The Buffalo Job Read online

  “I remember something like that,” Ray said.

  “Newton would be happy to know the headache from that apple wasn’t in vain,” I said. “They created specialized security consultants on their side. I am the equal, but opposite, reaction.”

  “Ilir, what the hell?” Dante said.

  Ilir flashed a look at Dante that shut him up fast.

  “I was told you were a fixer. That’s what your man said. He said you fix things.”

  I nodded. “That’s right. You need a painting that you can’t get, I can fix things so that you can get it.”

  Ray threw his hands in the air. “Nice work, Ilir. We’re fucked.”

  Ilir punched the redhead in the chest. The blow was like a nip from a bigger dog — just hard enough to remind everyone in the pack who the dominant mutt was.

  I picked up the envelope and put it on the table next to mine. “You three seem to be in the wrong place. Wait sixty seconds before you walk out that door. Not fifty-nine — sixty. Understand?”

  I tucked my chair in and walked to the rear door leading to the cramped storeroom I knew was behind it. I was one foot out the door when Ilir spoke.

  “Wait.”

  My right hand snaked into the jacket and my finger wound around the trigger. There was enough give in the holster to let me tilt it upwards so that I could fire through the jacket without turning around. It would ruin the coat, but not my day. Ilir wouldn’t be able to say the same. I turned my head just enough to see the three men.

  Ilir was standing, but his hands were empty. “Five would get us a plan. How much would it cost to have you steal it?”

  I turned and faced the younger man.

  “You’re acting as though you’re asking me to pick up a pizza on my way home. This isn’t a one-man job. It might have been once, but a botched theft and an attempted murder will have changed that. There will be more security and dealing with that takes time and manpower.”

  “We don’t have time for that,” Ilir said.

  I nodded towards Ray. “There’s always plan B.”

  Ilir looked at Ray, who had gone pale. He shook his head. “We’re in a bind here. We need that painting and we need to stay out of jail. The only way we can get both is if someone steals it for us.”

  “How much are you getting for the painting?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  My eyebrow raised half an inch.

  “Seriously, it wasn’t that kind of job. I can’t explain it, but it’s the truth.”

  “A lot of trouble for a job that doesn’t pay.”

  All three men nodded.

  I should have already been out of the coffee shop and on the street. I didn’t need the work. I had come away in the black from a few jobs over the last year and a half, and the consulting criminal gig was just starting to pay off. Every crook has a job on ice in their head, something that would pay off big-time if they could just get everything to fall into place. It was a lot of work convincing society’s most skeptical element to contract out something they held so close to the vest, but a few successes changed everything. Almost overnight, perceptions changed and word got out. At five grand a job, the money wasn’t enough to live on, but it was good money. The only problem with contracting was that it was contracting. I would stand in places watching money move back and forth only to let someone else collect it. The job was low-risk easy money, but low-risk easy money went with a low-risk easy life. I was getting bored and the more boredom I felt, the more I wanted out of the consulting game. I wasn’t desperate, or stupid, just itching to do more than write the plays so someone else could score a touchdown and fuck the homecoming queen. The three men and their missing painting didn’t sound like much of a job, but it was a job and a chance to get off the sidelines.

  “Sixty,” I said. The number came out so fast that I realized it had been waiting in my head.

  “Holy shit,” Ray said. He looked paler than when I said they should just kill him. Being deep in the red for the ginger was scarier than being deep in the ground.

  “That will cover everything. Manpower, expenses, whatever it takes.”

  Ilir ran a hand over the stubble on his chin. “We don’t have that kind of money, man.”

  “I guess the free heist business isn’t what it used to be.”

  I pulled my phone from my pocket and thumbed in the password. It took me less than half a minute to find the numbers I was looking for. I took a pen from behind the counter and found a pad of paper that was probably used for taking orders. I put both numbers on the paper and tore the sheet off the pad.

  Ilir looked at the numbers. “What is this? A phone number?”

  “The first number gets you in touch with a loan company. The company is run off a Native reserve in the States. Ask for Glen and tell him you want to take a loan. Tell him the loan is to pay a debt to James Moriarty. He’ll ask for an account number to wire the money into. Give him the second number.”

  “You want us to take a loan to pay you?”

  “Twenty each.” I looked at Ray who just kept getting whiter. I gestured towards the cash-poor pale-faced attempted murderer with a nod and said, “Maybe twenty-five, twenty-five, ten. Whatever works.”

  “Sixty thousand,” Ray said in quiet disbelief.

  “Sixty-five,” I said taking the envelope. “This is a deposit. Non-refundable.”

  The three men didn’t balk. When you were already in for sixty Gs, what’s five more?

  “How long can you keep Ray away from the cops?” I asked. “I’ll need some time to check the job over.”

  “About that,” Ilir said. “Fineberg says the longer we put them off, the more they will think Ray is their guy. He scheduled a meeting with the cops tomorrow at five. They’re going to meet Fineberg and Ray at his law office. Fineberg wants all of us there, y’know, as a statement of our innocence. We’ll say Ray was with us, and the alibi will keep all of us safe so long as that painting gets lifted by someone other than us.”

