Dale Conley series Box Set 2 Page 3

  The city’s nerves were still rattled, Felix reasoned, in the aftermath of the earthquake. Though life was returning to normal in San Francisco, the people moving about the streets had a dazed look in their eyes. Everything was wrong. And not just the crumbling buildings. There was something in the air. As if the damage was going to linger there forever.

  When the coast was clear, Felix crossed the street.

  He tipped his hat at an elderly lady, stuck his hands in his pockets, and tried to be as nonchalant as possible as he gazed at the bank a few storefronts down. It was one of Abe Ruef’s banks, and Felix’s new acquaintance, Mr. Jones, had helped him locate it.

  Ruef. And his corruption. The earthquake had taken so very much from the city. Ruef made it worse. And threatened to erase the disaster’s true impact from history.

  Felix wasn’t going to let that happen.

  It was still broad daylight. Lunchtime. He would come back tonight.

  And rob Ruef’s bank. Make a statement.

  Ruef wasn’t going to silence those people forever. Not if Felix could do anything about it.

  Chapter Five

  His name was El Vacío.

  The Shadow.

  Not his birth name, of course. That one was neither important nor regarded.

  The new name had come to him via reputation, and it was all he needed. He’d even developed an intriguing symbol from the initials. One swift flourish of the hand. Down, up, side to side.

  The waves were gentle. As best he could tell, it was some time around ten in the morning. The sun was starting to get warmer, giving just the slightest feeling of discomfort to his bare legs and chest, and he could feel the bridge of his nose begin to sweat slightly under his sunglasses. The canvas of the beach chair was dried out after years in the sun, and the equally sun-kissed wooden frame creaked as he adjusted his weight.

  In front of him, the Pacific was deserted but for a lone freight ship far out toward the horizon, leaving the port in Tumaco. On either side of him was visible the thick Colombian jungle that surrounded his property. When he wasn’t working, he enjoyed an isolated existence. But he kept civilization nearby. His work required it. He was a few kilometers south of Tumaco—its airport and resources a short distance away. If he needed more, Pasto—a city twice as large as Tumaco—was farther to the east. He was close to the Ecuadorian border, making it easy for him to leave the country and disappear into international anonymity. Once in Ecuador, he was only a short distance from a major metropolis, Quito. He had a stratified hierarchy of cities that he could utilize.

  Tumaco, Pasto, Quito.

  Big, bigger, biggest.

  He rested his arm on the small table beside him. His fingers were wrapped around a Mexican beer, and his forearm lay on a large, unopened envelope stamped AIR MAIL that the courier boy had delivered. It had sat there for a while. He was in no hurry to open it, even if the sender had rushed the package to him. The beer bottle was cold against his palm, and the lime slice still sat in the top of the neck, waiting.

  With his other hand he pinched at his scar. An idle habit of his. The scar was on the left side of his neck. Four inches long and an inch across. Large, but he was still able to hide it with makeup. Alternatively, it was low enough that a big collar could conceal most of it.

  Otherwise his entire visage was perfectly nondescript. He wasn’t particularly handsome, but he certainly wasn’t ugly. In addition to the scar on his neck, his face had an overall patina of wear-and-tear from years in his line of work—sleeping in vehicles in below-zero conditions, squinting in the desert sun, absorbing fists and boards and broken beer bottles. His body was wrought with hard, tight muscle. Yet he wasn’t bulky. Put him in a suit or a T-shirt and jeans, throw him into a crowd on a city street, and you’d never see him.

  His complexion was slightly olive, eyes brown, and hair a dark but not too dark brown. He could pass as Iberian. Or Italian. Or Balkan. And yet with the right clothes, the right demeanor, he’d blend in just as easily in Britain. Romania. Estonia. Bulgaria. People saw in him what they wanted. He was a blank canvas for their projections.

  Which worked out perfectly for El Vacío.

  He thumbed the lime into the bottle. The beer hissed out a few bubbles, and he took a swig, letting it slowly slide down his throat. He set the bottle down and finally gave his attention to the large envelope. He grabbed a shell fragment from the sand and slid it under the envelope’s fold, tore along the edge, then took out the contents. A small stack of papers. On top was a large black-and-white photo. A surveillance picture.

