Dan’s color drained a few shades. “I don’t appreciate this type of threat, Detective.”
“It’s not a threat. I’m telling you what will happen for a fact.” Resnick looked away as he rubbed his jaw. “I know he had other items besides money in those boxes. I know him well enough to know that. My guess is those items would send him away to prison for the rest of his miserable life.”
Raising his gaze to meet Dan’s eyes, he added, “If I were you and I cared at all about my family, I’d make sure those items ended up in my hands.”
Resnick gave Dan a short nod and left.
When Dan got back to his car he sat paralyzed for a long moment. Then he took out his cell phone and called Joel. The phone rang until the answering machine picked up. He hung up and tried again. This time after the fifth ring someone picked up.
“Joel, are you there?”
“Yeah, you woke me. Who’s talking?”
“Dan. We got to meet.”
“Yeah, okay.” There was a long pause. “You come here now, I’ll split everything with you.”
The phone went dead on him. Dan had no clue what was behind Joel’s change of heart and wondered whether this was some sort of setup. In the end he decided he had no choice. He put away his cell phone and headed for New Hampshire.
31
It was a little after seven when Dan pulled up in Joel’s driveway. The scene outside the house looked like something from a battlefield. With the summer winding down and the days getting shorter, the evening’s dusk added to the eeriness of the scene. Dan couldn’t quite comprehend why a car would be sticking halfway out of Joel’s house until he spotted the two bodies.
He walked slowly up the path to the front door and saw that one of the dead bodies was Shrini. He felt nothing seeing his friend lying there dead with a large gaping hole where his eye should’ve been. He rang the bell and stood mutely until he heard Joel weakly call out for him to come in through the hole in the wall.
Dan walked past another dead body and around the back end of the BMW before squeezing through the opening between the wall and the car. Inside he saw two more dead bodies and then caught sight of Joel propped up in a sitting position. Joel looked white as a sheet, a large puddle of blood underneath him. From what Dan could tell, blood seemed to be spurting out of his leg.
As Dan moved into the room he stared transfixed at one of the dead bodies, realizing it was Viktor Petrenko.
“Hey, pal.” Joel tried to smile. “Here’s the deal.
I’ll give you half of what I got. First bury these bodies, clean up in here, then take me to the hospital.”
“I can’t do that, Joel. I’m sorry, but I don’t trust you any more.”
Joel’s half-hearted smile disappeared. He lifted his gun and aimed it at Dan. “You trust me to blow your head off if you don’t do what I say?”
“Do what you have to, Joel.”
Joel’s eyes glazed over for a moment and then softened back to something more human. “Motherfucker,” he swore. “All right, I can’t blame you. What will it take?”
“I have to get my money first.”
“You give me your word you help me afterwards?”
“You’ve got my word.”
Joel made his decision, nodded slowly. “You try fucking me, you’re dead, understand?”
“Whatever you say, Joel.”
“End of my shooting range, you shovel off a foot of dirt. You’ll find a safe there. Combination two, twelve, two. You’re going to take only half, right?”
“That’s all.”
“Then hurry up. It’s going to take a while to bury these bodies.”
Dan went down to the basement, found a shovel and dug out enough dirt to expose the safe. He opened it, took out the duffel bag that he had used in the robbery, then wiped off whatever fingerprints he might’ve left.
When he got back upstairs, Joel asked what he was doing with the bag. “I thought you were only going to take half,” he demanded.
Dan ignored him and kept walking.
“Motherfucker! We had a deal!”
A bullet whistled past Dan’s ear. When he turned around he could tell from the expression on Joel’s face that the shot had not been meant as a warning shot. The only reason he missed was because his eyes were clouding up and he probably couldn’t see straight.
“You gave me your word,” Joel insisted. His body swayed back and forth. He wasn’t going to be able to keep himself propped up much longer.
“Joel, you’re bleeding out. No matter what I do you’re going to be dead soon.”
As Dan squeezed through the opening in the wall, he heard another shot fired, but had the feeling that this one missed wildly. Walking towards his car, he heard one last Motherfucker yelled out, Joel’s voice now feeble, barely recognizable.
During the ride home he thought about what his next steps were going to be. He no longer had to worry about Petrenko. Eventually the cops were going to find out about what happened at Joel’s house, but what would that prove? Even if they could now tie Shrini and Joel to the robbery they still had nothing to tie him to it… except his cell phone call to Joel. What could they prove from that? They still had no real evidence. Maybe they’d make him go through a trial, but he’d get through it.
He got home after nine. The house seemed quiet. Too quiet. He found Carol sitting alone in the kitchen, her face worn out, her eyes red and puffy as if she’d been crying.
“Where are the kids?” Dan asked.
“At friends’ houses.” She faced him. “That rash you had. That was the same day as the robbery. You got that from the makeup.”
“I told you how I got that-”
“Quit lying to me, Dan. You’ve been lying to me for months. All those meetings with Shrini and Gordon were so you could plan the robbery. Joel was involved too, wasn’t he? I remember that phone call you were so afraid of me overhearing.”
“Carol, please-”
“Quit lying to me, Dan. I can’t stand it.”
Dan sat down across from her. He couldn’t bear to look at all the pain in her eyes. All he could do was bury his face in his hands. “We were going to lose the house. We were going to lose everything we had.”
“So you robbed a bank. You killed a girl. Dan, she was only twenty!”
“Twenty-three,” Dan corrected her.
Carol’s jaw dropped as she stared at him.
“No one was supposed to get hurt,” Dan said quickly. “Gordon went nuts. There was nothing I could do.”
They sat in silence. Dan couldn’t break it. All he could do was wait for Carol to say something.
Finally, she did. “Get out. I never want you anywhere near me or my children ever again.”
“Carol, I love you.”
“I might still love you too, Dan. I’m not sure right now. But I can’t have you around my children.”
“Please, I had to do what I did.” He forced himself to look at her. “I’m going blind.”
“What?”
“I have retinitis pigmentosa. Another year or so and I’ll be completely blind.”
“My God! Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“You had enough to worry about as it was. If I had a job I would’ve had long-term disability to protect you and the kids. But without it what was I going to do? Have all of you end up in the streets?”
“We would’ve managed somehow.”
“How? On welfare? In a project somewhere?”
“We would’ve managed,” she repeated stubbornly. “Dan, it’s too late now to fix things. There’s nothing you can do except leave.” She paused. “I won’t tell the police what I know, but you have to leave.”
Dan stared at her helplessly. As much as he didn’t want to admit it, he knew there was no point arguing with her.
“Let me at least give you the money,” he said.
“No, don’t you dare even try.”
“Jesus, Carol-”
“Just leave, please.”
“What are you going to tell the kids?”