Urqell had not acted on the manager’s suspicion because it was Joe Tortelli’s policy to regard the police as an enemy and to avoid giving them a reason to become suspicious of any of his enterprises, even though most of them were, these days, legit. With Tortelli back on home base, Urqell informed him of the manager’s report and wanted to know what he should do.
“Go have a look,” Tortelli said. “Take some guys with you. If these bomb-throwin’ cowboys used the place, they won’t be there now, but we’ve got to get out in front of the story.”
Urqell and the three guys who went with him found the armored truck, the van painted to look like a Colt-Thompson support vehicle, and the very ripe body of the third guard, missing for fifteen days.
By Wednesday morning, the bombing-heist saga, which had faded somewhat from the news, was once more the top story.
93
Three hundred miles from the city, in a neighboring state, Lucas Drackman, Smaller, and Tilton were holed up in a comfortable house on a 210-acre farm, long fallow, that he had bought years previously in case he ever needed it for this purpose.
If their original plan had unfolded as intended, they would never have left the city. The authorities would have had no clue as to the identities of the perpetrators. As soon as Smaller had opened the armored door with a cutting torch and they had gotten their hands on the 1.6 million in cash, they could have gone directly back to the house overlooking Riverside Commons.
The Japanese swish on the park bench should have suggested to Drackman that their scheme might not unfold precisely as designed. But by then, they were on the cusp of action, and he believed that victory never favored the hesitant.
After the heist, in the Quonset hut, they had a police-band radio, an ordinary radio, and a TV to monitor the breaking news. Smaller hadn’t quite breached the thick door when Fiona called their attention to the TV. A reporter stood outside First National, talking to a disheveled woman with bits of debris in her hair, a bank teller who had been at work when the bombs went off.
“A little boy, a little Negro boy,” she said. “He shouted there was a bomb, we should get out. I thought it was a prank, then I knew it wasn’t. He saved my life. I dropped to the floor behind my window, the teller’s window, so I was protected.”
“A boy?” the reporter pressed. “Is he here now, do you see him now, this boy?”
She shook her head, and her voice quaked with emotion. “No. He was hurt bad. I thought he was dead. Like the girl. The girl … she was dead, it was horrible. This other boy was kneeling beside him. I tried to take him out of there with me, the white boy, I mean, but he said his friend was still alive, he couldn’t leave him.”
“His friend?” the reporter asked.
“The little Negro boy. Jonah. The other boy, he said, ‘Jonah’s still alive, I can’t leave him.’ ”
Drackman might have killed Tilton at that moment, right there in the Quonset. But when he had looked at my father, he’d seen genuine shock. He’d decided against a hasty execution.
Standing beside Drackman, Fiona had said ominously, “Juju.”
The occult interested Lucas Drackman. “Juju? Voodoo? What’re you talking about?”
“Jonah. Jonah Kirk. I should have smashed his monkey face that first day. He’s a weird little freak. He believes in juju. He has a metal box full of wangas.” When she saw that Drackman didn’t know the word, she described my collection of interesting junk as I would not have thought to define it: “Wangas. Charms. And fetishes—objects that are supposed to possess supernatural power.”
Now, Wednesday morning, sixteen days later, Drackman, Smaller, and my father were sitting around the kitchen table in the farmhouse, talking about the coming revolution, when the TV news reported that the Colt-Thompson truck and the missing—and murdered—guard had been found, though of course the 1.6 million in cash was long gone.
For days, Tilton had argued against ever going back to the city. Drackman had remained adamant: “We have a score to settle. Unless you don’t have the guts. No one’s immune if they’re in the way of the Cause, brother.” Smaller vacillated on the issue, but he had so long been steeped in paranoia that he tended to side with Drackman most of the time. Finally Tilton accepted the inevitability of the venture.