  A man in his late twenties. Shaggy hair. Square glasses. It was Jonathan Fair of the Irish crime family in San Francisco.

  Well, now. This was certainly going to be interesting.

  Chapter Six

  “‘Go with Beau,’” Dale said, reading from a framed image that hung in the office. It was a red-white-and-blue political campaign sign, the kind that’s stuck in front yards and stapled to telephone poles.

  San Francisco District Attorney Beau Lawton stood beside his mahogany desk, which was covered with folders, books, stacks of paper. There was a collection of diplomas and certificates hanging on the wall to the left of the desk, and on the other side were shelves full of legal texts. Flanking the desk was a pair of flags—one U.S. and one California.

  Lawton had the dashing looks of a Golden Age Hollywood leading man—Cary Grant with bigger hair, streaked gray in the temples and sideburns. Though he was highly polished and smelled of cologne and mouth wash, Dale got the sense that the man was a tenacious worker. His suit pants were dark brown with flared legs. His sleeves were rolled up, his tie loosened, arms crossed.

  Lawton stepped over to the framed sign, smiled fondly. “Yeah, I came up with that one myself. My campaign’s PR guys went for it, surprisingly enough.” He straightened the frame. “A little ironic now.”

  “Why’s that?” Dale said.

  “I ran for office saying I was going to take down the city’s mob bosses, Big Paul Fair and Angelo Alfonsi. Ridding San Francisco of the two crime families was the whole basis of my campaign—and my career since. Now a member of one of those families—who I prosecuted and lost—has broken out of the nut house he was sentenced to, and no one can seem to find him. I’m looking more and more like a fool every day.”

  Dale could tell that Lawton was a proud man, and by the bags under Lawton’s eyes, the last couple days had likely been living hell for him. The situation with Jonathan Fair was something no one could possibly have predicted, and heads were going to roll. By positioning himself as the city’s savior against organized crime, one of those heads could quite possibly be the DA’s.

  Lawton walked to a rolling, double-sided cork board, six feet across, with images of Jonathan Fair and five other men. Dale followed.

  “The Second Alcatraz. That’s what the media’s calling it,” Lawton said as he looked at the photos tacked to the board. He had a deep, smooth voice, but it had a subtle sense of veiled secrecy. He was a lawyer, after all.

  Dale nodded. “So I hear. We got a half dozen guys who break out of a state mental hospital. None of them technically a fugitive from the law since all of them were sentenced as ‘not guilty by reason of insanity.’ What does that mean for the DA’s office?”

  “It means it’s a judicial nightmare. There’s so much gray area here, it’s like we’re living in a constant fog.”

  “And I’m guessing the Fair family hasn’t been incredibly cooperative with the investigation.”

  Lawton laughed heartily. “Clearly not. But they wouldn’t be able to help us anyway. Jonathan and his twin sister vanished seven years ago before he resurfaced at the first bank robbery. Name had been legally changed. He was calling himself Jonathan Logan.”

  “Any leads on the sister?”

  Lawton shook his head. “They’d been living in Kansas, of all places. After her brother came back to California and got himself arrested, no one saw her again. She disappeared a seco
nd time.”

  “And Jonathan has multiple personality disorder, thinks he’s living in 1906 post-earthquake San Francisco.”

  Lawton pinched the bridge of his nose. “Yeah. If you’ll believe that.”

  “You don’t?”

  Lawton tapped a folder sitting at the corner of his desk. “Not in light of the robbery that sent him to the hospital in the first place.”

  Dale picked up the folder and flipped through its contents yet again. He’d been studying it relentlessly the past two days. There were images of the bank, the dynamited vault, and a row of teller booths with a message crudely painted across them in big, jagged strokes.

  “Robbery. Eight months ago. A bank in the Mission District,” Dale said, looking up. “I don’t see why the crime makes you doubt his mental condition.”

  “It was an Alfonsi bank, Conley. I find it pretty coincidental that Jonathan Fair hit one of the rival family’s banks while supposedly off in la-la-land, thinking he’s living in 1906.”

