Culprits Page 21

  That had been seven years ago.

  Three years into his stay and two years after the birth of their son, Joey, Maria was a widow.

  It was mid-January and Luis had been working on a construction site in a nearby town. He was on his way home after a long day. He would have been tired. It was later surmised that he had been rounding a corner at a speed incompatible for the winter conditions. He hit a patch of ice, lost control of his truck, careened off the road, and slammed into a tree. He was rushed to the hospital where he lingered for three days before succumbing to his injuries, leaving his grieving wife a single parent and deeply in debt. There hadn’t been any life insurance. They had talked of it often, but there never seemed to be enough money. Consequently, there would be no compensation money for Maria and her son.

  By that point, Hector, to his surprise, had become a part of the family. With Luis gone, Hector’s role grew. He often babysat for Maria when she worked late at one of the two jobs she had to take after her husband’s death. He made the boy’s lunch each morning, or made sure he had enough money to buy lunch that day at the pre-school he attended. He also took the boy to school and picked him up afterward. Sometimes he stayed to help the teachers as a volunteer. He’d read stories to the kids and help with the serving of school lunches. Once in a while he’d slip an extra helping or two to some of the kids in line. This particular school served an area of the city that was, to say the least, less fortunate than other sections. An extra apple or slice of bread on a plate could make a world of difference to some of the children he saw. His current situation had forced him to cut back on his work at the school.

  After school, he and Joey would play games before Hector made dinner. Along the way he became Tio or Unca Hector to the boy, an honorary moniker that was not discouraged by Maria and brought an unexpected warmth to the old man’s heart.

  What she did contest was Hector’s offer to buy the house from her. He knew she struggled each month with the mortgage and he saw it as way to take some pressure off the single mom. She looked at things differently.

  “I can’t take your money, Mr. Gonzales,” she said. “You need to keep your savings to supplement your Social Security. You need it for your old age.”

  “Maria,” he answered. “Take a good look at me. How much older age do I have? Better you and Joey have my money than the government. This way you won’t have to work so hard and I will have a fine house to enjoy what time I have left.” He didn’t bother to tell her that he wasn’t collecting any Social Security and never would. He’d never had a real Social Security card in his life, and as for what time he had left. Well, that was something else.

  After much back and forth Maria had finally consented to the sale. Hector had paid her more than market value for the house which led to more back and forth discussion, but in the end she accepted the money. The only condition he placed on the sale was that she keep the ownership of the home in her name.

  “But then it is like you don’t own it.”

  “I own it,” he said. “I’m paying you for it. It’s mine.”

  “But if something happens to you?”

  “Then you do with it as you please.”

  “But your family.”

  “Maria, I have no family. You and Joey… I don’t want to argue. I can do this. Let me do it.”

  In the end, there had been tears and, eventually, acceptance. And more tears six months later when Maria and Joey had moved to Florida. Her mother, who had escaped from Cuba in the ’60s, lived there along with some aunts and uncles, and she felt it was important for Joey to learn about her side of the family and their history.

  Waving goodbye at the loaded to the gills SUV until it turned the corner at the end of the block, Hector walked up the wooden steps to his house and discovered that somehow he’d, without thinking about it, without planning for it, and certainly never expecting it, gone and set down roots.

  Hector had come to the U.S.A. from Mexico the old-fashioned way. He crossed the border in the dead of night with nothing but the clothes on his back and a gallon jug of water. He was twelve years old. He was alone. He’d had a mother but she had died when he was seven. There had been a father, but his mother never got around to telling him who it was. In the end, what did it matter?

  After her death, Hector had lived the life of a street urchin—begging for change, avoiding predators, selling Chiclets gum to tourists, and thievery. Once he crossed the border into the land of the free, that latter choice proved to be the most lucrative of options available to him.

  Oh, he tired the straight and narrow. He took jobs away from plenty of white true Americans. He picked fruit. Painted houses. Washed dishes. Washed cars. But these jobs always found him working for someone else. He needed to work solo, be his own man with no one telling him what to do, and so he fell back on more familiar ways.

  He made sure to avoid the gangs. He might have been young, but despite the old saying that proclaimed the virtues of safety in numbers, from what he could see, the incarceration rate as well as the mortality rate in gangs suggested that they offered very little in the way of safety. He also hated tattoos. Eventually, time and circumstances led him to becoming a B&E man. It was less violent and less risky than drugs or armed robbery. He started with cars and then moved on to apartments and homes. An open window or a poorly secured door provided plenty of opportunities to make fast cash. Case a house. Wait for the occupants to go out for the evening or away on vacation and it was all yours for the taking.

  His safe cracking skills came more out of necessity than choice. It was easy to grab loose cash or whatever of value was left lying around a house that could be fenced quickly, but the real money was hidden in lockboxes and home safes. The first was simple enough to grab and force open at a later time, but it was the second, the safes, tucked into walls or sunk into floors, that held the cream, and they took an expertise to open that he didn’t possess.

