Two and a half hours later, we land at Miami International as the sun dips below the horizon. The Lear taxis to a Customs office for reentry, then we wait half an hour for a cab. Inside the main terminal, Vanessa buys a one-way ticket to Richmond, through Atlanta, and we hug and kiss good-bye. I wish her good luck, and she does the same. I rent a car and find a motel.
At nine the next morning, I’m waiting outside Palmetto Trust when the doors are unlocked. My carry-on bag has wheels and I roll it into the vault. Within minutes, I extract $50,000 in cash and three Lavo cigar boxes containing eighty-one mini-bars. On my way out, I do not mention to the vault clerk that I will never return. The lease for the safe-deposit box will expire in a year, and the bank will simply re-key and rent it to the next guy. I fight the early traffic and eventually make it to Interstate 95, going north in a hurry but careful not to get stopped. Jacksonville is six hours away. The tank is full and I plan to drive without stopping.
North of Fort Lauderdale, Vanessa calls with the welcome news that her mission is accomplished. She has retrieved the bullion hidden in her apartment, emptied the three lockboxes in the Richmond banks, and is already headed for D.C. with a trunkful of gold.
I get stalled in construction traffic around Palm Beach, and this ruins my plans for the afternoon. The banks will be closed when I arrive at the Jacksonville beaches. I have no choice but to slow down and go with the flow. It’s after six when I get to Neptune Beach, and for old time’s sake I check into a motel I’ve used before. It accepts cash and I park near my room on the ground level. I roll the carry-on inside and fall asleep with it on the bed with me. Vanessa wakes me at ten. She is safely tucked away in Dee Ray’s condo near Union Station. Quinn is there and they are having a delightful reunion. For this phase of the operation, Dee Ray has broken up with his live-in girlfriend and moved her out. In his opinion, she cannot be trusted. She is not family, and she’s certainly not the first girl he has cast aside. I pass along my request to hold the champagne for twenty-four hours.
We-Vanessa, Dee Ray, and I-expressed strong misgivings about Quinn including his estranged wife in our plot. A divorce looks likely, and it’s best if she knows nothing at this point.
Once again, I find myself killing a few minutes in the parking lot of a bank, First Coast Trust. When the doors open at 9:00 a.m., I wander in, as nonchalantly as possible, pulling an empty carry-on and flirting with the clerks. Just another sunny day in Florida. Alone in the vault, in a private stall, I remove two Lavos cigar boxes and place them gently into the carry-on. Minutes later, I’m driving a few blocks to a branch of Jacksonville Savings. When that lockbox is empty, I make my final stop at a Wells Fargo branch in Atlantic Beach. By ten I’m back on Interstate 95, headed to D.C. with 261 golden bricks in the trunk. Only the five I sold to Hassan for cash have disappeared.
It’s almost midnight when I enter central D.C. I take a brief detour and drive along First Street, passing in front of the Supreme Court Building and wondering what will be the final outcome of the momentous case of
However, better judgment prevails. I circle Union Station, follow the GPS to I Street, then to the corner of Fifth. By the time I park in front of the building, Mr. Quinn Rucker is bounding down the steps with the biggest smile I’ve ever seen. Our embrace is long and emotional. “What took so long?” he asks.
“Got here as fast as I could,” I reply.
“I knew you would come, bro. I never doubted you.”
“There were doubts, lots of them.”
We’re both stunned at the fact that we’ve pulled it off, and at that moment our success is overwhelming. We embrace again, and each of us admires how thin the other looks. I comment that I’m looking forward to eating again. Quinn says he’s tired of playing the lunatic. “I’m sure it comes natural,” I say. He grabs my shoulders, stares at my new face, and says, “You’re almost cute now.”
“I’ll give you the doctor’s name. You could use some work.”
I’ve never had a closer friend than Quinn Rucker, and the hours we spent at Frostburg hatching our scheme now seem like an ancient dream. Back then, we believed in it because there was nothing else to hope for, but deep down we never seriously thought it would work. Arm in arm, we climb the steps and enter the condo. I hug and kiss Vanessa, then reintroduce myself to Dee Ray. I met him briefly years ago in the visitors’ room at Frostburg when he came to see his brother, but I’m not sure I would recognize him walking down a street. It doesn’t matter; we are now blood kin, our bonds solidified by trust and gold.
