Finders Keepers Read online

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  Novella #1: Twinkle Toes is the fast-paced search for an exotic dancer Dev knew in high school as his pink-haired prom date, ‘Twink’. Twink hasn’t been seen since she went to a photoshoot for a sleazy car dealership and Dev sets out to find her.

  Novella #2: Dollhouse When Dev’s very close friend Sallie decides to conduct an undercover investigation of the Dollhouse, Dev pitches an uncharacteristic hissy-fit. Sallie’s a big girl, but Dev could be right about this one. The Dollhouse is an establishment with connections to local mob boss Tubby Gustafson.

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  Thanks, Mike Faricy

  Mike Faricy

  FINDERS KEEPERS

  Published by Credit River Publishing 2018

  Copyright Mike Faricy 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior and express permission of the copyright owner.

  All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  FINDERS KEEPERS!

  ASIN# B07F15R4LB

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the following people for their help and support:

  Special thanks to Nick for his hard work, cheerful patience and positive feedback.

  I would like to thank Roy, Steve and Julie for their creative talent and not slitting their wrists or jumping off the high bridge when dealing with my Neanderthal computer capabilities.

  Last, I would like to thank family and friends for their encouragement and unqualified support. Special thanks to Maggie, Jed, Schatz, Pat, Av, Emily and Pat for not rolling their eyes, at least when I was there, and most of all, to my wife Teresa whose belief, support and inspiration has from day one never waned.

  Finders Keepers

  Mike Faricy

  Chapter 1

  It was unusual for any traffic to be on the rural Minnesota road this close to the Canadian border, let alone this late at night. That the vehicle was a red, steel-plated armored truck carrying shrink-wrapped kilos of cocaine should have been a once-in-a-life-time occurrence. For Cecil and his crew-Carlo DaLuca, Izzie Erdman, Skoog and Jimmy-it was just another weekly run.

  Carlo DaLuca’s bulk oozed out of the passenger seat. His triple chins jiggled in time to the gravel road. His loud snoring helped to keep Cecil awake, who was more concerned about hitting a moose than running into any law-enforcement types. They had been working the route successfully for the better part of two months. There were no rivals looking to rip them off. No pesky undercover stings to worry about, no informers, and no turf wars. They just drove north. Izzie Erdman and Skoog would motor out to the middle of the lake and exchange the kilos for cash, which kept everyone happy. What could possibly go wrong?

  * * *

  Austin Boothe crammed the final White Castle burger into his mouth and washed it down with a Leinenkugel beer. He was average sized, and just on the verge of developing a beer belly. His thinning, unkempt brown hair was maybe two years away from a comb-over. His skin was pale from far too many hours in front of the TV.

  “I hope you don’t plan on leaving little white boxes all over the floor again, Austin. Like I don’t have enough to do already.” Celeste stood three feet behind him with her arms extended. She grasped red, eight-ounce weights, turning left to right at the waist in time to music pounding from her ear phones. “Five, six, seven, eight.”

  “Where’d you hide the damn remote, baby doll?”

  “I’m dancing three till close tonight. Five, six, seven, eight. Need you to pick up some things from my mom’s. Five, six, seven, eight. And clean all this up, will ya?” She dropped the weights next to the recliner, a cream-colored faux-leather affair with a strip of grey duct tape at the end of each arm.

  “I mean it, Austin. I need you to get that stuff for me.” She walked down her trailer’s narrow hall, pulling the t-shirt over her head.

  “No can do, baby. I got a meeting. I’m planning some shit,” he called to her.

  “I already told you, I’m dancing tonight. Hope you’re not seeing that worthless brother of yours again. Are you? Please tell me that’s not who you’re meeting.”

  “How can you be busy? Who goes to watch strippers at three in the afternoon?”

  “Big tippers is who, the rich business types, all the corporate executives.”

  “Big tippers, right. I’d like to—”

  “Just pick up the stuff at my mom’s. Will ya?” she said, then slammed the bathroom door to make her point.

  Chapter 2

  Over the course of three beers and multiple dishes of popcorn, Austin and his brother Andre reviewed their simple plan. Every Friday, Ladies’ Night, the club where Celeste danced, had a large amount of cash. The cash was picked up by an armored truck service, Knox Security, and then transported to the Miners National Bank for deposit.

  Two additional pieces of information tied all of this together. The bank’s IT manager, heavy tipping Rodney Debbens, was a regular admirer of Celeste’s. The other night he whispered to her during a lap dance. “I’m working on this damn security upgrade over the entire weekend. So I won’t be in. But, if you’re interested, maybe you’d like to come down sometime. Get a private tour of how all the new software works.”

  Celeste giggled, steamed his bifocals, took the parasol from his drink and stuffed it in her cleavage.

  “Now, Rodney, why would I want to see anything soft?” She retold the tale to Austin, making the point that Rodney had stuffed a nice, crisp, twenty-dollar bill in her thong.

