Free Tahoe Dark (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 14) by Todd Borg Page B

casino loading dock. The alley is narrow with lots of good cover for a robbery. Stupid route choice, I guess. We chose it for ease of access, not security. Anyway, just before they got to the loading dock, a group of robbers stepped out.” Bosworth had a faint accent lurking in his speech, like he’d spent his first few years in a Cockney family in London.
    “How many robbers?” I asked.
    “Four.”
    “Were the robbers armed?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Your men describe them?”
    “They were like gangbangers on TV. They wore black hoodies with the hoods up. What made them creepy was they had on those white hockey goalie masks. They carried AKs, according to Jim who was in Iraq, so he should know. Our driver – that’s Matt – stopped when two of the robbers stepped in front of the truck as it was going down the alley. They pointed their weapons at Matt, and at Jim, who was riding shotgun. My guys could see in the mirrors and on the rear-facing video that there were two other men who stepped out at the rear of the lockbox. Our windows are reinforced, but those AKs, well, you don’t want to take any chances. In fact, we make our rules clear to our crew. If someone sticks us, we stay in the truck and call it in. No heroes, is our motto. Of course, the trucks have loopholes, but we don’t fire through them unless fired upon. We’ve also got the run-flat tires if someone tries to shoot them out, but if our driver can’t step on the gas to get away, we do what the robbers say.”
    “So your guys played it by the book and stayed put,” I said. “Smart.”
    “Yeah. Jim immediately picked up the radio to call it in, but one of the robbers walked up to the windshield. He put a piece of paper against the glass and tucked it under the wiper. It said, ‘No radio, no cell phone.’ With his other hand, he held a smartphone against the glass. Then he held up another piece of paper that said, “Remove your weapons and get out of the truck, or we do this.” The paper had an arrow drawn on it. The arrow pointed toward the smart phone. Follow me?”
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “The phone played a video that showed a man holding a pack of what looked like three tubes wrapped in silver duct tape. The man on the video tossed the silver pack under a big truck. Then the man stepped behind a building, held up a little remote transmitter, and pushed a button. The duct tape package under the truck blew up in a huge fireball, shredding the truck. My boys said that the video looked like it was copied from a movie. Anyway, the message was clear.”
    “Not good,” I said.
    “Right. So, of course, the robber this morning pulled a duct-taped package out of his pack and held it up so that our men could see it was just like the one in the video. He tossed it under the lockbox, held up a remote for our men to see, then pointed to the paper sign that said they should get out of the truck.”
    “Your men did as instructed?”
    “Like I said, right out of our book. Removed their weapons and got out with their hands up.”
    I thought about it. “Were the handwritten notes used because the men can’t hear from inside the truck?”
    “Well, the armor makes it pretty soundproof inside. But we have mikes on our video recorders. The ones on the outside of the lockbox record sound with the video. Turns out none of the robbers said a thing. It’s like they knew that the hoodies and the hockey masks obscured their visual identity and not speaking obscured their audio identity. That’s my idea, anyway.”
    “Makes sense to me,” I said. “What kind of alarm system do you use?”
    “We’ve got the Red Web Alert setup. It includes the system here at our HQ, as well as the mobile communication system on the lockboxes. It’s got the full internet connection with the auto-trigger if the connection goes down for more than five seconds. Each guard has a foot switch they can hit without any robber seeing it. Matt and Jim both stomped those babies when those