A Man of Lies, page 10
“No,” Pickens shouts. “It’s trapped. You make one mistake and the safe will destroy itself.”
“But give me the key,” Holzmann says, “and we will open it together. I’ve heard good things about your crew, Cassiopeia, and the fact that you were able to get in here tonight speaks volumes to your skills. I’ll pay you double what I had offered to Herr Sands. A hundred thousand dollars, plus future employment. There’s fifty on the table right over there.” He points toward the paper bag.
Keeping her gun trained on Holzmann, Cass grabs the bag. There are five thick bundles of hundred-dollar bills inside.
“Fuck that,” she says. “Pickens, you seem to know a lot. You know how to open the safe?”
The man says nothing, but his expression is answer enough.
“Right,” she says, waving her gun at him. “You carry the safe. Holzmann here is gonna lead us out.”
“Cass,” Jonny Boy mewls from beside her. “I don’t like this, Cass.”
“Just shut the fuck up, and do your fucking job,” she says. “Pickens, grab the safe and walk. And you”—this to Holzmann—“anything happens to us, you catch nine double-aught pellets with your head. Jonny Boy, get your shit together, hold that fucking gun straight, and cover our back.”
“Will the rain damage anything?” Holzmann asks Pickens.
He thinks for a moment before he responds. “No, the inner core is still intact. The water shouldn’t get anywhere that matters. I’ll need my gear, though,” he says to Cass, pointing to a duffel bag on the workbench.
“Bring what you need,” she says. “But you’re carrying it.”
“We should get Vic,” Jonny Boy says. He keeps glancing at the ruined door, though he seems unable to take a step toward it.
“No,” Cass says. “We need to get the fuck out of here.”
With Pickens carrying the duffel over his shoulder and the safe under his arm, Cass follows Holzmann out into the yard, around the side of the house, and through the front gate once more. Holzmann says nothing more as they march to the van.
“You’re being awful quiet,” Cass says.
Holzmann shrugs. “You have a gun on me.”
“That didn’t stop you saying anything before.”
Despite the warmth of the summer storm, the gaze that he fixes her with chills her. She has spent her life being ignored and dismissed as a woman or a freak, but she gets the sense, as Holzmann looks at her now, that he truly sees her, that he is judging the full weight of her value.
“You will fail, Cassiopeia Mullen,” he says, forcing her to lean in to hear him. “You will err in this foolhardy ploy, and when you do, I will kill you. In the meantime, I am content to remain near, to ensure that your idiocy does not cost me more than the hassle of cleaning up whatever mess you left at my home.”
She should have let him stay quiet.
CHAPTER 23 Peter Van Horn, 5:20 P.M.
The crash of thunder jolts him awake. It is dark and pouring rain, and Peter Van Horn has no idea where he is. It returns to him slowly. Tracking Barrett, tracking the old man. He is still parked by the house in Elkhorn. He was supposed to go back to the station. They should have called him. He could have explained.
He takes his phone out, but the screen stays black. The battery is dead.
He grabs the keys off the center console, fumbling them in the dark. Maybe he can still make it back to the station in time to talk to Sarge. To make them all understand that none of this is his fault.
Movement outside his car draws his attention. People, obscured by dark and rain, come out of the gate of the old man’s house. They head away from him. In the strobe of a lightning bolt, he catches the shape of a gun.
What the hell is going on?
This isn’t his problem. All that he invites by carrying on is further questions into his own conduct.
He still has his service weapon. Leaving his keys in the ignition, he draws his gun and slides out of the car. He shuts the door quietly behind him, not that anyone could hear it over the rain and thunder. Staying in a low crouch, he runs along the side of the road, following after the figures. He sees one of them, too far away to make out any detail beyond their black clothing, getting into the driver’s seat of a white panel van. The van drives away, and Peter is left alone in the rain.
He saw them leaving the old man’s house with a gun, though. Someone inside might need help. He should call for backup. He knows he should.
