Free The Vaults by Toby Ball

Poole shouted, his nerves rioting.
    Bernal dropped to one knee again, closed and latched the case, and then stood up.
    “Turn around and walk to the wall.”
    Bernal turned his back to Poole and took two steps until he was leaning against a wall overlooking the stirring pond.
    “The girl in the apartment,” Poole said, “she wasn’t in on this, got it?”
    Bernal shrugged.
    “If she’s hurt, it will make things more difficult for you.”
    Again Bernal shrugged. Poole grabbed the case with one hand and with the other grabbed Alice’s arm, jerking her up with more force than he intended.
    “What time do you have?”
    Bernal checked his watch. “Five after eleven.”
    “Wait until ten past.”
    Bernal nodded.
    They half-walked, half-trotted down the path, the wind blowing pine needles and dead leaves around their ankles. Poole pulled the pillowcase off Alice and the stocking from his face and stuffed them in a coat pocket. He had left the bag at the gazebo, but it would not be of any use to the police.
    He parted with Alice, giving her one hundred dollars for the night and telling her to go home and keep her head down for a day or two. Then he walked home, every passerby sending his adrenaline spiking. Some actions you can’t backtrack on, and he was now committed to chiseling one of the most powerful men in the City. Poole was about to find out if Bernal’s ruthlessness in business translated to other facets of his life.
    He saw a tower of blue smoke rising into the blue and yellow neon of the Theater District across town, but it did not register in his preoccupied mind as anything of significance.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

    Red Henry sat in his favorite leather chair, feet on the matching ottoman, reading the
Gazette
. Occasionally, when he read something particularly annoying, he snorted in disgust or took quick, deep breaths to calm himself. It was not that the
Gazette
actually ran anything untrue—they were a respectable paper. It was not even their seemingly insatiable need for sniffing around City Hall trying to catch the scent of corruption. Scandal sells papers, and he certainly understood the profit motive. No, what left him particularly aggrieved was that they did not seem to see that when the City did well, the
Gazette
did well. And the City did best when Henry was given some goddamn latitude to make things work.
    “That shit-ant Frings,” he mumbled half-audibly.
    “What’s that?” His mistress, Siobhan, was stretched across his couch reading Nietzsche or some such crap. She was wearing a green silk sleeping gown that a previous mistress had left. It was alluringly snug and accentuated her long red hair.
    Henry looked at her; then decided it was worth answering. “Frings. He wrote a column, thinks he’s going to tie my hands.”
    Siobhan returned to her book. “Nobody ties your hands, sugar,” she said evenly.
    Henry gave her a heavy-lidded look, then put the paper down, and rose out of the chair, wearing only his slacks from the day, his suspenders hanging loose around his knees. His bare upper body was massive without being particularly fat or muscular. There was simply a lot of him. He stood at the window, taking in his fourteenth-floor penthouse view of the City. Actually, it was the thirteenth floor, but the elevator skipped straight from the twelfth to fourteenth floor. It disgusted him, indulging people’s ridiculous superstitions. Still, one must pick one’s battles and he had plenty.
    Henry pressed his palms against the window, slightly farther apart than his shoulders. It looked as though he were holding the City between his hands.
    The phone rang, and Henry turned slowly to watch Siobhan’s body moving beneath the silk as she went to the set. She answered, listened, then held out the phone as if she were offering him a martini. He walked slowly across the room.
    “Yeah,” he grunted, taking the phone.
    “Sir, there’s been another bomb.”
    Henry didn’t answer.
    “Sir?”
    Henry