Chapter 35

Alex woke to the sound of someone or someones bouncing around like popcorn kernels in an air popper. Boomer and Snickers had somehow gotten into his room and were acting rowdy. They pounced onto his bed as soon as they figured out he was awake.

“Get off!” Alex complained.

He glanced over at his clock, which read 6:30, the literal definition of the butt-crack of dawn.

Janice stuck her head in the door.

“I heard you’re now dating Dawn, too. How many girlfriends do you need? Is this a repeat of prom?”

This was Conclave, the gossip capital of Oklahoma, where secrets came to walk like the undead to terrify the unsuspecting.

“Go ruin someone else’s day. I’m going to get up and ride off into the sunset,” Alex said, picking Snickers up off his chest and putting her on the floor.

Boomer bailed off the bed before Alex could reach him, and the two mutts dashed out the door. Alex could hear them thundering down the stairs. Through the floor, he heard a muffled “Settle down!” that sounded like a grumpy Lyric.

“That’s the sunrise,” Janice said, pointing out his window.

“You know what I mean,” Alex said, throwing his comforter off his body so he could get up.

“What about you and Dawn?”

Alex threw his legs over the side of the bed and rubbed his face as he tried to fully wake up.

“That was just a stupid idea to help Dawn fend off Ethan and Caleb. The two idiots were fighting over who got to ask her out next. I made the mistake of telling the girls, and the next thing I knew, I felt like an extra in a soap opera as they took it and ran with it,” Alex said.

“You’re saying you’re not dating Dawn?” Janice asked to confirm.

“No, absolutely not. Maddie would kill me if I actually tried to do that.”

“But you like Dawn?”

Alex counted to ten in his head before answering.

“Yes. Dawn is lovely, and if Maddie and I should ever...” Alex trailed off.

That seemed to satisfy his foster mom’s need to pry into his life. She nodded and said, “Breakfast will be ready in ten.”

Stretch was in Oklahoma City, scouting Corval Security. Two guards manned the security booth at the entrance of the company’s compound. They looked more like ex-Marines than rent-a-cops in their smart light-blue uniforms with the CS logo on the breast pocket. One of them gripped a frighteningly lethal-looking shotgun as if he was protecting ammo in Ukraine instead of a secure complex on the outskirts of a Middle American town. The weapon looked like unnecessary overkill for the job, like bringing a machete to a knife fight.

The compound itself otherwise looked like a nondescript warehouse. Stretch knew that was by design. What it held was more cash than you would find at most banks. It was the hub that serviced most of the ATMs in central Oklahoma. Based on his research, they would have between ten and twenty million dollars in cash in their vault, most of it in twenty-dollar bills.

To score a heist, Stretch needed three things: a bold plan, the right team, and the skill to stay one step ahead of law enforcement. All he was lacking was the team, or this would have been on the top of his wish list of jobs.

The best part was that twenty-dollar bills were all but untraceable, except for new bills that would be in sequential order by serial number. The downside was that such a large amount of twenties would be a real pain to move. It would more than fill a standard U-Haul truck.

He estimated it would take at least thirty to forty-five minutes to haul the cash from the vault and load it into a truck with only a handful of guys. That was a long time to be inside a target location, making the odds of something going catastrophically wrong too high for comfort.

In the late ‘90s, a group of security guards decided to rob a similar facility in LA. They actually succeeded in taking nearly twenty million. They even got away with it for two years until their being amateurs bit them in the butt.

They’d been clever in that they didn’t spend money on lavish cars or vacations. They played the long game for lifetime security. They got caught because one of them wanted to buy some land. He’d met with a realtor and brought a cash down payment in a shoebox, not realizing that wasn’t how you purchased property.

The realtor was suspicious, so after the thief left his office, he called the police. They quickly figured out that the stacks of twenties were wrapped in bands with the security firm’s logo printed on them. The kicker was they’d been stamped with the date they’d been counted and wrapped, which matched the timeframe of the heist.

When confronted, the idiot had given up his crew.

On the other hand, Stretch knew the jewelry shipment would be much easier to transport. He figured they could crack open the truck and load everything in under five minutes.

Yes, there was the issue that many of the jewels would have numbers engraved in them, but a good fence could either find people who didn’t care or had ways of removing or altering the numbers so they couldn’t be tracked back to the robbery.

Stretch had hacked in and found that this was where all the jewels from LA to Dallas would be sent. Corval Security would keep them in their vault until all the shipments arrived. They would then transport a consolidated shipment to Tulsa for the trade show.

Stretch’s goal that day was to breach Corval Security’s systems and discover when the shipment would be sent and how they planned to keep it safe. Those two pieces of information were crucial to the success of his plan.

He checked to see if he was close enough; he was. Stretch then launched software to track the firm’s personnel and watched as his tablet confirmed finding several devices, which in turn found even more. Soon, Stretch could see several options he could check.

He isolated the Wi-Fi cameras and began to check the different video feeds. This was why he’d taught Alex to only install hardwired video security: to prevent people like him from hijacking them.

He found where they loaded and unloaded the trucks and saw they had a couple of different configurations. For smaller cash transfers, CS used the bags typically seen being carried in and out of other places, like grocery stores and banks. Those trucks each had a camera in the back and a couple of seats for guards.

For more secure transfers, there were trucks equipped with cages that held rolling four-compartment shelves, each shelf holding a metal lockbox. It would be one of those trucks that would be used to transport the gems and other jewelry. While having carts to move the lockboxes would make the heist easier, the cages would have to be cut open. That would add time to the job, something Stretch hadn’t figured into his plan yet.

He hacked into their computer systems and found they planned to move everything in three weeks. That should give them time to prepare for the job and get some practice in so it would go off without a hitch.

Steve had been all over his ass, wanting to make money. Steve had explained it by saying, “Right now, there are too many squirrels and not enough nuts. You need to find us more nuts.”

That little gem was right up there with phrases like ‘fraidy hole’ (tornado shelter), ‘ice box’ (refrigerator), and ‘all y’all’ (plural for y’all).