I Wait to Die

By William Wallace

Sometimes the stakes are so high that a crime seems too good to be true. That's the way it was when Frank returned to Oakland from Colorado to organize the multi-million dollar robbery of Redi-Money, a check-cashing outfit that catered to down-and-outers.

Complicating things were the fact that the heist was the brainchild of his best friend's "fiance," a femme fatale who oozed sex from every pore and seemed to be dead set on pitting Frank's crew members against each other. Add a crooked cop to the mix, and a payroll from the robbery that was too good to be true and you have the ingredients for disaster.

Read "I Wait to Die!" a crime novella by William E. Wallace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Wallace
• Release date: Apr 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301837915

William Wallace

William E. Wallace is the author of The Judas Hunter, a private detective novel, and Tamer, an upcoming western set in Gold Rush California. He is an veteran investigative reporter who worked 26 years for the San Francisco Chronicle before taking early retirement in 2006 to teach and write fiction full time. As a reporter he specialized in projects about political corruption, organized crime and police misconduct. His investigative reports won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the San Francisco Press Club. Wallace has taught journalism at California State University, East Bay in Hayward and at the University of California, Berkeley. He took his bachelor's degree in political science at Cal Berkeley and served as an intelligence analyst while serving in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War. He lives with his wife and son in Berkeley, California.

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I Wait to Die

By William E. Wallace

Copyright 2013 William E. Wallace

Published by William E. Wallace at Smashwords

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright and Legal Information

About the Author:

Chapter One:

The Redi-Money robbery was supposed to be the job of a lifetime: no alarms to disconnect, no vault to open; just a plain old-fashioned stick-up, a little bit like knocking over a 7-11.

A 7-11 with millions of dollars in the till, that is.

Unfortunately, things don't always turn out the way they're supposed to and that’s how it was with Redi-Money. Only one thing about the robbery ended up being as it was advertised: it was the job of a lifetime; my lifetime and that of everybody else in the crew.

That’s why I’m sitting here with the shades closed in a motel room on MacArthur Boulevard, drinking rye whisky and watching the minutes crawl by.

I’m waiting to die.

Harvey Kettler had first brought up Redi-Money when I got back from Denver that Monday and he collected me at the Amtrak Depot in Oakland. I called him from the pay phone at the station and he picked me up out front, tossing my suitcase in the trunk of his old Chevy.

You still got a piece? he asked casually as we caught the Nimitz Freeway, letting me know right away what he had in mind wasn’t going to be a job for a guy who lays awake at night worrying he might have to hurt somebody.

I nodded. Two of ‘em, just like always. That’s why you didn’t meet me at the airport, Harve. They don’t like you to carry weapons onto planes since those ragheads took out the World Trade Center. You might have read something about it in the papers?

He ignored the crack. Good, he said. I got a deal lined up that will put you on Easy Street, but we have to take the money away from some people who aren’t going to want to part with it. You in?

I looked out the window. When a crook tells you he has something lined up that will set you up for life, you have to be at least a little skeptical, but the fact is, I wasn’t getting any younger.

I’d gone to Denver because I needed a place where I could be on ice for awhile; a big deal in Los Angeles six months earlier had gone sour, leaving me flat and an old photo of me in prison dungarees on all the local television stations. I needed to be someplace where I could hang out until things cooled off. My half-year stay in the Mile High City had got me back on my feet, but the place bored me and the stuff I’d been doing was strictly nickel-dime.

Harvey had fronted me the money to get out of L.A. so I owed him. Still, I didn’t want to seem desperate, so I held back. What’s the target? I asked.

He could tell I was hooked by my question. A guy who doesn’t want to be a part of something says so up front. If he starts asking questions about what’s involved, it’s obvious he’s already at least part way on board.

It’s a check-cashing joint, he said. But the real money is in loaning people cash until they get paid. The suckers who use the place pay a big fee for the privilege.

I turned it over in my head. Maybe I was still groggy from my train trip, but I seemed to be missing something.

This is your big deal that puts us on Easy Street? I asked. Seems like chickenshit to me. I’ve seen these places before; they have ‘em in every skid row in America. The people who use them are no-hopers, like your old man before he died of liver cancer: they have lousy jobs or no job at all; they’re people on welfare, waiting for their next check from the county. How do you plan to make a decent score by hitting a place that caters to down-and-outers?

I was hard-balling, but he had my interest. Harvey wasn’t the highest caliber bullet in the box but he didn’t BS; if he thought there was money there, he had some angle that made it at least possible. He gave me a wiseass face that told me he knew something I didn’t.

How much money do you figure these five-and-dime outfits have in the cage at any given time? he asked.

I shrugged. A few grand maybe, I said without giving it much thought. Maybe twenty-thirty K, tops.

