Barely a Crime Read online

  They sat silently for several minutes, just relaxing, taking it in. They couldn’t see the river, but they could hear it. What they saw was the forest, and above the pines and aspens and junipers, the tops of the Rockies to the west, high and white-capped and purple in the distance under fat, white clouds.

  “You think this cabin is like your apartment, huh?” Crawl asked Brenna.

  “I like this neighborhood better,” she said.

  “Know what you should do?”

  “Hmmm.”

  Kieran thought, there it is again. Crawl’s going to tell her what she should do. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back and thought, instead, about how much he did like it here, listening to the birds calling and the insects clicking, and to how Brenna said, “Hmmm,” in that soft, special way.

  “You should get a picture of home,” Crawl said, “if that’s what you call that apartment you got. Take it with the camera you’ll buy after tomorrow. Download the picture into your new computer, which you’ll also buy. Then, when you get out on your new yacht. . .”

  She laughed and looked at Kieran, who still had his eyes closed. “Me and Kieran,” she said.

  Crawl barely paused. “Then you bring the shot up on your phone and look at it right there, in the middle of the Mediterranean. ‘Cause that’s where you’ll be if you’re smart, just off the coast of Italy. So you can look at the shot there, with a tall drink in your hand, and you can remember how in-the-toilet your life used to be. Before tomorrow happened.”

  Brenna laughed again.

  “No more Belfast for me,” Crawl said with a hard stare at the mountains. After a long moment, he looked at Brenna again. “I meant the part about Italy. You’ve got to see Italy, Bren.”

  “You liked Italy better than Ireland?”

  “It didn’t have factories,” Crawl said. “Not where we were. It was pretty, and it didn’t have people blowing each other up every two months.” He thought about it for a few seconds, then added, “I like it here, too, though. This is great country.”

  Kieran opened his eyes to rejoin them. “This is really nice,” he said. “I like it better here, in this spot, than Italy.” He stared at the Rockies and studied the sky. “Even the clouds don’t feel like moving,” he said. “Like they just want to stay where they are and enjoy things. Don’t make anything else happen.”

  “I might even buy the property between here and the river and build a house right down on the water,” Crawl said. “Just for vacations in the right season of the year.” He leaned forward, suddenly laughing, and jabbed Kieran’s arm. “But that would make it too easy, wouldn’t it, little brother? All teenage Jesus would have to do to find me is drive an hour from home, and, poof!. . . I’d be up in flames.”

  Michael arrived laughing and shouting nearly two hours after the others. He brought more food and drink, and two fluorescent lanterns. He also placed two heavy green backpacks against the wall by the door.

  There were bear hugs and more laughs, with a hard kiss on the cheek for Crawl, a hard handshake and hug for Kieran, and a gentler but firm handshake, and then a laughing hug and another hard kiss on the cheek, for the beautiful Brenna.

  For the next hour and ten minutes they sat grinning and talking around the table as they ate sandwiches and drank good, thick stout and told stories of Ireland the way it used to be and about California the way it was now. Then they shared a short but enjoyable showing of Michael’s prized few photographs of his wife, Sherri, and his only son, little Roddy, Crawl’s nephew.

  At six o’clock, the smiling stopped.

  Then there were maps, and more photographs, dozens of them, but not of Michael’s family. This time, of the doctor’s house, rising in the deep woods by a lake, of the highways in the area and the dirt road leading from the highway to the house. There was the doctor himself: a dozen long-lens shots like the one he had sent to Crawl’s e-mail, these taken both as the doctor arrived at and left from his office on two successive Fridays. The aunt was there, too, prim and proper, with a big gold cross hanging around her neck, shot as she exited her car at Marie’s school and shot driving past Michael with Marie in the passenger’s seat of her Lexus. And there was sixteen-year-old Marie Groves, as well, twenty-four shots in all, taken either with her Aunt Leah or with students outside of her school. Black hair, short. Alert expression. Soft-looking around her eyes, harder-looking in the set of her thin lips. Only smiling in one photo—one in twenty-four—taken as she ran down the steps at school with two other girls.

