Pursuit

By Matt Kruze

A pair of roaming criminals are targeting banks across the country. Despite the FBI’s attempts to bring them to justice, they remain at large.

When veteran Special Agent Calvin Marsland takes over the case, he is not prepared for what follows. As he chases the criminals from state to state, he is being pursued as well: Someone is watching hunters and hunted alike, waiting for a chance to strike.

While the chase unfolds from the metropolis of Dallas to the snowcapped peaks of Colorado, from the dazzle of Las Vegas to the shores of San Diego, someone is waiting, watching, planning the heist of the century. It is a crime that requires precision timing, planning to the tiniest detail. For all parties will be involved, used like puppets.

Can Marsland identify the trap before it is too late?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matt Kruze
• Release date: Aug 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301350926

Matt Kruze

Matt Kruze is a fiction writer with a penchant for crime and mystery thrillers. Following a well-received short story, The Villager, set in his home village, Matt has since published his debut full length novel, Pursuit.Matt lives in Buckinghamshire in the United Kingdom and is always happy to chat to aspiring and established writers.

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PURSUIT

MATT KRUZE

Copyright © 2014 Matt Kruze

All rights reserved

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters and situations are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

For Becky, who has trod more than her share of the long road.

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Unsub n a slang acronym used in law enforcement meaning ‘Unknown Subject of an investigation.’

Chapter One

Wanted Men

Thursday, 3.43 p.m.

A roll of thunder like distant rockfall.

The fawcett-hiss of rain, sudden as grain spilling from a split sack.

North-western Ohio, late fall.

The clouds were grinding in, thick and dark, and these gray days would prevail until the snows brought crisp, bright relief.

Had Kyle realised, as he approached the little Ohio town of Burley in the ageing brown Chevrolet, that by the end of the week his name would be at the summit of the FBI’s most wanted list, he might have elected to circumnavigate that vapid little settlement, now partially obscured by the heaving cataract of gray rainfall that drew across the valley floor before him in curtains. But he had no presentiment of the events in which he was to become entangled and so, having identified the bank earlier, eased the Camaro towards town, oblivious to the fate which would manifest itself over the coming days. A fate whose design was intricate, yet its very inception was born of nothing more complex than Kyle’s routine hold-ups and a determination to emulate, if only by location, one of the most notorious criminals of modern times.

Burley was a grimy smear of urbanization nestled in the corner of Ohio, touching the Indiana and Michigan State Lines. A jumble of red bricks barely arranged into architecture and imbued with the carbon deposits of the past hundred years, it was the epigone of those run-down industrial sectors found in every city from Boston, New York and Philadelphia to San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego – but there was no redevelopment in any part of Burley to counter the dreariness of abandoned warehouses with spikes of glass in the window frames and slashes of daylight showing through the roofs.

The Lauder Bank, however, in contrast and somewhat mysteriously to most of Burley’s citizens, thrived. It was one of those crowning glories found in all run down towns – a would-be saving grace if you like – a cynosure immured among the hulking shells of long abandoned factories and houses with wood for windows. The superficial observer, the passer by on the busy but sombre Main Street, witnessed a clientele rather down-at-heel who stood in stark contrast to the outward majesty of the bank: great, shining slabs of St. Anne’s marble enclosing the building in a shell of splendour and broad, black, unctuous windows with gold lettering etched into the glass mirroring the street and its steady crawl of traffic.

From nine-to-five Monday-to-Friday, and nine-to-midday on Saturday, the people of Burley came and went, slouching in the queue as they waited to withdraw pay checks or Federal Assistance money that had splashed into their accounts like rain in the desert, but seldom to deposit funds. An ill-fated bunch, sapped of ambition and self-worth, their contribution to the logistics of the bank was nevertheless significant: money. The green and white paper kind, wrapped into little bricks of cash, hundreds of thousands of dollars of it, safely locked away in the class I vault and bundled into the drawers behind the tellers’ desks. The kind you could smell, the kind that lands with a wonderfully euphonious thud when a bundle is dropped onto a desk. It is banks like this, serving the less affluent townships, which carry the most cash, since they undertake proportionately more transactions of that nature than their Beverley Hills or Manhattan counterparts.

A small-town bank, left to its own devices.

Or so it had been until today.

~

Again Kyle whispered to himself the words that spanned the windows in gold lettering. Lauder Bank, Ohio.

‘It’s a shithole.’ Raindrops stuttered down the glass, obscuring his view of the bank.

