Miami Heist Read online

  MIAMI HEIST

  VAN ALLEN PLEXICO

  Copyright 2020 by Van Allen Plexico

  White Rocket Books

  www.whiterocketbooks.com

  This one’s for Jim Yelton and Kevin Steverson,

  so badly mistreated in 1965 Sin City...

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  MIAMI HEIST

  Copyright ©2020 by Van Allen Plexico

  Cover design and map by Van Allen Plexico for White Rocket Books

  Dramati$ Personae

  John Harper, Noted heist planner, Flagler Beach, Florida (and points south)

  Saul “Salsa” Salzman, Attorney, Miami, Florida

  Lois Funderburk, widow and retired dancer from Las Vegas, Nevada

  Connie Perrigen, graduate student and John Harper’s girlfriend

  Big Bob Bigelow, heist planner, south Florida

  Denise Bigelow, Bob’s sister

  Oscar Diaz, associate of Bigelow

  Danny Goggans, associate of Bigelow

  Mike Wilson, associate of Bigelow

  Thurston Lansdale, Jr, owner, Ruby Island

  Don Garro, Security chief, Ruby Island

  Ricky Garcia, former police officer, Las Vegas, Nevada

  While loosely based on actual events surrounding 1966 Miami, all characters and locations in this book are the product of the author’s imagination. No similarities to anyone living or dead is intended.

  My thanks to those who helped Harper and Salsa return for another adventure. In particular Ian Watson and Rob Davis got the wheels turning this time. Bobby Politte talked through the second half of the story with me and set me on the right path. Maddie Lilley made an awesome suggestion that I snapped right up. Jarrod Alberich continued his championing of my work and contributed in multiple ways, all appreciated. Last but not least, I have to thank Sean Ali for his comments about the previous book and for his amazing (and unsolicited!) artwork and design for the alternate, convention-exclusive edition of Vegas Heist, which also became the Audible cover.

  ― Van Allen Plexico

  Southern Illinois, June 2020

  “When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.”

  ― Hunter S. Thompson at Miami Beach,

  Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

  Fall 1966

  1

  Harper teetered on his heels, then dropped to the concrete floor. He lay there, flat on the cold surface, not moving, merely moaning softly.

  No blood spread under him, however. He hadn’t been shot or punched. He’d suffered no physical damage at all. In point of fact, he was all alone in the basement of his old little house in Flagler Beach, Florida. But what he’d just seen had decked him every bit as effectively as a slug or a fist.

  Moments earlier, he’d pulled his dark blue Camaro into the driveway and leapt out of it in one smooth and quick move, then reached the front door in four catlike bounds. He’d fumbled with the keys a few seconds, then gotten the door open and hurried inside. The house smelled musty; he hadn’t been inside in weeks, if not months. What concerned him was that someone else had.

  Past the small kitchen and through the living room he’d raced, arriving at the door that led down to the basement. Flinging it open, he’d taken the stairs in three long steps, hitting the light switch as he passed it. The old bulb flickered to life as he reached the bottom. He looked around, sensitive to anything that might be amiss.

  There. In the back corner, behind the furnace, just visible in the pale light. A long wooden storage bin, unpainted, about three feet tall and the same in depth, that ran the width of the basement. The shiny new padlock that had held it closed was now missing entirely. Seeing this, Harper emitted his first sounds of anguish.

  The long box looked more like a bench or work surface than anything else, but the collection of power tools he normally kept scattered atop it had been swept aside, onto the floor. He stuffed his now-unnecessary key back into his pocket, grasped the lid, and raised it on its back hinges. He gazed down at the interior. It was just as he’d expected, and surprisingly obvious despite the weak basement light: The box was empty.

  That was when he had fallen over backwards. Now he lay on the floor, groaning.

  He indulged his self-pity for nearly two full minutes. Then he gathered himself back together and climbed to his feet.

  Back up the stairs he went, stopping only when he’d reached the dining room. He lowered himself into one of the wooden chairs that surrounded the square table and rested his right elbow on the surface, his chin cupped in it as he considered what had happened.

  A thousand thoughts ran through his mind. Who could it have been? Who could’ve known?

  The note had been sent to him at the hotel where he and Connie were currently staying, down on South Beach. It had arrived in general delivery, addressed to “Mr. Davenport,” the name he’d been using in Miami. No one on the staff that he’d questioned in the half hour before he’d jumped in his car and raced north had known anything about it or where it had come from. It had been only a small scrap of paper with a brief phrase penciled on it: “Flagler is nice, but just a down payment.”

  He had paused only long enough to give Salsa’s office a call and leave a warning message with his secretary: “Going to check on some friends at the old place; you better check on yours and hers!” Then he had steered the sparkling new Camaro onto US 441 North. And now here he was, transformed from a millionaire to broke in one swoop.

  He’d brought enough of his Vegas cash down to Miami to keep him going for a while, but the vast bulk of it he’d stashed away in the old house in Flagler Beach. Now he cursed that decision.

  Shaking off his funk as best he could, he reached for the black wall phone. It rang before he could touch it. He grabbed it off the cradle.