  Dale thumbed through the photos in the folder and looked at the image with the message again. “‘Tell the truth about the quake…’ The Great San Francisco Earthquake was a natural disaster of unprecedented scale, and we have plenty of documents and images and even film of the aftermath. So I’m wondering, what would Fair have to doubt about it?”

  Lawton lifted his hands. “That’s for you to figure out, history man. What I gotta figure out is why he broke these other guys out with him.”

  On the board, two of the men’s images had been crossed out with masking tape Xs. The word CAPTURED had been written on each X with black marker.

  Dale stepped closer to the board and examined the photo of Jonathan Fair. He was a bit of a baby-face, looking younger than his twenty-nine years. The photo was black-and-white, but Dale knew that Fair’s shaggy, mop-top hair—which was slightly tussled in the image—was reddish-brown. His complexion was fair, amusingly enough. Fair’s famous square-framed glasses rested over a pair of eyes that Dale couldn’t quite decipher. There was something enigmatic about them. Not dark. Just confusing. Dale couldn’t get a read on them. All he could sense was distrust. And a bit of fear.

  Lawton ran his hand along the images. “Quite the mix of guys. All professionals, all intelligent, which I guess makes sense given they were able to coordinate the breakout. We got an Army officer, a doctor who was tried for malpractice, a renowned artist, and a businessman who everyone thought was going to be governor someday. And of course there’s Lee Kimble, a former assistant district attorney.”

  “You know him?”

  Walton tsked. “Know him? We were friends. Until he turned out to be a child-killer.” He looked at Dale for a moment before continuing. “But apparently insane. Now he and these other whack-jobs are out on the street. And, of course, so is Jonathan Fair. So as the district attorney who built his whole career on fighting the Fairs and Alfonsis, if I can’t bring him in, I’m toast.”

  “You must have a lot of faith in Hanna Yorke, then, since you requested her personally,” Dale said.

  Lawton looked out the window at the front of his office and into the hallway. Near the conference room at the end of the hall, Yorke was speaking with a couple uniformed officers.

  Lawton’s eyes lingered on her for a long moment. “Yeah, I trust her.” He turned back to Dale. “You, not so much. I’m just gonna be frank with you.”

  “I do have a sinister look about me, don’t I?”

  Lawton snickered. “The BEI.” He said the letters slowly and with a skeptical tone. “Bureau of Esoteric Investigation. Never heard of ’em until two days ago. And I’m guessing you’ll disappear after this case and all our conversations will have never happened.”

  “Something like that, yeah.”

  Lawton scoffed. “Feds.”

  He sighed, looked Dale over, still assessing.

  “An expert in history.” He leaned back against his desk, strummed his fingers on the surface, and continued to stare at Dale. Then he made up his mind.

  “All right,” he said and grabbed a note from the desk, handed it to Dale. “This person’s been calling in. Non-stop. Every day. Name’s Britta Eaton. Says she’s got some historical earthquake information that can help. You handle this nutcase. My gift to you.”

  “How generous,” Dale said.

  Chapter Seven

  It was such a curiosity. An all-glass door. But Felix had not the time to marvel. He had to hasten.

  Mr. Jones had said that pounding on the glass would summon the nightwatchman. Felix had intended to simply bust the glass, force his way through, and then deal with the watchman. But Jones had been insistent—adamant, even—that breaking the glass would somehow trigger some sort of alarm system. Felix could not fathom how Jones could possibly be correct about this, but he acquiesced to the suggestion and gave the glass a good rapping.

  Although Jones had not yet let him down, Felix was beginning to get flustered with his insistence on certain matters.

  Nonetheless, after waiting a moment, the nightwatchman did appear behind the glass of the door. And he was a Negro. A Negro!—working in a place of such prominence, an establishment controlled by the most powerful man in the entire city.

  It made Felix swell with pride for a moment, this city of his. Such humility and openness. But, again, Felix did not have the time to marvel.

