“Man’s got himself a plush bunker and war room,” Marco said.

“You really can open the safe?” Kora asked.

Marco went to the safe embedded in the wall. He checked the
locking mechanism and shook his head. “This is a big damn problem. This baby has
serious defenses and a bank-style time lock.”

Kora came over. “Dutch didn’t give you the combination?”

“Not for this baby. This isn’t the safe he thought was in
here.”

Sydney liked this play. It was, in fact, the safe that Dutch
had put in, but Kora and the killer didn’t know that.

“You can’t crack that?” Leon asked in a hiss of a voice.
“‘Cause if you can’t crack that, you got nothing to trade your life for.”

“This is state of the art,” Marco said. “You want inside
this thing before tomorrow afternoon, the only thing you can do is get the
lawyer over here. Let him open the thing for us.”

Leon turned to Kora as if she had the answer.

She said, “If that’s what we need to do, that’s what we’ll
do. I’ll call Oggie and have him send Rouse over. Tell him we broke something.
He’ll come on the run.”

Leon said, “You sure they won’t send a bunch of goons over
here?”

“Hell, no,” Kora said. “Everything in here stinks of some
kind of fraud or another. Most of those guys are cops.”

Kora turned to Marco. “Can you bring the cameras back up so
we can see who’s coming?”

Marco said he could. Within a minute, he had the cameras
back online so they could get pictures on Rouse’s smartphone and on the cameras
in the office.

Kora then took out the smartphone. “Thorp is gonna be a
little pissed, but he’ll do the right thing.”

“You aren’t calling Rouse?” Sydney said.

“Can’t. This is his phone. Oggie will send him over.”

***

Thorp was already in a highly agitated state, his
imagination all over the place about what was going on with Kora and the pro,
when his cell buzzed. It was Kora.

“About time, Kora. We’re waiting for the fountain scene.
Where the hell—”

“Get Rouse over to his house right now,” Kora said. “We
broke something that might be important. Have him come through the tunnel so he
doesn’t set off a bunch of alarms.”

“Kora, damnit, what are you—”

“Right now. It’s kinda a big problem and he’s gonna be
pissed. But he needs to deal with it right now,” she said, and then the bitch
promptly hung up on him and wouldn’t answer when he called back.