Strip

18

IT WAS AFTER 2:00 A.M. Jeff and Carrie sat in her white car down the street from Siren and watched the building from a distance. A dozen people walked out the side door in a small gaggle, talking to each other, and stepped onto the darkened parking lot. A couple of them waved, and all of them got into cars. In the headlights from one of the cars, Jeff picked out Lila from the corn-silk blond hair and her tall, thin silhouette. She got into the little red Honda and started it. Jeff watched her as she drove off the lot and disappeared down the road.

“I don’t see any lights on,” Carrie said.

“There aren’t any windows. It’s a strip club.”

“Oh. Yeah. I suppose they don’t want to give it away for free.”

“They’re closed for the night, so the neon light on the roof is off, and the floodlights for the parking lot.”

“How did you think of this place?”

“It’s the club where the money came from last night. Those three guys who were outside the bank last night work for Manco Kapak, and the money was his profit. They were depositing it for him.”

“I could see what they were doing with it. But don’t we have all their money now?”

“No. That was just last night’s take—l ast night’s money. We want tonight’s money.” He looked at her closely. “Unless we don’t. You were the one who said you wanted to do a robbery tonight.”

“I didn’t say I wanted to rob a strip joint.”

“Fine. Let’s go home.”

“Not so fast. I’m thinking. Have you cased this place—gone inside so you know your way around in the dark?”

“I have. I know the layout fairly well.”

“You’re so pathetic. Coming out here and sitting in a dark bar with a couple hundred of your fellow losers to see one girl dance naked. Couldn’t any of you get a date?”

“In the first place, it isn’t one girl, it’s like four or five at a time. Over an evening, it’s a lot of them.”

“Oh. Only fifty to one, then. No wonder you’re an expert.”

“I was checking the place out so I could rob it.”

“Were all those tits and asses better than mine?”

“The ones I saw weren’t. But I may have missed some, because I was looking to see where the doors are and the windows aren’t, and so on. So far, you’re the best-looking woman I’ve seen.”

“I wish it were lighter in here so I could see your face.”

“I’m not lying to you. It’s true.”

“What’s your plan for this place?”

“It’s almost the time when they show up at the bank every night. We can’t go back to the bank. They’ll be expecting us. They’ll have armed guys hiding all over the neighborhood waiting. So I’m thinking we might be able to stop the bagman before he gets there—maybe force him off the road and rob him. He’s probably going to be alone tonight, because they’ll want everybody else out of sight.”

She smiled. “That’s such a good idea, baby. I love it that you’re not as stupid as I thought. Let’s do it.”

“Okay. The regular employees are gone. We can just wait until the bagman goes out to his car and heads for the bank.”

They sat quietly, now and then shifting in their seats to get a better view of the Siren parking lot. Jeff was glad that all the waitresses’ cars were gone. The idea of meeting Lila in the middle of a robbery seemed to be the biggest worry, and it was gone. After a time Carrie said, “It’s been an hour, and nobody’s come out that door. What do you suppose is going on?”

“Nothing that I can see.”

“So why isn’t it? Did they take the money to the bank already?”

“I doubt it. We were here at, like, eight minutes after two. They couldn’t have counted all the money and bagged it and filled out deposit slips in eight minutes. Could they?”

“I don’t know. You’re the bandito.”

“Exactly. I can tell you this is not normal.”

“Maybe they’re sick of getting robbed, so they’re doing things differently.”

“That’s got to be it,” he said. “You have a talent for this.”

“I do?”

“Yes. Maybe what they’re doing is having an armored car come and pick it up, the way supermarkets do. But no armored car came after closing, so the pickup must be tomorrow morning.”

“So what do we do about it?”

“I’ve got to think. I can’t see waiting and trying to shoot it out with an armored car crew.”

“Nothing to argue with there.”

