Canine Christmas (28 page)

Except that while quite a few pickups had been stopped, none had contained three men, their handguns, or thirty-six thousand in cash.

“Besides,” said Joe Bob, “Old Feller would of tore them to pieces.”

Pray tried to refocus. “What?”

Joe Bob seemed hurt, leaning down to scratch his dog between the ears. “Old Feller got wind of three strangers barreling in here, Chief, he would of tore them to pieces.”

“Right.” Pray tried to keep the sarcasm out of his voice, especially given that he hadn't seen the hound burn twelve calories total in the five months he'd been driving past the Brewster house to the restaurant where he took most of his meals.

“Well, if you do see or hear anything, call the office.”

“You gonna go around to everybody else you already talked to once?”

“Can't think of anything else to do,” replied Chief Lon Pray, putting the cruiser in gear and pulling away.

“Like I told you before, Chief,” said Mary Boles from behind the bank desk—a nice holly wreath centered on its front—“it had to be somebody who knew we had extra cash on hand to cover the mill's Christmas bonuses.”

Watching Boles, a plump black woman in her forties, Pray fidgeted in the customer chair, finding it uncomfortably like the client chair in his divorce lawyer's office back in Boston. “Isn't that pretty widely known, though?”

“In town, yes. Even in the county. But robbers from any distance away? I don't see how they could know that today was one of maybe three times a year there'd be enough cash in the vault to be worth stealing.”

From Pray's experience, armed bank robbers were the most dangerous felons around exactly because they didn't know very much or plan very well. But, he had to admit, so far these had planned well enough to fool him.

“Mary, can we go over what happened in here this morning?”

“Again?”

“Please?”

“Okay.” The manager seemed to compose herself for reciting a particularly distasteful poem. “I'd just opened the front door from the inside, and Eugene was just unlocking his drawer at the teller's cage, when the three men burst in.”

“And Josh?”

Boles blushed at the bank guard's name. “In the bathroom, like I told you before.”

“Then what?”

“These three men came busting through, like they knew the precise moment I'd be opening up.”

That didn't seem to Pray like much of a clue, but he nodded to keep Boles talking.

“The one man, he stuck a gun in my face and walked me backward to the vault. The second one rushed past us, and I heard him tell Eugene not to press any button, or he'd die with his finger on it.”

“What about the third man?”

“He ordered me to open the vault, which of course was where we kept the money after the armored car dropped it off yesterday.”

“And you did.”

“Open it? Damned right, with that spooky first man pressing his gun to my cheek.” Boles went to rub the spot.

“Mary, the man who stayed on you, he never spoke?”

“No.”

Pray always felt uncomfortable asking, much less repeating, the next question, but it was necessary. “And you don't know the race of that man?”

She shook her head. “Like I said before, they all wore masks and gloves, long-sleeved shirts, and pants. But from the voices of the two who spoke, I'd say they were white, so I'm guessing two grains of salt didn't ask a peppercorn to join them.”

Pray grinned, getting the impression Boles was trying to make him feel at ease for having to ask the question at all. People rarely behaved so considerately up north when probed by touchy questions.

“Anything else, Chief?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Eugene.”

“I had to send him home,” said Mary Boles. “Poor boy was shaking like a leaf.”

“How about Josh, then?”

“Mary has her habit of opening on time,” said Josh Stukes. “I have mine of relieving myself just then.”

Pray blinked at the doughy, fiftyish man with sandy hair. “You couldn't wait till the first few customers came through?”

“Chief, you never worked in a bank around Christmas, let me tell you. There ain't never a time nobody's coming through the doors, so one time's as good—or as bad—as another.”

“Give me the sequence again, then, as you remember it.”

“All right.” Stukes pointed toward the rear of the bank lobby. “I was just finishing, and the flushing kept me from hearing anything. When I opened the door, I got the muzzle of a Ruger forty-four stuck in my face.”

“And you knew it was a Ruger …”

“… account of that's what I have next to my bed, for home protection.” Stukes pointed again. “This feller with the cannon walked me over to where they already had Eugene and Mary, kneeling on the floor, noses against the wall, and I joined them.”

