Prince of Thieves Read Online Free Page A

Nothing very fancy. Our boys are blue-collar bandits. Real salt-of-the-earth numskulls."
     
     
Frawley said, "Numskulls who can bypass alarms."
     
     
"Spack's gonna cut out this hole for us," said Dino, turning to leave. "Hey, careful up there, Spacky, you don't pull any muscles, have to take a year's disability vacation on my account."
     
     
Chuckles from firemen above, and Captain Jimmy saying, "Dean, you know there's only one muscle I'd pull for you."
     
     
    * * *
OUTSIDE THE BACK DOOR Frawley heard the cars on the nearby turnpike, speeding into and out of the city. The small parking spaces and chained Dumpsters sat lower than the street, a culvert gathering sand, grit, and trash.
     
     
A Morning Glory score was typically the most successful and lucrative type of bank robbery. Ambushing employees before the bank opened meant fewer people to control. The branch's cash stores were still centralized in the vault, not yet disbursed to tellers or spread around in secondary safes or backup drawers, and therefore easy to find and carry with speed. The typical Morning Glory involved a distracted branch opener getting waylaid in the parking lot at gunpoint. Breaking in overnight and lying in wait for the manager to arrive-- the Jack-in-the-Box-- showed a deeper level of preparation and, among notoriously lazy bank robbers, an aberrant affinity for hard work.
     
     
Frawley saw a photographer laying a ruler next to the tire treads in the road sand. He almost told her not to bother. The stolen getaway van would turn up in a few hours, in a vacant lot somewhere, torched.
     
     
He envisioned them loading the van, hustling but not panicked, the silent alarm ringing only in their heads. Why take the time to beat the assistant manager? The vault was empty, and they were already on their way out. Taking the manager was schizo. It was a piece that didn't fit, and as such, something for Frawley to key on.
     
     
    * * *
THE SHAPE OF THE bloodstain soaked into the carpet behind the tellers' cages resembled the continent of Africa. A lab technician was sampling it and depositing fibers into a brown, coin-sized envelope.
     
     
"He was cuffed to the chair." Dino held up an evidence bag containing a snipped plastic bundling tie, the kind with locking teeth. "Cracked his jaw, maybe his cheekbone, the bones around the eye."
     
     
Frawley nodded, the odor at its most pungent there. Bleach effectively fragged DNA. Criminalists at the FBI lab used it to blitz their work surfaces clean, to avoid any evidentiary cross-contamination. Pouring bleach was something he had heard of rapists doing, fouling genetic matter left on the victim, but never bank robbers. "Bleach, huh?"
     
     
"A little extreme. But camping out here overnight, you can never be too careful."
     
     
"They sure don't want to get caught. These guys must be facing a long fall." Frawley slid his beeper to his hip and crouched behind the third teller's cage, noticing blond crumbs on the paling carpet, partially melted by the bleach. "They sat here and had a picnic."
     
     
Dino crouched with him, his mechanical pencil tucked behind a hairy ear. "Gets hungry on a job, Frawl. I told you, these are blue-collar bandits. Boiled eggs and thermos coffee. The Brown Bag Bandits."
     
     
Dino stood again while Frawley remained on his haunches, imagining the bandits hanging out there as the sun came up, the bank theirs. He rose and looked through the teller's cage to the windows along the front of the building, the square outside. He had a vague memory of passing through it the day before-- a sense of entering the home stretch, his legs burning, the crowd cheering him on. "Marathon runs right by here?"
     
     
"Holy shit, Frawl, I forgot. Look at you. Twenty-six point two miles and you're up and around like nothing happened."
     
     
Frawley returned his beeper to the front of his belt. "Broke three and a half hours," he said. "I'm happy with that."
     
     
"Well, congratulations,