“He been staying with some girl whose biker boyfriend mentioned me to him. At least that’s what he said.”
“Hiding stuff for biker gangs, too?” Reggie asked.
“Go on with your story.”
“So, Goemann fills us in on this unique banking service you offer. We asked him which house the stuff was hidden in, figuring maybe you told your depositors that, but he said he didn’t know. Me and Wyatt pressed him on that, and he came up with this house where a couple of old retired teachers lived. Turns out Goemann just pulled the address out of his ass, because we searched that house from top to bottom. Attic, too.”
The Bradleys. These two had murdered Richard and Esther Bradley. Reggie and Wyatt were more than a couple of crooks trying to rip off another crook. They were stone-cold killers.
Vince said, “Hang a right here.”
I did. Now we were driving through the old downtown, along Broad Street. A minute later, we were on Golden Hill.
“Left up here,” Vince said, “and then stay on Bridgeport.” To Reggie, he said, “Now I’ve got a question for you.”
“Go ahead. We’re all friends here.”
“That was a lot of seed money you put in. Maybe not the biggest deposits I ever had, but cumulatively that was a chunk of change.”
“Well, first of all, we’re getting it all back, aren’t we?” she said. “But even if we didn’t, we did have some money to throw around. Ever heard of filing bogus returns to the IRS?”
“Let me guess,” he said. “Rip off identities, file returns in their name that claim decent refunds, have them sent to a PO box.”
“More or less. Wyatt here — he’s my husband — is the brains behind that.” I glanced in the mirror, saw the man smile.
Reggie continued. “We got refund checks coming in pretty steadily. Great line of work. Not like robbing a bank. You don’t get hurt. Maybe some RSI, all that time you have to spend at the computer, but other than that, it’s great. That’s Wyatt’s baby. I take on other jobs that are more physically demanding.”
“Like killing people?”
“Whatever.”
“So why this, then?” Vince said.
“Hmm?” Reggie said.
“Ripping off what’s in my houses, all this bullshit, when all you want is what Eli left with me.”
“Like I said, it’s a favor for my uncle. Getting back what belongs to him. But you can see how this has turned into a golden opportunity. It’s like fishing with nets. Maybe you’re just out for salmon, but if you end up with a ton of lobster, you don’t throw it back into the ocean.”
“Left at the lights up here,” Vince told me.
I put on the blinker and moved into the turning lane.
I slowed, tapped the brake, put my left blinker on. Once I was through the intersection and heading south, Vince gave me a couple more directions. Now we were heading down a street I knew very well.
“It’s up here,” Vince told me. “Turn into that house up there with the small SUV with the ladder on the roof.”
I pulled into the driveway, killed the engine. I’d had a feeling this might be where we were headed. No wonder Vince had told Cynthia and Grace to get lost.
I was home.
Fifty-nine
Terry
Vince had hidden Eli Goemann’s stuff in our attic?
If so, it hadn’t been there long. Reggie had made it clear that it had been left with Vince in only the last couple of weeks.
When the hell had he been in our house? Him, or one of his crew? And if there was nearly a quarter-million dollars hidden over our heads, why had Vince not wanted to bother getting it before we left to clear out other houses?
It wasn’t as if I could ask him right now.
“Nice little house for a nurse,” Reggie said as she took the keys from me and the four of us opened the doors of the BMW. I noticed she had Vince’s gun in her hand, and once Wyatt was out I saw he had his tucked into his waistband.
Vince struggled some to get out of the car, and he wobbled some when he got on his feet. He didn’t look well.
“I need to find a can,” he said. “I’m gonna overflow.”
“Huh?” Reggie said.
“My goddamn bag,” Vince said to her.
She blinked, taking a moment to figure out what he might be talking about. “Oh,” she said. “Well, let’s get inside.”
Vince pointed to my Escape. “Grab the ladder off that car. We could use that.”
Wyatt had a puzzled look on his face. “If the woman who lives here is at work, whose car is that?”
Shit.
Vince didn’t wait a beat. “The hospital’s only five minutes from here. She bikes it.”
“How do you know?” he asked.
Vince shot him a look. “You think I’m gonna leave money in people’s houses and not know their routines?”
I went over to the Escape. Normally, to get something off the roof racks, I’d open a door or two and stand on the sill to make it easier to undo the bungee cords. But I wasn’t supposed to have a key to unlock it, so I had to stand on my toes to get the job done. I dragged the ladder down carefully.
I carried it to the front door, where everyone was waiting for me. “You’ve got the key, right?” Vince asked.
I reached into my pocket. “I do,” I said, pulling out a ring that included the keys to the Escape sitting in the driveway. If Wyatt or Reggie thought it odd that I kept my car remote on the same ring as the key to just one of the many houses Vince had access to, they didn’t mention it.
“And you know the code?” he asked.
“I’ve got it written down,” I said, and made a show of looking in my wallet for a scrap of paper — in fact, a gas receipt — which I then shoved back into my pocket. “Yeah, I’m good.”
I moved ahead of Vince and the others to get to the front door first. I fumbled some, getting the key in and turning the lock, and when the door opened and the security system began to beep, warning me that I had only a few seconds to disable it, I feigned a moment’s confusion, wondering where the keypad was.
I entered the four-digit code to stop the beeping, then went back out to bring in the ladder. Everyone moved a few steps into the house, at which point Wyatt took the gun from his waistband and held on to it.
“Bathroom,” Vince said.
I said, “It’s—”
And stopped myself.
Then, barely missing a beat, I said, “I think it’s just up the hall there. I used it last time I was here.”
Vince was really limping. He walked a few steps, found the ground-floor powder room, and stepped in. As he went to close the door, Wyatt held up a hand, blocking it.
“Not letting you out of my sight,” he said.
“Great,” Vince said. “You can see how I do it.”
From my position down the hall, I couldn’t see a thing, but I could imagine. I wondered how long Wyatt would really want to watch Vince empty a urine-filled plastic bag.
“Oh man,” Wyatt said.
Not long, as it turned out. Wyatt stepped out into the hall, just outside the door to the kitchen.
The kitchen.
There were family pictures plastered all over the refrigerator, held in place with decorative magnets. If Reggie or Wyatt wandered in there, looked at the fridge, saw me in one of the snapshots, how was I going to explain that?
I backed into the kitchen, glanced at the fridge, gave the pictures as fast a glance as I could. Given that I was the one who had taken most of them, it was rare that any of them featured me. Plenty of Grace, and Cynthia, and Cynthia and Grace together. Of the dozen or more pictures, I was pretty sure I was in only one of them. I was with about twenty of my students, a three-year-old shot taken just before we all got on the bus to go see a play on Broadway. A rare excursion for my creative writing students at the time. My head was so small in the pic that even if Wyatt or Reggie saw it, I wasn’t sure they would recognize me.