Forty Thieves Read online

  The house at 2995 had several of the qualities that Sid and Ronnie had been watching for. The façade was brick and mortar, but it seemed to be an add-on that didn’t fit the original style. The windows had a matching set of curtains, but six inches behind each one appeared to be an opaque layer like blackout curtains.

  There was a big black pickup truck with tall tires parked nose outward in the driveway. It reminded Ronnie of a watchdog—a pit bull, maybe, with a big blunt muzzle. It occurred to her that a truck like that wasn’t a likely sign that the Europeans were here. The big truck would probably look ridiculous to a European, and it wouldn’t help a robber keep a low profile. But she knew it was possible that the house’s occupants had been murdered by the panthers, and this truck belonged to a dead man. And maybe the truck had been kept as an escape vehicle. It gave the place the look of being occupied, but it was also the sort of truck that somebody could use to make an off-road run through the desert to the Mexican border.

  Sid and Ronnie paused near the house to exchange silent signals and then split apart to enter the property. Sid went to the right side up the driveway, where the neighbor’s orchard would complicate his silhouette, and Ronnie went to the left near the edge of the lawn where the empty lot began.

  They each found a vantage where they were difficult to see, sat down, and waited. For the agreed-upon fifteen minutes, they stayed absolutely still and listened for any sounds, observing everything they could see. At the end of fifteen minutes they moved again, this time close enough to touch the house.

  On Ronnie’s side, all of the windows had been blocked by blackout curtains, and when she put her ear to the glass, she heard nothing. She continued beside the house to the back corner, and looked into the two-acre backyard. Parked on the back lawn behind the house were four vehicles. She held her position.

  Sid moved to the big black pickup truck in front of the garage and looked inside. The truck’s interior looked pristine from the driver’s side window. Even in moonlight he could see that there was nothing on the seats or the floor. He moved around to the truck bed, but it had a hard-shell cover that was locked, so he kept going until he reached the passenger side. Something looked odd from that side. The seal along the bottom of the window on the right door seemed to have been scraped. He felt it with his finger, and it was rough. Maybe somebody had used a slim-jim to open the lock without a key. He cupped his hands around his eyes and pressed his face to the window. He could see from this side that the cylindrical ignition lock had been pried out of the steering column, leaving the wires protruding a couple of inches. The truck had been hot-wired.

  He thought for a moment. Trying to communicate with Ronnie now could give away her position. The fact that someone had hot-wired the truck would give the police probable cause for a search, but it didn’t prove anybody was in the house, and telling Ronnie wouldn’t contribute to her safety. Right now she should already be crouching somewhere near the back of the house, as alert to all of the dangers as she could be.

  Sid moved on. The windows on his side of the house were all blacked out. The garage was closed and it had no windows, so he moved around it toward the back of the house. In a moment he and Ronnie would meet, and they’d determine then whether they should try to enter the house.

  As he took his next step he heard an unexpected sound in the distance. It began to grow gradually—car engines and the hiss of tires on the empty street. He pivoted and backtracked around the garage to the front corner, hid, and watched.

  There were three SUVs. All of them came around a corner far down the street moving toward the 2900 block. As soon as they’d cleared the corner, they turned off their headlights, and moved along the center of the street in single file. The cars went slowly to keep their noise low, almost coasting for the last few hundred feet. The only illumination came from their red brake lights when the drivers stopped in front of 2995. Sid could only hope that Ronnie had heard them coming too and taken cover in time to keep from being seen.

  Each SUV had only a driver inside. When the drivers opened their doors to get out, Sid could see that they had all turned off the dome lights so the interiors would remain dark. They got out and walked to the front steps, but only one man climbed to the door. He knocked.

  As soon as he did, the door swung open and people began to come out of the house. There was a dim light on somewhere deeper inside the house, and now Sid was able to make out a few of the faces when they turned back to look behind them toward the light or whisper to a companion. First there were a couple of younger men, and then three women, and then three more men. Then there was another woman, then several more men. Each of the people carried a large shoulder bag, a pack, or a small airline carry-on.

