Kearns said, more to Kapak than to Slosser, “I called a carpenter already. They should be here within an hour.” He looked at his watch.
“Want to stick around here, or you want a ride home?” Slosser stepped toward the door.
“My guys can handle this,” Kapak said. “I’ll go with you.”
“Okay.”
The two men walked across the parking lot. The tape had already been taken down, and Kapak could see deep marks on the pavement that he supposed were gouges made by the heavy safe.
Slosser said, “Are you ready to tell me who’s at war with you?”
“It’s a guy. I don’t know much about him, but his name is Joe Carver.”
“I’ll check that out,” said Slosser. He’d had detectives looking into it since the shootout at the bank. The problem was that there were lots of Joe Carvers, all over the country. Given a year or two of solid work, it was possible to check on each one—even call them all on the phone and talk with them. And the detectives were doing that. But so far there was no clear connection between any of them and Manco Kapak, and no evidence that any of them had a history of bank deposit robberies.
23
CARRIE SAID, “What are you doing?”
“You’ll see.” Jeff knelt in front of the safe, held the flour in the palm of his hand, took in a slow, deep breath, and blew. The fine white cloud flew from his palm and covered the keypad of the locked safe. “See? Look closely.”
She knelt beside him and leaned close to the keypad. “Oh my God. Fingerprints.”
“Right,” said Jeff. “There are prints on the one, the seven, the eight, and the four. No prints on any of the other keys. If you have ten digits, then there are a billion possible combinations. But if you have a ten-digit keypad with fingerprints on only four numbers, then the combination has to be an arrangement of those four numbers. That’s, like, twenty-four possible combinations.”
He took up the paper and pencil, wrote 1478, then pushed those keys. Nothing happened. He tried 1487, 1748, 1784, 1874, 1847. “Okay. Now we start with 4.” He tried 4178, 4187, 4781, 4718, 4817, 4871. “Now eight.” He punched in 8147.
“I’ll go make some coffee.” Carrie got up and stepped toward the back door.
“Got it.”
“What?” She turned to see him swing the safe door open.
“It’s 8147.”
She moved closer to him as he looked inside. “Four bags this time. Does that mean what I think it means?”
He pulled the first bag out and handed it to her. She opened it and looked inside. “It’s money, all right.” She pulled out the deposit slip. “Twenty-six thousand from Temptress.” She set the bag down and picked up the next. “Twenty-two from Siren. Only sixteen from Wash. This one doesn’t say what it’s from, but it’s got over eighteen in it.”
“I guess we paid for last night’s dinner.”
She put her arms around him and squeezed, rocking him from side to side. “I can’t believe you. You’re so dumb and so smart at the same time. You always surprise me.”
“Then at some point you’ll expect to be surprised, and so you won’t be. Still want this safe?”
“I don’t know. Should I?”
“There are pros and cons.”
“What are the pros?”
“You and I don’t have to haul the damned thing somewhere in a stolen SUV and dump it.”
“What are the cons?”
“If you leave it in your house, somebody can always look at the serial number and trace it to the strip club. Or you sell the house and some future owner forgets the combination, so he writes to the company and asks for it.”
“Not good,” she said. “Let’s get rid of it. I don’t want to do it myself, though. We just stole, like, eighty grand. Can’t we just find some neighborhood kids we can pay to drive the SUV away and ditch it?”
“I’d like to, but even if they didn’t get caught doing it, they’d talk about it later, and eventually the cops would be asking us about it.”
“I hadn’t thought about it that way—that whoever dumps it could get caught. Maybe it will be a sort of adventure.”
“An adventure?”
“Yes,” she said. “You know I love that. It’s the best.” Her eyes were glowing.
Sometimes he felt as though he had managed to grab the mane of a running horse, but holding on took all his physical strength and presence of mind. And it could only end one way that he knew of.
He was trying to learn to think faster than he usually did, because she could never be stopped, only diverted onto another path that she’d gallop down at the same frenzied pace. “We’ll do this. Let’s take the Sequoia and leave the safe inside when we dump it. Do you have any Windex and paper towels?”
“Sure. I have some out here in the garage.” She went to a cupboard on the side wall that held supplies. “What do you want cleaned?”
“The safe and the parts of the SUV we might have touched—door handles, windows, dashboard.”
“I’d better do it,” she said, and began to spray the door handles and wipe them off.
“What—men aren’t good at cleaning things?”
“Not men. You.” She sprayed the Windex in his direction, but he dodged it. She wiped every interior surface, then all of the door handles, and stood on the running board and wiped great swaths of the doors and roof. Then Jeff pulled the SUV out of the garage, hosed it off, wiped it with a chamois while Carrie went inside to get ready.
Carrie came out wearing a crisp summer dress and flat shoes that looked like ballet slippers. “I’ll drive the big one,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
He knew that she had made the determination that driving the stolen vehicle with the safe in it was more exciting than driving the getaway car, so he knew that there was no way to talk her out of it. And ordering her not to would make her start searching for greater risks. “Then wear a pair of gloves.” He reached into the trunk of his Trans Am and handed her a pair of clear surgical gloves.
He watched her put them on. “We just want to get rid of it. That means park it someplace where the neighbors will put up with it for a day and then call the cops. Don’t pick a place where there will be cameras. No shopping malls, airports, public buildings, parking structures. It should be along a curb in a residential neighborhood. We keep it absolutely simple. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said. Her big, clear eyes were unblinking and the smile on her lips seemed almost innocent in its sincerity. “I know a good place. Just follow me.” She put on the gloves, climbed in, and shut the door, and began to back the big vehicle down the driveway.
As Jeff stepped to his car, he began to think of other things he should have said before she left. She was driving a car stolen in an armed robbery. It would not be wise to drive it very far. She shouldn’t speed or otherwise draw attention to herself.
When she finished her descent down the driveway, Jeff began his. He heard her step hard on the accelerator to start down the hill toward Ventura Boulevard. She reached Ventura Boulevard at around forty-five miles an hour, and bounced across the intersection. Jeff reached the intersection and found the traffic signal was red, so he had to make a right turn onto Ventura, a left into the parking lot for the big Ralph’s Grocery Store on the corner, and come out the exit onto Vineland Avenue.
He could just see the Sequoia disappearing around the right turn far ahead at Riverside Drive. He accelerated and came within sight of her as she went up the freeway entrance ramp. He followed, heading east toward Glendale and Pasadena. As they drove, Jeff began to feel calmer. It wasn’t wise to drive a stolen vehicle far on a major freeway, but there were no police cars in sight at the moment, and as long as she wasn’t unlucky, she would probably be able to do this. They could be home by 9:00.