Curtis (16 page)

He nodded as she went back to drawing.

“I figured that Vaughn was gonna kill me
anyway. Him or his daddy. I was supposed to wait until they showed then I was
to get the money out the next week and bring it to the meeting place. But they
never made it. They was picked up the same day. I hid it in a different spot than
they told me to. I was gonna have running money if I ever got away.”

“But you never went back for it either. Why
not?” Daniel watched her pause in her drawing and then finished it up.

It was very crude and it took him a few
minutes to figure out she was drawing the inside of the building. It was the
second floor and she even drew in a few of the larger printers that were still
housed in there. When she finished she handed it to him.

“I don’t understand this.” He did, but
wanted her to explain. “This looks like any building in the downtown area. You’ll
have to be more specific.”

She took it back and put the address at
the bottom of the picture then put a large X near the wall where someone, her
son, he supposed, had knocked it down. He looked at her then and was surprised
by the tears in her eyes.

“I never loved any of them. Especially
not my husband. But I was forced to marry him on account of who I was. My
family wasn’t big in the crime circuit yet, but Vaughn, my husband, was. And me
being a widow was something he liked. Made him think that I would be grateful
for him. I wasn’t. I didn’t want that shit. But I mostly didn’t want them to
have it either. And after a time…” She shrugged. “After a time, I was too used
up to care much for anyone to get it.” She pulled a necklace from under her
shirt and revealed a small locket. “My daughter was all I had in the world. And
he…I ain’t never seen my grandkids on account of she being afraid they’ll say
something to someone. You think that’s fair?”

“No.” Daniel almost felt sorry for the
woman. She’d been as fucked as any of them had been in her situation. He pulled
out the picture he’d gotten when he’d had the daughter investigated. It was a
picture of the three little kids in the yard along with a dog.

She started crying almost immediately
and held it to her heart. It took him a few seconds to realize that she’d never
even seen a picture of the children. When she took off the necklace, he thought
she was going to put the pictures in it and couldn’t see how that would work
with them being so big. But she opened it up and took out a small folded piece
of paper and handed it to him.

“This will get you the rest of the
information you need, including the primer that makes it so’s you can read the
code. The safe is in the big house, the one that Vaughn and I lived in until he
went to prison. I’m sure that even that son of his didn’t know this one. After
his dad was put away I sent away for the instructions on how to change the
combination. Never did tell them that I knew it. I didn’t trust them Feds and
for good reason.” She looked at the picture again and put it in her shirt. “You
find them people and make ‘em pay. I trust you now to do the right thing.”

She got up and lay down on the bed. She
didn’t speak again as he and Jesse moved to the door, taking the drawing with
them. They were nearly out when she spoke again.

“I never did drugs until Vaughn tied me
down and shot them in me. I was a good girl and once he got me hooked up on
them…well, I never wanted to come back down.” She sat up slightly. “You tell
that boy that I hope he pays for every crime he committed. Every last one of
them.”

Curtis looked at his brother in the hall
then back at the woman. “I plan on it. He fucked with the wrong family when he
messed with mine.”

“Good,” she said softly as she lay back
down. “Good riddance to them all too. Especially to that old bastard Vaughn.”

Chapter 13

Kylie looked out the window from the
second floor of the building. A woman was directing things down there like she
knew just what she was doing. And not one man seemed to mind the fact that she
was doing the ordering either. She looked up as the man she’d been introduced
to late last night stood beside her.

“My wife. Willow can run a crew into the
ground and they’d still love her.” They both watched as a fence was put up
around the entire parking lot as well as the building in a matter of minutes. “She’ll
have this place in lock down in an hour tops.”

Last night it had been decided that a
construction crew would come on site today and start the renovation. Most of
the “crew” consisted of the Hunter family, but there were a few workers on site
as well. One of them was the man standing in front of her. Jared Stone owned
Stone Construction. She wondered what else the man did besides love his wife. Willow
came into the building still shouting orders to a man named Conley and they
both came up the stairs as if they were nothing but a ramp. She grinned at her.

“Don’t you just love the smell of
sawdust in the morning?” Willow Stone said with a smile.

Kylie nodded, not sure what the hell
that meant.

“I love my job.” she continued as she
moved to another room, still telling people what needed to be done.

Mrs. Hunter was dressed in jeans and a
large flannel shirt and had on the most ridiculous bandanna she’d ever seen. She
was walking around the site in two hundred dollar boots. She’d told Kasey,
Royce’s wife, that there was no need to not be stylish. They had laughed for
ten minutes.

“Well, my dear, are you ready?” Curtis
stood just behind her as he asked.

She looked up at Curtis and nodded then
shook her head.

“You don’t want to know what you’ve been
hiding away for nearly three decades?”

“Not really. But I know that’s what we’re
here for.” She glanced over at the man who was simply standing against the
wall. “Who is he?”

Curtis looked over at him and then back
at her. “He says he’s with the Feds. William Trust, as in trust me. His words,
not mine. But we can’t dig this crap out without having a witness and he came
along. That man over there.” He pointed to a man standing next to Daniel. “That
man is a friend of Daniel’s. His name is Charles Mann. I think they went to
school together. He’s the main reason we’ve been able to get this crap going so
quickly.”

Willow walked to the drawing on the
floor and looked around the room. Kylie liked the brass young woman who seemed
to be everywhere at once and hoped to get to talk to her soon about an article
she was thinking about. Women in jobs that men primarily do. She had a feeling
that Wills, as she was called, wouldn’t like the title so she was going to work
on that before she called her.