He was silent for a moment. “I think I’ve got it. They’ve always deposited the money at closing time. They didn’t deposit the money tonight, and the armored car didn’t come, so it must be coming in the morning. I’m sure of that much. Meanwhile, there will be somebody in there watching the money. Does that sound right?”

“Yes. It does. It would explain why there are two cars still parked by the building.”

He craned his neck to see the cars, then nodded. “It probably takes two guys to watch money, because they’re mostly watching each other. It has to be the dullest thing there is to do.”

“Sounds true.”

“Those doors are going to be locked and probably deadbolted, so we aren’t going to get through them. The two guys have to come out and let us in.”

“Okay.” She waited.

“We have two choices, I think. One is to go to the side of the building, find the phone junction box, and cut it. That will get rid of the alarm. Then we find the main circuit-breaker panel and flip the switch to kill the power. One of them will come outside to see what’s wrong. I hold my gun on him and tape him up with duct tape. When he doesn’t come back inside or anything, the other one will come at least as far as the door. He’ll call out to his friend—’Where are you? What’s going on?’ At that moment you put your gun to his head. We tape him up too.”

“Then what?”

“If there’s a safe, we make them open it. If they can’t, we put tape over their eyes and make them carry the safe to our car. It won’t be a big safe, or they could just leave the money in it and go home.”

“What if they’re asleep? If they’re asleep, they won’t even know the power and the phone are turned off”’

“Well, that’s true, but these are guys who work for a nightclub company. They have to be used to staying up late. If they don’t come out after ten or fifteen minutes, we can knock on the door and pretend to be cops who saw their cars and want to know who’s in there at this hour.”

Carrie sat absolutely still for a few seconds, then said, “All right. I’m in. Let’s get at it. Should I park at the back of the place, behind the Dumpster?”

“Yes. That way when they look out they won’t see it.”

She drove her car up the street, turned into the parking lot, turned off her headlights, and circled the building from a distance. She saw the spot she wanted and coasted up to it, then got out.

Carrie took her big .45 pistol out of her purse, pulled back the slide to bring a round into the chamber, and put the purse back into the car under the seat. She hid the gun in the back of her pants against her spine and covered it with her sweater.

She moved to the brick wall and walked along it to the door. She stood with her back to the wall at the hinge side and nodded to Jeff.

He moved off around the building to find the phone junction box and the circuit-breaker panel.

A man’s voice, disembodied and electronic, seemed to come from the sky above her head. “I’m sorry, ma’am. But we’re closed for the night.”

“What?”

“I said we’re closed now. The bar can’t serve anybody after two.”

She located the speaker, a little square gray metal box with holes on the front in a circular pattern. But what was above it worried her much more. It was a video camera mounted under the eaves of the building. Its single shiny black lens was staring right at her.

She pushed off to move out from the wall, wavering a bit as though she had been standing with her back to the bricks to steady herself, and put on a drunk voice. “I don’t want a drink, thankyou-verymuch. I had some drinks already, and I’ve got all I want in the car. I’m not here for that.”

“Then what are you here for, miss?”

“I’m here to audition.”

“Audition for what?”

“A job. Isn’t this a strip place?” She began to dance to unheard music.

“That’s what you want—to audition for a job as a dancer?”

She shouted, both to let Jeff know that she was talking to someone, and to keep the man’s attention on her monitor rather than spotting Jeff on another one. “Not dancing, silly! I don’t want to dance. I want to strip!”

“Look, miss?”

“What?”

“The manager already went home, and the talent coordinator is only in on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from noon to eight. We don’t do auditions in the middle of the night. Please go home, sober up, and give the club a call around noon tomorrow. The manager and the talent coordinator will make an appointment for you. Okay?”

“Fuck, no! I’m not going to leave work to drive all the way over here to take my clothes off at noon. I’m not going to be in the mood then. I’m in the mood now.” She did a wriggling, suggestive dance, lifted the front of her sweater, and undulated her hips, careful not to turn her body to let the gun at the back of her waistband show.