‘It’s not so bad,’ Sammy objected, then qualified: ‘Compared to the rest of the town.’

‘That’s what I mean – the town. Not the bank. The bank’s fine.’

‘Oh.’

He turned away from the bank to look at Sammy and give him a frown. His agitation was bravado though, feigned irritation to conceal the clamour of nerves and the adrenaline coiling through his lower gut.

The rain was falling harder now, squeezed through the cloud layer and merging into a single membrane that slid down the Chevrolet’s windscreen in molten waves as though the very glass were melting.

‘I bet it rains here the whole time,’ Kyle mused, leaning forwards so that the tip of his nose pressed flat against the cold glass. ‘That cloud – I bet it never moves, like in the cartoons.’ He laughed humourlessly and a patch of mist bloomed and quickly contracted on the window in front of his lips.

Sammy did not respond.

A pretty lady came out and tottered on precarious stilettos, hurrying towards shelter.

‘That’ll do,’ Kyle whispered, his voice tremulous. ‘Leaves five inside.’ He started the engine and pulled out onto Main Street, then turned right at the intersection and parked just beyond a white minivan.

Kyle opened the door and climbed out, squinting in the rain that made a white mist above the road surface and caused bubbles to pop up like delicate glass bulbs on the water. A fucking long way from Colorado, he thought, dark hair quickly slicking to his head.

~

They sat in the bank for a minute and a half on seats that made your buttocks go numb, next to the big front window that mirrored the tellers’ desks fairly well on gloomy days like this. It was easy to sit and wait, not to take action, just as it was easy to get up and walk away, but by this stage you were only minutes finishing the job, and it was that element of promise that seemed to check his unravelling nerves.

Kyle looked at Sammy and nodded. They removed black bundles from their jeans pockets which unfolded in well-rehearsed acts of prestidigitation to become balaclava helmets. They put gloves on, pulled the masks over their heads and got to their feet. Sammy withdrew a Mossberg 500 12-gauge pump-action shotgun from beneath his long jacket (a tool which came with the package when you took Sammy on as your sidekick, Kyle had discovered happily, and you could ask how he came by such a weapon but you never really got much out of Sammy, so Kyle contented himself with not knowing and besides, he’d been pleased to replace his old Remington which was better for pointing at pheasants and the like). He shoved the forend – the green synthetic grip beneath the barrel which causes the action to lock up, readying the weapon for firing – forward with his left hand and the snap of plastic against metal got everyone’s attention.

‘Hello,’ Kyle said simply. He was softly spoken, his voice inflected with a gentle asperity, and that was the single most noted fact given by his growing trail of eyewitnesses. ‘Any of you tellers press any buttons and he’ll open up your faces with this. We’ll kill everyone here if we have to.’ It was important to remind the tellers of the danger of pressing their silent alarm buttons straight away, because that was what they were trained to do first. Kyle had established that right from the start, when he’d heard that robbing banks was a piece of cake. All tellers, even in the small town banks, were instructed that when held up, you handed over the money, because the Federal Insurance would cover it, you tried to insert a dye pack or a tracker if you could-though there were many banks who discouraged this of their staff – but first and foremost you pressed the red buttons hidden from view but within easy reach as you took the cash from the drawers. You might also take hold of the bait money, notes reserved especially for those clients who possessed weapons and an aggressively persuasive business manner, and hand that over as well. The bait money was a bundle of bills that had noted serial numbers and should anyone be caught with those bills on his or her person following a bank robbery, they were going down. That didn’t concern Kyle. He took the view that if ever he got himself apprehended then it was all over any way you looked at it, bait money or not. He adhered strictly to a literal policy when it came to avoiding the arm of the law, and he never kept the cash on his person for long anyway. No, it was the silent alarms that presented the most immediate threat. If a teller pressed the panic button you’d likely still get out in time, but eventually you were going to pull a job, the silent alarm would be raised and a patrol car would be passing just at the wrong moment. If you could persuade the tellers to think twice about shouting, electronically speaking, for help, then the odds against getting away swung significantly in your favour.

Sammy walked over to the Plexiglas window that shielded the three tellers from fists, spit, or on a bad day, knives, but not from flying lead shot, and pointed the barrel at the man on the left.