  There was a long pause, while shadows cast by the light inside seemed to be moving rapidly about. The light went off, and the final dozen men came outside, and the last one closed the door.

  Sid stared. There was no question these were the panthers, but they were about to leave. In a minute they’d be in the cars and heading off, and he knew that meant they had reason to think they’d never be caught. If he was going to do anything, it had to be now.

  Sid backed away from the front of the house, taking out his phone, and dialed 9-1-1. When the operator answered, he said in a low voice, “My name is Sid Abel, and I’m a former LAPD homicide detective. I’m at 2-9-9-5 Quillivray Way in Chatsworth. The crew of jewel thieves the LAPD is looking for are here, getting into cars and preparing to move out. There are at least thirty. This is urgent. Please get this call to all police agencies in the northwest part of the Valley.”

  He cut the call and pocketed the phone, but he sensed that something had already gone wrong. A moment ago there had been a low sound of whispered and muttered conversation as the panthers moved toward their cars, but it had stopped. The world had gone silent, as though all movement had halted and every person was listening, trying to determine exactly where he was. He took out his pistol and stood still, hoping he was wrong.

  There was a harsh whisper, and then footsteps coming from the front of the house. Sid couldn’t run around the house to the back, and lead them straight to Ronnie. He took a couple of steps and hoisted himself over the chain link fence into the next yard.

  The first two panthers appeared at the front corner of the garage, where he had been a moment ago. They had heard him rattle the fence as he had gone over it. One of them switched on a flashlight and aimed the beam in Sid’s direction, but Sid had anticipated something of the sort, and lay flat a few yards into the orchard in a depression between two rows of trees. When the beam of light didn’t find him instantly, it began to move. It swept along the fence, searching hungrily for a sight of him. After it had passed him, he remained flat on the ground with his face down.

  Suddenly the beam flicked back to his hiding place, stayed there for about three seconds, and then began to move away again. The silence was shattered by a loud burst of automatic weapon fire, and the muzzle flashes illuminated the trees around him. The air in the orchard was full of flying bark chips and splinters as the bullets tore into the trees.

  A moment later the silence returned, and Sid sensed the shooter had paused to replace his spent magazine. Sid looked, aimed, and fired his pistol twice at the torso of the human shape beside the man with the flashlight. Then he moved his aim to the flashlight just as the man switched it off. Sid fired three times, but he was not sure whether any of his bullets had found the man.

  Next Sid heard a sound he had been dreading—the familiar pop of a Glock pistol. He knew it must be Ronnie firing from the far end of the house. There were three more rapid shots, then two. Sid got up and ran along the grove of fruit trees toward the sound, but then the air around him exploded again with flying bark and chips as shots came at him from the front corner of the garage. He dropped to the ground and flattened himself while the bullets pounded into the trees above him.

  At the far end of the house, Ronnie pressed her back against the bri
cks as she aimed her pistol toward the backyard. That was almost certainly where the next panthers would be coming from. She had already stopped a group going out the back door toward her to reach the hidden cars, then turned back an incursion from the front of the house, and now it was time for them to try to trap her in a cross fire.

  The first two stepped out from the back corner, as she had expected. She fired four shots rapidly, and they dived or fell back out of sight.

  She began to turn her head to check the front again, when there was a burst of automatic weapon fire from the empty lot beside the property. At first Ronnie thought the person was firing at her, but then she saw splinters and chips of brick flying from the front corner of the house. Someone in that vicinity returned fire for a moment, and then the person in the empty lot fired again and the shots stopped.

  Ronnie caught movement and strained her eyes to see a small person running toward the house carrying a short rifle with a long magazine protruding from the underside.

  The woman dashed out of the field to where Ronnie crouched, and knelt beside her. She was small and blond, had an H&K MP5 in her hands. Over her shoulder was some kind of bag, which Ronnie assumed must contain ammunition. The woman said, “We can’t stay here. They’ll just keep coming. Come on.”

