[Tom Reed and Walt Sydowski 04.0] No Way Back Read online

  No Way Back

  Rick Mofina

  Copyright © 2015 Rick Mofina

  Copyright © 2003 Rick Mofina

  ISBN Kindle: 978-1-77242-010-4

  Carrick Publishing

  Cover design by James T. Egan, bookflydesign

  This e-book is intended for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be sold or given away to other people. If you’re reading this e-book and did not purchase it, please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy.

  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the creation of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Begin Reading No Way Back

  A Note to the Reader

  About the Author

  Contact Rick Mofina

  Also by Rick Mofina

  Dedication

  This book is for

  Ron and Mary

  And if you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

  — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

  1

  The register at the San Francisco Deluxe Jewelry Store whirred as sales clerk Vanessa Jordan slid the credit card receipt to the woman admiring the custom order she had bought.

  “Your husband is going to adore it,” Vanessa said.

  “I hope so.” Her eyes glistened. “I wanted something special for our anniversary.”

  Vanessa thought her customer was beautiful. She was wearing a tailored mauve suit, had lovely brown hair, pearl studs, a matching two-row necklace.

  “Trust me, he’s going to love this. I’d be happy to gift wrap it for you.”

  Studying the exquisite craftsmanship, the woman considered the offer when the store’s front door chime sounded, diverting Vanessa’s attention to the security monitor under the counter. The video screen showed two people waiting at the entrance. A big woman in a long beige coat standing behind a man in a wheelchair. Access through the front door required staff to activate a remote lock. The store’s guard had just left for his usual fifteen-minute break to get a bagel at the corner bakery. Vanessa followed the security procedure, scanned the other monitors, and inventoried the store: She had her customer at the cash register. Across the floor, a man in his sixties was alone, looking at watches. There was a couple in their late twenties near the engagement diamonds, cooing at rings. Through the window to the street she saw nothing unusual. Everything was fine.

  Vanessa glanced over her shoulder down the hall at the manager, a kind soft-spoken man who wore frameless glasses. He was working in the back office, which had the same closed-circuit monitors and a speaker for the front chime. Upon hearing it, he left his desk to help, nodding an okay for Vanessa to open the door. She pressed the button under the counter. The woman and the man in the wheelchair entered.

  At that moment, the customer at the counter had reached a decision. “Yes, I would like it gift wrapped. Will it take long?”

  Vanessa didn’t answer.

  “Excuse me, miss? I’d like it gift wrapped.”

  Vanessa was staring at the front door. The manager had arrived behind her, adjusting his jacket, stopping dead in his tracks.

  Once inside the store, the old man leaped from the wheelchair. The woman pushing him folded it, wedging it so the automatic door could not lock behind them. She was over six feet tall, wearing a kerchief over her thick blond hair. She had large dark glasses. Her face was smeared with layers of freakish white makeup that no longer disguised the Adam’s apple of a man as his long coat snapped open and he produced an automatic assault rifle.

  “This is a holdup! Everyone on the floor!”

  Someone screamed. The gun came alive, exploding with rapid fire, destroying every security camera including those hidden in the store’s custom-made grandfather clock and the overhead light fixtures. The clinking of debris and spent shells filled the air. The wheelchair man stepped forward, silver talons of hair reached from his fedora, huge dark glasses hid much of his face, which resembled fiery red plaster. He opened his coat to a Kevlar vest with a hand grenade clipped to each side of his chest.

  “Don’t touch any alarms,” he said to the manager, who ceased inching toward the counter.

  The shooter replaced his empty magazine, let go a staccato burst above the manager’s head. Rounds ripped into the wall, smashing an array of expensive Swiss and Austrian clocks. Then he directed gunfire at every display case glass rained everywhere. The engaged woman screamed, her boyfriend shielded her with his body under a table. The old watch shopper lay face down on the carpet, his hands trembling above his white hair. The red-faced man came around the counter, pressed the muzzle of a handgun to Vanessa’s head while shoving a canvas bag in her face.

  “Fill this with everything from the displays now,” he said, then turned his gun on the manager, thrusting a bag at him. “I know your vault’s open. I know what you have. And I want all your videotapes. Let’s go!” They disappeared into the back.

  In front, Vanessa hurried from display to display, her fingers bleeding as she swept rings, necklaces, earrings, bracelets, watches, into the bag.

  In seconds the manager returned, hands above his head. The wheelchair man was behind him, pressing his gun to the manager’s neck, clutching the canvas bag laden from the vault’s contents and security tapes. One of the grenades was missing from his vest.

  “Please don’t hurt anyone,” the manager said. “You have what you want. Just go.” The gun’s grip thudded into his lower neck, dropping him to the floor. Vanessa cried out as everyone’s attention was jerked to the front.

  Outside, a loudspeaker sounded the word “Police.”

  The red-faced man hurried from the manager to the side of the entrance window, cursing at what he saw down the street.

  “What is it?” said the shooter, darting to the window, eyeballing the problem. “Damn it!” He tightened his grip on his automatic rifle, scanned the customers and staff, assessing their situation. “What the hell are we going to do? How do we get out of this?”