Kyle glanced at the safe set into the wall behind them, then ignored it. There was a prickle of almost electrical tension in the air, a tightening of the space around him that made his fingertips tingle. He took a brief inventory of the bank’s patrons, studied their countenances for signs of possible resistance. As his gaze fell on them, in turn, they looked away, fearful of this man’s attention. An old man stood rooted to the spot where he had been queuing, a middle-aged woman behind him. A couple of men who could have been related, one slightly leaner than the other, less rubicund than his colleague who looked as though he might have recently returned from a vacation in sunnier climes, stood midway between the counter and the door; they had been on their way out when Kyle and Sammy entered. Five people, not including the staff.

The rain knocked harder against the glass, drowning out, almost literally, the whisper of the air conditioning. It put Kyle ill at ease because it impaired one of the most vital senses. He took a moment to absorb the surroundings: two wooden doors behind the desks; a third to the left of the row of tellers, a digital keypad set into the wall beside it. He stared intently at the doors, as if to penetrate the thick beech panels. Above the bank’s main entrance, a camera was suspended from the ceiling and three more were positioned above where he now stood. Four fixed cameras, strategically angled, were all the bank required to capture on film every person who entered, client or otherwise. They didn’t worry Kyle; you just kept your head down until the balaclava went on. Simple. Now he stared into one of the lenses from behind the safety of his mask and smiled at how easily such a potentially dangerous piece of technology could be rendered useless.

He looked back at the young teller and squinted at the name badge pinned to the breast of his white shirt. ‘How much money’s in the drawers? Miesz—kowski – is that right?’

He nodded. ‘Yes, Mieszkowski, sir. I don’t know exactly. A few thousand in each maybe.’ Beads of sweat bloomed upon his forehead and his pallor bleached from pale wax to the colour of ash.

Kyle stuffed the black canvas sports bag through the gap in the screen and glanced at Sammy, who pointed the barrel of the Mossberg at the young teller. ‘You fill up the bag from all the drawers or he’ll open you up with that thing. This bank – within these walls – this’ll be the last place you spend any time on earth. You try anything, anything at all, and you won’t have a face left, you understand me?’

It wasn’t that Kyle had a predilection for terrorising people, an ambition hell-bent on obtaining his lucre no matter the human cost: he was here only to take what he occasionally managed to convince himself was his rightful gain, and in so doing avoid endangering the lives of his victims. He employed this basic principal: by threatening violence, its necessity could be obviated. It came down to one thing: Kyle had a conscience – albeit the recondite processes which drove it were not always decipherable upon introspection.

Mieszkowski’s conduct was laudable: he filled the sack with cash almost meticulously, like a packer at the grocery store, as though possessing some kind of acumen in the business of being robbed. He was a little too composed for Kyle’s liking but with any luck he was only adhering to the bank’s armed robbery procedures and, with a little more luck, those procedures didn’t encourage the staff to insert dye packs or depress the double buttons beneath the counter, alerting the security office.

This moment was hardest on the nerves; he felt like a man free-falling, head spinning as he entered an almost dreamlike, vertiginous state. There came the sensation of sweat mounting at his temples, dampening the balaclava. Kyle surveyed the bank’s customers again, the hapless group who had chosen just this moment of a rainy Tuesday afternoon to conduct their financial business: the old man in a tired suit that was going shiny on the sleeves; the middle-aged woman with neatly coiffed hair but too much makeup, thick and waxy on eyes and lips like a carapace; the two men who might have been brothers, or cousins at least. They glanced around with febrile eyes, unsure of where they ought to look. But the old man, jaw set slightly, squinted hard at them. Kyle disregarded him as Mieszkowski went from drawer to drawer, filling the bag with money.

The last few-thousand dollars were deposited into the bag and then the young teller placed it on the counter. Seizing the handles, Kyle yanked it through the opening in the Plexiglas and they walked backwards towards the door, covering the staff and customers of the Lauder Bank with the shotgun.

It was done. They must get out, and away clean, but there was a thrill to that, a little frisson of excitement borne from success.

Kyle wanted to reassure them or say something but his throat was tight and he thought his voice might give out, so he only nodded as the door behind them slid open and the sound of the rain came at them.

Total time elapsed: four minutes, thirty-five seconds.

The sidewalk was deserted and they removed the balaclavas, Sammy tucking the weapon back under his jacket. Just two men with a black canvas bag.

