“He agrees you’re good to go. But as I said, this isn’t how you get the job. If our boss thought I told you different, I’d be out there looking for a job with you.”
“Can’t you help me? I’m the one being brave. I’m a shy person who works in a bank. If I do my act now for two strangers—two, right?—then I’ll be over the stage fright, and it’ll be easier to really audition.” She began to move her hips again in a silent dance.
There was a soft scraping sound as though a hand were muffling a microphone, and then the microphone cleared again. “As long as you understand that we got nothing to do with hiring. We’re just, like, night watchmen. You got it?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “It’ll really help me. All you have to do is watch my act and give me whatever pointers you can.”
She heard the sound of someone fiddling with the hardware on the inner side of the steel door. She shrieked “Yippee!” so Jeff couldn’t not hear it, then spotted his shadow near the corner of the building.
The door swung open, and there was a smiling man. He was very tall and broad-shouldered, with thick, dark hair and green eyes. He wore the pants from a black suit like the ones the men wore last night at the bank, but without the coat. His white shirt had the sleeves rolled up and the collar open. “Hello,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Penelope,” she said.
He bowed. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Penny.”
“Penelope,” she said with drunken insistence.
He turned to call to someone inside. “Jimmy, this is Penelope.”
The other man came to the door and said, “Hi.” He stepped back a few feet. “Come on in.”
She was sure now that there were only two of them. Now that she could see them both, she took a step, leaned drunkenly against the steel door to keep it wide open, and used the awkwardness of the move to cover the hitch of her shoulder to pull the pistol out of the back of her waistband. “Don’t move,” she said.
“Shit,” said the tall man. He made a quick move toward her.
She fired the gun high, so the bullet passed over his shoulder, and he stopped. She looked at the man behind him and said, “If you reach for it, I’ll kill you.”
He raised his hands and looked at her. “Penelope, why don’t you put that away?” He saw Jeff slip in the door beside her. “Oh, boy” Jeff was wearing a ski mask, and he handed one to Carrie, who put it on while he held his gun on the men.
“All right,” said Jeff. “Just shut up. We’re going to do this quick and easy. Both of you go up to face that wall, legs spread, hands out wide, and lean.”
The two men obeyed.
Jeff frisked the two men cautiously, keeping his gun on one of them every second. He found two pistols and tossed them out the open door.
“We’re here because we’re sworn peace officers,” said Carrie. “But not like any cops you’ve ever seen. If we decide to kill you, no local cop is ever going to ask us why.”
“Oh, feds,” said the big man.
“What’s your name?”
“Vassily Voinovich.”
“And how about you?”
“Jimmy Gaffney.”
“All right. You should know that if we find out either of those are false names, you’re going to jail for a long time. If you interfere with what we’re doing, same thing happens. If you make either of us think we’re in danger, you won’t make it to jail.”
“What do you want?”
“We’re doing an audit of the money coming into this business. You’re going to get tonight’s take for us. Our office is going to look for particular serial numbers, do some chemical testing. If we don’t find anything, your boss will get it back. If we do, God help him.”
“We can’t get the money for you. It’s in the safe.”
“Show us the safe,” Jeff said.
“It’s in the next room,” Voinovich said.
Carrie pushed her pistol against his temple. “He didn’t say ‘tell us.’ He said ‘show us.’ Everybody comes along.”
The room was a small, neat office, and Jeff could see this was where the two men had set up to spend the night. The security monitor where the two men had seen Carrie was mounted on the wall, and their coats were hung on the chairs. There were two hands of a gin game laid out on the desk face-down. It told Jeff that the big guy who had gone to the door probably had not known that the wily-looking redheaded Irishman would look at his cards. The safe was a small one—only about two and a half feet high, and two feet wide. There was an electronic keyboard with the numbers zero through nine on the keys.
Jeff said, “Okay. We’d like you to open the safe for us.”
The two men looked at each other in a silent inquiry that Jeff hoped was “Should we?” and not “I don’t know how, do you?”
“We can’t.”
Carrie said, “Do you mean you don’t have the combination, or you’re aware that if you don’t, we’ll kill you, and you’re willing to be killed?”
“The first one,” said the big man, Voinovich. “No combination.”
Carrie said, “That’s bad news.” She aimed her gun at his chest and kept opening and closing her fingers on the rubber handgrips of her big .45 pistol, trying to get the best hold on it to take the recoil.
“Wait. Hold it,” said Jimmy Gaffney. “We honestly don’t have the combination to the safe. If you were Manco Kapak, and you had two guys guarding your safe, would you give them the combination?”
“Looking at you, maybe not,” Carrie admitted. “So we’ll move on. First thing is that you guys are going to take the monitoring system apart. I want the recorder. Get started now.” She turned to Jeff. “If they seem to be near to trying something—even thinking about it, kill them.”
She crawled under the table where the safe was and examined it, then tugged on it, trying to rock it. “It moves a little. It can’t be bolted to anything serious. Watch them while I look.”
She went out the office door and around to the other side of the wall. She was gone a couple of minutes and came back. She had four nuts in the palm of her hand. “It’s four bolts through the wall, the nuts on them only hand-tight. There was a little cabinet in front of them.”
Gaffney said, “Kapak wanted it that way so we could get it out in a fire. Nightclubs burn down all the time.”
“If there’s anything else we need to know, you ought to tell us,” Carrie said. “It’ll go easier on you at your trial if you cooperate.”
“What do you want me to tell you?”
“Where’s the recorder for the monitoring system?”
“It’s over there in the cabinet.”
“Get it.”
Gaffney went to the cabinet and opened it, then pulled out a thin rectangular box. He unscrewed the video cables from the back of it and set the box on the desk. Carrie followed the cables along the ceiling back to the camera outside to be sure that was what the box was, then came back. “Okay.”
Jeff said, “Take your cell phones out and set them on the desk.”
The two men complied.
“Now you’ve got one more thing to do for us, to get the safe out of here and into the trunk of the car.”
The two men knelt beside the safe, but didn’t seem to be able to do more than rock it a little. Jeff tried too, to be sure they weren’t faking. “Why isn’t this thing moving?”
“I don’t know,” said Gaffney.
“Who owns the Toyota Land Cruiser out there?”
“I do,” said Voinovich. “And it’s a Sequoia.”
“Give me the keys.”