  The second piece of information was from Chester Penfield, night watchman at Knox Security. Seventy-eight-year-old Chester had worked security for the past two months. He was armed with a flashlight, a cell phone and a panic button mounted on the desk where he sat when he wasn’t making his three-minute rounds of the concrete-block building. As a man in uniform he was burdened with a good deal of responsibility and needed the daily stress release of a boiler-maker. Austin overheard him one recent afternoon at the bar.

  “I ain’t gonna tell ya where a certain large deposit is from, boys. But let me just say, them gals make an awful lot of money flashing around their bare behinds.”

  Since there wasn’t a proctology practice in town, the Boothe brothers put two and two together over beers, and suddenly a plan was born.

  “I, I just don’t know,” Andre said, shaking his head as he worked his way through another beer.

  He was a younger version of Austin, physically unremarkable, thin, with unkempt brown hair. He’d been attempting to grow a mustache for the past five or six weeks, not that anyone had really noticed.

  “You getting cold feet on me? Now?” Austin asked.

  “No, no, nothing like that. It just seems so simple, and if it’s so simple why hasn’t—”

  “Simple? Hell, that’s the beauty of this. It is simple. All that bullshit about split-second timing, secret combinations and hanging from tall buildings? Leave that to Hollywood and that pissant, Tom Cruise.”

  “Yeah, but this sounds so easy that something—”

  “It sounds easy because we’ve planned everything. That security building is in the middle of a damn forest, one road in, and the same road out. We go in the back way, through the woods, no one sees us. We’ll be waiting when that armored truck drives up to the loading dock. They unload the thing, won’t be more than a little old bank bag. We’re hiding, and come out from under the dock. ‘Hands up, boys. Everyone back in the truck.’ We chain the damn door shut, and we’re out of there. Forty-five seconds, tops.”

  “The guards?”

  “Guards? You mean like old Chester? What’s he gonna do? Shine a flashlight on us? The Gleeson brothers driving the damn truck? Those two together have to come in at close to seven hundred pounds. The only problem is there won’t be room for Chester with those two fatties stuffed in the back.”

  “But they can push an alarm.”

  “We’re counting on that. It’ll take the cops at least ten minutes to get out there. ‘Course, that’s if they’re in the car, ready to go. They’ll be coming down that dark road. It’ll take ‘em at least another five, maybe ten minutes to cut the locks we put on the armored truck. Call it twenty minutes. Hell, we’re hot-footing it over on County 12. Just two guys heading to the cabin for a little weekend fishing. We got this one in the bag, man. All we gotta do is relax and get ready for our stroll down Easy Street.”

  Chapter 3

  What was now the Knox Security building had, at different stages in its life, been a contractor’s warehouse, a propane gas company, and a short-lived pottery factory that went bust way back in 2005. After that, the building stood vacant for a number of years. For Chicago brothers Salvatore and Massimo Saventinni, the setting was perfect. The building was virtually isolated in the wilderness of Northern Minnesota. It sat in relative proximity to the Canadian border. Most importantly, there was no one within miles who gave a damn.

  They converted the walk-in, propane-fired kiln from the pottery factory into a makeshift vault that was still
capable of incinerating anything inside at 2350F. For a dollar above minimum wage the brothers hired Chester as a night watchman and the Gleeson boys, two otherwise unemployable locals, to provide the perception of a legal enterprise.

  The concept had been the brainchild of Massimo, at seventy, the younger brother by eight years. They hired the locals on a part-time basis. Filter a few thousand dollars through the town bank to make things look legitimate, all the while hauling kilos up to Canada and funneling cash back down to Chicago.

  It worked like the proverbial charm. In fact, business had grown to such an extent that the armored truck was now making a regular weekend run through the pristine wilderness to the Canadian border in order to meet the increased demand for product.

  It was this regular weekend run that had given the Gleeson brothers and Chester every Friday night off, with pay. They were replaced with a crew of street-smart Chicago wise-guys. The wise-guys continued to keep up appearances, making the Ladies’ Night deposit every Friday at the Miners National Bank. Except for this Friday, when the cash would be held in the Knox security vault until heavy-tipping bank IT manager Rodney Debbens phoned to say the security system at the bank was back online.

  Austin and Andre Boothe, attired in black sweatshirts, black jeans, dark brown cotton garden gloves and clown masks, huddled beneath the loading dock, crouched up against the building’s damp concrete block wall. They were armed with the twelve-gauge shotguns they used every fall for duck hunting. They had no intention of using the shotguns, secure in the knowledge that both fat Gleeson brothers and seventy-eight-year-old Chester would take one look and freak.

  The armored truck, stuffed with three million plus in illicit drug money plus the thirty-five-hundred-dollar Ladies’ Night deposit, backed into the Knox loading dock. Shrill beeping and flashing taillights warned that the seven-ton, armor-plated vehicle was moving in reverse.

  Overhead, the garage door opened. A heavy cart rolled across the wooden planks of the loading dock. Austin figured it must be seventy-eight-year-old night watchman Chester. Andre flashed his brother a questioning look, but Austin shook his head, signaling there was nothing to worry about. Once the truck was turned off, both the passenger and driver’s doors flew open.

