Burn (Michael Bennett 7)

“They went down that hall for the basement vault maybe ten minutes ago,” he said in hushed panic. “Be careful. They have guns. Machine guns, it looked like. I believe they’re still down there.”

CHAPTER 95

I HANDED HIM THE knife to free the others as Arturo, Robertson, Brooklyn, and three other cops followed me toward the hall. Beyond an empty office was a stairwell that went down to a half-flight landing and then made a blind turn.

“Mike, this is nuts, man,” Arturo whispered, wiping his sweaty hand on his jeans before retightening his grip on his Glock. “We can’t handle machine guns, can we? Shouldn’t we get ESU for this?”

I put a finger to my lips before I tiptoed down the stairs and waited by the turn in the stairs, listening carefully. The only thing I could hear was the muffled clang of alarms still going off outside, so I shot a quick peek around the corner.

At the bottom of the stairs, a pudgy thirty-something black bank guard sat gagged and duct-taped like the folks upstairs. As I stared at him from up the half flight of stairs, showing him my shield, I thought he might indicate with his eyes where the still-unseen thieves were in relation to him. But he only stared at me in terror as he tried to say something through the gag of tape.

I finally went down the last flight of stairs over the barrel of the shotgun. Past the neutralized guard was the thick steel door of a huge floor-to-ceiling vault. It was wide open. The vault filled the basement space, and I could tell immediately that it was empty. The thieves were gone.

“Where’d they go?” I said to the guard as Arturo cut his hands free and helped him take the gag off his mouth.

“They got something from the vault and went back up the stairs,” the guard said between hyperventilating breaths.

“How long ago?” I said.

“Five, maybe six minutes.”

I stared at him as I hurriedly thought about that. The manager upstairs would have seen them leave through the front. But he hadn’t. He thought they were still down here.

“Brooklyn, Robertson,” I said. “They must have gone up the stairs and left out the back of the bank somehow. Get up there and check.”

They ran back up the stairs, and I poked my head into the vault and

looked down at its floor, thinking I’d see it completely trashed like at the first jewelry store. But it was surprisingly clean. There was nothing on the concrete floor. Everything was as neat as a pin.

Everything except for one small anomaly.

Above and a little to the right of center of the wall of steel triple-key safe-deposit boxes, a small box—little bigger than an apartment house mailbox—stood open. Its stainless-steel door was scratched up and mangled, hanging off one hinge.

I clicked on a small flashlight from my belt and walked over and played its beam over the interior of the empty metal slot.

“What the hell?” Arturo said. “These guys knock over two diamond stores and then they come in here for this one little bank box? Was it a special kind of diamond in there, maybe?”

“Maybe it wasn’t diamonds,” I said. “Maybe it was never about diamonds at all.”

We stood there dumbfounded for another ten seconds, thinking about that.

“OK, I’ll say it if you won’t,” Arturo finally said. “What in the hell could have been in that little box?”

CHAPTER 96

THE THIEVES HADN’T FLED out the back of the bank, we quickly learned.

They’d exited through the bank’s ceiling.

It was Arturo who found the rope ladder in the bank’s janitor closet. Though it looked like it was from a child’s swing set, it was surprisingly sturdy when I went up it into what looked like a vacant office on the bank building’s second floor. My eyes went directly to an open window, outside of which I could see scaffolding extending from the construction site to the east of the bank.

Arturo and I went back down the ladder and sprinted out of the bank and past a middle-aged Hispanic guard into the five-story construction site. I cursed and immediately started running when I saw that the site went all the way through the block to Forty-Sixth Street.

“Hey, you see anybody come through here in the last twenty minutes or so?” I yelled at a thinner, younger, and more bored-looking version of the Forty-Seventh Street guard.

He squinted as he began picking at his teeth with his pinkie.

“Just those three messenger dudes,” he said as he wiped his pinky on the lap of his cheap rent-a-cop pants.