  The woman trotted along the side of the house, her rifle raised to her shoulder. She stopped beside a small rectangular opening in the foundation with a metal screen over it. She glanced at Ronnie to be sure she was covering her, unlatched the metal screen, and tugged it off. She slid her body into the opening, feet first, and beckoned to Ronnie to follow, then grabbed her rifle and pulled it in with her. Nicole waited inside the opening. She had seen that Veronica Abel was trapped, and known she would die in a minute. She needed to keep her alive, for now. “Hurry,” she whispered.

  When the woman disappeared, Ronnie hesitated. Out here she was exposed, but in there she would be protected from fire by the foundation of the house. She took a deep breath, crouched, went to her belly, then slithered into the dark rectangle.

  The woman edged close to her, reached out, and pulled the metal screen back into place so it covered the opening. Then she rolled once and began to crawl away.

  They were under the floor of the house on a dirt surface. Ronnie could see three other screened openings, because they were all slightly lighter than the crawl space where Ronnie was now. In the near darkness, she could make out a plank surface above her with thick joists holding it to the foundation and to the planks running under the floor. There were copper water pipes running along above her, and a couple of thick ceramic drainpipes coming down from above to join the main drains that ran underground to the sewers.

  The woman was crawling away from the foundation now, and Ronnie followed. They kept going until they reached a spot where the ground seemed to drop off. Ronnie peered over the edge, not quite able to make out much until the woman lowered herself into a small room, like a concrete box about ten feet on a side.

  Ronnie lowered herself down beside her. There were a hot-water heater, a nest of telephone wires and cables, and a set of wooden steps leading up to a door. The woman whispered, “I’m Nicole.”

  “Ronnie.” She held out her hand, but the woman ignored it.

  “What we’ve got to do is go up there, step out, and clear the house to be sure they’re all outside. I’ll go right out the door, and you go left. Then we’ll move together toward the front door to clear the house. You know how to do that, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Ronnie. She had been feeling dazed at the sudden appearance of this woman—or sudden reappearance. Nicole was definitely the woman who had been on the video recordings planting the bomb in the house in Burbank. She was carrying an MP5, roughly the kind of rifle that had been fired at Ronnie and Sid in the night attacks. It occurred to Ronnie that she could put her Glock to the woman’s head and handcuff her right now. But this Nicole had just pulled Ronnie out of a cross fire. And there were dozens of people upstairs who wanted them both dead.

  The woman patted Ronnie’s shoulder. “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  Nicole went up first and stood with her feet on the top step while Ronnie climbed up beside her. Nicole slowly turned the knob, and then, in one motion, pushed the door out and sprang out after it. She dashed to the right and Ronnie went to the left. Ronnie saw no targets—no movement, no human shapes. She waited, her weapon aimed up the hall toward the front of the house while Nicole checked the kitchen behind her.

  When Nicole came up beside her, they stepped forward together, moving from room to room, making sure nobody was left in the house. They returned to the living room. It was a large, open space with windows at intervals. Nicole crouched at the nearest window, reached around the blackout curtain and unlatched it, then slid it open. She knelt to the side of the window and moved the curtain a half inch to look out along the barrel of her weapon.

  Ronnie opened the window across the room from the woman’s, so she could see the driveway and the orchard, the last spots where Sid had been.

  There was another burst of automatic fire outside the house, and a moment later, five shots from a pistol. Ronnie swept the curtain aside and looked for a target, but saw nothing. She held her pistol ready, looking from side to side for a target.

  Another burst of fire came from somewhere near the cars parked in front of the house. Nicole leaned out with her rifle and fired a burst out the front window toward the cars, and then ducked back in. Shots pounded against the front of the house, and others punched the curtains on Nicole’s window inward.

  Ronnie ran for the next side window, looked out, but still saw nothing. There was automatic fire, and she fired five shots at the muzzle flash, and then ducked back. Shots exploded through the window, and pounded the bricks outside.

