Read Chapter 29: The Gold Coin

DeVries turned his back on Walter as if the bound man were already a piece of furniture. The click of his heels on the marble floor was slow, deliberate. He stopped before the massive oak desk and poured two fingers of whiskey into a crystal glass, not offering one to Roy.

“You understand the position you’re in, Mr. Royce?” DeVries said, using the name that cut Roy deepest. “You stole from me. You killed a man to do it. And you brought me nothing but a paper I already own three times over.”

Roy stood near the door, sweat beading at his collar. “I didn’t know you had the originals. I thought the bank vault was the only copy.”

“You thought,” DeVries said, tasting the word like spoiled meat. “That is precisely the problem. Men who think are dangerous. Men who act without thinking are liabilities.”

Walter strained against the ropes binding his wrists to the chair. The movement was subtle, hidden by the bulk of his coat. The gold coin in his shoe had been a gift from a dead teller at the First National, a man who’d pressed it into Walter’s palm the day before the bank run. *For luck,* he’d said. The teller was dead now. A gunshot wound in an alley, or so the papers claimed.

The coin had a milled edge. A sharp one.

“So what happens to me?” Roy asked, and for the first time Walter heard genuine fear in the man’s voice. Roy had always been good at bluffing. Now the bluff was gone.

DeVries set down his glass and walked to the window. Beyond it, the Springfield night pressed dark against the glass. “You’ll be taken to Chicago. There’s a fellow there who handles personnel changes. He’ll find a use for you. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere your mouth can’t cause trouble.”

“You’re going to bury me alive,” Roy said flatly.

“I’m going to make you a night watchman at a warehouse,” DeVries corrected. “Alive, but buried enough.”

The guard standing behind Walter laughed. A low, throaty sound. Walter knew that laugh. The man he’d shot earlier. The bullet had clipped his shoulder, and he wore a tight bandage beneath his jacket, but the anger in his eyes was fresh and hot.

Walter moved his ankle, twisting the shoe against the chair leg. The coin shifted. He felt its cold weight press against his arch.

“What about me?” Walter asked, keeping his voice level.

DeVries turned from the window, almost surprised to find Walter still there. “You are more interesting. An honest man who became a thief. A banker who became a bandit. You have the credentials to get into rooms my other men cannot.”

“I told you. I’m not for hire.”

“And I told you the alternative.” DeVries walked to Walter, stopping three feet away. “You found the document once. The carbon copy you claim to have hidden—where is it, Mr. Crane?”

“Hidden.”

“Where?”

Walter smiled. The expression felt cracked and old on his face. “I told you. I’m not for hire. You kill me, you lose a map you can’t find. You let me live, I stay a problem. I’m not sure which outcome you prefer, Mr. DeVries. That uncertainty is the only weapon I have left.”

DeVries studied him for a long moment. Then he nodded slowly. “You have some spine, Crane. I’ll give you that.”

“Sir,” the wounded guard said. “Let me take him out to the stables. Get it done with.”

“No,” DeVries said. “Not yet. I need to think.”

He walked to the door, and the wounded guard followed. As they reached the threshold, DeVries paused and looked back at Roy. “You. Stay here. Watch him.”

Roy’s face tightened. “Me?”

“Consider it trust-building. And if he escapes, I’ll know you at least had a chance to stop him.” DeVries smiled a cold man’s smile. “A chance you’ll fail.”

The door closed behind them. Roy stood alone in the room with Walter, the silence stretching between them like wire.

Roy walked to the sideboard and poured himself a drink without asking. His hands shook slightly as he raised the glass.

“You lied about the second copy,” Roy said.

“Maybe.”

“You don’t have leverage, Walter. You’re just a corpse who can still talk.”

“If I’m a corpse, you’ll follow soon after.” Walter shifted in the chair, buying himself room. “DeVries doesn’t keep witnesses. He kept Doc alive long enough to do his job, then sent you to clean up. You think you’re any different?”

Roy’s drink stopped halfway to his mouth. A flicker of doubt crossed his face.

“He wants me to kill you for him,” Roy said. “That’s the real plan. He just didn’t want to say it in front of the guard.”

“So why haven’t you?”

Roy looked at him. Walter saw calculation move behind his eyes. What lived behind those eyes now wasn’t greed or ambition. It was the terror of a man realizing his escape route had been blocked from both ends.

“Because I haven’t decided if you’re better alive or dead,” Roy said. “You know things, Walter. About the bank. About the document. About the crew.”

“The crew you betrayed.”

“The crew that was bleeding out anyway.” Roy set down his glass and pulled out a revolver. It was a different gun from the one he’d used at the warehouse. Newer. Clean. He checked the cylinder, spun it closed. “I’m sorry, Walter. I liked you more than most. But I can’t leave a thread that leads back to me.”

He raised the gun.

Walter moved.

His foot came up, the shoe bending at the toe. For two weeks he’d kept the coin in his left shoe, wedged against the leather seam. He’d told himself it was a keepsake. But some part of him had known it was a tool.

He hooked his left leg upward, dragging the coin’s milled edge across the rope binding his right wrist. The rope was hemp, thick and coarse, but the coin’s edge was sharp enough to slice bread. It bit through the first two strands with a dry, scratched sound.

Roy heard it. His eyes flickered down.

Walter pulled his right hand free and lunged forward, headbutting Roy’s wrist. The gun went off—a single loud crack that punched a hole through the French doors behind the desk, showering the carpet with glass. Roy stumbled back, clutching his hand. Walter didn’t wait. He drove the edge of his palm into Roy’s neck, just below the ear, a move Doc had taught him in a dusty warehouse in St. Louis.

Roy collapsed like a sail cut loose from its mast.

Walter grabbed the revolver from the floor and tore the remaining rope from his left wrist. From beyond the room, shouts rose. Boots thudded on staircases.

He headed for the window, not the door. He shoved aside the drawn curtain and kicked out the remaining glass of the French doors, feeling it bite through his trouser leg. Beyond them, the mansion’s gardens spread into darkness, scattered with hedges and stone benches.

He was through the doorway when a voice called behind him. Roy’s voice, ragged from the blow to his throat.

“Crane!”

Walter turned. Roy was on his knees on the carpet, one hand pressing a bloodied line across his jaw, the other pointing the knife he’d pulled from inside his jacket.

“You’ll die out there,” Roy said. “DeVries has men in the grounds. You won’t make it past the gate.”

The broken French doors stood between them, forty feet of open ground. Roy couldn’t cross it fast enough to catch a man who was already running. But Walter knew Roy was right. He wouldn’t make the gate.

He didn’t intend to.

“Tell DeVries his security is worse than his whiskey,” Walter said.

Then he turned and disappeared into the dark.

He moved low across the lawns, keeping to the shadows of the hedges, the stolen revolver heavy and cold in his hand. Behind him, he heard shouting. Voices converging on the room he’d escaped.

And then, closer than he expected, Roy’s voice calling to the guards: “He went toward the stables. Track him there.”

*He set me a path,* Walter thought, and smiled grimly. Roy was many things, but a fool wasn’t one of them. He knew DeVries would blame him for the escape. Sending the guards on a false trail was Roy’s only chance to make that blame less lethal.

Walter circled east, away from the shouts. The mansion sprawled across the estate like a sleeping animal. He drifted through formal gardens, past trimmed hedgerows and a marble fountain choked with dead leaves, toward a wing of the house that showed no lights. If there was a way back in, it would be quiet, unguarded, secret.

The whispers of panic behind him grew louder—and then the dog began to bark.

Walter broke into a run.