The Smoke Room (9 page)

12. CASH ME OUT, BABY, I’M BLOWIN’ TOWN

“
YOU TALKING TO
yourself?”

Lieutenant Sears breezed into the beanery and deposited a sack lunch in the refrigerator. His wife, Heather, got up in the morning before he left for work and put together a couple of sandwiches and a pile of sliced veggies, with a small bag of raisins for dessert. It seemed out of character, because according to Sears, she ruled the roost in their household and dominated their decision making. Although she didn’t have a job and he was often tired from having worked a twenty-four-hour shift, he ran all the household errands, did the chores, and did virtually all the shopping and cooking. Her sole concession to domesticity was the sack lunch. Johnson said it was because she knew we would see it.

We all thought the way she made him dance to her tune was funny, considering what a ball buster Sears was inside the department.

“You were talking to yourself,” Sears said. Hampsted had left the room.

“Was I? I guess it was this article.”

“What article’s that?”

“The Charles Scott Ghanet thing.”

“Charles Scott made the paper? I’ll have to read it when I get time.”

I got up and walked across the bay to the firefighters’ quarters and my locker, changed into my uniform, and inspected my face in the bathroom mirror. I only needed to shave every two or three days, but I ran the electric shaver over my face anyway.

The news about Ghanet had hit me like a falling house. If Sears didn’t nab us, the local gendarmes would, and if the local gendarmes didn’t, the FBI would, and if the FBI didn’t, some tenacious reporter would do it for them—all of which didn’t even take into account the treasure seekers who were bound to show up. I could turn myself in right now, but at this late date I couldn’t see how it would make any difference.

My only consolation was that we hadn’t made bigger targets of ourselves by indulging in conspicuous binge spending. If you were going to be a criminal, you’d better be a smart one—like Ghanet. Look poor; act poor. Keep your money where nobody will find it. Avoid ostentatious displays of wealth.

I relieved my man early—actually, my woman, Stanislow—and busied myself in the apparatus bay doing normal morning maintenance in the hope that keeping busy would stave off my mounting anxiety. I half expected Tronstad and Johnson to call in sick, but they showed up at their normal times, Ted at 0729, one minute to spare, and Robert six minutes later, at 0735. Sears and I were the only ones who routinely came in early. The drivers on the other shifts resented Johnson, who came in precisely five minutes late every shift. Whenever he needed somebody to trade shifts or stay over a half hour, he got stiffed, a fact he attributed to racial prejudice, when in fact it was due to his chronic tardiness, a habit that, ironically, several others unfairly attributed to race.

If Johnson and Tronstad knew about Ghanet, they didn’t let on. Tronstad was bouncing on the balls of his feet and grinning ear to ear, and Johnson moved about the apparatus bay whistling as he checked the lights on the rig, the fuel level, and the water level in the tank, looking over the hose beds and equipment and glancing at his watch periodically.

Johnson approached the workbench, where I was running the Lifepak through the morning tests. “You see the newspapers?” I asked.

“I saw.” He grinned, his teeth white and even. “We got the real deal. Think about it. No taxes, either. We’re rich.”

“We’re not rich, Robert. We’re in trouble.”

“How do you figure?”

“To start with, there’s a thousand cops looking for what we have. And Sears doesn’t know about Ghanet right now, but once he does, he’s going to figure out what that bond was all about. I wouldn’t be surprised if the chief of the department and the police show up for roll call.”

The permanent frown lines in Johnson’s forehead deepened into trenches, as if this was the first time he’d considered the bonds a liability instead of an asset.

“I think we should turn it in right now. Tell them we thought it was worthless. That Tronstad took it and we would have given it back earlier but we thought it was junk.”

“No way in hell. I’m not doing it.”

“What if I turn it in? I’m the one who has it.”

“I’ll tell them you stole it.”

“You wouldn’t do that.”

“Try me.”

“Jesus, Johnson. You’re losing your marbles here.”

“
You
are, if you think I’m giving back twelve million dollars.”

“You two having another lovers’ quarrel?” said Tronstad, grinning as he passed us on his way to the watch office for eight o’clock roll call.

