The Box by Jeremy Brown (ebook reader play store txt) 📕

Connelly studied the tire.

“I’d offer to help, but that seems like a private moment.”

Nora shrugged.

“I’m trying to think of everything here as assets, rather than memories.”

“So forget the swing. Let the buyer decide what to do with it.”

She seemed to like that idea.

“Come on. I’ll show you the inside.”

Connelly got the feeling she was trying to maintain the demeanor she carried in Minneapolis, but it was hard to do here at her childhood home. Her shoulders were more relaxed, her hair bounced a little more when she walked to the set of stairs leading to a side door.

He followed her up the steps and waited while she unlocked the door.

“So…I heard your parents are out of town.”

She smiled.

“They are.”

Two weeks after that, when Connelly came into the Vegas suite and said, “I know when it’s happening,” Bruder and Rison and Kershaw all looked up from the catalog of surveying equipment.

Connelly had been spending the weekends with Nora and getting some decent results, background and such, but nothing solid to act or plan on.

So Bruder was skeptical when he said, “When?”

“Two weeks from Wednesday.”

“How do you know?”

“Nora told me she’s going to be in town early, Wednesday instead of Friday, and wondered if I could meet her. I asked why, and she said the subsidy checks come on that Monday, she’ll cash hers, and the Romanians will come on Wednesday morning to collect.”

Bruder said, “Just hers, or everyone’s?”

“She said it they make the rounds that morning.”

“So everyone,” Rison said. “That’s the day.”

Bruder looked down at the catalog.

He and Rison and Kershaw had spent their time gathering the gear—the truck, weapons, disguises, surveying tools—and he wanted a few more things to complete the facade.

If Connelly was right, they had time.

He asked, “What did you tell her?”

“Nothing yet. I just got the message when I landed.”

Bruder said, “Tell her you’ll be there Wednesday night.”

“I think she wants me there for the pickup, in the morning. When the Romanians come to her house.”

“You’re going to be busy in the morning.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.”

Bruder looked at him.

“You can keep things going with her until then?”

Connelly shrugged.

“Sure.”

“And it won’t be a problem when you don’t show up on Wednesday night.”

“What do you mean?”

Bruder glanced at Rison, then told Connelly, “After the job on Wednesday morning we’re gone. You can’t see or speak to her again.”

“Right, I know that.”

He wanted to say more, so Bruder waited.

Connelly said, “But I was thinking, if I don’t show up, or call, or anything, she’s going to put two and two together and realize I had something to do with the heist.”

Rison said, “So? She doesn’t know your real name. She knows your face, but if you stay out of the town, and maybe Minneapolis, you’re fine.”

“Yeah,” Connelly said, like he still thought it was an option.

Bruder said, “I don’t care what you do or where you go after the job, but you can’t go back to her. You do that, you’re putting all of us on the line. And her.”

“She’ll already be on the line, man. After the job the Romanians will be on the warpath. If they hear anything about me going missing, they’ll ask her some hard questions. No doubt in my mind. They might do it no matter what, to her and everybody else in town.”

“She has a gun,” Bruder said. “And so does everybody else in town, probably. And I’m not just talking about the Romanians.”

Connelly stared at him, then looked at Rison and Kershaw, who both just looked back at him.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“She’s already close to being a loose end,” Bruder said. “If you go back to her after the job, you make a direct connection from her to us. The Romanians or the cops get a hold of her, and then you, it makes trouble for us.”

“You can’t just kill her,” Connelly said.

“Yes I can,” Bruder said, “but I won’t. If you go back to her, she becomes your problem to deal with.”

“You want me to kill her?”

“I want you to decide, right now, that you aren’t going to do something stupid that will force you to.”

“Okay, fine. Just…give me a minute to process everything.”

“You knew going in this was the deal,” Rison said.

“Yeah, I get it. I’m just still in character, you know? I’ll be fine. You don’t have to worry about her.”

Bruder didn’t bother telling him that if it came down to it, if they gave him reason to worry, he’d clip both of them off.

Rison broke the tension by clapping his hands once.

“My boy came through.”

He looked at Kershaw.

“You owe me a hundred bucks, amigo.”

Part Two

Chapter Eleven

Inside the hunting trailer, Bruder pulled a can of compressed air from Kershaw’s tools and used it to freeze the blood and brains Claud had left on the wall.

He looked over at Connelly, who seemed to be taking his sweet time looking for the phone he’d been using with the Nora woman.

Bruder went back to the blood and brains and thought about what to do with Claud’s car. Someone would find the body, eventually, but if the Romanians came around he didn’t want any obvious signs they were a man down.

Better to keep them guessing.

He used his knife to scrape the frozen bits off the wall, then the edge of his boot to shove it down the ragged drain hole in the floor.

Done with that, he said, “What’s taking so long?”

“I didn’t think I’d need it again,” Connelly said without turning around.

It was a feeble dig, implicating Bruder and his demand that Connelly act like a professional and sever all communications with Nora.

Then Connelly straightened up with the old phone and SIM card and battery, separated but in the same plastic bag.

Bruder looked at it like it was radioactive. It went against every rule he had to still have the phone around, but Connelly and the other two convinced him it might be necessary.

Bruder had said, “If we need you to call her again for