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

the sawhorses were still there, taking up enough room to block both parking spots.

“Well, what the hell then?”

Jim walked around the front corner and stared at the spot where the Cherokee should be.

Had Carol left while he was taking out the compost?

No, she would have taken the Ford.

He looked north, toward town, and saw nothing.

He looked south and saw a tractor parked on the side of the road, about a hundred yards away, an angular lump in the settling gray of night.

Well, that hadn’t been there before, when he looked out and saw the Lexus going by.

He went inside and got the deer shiner, forgetting to put the empty bowl down.

Carol was just putting the rolls on the table.

She picked up on Jim’s focus.

“Coyotes?”

“The damn Cherokee is gone,” he said.

She blinked a few times.

“What?”

But he was already out the front door and she followed him, across the yard to the south.

She glanced at the driveway and sure enough, the Cherokee was missing.

“Jim?”

He got to the edge of their grass and hit the spotlight and put it on an orange Kubota tractor squatting in the field, just off the road.

“What’s that doing there?” Carol said.

“No idea. It’s the Albrecht’s, right?”

“Oh, I think so.”

Jim moved the beam to point toward the Albrecht property, much too far away to be seen, even in broad daylight.

“What the hell is going on down there?”

“Jim, the Cherokee’s gone.”

“I know, I know. Where’s the damn phone?”

The Romanian driving Nora’s car pulled into a short driveway blocked by an eight-foot gate.

A pickup truck faced them from the other side, its bumper touching the gate.

In case anyone tried to ram their way through, Connelly supposed.

The driver opened the door and put one foot out, just enough to stick his head above the roof and yell something.

Another man—Connelly thought he might be the one from the road, with the machine gun, but couldn’t be sure—came around the corner of a squat block and steel building to the right of the gate.

He laughed and said something in Romanian, then backed the pickup away from the gate.

By then the truck behind Connelly had arrived, and the bulky driver shuffled past to push the gate open.

As they pulled through the driver pointed through the windshield.

“You recognize those?”

Connelly looked at the armored car, dumped next to the pickup truck they’d sent rolling across a field. The two bodies were still in the bed.

“Yeah, I do.”

No point in lying about it.

They sat there while the other pickup came in behind them, the two men outside the car talking and glaring in at Connelly while they closed the gate and put the truck back in place against it.

The driver pulled to the right and drove toward a bland house in the back left corner.

He said, “You shot them?”

Connelly shook his head.

“No, not me.”

“What about Claudiu? Did you kill him?”

This, maybe he could lie about.

“I don’t know who that is.”

“No?”

The driver was getting antsy, pulling on the steering wheel.

Connelly got the feeling the guy knew these were their last moments alone before Razvan took over, and he might be working himself up to get some shots in before it was too late.

He turned toward the driver and scratched his chin with the hand holding the remote for the explosive charge.

“No, who is Claudiu?”

The driver glanced at the remote and gave a sour grin, knowing what Connelly was doing.

“You’re going to be sorry, my friend.”

“Sorry? Why? I thought we were doing a trade here, nobody gets hurt.”

They stopped in front of the house, next to the truck Razvan had used to drive Nora away.

The front door opened and Razvan was there, ducking down to look out at them.

The driver said, “Sure, you’re right. Everything is fine.”

He popped the trunk and got out.

Connelly leaned over to unclip his seatbelt and said, just loud enough for the open radio, “Hurry hurry hurry.”

Chapter Nineteen

Sheriff Wern was eating a cold takeout dinner from Len’s in his office and thought he was at the end of a long, insane day when he heard Dispatch put the word out about Jim Thorensen’s Jeep Grand Cherokee going missing.

Dispatch, currently a woman named Beth, went on to say, “Jim also told me he saw a man driving Nora Albrecht’s car, the Lexus, but she hasn’t reported that stolen.”

Wern thought about that.

Jim Thorensen, who lived next to Nora Albrecht, who seemed to be the focal point of Razvan’s efforts to get his property back.

Wern had gathered that much when Razvan told him he didn’t need the checkpoints at the crossroads and along the highways anymore, and if anyone around the Albrecht property called in about noise, he should ignore them.

“What kind of noise?” Wern had asked.

“Just ignore them,” Razvan told him.

And now Jim Thorensen’s Cherokee was missing, and some guy was driving Nora’s car around.

Should he ignore that?

They didn’t get many stolen vehicles around town.

The ones they did get were almost always a misunderstanding or a dumbass kid trying to impress a girl or prove a point to their parents.

But this was different, he knew.

He got on the radio.

“Copy that, Dispatch. One-two, what’s your twenty?”

This was Officer Hennig.

“One-two, I’m at the motel, domestic disturbance.”

Again?

If they weren’t careful, Ed and Barbara were going to burn that place down someday.

He told Hennig, “When you’re done there take a drive out to Jim Thorensen’s and take a look at the Albrecht place.”

“What am I looking for?”

“Oh, just trouble of any sort.”

“Plenty of that to go around today.”

“I’ll sign off on that, for damn sure. One-four, what about you?”

Unit One-Four, Donaldson, came back: “Two miles west of town, speed trap in the median.”

Wern said, “Do me a favor, take a look up Pine, to the intersection with 64th. Keep an eye out for the missing Cherokee.”

Donaldson had been out there with one of the Romanians during the whole lockdown and had told Wern he wasn’t going to shoot anybody, no matter what the Romanian said, unless his or another resident’s life was in danger.

Meaning, if the Romanian got