The figures left the gate ajar. Peter opens it with the muzzle of his gun, both leading with the weapon and trying to avoid touching anything directly. He pushes his hair back. Perhaps the wet will keep it in place.
There is a small guardhouse, but he can’t see inside. He hurries past toward the house in the center of the lot. The front door is cracked. Light from inside seeps out.
“Hello?” Peter calls as he mounts the steps to the porch. “Is anybody home? This is the Omaha PD.”
He gets no response from inside, but the front door has been kicked in. He should call this in. A crime has been committed, the scene is not secure, and he is here without backup. Protocol is to call it in and move off the premises, establish a perimeter, and wait for detectives to arrive.
The front door just barely hangs on its frame, and the hinges groan in protest as Peter nudges it aside and steps into the mansion’s foyer.
Holy shit.
Peter isn’t one for obscenity, but it feels appropriate now. Nothing else can convey what lies before him. A man in a suit slumps on the ground in the back of the room. He might have been one of the guards that Peter saw earlier. He isn’t, but he’s dressed the same.
Peter knows he’s dead. Living bodies don’t look like that. They don’t lie that still. He spots a gun on the ground near the corpse. Another door drifts open beyond the dead man, beckoning Peter on to further horrors inside.
Peter can feel that coil tightening across his chest again. Whatever is going on, he should not be here. He doesn’t know how this is going to spin against him, but he does know, as surely as he has ever known anything, that this does not end well for him if he is ever linked to this house.
He goes through the last few minutes in his mind. He was careful not to touch anything. There should be no trace that he was ever here. He holsters his gun and walks away. Back down the driveway that bends lazily across the yard. Past the darkened guardhouse—better to not look inside.
He wants to run. More than anything, he wants to break into a sprint and put as much distance between himself and that house—that body—as he possibly can. But there might be people watching. A neighbor looking out a window. He must stay calm.
He gets back to the street, back to his car, and opens the door with trembling hands. The key is still in the ignition. His fingers slip off it at first, but he gets it to turn, and the engine comes stuttering to life. He needs to get home.
Nobody knows he was there. He touched nothing. He left no trace. There were no witnesses. Tomorrow he will go in to work like nothing happened. He will explain to Sergeant Nowicki that he was distraught over the morning’s meeting, and he left early. He must have failed to clock out due to the mental duress. Sarge will insist on an official write-up. Professional Oversight will be displeased. He might lose his job. He might lose everything to the bank. But there is somebody out there who wants to do worse. Someone is trying to destroy him. And Peter will not let them put that body on him.
There is no way he can be placed in that house. He left no trace. There won’t even be cell records that he was nearby since his phone was dead. He can do this. He just needs to say nothing. Keep his head down and get through it.
That’s what he tells himself as he lies in bed, still soaked through from the rain. The adrenaline crash takes him, and his whole body begins to shake. Maybe this is shock, he thinks. He wonders that he can observe his body’s reaction, the tremors, the elevated heart rate, the hyperventilation, with such detachment.
He does not experience the things his body is going through. It’s as though he were in the chair beside the bed, watching himself undergo this trauma but not participating.
He left no trace, he tells himself.
And he is almost correct.
If he had stopped on the porch, it would have been true. If he had opened the door, but gone no further, then that would have been the end of it. He could have gone in to the station, taken his lumps, and gotten on with his life. But he hadn’t stopped at the porch. He entered the house, and as he stepped inside, he stepped into view of a camera, mounted to the ceiling, recording everything that happens in that room. Everyone who enters Holzmann’s headquarters.
CHAPTER 24 Cass Mullen, 5:23 P.M.
Cass keeps her speed low as she navigates the suburban streets. They can’t risk getting pulled over for running a stop sign.
“Hey, Cass,” Jonny Boy says from the back. He’s on the storage box, holding the rifle loosely on Holzmann and Pickens, who are on the futon, flanking the safe. “What are we gonna do?”
“We’re gonna be rich,” she says.