The man in the speaker chuckled. “Please. I can’t deny you’re hot. I’m sure you can get a job here any time you want. But hiring people—that’s not my job. On nights like tonight, I sometimes wish it was. But it isn’t.”

“But you can help me get a job. I’ll show you my act, and you tell me honestly what you think, so I can fix it.”

“I can tell you without seeing the best parts of your act that you’re qualified. Isn’t she qualified?” There was some muffled speech. “My friend says you’re more than qualified.”

“I didn’t hear that.”

“He agrees you’re good to go. But as I said, this isn’t how you get the job. If our boss thought I told you different, I’d be out there looking for a job with you.”

“Can’t you help me? I’m the one being brave. I’m a shy person who works in a bank. If I do my act now for two strangers—two, right?—then I’ll be over the stage fright, and it’ll be easier to really audition.” She began to move her hips again in a silent dance.

There was a soft scraping sound as though a hand were muffling a microphone, and then the microphone cleared again. “As long as you understand that we got nothing to do with hiring. We’re just, like, night watchmen. You got it?”

“Absolutely,” she said. “It’ll really help me. All you have to do is watch my act and give me whatever pointers you can.”

She heard the sound of someone fiddling with the hardware on the inner side of the steel door. She shrieked “Yippee!” so Jeff couldn’t not hear it, then spotted his shadow near the corner of the building.

The door swung open, and there was a smiling man. He was very tall and broad-shouldered, with thick, dark hair and green eyes. He wore the pants from a black suit like the ones the men wore last night at the bank, but without the coat. His white shirt had the sleeves rolled up and the collar open. “Hello,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Penelope,” she said.

He bowed. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Penny.”

“Penelope,” she said with drunken insistence.

He turned to call to someone inside. “Jimmy, this is Penelope.”

The other man came to the door and said, “Hi.” He stepped back a few feet. “Come on in.”

She was sure now that there were only two of them. Now that she could see them both, she took a step, leaned drunkenly against the steel door to keep it wide open, and used the awkwardness of the move to cover the hitch of her shoulder to pull the pistol out of the back of her waistband. “Don’t move,” she said.

“Shit,” said the tall man. He made a quick move toward her.

She fired the gun high, so the bullet passed over his shoulder, and he stopped. She looked at the man behind him and said, “If you reach for it, I’ll kill you.”

He raised his hands and looked at her. “Penelope, why don’t you put that away?” He saw Jeff slip in the door beside her. “Oh, boy” Jeff was wearing a ski mask, and he handed one to Carrie, who put it on while he held his gun on the men.

“All right,” said Jeff. “Just shut up. We’re going to do this quick and easy. Both of you go up to face that wall, legs spread, hands out wide, and lean.”

The two men obeyed.

Jeff frisked the two men cautiously, keeping his gun on one of them every second. He found two pistols and tossed them out the open door.

“We’re here because we’re sworn peace officers,” said Carrie. “But not like any cops you’ve ever seen. If we decide to kill you, no local cop is ever going to ask us why.”

“Oh, feds,” said the big man.

“What’s your name?”

“Vassily Voinovich.”

“And how about you?”

“Jimmy Gaffney.”

“All right. You should know that if we find out either of those are false names, you’re going to jail for a long time. If you interfere with what we’re doing, same thing happens. If you make either of us think we’re in danger, you won’t make it to jail.”

“What do you want?”

“We’re doing an audit of the money coming into this business. You’re going to get tonight’s take for us. Our office is going to look for particular serial numbers, do some chemical testing. If we don’t find anything, your boss will get it back. If we do, God help him.”

“We can’t get the money for you. It’s in the safe.”

“Show us the safe,” Jeff said.

“It’s in the next room,” Voinovich said.

Carrie pushed her pistol against his temple. “He didn’t say ‘tell us.’ He said ‘show us.’ Everybody comes along.”

