A Pure Double Cross (20 page)

I smiled and nodded and checked their leather bindings. Henry knew how to tie a knot.

We made our way down the corridor under the hospital lights. Sweat trickled down my ribcage.

The squadron of officers Seifert had deployed to the tunnels had to know they'd been had. Would they remain at their posts and await further orders like good little soldiers? Or would they come storming down the stairs or deploy to Rockwell to open fire as we pulled out of the delivery gate? Providing we could get the delivery gate open and the loogans hadn't already been bushwhacked by Jimmy and Ambrose was able to bluff his way past the Secret Service agent in the tollbooth, find reverse and back the Packard up to the dock.

Other than that we were all silk.

We reached the end of the corridor. I'm a blue collar boy, I know loading docks. They're loud sprawling places that stink of diesel smoke and sweat. But this loading dock was small and very, very clean. A narrow drive angled off toward the tollbooth and the gate on Rockwell, neither of which we could see from the dock.

The Schooler gave me a quick over-the-shoulder. I had the head muckety-muck at gunpoint. It was my turn.

“Open the gate Commander,” I said. “Open the gate and we'll go away and never darken your door again.”

“I can't,” said Seifert.

I positioned his gun at the base of his spine. “Can't? Or won't?”

“I can't,” said Seifert. “It's a two switch system. A release button down here, and one upstairs at the command center. Both have to be activated.”

The Schooler's grimace said that this was the first he'd heard of a two-switch system.

“Prove it to me,” I said, grabbing Seifert's collar and marching him over to the big square orange wall button to the left of the dock.

He pushed it. Nothing happened. I pushed it and held it down. Nothing happened twice. “Get on the horn to the command center and tell ‘em to throw the switch!” I said.

Seifert snorted.

“What's so funny?”

“Lieutenant Commander Rolf Petersen is next in line for my job. This is the best night of his life.”

Son of a bitch. This was what the Gorgons meant by
see you soon.
I searched the four walls, six walls, however many there were in this medieval castle disguised as a bank. I saw a fire hose in a glass case. Ah ha.

There was an override, had to be. An override in case of fire. Time to get brilliant Schroeder. Whatever it was wouldn't be hidden or hard to find in a hurry. I searched the ceiling for emergency lights that would kick on in a power outage, saw one above the big orange wall button.

I marched Seifert over to it and explained the situation. “There's an override code for this button. Use it now or we all get dead.”

The Commander declined my invitation. I bent down and whispered in his ear.

“I understand that you're eager to die a hero Commander, but I'm thinking young Francis might like to wait a while.”

Seifert cursed, and pressed the big square button once, twice, and held it down. The third time was the charm. I heard the distant ribbed steel gate roll open. T'was a sweet and beauteous sound.

I looked at my watch and looked away. I didn't need to know the precise time to know we were behind schedule. The Secret Service agent in the tollbooth knew it too. He wouldn't raise that steel arm if he thought the Federal Reserve cops had time to sniff out the double cross and rush out to Rockwell, blocking his escape route. Could be they were already there. The silence dragged on. The Schooler and I exchanged a quick anxious glance.

Then I heard it, the thrum of an engine. It was low and throaty, idling. A vehicle waiting for permission to enter. Which meant the Fed cops hadn't deployed to Rockwell. Not yet. The question was which vehicle with what passengers?

I squinted my eyes to hear. Muffled voices echoed down the tunnel. No shouts, no gunfire. Just indecipherable conversation followed by a car door slam.

I wrote a term paper on Einstein my senior year in high school. What a headache. What he said, best I could tell, was that if you run real fast time slows down. I wasn't running real fast at the moment but it sure felt that way. It couldn't have been more than five seconds before that vehicle made its appearance, it couldn't have been less than five years.

A wine red Packard backed up to the loading dock.

Sean and Patrick scrambled out and jumped on the running boards, gun hands deep in their overcoat pockets, their eyes darting above the checkered kerchiefs that covered their mugs.

Ambrose moved more deliberately, climbing out in stages, gat in hand, walking to the boot of the Packard with a rolling gait. He wore a black silk scarf pulled down over his nose,
eyeholes cut out, tied behind his neck like a buccaneer. Kid was a born crook.

