The Fraud (34 page)

“Okay,” I said. “Give me a moment. Mr. Kuti, could you please keep an eye on the house while I make the call?”

“Of course,” he said, and began walking back up toward the street.

I walked perhaps a hundred feet in the other direction, far enough that I was sure Zabrina wasn’t hearing my voice in stereo. I took a few deep breaths to calm myself, then dialed.

After three rings, she answered. “Hello?”

“Hey, Zabrina, it’s Carter Ross from the
Eagle-Examiner,
” I said, breezily.

“Oh, hi,” she said, matching my tone.

“Hey, this may sound like a strange question, but have you seen my fianc
é
e, Tina Thompson? I asked her to go over to your house to pick up those insurance documents, but I haven’t heard from her in a little while.”

“Huh, that’s strange.”

“So you haven’t seen her?”

“No, not at all. I was actually starting to wonder where you were,” Zabrina said, not too quickly, not too slowly. If she had been surprised at all by my calling, she was already over it. It was chilling how smooth she was.

“Yeah, I asked Tina to pick them up because I was running late,” I said, then forced a laugh. “But she’s pregnant. So she probably stopped for ice cream and pickles or something.”

“I guess. If she comes by, I’ll be sure to tell her you’re looking for her.”

“That’d be super,” I said, then sighed as if I was being terribly inconvenienced. “Well, I guess I better come out and get those documents myself. I should be there in ten minutes or so.”

There was no hitch in her reply. “Actually, would you mind waiting until tomorrow? I’m beat.”

It was a nice try. But I had anticipated her attempt to delay and was ready with a response. “I would, except I need to write this story tonight and Tujuka Okeke still isn’t talking to me. Without the documents, I can’t write. And I promised the story to my editors first thing in the morning.”

“Oh. Well, I’m sorry, but I’d really rather you didn’t come by. The thing is, I’m not dressed.”

“No problem,” I said. “Just leave them on the front porch. I promise I’ll avert my eyes from the house as I grab them. I’ll be right over and then I’ll be out of your hair.”

I prepared myself to bat down her next flimsy objection, but she had finally run out of them. Perhaps she realized too strenuous a protest against a fairly reasonable request would have seemed out of place.

“Okay, fine,” she said. “Just don’t knock on the door, because I won’t answer.”

“You got a deal,” I said. “Thanks for helping me.”

“No problem,” she said, then hung up.

I trotted back up the street, flashing a thumbs-up at Sweet Thang. “She bought it,” I said.

“Okay. What’s the plan now?”

“You’re going to get in my car and wait for me to text you. In ten minutes, you might have to pretend to be me, pulling into the driveway of Zabrina’s house and retrieving insurance documents from the front porch. There’s a baseball cap in my backseat. Just put it on, tuck your hair up in it, and make like you don’t have hips or boobs as you walk. Hopefully the darkness will do the rest for us.”

“Got it. What are you going to do?”

I shook my head and said, “I wish I knew.”

CHAPTER 45

After thirty-three years on this planet—one-third of a century, if you want to make it sound more profound—I thought I knew myself pretty well.

The guy I knew had taken a respectable amount of God-given smarts and chosen to apply them to a job with low respect and even lower pay because it was a field that allowed him to fully explore—and even, sometimes, to explicate—the human condition. Folks sometimes found him a little too glib for his own good. Or just a bit overwhelming. But most of the time they recognized that the reason he engaged in the world so thoroughly is that he liked people, in a very real, very genuine way.

He once, long ago, broke a kid’s nose during a playground scuffle. He didn’t particularly like how that made him feel inside. You could call him a pacifist; or, if you hadn’t grown up much since your own playground days, you could call him a wimp. All I know is that the guy had never intentionally harmed anyone since then. At least not physically.

I never thought that guy would have ended up crouched against someone’s front porch lattice with a shotgun cradled in his hands.

Yet that’s where circumstance had pushed me. I still didn’t quite understand it, even though I had lived every step of the journey. And the only thing that kept it from being utterly surreal—like, how the hell did this happen to
me
, the peace-loving wimp?—was that I had to stay incredibly focused on the moment.