  The side of my mouth twitched up into a grin. One day to pick up a painting that was almost stolen and the cause of an attempted murder just a handful of days before.

  “Get the money transferred,” I said.

  “How do we know you won’t just take our money and run?” Dante asked.

  I looked at the feminine man; he crossed his arms and stood his ground. “We are not in a business that offers guarantees. If you have any doubts about this, don’t transfer that money. All it will have cost you is a few hours riding a train and five grand split three ways.”

  “Thirty now,” Ilir said. “Thirty when the job is done.”

  “Forty, twenty,” I said.

  Ilir looked at his partners, but I could tell from the looks on their faces that they were just waiting to follow his lead. “Done.”

  “Move the money,” I said as I stepped into the back room.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Friday at four in the afternoon was bustling outside of the TAG. Tour groups passed me as they led tourists into the building. Native Torontonians brushed past me ignoring the cultural warehouse to their left. I nodded to the two men who were watching me with the focus of inebriated birds of prey. The two cleaned-up homeless men saw my signal and they immediately lifted their flyers into the air. Each held up fat pink stacks of paper that had all the markings of a genuine endeavour by the gallery. The barking that came from the two men was eerily similar to an old-timey carny trying to rope people in to see the bearded lady.

  “Step right up, ladies and gentlemen. Step right up. In an effort to increase awareness about the arts, the Toronto Art Gallery is holding the first ever impressionist scavenger hunt.”

  Small groups of people disengaged from the herd to listen, but most kept walking.

  “Inside the gallery, at this very moment, is ten thousand dollars. That’s right
, ten thousand dollars in cash.”

  The mention of money did what mere advertisement couldn’t — everyone on the sidewalk who had been in earshot stopped where they were, changed course, and advanced on the two men and their colourful papers.

  The two men that I had chosen saw the sudden influx of attention and turned their banter up another notch.

  “That’s right! Ten thousand dollars free to whoever finds it first. Just complete the scavenger hunt. What could be easier? Learn about art and have a chance to go home with some colourful paper of your own.”

  The flyers started moving fast. Each man had been supplied with two hundred sheets of paper; the thick stacks looked to be half of their original height when I passed by the two homeless men and quietly slipped each a fifty.

  “Nice work, fellas.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” the second man echoed.

  I let the current of excited people pull me towards the bottlenecked entrance. The swollen line was gaining length and girth and I found myself jammed in behind three teenagers armed with flyers in one hand and smartphones in the other. They were all updating their Twitter accounts with information about the scavenger hunt.

  I paid the entrance fee and walked with the crowd of ­scavengers towards the impressionist exhibition. All around me, I could hear people reading off the pages I had typed up with the help of information taken directly from the TAG website. There were five different sets of instructions in all — enough to keep the entire exhibit pregnant with a litter of uncultured reality TV disciples for at least a half an hour.

  By my watch, it took less than a minute for the first security guard to break away from the established route he circled for the duration of his shift and show up in the wing housing the impressionist exhibition on loan from Philadelphia. It took another minute for the poor guy to realize that he was horribly outnumbered and overwhelmed by the throng and call for help. The night before, I had been in the gallery watching the space as it breathed. There was a rhythm in the space, as if the gallery were a hibernating beast. The guards — there had to be at least two more on duty than before the attempted murder — moved with the type of efficiency that only boredom-inspired autopilot could create. They circled their designated zones slowly and then started again. Every now and then they interacted with a patron, either to tell them to step back or to answer a question, but they always ended up back on their practised route. The same number of staff was working today and within a minute, the lone guard was joined by five others. One of them, a man in his late fifties with a flat nose and thinning hair, liberated a flyer from a young tween and began examining it. He brought his walkie-talkie to his mouth, but it was already too late.

  “Woman in the Water! It’s behind Woman in the Water!”

  The young woman who screamed her solution to the final clue had meant to tell only her boyfriend beside her, but the herd picked up on the exclamation.

  There was no painting in the gallery titled Woman in the Water, but there were three paintings on the wall with women near bodies of water. The crowds circled the three paintings like carrion birds. There was squawking from each huddle about the choice before the birds in each group began their slow timid approach. Fingers began tentatively reaching for the art, but the first shout started a frenzy.

  The six security guards began yelling for order, but the crowd was too loud for anyone to hear them. Four of the guards plunged into the crowds while the other two brought radios to their lips. I saw more guards coming towards the impressionist exhibit as shouts turned to screams. People were being dragged to the floor as more and more bodies surged forward towards the paintings. Anyone who had been unaware of the scavenger hunt had backed away from the small riot, but they stayed in the periphery with their eyes glued to the chaos. The only exception, investigators would find when they checked the tapes, would be the man in the sunglasses and hat.

  I kept my brim low as I passed through the gaze of the three cameras observing the European art collection. The room was deserted as I approached the two-by-three rectangle on the wall. The picture wasn’t much to look at, surely nothing to shove wire cutters into a man’s brain over, but art was subjective I guessed. The attempted robbery had resulted in an increase in warm body security, not in anything technical. I had toured the TAG the day before with a group. The guide was not enthusiastic about discussing the robbery, but she did remark with pride that the TAG’s strict security measures had made sure that they did not lose a valuable piece of art on the sad day of the attempted robbery. She beamed with pride for just a second when she said, “The art never even made it off the wall.”

