Mal sat behind the wheel of the Cadillac hearse he used to haul his equipment, watching a pair of guards wheel a cart loaded with sacks of cash onto the loading dock. Stu unlocked the back of the armored truck. When the guards had their heads in the truck, Stu jerked his chin at Mal.
Time to go.
Only Pete and Stu knew part of the take now resided in Mal’s disappearing cabinet. It had been easy to pull off: stopping by the money room for a palaver, parking the dolly with the cabinet outside the door, keeping the guards laughing while Stu slid bags in the secret compartment, wheeling the cabinet to the hearse and humping it into the back as if it were nothing more than a cheap stage prop.
Stage one had been diverting the cash. Now for stage two, getting it away from the club.
Mal turned the key in the ignition and put the hearse in gear, his senses hyper-alert as he eased down the drive to Route 27 five minutes ahead of the truck’s scheduled departure. The truck would turn north on its regular route. Mal turned south. If he escaped notice for the next twenty minutes, he’d be scot-free.
The country road grew pitch black as he pulled away, the narrow slice of his headlights blinding him to everything else. If Dalitz was smart, he’d have a second crew of goons waiting on the south road in case Pete re-routed his truck. In the black void surrounding him, they’d be invisible until it was too late.
Mal felt his heart beating like it hadn’t since his days picking pockets under the nose of the Garda, when a fumbled dip or the unexpected turn of a head would mean a beating.
The road rose and fell in gentle rolls. Mal searched the side of the road, looking for a telltale glint, a reflection, movement, something to let him know someone was there. He wouldn’t find them on the rises, where they’d be silhouetted against the sky. Instead, he focused on the dells and copses while keeping a steady rate of speed to suggest he wasn’t looking for anything at all.
Three miles from the club, he’d almost decided they weren’t there when he caught a flicker of movement up on the left, a shaking branch on the edge of a copse. He maintained his speed, splitting his attention between the road and the trees, expecting a car full of goons to come roaring out.
He counted, topping the next rise at five. His was the only motor he heard. When he reached ten, he exhaled, not realizing until then he’d stopped breathing.
At the count of twenty, Mal reached McMurtry’s farm and relaxed. McMurtry managed to hang onto his cows during the recession, but he’d never recovered and the place showed it. Mal drove another seven miles with nothing to set off alarm bells, then wheeled the Caddy onto the track to the barn where he built his tricks.
Unlike most barns in the area, this one had a cellar below a wood floor. He stashed the money bags and parked the hearse on top of the trapdoor.
Pete had skimmed as much as he dared, wanting to look like a slow night, not wanting the goons to realize he was shorting them. That was twenty grand Dalitz wouldn’t get his paws on.
Now that their experiment had worked, they’d slowly increase the skim to make it look like business was going down the tubes. And they needed a solid plan for what to do with the money to keep it hidden. The barn was fine for overnight, but it wouldn’t do for long term.