“Okay. As far as I can figure, this is
where she said it is. If not then we’ll be awhile longer.” Wills walked around
the thick wall of bricks and then faced it again. “Why is this even here? The
specs for this floor say that this wall should be over there about fifteen
feet. Even my mutts can see that this isn’t a load bearer.”

Kylie had heard about Wills’ dogs. Two
large dogs named Come Here and Damn It, respectively. She said that her nephew
had one of their offspring, but she wouldn’t tell her what he’d named it. She
said that seeing was believing.

The hammer that Conley was holding
looked big enough to take down the building, much less a wall. He and Jared
stood side-by-side with twin hammers and took several deep breaths. When Jared
swung his first at the wall, all it did was make dust fly all over the room.
Conley’s didn’t do much more than that. But the third and fourth swings brought
some of the bricks down, and by the time they were hitting nearly a dozen each
there was a large hole in the wall. The Fed guy stepped closer as the wall
started to crumble.

“You do know that whatever is behind
here is going to have to be taken into custody, right?”

She nodded and looked at Daniel. He
winked at her.

“There will need to be a listing of what
is found as well, matched against the inventory that is claimed to be of taken
that day.”

“Yes. And if nothing matches then all of
that belongs to Kylie. I know what we’re doing here. She and her future husband
own the building. They’re cooperating fully with this.” Daniel glanced over at
her before continuing. “You might want to back the fuck up, William. No one
here is going to run off with the family jewels.” He flushed, but didn’t
apologize. Daniel moved her back when the wall took another hit. “He’s just
pissy because he was on the case all those years ago and talked the Feds into
believing that the money wasn’t here. I guess it pays to do some research
before jumping to conclusions.”

“Do you really think there’s going to be
anything in there?”

Daniel didn’t get to answer because
Curtis had hit the wall with his turn and a big portion of it fell away. The
shouts made her think of a sports arena. She looked over the heads and
shoulders to see that there were bags, gray with dirt, lying in the debris.

She knew bank bags when she saw them.
These were old and dirty, but bank bags nonetheless. They waited while William read
off the numbers to one of the men that had come with him. So far, it was a
match for each one.

After twenty minutes it was confirmed
that the bags were indeed from the First National Bank of Ohio. Now all they
needed to do was figure out what was in them. The key that was supposed to open
them wasn’t working as well as she’d hoped. She wanted to knock the man out of
the way and try it herself when, suddenly, the lock popped loudly in the room. William
opened the bag and took a deep breath as he reached inside.

The first thing he pulled out was stacks
of cash. It looked to her like it was fifties, but she wasn’t sure. She knew
that there had been a great deal of money stolen that day and now it seemed
that it had been found. She leaned heavily against the press while he took out
more and more money.

“It seems unreal, doesn’t it?” Curtis
helped her by picking her up and sitting her on the press as he continued to
talk softly to her. “I knew it was going to be really here, but now that I see
it, it’s sort of surreal.”

“All that money belongs to those people
they robbed.”

Curtis shook his head.

“They don’t get it back?”

“The insurance company that the bank
held paid everyone back. The people who had jewelry and polices in the safety
deposit boxes filed a claim on what they had in the boxes, and it too was paid
to them. This stuff, mostly the money, will go to the insurance company if they’re
still in business. Daniel is looking into that now.”

“And if they’re not? What happens then?”
She didn’t think she was going to like his answer when he grinned at her. “Please
tell me that we don’t get it? What are we supposed to do with all this? People
lost their lives for that. I don’t think I want anything to do with it.”

“I have an idea how we can use the money.
If we get to claim it, we’ll use it to set up your project. The money will go a
long way to making your dream come true.” He moved to stand in front of her and
blocked her view of what was going on. “You have no idea how much I want to
take you right here.”

She was shocked when she looked up. His
entire body seemed to be hard and ready. She leaned her head against his chest
and heard his heart pounding. Christ, would she ever be able to get enough of
this man? She doubted it. And he’d been right in front of her her entire life. She
wondered when she’d gone from finding him to be the most irritating boy on the
planet to the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. She found she
really wanted to spend her days making him very happy. Starting today.

“You’re insane, you know that, right?”
She almost didn’t recognize her own voice. It had turned rough and low. “There
are any number of people in this room who can hear you.”

He laughed. “But you’re the only one I
care about.”

His kiss was devastating. His body
pressed against hers and she melted against him. When he pulled back she was
breathing hard and suddenly didn’t care about the goings on around them. When
he took a step back she whimpered.

“We have all the information we need. We’ll
lock this up and take it—” William was cut off by a man standing next to him.
The man that Curtis said was a friend of the family.

“This money is going into a vault until
such a time as we can determine who it belongs too. You’ll get a receipt for
it.”

Kylie looked at Curtis when he stepped
in front of her. Something was going on here.

“You might want to hand that officer
your weapon.”

She started to jump down, but Curtis
held her back. He was covering her and she was suddenly grateful when the man
who’d been counting the money had leapt up. His gun was the last thing she saw
before she was thrown to the floor.

Shots were fired. Four if she had to
guess. And when she was able to move the heavy body on top of her, she looked
around the room. Willow, like her, had been thrown to the floor and her husband
was lying on top of her. Curtis helped her up, but didn’t let her go near what
looked to her like a body. Someone had killed the Fed.