“And that was it?”

“Mary already had the vault opened by the time I got out there, and all I heard was the one feller telling us all to be quiet and nobody had to get theirselves shot. So I was quiet as a little mouse.” Stukes suddenly grinned, but not pleasantly. “Speaking of mice, you gonna talk to Eugene again?”

Very evenly, Pray said, “Yes.”

“Hope for your sake he changed his undies first.”

“Chief, I really don't know what else I can tell you about that frightful experience this morning.”

Lon Pray watched Eugene Cornwell cradle a small dog in his arms. The dog was a little mop of brushed hair and cute as a bug, the living room decorated tastefully even without the handsome tree and draped bunting of pine branches.

“Eugene, I won't know what'll help me either till I hear you tell it again.”

Cornwell closed his eyes, then opened them. “Very well. I was behind my cage, just opening my cash drawer for the morning and arranging the currency and coins, as is my habit. Suddenly, I heard a stampede sound from the front door. I looked up to see these horribly dressed men barging past Mary, one stomping up to me and pointing a monstrous gun right here.” Cornwell's index finger reluctantly left the dog and tapped the owner's forehead over his nose. “They say your whole life is supposed to flash by in front of you? Well, I swear my only thought was,‘Who would take care of Florinda?’ ” Cornwell's finger returned to the dog, and his forehead dipped to touch the same spot on the dog, who licked it appreciatively.

Pray waited a moment. Then, “You did hear the men speak?”

“At least one of—no, two of them. But I was too terrified to recall anything they actually said.”

After striking out again on race, age, and idiosyncrasies, Lon Pray concluded with, “Anything else you remember?”

“Yes,” said Eugene Cornwell, “I remember that the reason I relocated here after college in Richmond was to be able to feel safe in a small town.”

“That was still pretty brave of you, Luis.”

Pray noticed that his words made the thirteen-year-old in the Atlanta Braves jersey stand a little taller, the wiry dog at his side whuffing.

“Without Mrs. Boles and her bank, we do not have our life here.”

Pray knew that the Cortez family had moved in over the store they were running after Luis's parents had decided the migrant life left a lot to be desired. But he also knew how impossible becoming shopkeepers would have been if their loan request had been turned down.

“Luis, can you tell me again what you saw?”

“Sure thing. I am outside our store, washing down the windows from the dust that seems to come during the night from nowhere. I hear the sound of people running, so I turn to see three men crossing the street from the bank, guns in their hands but not shooting at anybody. I drop my window brush into the pail, and I wait until they cannot see me before I run after them.”

“You get any kind of look at their faces?”

“Like I tell you before, they have masks over them, and gloves on the hands, too. But the way they run, I think they must be white.”

“Why?”

Luis Cortez scuffed at the dust with the toe of his sneaker, causing the dog to stick his nose down there and paw the ground himself. “Because they do not run so very well.”

Pray tried not to grin this time. “Go on.”

“I am coming after them down the path through the woods. I can hear them in front of me, making noise with their feet and hitting the branches with their arms, maybe, but not talking or nothing. Then I hear the sound of a car engine starting, only when I get to the edge of the fire road, I can see that it is a pickup. By this time, though, the truck is too far away to see anything but that it is dark in color.”

Which was what Pray had put out over the radio to his officers and the sheriff's deputies. Too bad half the vehicles in the county were pickup trucks, and half of those were blue, black, or brown.

“Nothing else, Luis?”

The boy and his dog pawed at the ground in unison. “Just that when I tell my mother what I did, she slap me hard enough to loosen a tooth.”

Chief Lon Pray tried to tell himself that, as a parent so close to Christmas, he wouldn't have done the same thing. Tried and failed.

“Anything?” said Pray.

Edna Dane, one of two uniforms on the roadblock, reached into her cruiser, a short pony-tail bobbing against her neck under the Stetson. Coming out with a clipboard, she looked down at it. “We've had fifty … five vehicles so far. Twenty passenger cars, three semis, two buses, five panel trucks. The balance were pickups, seven of them dark in color. We called them all in to Dispatch. None with more than two men in it, and no wants or warrants on any of the trucks or occupants.”