Kyle stared up into the dense sky. Great slabs of cloud were growing muddy in the already-fading light of mid-afternoon. In any other part of the world, Kyle thought distantly, they would be suffused pink or red by now, warming to a fiery glow as day drew towards sunset. In fact, had they arrived in town a day sooner, they would have stood beneath the yellow October sun, flaring in a screen of pure blue and casting dark blocks and blades across the streets and sidewalks. Those on foot, including the bank’s patrons, were dressed for the most part in t-shirts and wore dreamy smiles in response to the unseasonal, unexpected warmth. But at 3.48pm of that previous day, precisely twenty-four hours before Kyle and Sammy had egressed from the Lauder Bank, a police cruiser had drifted slowly by the gray marble façades. Had Kyle and Sammy arrived a day sooner, they would have emerged to the quick yelp of breaks and a sudden wash of blue light. Such is the fortuitous nature of bank robbery.

Today, unappreciative of their good fortune, Kyle swore and cursed as they jogged across a street half an inch deep in flowing water that splashed up with each footfall, darkening the cuffs of their jeans.

In the Camaro, Kyle sat behind the wheel and took five breaths, then fired the ignition and pulled away.

‘That was okay,’ Sammy suggested, panting, as the V8 picked up smoothly.

‘Few thousand bucks,’ Kyle murmured, glancing in the mirror. ‘Told you this place was a shithole. Should’ve just driven right through.’ He reached behind him and found one of his t-shirts which he used on his hair, although it was more an exercise in wetting a t-shirt than drying hair.

Sammy’s head had dropped and Kyle could have sworn his lower lip was protruding.

He sighed heavily. ‘Sam you did okay. Pulled it off just like we practised. It’s my fault okay? Only...if we’d chosen somewhere else we could’ve scored twice that.’

Exactly what that amounted to was very much in question since neither of them had counted the money, but it felt light. Argued another way of course, even if it was no more than six thousand dollars that was still an hourly rate of nearly eighty-thousand, but you were always on borrowed time in this game.

They left Burley, skirting the town to the south, climbing steadily to an elevation of some five hundred feet, the iron sky descending as the road rose to meet it. The little network of streets and the scatter of buildings lay spread out below them and he thought he could identify the bank on Main Street, a steady stream of cars gliding along that principal thoroughfare; the traffic lights changing colour – silent little pinpricks of red and green.

To the west, a ragged curtain of rainfall advanced on the town across the dim, gently rolling landscape. The image sent a shudder down his back and he turned away from the miniature scene, fixing his gaze on the road ahead.

~

Two weeks earlier

He turned his back on the single storey building, which in three hours would become a crime scene of national magnitude, and gazed at the expanse of blue ocean. Out in the curve of the bay, beyond the marina with its clutter of bright masts, a thrust of wind pressed the surf into wrinkles flecked with white. He shivered at the sight. A cloud drifted across the face of the setting sun, extinguishing the glare that was reflected in the lenses of his cheap sunglasses.

Beneath the woollen cap a thatch of dreadlocked hair the colour of old straw made his scalp itch. He could hardly imagine how it might feel to have real hair like this.

The wind pushed inland, stirring the boats in the marina, bent the palms lining the promenade, made their fronds clatter. It thrust up the gentle incline to the bench on which he sat and hardened the skin on his forearms, flapped the bottoms of his flared jeans and drove in through ragged tears in the denim.

Dropout, tramp, loafer. Those names, and others, he had been called during the past eight hours as he’d scouted the western edge of town, ticking off every intersection, tracing on foot every route and its alternative. He sympathised with those who really had nothing – the homeless, the streetwalkers, those who didn’t belong. Pitied their day-by-day existence, the need to survive from one meal to the next, one shelter to another. He could not empathise though, for he was the richest tramp in the world, and by two a.m. he would have shed these tattered garments and would have contributed another two million dollars to an already enviable fortune.

The sun dipped below the base of the cloud, molten reflection flashing in the dark windows of the bank behind him, painting a rosy glow onto white stucco walls.

An unusual location for a bank, he considered, not for the first time. He suspected the building itself was little more than an appendage to the ATM housed in the front wall; a financial grazing point, but with staff present during the day to assist those clients who needed more than just a quick injection of cash. The bank’s principal clientele would be tourists, and he didn’t imagine it would normally carry money sufficient to justify the investment of his time. But his intelligence was never in error and if it said there would be two million dollars in the vault until the following morning, he had no reason to doubt that.

By nine a.m., when the bank opened for business, that money would be gone. By nine a.m. he would be many miles from the tourists and the undulant ocean and the swirls of magnolia sand eddying across asphalt streets. And he would have left the bank’s vault empty – the only indication that anybody had set foot inside the building during the night.

After that nobody would call him tramp or loafer.

They would call him the name that the newspapers had given him, a name that trailed behind him from state to state.

And over the coming days he would finalise his plans for the strangely successful amateur, Kyle Anson.