  It was just what I thought. The cable had done its job; for the gallery, that would be a confirmation that they did everything right, and no one changes something that they got right.

  I lifted the artwork and got it six inches from the wall before the wire went taut. I let the art down gently so that it was hanging against the wall. The frame had the wire affixed to its reinforced backing; the wire ran from the painting, through the wall, and into a mechanism behind the drywall. The wire was coated with a thick rubber that told me cutting it would immediately trigger an alarm. I took off my satchel and unzipped it. Inside the bag was a thick cloth that had been folded into a dense rectangle. I pulled out the cloth, unfolded it on the floor, and then unzipped the smaller rearmost compartment. I extracted the small electric handsaw and thumbed the power switch. The rotating blade would go through rebar — the thin security chain didn’t even put up a fight.

  The painting came down and within seconds I had it wrapped in the cloth and inside the shoulder bag; the tool went back into the small compartment and the bag was back on my shoulder in half the time. If there was an audible alarm, I couldn’t hear it over the shouting and screaming still coming from the impressionist exhibit. I went down the stairs and rounded the base. There were cameras everywhere, but to the right of the stairs was a blind spot that covered four feet. I set down my bag and reversed my jacket. I pulled a different hat from the inner pocket and exchanged caps. The sunglasses changed next and then I pulled a flattened black duffel bag from an inner pocket of the satchel. I put the satchel into the duffel bag and left the blind spot. The main level was chaos as employees did double duty dealing with the small-scale riot upstairs and the excited onlookers downstairs. I walked out the front door, passing by two policemen on their way in. Who said art galleries were boring?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Tell me you didn’t.”

  Ox had wanted to meet in person. I picked a spot on the waterfront overlooking Lake Ontario. The breeze coming in off the water did nothing to cool me off. With the humidity, the temperature was in the low forties. My skin was dewy with perspiration and it made everything I had on my body stick to me. I took a swig from the bottle of water I had bought just before I sat down beside the older man; it had already started to go warm.

  “You know what? Don’t even lie to me. I know it was you. I knew it was you before I really knew it was you. Who else would boost a piece of art in the middle of the day?” Ox pulled at the collar of his shirt as though he was letting off steam from somewhere down below. Not for the first time, I wondered how the neck of his shirt remained so tight after birthing Ox’s head earlier that morning. Ox looked like a guy who should be named Ox. He had a huge bovine head accessorized by a sloped forehead more suited to early man. Supporting the massive skull was a body belonging to a smaller human. As Ox settled into the growing frailty of his sixties, his body began more and more to resemble abstract art.

  The water felt as hot as the air in my mouth. I turned the bottle and let the remainder splash the pavement. The edges of the puddle had already begun to evaporate when Ox spoke again.

  “Why the hell would you want to meet here? It’s forty with the humidex. My goddamn junk is stuck to my thigh.”

  “You complaining? Us
ually it’s stuck to your knee.”

  “Oh, he speaks, and he’s funny.” Ox lifted an arm and put it on the back of the bench. The sweat stain under his arm was making a break for his belt. “Make me laugh, ­funny man. Tell me the one about the guy who turned an easy bit of consulting into a robbery?”

  I turned my head so that the broker could see my eyes. “This isn’t a partnership, Ox. I don’t run anything by you.”

  The big man showed more backbone than I was used to. He leaned in close enough for me to feel his breath on my face; the acrid exhalations were hotter than the air. “I know what this is, Wilson. I’ve been doing it longer than you’ve been alive, so cut the shit. I don’t need you to run anything by me, but if I am setting up jobs for you, I need to know what kind of jobs my name gets attached to.”

  “You saw the papers,” I said. “There are no leads and the cops are asking anyone with information to call Crime Stoppers. If the cops are asking for help, it means they have nothing. You’re in the clear with the law and you got your cut. What is the problem?”

  “What’s the problem? What’s the problem, he says. Let me ask you this, what do you know about Albania?”

  “I can spell it,” I said.

  “Anything else?”

  I paused and gave it thought. “No.”

  “It’s a tiny place in Europe. I think it borders Greece or something.”

  “Fascinating,” I said in a tone that let Ox know that I found it anything but.

  “Then, I’m guessing you don’t know that the Albanian mob is going strong in your neck of the woods.”

  Ox meant the city, not the neighbourhood I lived in — he didn’t have a clue where I bedded down. I had chosen the city because it would be a much bigger haystack for anyone looking to search through. I was harder to find than a needle — sharper too. I lived in a sparsely furnished apartment on Jane Street just down from Finch Avenue. The rent was cheap and the building reflected it: exposed pipes sweated all day long or, worse, dripped never-ending puddles into strategically placed buckets. The electricity was spotty and the heat non-existent in the winter time, but everybody kept to themselves. The building was full of immigrants who had the kind of suspicion and shyness that could only come with unstamped paperwork. I had been in the building almost a year and no one had bothered to so much as nod to me in the hallway.