  “Yeah?”

  “Harper. Finally. I was out on the golf course. I’ve been calling every ten minutes since I got your message.”

  “Just got here,” he replied.

  “So—what’s the word?” asked the other. “What the hell’s going on?”

  Harper drew out a cigarette, lit it, inhaled, then exhaled smoke slowly, thinking. Concerned about saying too much over the phone, but yet needing to know. Needing to find out if all three of them had suffered this same fate.

  “You still there?” the voice asked.

  “It’s gone,” he said, his voice flat.

  “Gone? What’s gone?”

  A pause, as Harper didn’t respond.

  “Wait—you mean—gone? Seriously?”

  “Yes.”

  “As in, the—um, the stuff from out west?”

  “Yes.”

  “All of it?”

  “All that was here. Which was most of it.”

  A deathly silence descended.

  “What about yours?” Harper asked finally.

  “Dunno,” the other said. “Your message was whatcha call cryptic. I figured I’d better check on Lois, so I’m over at her place now.”

  “And?”

  “Hang on.”

  Silence for a couple of minutes, then, “Hers is good. All accounted for. Of course, she didn’t have most of hers here.” He paused. “It’s complicated.”

  “And her?”

  “Huh? Oh—yeah. She’s fine, too. Peachy keen.”

  “Okay, good.” He looked at his watch. “I’m heading back down in a few minutes. Go check on yours.”

  “You better believe it.”

  “I should be there by about seven. I’ll meet you at your office.”

  “Yeah.”

  Harper hung up the phone. Part of him felt like
just sitting there and brooding. But that wouldn’t accomplish anything useful. He forced himself to get up, turn off the lights and walk back out to the Camaro.

  Who could’ve done it? Who could’ve known it was even there? It couldn’t have been someone just breaking in randomly and finding it. That kind of person wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of leaving him a note at his hotel, bragging about it. No, this felt personal. Personal in the extreme.

  But—who?

  He climbed into the car and fired up the engine, still mostly distracted by the puzzle. Nobody still living had known about the heist in Vegas except Salsa and Lois. And surely it wasn’t one of them. Why would they take his money? And besides, Salsa had sounded horrified, and he wasn’t that good of an actor.

  It made no sense at all.

  He wrestled the shiny new car out onto the highway and rocketed south. It was early afternoon, and traffic was light. He’d have plenty of time to mull everything over during the five hour drive back to Miami. Somehow, though, he suspected he’d be no closer to the answer when he arrived.

  The flat, monotonous Florida landscape slid by, hour after hour, but Harper was entirely oblivious to it. His mind was occupied, his thoughts racing faster than his car. For this reason, he didn’t notice the battered old Ford keeping its distance well behind him.

  Five hours and change later, the sun having already dipped below the skyline, he crossed inside the city limits of Miami. His suspicions before leaving Flagler were confirmed: he was no closer to an answer than he’d been back at the house. His anger undissipated despite the hours of solitary driving, he pulled into the parking lot of Salsa’s little office building, located just south of downtown—a combination law office, strip mall and money laundering operation. The lights in the main office were burning. He hopped out and went inside.

  Salsa sat at his desk, his head in his hands, his expression inconsolable. Lois stood to his left, blonde and statuesque, a deep frown creasing her lovely features.

  “Gone,” he told Harper, his voice cracking. “Every bit of it. All my Vegas money. Gone.”

  Harper’s eyes narrowed. Somebody knew. Somebody knew about all of it.

  “We’re getting it back,” he said.

  “Well, sure,” Salsa replied, raising his head from his hands and looking off to the side, not meeting Harper’s gaze. He appeared forlorn and miserable and totally unconvinced by what his partner had said. “Of course we are.”

  No one spoke for a few seconds. Then Salsa inhaled and appeared to gather himself up. He took a deep breath and let it back out. Finally he looked up and met Harper’s eyes.

  “But, in the meantime,” he said, “I take this to mean the island job is back on.”

  2

  Harper moved sharply to his left as the woman standing next to him was violently sick over the side of the boat.

  “Oh, dear lord,” she moaned as he handed her a handkerchief.

  They stood at the forward railing of a luxury ferry that moved almost silently across the darkening waters south of Miami Beach. To the right the sun was dropping toward the horizon; toward the city of Miami itself, where office buildings and hotels stood out in silhouette against the streaked orange sunset, and the Everglades beyond and below. To the left lay the Atlantic Ocean in all its deep blue-green majesty, uninterrupted to where it met the evening sky.

  A few feet on past them, just above where the boat’s prow cut the waves, stood another couple. These two were holding hands and gazing ahead, neither exhibiting any signs of sea sickness. They were both tall and slender; the man had dark hair and wore a black suit with a red pocket square, while the woman had long, wavy blonde hair and wore an elegant light-blue dress.

  Ahead of them, rising slowly from the waters as they approached it, was an island. Rock surrounded it, extending down below the water line, protecting its shores from erosion. Only trees were visible atop it at first, but as the ferry drew closer it became possible to make out the shapes of a few buildings further inland. Wooden posts here and there held electric light fixtures that bathed the immediate areas in a sort of ghastly yellow light.

