Duke City Split Read online

  Duke City Split is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Alibi eBook Original

  Copyright © 2014 by Steve Brewer

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States of America by Alibi, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  ALIBI and the ALIBI colophon are trademarks of Random House LLC.

  eBook ISBN 978-0-553-39030-8

  Cover design: Scott Biel

  www.readalibi.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Bud Knox relaxed on a park bench, basking in the April sunshine, his windbreaker zipped to his chin. A placid man with thinning brown hair, Bud looked nothing at all like a bank robber.

  He looked like somebody’s dad, which in fact he was. He’d brought his two daughters to this very park before, though it was miles from their home in Albuquerque’s northeastern sprawl. The girls liked the sandy playground, with its squeaky swings and plastic climbing castle. Bud enjoyed the way the old elms whispered over the cavorting children.

  A shadow fell across his face, and Bud opened his eyes. Mick Wyman stood over him, backlit, much of his craggy face hidden behind wraparound sunglasses and his drooping mustache. He wore no jacket, and his denim sleeves were rolled to his elbows, exposing thick, tanned forearms.

  Now this guy, Bud thought, looks like he could rob banks for a living.

  Mick was a bruiser with shaggy black hair, and he could freeze a sputtering bank guard with his icy blue stare. He was thirty-nine years old now, five years younger than Bud, and they made a good team: Mick supplying the brawn, the boldness, Bud the cautious family man. Mick thrived on thrills. Bud was perfectly content to hang around the house, poring through his ever-growing library and plunking at his computer and cooking for his wife and worrying about his receding hairline. His daughters’ soccer games were all the excitement he needed.

  Economic necessity regularly prodded him into action, however, and it usually was Bud who scouted the banks they robbed. This time was different. It was Mick who’d called this meeting in the park.

  “Hey,” Mick said as he joined him on the slatted wooden bench. “How you been?”

  “Good. You?”

  “Still flush, but nothing much going on. Kinda bored, to tell you the truth.”

  Mick scanned the kids squealing around the playground, their watchful parents guarding the perimeter.

  “You didn’t bring the girls?” he said.

  “Nah. Linda took ’em shopping at the mall.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Yeah, it’s the beginning of the end. Pretty soon, they’re teenagers and they want shoes that cost two hundred bucks.”

  “Sounds like you’ll need extra cash.”

  “Always,” Bud said. “Got a plan to get some?”

  “Maybe. You’re not gonna like it, though. It’s close to home.”

  “How close?”

  “Right here in Duke City.”

  “You know better than that, Mick. You don’t mess in your own nest.”

  “I know. I was ready to turn it down right away because of that. But wait until you hear the details. I met this kid last night at Silvio’s Bar—”

  “Silvio’s? I thought nobody went there but felons and freeloaders.”

  Mick arched a black eyebrow above the sunglasses.

  “I stop by there occasionally. Take a neon bath. Listen to the jungle drums.”

  Bud snorted.

  “I’d agreed to meet this kid Johnny there,” Mick said. “I know it’s him soon as he comes in the door. Spiky blond hair. Skinny jeans and loafers. They don’t get a lot of hipsters in Silvio’s.”

  “Where were you?”

  “At a corner table, my back to the wall. I had one of my Army .45s in my lap, in case it’s some kind of trap.”

  “You mean cops?”

  “Cops, somebody playing cute, I don’t know. It’s an introduction. I’m being careful. But not this kid. He sits down and spills everything right away.”

  A red-haired girl chased a purple ball to within twenty feet of the men on the bench. They sat silent until she ran back toward her plump mommy.

  Bud said, “They don’t mind you waving guns around at Silvio’s?”

  “It was under the table. Hell, at Silvio’s, everybody’s got a gun. Except for Johnny, this talkative kid with the zits on his chin.”

  “What’s his story?”

  “Johnny lives near that big brown Indian casino north of town. You know which one I mean.”

  Bud nodded. The Tewa Casino and Hotel was one of the biggest in New Mexico, a multilevel mud monstrosity that marked its territory in the Sandia Mountain foothills with a giant sign in glowing yellow.

  “Johnny noticed that an armored truck comes down the hill from the casino every morning. He started following them.”

  “They didn’t spot him?”

  “He used different vehicles borrowed from this car stereo place where he works. He followed them for a couple of weeks. The armored truck takes different routes, but it always goes to the sa
me little branch bank. A pushover.”

