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Xlibris US - Frank Hazard

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130 pages

English

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THE FATAL HEIST is a unique crime thriller as deftly plotted as it is tough, philosophically trenchant and suspenseful. Wolf, a professional thief, survives a violent police raid on an apartment where he and his colleagues, all criminals, have gathered to divide the money acquired during a bank robbery on the previous day. All of his colleagues are killed. Another colleague and thief, Duster, has appropriated the money in association with a corrupt police officer named Keyes.
Wolf seeks refuge in the apartment of his lover Rita, a disbarred lawyer, but he flees the apartment when several men arrive to murder him. As he eludes police and sinister criminals who intend to kill him, Wolf undertakes a desperate search for the stolen money and his dangerous quest involves beautiful women and dishonest cops, prostitutes, gangsters and dissolute thieves. There are vivid gun battles and relentless action sequences but there are also philosophical reflections that distinguish THE FATAL HEIST as a superior entertainment that will appeal to general audiences as much as it will challenge and fascinate the most fastidious readers.

Sujets

Fiction

Thrillers

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Publié par	Xlibris US
Date de parution	06 octobre 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781499060317
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

The Fatal Heist

Frank Hazard

Copyright © 2014 by Frank Hazard.

Library of Congress Control Number:
2014914953
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-4990-6033-1

Softcover
978-1-4990-6032-4

eBook
978-1-4990-6031-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 03/16/2023

Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
663425
CONTENTS
PART ONE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
PART TWO
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
PART THREE
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One

FOR

N.L.W.

Et in Arcadia ego

They cover their tracks well, the inner
ring that distributes murder.

Maxwell Anderson, Winterset

He who goes astray within himself does not have such a large territory in which to move; he soon perceives that it is a circle from which he cannot find an exit.

Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE

They met at dawn to divide the money, the five of them, but they began to worry when Max didn’t show up. Max had the money. The last they saw of him was the day before, after the robbery, in one of the get-away cars with Duster at the wheel. There had been three get-away cars – two were decoys.
They had been in the apartment a long time, since four o’clock or so, and the darkness outside the window was slowly turning gray-blue, with a few flakes of snow whirling down. Everybody was worried, especially about Max, but nobody said anything. Talk would cause bad luck. Louie was anxiously clasping his hands together and puffing on the cigarette that dangled from his skinny lips while his girl, Florence, was tensely seated beside him on the couch. It was her apartment. All the lights were turned off but even among the shadows Florence still looked good, wearing those tight jeans and that tight sweater. She would look better without any clothes on, Wolf thought, but he snapped his mind away from secret fantasies of the girl’s splendid body. He couldn’t afford to relax, not now, even to ease his tension somewhat. From where he was seated, keeping watch at the window, he could see the alley down below and, out front, part of the street and the coffee shop where Brady, on the look-out, was supposed to be. The apartment was on the third floor, at the rear of the dingy building – if necessary they could in an emergency get out the back way, through the basement door, or down the fire-escape and along the alley. Wolf didn’t want to over-react though. You had to keep calm. They had worked out a plan in case of an emergency but he kept telling himself that they wouldn’t have to use it. Max would show up. Or call. Duster was not somebody that you could altogether trust no matter how useful he was during a robbery, but chances were that Max would outsmart him if any trouble occurred between the two of them. It was too damn late, though, to get suspicious now. Outside the snow was beginning to come down faster. Max would show up. He was late but he would show up or call.
When there was a knock at the front door, Wolf instinctively and promptly reached for the gun in his coat pocket, as Florence and Louie jumped up from the couch and Louie held a gun in his hand, even though the knock conformed to the signal (two short beats, three long beats, two short beats) they had for safe entry agreed on.
Everybody was on edge, nervous.
Across the room, at the door, Vince looked over at Wolf, as if to ask what he should do.
“That’s the right signal,” Wolf said. “Take a look.”
Vince was skinny and short. He had an ovular face. And he had big round eyes, with bags under them, that seemed to get bigger and rounder in the dark apartment as he stared momentarily at Wolf, and blinked. The eyes when he blinked them disappeared among the shadows and then came back. And then Vince looked through the spy-hole in the door.
“It’s Brady,” he said.
“Let him in.”
“What the hell!” Louie scowled. “He’s not supposed to be back yet.”
Wolf said, “Calm down.” Louie was reliable most of the time, but he had a tendency to lose his temper when he was nervous, and this certainly wasn’t the moment for him to be throwing a tantrum. The situation was too crucial. “And put that damn gun down,” Wolf told him.
Florence went up to Louie and she put her hands on his shoulders. “Come on, Honey, relax.”
Wolf said, “Keep him quiet.”
“Don’t worry bout it,” she snapped.
Wolf didn’t like that tone of voice, but Louie responded to her. “You got to keep cool,” she told him, gently massaging his shoulders. Louie put the gun back in his pocket, frowning and mumbling obscenities under his breath, and he sat back down on the couch with the girl. She lighted another cigarette for him.
Across the room Brady, thick-set and tall, had come into the apartment and Vince closed the door and locked it behind him.
“What are you doing here?” Wolf asked sternly. “You’re still supposed to be on watch across the street.”
“I got tired of waiting,” said Brady. He looked like a big walrus standing there, with his thick glasses and moustache and big lips. His crumpled raincoat was too small for him. It was bunched at the shoulders and too short for him, with the bottom edge rumpled a couple of inches above his knees. There were snowflakes in his hair and on his shoulders and the thick lenses of his glasses. “Besides, the toilet is broken in that place across the street,” he said. “I’ve had four cups of coffee and I have to go to the can.”
“You should have called us first.”
“That’s right,” Vince said, his big eyes getting wider. “Wolf’s right.”
“You know the rules,” said Louie. “You should have called.”
“If I’d called you would have made me stay there,” Brady said. “What was I supposed to do – piss on the street?”
Each of them was supposed to take his turn for an hour keeping watch in the coffee shop across the street. In order to call the apartment and alert the others when Max and Duster showed up outside – or in case there was a chance or even the suspicion that something might go wrong, such as the police showing up unexpectedly. Louie had volunteered to go first, at four o’clock. Florence was exempted, because a good-looking girl alone in a coffee shop at that hour of the morning might have been mistaken for a whore and she just would have been harassed and distracted. Brady took his turn after Louie and Vince was next.
“It’s close to six now,” Wolf said to Brady. “You could have waited a few minutes.”
Vince said, “I’ll go over there now. I don’t mind being a little early.”
“If Max and Duster haven’t shown up by now,” Brady said, “I wonder if they’re going to show up at all.”
“Screw you, Brady,” said Louie, with tension bristled again in his voice.
Vince with his big round eyes glanced nervously at Wolf.
“I suppose we’ll find out sooner or later,” Wolf said calmly. “We’ll see.”
“You’re full of shit,” Florence said to Brady. “That’s a bunch of shit.”
He asked her bluntly, “Where’s the can?”
“It’s down the god damn hall by the bedroom,” she told him.
That awful surly tension remained in the room as Brady lumbered away down the hall and nobody said anything.
Outside the snow was falling more thickly, Wolf noticed when he glanced out the window. It was a mistake not to have anybody on the look-out across the street for such a long time, he thought. Where the hell was Max, had something gone wrong, why didn’t he call at least? The shadows in the apartment dissipated as dawn turned slowly into morning – you could even make out the outline of the shotgun on the coffee table and a few other weapons clustered around it formidably. You can’t jump to conclusions, Wolf told himself. Or over-react. There was nothing to worry about, not yet.
“Wolf?” Louie quietly asked, puffing a cigarette as Florence beside him on the couch rested her head on his shoulder and he gently stroked her hair. “Do you think there’s anything wrong, Wolf?”
“We’ll be all right.”
“You sure?”
“We’ll be all right.”
At the front door Vince, wide-eyed, was putting on a ratty overcoat. “I’m going across the street.”
“Be careful,” said Wolf.
“I wouldn’t be anything else.”
Brady came back from the bathroom zipping up his fly. “What the hell’s that?” he asked, pointing be