The Russian Heist by Robert White

Author:Robert White [White, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Mal Press
Published: 2022-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 26

Seventeen Days after the Heist: Kamal al-Sadiki-X She knew she shouldn’t have come in, but inactivity was worse than this woozy feeling. She had to watch out for standing up too fast, making a quickmovementorturn.TheCAT-scansaidnopermanentdamageandthe swelling had subsided. A little vertigo would not hurt. For a while she was concernedtherewasgoingtobeapermanentwafflepatternonthesideof her face.

She was frustrated, angry, and sad all at once. She hadn’t cried in years andshewasn’tabouttostart,sosheduginanddidherreportoverthegun, three copies, one more for a requisition for a new gun (ditto the usual copies: for us, Division of Criminal Investigation, and DC headquarters), and the incident report. Always and forever the eternal, never-to-be-readtwice incident report. Marge brought a three-page form and placed it in front of her that Youngstown PD had just sent over.

“What is this?” she asked. “Another DIR,” she said. “They want a detective’s interview report for the task force.”

She snapped something about not getting an opportunity to ask her attacker any questions when something Harry said came to mind: Sarcasm winsno friends. She knew he faked the cheery mood and was as dead-tired as shewas.Buthetookovertheoffice,hershareof theirthreeinvestigations, andthetaskforcedutiesaswell—nottomentionthetimehespentwithher inthehospital,fussingoverheruntilshehadtoorderhimoutsoshecould get some rest.

The pitch black saved her life—that and the fact that her flashlight had rolled under the bed. They found a scored channel an inch wide and eighteenincheslongagainstthewallwhichhadstoppedjustaninchfromwhere she lay slumped. The attacker must have intended a second blow to be the coup de grâcebut the wall deflected the aim. She had a deep bruise over her shoulder blade where the instrument, probably a gun butt, had ripped the fabric of her blazer, put a nick in the shoulder strap of her harness, but fortunatelymissedtheclavicleonitsdownwardarc.Shewassoreandmanaging the headache fine, however. Harry told her she was out for a couple hoursandthatthecoponhissecondpasscalledinhervehicleinthedriveway to make sure everything was copesetic, and that’s when he was awakened at three-forty five in the a.m. and knew there had to be a big problem.

They had ditched both the Ford Econoline and the Camry at an abandoned farmhouse on Route 46 just south of Jefferson. Both vehicles were parked inside a rotting barn and covered under cheap plastic covers. The drainage ditches on either side would be filled with purple loose strife and pussy willows in the spring.

Forensics had found tire patterns of a third vehicle, the one they had used for the final getaway, but the tire marks were not definitive enough to make it. Too much time had elapsed and the freezing and thawing over the week had rendered the dentist’s plaster cast too indeterminate to match up with their indexes in DC or Columbus. The barn roof was ribbed by exposed rafters and open to the sky where it had been parked and so porous that the icy rains and melting snow churned the ground to a thick soup. Footprints from the airport and shoes from their own closets put them right there. The four known suspects comprised “the gang” in what the newspapers were calling “the Wing Ding heist.”

The kid’s buddies, those “free runners,” were yakking to the media and soaking up attention. They kept cops busy, even so, hauling them around YoungstowntovariousplaceswheretheyhadgonewithFarona.

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