  Bud knew better than that. Some banks were easier than others, but none were pushovers.

  “Johnny says there’s only one guard on duty. The usual cameras and things, but we know how to handle those.”

  “Come on, Mick—”

  “Think how much cash moves through a casino on a given weekend. Think how much the truck delivers to that bank on a Monday morning.”

  “They must take extra precautions,” Bud said.

  “The kid says no. He says they’re hiding in plain sight. Who would move a fortune through a little bank in a strip mall?”

  “He saw the delivery?”

  “Several times. They keep the cash in some kind of Lucite lockbox with wheels. The guards roll it off the truck and right into the vault. The tellers count the money and put it in bags. Sometime in the afternoon, it gets picked up by the bank’s regular armored transport and taken downtown. But the vault stands open all day, tellers going in and out.”

  “And there’s just one guard?”

  “Three on the armored car, of course, but we’d wait for them to leave. Only one guard in the bank, staring at the ceiling, thinking how much his feet hurt.”

  “This kid told you all that?”

  “Everything except the name of the bank.”

  “Wouldn’t be too hard to figure out,” Bud said. “What’s to keep us from following the trucks and finding the bank on our own?”

  “Well, Johnny would know we did it, for one thing,” Mick said. “And he’s seen my face.”

  “How did he even get on to you?”

  “Bartender at Silvio’s. Bald biker named Sid Harris. Used to be in the game, till he got caught outside a bank in Santa Fe, covered in pink dye from one of those exploding money packs. He pulled ten years at Leavenworth.”

  Bud coughed. Prison was his greatest fear. He’d never done time, never even been arrested. He couldn’t stand the idea of being separated from his family.

  “That was years ago,” Mick said. “He’s clean now, but he keeps his ears open. The kid approached him about finding a crew. Sid mentioned it to me.”

  Bud didn’t like this kind of exposure. He always insisted on banks in other states, far from their everyday lives, far from any Albuquerque lowlifes who might rat them out to cut a deal with police. It sometimes meant weeks away from home on “business trips,” living in motels, staking out banks, but he considered the distance a safety cushion.

  A little boy ran past, shrieking, his arms extended like the wings of a plane. Mick hunched his shoulders against the noise. Bud, veteran parent, didn’t even flinch.

  As the child dashed away, Bud said, “So if we pulled the job ourselves, Johnny would run to the cops?”

  “He didn’t say that, but it would be a risk.”

  “What does he want for the information? A percentage?”

  “He wants an even split,” Mick said.

  “A third?”

  “And get this: He wants to go along on the heist. He’s never done it before, and he’s hot to lose his cherry.”

  Bud frowned. He and Mick never worked with others. They had a successful system, just the two of them.

  “We might need a third man this time around.” Mick grinned. “To help us carry all that cash.”

  Chapter 2

  The next morning was a Friday, and Johnny Muller was enjoying one last cup of coffee before work when someone knocked on the door of his second-floor apartment. He glanced at his chunky wristwatch as he went to answer the knock but forgot about the time when he found the bank robber waiting outside.

  The big man looked the same as he had at Silvio’s, even dressed the same, except now he wore sunglasses and a gray windbreaker over his denim clothes.

  “Let’s go for a ride.”

  He turned away without waiting for an answer. Johnny grabbed his leather jacket off a chair by the door and followed, saying, “I’ve got to go to work soon.”

  “This won’t take long.”

  The bank robber—Johnny still didn’t know his name—trotted down the steps to the ground floor, then climbed behind the wheel of a dark blue Dodge Charger with tinted windows.

  Johnny dropped into the passenger seat, saying, “So, you thought about my offer?”

  “I talked to my partner about it.”

  “Yeah? What did he say?”

  “I’m interested.” The voice came from behind him, and Johnny nearly shat himself in surprise.

  He turned to see a man slumped in the narrow backseat. The man wore an overcoat and a black woolen ski mask.

  “Hey, what the fuck,” Johnny said. “What is this?”

  “A friendly meeting,” the driver said. “My partner doesn’t want you to see his face.”

  “Jesus, man. You startled the hell out of me.”

  “Sorry about that,” said the masked man. “Just being cautious. We don’t know you.”

  “I don’t know you, either.” Johnny took a deep breath, trying for calm. “I’m operating on trust here.”

  “Yeah,” the big man said. “We’re not much on trust. We probably shouldn’t be here at all. But we talked it over, and the potential’s good enough that we have to hear you out.”