  “You’ve already got copies of a few of these,” Michael said. He put the maps in one pile and the photos in three separate piles. “But we’ll look through them again to make sure there aren’t any questions or concerns.”

  “Take us through them,” Crawl said.

  Brenna noticed that Kieran’s right knee was bobbing steadily and that he was still staring at the photographs of the girl, not the maps. She reached to rest her hand on his.

  “This,” Michael said, pointing to a circle drawn on the map in red, “is where we are now. By this river and little lake.” His finger traced a line to the highway, then around several long curves on the highway and up a smaller line representing a dirt road with another lake. There was another circle, also in red. “Forty miles,” he said, “the man’s house.”

  He pulled out several close-up photos of the house and the parking area in front of it, then two of the lake behind the house. “Bruce Lake,” he said. “They live on the west shore. Another house is down in this direction, but that won’t come into play.”

  “How do we make sure?” Crawl said.

  “People are gone. They had some workers setting it up for summer, boat in the lake kind of stuff, but they’re all done. People won’t be back for a week at least, guaranteed.”

  His hand swept over the map. “All this,” he said, “is mountains and woods. A few campers, rangers, whatever. A few hikers, maybe, watching out for brown bears, which is the kind you want to stay away from. Black, you say ‘boo’ and they go away. Brown bears eat you for lunch.”

  “Black, boo. Browns, lunch,” Crawl said, smirking. He winked at Kieran, who looked at him but didn’t change his concerned expression.

  “The doc and this old couple own the only private property for about ten miles. There’s a ranch south of here, but it’s way out of the picture. And no cabins like this one, not on Bruce Lake, which is about three-quarters of a mile across at its widest and pretty long. End to end, about a mile and a quarter, something like that.”

  His finger traced sideways across the map, moving slowly on a line from the doctor’s house to State Highway 10. “Now this little thread here is very important to our future well-being,” he said. “This is Ridge Road. And this, this point right here, is where we get the girl.” He let them ponder the spot his finger pointed to for a long moment, withdrew his finger, then continued. “Cells are dicey, territory like this, so I have radios for us too, just in case.”

  “He can still make a transfer of the money, though, right?” Brenna said.

  “He doesn’t have to get out. He has a satellite dish as big as a lake,” Michael said. “Phones, web, whatever.”

  “How’d you get detail on him and the place?” Crawl asked.

  “Realtor. Wanted me to know I’d be safe when I bought my next house from him.”

  Crawl nodded.

  Michael noticed that Kieran was looking at the photographs again. Looking at the girl, Marie. Looking sad.

  “So anyway,” he said, “the radios are good for keeping us in touch with one another if we need them. Then Ridge Road runs past this point, a mile or so from where we get the girl, and right here this private road goes three, four hundred yards back to the man’s house. Right here. By the lake.”

  He studied Kieran again, just for a few seconds, then said, quietly, “You’re right, Kieran. The girl looks like your sister, Colleen.”

  Brenna pressed forward.

  Crawl whispered, “Yeah
. She does.”

  Kieran said quietly, as if in a trance, “Not really. Her face is different. This one is thinner. And she looks twelve years old. Her hair isn’t as long.”

  “Right,” Michael said. “All in all, she’s a pretty average kid, I guess. Independent. I guess she would be, from the looks of the aunt, anyway. Kids at her school confirm she’s kept on a pretty tight rope at home, so probably has to make do on her own, you know? But there’s nothing you have to worry about as far as holding her for a few days.” He smiled. “No black belts or anything.”

  “You talked with kids at her school?” Crawl asked, showing surprise.

  “I said I was the owner of a photo gallery down in Albuquerque, there to talk to the school about getting some of their graduation picture business. It was easy. Kids like to talk about other kids, like it’s all good gossip. And they all know about Aunt Leah.” He pulled out two photos of the aunt. “They’ve got names for her: Hell-a-Leah, saying it like Halleluiah. And Fire Ant. Stuff like that. She drops the girl off in the morning, picks her up after school. You know the routine.”