Ambrose opened the trunk.

I nodded to Sean and Patrick. “Unload it!”

They got to work. 900,000 dollars of newly-minted stacked-and-bound Federal Reserve notes, legal tender for all debts public and private, were quickly stowed.

I said, “On the floor, face down,” to Francis, “In the back seat,” to Sean and Patrick and “You're coming with us” to Seifert.

Sean and Patrick piled into the back seat like kids off to the Bijou, Francis flattened himself on the loading dock, the unseen Federal Reserve cops stayed that way. Not even Commander Seifert squawked, which made me nervous.

The old women in Youngstown had a saying.
Stets hält man den ältesten Wolf an der kürzesten Kette.
‘You keep the shortest chain on the oldest wolf.' Seifert would bear watching.

“You drive,” I said to Ambrose. He jumped behind the wheel.

I took a look down the corridor. The Gorgons were still struggling against their lanyards.

“Enjoy the rest of your evening gentlemen!” I called as I marched their commanding officer down the narrow step stairs and into a back seat crammed with masked and giddy loogans.

The Schooler was the last one to join our happy group, Beretta out, backing up, sliding in to the front seat, head and gun out the window as Ambrose wheeled the Packard down the curved narrow drive at a high rate of speed. I braced myself for a collision with the steel security arm and gunfire from the redeployed fed cops on Rockwell ahead.

The steel arm was vertical, the tollbooth empty. No gunfire commenced.

The Packard breached the castle walls and hooked a sharp squealing left onto Rockwell. No sign of Jimmy and the seven twerps.
That I halfway expected. There was another place they could go.

What I hadn't pictured was a street and sidewalk free of Federal Reserve police. They were, apparently, still at their posts. Good little soldiers, their weapons trained on ghostly phantoms in the far distance.

The Schooler and I exchanged another quick and anxious glance. Had we had really pulled this off?

Then we heard the sirens.

“Where'm I goin'?” said Ambrose from the front seat. Yelled actually, the sirens were that loud.

The plan was to drive three short blocks to the alley off E. 2
^nd
and roll up the ramp into the back of the waiting freight truck. But I had other ideas. The Schooler hadn't revealed our final destination, where that truck was headed. If Jimmy wanted in on the party, and he did, then the rendezvous in the alley was his last best shot.

The Schooler told Ambrose to take a right on E. 2
^nd
. Ambrose slowed. We passed a screaming squadrol headed the other way, the cops so intent they never glimmed us.

“Don't turn,” I said to Ambrose. “Keep west on Rockwell, and don't spare the horses.”

Ambrose punched it good, ignoring The Schooler's angry
Hey,
earning the Mooney Brothers a hefty bonus should we ever get that far.

Another screaming squadrol brodied across the intersection of E. 2
^nd
and Rockwell, behind us, headed east. God bless the bumbling Cleveland PD.

The Schooler and I had to talk, which meant the Commander had to go. He wasn't much use as a hostage now that the local goms were hunting us. And I didn't trust him not to try something stupid. We stopped at the traffic light on West 3
^rd
. I jacked open the door.

Commander Seifert, who was perched on my lap like Charlie McCarthy, lunged for my gun, his gun, with both hands. His left hand grabbed the barrel, pushing it down. His right thumbnail bit into the underside of my wrist as his fingers tried to peel mine off the gun butt.

It was well executed. It might even have worked were it not for my excitable seatmates. Sean and Patrick flew, there's no other word for it,
flew
across the back seat and expelled Commander Seifert from the vehicle and into the middle of Rockwell Avenue.

He staggered, blinking, to his feet. I felt bad for him one last time.

We roared off at the green. When I looked over The Schooler was measuring me for a coffin.

“Jimmy and his itchy young men are hiding in that alley, have to be,” I shouted. “Wherever we're going we need to get there without the truck.”

The sirens swelled to an operatic chorus, Ambrose sped west. Rockwell became Frankfort. We passed Lulu's Place, clusters of people on the sidewalk asking what's all this, and entered the Warehouse District. That was the plan maybe. Wheel into the abandoned plant that Jimmy had hauled me to when I first met The Schooler. Lie low, wait for the heat to cool.