  The man was hulking and tall with a thick beard. He gave Felix a puzzled and slightly perturbed look as he rattled around with the locking mechanism. The door opened a crack. “Just what do you—”

  Felix thrust the rag that Jones had given him over the man’s mouth. His eyes went wide for just a moment, and then his large form collapsed to the floor.

  Felix rushed inside. It was the biggest bank he had ever seen. And, like so many things lately, something about the place felt strange, foreign, curious. It was as though Felix’s mind was having trouble reconciling the small details of the world around him.

  The vault was in the back. He dashed across the lobby then removed the knapsack from his shoulder. He retrieved the dynamite, set it at the base of the vault’s door, lit the fuse, then sprinted to a partition a few feet away.

  The fuse was short. Time was of the essence.

  Though Felix had covered his ears with his hands, the noise was tremendous—a terrible, screeching roar that tore right through his flesh and bones. The marble shook beneath him, and a wave of power pushed him forward. There was a crumbling sound of stone and metal tumbling, and when the chaos seemed to have subsided, Felix looked back toward the vault.

  A cloud of dust and smoke. The door was ajar, about three feet, plenty of room for him to squeeze through.

  He jumped to his feet and was about to sprint to the vault, when a voice boomed from behind him.

  “Stop!”

  The nightwatchman.

  Felix slowly turned around … and saw that at the far end of the bank, the man was still lying in a motionless pile on the floor.

  The voice had sounded unreal. Surreal, even. Almost like it had come from within Felix’s own head. His imagination. The stressful nature of his purpose was beginning to strain him, he knew, but he had not yet suspected that he might be slipping into mania.

  He had not the time to ponder these things presently.

  He darted through the mangled opening of the vault then tore open his knapsack and shuffled in as much cash as he could.

  Back out the vault. One more thing to do. This was not a crime of price or passion. It was a crime of purpose.

  There was a desk to the side of the lobby area with a wall of evenly spaced, square glass cubes behind it. The desk was waist-high, and there was a big, flat surface on the front.

  Perfect.

  He dashed to the desk, dropped to his knees, then unhooked the small canister of paint from his belt and grabbed the brush from his pocket. After quickly opening the paint, he dipped the brush and began his message with the number.

  478.

  Fel
ix was no longer a reporter. While that pained him more than anything in this new life he was pursuing, he knew that he was serving a larger and wholly justified cause. And he also knew, as a former reporter, that his message would be relayed to all of San Francisco through the newspaper within a day.

  And then people would begin to question 478.

  Chapter Eight

  Marco Alfonsi rushed down the hallway of his father’s mansion with his older brother, Matt. The tapping sounds of their dress shoes against the hardwood floor were in near synchronization. The hallway was shadowy with dark-stained wood and sconces that cast just a scant amount of muted, golden light, creating an atmosphere Marco had found creepy as a child. Drifting through the air was the fantastic aroma of his mother’s pasta alla Norma. They had been in the early stages of a late dinner. Even though there were numerous servants, his mother insisted on cooking from time to time. Traditional Italian.

  But tonight’s meal wasn’t going to happen. Not after the news that had just arrived.

  “What do we know?” Marco said.

  Matt shook his head. “Not much yet. Just that it was one of our banks. And that it was Jonathan Fair.”

  Jonathan Fair... While the whole world seemed to be looking for the man, Marco’s family had been waiting—waiting for the strike they were sure was going to happen.

  And the Jonathan Fair situation would be Marco Alfonsi’s opportunity. People tended to shine during a crisis. Marco was going to use this crisis to prove himself to his father.

  He looked at his brother. “Papà’s going to let me into the meeting. I know he will.”

  Matt smiled and put a hand on his shoulder. “I hope so, fratello. I really do.”

  Matt had to look down at Marco when he spoke to him. He was three inches taller. As much as Marco disliked it, the height difference reflected the core of their relationship—Matt being older and protective of the smaller and younger Marco. Physically, Matt had taken after their father. He was square-jawed, handsome, with slicked-back, black hair. The classic gangster look. He had an athletic build and the skills to match. He’d played football in high school and even a bit in college before his knee injury. He was decisive and commanding with a deep voice.