  Austin and Andre instinctively pressed back against the concrete-block wall, concentrating on the footsteps overhead. Since they ignored the exiting driver and passenger, it failed to register with either of them that the three-hundred-and-fifty-pound Gleeson brothers would not be wearing handmade Italian shoes, nor tailored Armani trousers.

  Austin couldn’t quite make sense of the footsteps overhead. It sounded like half a dozen people up there, but then again, the Gleeson boys were awfully big. The rubber clown mask pulled over his head severely limited his ability to discern what was being said and so he signaled Andre with a poke from his twelve-gauge to cautiously begin crawling out. They planned to slip out from under the loading dock, one on either side of the massive armored truck, point the twelve-gauge shotguns, not say a word, grab the money, and run. Easy as one, two, three.

  The plan began to go wrong almost immediately. Austin, ready to jump out from beneath the dock, gave a final glance in Andre’s direction. Andre signaled that he was caught on a nail. Austin watched and waited while his heart pounded out a warning to anyone standing directly overhead. Andre laid his shotgun down and worked to free himself. After what seemed like an hour he signaled a thumbs-up. For just a half-moment Austin thought about shooting Andre, but then nodded, and as planned, they jumped out in unison.

  Who was more surprised? Austin and Andre, expecting to find the fat Gleesons and geriatric Chester, or the five, broad-shouldered, muscled, Chicago wise-guys glaring like a pack of wolves at two trembling shotguns held by fools wearing clown masks? Someone, maybe everyone, exclaimed, “Shit,” just under their breath, and then the smallest of the huddled group flashed some sort of weapon out from behind his back and squirted what sounded like a thousand rounds in Austin’s general direction.

  Austin’s shotgun discharged as he ducked, exploding an overhead light on the loading dock. Andre fired his shotgun, racked another shell and fired again in sheer panic. The wise-guys moved as one inside the block building, quickly pointing weapons back out the door and firing wildly.

  Two steps into his retreat, Austin spotted the keys still in the ignition. He leapt into the driver’s seat of the truck, fired up the engine and floored it. He picked up Andre sprinting for the tree line halfway across the parking lot.

  “Get in, get in! Come on, damnit.”

  “Oh my God!” Andre screamed, hopping onto the running board, and dropping his shotgun in the process.

  The large sideview mirror suddenly shattered on the driver’s side. Then two spider webs appeared across the laminated driver’s window, rounds accurately aimed at Austin’s head. A number of metallic pings struck the welded steel side of the vehicle as they raced out of the parking lot and down the dark road.

  “Oh my God!” Andre screamed and started to pray.

  A minute later Austin swung a hard right onto a logging trail. As he turned, the still open rear doors slammed against the side of the truck. He drove up over a slight rise and cut the lights, creeping cautiously through the forest, guided only by moonlight. No sooner had he cleared the slight rise when the trail behind was momentarily illuminated by two cars racing past in hot pursuit.

  “Who the hell are those guys?” Andre screamed.

  “I don’t know, but we’re getting our asses out of here. You okay?”

  “No! I think I wet my pants.”

  “We can get new pants. Right now let’s just get to my pickup and as far away from here as possible.”

  They continued a mile or two further until Austin felt the heavy vehicle slowly begin to slide off the muddy logging trail. He braked, shifted, spun the wheels, shifted some more and became hopelessly mired in mud. They climbed out of the cab and stared at all four massive wheels buried clear up to the axles.

  “Oh, this is just great. Now what do we do?” groaned Andre.

  They slopped and slid their way to the rear of the truck. Their feet were caked with heavy mud as they peered inside. There wasn’t a bank bag anywhere. There were, however, what looked like six large nylon shoulder bags, complete with shoulder straps, secured to a two-wheeled dolly.

  “Are you kidding me? After all that, all we get is lousy laptops?” Andre said.

  “I don’t think these are from Ladies’ Night,” Austin said as he stepped onto the massive bumper. He crouched and scurried toward the front of the cargo area. The two-wheeled dolly was clamped to the front wall. The nylon bags were held firmly in place by elastic cords. He pulled the top bag off the stack and unzipped it.

  “Jesus!” he exclaimed after a very long pause.

  “Now what?” Andre asked.

  “Man alive.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “More damn money than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Austin said, then hurriedly slid the bag across the chromed-steel floor. He tore the next bag off the stack and unzipped it.

  “Oh man.”

  He unzipped the third, glanced quickly inside, and slid it across the floor. He slung the next bag across his shoulder, grabbed the final two in his hands and exited.

  “You mean to tell me those gals make this kind of dough stripping? Oh, sorry, didn’t mean Celeste or nothing. I just meant that—”

  “This ain’t Ladies’ Night money, not this much. I don’t know where it’s from, but I think it’d be a good idea if we got the hell out of here as fast as possible. Pick those bags up and let’s go.”

  “Where?” Andre asked, looking around the dense, dark forest.

  “Well, not back the way we came, that’s for damn sure. We gotta get over to my pickup on County 12.”

  They left the armored truck and began walking as fast as possible toward where they thought the pickup might be. With luck they had four or possibly five miles to travel.