The Town: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

busted.” Frawley put his hands on his hips, his thighs and calves still stinging. “So what’s your call?”
    “Early call?” Dino sucked in a breath and joined Frawley in looking around. “It’s a good pick here. The holiday, the hundredth running of the marathon. Nice weather, a square full of hungry race fans. The bookstore, clothing stores across the street—though they’re mostly credit-card transactions. But the convenience store, the McDonald’s, that Espresso Royale coffee thing. Plus the Sox are in town, that ups the neighborhood restaurant and bar cash big time, over three days. Plus—Jesus—the nightclubs on Landsdowne Street. Their combined Saturday-Sunday takes?” Dino worked his tongue around the inside of his cheek. “I’m gonna go large here. With the vault, the night deposits, the ATM? Put me down for three and a quarter. Plus or minus ten percent, yeah, I’d say a good three and a quarter.”
    “I’m going three-five,” said Frawley, turning toward the open vault. “
Fuck,
I want these guys.”
    F RAWLEY NEEDED THE VAULT . The vault was his vic. Not the corporation that owned the bank, not the federal government that insured it and employed him. The vault: emptied and plaintive and violated. He needed the vault in the sameway that homicide detectives generate sympathy for the corpse to fuel their hunt.
    The safe-deposit room had not been touched. Drilling each individual box demanded a blind man’s patience and a lottery player’s devotion, a hundred-to-one gamble on finding anything of value that wasn’t insured and traceable.
    He moved through the open interior door into a well-maintained cash hold. Frawley sometimes found tellers’ jackets and umbrellas hanging inside vaults. He had seen vaults used as break rooms.
    Fingerprint dust coated the cabinets and doors. Only traveler’s checks, scores of torn, color-coded paper straps, and the manager’s tally sheets remained inside the forced cabinet. Frawley tried to shut the bent door with his elbow, the hinges whining as it crept open again.
    Six rigid bundles of cash had been set aside, left behind in a small, neat pile over the cash drawers. Frawley cracked open one of the short stacks of retired bills, finding a dye pack nestled in the hollow. He recognized the SecurityPac brand. Dye packs worked when removed from the bank’s premises, triggered by electronic transmitters hidden near the doors. The device was timed to delay detonation for twenty or more seconds, the pack burning at 400º Fahrenheit, too hot for the thief to grab and throw. It released an aerosol cloud of indelible red dye powder that turned note-passers into human smoke bombs, voiding currency and staining human skin for days. Less well-known was that many dye packs also emitted a small burst of incapacitating tear gas.
    He examined the drawers without touching them, empty but for the bait bills clipped together in the bottom of each slot. Bait bills were $10 or $20 notes whose denominations, series years, and serial numbers were recorded and kept on file by the bank, per federal deposit insurance regulations. This established a paper trail linking a suspect and the cash in his pocket to the crime scene.
    Many bait bills also contained a tracer in the form of a thin magnetic strip that, once removed from the drawer, triggered a silent alarm signal to police dispatch. Known as B-packs, these particular bait bills acted like tracking bugs, the same way a LoJack device works in a stolen automobile. Many counterjumpers, arrested at their home hours after what seemed to be a successful $1,200 job, never learned until their court date how it was that the FBI fingered them.
    With no carpet to absorb it, the bleach odor was dizzyingly potent, but Frawley remained inside as long as he could. He wished that the vault could beg him for justice. That it was someone whose hand he could take in a gesture of reassurance, offering a covenant, cop to vic. Then he wouldn’t have