  The blonde woman squinted at the vista ahead and then looked at the man by her side. “Ruby Island,” she said. “I’ve wanted to come here for years.”

  “Yeah?”

  She nodded. “Al Capone owned a house here. So did Richard Nixon.”

  The man chortled. “Same thing,” he said.

  The blonde harrumphed. She turned back to the sight of the island growing nearer. “I’m just saying this is some of the most expensive real estate in the country. I never thought I’d get to visit.”

  “If all goes well,” the man said, “this won’t be the only time we’ll visit.”

  Behind them, the other couple still leaned against the rail but were now facing in the opposite direction, toward the interior of the boat. The woman, of medium height and brunette, still dabbed at her mouth with the handkerchief. The man, big and muscular in his dark suit jacket, seemed calm and unruffled as he stared away inland.

  “Why don’t they have a bridge?” the brunette asked the universe, misery clear in her voice. “How can they be so rich and not afford a bridge to the mainland?”

  The universe didn’t answer, nor did the big man. So the blonde crossed over to her and said in a low tone, “They don’t want a bridge. The richer you are, the harder you want to make it for the regular people to get to you.”

  “I used to be rich,” the tall, slender guy noted wistfully, as much to himself as to anyone. “Until very recently, in fact.”

  “It’s a good thing I still am,” the blonde replied with a wink.

  The ferry angled off to the right, so that the nearest part of the island slid past to their left. They continued in that fashion a bit longer, then curved back around to the west. Into a small, artificial harbor they passed, a pier at the far end. Within a couple of minutes, the ferry boat had pulled in against it and the engine stopped. Uniformed attendants hurried to tie ropes fastening the boat to the dock, and then they extended a short gangway and opened a metal gate further along the railing.

  Smiling warmly and nodding at the attendants, the first couple moved easily out across the gangway and onto the pier, some dozen or more expensively-dressed men and women gliding along just behind them. The other couple moved more slowly, the color now having entirely vacated the dark-haired woman’s face just as her dinner had vacated her stomach. The man helped her to the gangway and across.

  “Here we are,” said Saul “Salsa” Salzman from up ahead, turning slowly to take in the view from the pier and waiting as the rest of the passengers went by. Once they were gone, he looked at the row of concrete steps that led up the low hill to the buildings at the top. His eyes flicked briefly over the pair of armed men situated one on either side of the far end of the pier, as if guarding the entrance to the island proper. Then he turned to the couple who had been the last to cross over and were just now approaching.

  “What do you think of the place?” he asked the big man.

  “We’d need our own way on and off. Not the ferry,” Harper said. He shrugged. “I haven’t seen the parts I came to see yet. And I don’t love the fact that it’s an island,” he added.

  “An island?”

  “Surrounded by water. All the way around.”

  Salsa took this in and shrugged. “Isn’t that strange. Most of them are, I think,” he said.

  “Exactly,” Harper said. “Limited escape routes.”

  Salsa nodded.

  They had begun toying around with plans for the island job several weeks earlier, but always more hypothetically than seriously, at first. After all, that had been back when each of them had still possessed a one-third share of the vast riches they’d taken from their last big operation, on New Year’s Eve.

  They hadn’t needed the money. Not after the Vegas job. No, it had been the challenge of it—the challenge, and the possible size of the prize—that had first caught
Salsa’s attention and captured his imagination. He in turn had presented it to Harper, knowing his old partner would never be able to resist at least investigating it, noodling around with it. And he’d been right.

  But it had always been more of a theoretical thing. A “what if” thing. A “how would you go about it, if you were to actually try it” thing. Right up until the moment they both had realized their money had been taken away.

  So here they were, along with their significant others, all of them dressed to the nines and surrounded by other wealthy denizens of the city of Miami.

  The piece of land on which they now stood went by the name of Ruby Island, a small chunk of expensive real estate located just south of the fancy sandbar called Miami Beach and just north of the Florida Keys. Salsa had explained the history of the place to the others thusly:

  Originally built up from the seabed and owned by an early automobile magnate from the Midwest, ownership of Ruby Island changed hands a number of times before it had passed to a wealthy New York businessman prior to World War II. That man, Thurston Lansdale, Sr., had been very involved in the rapid build-up of Miami Beach prior to the war. He’d kept his hands in any number of pies, from banking and finance to shipping, and perhaps some shadier activities as well. Once he’d made and increased his fortune and then bought Ruby Island, however, he’d settled into the sprawling mansion there as a sort of recluse, removing himself entirely from Miami society. Over time he’d come to curse the influx of tourists to his formerly fair little city and bitterly regret his part in encouraging them to come in the first place. With his wife dead for over a decade from cancer and his son mostly away at boarding school, he existed for a time as a virtual ghost bumping around his own haunted mansion. Finally, around the time Eisenhower was leaving the White House and JFK was taking his place, the old man literally became a ghost, passing away with little fanfare from various long-term illnesses that even his vast wealth couldn’t keep at bay forever. He left the house, the island and a good chunk of the money to his only child, the now-grown Thurston, Jr.