~

Friday, 2 a.m.

Calvin Marsland slumped back on the bed of yet another ragged motel room. He found the rattle of the rain against the window intrusive. To some it was a soothing, quiescent whisper, like the wash of the sea edging onto a plane of sand, and often was to him, but this night he had focused upon it too intently and, as his mind twisted its perception of the noise into an encroachment, so it became the root of his insomnia.

He pressed the off button on the TV remote and the room went black.

‘Dammit,’ he hissed, reaching across blindly and switching on the lamp that stood on the table next to the bed. Its glow suffused the amber liquid in a bottle of Maker’s Mark. He picked it up – it was like a tonic to feel the weight of the full bottle in his hand – and peeled off the red wax-covered paper strip before unscrewing the lid. He tipped the bottle and licked his lips as bourbon fell into the glass. This was his favourite tipple, a drink that he relished and caressed with every mouthful. Drinking, he absorbed the room for the first time. The décor was egregious in places, stolid to a point somewhere far beyond insipid in others. And there was a stench to the place which caused his nose to wrinkle. Nothing offensive, but the air carried a scent redolent of abandoned houses, vaguely musty furniture and an absence of freshness, of life.

After a time the rain eased off. He finished the glass of Bourbon, poured another measure, downed it, and switched the light off.

For a minute or two he sat still, blinking at the illusory silver sparks that bounced around in the darkness, massaging the back of his neck, knowing he ought to be wanting his phone to ring but hoping it wouldn’t till morning, before shuffling down in the creaking bed until his head rested on the crumpled pillows, misshapen and uncomfortably warm after three hours of being pressed between his back and the wall.

~

A little after six a.m. Special Agent Robert Johanssen awoke, only somewhat refreshed. He rose from the bed and went over to the window, bare feet peeling off the sticky linoleum tiles. He pulled the cord and raised the dented Venetian blind, exposing smudged, fingerprinted glass behind.

The sun had lifted above the horizon but was concealed behind an orange smudge of cloud. Yesterday the air had been heavy, freighted with the last touches of fall’s humidity; now winter had lain down its crisp mantle and the windows of the cars in the lot were furred white.

He sighed, clouding the glass, and rubbed his beard, the growth no longer prickly but soft: hair, not bristle. He considered leaving it, reflecting on the frosty world dawning outside, but it made him feel unclean.

He went over to the bathroom, the floor cold beneath his feet. He showered, dried, then removed his bathrobe from the hook on the door and put it on, careful not to let the cord drape on the floor. He wiped a clear patch in the misted mirror with the base of his fist and shaved for the first time in three days – a painful, brutal affair. When he was done, he studied his face in the mirror and saw a visage beset with lassitude. This occupation of constant travel – constant pursuit – was neither salutary to his emotional wellbeing nor to the outward appearance he presented to the world. He cleaned his teeth in a further effort to revitalise, even though he’d have to do it again after breakfast. His stomach whined and a ripple of hungry nausea washed through him.

His partner would come knocking soon. The inscrutable Marsland, both night owl and worshipper of the rising sun apparently, he was that rare and inconvenient paradox. Johanssen had known him for just two weeks but he had deciphered the code of Marsland’s sleep pattern within two days. For all his acuity though, both the naturally inherent kind and the academically inculcated, Johanssen could not have stated on the bible that he knew Marsland at all; their relationship did not extend beyond the realms of professional acquaintance.

It was half six when Marsland came. A frame of silver daylight flashed around the doorframe in rhythmic accompaniment to his pounding fist. The hinges clattered and Johanssen thought he saw a blade of light open up in the wood panelling of the door. Marsland would complain about this in his way, deploring the room, probably the bed – the décor for certain. So, braced for the most cogent argument from his partner as to why employees of the FBI should have greater expenses lavished upon them, he felt almost dejected when the older agent strode across the threshold gripping a rolled up newspaper, whistling tunelessly.

‘Good night?’ Marsland asked, seating himself on the bed, bouncing on it experimentally.

‘Sure. Yours?’

‘Slept like the dead my friend.’ He stretched theatrically.

‘Mm.’

‘You don’t believe me,’ Marsland observed, suddenly rising. ‘That is your constitutional right of course.’ The truth was that he had been granted some six hours’ sleep, but it had been plagued by malevolent dreams: turbid images of men who had served under him in Viet-Nam; an elderly neighbour from his childhood days whose name he had only ever know as Herb; his wife, dead almost ten years now; all of them decaying before his eyes,