No Safe House

Fifty-eight Terry

Once we were all in the car and Wyatt had put into the trunk all the bags of money and other assorted items that had been recovered from the homes Vince had used as safe-deposit boxes, Vince tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Get us out of here and go left on Cherry. When you get to Prospect, go left.”

I did as I was told.

“So, I’m curious,” Reggie said. “How do you do this? You hide the money in regular people’s homes, right? But is it without their consent, or are they in on it?”

“They don’t know,” Vince said.

“Brilliant. But then how do you keep them from stumbling onto it? If you put it in the walls, between the studs, you’d have to cut into drywall, do all kinds of repair, paint, that kind of thing. I mean, if you were going to leave something there for ten years, that’d be okay, but it’s not like that, right?”

“Attic,” Vince said. “Under the insulation, usually.”

We no longer had a ladder with us. I hoped, whatever house we were going to, the attic was going to be easily accessible.

“Two men, brothers,” Vince said. “Logan and Joseph. They’re with you.”

“Yeah,” Reggie said. “We all left some money with you to see where it would end up. And you’re right about the GPS. Every time we gave you money, we watched it go to a different place. But we had no idea how many spots there are. If it was just one, we could have handled this some other way. In the end, it made more sense to grab your kid and get you to bring it all to us.”

Was Vince thinking what I was thinking? If they knew where some of the money had been stashed, maybe they’d been the ones who’d hit the Cummings house last night. They’d scored there, but it wasn’t as big a score as they’d thought it would be.

“How’d you hear about me?” Vince asked.

“One of your other customers. Goemann. He was hiding some things that didn’t belong to him. Took them from my uncle. Couple hundred thousand, and the vase. Said he entrusted them to you, couple of weeks ago, because he figured my uncle would come after him before he could sell them to another interested party. How would Goemann have heard about you?”

“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.