Tempted by Trouble (31 page)

It was the Hallway of Commandments. Every ten feet, one of the Ten Commandments was framed on the wall, all of the frames identical, golden and six feet tall.

Blood had been on the bottom of the duffel bag Jackie had dragged from the basement, and a bright and wet redness stained the carpet. I followed the trail of blood and money in reverse like a path of the unrighteous, the redness becoming thicker as I made my way toward the concrete stairs. I walked up on a dead body. The blood and the vacant look in his eyes told me he was gone. He had been killed either by Eddie Coyle on their way in or by Jackie on her way out. My bet was on the latter. Eddie Coyle would’ve killed him somewhere near Birmingham and left him wrapped in carpet and dumped near the Odenville exit.

Something told me everyone was as dead as Sammy and Rick.

My head was filled with questions. Every ragged breath I took smelled foul, the air thickened by the stench of panic and confusion. The trepidation was stronger than the angst inside a house of horrors.

Two people were on the ground, a man and a woman, both dressed in Sunday clothing, both secured with plastic ties, both down on their sides, positioned feet away from each other, with their heads covered and their faces in the direction of the nearest wall, both alive and trembling in silence.

They had been the first to run into Eddie Coyle and friends, but all they would probably remember seeing was guns and four monsters in masks. I hurried down the concrete stairs and stepped through another metal door that had been left wide open when Jackie had exited dragging a fool’s fortune.

In the bowels of the building, light changed to darkness and every step on the concrete floor felt like glue on the soles of my shoes. Each movement told me that I was walking through the stickiness of blood.

A gunshot rang out and a bullet exploded in the wall near me. Someone in the room screamed. The firing continued until the shooter emptied their clip. Not until it was silent again did I hear terrified cries.

It sounded like a baby whimpering. It was a woman. She stopped praying and shrieked. Then she went quiet and her breathing became heavy; she was terrified and trying not to make a sound.

I swallowed and yelled, “
No soy policía. ¡Soy yo! ¿Donde están?
”

As soon as my panicked voice rang out in rapid Spanish, Eddie Coyle’s wounded and angry timbre called out from the other side of the room, at least thirty feet away. “Help. We have to get out of here. We need your help. Get the lights. Turn the damn lights on.”

 

 

 

 

Cora had been attacked
first. While everyone paused to stare at the money, enraptured by its radiance, Jackie raised her gun and brought it down on Cora, striking her from behind with a blow that was intended to crack her head wide open and maybe kill her instantly. Jackie saved her bullets, not knowing how many people she might have to shoot or how many shots it would take to get from the basement to the stage-one getaway van. Her world spinning from white to black, Cora went down hard. She hit the concrete, banging her head, but she fought to stay in this world. She was from Brooklyn. She was a fighter. She’d come from a single-parent home, from a mother who made hard choices and did what had to be done to provide for her children. She had no idea what was going on, only knew that this wasn’t part of the scheme. Eddie Coyle and Bishop, it only took them less than a second to redirect their weapons.

Cora was on the ground, and Eddie Coyle and friends stood over the fortune, staring at Jackie with disbelief.

Jackie had her gun pulled on Eddie Coyle, and Bishop had directed the business end of his nine-millimeter at Jackie. And my wife, the one who had pulled most of this together, she held her bloodied head and fought to get up, only to fall back down. Then she collapsed on her back and looked up at the fluorescent lighting. With vision that was blurry at best, as her heart stampeded inside her chest, she made out what was going on. She saw guns drawn. She saw death. She saw the dead-end road where she had led us all. The girl who was born up in Brooklyn, the teenager who had been reared in Detroit, the woman who had gone into the navy, the autoworker who had given her blood, sweat, and tears to the auto industry, the woman who had married me, the woman who had fallen apart during hard times, the woman who had challenged my manhood, she looked up and instead of lifting her gun and becoming a killer, she recoiled in horror, pulled herself into the fetal position, and became nothing more than a terrified child.

Eddie Coyle had faced Jackie and said, “What’s going on?”

She nodded. “You know.”

“I’m not a man who makes assumptions. Just so we’re on the same page, enlighten me.”

“Put your guns down. Put your guns down and move away from the money. Get inside the vault.”