The room was a small, neat office, and Jeff could see this was where the two men had set up to spend the night. The security monitor where the two men had seen Carrie was mounted on the wall, and their coats were hung on the chairs. There were two hands of a gin game laid out on the desk face-down. It told Jeff that the big guy who had gone to the door probably had not known that the wily-looking redheaded Irishman would look at his cards. The safe was a small one—only about two and a half feet high, and two feet wide. There was an electronic keyboard with the numbers zero through nine on the keys.

Jeff said, “Okay. We’d like you to open the safe for us.”

The two men looked at each other in a silent inquiry that Jeff hoped was “Should we?” and not “I don’t know how, do you?”

“We can’t.”

Carrie said, “Do you mean you don’t have the combination, or you’re aware that if you don’t, we’ll kill you, and you’re willing to be killed?”

“The first one,” said the big man, Voinovich. “No combination.”

Carrie said, “That’s bad news.” She aimed her gun at his chest and kept opening and closing her fingers on the rubber handgrips of her big .45 pistol, trying to get the best hold on it to take the recoil.

“Wait. Hold it,” said Jimmy Gaffney. “We honestly don’t have the combination to the safe. If you were Manco Kapak, and you had two guys guarding your safe, would you give them the combination?”

“Looking at you, maybe not,” Carrie admitted. “So we’ll move on. First thing is that you guys are going to take the monitoring system apart. I want the recorder. Get started now.” She turned to Jeff. “If they seem to be near to trying something—even thinking about it, kill them.”

She crawled under the table where the safe was and examined it, then tugged on it, trying to rock it. “It moves a little. It can’t be bolted to anything serious. Watch them while I look.”

She went out the office door and around to the other side of the wall. She was gone a couple of minutes and came back. She had four nuts in the palm of her hand. “It’s four bolts through the wall, the nuts on them only hand-tight. There was a little cabinet in front of them.”

Gaffney said, “Kapak wanted it that way so we could get it out in a fire. Nightclubs burn down all the time.”

“If there’s anything else we need to know, you ought to tell us,” Carrie said. “It’ll go easier on you at your trial if you cooperate.”

“What do you want me to tell you?”

“Where’s the recorder for the monitoring system?”

“It’s over there in the cabinet.”

“Get it.”

Gaffney went to the cabinet and opened it, then pulled out a thin rectangular box. He unscrewed the video cables from the back of it and set the box on the desk. Carrie followed the cables along the ceiling back to the camera outside to be sure that was what the box was, then came back. “Okay.”

Jeff said, “Take your cell phones out and set them on the desk.”

The two men complied.

“Now you’ve got one more thing to do for us, to get the safe out of here and into the trunk of the car.”

The two men knelt beside the safe, but didn’t seem to be able to do more than rock it a little. Jeff tried too, to be sure they weren’t faking. “Why isn’t this thing moving?”

“I don’t know,” said Gaffney.

“Who owns the Toyota Land Cruiser out there?”

“I do,” said Voinovich. “And it’s a Sequoia.”

“Give me the keys.”

“I don’t want to.”

Jeff said, “Look. You’ve had guns pointed at you for ten minutes. Has anybody harmed or abused you in any way? No. Did we come in here and start shooting your toes off? When you said you couldn’t open the safe, did we shoot one of you and tell the other one to do it? No. We trusted you. Now it’s your turn. Give me the keys.”

“I still owe money on that car.”

“Then you’ll be glad to be the one I shoot.”

Voinovich reached into his pocket and produced the keys.

“Toss them near my feet.”

The keys landed between Jeff’s feet. He picked them up, then said, “Don’t take your eyes off either one of them.”

“All right, guys,” said Carrie. “Stand close together so I can see you both.”

The two men stood there with Carrie holding her gun on them. Then Jeff returned, uncoiling a rope as he came. “Okay, everybody out of the office and out here with me.” The others came out and stood with him near the steel door.

Jeff tied the rope around the safe and went to the door. “Everybody stand clear.”