  The red-faced man went to Vanessa, seizing the bag from her. “You’re done. Get on the floor.”

  He then squatted to appraise the female customer near the counter. In her thirties, well-dressed, nice figure, brown hair. Flawless skin that smelled real good as he leaned into her face to push his gun against her head.

  “Did you drive here, lady?”

  She nodded.

  “Alone?”

  She nodded.

  “Is your car near?”

  She hesitated, blinking at the black lenses that hid his eyes. The muzzle drilled hard into her skull.

  “Please don’t hurt me.”

  “Do you want to live?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is your car near?”

  “Yes.”

  The woman felt herself being hoisted to her feet, felt the gun jabbing into her back, rushing her to the door where the man opened the wheelchair, then forced her into it as she pleaded in vain. At gunpoint, he ordered her to produce her keys from her purse, then her driver’s license, registration, and insurance information identifying her car, the make, model, year, color, plate number. He snatched her wallet, surprised as he fanned her cash. He flipped through personal items, credit cards, bank cards, pausing at the color snapshot of a boy. He looked ten or twelve, brown hair like hers.

  “This your kid?”

  Tears came. She squee
zed her eyes shut, nodding.

  “Where’s your car parked?”

  “Please.”

  “Where?” He thrust his gun against her neck.

  “To the left at the end of the block. This side of the street.”

  He drew his face within inches of hers. She stared into his dark glasses, seeing nothing in the blackness but the reflection of her fear.

  “Make a sound and I’ll go to your home and kill your kid. Understand?”

  He threw a blanket across her lap, the bags under the seat, then handcuffed her wrists to the armrests.

  As she felt the metal clamping hard against her skin, her mind reeled. Did she kiss her son this morning? Her husband? Tell them how much she loved them? She saw their faces. Heard their voices. Tears rolled down her cheeks. She couldn’t move her hands to brush them. This isn’t happening. It’s not real, I’m dreaming. Wake me. God, please wake me now.

  The shooter’s head shook, his blond curls jiggling. “This is all messed up, man. Don’t be a fool. We’re not taking her.”

  The handgun flew into his face, scraping his makeup-caked chin. “You’re with me. Or you’re dead. Right here. Right now. That clear?”

  “Okay, okay, it’s cool. It’s your party.”

  The red-faced man whirled, plucking the remaining grenade from his vest, holding it up. “Just like the one I left at the back.” He affixed a magnet and trip-wire mechanism to it at the front door’s inside handle. “The trip retractor sets automatically when I close this door. Open it from either side, it detonates, killing anyone within twenty-five feet.”

  They left.

  The heist took minutes. The victims remained inside the jewelry store. Glass tinkled in the aftermath. Vanessa wept softly. The old watch shopper’s hands were still trembling above his white hair. The manager’s mind blurred with worry for his customers. Grenades on the doors. Lord, help us. They took that lady. She was just buying her husband a special anniversary gift; now she is a hostage. Oh, God, please help her. Struggling to make sense of it all, the manager heard the engaged woman murmuring to her fiancé under the ruins of a display case, her words growing audible.

  “Our Father, who art in heaven—”

  They all flinched at the sudden pop of gunfire coming from the street.

  2

  Now what do we have here?

  Waiting for the light to change, Officer Rod August saw a large, butt-ugly woman and a man with long hair and a goatee hefting a big old-timer from a paneled van into a wheelchair. The woman got behind the chair and pushed the old man down the sidewalk. The goateed man remained in the van, which was parked illegally in a red zone. No hydraulic lift, no commercial, delivery, or handicap designation on the plate or window.

  What’s wrong with this picture?

  The light changed. August eased his black-and-white SFPD patrol car forward. He pretended, from behind his sunglasses, that he didn’t catch the prison tattoos on the van driver’s arm, extending from the window with a stream of cigarette smoke. He let on as if he’d missed the tailpipe jitter of the idling engine. He memorized the California plate number.

  It never hurt to be vigilant. There’d been a spate of burglaries in August’s zone of this business strip in the Richmond District north of Golden Gate Park. Out of sight to round the block, August radioed his dispatcher to run the tag. Routine. The job was 99 percent tedium, 1 percent adrenaline.

  August yawned. The tag was probably nothing. Could be that Mr. Tattoo there was a good boy doing a good deed for Granny and Gramps. But what the hell? He had an hour before his meeting with his lieutenant to discuss his desire to detail into robbery. To move up the ranks. August had five years on the street and had developed the instincts of a detective.

  Now Billy, his son, was talking about becoming a cop, like the old man. August flipped down the visor to the small color school photograph of a blond-haired six-year-old, bright blue eyes radiating hope over a mile-wide grin missing a lower front tooth. You and me, pal. Partners. August got Billy this weekend. They were going to Big Sur, or to see a ball game, or just hang. Whatever Billy wanted. It was going to be great being with him.

  Static crackled over August’s radio.

  “Your number comes back ten-thirty from Bakersfield PD. Stand by.”