“Get inside the vault?” Eddie Coyle chuckled. “You’ve blown a damn fuse.”

Bishop laughed like this moment was absurd.

Eddie Coyle said, “Calm down, partner. Take a step back, rewind, and think about what you’re doing here. We’ve worked a long time on this. We’re almost done. What, you want a bigger cut? Fine, I’ll give you ten percent of mine. How does that sound? Consider it a bonus. Now, let’s wrap this up.”

“Stop talking and get inside the vault.”

“Put the gun down and let’s get what we came for so we can get to the van and leave.”

Jackie shook her head, “I have a higher calling. I’m going to get what I came for.”

“Is this what you and your new bed partner have planned?”

“I don’t need him. He’ll get left behind with the rest of you.”

“What does that mean?”

“He will never make it out of Trussville. Not with this money.”

Eddie Coyle said, “You’re not robbing us, so get that idea out of your head.”

And there was Cora, dressed like a churchwoman, her head bloodied and clothing ripped, blinded by her own blood, eyes closed tight, and as frightened as a child who’d seen the bogeyman.

Jackie snapped, “I want your guns and I want all of you to get inside the safe.”

Bishop snapped, “So you can shoot us? Are you flying over the cuckoo’s nest?”

Eddie Coyle said, “If you know what’s good for you, if you want this to end in a way that can still be beneficial to you and your kid, you’ll put your gun down now.”

“Or what?”

“You knew what when you made that stupid move.”

Jackie said, “I’ll put you down.”

Eddie Coyle gritted his teeth. “No you won’t.”

“I’m just like you
and you know that.
”

“Think about what you’re doing.”

“I’ve gone too far already. It’s a done deal.”

“No one has gone too far, not yet.”

“And I know what you’ll do to me when we leave here.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know you better than I know myself.”

Eddie Coyle said, “We’re two minutes behind schedule.”

“You know what this is about for me.”

“Your kid. We’ve heard that sob story a thousand and one times.”

“I’ll kill you and your brother if I have to.”

“Obviously you haven’t thought this through to the final curtain. If this is your plan, if this is your damn plan, you should’ve waited until after all of us had left with the money. You should’ve made sure we’d gotten away. See? You’re not thinking. Your plan is flawed.”

“Stop talking and put your guns down.”

Bishop said, “That’s not going to happen and you know that’s not going to happen.”

They stood in a triangle with a mountain of prosperity glowing between them.

Jackie fired at Bishop and Eddie Coyle fired upon Jackie. Bishop fired last, his shot meant for the center of Jackie’s heart. The hostages screamed into their gags and prayed and called out for miracles, one kicking and shouting muffled neologisms, nonsensical words that were like speaking in tongues. The noise inside the basement had to be harsh, like being trapped inside a shooting range.

Explosion after explosion after explosion echoed in the death room, while not too far away, on the other side of Trussville, a peaceful congregation at First Baptist was singing the Lord’s Prayer. Bishop had taken shots to the gut, left leg, and shoulder; Eddie Coyle had been hit twice, but Eddie Coyle shot Jackie in her left shoulder. Bishop went for the kill shot but missed, and Eddie Coyle’s mistake was not going for a kill shot. I didn’t know if that was because Jackie was a woman, or because she had been dependable for so long, or if Eddie Coyle thought she would snap to her senses. Maybe he wanted to scare her back to sanity. But in the end, he would need her to have two good legs and able to walk out of the annex on her own, even if he had to grab her neck and frog-march her to the van. That had been Eddie Coyle’s second mistake in this business, thinking that Jackie wouldn’t pull the trigger on her gun.

The broker of greed attacked desperation and desperation responded with equal fury.

 

 

 

 

I clicked the lights
on and again a saintly brilliance attacked my eyes. When everything became clearer, I saw spots of blood and rivers of redness, and I saw more money that had been spilled when Jackie fled. The blood that soiled the front of my suit, my coat, the blood that saturated my clothing, the blood that had run down to my shoes, it was turning cold. But the blood that soaked into my clothing was insignificant compared to what I saw when my eyes refocused. It was a financial battlefield. I saw the aftermath of greed and insanity. Bullets from four nine-millimeters had been discharged and those projectiles had damaged every wall. The concrete structure that had been designed to be a fallout shelter was solid enough to trap all sounds. The two-feet-thick concrete and steel walls stole every gunshot and moan and scream to God and Jesus.