As usual, Sears had typed out a schedule for us. No other officer I’d heard of was as meticulous, or as obsessive.

“Listen,” Sears said after we’d gathered in the watch office for roll call, “I’ve been out of town at a women’s rugby tournament with Heather, so I haven’t had time to think about this—” He pulled the folded bond out of his shirt pocket and tapped it against his mustache. “—but I know something is going on.” The shaved stubble on his face caught a shaft of sunlight coming through the window on the front door. I liked him. I couldn’t help it. He was going to write charges on us and probably put at least one of us in jail, but I liked him. He was a man who tried to do the right thing. “I don’t know what you three are up to, but I’m going to get to the bottom of it before the day is out.”

He looked at each of us in turn. “I hope this isn’t what I think it is, because I’m so proud of you guys,” Sears said. “You’re the best-drilled company in Battalion Seven. You know, when I first got here, you were a joke, but now you work together like Chinese acrobats.”

“Thanks, Lieutenant,” said Johnson.

“Yeah, thanks,” I said.

“How’d the rugby tournament go?” Tronstad asked.

Sears handed him the list of chores he’d printed out and said, “You just worry about today. I’ve got a union meeting, but I should be back around suppertime. Maybe a little after. You’ll be acting lieutenant. The chief is sending somebody up here from Thirty-two’s to fill in your spot.”

“Yes, sir,” said Tronstad, saluting smartly. In the fire department we didn’t salute our officers unless making a joke or mocking them. Sears gave him a withering look.

The three of us walked down the hallway to the cramped beanery, where the television was tuned to one of the national morning shows. The interviewer was quizzing the attorney of a murder suspect. Johnson turned the sound up to cover our voices and said, “Gum thinks we’re in trouble.”

“Don’t be an ass.” Tronstad slapped me across the shoulders and grinned. “What trouble?”

“How about a bunch of FBI agents combing through Ghanet’s house?” I said. “We gotta give them back.”

“They don’t even know Ghanet had the bonds. You don’t think I left any lying around, do you?”

“How would you know in all that junk?”

“And how’re you going to explain the one Sears has?” Johnson asked.

“I can explain anything.”

“Maybe we could make an anonymous phone call and tell them where the bonds are,” I suggested.

“Oh, yeah,” said Tronstad, playing with his mustache. “That would be brilliant. They’d be on us like stink on shit. Go ahead and make the call, if you want to get jailed for grand larceny and obstruction of justice.”

Johnson looked at me. “He’s right. We’re in this and we can’t get out. It’s like when you’re a kid on a sled going down a fast hill with a lot of rocks around. You ride it out, because if you bail, you’re going to get hurt. The sled keeps going faster and faster, and your only chance is to ride it out.”

“Yeah,” said Tronstad. “Unless you want to go to jail and deal with a bunch of butt pirates. Pretty boy like you would be wearing lipstick and eyeshadow by the end of the first week.”

“Geez, Tronstad,” I said. “Don’t talk like that.”

“Don’t talk like what?”

Tronstad and I had both been aware that she was coming through the patio door, but we’d kept talking, the way you do sometimes when you’re caught up in a conversation.

The lieutenant’s wife was tall and athletic in a gawky sort of way, with thick, tattooed ankles and a mane of blond hair that was a chronic mess. The cargo shorts she was wearing showed off rugby bruises on both legs. She spoke to us as if she were one of the guys, and I liked that about her. Heather Wynn—she’d kept the last name of her first husband, who’d died in a car wreck. “You guys look like you’re having a meeting.”

“We don’t have any secrets from you,” said Johnson, stepping forward for the obligatory hug. “What brings you here on this fine sunny day?”

“I need to speak to Sweeney for a few minutes. Whose new truck is that out there?”

“That’d be mine,” said Tronstad.

“You bought a new truck?” I blurted.

“There’s a new Cadillac SUV out there, too. Whose is that?”

I turned to Robert Johnson, who at least realized the insanity of what he’d done and looked chagrined. “It’s actually . . . kind of a demo thing. We’ll probably take it back. I’m not really sure we can afford a new car right now.”