Pray squinted past the other uniform, standing hipcocked with the butt of a riot pump gun resting on his thigh. The pavement was otherwise empty in the noonday sun, people either working or doing holiday shopping at the mall ten miles away.

Dane said, “I'm guessing you haven't had any better luck at the other roadblocks or you wouldn't be here with me.”

Pray turned to her. “You grew up in town, right?”

“Born and bred, except for four years of Criminal Justice over to the university.”

“Answer me this, then. Three men hit our bank at opening, and then run for it instead of driving away. But they get into a pickup on a fire road barely ten feet wide that would leave them no way out if just one of our cars—or hell, a county surveyor even—happened to be on the road at the same time. Now, why would a gang risk that?”

Edna Dane smiled, and Lon Pray thought he could see the teenager she'd have been a few years back shining through. “I guess if I knew that, Chief, you'd have stopped fifty-five vehicles this morning, and I'd be worried sick over what you didn't find.”

Chief Lon Pray stopped at his own house—a small ranch he rented on the edge of town—to let the dog out, as he did each day around lunchtime. Everybody else in the area just seemed to let their pets roam free during the day, and probably, Pray thought, in time he would, too. But back in Boston, before making detective, he'd tried unsuccessfully to comfort one too many kids kneeling in streets, crying uncontrollably while they in turn tried to will their pets back to life after being hit by passing cars.

And Lon Pray didn't think he could tolerate that happening to Grizzly at this time in his life. In Pray's own life, that is.

After his divorce, most of the marital property—house, car, even their TVs—went to the ex or her lawyer. Funny, Lon realized as he unlocked his back door. You thought of her as Sally in Boston but down here as
the ex
. I wonder if other guys—

Which is when Pray was knocked nearly flat.

“Grizzly!”

The combination German shepherd/Irish wolfhound had already bounded by him, loping around the yard like a racehorse around its paddock. Watching him, Pray couldn't stay mad. Grizzly had been the first creature in his life after the divorce, and the chief knew that, in a very basic way, the dog kept him sane.

By the time Grizzly got the pent-up energy burned off, Pray already had washed out his water bowl and filled it with fresh from the tap. Placing the bowl down in the yard, Pray watched Grizzly pad over in that slightly prancing way he had from the Irish side of his family. Lon decided to let the dog run free for another ten minutes, then grab a sandwich-to-go at the restaurant before wracking his brain again on why the robbers had planned their escape as they had.

And why the roadblocks hadn't turned them up.

But meanwhile, he'd take a page from Joe Bob Brew-ster's book and just sit on his porch, giving himself an early Christmas present by watching Grizzly enjoy the habit of midday exercise.

Driving by the Brewster place, Lon Pray gave a thought to stopping and asking Joe Bob a third time if he'd spotted anything, but the man was holding up a newspaper instead of the usual book, just the carroty hair visible above the top of the paper. Pray thought Joe Bob must be deep in thought, too, because he wasn't rocking, and Old Feller wasn't in his customary position but rather a full yard away from the chair.

It was five minutes later that Pray, ordering his trademark ham and cheese on wheat with mayo, suddenly registered what he'd seen. Then he put it together with what he'd heard, both as answers to his questions and as statements that had seemingly been offered gratuitously.

And, sprinting to his cruiser, Chief Lon Pray thought he'd figured it out.

Twenty minutes later, the man in the rocker was still holding the newspaper, and Old Feller was still lying a good three feet away.

Which was fine by Lon Pray, now crouched behind a tree rather than sitting behind a wheel.

Pray waited for three minutes more, until he heard the shrill whistle from the back of the house. Then he leveled his Glock 17 and yelled over the sound of breaking glass. “Let that paper fall from your hands without lowering them!”

Old Feller looked first toward Pray, then to the rocker. The paper trembled, but didn't fall from the fingers holding it.

“Be smart!” yelled Pray a little louder. “Nobody's been shot yet. Don't make yourself the first.”

From the back of the house, Officer Edna Dane's voice rang out with, “Clear in the house. I say again, the house is clear.”

Pray yelled a third, final time, “Last chance to see Christmas.”