  At nineteen, Hector was serving his one and only jail term when he met Finny Adaire. Finny was old, older than Hector was now, and was also waiting out his first jolt. He had been cracking safes for over forty years when Hector met him. It was an uncommon relationship, an old Irish criminal at the end of his career and a young Mexican ladrón at the beginning of his. Maybe it was that. The old man was alone and suffering from a variety of ailments. He could see the carrion boat coming his way and, possibly, that made him pay more than a casual interest in an upstart like Hector who kept to himself and didn’t associate with any of the undesirable prison elements, or maybe he recognized a bit of himself in the boy. Finny had grown up alone on the streets of Belfast before making his way as a teenager to America, where he learned his trade and became one of the best box men in the business.

  Hector once asked him how he’d come to be sent up.

  “A man said ‘trust me,’” he said.

  “And?”

  “And I fuckin’ did,” said Finny. “And you can believe that won’t happen again. Fool me once. I should have known better. In this life, trust isn’t something you need to proclaim, it’s something you earn.”

  The two men had become friends, and when Finny was finally released from prison, he walked out of the gates to find a classic, coal black, 1968 Cadillac Fleetwood 60 special sedan waiting for him, a grinning Hector sitting behind the wheel. Finny walked along the length of the car, admiring the well-polished exterior, he put his bag in the trunk, and then settled himself into the passenger’s side of the car.

  “Where to?” said Hector

  “Is there a bar close by?”

  “More than one.”

  Finny settled back into the soft, warm leather upholstered seat and shut his eyes.

  “Dealer’s choice,” he said.

  Thus began a most profitable partnership. When Finny died seven years later, he had taught Hector everything he knew about the business. There wasn’t a lock the young man couldn’t pick, a security system he couldn’
t bypass, or a safe he couldn’t crack or blow with an expert use of explosives.

  It was sometime later that Hector met O’Conner. The criminal was looking for someone to break into a large walk in safe, set in a high-rise office building. Hector had been referred to the man by the Financier.

  The safe held two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in gold coins. The electronic security system had been complex and had taken Hector nearly an hour to bypass. Once inside, though, the actual opening of the safe only took ten minutes. Hector had walked away from that job with a fifty thousand dollar payday and a working relationship that would last for over a decade.

  The Crystal Q job had netted him five hundred thousand dollars. The biggest payout of his career. But then those two assholes, the pilot and his accomplice, had tried to take it away. It was a good thing O’Conner had been prepared. The double cross had failed and left the accomplice dead and the son of a bitch pilot wounded, gone, and penniless. O’Conner had redistributed the take among the remaining crew, then everyone scattered in seven different directions.

  That should have been the end of it, but then he’d gotten the call from O’Conner.

  “He talked,” said O’Conner. “Culhane and the Financier are missing. I’m thinking they’re both probably dead.”

  “The fucking pilot?”

  “Yes,” said O’Conner.

  “And you think they got to Culhane and the Financer?”

  “It’s a concern.”

  “So what? They were connected. He doesn’t know all of us.”

  “Someone always knows someone,” said O’Conner.

  “So what are you doing?”

  “Keeping my eyes open. Thinking that something’s gotta happen.”

  Hector was quiet.

  “You might want to consider taking a vacation,” said O’Conner.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

  “You okay?”

  “Sure,” said Hector. “I’m fine… Just running some things through my head.”

  “Seriously, you old bastard,” said O’Conner. “Take the money. Go somewhere. Lay low until this thing blows over.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “It will,” said O’Conner.

  “You sound pretty confident.”

  “I’m…”

  “You’re what?”

  “I’m just running some things through my head.”

  “Hah.”

  “You watch yourself, Hector,” said O’Conner. “I’ll let you know when things clear up.”

  “I will.”

  “You sure you’re okay? You don’t sound right.”

  “Well, I just found out some super rich, pissed off Texan one per-center might be gunning for me. That can change the way a man sounds.”

  “Fair enough,” said O’Conner. “I’ll call you.”

  “Okay,” said Hector.

  O’Conner disconnected and Hector felt the world around him get a bit colder.

  Now, two months later, he knew they had come for him.

  Hector opened the drawer of the bedside table and pulled out his vape pen. With a click he sucked in a lung full of heated cannabis oil, the cannabinoids delivering a soft relief from the pain in his gut. The diagnosis had come nine months ago. Well before the Texas job. The doctor, with his most serious face, had sat with him and talked about options, the first of which would be a surgeon gutting him like a fish to get what cancer they could, followed by chemo and radiation. The odds were against him beating the disease. The surgery and treatments would more than likely only buy him a few more months. Months of discomfort and pain with the end result being the same as if he did nothing. At sixty-nine, Hector couldn’t really see the point.