  Crawl said. “Yeah, we do. So let’s look at the road again, where we borrow her for awhile. You got photos of that, right?” Michael nodded and spread them out.

  At the spot where they would take the girl, the road looked like a dry riverbed running between walls of pines that rose up like cliffs on both sides. Michael pointed out just one break in the trees along the stretch where they would grab the girl, and that, he said, was just a marshy area with standing water.

  “Tomorrow night,” Michael said, “after the shopping and all, the girl and her aunt will get to our spot about seven o’clock, give or take twenty minutes, just to be safe.” He was tracing his finger over the point of the abduction. He said, “That would put us in place by 6:40 at the latest.”

  Crawl looked at Brenna, then at Kieran, then at his brother, Michael. “So, have we been over that part enough in the last two weeks?”

  Three nods.

  “No questions? Problems? Anything we need to go over one more time?”

  “Don’t worry about us,” Kieran said.

  Crawl said, “Good. And even if the kid or the aunt screams loud enough that the doc hears them from way down at the house, all it’ll do is heighten the effect, you know? Make him all the more desperate. So don’t try to stop them if they scream.”

  Michael said, “We’ll take her screaming.”

  Brenna said, “She probably will be.”

  “And take her without hurting her,” Kieran said.

  Michael smiled. “Oh, hell, no.”

  “Make sure we don’t hurt her.”

  Michael said, still grinning, “We wouldn’t do that, would we, Bren?”

  Brenna said, “No need. And the aunt will be screaming all the way back to the house, so you guys will hear her coming.”

  “Just make sure about grabbing her keys,” Crawl said. “Make sure when she goes back to the house, she’s walking. Don’t let her follow you out of there.” Then he thought for a second and added, “Is the girl gonna be throwin’ up?”

  Brenna said, “Throwing up?”

  “Morning sickness. When do they start throwin’ up?”

  “Sherri puked at about three or four weeks, I think,” Michael said.

  “I don’t clean it up if she’s puking,” Crawl said, looking at Brenna.

  Kieran’s gaze rose from the photo of the girl to settle critically on Crawl. “Seven and a half million dollars on the table, probably a life sentence if we’re caught, and what? We’re going to sit here and worry about who cleans the floor?”

  Michael raised his hand and rose, grinning broadly, from the table. “I agree with the young man from Belfast,” he boomed.

  Suddenly, laughing, he hurried across the room.

  Crawl, seeing where his brother was going, smiled and pulled his chair closer to the table.

  Michael picked up the two green backpacks that he had placed near the door and said, walking back with the packs held high, “Let’s talk toys, instead.”

  Slowly, without sitting down, he bent over the table, opened the first of the two backpacks and carefully unwrapped a stainless steel Heckler & Koch 9mm compact automatic handgun. “Insurance,” he whispered. “More than we’ll ever need, but. . .” He picked up the weapon and held it in his open palm. “It’s the only way to shop.”

  He placed the gun on the table and unwrapped another, this time a black H&K .40 caliber.

  Kieran glanced uneasily at Brenna.

  She was smiling even wider than Michael.

  The third weapon was another black H&K .40 caliber. The last, another stainless steel 9mm.

  “I want one of the silver ones,” Brenna said as soon as the fourth weapon touched the table.

  “Beautiful,” Crawl said, reaching for the first of the silver 9mm H&Ks.

  Brenna picked up the second 9mm and weighed it in her hand. Her eyebrows arched, as if she were surprised to discover how heavy a gun really is. Another smile, this time nodding.

  Kieran said, “I never knew you liked guns.”

  Brenna shrugged. “I never held one,” she said quietly. “But I don’t mind it.”

  Michael took a .40 caliber and snapped the bolt back hard, testing the action.

  Brenna saw what Michael had done and tried it herself. The first time her fingers slipped off, and she giggled. The second time, she made it happen.

  Kieran picked up the last of the weapons, the other black .40 caliber. He checked the weight. He slipped his finger around the trigger. He worked the safety several times with his thumb. He checked the action. He put the gun down.

  He glanced at Brenna. He glanced at Crawl. He glanced once again at the photo of Marie Groves.

