MARTY’S UNCLE’S house sat back off the road on the better side of town, an enormous three-story Tudor surrounded by a stone wall capped with decorative iron spikes. Casey peered through the bars of the gates at the house’s outline as they rolled slowly past. They’d left Marty’s Volvo outside his apartment and rode together now in Jake’s Cadillac.
“How the hell do we get in there?” Jake asked.
“Every Sunday growing up,” Marty said. “Turn there.”
Jake turned at the corner and followed the side street adjacent to the mansion.
“We’d have dinner at Uncle Christopher and Aunt Dee’s,” Marty said from the backseat. “My cousin Ruth, she’d take us out back and smoke cigarettes. There’s an old door in the wall behind the garden with a lock that must be a hundred years old. You can open it with a tire iron.”
“You think this is Mission Impossible?” Casey asked.
“It’s my uncle’s place,” Marty said.
“You just got fired,” Casey said.
“I’m good with it if he is,” Jake said, pulling over in the deep shadows of the trees overhanging the street. “I’ll go, too.”
“Listen to yourselves,” Casey said. “What are you going to do, break a window?”
“My uncle calls it the men’s room,” Marty says. “There’s a mahogany bar, a pool table, darts, a poker table. He’s even got a walk-in humidor and a wine cellar. There’s an office down there, too. Big leather chairs and books. That’s where he keeps the safe. There’s some steps back by the garage. He keeps a key in the light fixture.”
“And then you blow the safe?” Casey said. “Or are you a safecracker, too?”
Marty blinked at her from the gloom of the backseat. “I know the combination.”
“And you’re sure that’s where records are?” Casey asked.
“I’m the one who put them there.”
Casey nodded. “And you two won’t mind if I stay on the sidelines for this? I’ve got enough charges pending against me.”
“We got it,” Jake said. “Although the prison stripes would suit you.”
“Up yours, Jake.”
The two of them disappeared, leaving Casey alone in the dark. Jake popped the trunk and she watched them jimmy the lock on the metal door, Jake forcing it open with his shoulder. After a few minutes, Casey got out and started up the sidewalk, using a stick she found to scratch the stone wall. When she reached the corner of the uncle’s property, she saw a car slowing down on the street to turn into the gates.
Heart pounding, she tucked herself behind a forsythia bush, its bloom a dull gold in the haze of the streetlight. The headlights blinded her as the car swung into the drive, idling almost silently as it waited for the gates to open. With a grinding shriek, the heavy metal bars began to part. Atop the corner posts, two bronze carriage lamps glowed yellow, and when Casey pushed through the fringe of the forsythia, she could clearly make out Ralph’s face sitting behind the wheel of the pewter Lexus.
The gates clanged and Ralph disappeared through them.
Casey whipped out her phone and dialed Jake, praying he’d answer.