He stepped outside, got into the Toyota Sequoia, and started the engine. The others could hear the engine accelerate. At their feet, the loose coils of rope snaked around on the floor like a whip, then went taut, vibrating like a harp string. There was a loud engine sound, angry and dangerous, now mixed with the screech of wood straining to pull free of nails, then wood popping and cracking. Carrie and the two men looked at the wall, which was beginning to cant toward them, dragged out of position by Voinovich’s big vehicle.

Carrie held her gun in both hands, using her left arm to steady it. She shifted her aim now and then from Voinovich, who was looking frantic about the fate of his Sequoia, to Jimmy Gaffney, whom she didn’t trust because his eyes were filled with guile. She didn’t like being in the room with them, and she didn’t like the fact that the office wall was moving, bottom first, toward the door.

There was a higher squeal of nails, a last bang of wood breaking, a shredding noise, and the wall fell inward into the office.

The safe skittered across the concrete floor to the doorway, hit the slightly raised weather-strip, tipped, and bounced end over end into the parking lot.

Jeff returned. “Okay, guys. Here’s the last bit of work we’ll need from you. Come out here and lift the safe into the back of this thing so we can be on our way.”

Voinovich said, “Don’t take my SUV”

Jeff said, “What choice do I have? Nobody else has a car that can even hold it.”

Voinovich turned to Gaffney. “Say something.”

“Don’t take his car. It’ll break his heart.”

Jeff said, “I’ll leave it in perfect shape on the street somewhere and call the club to tell you where it is.”

They walked out to the place where the safe lay, a few feet behind the SUV. Voinovich said to Gaffney, “If we had the combination, this wouldn’t have happened.”

“No shit,” Gaffney said. “I would have taken the money myself and be halfway to Rio.”

“You wouldn’t fit in there. Everybody is brown. You’d look like a freak. Help me lift this. And get it onto the carpet so we don’t scratch my bumper.” They squatted, lifted, and strained. “Use your legs, not your back.”

They lifted the safe onto the bed at the back of the SUV. Then they both sat on the bumper, breathing heavily and stretching their strained arm muscles. Gaffney looked at Jeff. “Jesus Christ. Getting robbed by you two is a lot of work.”

Carrie walked up with the two pistols that belonged to Gaffney and Voinovich, handed one to Jeff, and kept the other.

“Okay, guys,” Jeff said. “We’ve got to finish up and get out of here. Let’s head inside.”

“You’re not going to kill us, are you?”

“Not if you do as we say,” said Carrie.

They made their way past the fallen wall into the office. Jeff said, “Sit down on those chairs.” The two men did, and he wrapped duct tape around their wrists to bind their hands behind them, then taped their ankles together, then ran tape around and around them to keep them on the seats. He went to the desk, removed the batteries from their cell phones, then took the recorder from the security system.

“Well, good night, guys.”

They nodded sullenly. As Carrie was leaving, Gaffney said, “Would you really have killed us?”

“I’m still thinking about it.”

“Oh.”

Jeff and Carrie went outside, locked the steel door behind them, and stopped to look at each other for a moment. “What do you think?”

“I’m glad they don’t let strip clubs operate near residential neighborhoods. If they did, you couldn’t feel good about firing a gun. But here you could set off bombs.” She smiled up at him. “Can I shoot them?”

“What? Why?”

“Because I never have, and this is such a great opportunity. I really, really want to.”

“Get your car. I’ll follow you home.”

“How about just one, then?”

“We’ve got to go. The police come by these places regularly, just to check the doors.”

He followed her back onto the freeway, onto the exit ramp at Vineland, and up the hill to her house. When they arrived, she opened the garage door and he drove in. She threw an old folded tarp on the floor and covered it with two sheets of plywood. They slid the safe out onto the plywood so it wouldn’t chip the concrete garage floor.

She was beaming. “You know, tonight was even better than last night. Robbing a strip club. Holding hostages. Grand Theft Auto. And tomorrow, safecracking. I think I’m falling in love.”