  He started the engine, backed the Charger out of the parking slot and turned it toward the street. Empty fields stretched away on the far side of the blacktop. Scattered sagebrush and chamisa rocked in the wind.

  Johnny looked up the long straightaway to where the Tewa Casino and Hotel stood just outside the city limits, in the foothills of the looming mountains. Even this far away he could read the casino’s yellow sign.

  “So,” the man in the backseat said, “the armored truck comes right down this road every day?”

  “Yeah. It’s the only way in and out. The road dead-ends at the casino.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “As I told your partner, I noticed it from my window upstairs there, and got curious. So I started following the trucks.”

  “And they never spotted you behind them?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  Johnny turned to look at the man in the ski mask.

  “Well, I can’t be a hundred percent sure, can I? But they never changed anything. Didn’t try to outrun me or call the cops on me or anything like that.”

  “How long did you follow them?”

  “Three weeks. But not every single day, you know. Some days I had to get to work early or whatever.”

  Out on the street, the Charger headed downhill toward town, the driver gunning the engine. From up here in the foothills, they could see the city sprawled before them, filling the leafy Rio Grande valley and climbing the arid West Mesa beyond.

  “Show us this bank.”

  Johnny nodded, then caught himself. “You mean we’re going to do it?”

  “We’re not promising anything yet,” the driver said. “We need to check it out.”

  “But if I show you which bank—”

  “Don’t worry. We won’t rob it without you. Most likely, we won’t rob it at all.”

  “How come?”

  “Too close to home,” said the man in the backseat. “We don’t need the heat.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Just show us,” the driver said. “If we decide it’s a job worth doing, we’ll include you. If we don’t like the way it looks, then we’ll go our separate ways and forget we ever met.”

  “Okay,” Johnny said. “Take a left at the next light.”

  They turned onto Wyoming Boulevard, a four-lane avenue lined with houses and stores and fast-food joints. It was two miles south to the bank, which stood in a puddle of asphalt at one end of a strip mall. The shopping center had five storefronts side by side—beauty shop, tax preparation office, drapes-and-blinds store, pet shop, and cut-rate cigarette store. The First State Bank of Albuquerque, a one-story building made of gray concrete and brick veneer, sat apart from the others, a few parking spaces in fron
t and a drive-through window on the south side.

  The parking lot was empty, but they didn’t pull in, just slowed as they passed by.

  “Nobody’s open yet,” Johnny said, glancing at his watch. A quarter to nine. “Shit. I’m gonna be late for work.”

  The driver turned on his blinker. “We’ll take you home. We don’t want you to be late.”

  “That’s right,” said the other man. “Stick to your normal routine. If we do this job, we don’t want somebody thinking afterward about how you’ve been acting funny.”

  “Don’t worry,” Johnny said. “I’m cool.”

  The Charger U-turned around the median and zoomed along the busy street, heading back the way they’d come.

  “So what do you think?” Johnny ventured. “It’s like I said, right? Looks easy?”

  The driver snorted.

  “They’re never easy, kid. But we’ll check it out. If it looks doable, we’ll be in touch.”

  Nobody said another word until they pulled into the parking lot outside Johnny’s apartment. He had his hand on the door handle, ready to get out, but had one last question.

  “How long am I supposed to wait?”

  “Until you hear from us,” said the man in the ski mask. “It won’t be long. Just sit tight.”

  Chapter 3

  They’d left the apartment complex and gone about a mile downhill when Bud Knox pulled off the ski mask. Still in the backseat, he leaned over so he could see his reflection in the rearview. He wiped perspiration from his broad forehead and smoothed his thinning hair.

  “So,” Mick said, “what do you think?”

  “You’re right about that kid. He’s no cop. Too young and squirrelly to be undercover.”

  “What do you think about the bank?”

  “Too soon to say,” Bud said. “We’ll have to check it out. Watch the place on our own.”

  “Sure. But it’s possible he’s right about it?”

  “I suppose,” Bud said. “But it still makes me nervous, being so close to home. It’s risky.”

  “They’re all risky,” Mick said. “But what if Johnny’s right and we walk away with a bundle? We wouldn’t have to pull another job for a long time. And you don’t have to be away from your family while we set it up.”

  “I’ve got to think about it some more. I really don’t like the idea of including that kid.”

  Mick drove in a silence for a minute. Bud watched him from the backseat, knowing he was trying to think of a way to sell it.