  A roller. I knew it. Stolen. Gotcha.

  “Complainant Victor Trang reported plates stolen from his 2000 Neon a week ago.”

  August came around the corner, then crept up on the parked van. Its motor was still idling. Time to go to work. He put the transmission in park, called in his location, a description of the van: a white Ford mid-1990s, and the hero in the driver’s seat whose cigarette hand was tapping the side mirror. The tapping stopped when August activated his emergency lights, hit his siren to yelp twice. He unbuckled his seat belt, then his holster, gripped his Beretta, then used his loudspeaker.

  “This is the San Francisco police. Shut off your engine and step out of the vehicle now with your open hands visible above your head.”

  Nothing happened.

  August repeated his order. Nothing happened. The side mirror adjusted. August caught a pair of cold eyes watching him. August’s game face betrayed nothing. All right, asshole. I’m not asking three times. August opened his door to shield himself as he stepped out, taking stock of the street around him. It was empty until he saw someone approaching.

  Instinct told him to call for backup. Naw, hold off. I can handle this.

  August’s radio crackled with the first report, from a barbershop, of shots being heard in the San Francisco Deluxe Jewelry Store. At that moment August recognized the wheelchair people returning to the van, which began swaying because the driver had suddenly changed his position inside.

  In that terrible instant of knowing, August’s thought process accelerated to absorb, comprehend, analyze what had befallen him, for there were now three people nearing the van.

  August’s pulse raced upon seeing a terrified woman handcuffed in the chair under a blanket, which was folded back by a breeze, revealing the canvas bags. He saw how the large woman pushing the chair had locked on to him from behind her dark glasses as the old man in the hat shot out his arm to fire a handgun repeatedly into the van at Mr. Tattoo. August’s brain commanded his body to leap back into his patrol car, call for help. The big woman was now training an automatic assault rifle on him. August heard the handcuffed woman scream, saw the muzzle fire, his windshield blossoming with round after round, felt burning sledgehammers pound his arm, his vest, wrist, shoulder, throat. Christ. The glass popping, gunfire, screams. Warm liquid flowed all over him. What was that? His body numbed. His dispatcher was calling, her voice quivering. August was gripping his open microphone as he lay in the front seat of his patrol car gazing up at his son’s face smiling down on him.

  3

  The police scanners sizzled at the San Francisco Star.

  The young reporter assigned to them was doing her best, deciphering codes, making calls, jotting notes as the chatter spilled over the glass walls of the small office tucked in a corner of the newsroom. Experienced listeners kept the volume low but when a story broke things got hot.

  No one knew that better than Tom Reed.

  From far across the metro section he picked up on the emotion in the dispatchers’ voices. It was a skill he’d never lost even though it had been ages since he did a shift at the police radios, the most dreaded job in the newsroom. The noise irritated the burnouts who wanted them silenced, a blasphemy to diehards like Reed. Scanners were sacred. They alerted you to the first cries for help, pulling you into a story that would stop the heart of your city. Or break it.

  Reed sensed something was up. But he forced himself to shrug it off. None of it mattered to him anymore. Today was the day he was going to quit.

  He took stock of the newsroom, the editors, deskers, reporters. At their computers, keyboards clicking, phones ringing, people taking notes, conversations flaring, large TVs locked on to twenty-four-hour
news stations on overhead shelves. The smell of news and coffee in the air. Reed loosened his tie, draped his jacket over his chair, settled in.

  You’re going to miss this.

  Milestones stared at him from the half walls around his desk, a faded clipping, with the head FORMER GREAT FALLS NEWSPAPER BOY NOMINATED FOR PULITZER PRIZE. It resurrected boyhood memories of Montana, the Rockies, Big Sky Country. Crisp editions of the Trib, bulging in that bag, gray with newsprint, slung over his shoulder as he trudged the streets of his neighborhood, dreaming of becoming a big-city crime reporter.

  Next to the clipping, a snapshot.

  Reed saw a cockier, younger version of himself grinning in front of the Golden Gate Bridge with the gang from the San Francisco bureau of The Associated Press. It was his first job after college and where he broke the story on crime networks on the West Coast that got him short-listed for the prize. He didn’t win but it boosted his ego and prompted the San Francisco Star to hire him as a senior crime reporter. A dream realized.

  The yellowing tear sheets of his bigger stories layered the walls around his desk. So many. Cases that had led him into the darkest regions. The way Virgil guided Dante’s descent into hell. Headlines above Reed’s byline screamed of earthquakes, fires, executions of unrepentant killers, drug wars, blood-drinking cults, shooting rampages, babies whose corpses were found in the trash. Or worse. It was a world of pain and Reed was one of its chroniclers, on the scene each time a new horror surfaced, ensuring that an accounting of it bled in the black ink of the San Francisco Star.

  Over the years, he felt each story fracture the armor he wore as protection from the tragedies he covered. It became an internal battle to keep his distance, especially from the ones whose acts were so hideous the details never made it into print. Instead, they wormed their way into his dreams.

  When he tried to drown them with Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Sipping Whiskey, his life began disintegrating.