He was grinning openly now, watching traffic as he turned off the Nimitz onto Highway 24 near downtown.

What would you say if I told you that when we hit this particular outfit, it will have more than four and a half million dollars on hand. All cash: used bills, mixed denominations? he asked.

This had to be a joke. If it was, Harvey had grown a sense of humor while I was out of state.

I’d say you were full of crap, I told him.

He glanced at me again. But if it was true, if there was actually was that much there, ready to grab, what would you say then?

I laughed. I’d ask you, ‘what’s my cut gonna be?’

Harve gave me a wink. Let’s get a beer, he said.

§

Over a couple bottles of Budweiser, Harvey laid it all out:

Redi-Money operated ten stores in the East Bay, each located in the kind of neighborhood that municipal officials call troubled, meaning they run hot and cold with shit-birds the way some places do with cockroaches.

Every Sunday night, he said, the cash from nine of those operations is delivered to the main branch in Oakland, a cinder-block bunker on East Fourteenth Street, the six-mile stretch of pavement that do-gooders downtown renamed International Boulevard to build community pride among the junkies, hookers, crack-heads and hustlers who infect it like flesh-eating bacteria.

In the bunker, the weekly take from all ten branches goes through a counting machine and gets bundled for an armored car to take to the bank at 8:30 Monday morning.

I interrupted him when he got to the armored car. I don’t do those, I said. You can’t get into one with a Howitzer. The guards all pack, even the guy behind the wheel. They lock ‘em down at the first sign of trouble and hit the panic button for the home office. They’ll have cops there in two minutes, even in a town like Oakland where they put most of the cops on the dole when the city started to go broke.

He shook his head. I know all that, he said. Remember? You broke me in on robbery. First rule: don’t try to take an armored car because you get killed or you get caught.

I sat back and spread my hands. Okay. We aren’t doing the car, then. What are we going to stick up?

He grinned. We do the Redi-Money bunker, instead. We can go in at 8:20 a.m., ten minutes before the transport gets there, he said. We pick up the bundles, throw ‘em in duffle bags, toss the bags into the back of a van and scoot.

He raised his hands, palms up and empty, to demonstrate how easy it would be.

I mulled over what he’d told me, looking for holes.

You say the main branch is concrete brick?

Yeah, he said. The front is on the street and the check-cashing operation is in the offices there. The counting room’s at the rear, with a loading dock where the armored car makes the pick-up.

The building is on an open lot, right? And there’s a chain-link fence around it?

He nodded. There’s a single gate that opens on the side street, he said.

I visualized it and locked in the image.

I assume this receiving area is well lit?

Not so much, he said. There’s a bank of lights over the dock and two lights on the fence.

What about guards? Closed circuit TV? Is anybody watching?

The guard post is inside the office. A guard monitors the CCTV camera from a security post at the rear, near the door to the loading dock, only inside.

One camera?

Exactamundo.

Any hundreds? I asked, using cop shorthand for alarms.

Controlled from the same guard post. An audible that also rings up the cops. It’s a panic button like the transport has, only with a different security outfit.

I thought about that. So if you get the guard post in the office, you’ve got the entire compound, then.

Harvey grinned again. Everything but the bar and hot tub. One-stop shopping.

How did you plan to take control?

Through the street entrance, he said. The check-cashing operation locks down around 1:45 p.m. each night.

Same as bars, right? I said. They probably don’t want the place jammed with drunken losers after closing time.

Right. The check-cashing crew that’s out front goes home at a quarter to two when they shut down for the night. There’s three people left in the counting room with the guard, and the only thing between the check cashing center and the counting room is a combination door.

I frowned then for the first time. To get the money we’d have to go through the combo.

How do we get in?

We’ll have the code numbers.

I looked at him with my smile back and spreading across my face. No wonder Harvey kept flashing that smug grin.

You sly son of a bitch: you have somebody inside, I said. My tone made it sound like a question but it wasn’t, really; even with a half-assed security set-up like the one at Redi-Money, you could only knock the place over with the help of an employee. Otherwise, you would have to use so much force to get inside where the cash was that you’d wake up every cop sleeping away his graveyard shift in the alleys of East Oakland.

Harvey nodded. Our contact not only knows the combination, but is giving us a key to the front so we can get in after the cashiers leave for the night. That way we don’t have to pick the front lock or crash it. That gives us more time and plenty of quiet. We should be inside about 30 seconds after we get out of the van in front.

Is this guy you have inside a friend of mine?

I asked because everybody I knew had a felony sheet and nobody was going to hire them to count the take from a mom-and-pop grocery store, let alone a check cashing operation with millions in untraceable cash. If somebody I’d worked with was the inside man, he’d have to be using a phony name and fake ID. He’d be the first one the cops grabbed