  Nicole said, “Try not to shoot my husband. He’s big—taller and heavier than the thieves. He’s wearing a black outfit like mine. Okay?”

  “I know what he looks like,” said Ronnie.

  Nicole froze, staring at her.

  “I know you too,” said Ronnie. “You missed some of the cameras in that house in Burbank.”

  “What are you planning to do?”

  “Same as you—try to keep my husband alive.” Ronnie peered out the window at the dark yard.

  Outside, at the rear of the house, Gavrilo kept low and hurried along behind the row of parked cars. He had his Scorpion strapped to his back because his hands were full. One of the intruders had shot Srdan and Tomislav from the orchard next door, and he had come upon them near the front corner of the garage. Gavrilo had taken Srdan’s pack and stripped off the vest Tomislav had on. The vest had about fifteen pockets, and each was filled with money or diamonds. The vest was a bit tight for Gavrilo and constricted his movements, especially with one backpack over each shoulder. When he had come upon the body of Jelena, he had taken her shoulder bag too. He tried the door of the first car, but it was locked. He tried the next, and it was unlocked, but he couldn’t find the keys.

  The plan had been to leave each of the cars with its keys on the seat, so where were the keys? He bent low, felt around on the floor in front of the seat, and ran his hand between the seats, but the keys were not there. He moved a few steps farther, burdened by the bulk of his own backpack and the extra packs and bags he had taken from his fallen friends. At least one of the cars had to have keys in it. The next car had to be the one.

  He stepped to the passenger side to keep away from the line of fire, and he could see the car keys in the ignition. He slipped the first pack off one shoulder, the next off the other shoulder, and he felt lighter. Then he slipped off Jelena’s shoulder bag, opened the back door, and set them all on the backseat. He had gotten used to Tomislav’s vest, but if he was going to try to drive anywhere, he knew it wasn’t a good idea to wear it. He straightened to take it off. As he got the vest off, he heard something behind him. He turned and saw a tall man he didn’t recognize. He pulled the sling of his
Scorpion submachine to bring it down from his back to his hands, but before he could aim it, the man’s shot hit him in the chest.

  As he fell against the car, he looked up at the tall, muscular American. For a second he wondered about the man. Did American police officers use silencers? And then he died, leaning against the car.

  Ronnie and Nicole crouched in the living room. There were more shots, all of them high, just above the level of the bricks, piercing the wall and peppering the opposite wall above their heads.

  Ronnie said, “You know this house, don’t you? Is it yours?”

  Nicole said nothing.

  Ronnie said, “Just answer one question. Why did James Ballantine die?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The black guy in the storm sewer. You were hired to keep us away from that case.”

  “I don’t know everything. I heard that he was dating one of the women. He figured out that she was somebody who had a lot of money and a lot of secrets. Maybe he knew what she was—that she was a jewel thief. He tried to boss her around and make her give him money. She didn’t like it, so she killed him.”

  “Where is she? Do you know?”

  “No. I don’t know any of them,” Nicole said.

  “That will have to be good enough. I’ve got to get out there now and help my husband.”

  Ronnie rose to her feet and stepped through the back door, off the steps to the ground. She dashed in the direction where Sid had been, along the side of the orchard. She saw him break from cover. She felt relief and fear in the same instant. He was alive, but what was he doing?

  As Sid came over the fence, he saw her, stopped with his gun in both hands, and aimed ahead to cover her. When she caught up they ran around to the front of the house.

  At the front of the house was chaos. There were bodies on the ground, and people running to get into the waiting cars. In the distance they could hear sirens. Sid sensed motion behind him and turned his head, but what he saw didn’t make sense. A large man was carrying five bundles—three backpacks and a couple of shoulder bags slung over his shoulders. He climbed into the big pickup truck. A second later a blond woman dashed up from the other side and threw herself into the passenger seat. Sid raised his weapon to aim, but Ronnie held his arm and said, “Not them. I promised.”