The vault was across the room, its heavy door shiny and silver and still ajar. Four more men and women were bound with plastic ties and gagged and had been left in different parts of the basement. Eddie Coyle’s clean-shaven face revealed that he was in pain. His dark suit no longer looked brand-new. His skin was drenched in sweat. He held himself up with his left hand, wounded and bleeding, his gun in his right hand and aimed at me. His black mask had been removed. The sweat from his forehead streamed like a river. His lips trembled and his trigger finger was nervous and ready to fire his weapon, his expression intense and filled with hate and paranoia. He was ready to have another shootout.

He shouted, “Put your gun down.”

“You’re going to shoot me?”

He screamed and spit flew from his mouth. “Put it away or I will blow a hole in your head.”

He was walking the road that led to insanity. I remained collected.

At first I tried to stick my nine-millimeter inside the waist of my pants. Then I changed my mind and slid the instrument of death across the floor to him. What Eddie Coyle did to me didn’t matter.

Eddie Coyle’s shoulders slumped as he lowered his weapon. He put his foot on my gun and glowered around the room, scoured from wall to wall and snapped, “She shot up the place and took the goddamn money.”

“She’s gone.”

“Where did she go?”

“It looks like you have bigger problems.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m doing my job. I’m just doing my job.”

Cora was down on the floor, blood draining from her head and into her eyes, blinding her and seeping across her lips, moving inside her mouth, the taste of her blood paralyzing her, the reality of her wound leaving her too disoriented to react, too terrified to stand up.

She called for me. She called for me in rapid Spanish. She called for me to save her.

I said, “Dead, alive, or injured, we all came together and we’re all leaving together.”

Eddie Coyle said, “If the police come, then we’ll all go to jail together.”

“I know. We’ll sing the prison blues at Sing Sing. Two shows a night, three on Saturday.”

“You should’ve left.”

“But I didn’t.”

Cora’s gun was no longer in her hand. She was the one who had lost it and began firing until her clip was emptied; she had fired across the room blindly, fired like she was doing her best to gun down Jackie, then dropped her weapon and screamed in frustration, cursed before folding in horror.

I went to her and grabbed her by her arm, then pulled her to her feet.

I asked, “Can you stand up?”

“I think so.”

“Get on your feet, walk toward the door, and try to crawl up the stairs if you have to.”

“I can’t see anything. I can’t see.”

Bishop was badly wounded. He was unconscious. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing. One of Cora’s frenzied shots in the dark might have finished what Jackie had started.

I told Eddie Coyle, “We’re going to have to carry your brother.”

“She shot me in my shoulder and my elbow. I only have one good arm.”

“Then use it. Suck it up, be a man, and use your good arm.”

Cora didn’t make it as far as the door before she went down on her knees.

My body ached all over, but I gritted my teeth and lifted Cora. I swooped my troubles up in my arms and carried her up a flight of stairs. She held her face to my neck, her lips on my skin, whispering to me all the way, saying things that came from her heart, apologizing for everything. I carried her through snow and ice, and as my back ached, I put her inside the idling van with Jackie’s remains.

I ignored my agony and ran back to the basement.

Eddie Coyle was standing over his brother with tears in his eyes.

He said, “He’s gone. My brother’s dead.”

“You sure?”

“He took one to the heart. My brother’s dead.”

“Suck it up, Eddie Coyle. Suck it up and let’s get him out of here.”

We dragged Bishop to the bottom of the stairs, then caught our breaths and picked him up. It was like picking up a refrigerator filled with frozen steaks. We carried Bishop’s dead weight up the concrete stairs, then grabbed his feet and dragged his bloodied frame down the carpeted hallway as far as we could. I struggled and summoned all of my strength and pulled his dead body upright so we could carry him by his shoulders with his feet dragging. His Johnston & Murphy shoes came off and left him in his black socks. We grabbed his suit coat and tugged and turned him until we had him facedown in the backseat of the stolen van with Jackie.