Jonny Boy looks at her through the rearview mirror. “What are we gonna do about Vic?” He pulls the balaclava off, and his face is pink. Rainwater mixed with blood. Vic’s blood.
Fuck. For all her complaints, Vic was always there for her. He always had her back. He might have been an idiot, but he was her idiot. And now he’s dead.
Holzmann has rattled her. Left her questioning herself. She could have just sold him the key. Stuck to the plan she had this morning. Get it from Barrett, cut out Richard, and set herself up with the biggest game in town. It was a good plan. But she’d gotten it in her head to go after more.
Fuck that, and fuck regrets. She’d never be happy working under Holzmann. Don’t think she hadn’t noticed that Jonny Boy was “Herr Wright” while she was just “Cassiopeia.” Misogynist fuck. She has his key. She has his safe. She has him. He may be the most feared man in Omaha, but she just took down his whole operation with nothing but two dumb fucks.
“We’re gonna honor him,” she says, meeting Jonny Boy’s eye in the mirror. “Every day we’re sipping our piña coladas, living the good life, being the baddest motherfuckers around, we’ll toast to him.”
“He’s dead, Cass,” Jonny Boy says, as though she didn’t fucking know that already. “They shot him, and he died, and I watched him—I watched it happen.”
“Yeah. That happened. But we got a job to do, so man the fuck up, and let’s find out what he did it all for.” She grabs the key from the glove box and tosses it back to Jonny Boy.
He—miracle of miracles—catches it out of the air in his left hand, keeping his right on the rifle. He considers the lump of metal, trying to figure out how to make it work. “What do I do with it?” he asks, waving it around in front of the safe.
“Just open it,” Cass says.
Jonny Boy grabs the handle of the safe, but Holzmann puts his hand on top of Jonny Boy’s. “Do not force it,” he says.
Jonny Boy pulls his hand back. “Don’t touch me.”
“If you force the handle,” Holzmann continues, “then it will destroy the egg inside. You must use the key to open it.”
“And how do we do that?” Cass asks. She squints through the dark outside, trying to make out the writing on a street sign. She doesn’t want to use the GPS on her phone and leave a digital trace of her presence on these streets. Pickens starts to laugh. He has been compliant so far, but, as his laughter intensifies, she grows concerned.
“What’s so funny?” Jonny Boy asks, but the man just keeps laughing. Jonny Boy swings the gun to aim at him, which only causes the laughter to redouble.
Cass turns her focus back to Holzmann. “What’s the egg? You said the safe will destroy the egg. What is it?”
Holzmann’s eyes flick to hers, and he smiles but says nothing.
Jonny Boy jabs the rifle at Pickens. “Why are you laughing?”
“The key,” the man gasps. “Look at it.”
Jonny Boy had been holding the key in his left hand. When he raised the gun, he used that hand to grab the forestock, cracking the key into it. Now that it’s been pointed out to him, Jonny Boy sees it. In its mirrored skin. A chip. The tin emulsion that the aluminum was bonded to has broken off, revealing the inert plastic beneath.
“What does it mean?” Jonny Boy asks, staring at the gouge in the metal.
Pickens swallows down the trailing end of his nervous laugh. “It’s a fake,” he says. “That isn’t the key.”
That doesn’t make sense, not after everything they did to get here. “It can’t be fake,” Cass says, turning in her seat to look for herself.
Holzmann, having decided that he will get no better distraction than this, lunges forward. His shoulder collides with Jonny Boy’s gut, but, unable to find purchase on his rain- and blood-slicked clothing, he bounces off the man’s prodigious girth.
Cass flinches at his sudden movement, pulling the wheel slightly to the right from her twisted position. At the same time, the back right tire passes over a pothole, and the back of the vehicle begins to drift.
Jonny Boy, spinning to face Holzmann and feeling the seat beneath him move, instinctively grabs for something. His left hand closes around the fake broken key as his right squeezes the trigger of the rifle.
