Thick as Thieves Read Online Free PDF Page A

bed at night with images of sobbing widows in his head, and big-eyed orphans turned out in the cold? Takes the joy from living, don’t it? So it’s black money only I go for. There’s plenty of that lying about, and it leaves you with a nice clean conscience afterward.”
    Carr peered at Declan through smoke and his own drunken haze, still waiting for the punch line. “So, you rob from the rich and give to …?”
    “Myself, Mr. Carr. And it’s rich shites I rob from—drug runners, gunrunners, whore runners, human smugglers, kidnappers—the very worst swine. I’ve lightened the till on all of them.”
    Carr pulled on his beer, but it didn’t help to anchor him. “I can’t imagine they’re very happy about it,” he said finally. “And they’ve got plenty of firepower of their own, and no hesitation using it.”
    “That they do.” Declan laughed. “But the upside is they don’t go whining to the
polizei
either, except maybe to the ones they’ve got on payroll. And when it comes to security, they tend to go for quantity, not quality, if you know what I mean. Heavy stuff, lots of tech sometimes, but not subtle, and typically with some very large blind spots. And, of course, the boys and me are stealthy bastards—they don’t know we exist until we’re over the threshold, and then it’s in fast, out fast, and clear out of town. We don’t leave footprints, and we never—but never—fish the same stream twice.”
    “Security in obscurity,” Carr recited—an old lesson that he knew was only sometimes true. “So what’s the downside of your business?”
    “What you’d expect: people get cross, they brood over things, they have long memories, and if they catch you they’ll kill you all kinds of dead—by which time death will seem like a mercy. But like I said, we’re dead sneaky: never been pinched; never come close. We’re phantoms, Mr. Carr—black cats tippy-toeing in the black night.”
    The smoke that swirled around the room seemed to fill Carr’s head. “I’ve got to have a talk with Teddy Voigt. I don’t know what he’s been telling you about me, but I—”
    Declan laughed again. “Teddy said you might be just the ticket.”
    “The ticket to what?”
    “To bigger and better, Mr. Carr—a step up in the league tables.”
    “I’m not following.”
    “I’m running a nice enough carnival now. I’ve got a strongman, a fire-eater, a boy who bites the heads off chickens, and I’m the barker that keeps it all going. Our show does fine, Mr. Carr, a reliable money-spinner, but it’s still just a carnival, and I’ve got bigger plans. I want me a full-blown circus, with three feckin’ rings and a fat box office every show. But for that I need a ringmaster: someone to sort out the elephants and monkeys, and stuff the clowns in their wee cars. Someone to make sure the trapeze girl doesn’t land in the lion’s cage, you see? You understand, Mr. Carr, I need a planner, an organizer. Teddy says that’s you.”
    Carr’s mind was stuttering, and organization was the last thing on it. He could muster no more than an adolescent shrug, but Declan had momentum enough for both of them.
    “Teddy says you’ve got an engineer’s eye for operations—a talent for breaking big problems into bite-size ones, for finding the shortest paths and the points of failure, and coming up with contingencies and fallbacks. He says—”
    “Teddy’s talking out of school. He should know better.”
    The smile widened on Declan’s chipped red face, and he ran a hand over his thinning hair. His eyes were cold and probing through the smoke. “He says that you’re careful too—that you always pack the belt
and
the suspenders. Caution is a virtuous thing in a planner.”
    Carr could never put his finger on just when he’d begun to take Declan seriously, to believe that his talk of robbers and ringmasters was more than just drunken digression, or the overture to some elaborate scam. Maybe it was in the long