Betrayed 2(222)

“Looks can be deceiving,” I said.

He slid the sunglasses back on his nose and pulled the cap low again. Sitting back, he asked, “So, what’s the setup? What do they have in the way of security?”

“The setup is one small showroom lined with jewelry cases,” I said, describing the place from memory. I’d gone into Crown’s two weeks earlier to buy the vintage Rolex Mariner that was strapped to my left wrist. I loved old Rolex’s about as much as I loved Lincolns. I’d paid cash for the watch, nearly nine-thousand dollars, part of my cut from selling a semi-truck load of stolen cigarettes to a gang of goons from upstate somewhere.

Buying the watch was just part of the reason I was there. The main reason was to case the place to determine if it should be the target of my gang’s next hit.

I rested a hand on the steering wheel and aimed a finger at the storefront. “There is a fat fuck of a security guard who sits right inside the door. He has a pistol in a holster that he’s probably never even fired. He can be taken out before he knows what hit him. When I was there, he had his nose stuck in a newspaper and wasn’t paying too much attention to what was going on around him. There is one door at the back of the showroom that leads to an office, and a room where they do jewelry repair.”

Eddie nodded as he listened. “So, you’re thinking smash and grab?”

Eddie and I had been doing smash and grabs since we were kids. Basically, you run into a place, smash the fuck out of the glass display cases with a hammer or the butt of a gun, and grab whatever the fuck you can and get the fuck out. Smash and grabs worked fine if you didn’t care what you got away with. The Crown hit would not be a smash and grab because I didn’t care about the shit in the display cases. I wanted what was kept in the safe in the office.

“Not a smash and grab,” I said.

Eddie dug a cigarette pack from his shirt pocket and held it out to me. I shook my head and said I was trying to quit. I rolled his window down a couple of inches. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke toward the window, then gave me a sideways frown. “Not a smash and grab. Okay, what then?”

“There is a safe in the office,” I said. “A source I have on the inside tells me that Mr. Crown stores a couple of million dollars’ worth of loose diamonds there at any given time. That’s our target.”

Eddie grinned and poked me with his elbow. “Who’s your inside source? Let me guess, that fat girl you’ve been banging? What’s her name? Doris, Doreen…”

“Dottie,” I said. “And she’s not fat. She’s pleasantly plump.”

“What you call pleasantly plump I call fat, my brother,” Eddie said. “I knew there had to be a reason you were dipping your stick into that one. Not exactly your usual type. So, what’s her connection to the jewelry store?”

“She’s the one who sold me the watch,” I said, wiggling my wrist at him. “Turns out, Dottie is a very lonely, very horny lady. After a couple of hours of banging the shit out of her at the No Tell Motel, she was more than happy to answer all my questions about her place of employment.”

Eddie scratched his chin, which was covered with a scraggly beard he’d been trying to grow since high school. “What’s gonna happen when the cops question Dottie after we hit the store?”

“Won’t be a problem,” I said, shaking my head.

He gave me a sideways glance, then a smirk. “You gonna kill her?”

“I don’t kill people, Eddie,” I said, giving him a hard look that made him turn away. I was a criminal, but I wasn’t a killer. Eddie had killed people. Sometimes, people who didn’t deserve to die, like that poor schmuck at the convenience store a couple of months back. Eddie’s temper got away from him sometimes and people got hurt. Sometimes, I thought he might even like it; hurting people. But he’s my little brother. I love him. I try not to think about it too much.

“So, what’s your plan for her then?”

“I wore a disguise whenever I was with her,” I said. “Dottie knows me as a traveling salesman from Reno named Carl Douglass who wears glasses and a bad toupee. Carl is going to take Dottie on a little trip a couple of days before the job. She’ll be heavily sedated in a motel while we do the job. I have a guy who is going to babysit her for me. When I give him the all-clear, he’ll let her wake up the next day to find a note from dear old Carl telling her he’s gone back to his wife and she should take the bus home.”

“I hope you at least have the decency to give her one more good fucking before you give her a good fucking over,” Eddie said, chuckling at himself. That was another flaw Eddie had: he wasn’t nearly as funny as he thought he was, but I didn’t need Eddie to be funny. I needed him to watch my back, which he’d been doing his entire life.