The bullet passes harmlessly over Holzmann and impacts the rear of the van, deforming the latch that holds the doors closed. As Holzmann tumbles into them—having been thrown fully off his feet by the van’s sickening lurch to the side—the doors fall open, and he teeters on the precipice.
Cass turns back to the road. She needs to get control of the van before she can sort out the clusterfuck unfolding in the rear. She spins the wheel left, into the drift, and the tires bite into the asphalt once more. The back of the vehicle fishtails as it realigns with their direction of travel.
The rifle’s roar deafened her, so she can’t hear what’s going on behind her. She glances in the mirror, but all she sees are the doors flapping in the rain.
“Jesus, fuck!” Cass shouts. She brings the van to a stop in the middle of the street. “What the fuck is happening back there?”
Jonny Boy looks out the open rear of the van into the dark beyond before pulling the doors closed once more. Face ashen, he turns back to Cass.
“Holzmann’s gone,” he says.
Fuck.
Cass slams the van into reverse, hoping to find the old man laid out on the pavement, but the same cover the dark and rain gave her earlier makes it impossible to see the street, and someone’s coming out of a nearby store to check on what happened.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Holzmann is gone. The key is fake. Vic is dead.
But they have the safe, and they have Pickens, now curled protectively around it, and Pickens seems to know more about it than they do.
As she puts the van back into drive, she glances in the mirror at the man and the safe.
“So tell me about this egg,” she says.
CHAPTER 25 Henry Holzmann, 5:29 P.M.
Henry Holzmann picks himself up off the asphalt. His trousers are ripped at the left hip and the right knee, where he bounced as he rolled from the van. He makes an effort to straighten his jacket and restore order to the tuck of his shirt, but the whole outfit will need to be replaced.
He considers going after the van. Cassiopeia and her fat idiot of a lackey have his safe and his safecracker, but he is unarmed and injured from his fall. For several months now, a pain has been growing in his left leg. He has practiced, in the late hours of the night, walking with a cane in preparation for the day when that would become necessary. That day, it would seem, has come early.
A cane offers many advantages if you look past the implicit acknowledgment of weakness. As a gestural tool, it provides a powerful emphasis. It gives the hands an occupation. In material and decoration, it can convey status and origin. It is a weapon.
Holzmann has a number of canes prepared, and they wait for him back at his office. He does not relish the idea, but one must accept one’s situation if one is to overcome it. There is no strength to be gained in pretending he is anything other than that which he is: an old man. But those canes are of no use to him now.
He is not far from his headquarters, but he is far enough that walking back is out of the question. There is every possibility that, given the gunfire, the police will be converging there soon, and he has no desire to be there when that occurs.
He will lose the money that was stored there. And the drugs. But that is of no concern. He kept no records in that estate, and what he had there is but a fraction of his operation. Those things can all be replaced. All that matters now is the safe.
He misses the days of pay phones. They offered both anonymity and convenience that cell phones cannot match. If pay phones were still as ubiquitous as they were thirty years ago, he would have been able to reach his people immediately. Even if he carried a phone on him—and he does not, why would he burden himself with a microphone and tracking device?—it would have likely been rendered inoperable by his fall from the van.
“Sir, are you all right?” a young woman behind him calls out.
A pretty girl, the hair in her ponytail curling in the rain, runs toward him with an umbrella. She wears an apron full of pockets bearing the logo of the florist’s shop on the street corner. As she catches sight of his disarray, her mouth falls open.
“You’re hurt,” she cries. “Oh my god, did that car hit you?”
“No, my dear.” He gives his jacket sleeves a final tug, situating the cloth as best he can. “I just took a bit of a tumble on the curb. I seem to have misplaced myself in this weather.” He gives her as gentle of a smile as he can muster and allows her to take his elbow. She smells of pollen and cut flowers, an odor of life that can only be acquired through killing. As she moves the umbrella to cover him, he pushes it back. “You are too kind, madam, but please, keep yourself dry. My attire is already a lost cause, but yours need not be sacrificed.”