The first bottle of champagne is poured into four Waterford flutes-Dee Ray has expensive tastes-and we chug it. Dee Ray and Quinn stick guns in their pockets, and we quickly unload my car. The party that follows would seem implausible even in a fantasy film.
With champagne flowing, the gold bars are stacked ten deep in the center of the den floor, all 524 of them, and we sit on cushions around the treasure. It’s impossible not to gawk and no one tries to suppress the laughter. Since I’m the lawyer and the unofficial leader, I commence the business portion of the meeting with some simple math. We have before us 524 little bricks; 5 were sold to a Syrian gold trader in Miami; and 41 are now resting safely in a bank vault on Antigua. The total taken from our dear pal Nathan is 570, worth roughly $8.5 million. Pursuant to our agreement, Dee Ray gets 57 of the glowing little ingots. His 10 percent was earned by fronting the cash Quinn was caught with; for paying Dusty’s legal fees; for supplying the four kilos of Nathan’s cocaine, along with the pistol and the chloral hydrate I used to knock him out. Dee Ray picked up Quinn when he walked away from Frostburg, and he monitored Nathan’s release from prison so we would know exactly when to start the project. He also paid the $20,000 deposit to the rehab center near Akron for Quinn’s phony cocaine problem.
Dee Ray is in charge of the yacht. As he’s getting drunker, he hands over an itemized list of his expenses, including the yacht, and rounds it all off at an even $300,000. We’re assuming a value of $1,500 an ounce, so we vote unanimously to award him another twenty bars. No one is in the mood to quibble, and when you’re staring at such a fortune it’s easy to be magnanimous.
At some unknown and unknowable point in the future, the remaining 488 bars will be equally divided among Quinn, Vanessa, and me. That’s not important now-the urgency is in getting the stuff out of this country. It will take a long time to slowly convert the gold to cash, but we’ll worry about that much later. For the moment, we are content to pass the hours drinking, laughing, and taking turns telling our version of the events. When Vanessa replays the moment in Nathan’s house when she stripped naked and confronted his buddies at the front door, we laugh until it’s painful. When Quinn recounts the meeting with Stanley Mumphrey in which he blurted out the fact that he knew Max Baldwin had left witness protection and left Florida, he imitates Mumphrey’s wild-eyed reaction to this startling news. When I describe my second meeting with Hassan and trying to count 122 stacks of $100 bills in a busy coffee shop, they think I’m lying.
The stories continue until 3:00 a.m., when we’re too drunk to go on. Dee Ray covers the gold with a quilt and I volunteer to sleep on the sofa.
CHAPTER 44
We slowly come to life hours later. The hangovers and fatigue are offset by the excitement of the task at hand. For a young man who has lived on the fringes of an operation adept at smuggling illegal substances into the country, the challenge of smuggling our gold out is light lifting for Dee Ray. He explains that we are now avid scuba divers, and he has purchased an astonishing collection of gear, all of it stored in heavy, official U.S. Divers brand nylon duffel bags, each with a solid zipper and a small padlock. We hustle around the condo removing masks, snorkels, fins, regulators, tanks, weight belts, buoyancy compensators, gauges, dry suits, even spearguns, none of which has ever been used. It will be on eBay within a month. The gear is replaced by an assortment of smaller U.S. Divers snorkel backpacks and dry bags, all filled with gold mini-bars. The weight of each bag is tested and retested by the men to see how much can be carried. The bags are bulky and heavy, but then they would be if filled with scuba gear. In addition, Dee Ray has accumulated a variety of luggage, the sturdiest cases he could, and all on rollers. We place the gold in shoes, shaving kits, makeup bags, even two small tackle boxes for deep-sea fishing. When we add a few items of clothing for the trip, our bags and gear seem heavy enough to sink a fine boat. The