  He’d first noticed the black Ford Explorer cruising by the house a week ago. He saw it again later in town and again a few hours after that parked down the street from the house. Inside were four men, all looking grim and unhappy in the Minnesota cold.

  That’s when he began to make his plans.

  Cochran and his crew climbed the steps of the house. The windows were dark. They assumed the old man was in his room asleep. Still, they were as quiet as they could be as they approached the front door. From their previous break in they knew that the only thing guarding the house from the evils of the outside world was a standard deadbolt. Pulling out his tools, Dayton had the door opened in just a few minutes.

  Once inside, using hand signals to communicate, there had been a quick search of the first floor. As they’d found before, the house was filled with simple, non-expensive furniture. The only extravagance seemed to be a beautiful six-foot Christmas tree with a few brightly wrapped packages sitting around its base. Once they had confirmed there wasn’t anyone in the bottom floor, they all gathered at the foot of the stairs leading to the second floor. It was then that the lights came on.

  Hector was sitting quietly on a chair at the top of the first landing. Guns quickly came up and pointed at the old man, who continued to sit, his arms crossed in front of him. He had a bemused look on his face.

  “Madre de Dios,” he said. “How long did it take you to open that lock? Three minutes? Four? And then you clomp all over the place. How much noise were you looking to make? That is just sad.”

  “Don’t move!” said Cochran.

  “I will say you did a good job tracking me down,” he said. “But it wasn’t just good legwork, was it? That perra of a pilot gave me up.”

  “Does it really matter how we found you?” said Cochran. He continued to point his gun at Hector. “We’re here. You’re here. That’s the main thing, isn’t it? Oh, and the money. There’s that too. So, where is it?”

  “Money? That’s why you are here? You want money? I’m sorry to say, mi amigos, I don’t have anything on me. I do have a change jar in the kitchen, though, where I keep my spare change. There’s at least twenty bucks in there. Maybe more. It is all yours if you want it.”

  Eddie chuckled but stopped when Cochran gave him a cold stare. The leader then turned his attention back to Hector.

  “You really going to fuck with me?” he said.

  “Trust me,” said Hector, his eyes serious. “I am not fucking with you. There’s no money here.”

  “You went through a half million dollars in two months? Right.”

  “Well,” said Hector, a slight smile coming to his lips, “there was a time in Buenos Aries. I’m thinking I was a little younger than you. It wasn’t five hundred thousand dollars, but it was a lot and it was all gone in one glorious week. Oh, now that was… Have you ever been to Buenos Aries? No? You don’t know what you are missing. But no, I didn’t spend the money. Though who told you it was only half a million?”

  That got the men’s attention. The guns came down a bit.

  “You saying there’s more than that?” said Eddie.

  “How much more?” said Morris.

  “Don’t talk to him,” said Cochran. “He’s full of shit. He’s just talking bullshit.”

  “Where’s he gonna go?” said Morris. “Maybe he is talking bullshit. Maybe. But what if he’s not? Harrington only wants his share of the money back. Right? He says that’s five hundred thousand dollars. If we give him that, he’s happy, we get paid, and we’re done. But if there’s more to be had, we can split that up four ways. Then when we’re done, Harrington gets what he expects, we get paid, and we get a little bonus on top of that. Happy all the way around.”

  He looked back up the stairs. “How much more, old man?”

  “At least another three or four hundred thousand,” he said. He gave an apologetic shrug. “At my age, I’m bad about keeping track of my money.”

  “And you’ll tell us where all this money is if we let you go,” said Cochran. “Is that it?”

  “Oh, I’m just answering questions,” said Hector. “Did you think this was a negotiation?”

  “What the fuck?” said Morris.

 
“Told you it was bullshit,” said Cochran. He raised his weapon again. “Where the fuck is the money?”

  “Right now?” said Hector. “It is in a safe place. A good place, I think.”

  The men were silent.

  “The towel head bitch,” said Eddie.

  “You should watch your mouth,” said Hector. “But no, she doesn’t have any of what you are looking for.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” said Cochran.

  Hector’s only answer was a smile.

  Corcoran looked around at the house, filled with Christmas decorations. The wreaths, the tree with wrapped packages sitting beneath it. A bitter smile came to his face.

  “I get it,” he said. “You think we’re stupid?”

  “That is neither here nor there,” said Hector. He rose from the chair. “It doesn’t really matter what I think. Does it?”

  “Hands, motherfucker,” said Cochran.

  All four men raised their weapons and pointed them at the old man.

  Hector dutifully raised his hands, showing his empty palms.

  “We’ll see who’s stupid. Get your ass down here. We got some talking to do. And trust me, you are not gonna like how the conversation is going to go.”