“It's close, right?” The Cuyahoga River was now just three blocks away. And Frankfort didn't cross it.

“It's not a place you would expect,” said The Schooler, turning away from me, surveying the chaotic street calmly.

“Where then?”

“Whiskey Island,” said The Schooler to no one in particular. “We go tonight.”

I didn't have time to ask go where and on what because Frankfort came to a screeching halt and us with it. The Schooler told Ambrose to turn left on West 9
^th
, then said “Hold up!”

A big dark sedan with a red light on the dash took the corner on two wheels, headed east. The car had the seal of the City of Cleveland on the door and two guys in suits in the front seat.

Christ, they had everybody out. The driver raked us with a look and said something to his passenger.

“Go, go, go, go,” I said.

Ambrose launched the Packard south on West 9
^th
, sideswiping a southbound taxicab in a shower of sparks. The dark sedan hooked a U and gave chase. Ambrose leaned on the horn and straddled the centerline. Oncoming cars ducked for cover.

And there we all were. Me, The Schooler and the Mooney brothers, tearing into the teeth of traffic, a ragtag band of bank robbing bandits pursued by a couple of Cleveland building inspectors. It was almost funny.

And a positive knee-slapper when Ambrose, at Henry's instruction, raced ahead of a lumbering flatbed and Sean and Patrick leaned out the window to shoot out its tires and Ambrose used the shuddering, sideways skidding flatbed to cover his high speed, hair raising, horn honking expedition across the six-way intersection in front of the Detroit-Superior Bridge that climaxed in a hairpin right turn down dark narrow twisty Columbus Road.

No big dark sedan followed. My heart resumed beating. Sean and Patrick whooped and hollered. Ambrose told them to shut the feck up. The Packard wound its way down into the netherworld beneath the span, passing snow-capped mounds of anthracite and square brick buildings so soot-blackened they existed only in silhouette.

“Take a right on Canal and follow it around to Center,” said The Schooler.

“Where's Canal?” said Ambrose.

“Here.”

Ambrose turned right and followed it around. The bleating screaming squadrols wouldn't find us down here, I thought. We were home free.

But then we Midwesterners are optimistic to a fault.

A distant burn-off pipe cast a faint hellish glow on the Flats as we approached a narrow, red steel pivot bridge. A bridge used by ore trucks headed east to the steel mills, a bridge used by I-beam and ingot haulers headed west to the docks. It was pivoted in the right direction, across the river. It held no traffic.

Once we crossed the bridge it was a straight shot down Center Street to Whiskey Island. We would pass just below Mrs. Brennan's rooming house, repository of my one priceless possession, a creased and spattered photo of the All American girl next door.

“Stop here,” said The Schooler at an unmarked cross street that fronted the pivot bridge. He studied the span intently, I couldn't say why. There was no roadblock in sight, save for the standard crossing gate at the far end. And tempus she did fugit.

I looked behind. Headlights, a few blocks backs, closing fast. I looked ahead. Nothing but asphalt.

“Go for God's sake.”

Ambrose tromped it. The Packard jumped up off its back axle and rocketed onto the narrow span, spewing a vapor trail of gravel, ice and iron ore dust. The Schooler cursed and ducked his head under the dashboard.

The bridge was clear, likewise Center Street on the far side. What had the Schooler seen that had him cowering on the floorboard?

Maybe it was what he hadn't seen. There were only a handful of bridges across the Cuyahoga, a handful of choke points. They had everybody out by now. Off duty jailers, bailiffs, high-ranking desk jockeys and every Treasury, Secret Service and FBI agent in town. The Schooler had his head
under the glove compartment because he hadn't seen a roadblock.

I told Ambrose to slow down. I hung my head out the window and squinted against the wind, saw a shack-sized pilothouse on the far side of the bridge. I wiped grit from my eyes and looked again. The guard gate was down.

I looked behind. The following headlights were gone, possibly laying in wait back at the bridgehead. We weren't going to back up and find out. We had to cross a bridge at some point.