To my immediate left, close enough that our elbows kept brushing, was Hakeem Kuti. We had huddled briefly out on the street and decided that there were two likely scenarios: one, they would send out one person to move the car, in the hopes that I would simply come and go; or, two, they would all come out and evacuate the house altogether, moving their entire operation elsewhere.

We decided if one person came out, Kuti would jump him. If they all came out, we’d both jump them.

It was not an especially elegant plan, I suppose. And it relied almost totally on the element of surprise. But it was the best we could come up with in the minute we had allotted ourselves.

The only good thing was that Zabrina didn’t have much time to plot, either. The clock had started ticking the moment I hung up the phone with her. She thought I would be there in ten minutes. Between the one minute I spent talking to Kuti and the one minute we spent getting in place, there were now eight minutes left.

I began counting seconds, one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi-style. For the next two hundred Mississippis, there was no discernible activity within the house. No lights had gone on or off. No noises had escaped.

Then, from the porch, I heard the sound of wood scraping against wood. The front door, which was old and swollen with time, was opening.

The click of metal and the whooshing of a pneumatic piston came next. It was the screen door. As the wooden door slammed noisily shut, the screen door hissed softly back into place. I couldn’t see who was coming out. But I could hear sneakers sliding on old grit over the porch floor.

Make that: one set of sneakers. There was definitely only one person. The door hadn’t been opened long enough for two people to come out and I didn’t hear more than one pair of feet moving. It was a man, judging from the heaviness of the footfalls. I held up one finger in front of Kuti’s face. He nodded.

The sneakers stopped for a brief moment at the edge of the porch. By turning to look over my shoulder, I could now make out the chilling sight of a man with a black ski mask pulled over his head. He bent down and set a thin sheaf of papers on the porch floor. Then he straightened and descended the steps, his knees pumping quickly.

He went left, passing directly in front of us without turning his head. His focus was on Tina’s Volvo, still parked in the driveway. He had the keys in his right hand. He was moving with the alacrity of a man under time pressure and the obliviousness of one not expecting company.

Kuti let him go by, then leapt out from our hiding spot. The rustling of some dead leaves caused the man with the black ski mask to swivel his head in Kuti’s direction, but he was far too late. Kuti was already on him. In what looked like a move he had practiced, Kuti clamped his hand over the man’s mouth and stuck the gun barrel in his ear.

“Quiet,” Kuti said softly. “If you make a sound, I will kill you. If you make a move I consider threatening, I will kill you. If you follow instructions, you will live. Nod once if you understand.”

The man bobbed his head.

“Very good,” Kuti said. “Are your instructions to get in the Volvo and drive away? Nod once if yes.”

The man’s head dipped again.

“Are the others coming out behind you? Nod if yes, shake if no.”

This time, he shook. There was no way to know if he was telling the truth. We could only hope he was too scared or too shocked to lie.

“Very good. Now walk at a moderate speed to the car’s driver’s side door. You will receive further instructions when they are needed.”

The man began walking in a normal pace, with Kuti moving behind him and keeping the gun trained on the man’s head the whole time.

Kuti stopped to give more directions when they reached the Volvo. I couldn’t hear them by that point, but I watched as they simultaneously opened and then closed their respective doors—the man the front, Kuti the rear. Obviously, he had them synchronize both actions so that anyone inside would only hear one door opening and one door closing.

The Volvo’s engine came to life. Its headlights turned on automatically. Its white backup lights followed. Soon, it was backing out of the driveway and turning in the direction of where Sweet Thang had parked my car. Then it left my sight.

There was no sign that anyone inside the house had been aware that one of their teammates had been hijacked. The whole exchange in front of the porch had taken thirty seconds and had been very quiet, so I wasn’t worried about anyone hearing anything unusual. Nor was it likely they had seen anything. The rooms with the lights on were all in the back part of the house. Assuming Zabrina and her other associate had stayed there—and they would, since they were anticipating I was going to show up any moment—we were in good shape.