We all knew the finance company had repossessed Tronstad’s original Ford F-350 for nonpayment. Since then he’d done the forty-five-minute commute from his apartment in Kent on his Harley. Most people who had as much time in the department as Tronstad had bought a house by now, but Tronstad fiddled away while Rome burned.

“And what’s this?” Heather took Robert Johnson’s wrist and pulled it toward her. “
Longines?
This must have cost a pretty penny.”

“I got a deal on it,” said Johnson, who’d bought a new Cadillac
and
a five-thousand-dollar watch.

“And what about you, Gum? Everybody else has something new.”

“He’s got a new girlfriend,” said Johnson.

“Yeah,” said Tronstad. “Old enough to be his mother.”

“Ooooh,” Heather teased. “An older woman? Is that true, Gum? What is she? Thirty?”

“A little older.”

“I’m tellin’ ya, she’s old enough to be his mommy,” said Tronstad. “She’s fifty if she’s a day.”

“She’s forty-five.”

“What’s she like?” Heather asked. “How old is she really?”

Heather Wynn had eight to ten years on me and had always dismissed me rather casually, I thought, until this news about an older woman, which seemed to intrigue her.

“Heather.” Lieutenant Sears appeared in the doorway behind us. “I thought I heard your voice. Why didn’t you come straight to my office?”

“The guys and I were having a chat, honey. Have you met Gum’s new girlfriend?”

“I don’t believe I have.” Sears looked at me for a moment, then turned back to his wife. We knew they weren’t happy together, that she’d talked of divorce and left him several times, but we also knew he clung to her like a nonswimmer clung to an overturned raft.

When we were alone again, I sat heavily at the table and looked at Johnson and Tronstad. “You
both
bought new cars? The cops are looking for Ghanet’s money, and you bought new cars? You don’t think anybody’s going to connect that?”

“I didn’t know Robert was buying one,” said Tronstad, picking up the sports page from the morning’s
PI.
“I’m the one who needed it. He didn’t need that gold-plated watch, either.”

“It’s not plate. It’s solid,” Johnson said. “And I didn’t know about Ghanet when I bought the Caddy. It didn’t come out in the paper until the next day.”

“You must have gone directly from my house to the dealer,” I said.

“I can buy a car if I want,” Johnson said.

“It’s not like we called each other up and compared notes,” said Tronstad. “’Sides, I had a handful of the bonds, and I wanted to see if I could cash them.”

“You cashed some bonds?” I cried.

“Just enough for a down payment on the truck.”

“We’re dead meat.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Tronstad. “This is a matter of bluffing our way through. Stuff like this used to happen in the Air Force all the time. I always weaseled out of it.”

Johnson sat next to Tronstad and propped his elbows on the table. His uniform shirt was immaculate and stiff from the cleaners. “What else did you buy, Tronstad?”

“I mighta bought some other shit.” He leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially, “I’ll tell you this. Those bonds are as good as gold. Maybe better, because they’re easier to pack around. Especially the U.S. Treasury bearer bonds. People at the bank thought I was an oil sheik.” He opened his wallet and showed us a hundred-dollar bill. “That’s all I got left.”

“You spend everything, don’t you, Ted? Every red cent.” Johnson glared at him.

“I just showed you a hundred bucks, didn’t I? Look.” Tronstad reached out and tapped the back of my hand. “Maybe after Sears leaves we can take the rig and pick them up, huh?”

“I’m not getting the bonds today. Not so you can spend them.”

Tronstad smiled. “Who put you in charge?”

“You did.”

“You did what?” Chief Abbott bustled into the room, grabbed a coffee cup, filled it, slopping some onto the floor, and pulled out a chair. Before he could sit down, his phone rang. “I’ll get that in my office,” he said, hustling down the corridor, his footsteps on the wooden floor like cannon shots, an aroma of black coffee and Aqua Velva aftershave wafting in his wake. I figured he was still jacked up from talking to Heather, on whom he had a crush. We’d heard them talking up the hall.