  Under the table, his knee was bobbing fast.

  It was nearly dusk. Crawl and Michael had gone to the river to visit and, they said, to talk over old times.

  Maybe to make their own plans in secret was the way Brenna saw it, and she said so to Kieran after the brothers left.

  “You’re talking crazy,” he told her. They were sitting at the table, side by side. He was pulled back farther from the table than Brenna, with his legs crossed. “What’s gotten into you?”

  “What do you mean, gotten into me?”

  He shifted his weight and uncrossed his legs. “Nothing.” He crossed his legs again, this time with the left leg on top. “But where’s that come from, ‘Maybe they’re plotting something’ down by the river?”

  “I didn’t say ‘plotting something.’ ”

  “What’d you say?”

  She waited several seconds before answering, then chose her words carefully, speaking softly. “I just think we have to remember, this is all I’m saying, that there’s seven and a half million, real, live, U.S. dollars in this.” She began to peel the label off her empty bottle of stout. “I didn’t mean plotting.” She sucked in her lower lip, held it with her teeth for just a second, then released it and said, “I’m sorry.”

  “He’ll always be my brother,” Kieran said. “As close to one as I’ll ever get, anyway.”

  “I said I’m sorry.” She slid the bottle away and reached for her H&K. “Everything is planned really good, and we’re all on top of it, and it’s going to be fine.” Picking the gun up, she slid the chamber open, then let it snap shut. Aiming it at her empty bottle, she pulled the trigger.

  “I don’t think we should load those,” Kieran said, studying her.

  “Oh, God, Kiero.” She laughed and shook her head. “We’re so past that question.” She put down the gun, slid her chair nearer and leaned to slide her arm around his shoulder. “This guy has guns. He doesn’t have any bodyguards watching his house, he must have guns. Everybody living in these mountains has to have guns.”

  “I didn’t say he hasn’t got guns.”

  “He’s got the witch driving around in a car all by herself, driving all through the backcountry with a kid to protect, she’s p
robably got one herself; one in the house, one in her car. At least. One for each of them in the car, how do we know?”

  “I didn’t say we shouldn’t have the weapons. I just said I’m not sure about loading them.”

  “Michael’s even talking about bears that eat us for lunch. We hadn’t even figured on that.”

  “I just said I don’t see why we have to load them. You really think we need that? You show it, that’s all you have to do.”

  “Show it to a bear?” she said.

  They stared at each other in silence for nearly a minute. Then she smiled warmly. Her hand started rubbing his shoulder.

  “Tell me about the teenage Jesus,” she said, murmuring softly. Her smile faded but didn’t quite leave the corners of her lips. “What you and Crawl were talking about.”

  He exhaled in a soft laugh and shook his head. “That was nothing.”

  Her free hand moved to take hold of his wrist. She whispered, “Hey,” very softly.

  Kieran tightened his jaw for several seconds. Then he said, “This is all so damned weird, Bren. Don’t you think it is?”

  “Teenage Jesus.”

  He cleared his throat and shrugged. “Just something that popped into mind. Crawl and I were talking about it for about ten seconds back in Italy. I said, we do this, maybe a teenage Jesus would show up someday, come to find us, and he wouldn’t be happy.”

  Brenna closed her eyes and laughed out loud. “I’m sorry,” she said, suddenly forcing herself to stop. Then she giggled again and lowered her head. “But that’s really funny, Kiero.”

  He laughed too, but just with a breath, briefly. “That’s what Crawl thought.”

  She shook her giggle away and said, “I’m sorry. Really.”

  “I wasn’t serious about it. But you know? It says things, about when he comes again.”

  “Jesus or Crawl?” She laughed again.

  “Don’t laugh, Bren, c’mon. You said nobody ever took you much to church, but it talks about trumpets going off and time slamming to a stop and all, you know what I mean? I’m just saying, it might be a shaky thing to be screwing around with.”

  Brenna said, “The weird part I see coming is, if the doctor does pull it off, she’ll deliver a freak baby. Probably D.O.A. That blood is older than dirt.”