Now it was Sweet Thang’s turn. Keeping my cell phone low against the side of the porch, where no one would see its little light come on, I checked the time. It had been eight minutes since I called Zabrina.

“Go in two minutes,” I texted her.

No more than ten seconds later, I received her reply. “Got it.”

I slipped my phone in my pocket and settled back against the porch, listening intently but hearing nothing of interest until the Malibu’s engine came into earshot exactly two minutes later.

As instructed, Sweet Thang pulled into the driveway. She got even with the path that led to the front porch and quickly got out of the car, leaving the engine running and the headlights on. I can’t say she looked particularly masculine as she walked up toward the porch. But she didn’t look particularly feminine, either. I was really banking on the fact that no one would be watching.

I’m not sure if she saw me as she crossed in front of me. If she did, she was smart enough not to acknowledge me. She climbed up two of the front porch steps, just far enough that she could reach the sheaf of papers that had been left there, and grabbed them. Then she whirled around and retraced her steps back to the Malibu.

Moments later, she was backing down the driveway, just like the Volvo moments before her. Other than her inability to transmogrify into a six-foot-one man, she did it as well as it could have been done.

Her departure brought silence back to the house. It was about this time I suddenly realized one glaring omission from our plan:

We hadn’t discussed what to do next if only one person left the house.

I assumed Kuti would stay somewhere nearby, but he would be busy keeping watch over the man with the black ski mask. Which meant I was now on my own.

And neither Tina nor our child had much time for me to decide what to do next.

*   *   *

My feasible options, as far I could figure them, were limited. My good options were nonexistent.

I was one man with a shotgun against two people, both of them armed, who were somewhere inside a large, three-story dwelling. I harbored exactly zero fantasies about trying to shoot one of them through the window. There was little chance I could get a clean shot—they were too high up in that fortresslike house—and even if I did, I had no empirical evidence I possessed the skills to shoot the side of a barn from ten paces, much less a human being from thirty yards. The thought that I could miss and hit Tina was too horrible to contemplate.

Plus, there was still the matter of what to do about the person I didn’t shoot, who would then be alerted to my presence.

I was out of time to do the safe thing, which was to wait them out. There was really no choice. I had to force the action. I had to go in. One against two.

The last thing I did before leaving the safety of my hiding spot was text Sweet Thang, dictating what was essentially my backup plan: “I’m going in. Stay close. If you don’t hear from me in twenty minutes, assume I’m dead. Call the cops.”

I stood up halfway, staying crouched low enough to keep my head below the height of the porch. I crept around to the steps and climbed them, one by one, then softly walked across the porch. I kept my shotgun pointed at the door. If anyone came out, they were going to get a mouthful of buckshot.

My first real barrier was the screen door. Thankfully, it looked to be fairly new, not some rusty thing that would creak a lot. Taking my nontrigger hand off the shotgun, I slowly lowered an L-shaped brass handle until I felt the catch come free. I pulled, doing it gradually enough that the pneumatic piston did not hiss.

Once the door was open wide enough, I slid my body behind it. The next barrier was the old wooden door. I tried its round knob and was relieved to feel it rotate in my hand. The guy in the black ski mask hadn’t bothered locking it.

Now I worried about noise. I remembered the sound the door made as it rubbed against its jamb. The last thing I needed was to announce my entry with the squeal of wood chafing against wood.

Fortunately, having grown up in an old house—and having maybe, possibly, snuck out of said house on one or two occasions—I knew a little something about keeping old doors quiet. The squeaking always came from the left, as a result of moisture-related swelling; or the bottom, as a result of the door settling on its hinges.

Having already turned the doorknob, I pulled as hard as I could to the right, toward the hinges, so the left side wouldn’t rub. Simultaneously, I lifted it slightly, so the bottom wouldn’t chafe, either.

Then I put some weight behind it. I held my breath as it swung quietly open. I entered the house, keeping my non-gun-hand on the screen door until it eased shut. Then I swung the wooden door back, leaving it slightly ajar so I wouldn’t have to risk that horrible wood-on-wood sound as it closed.