The Upper Hand Read online

  PRAISE FOR JOHNNY SHAW

  Praise for Dove Season: A Jimmy Veeder Fiasco

  Winner of the 2012 Spotted Owl Award for Debut Mystery

  “[Johnny Shaw] is excellent at creating a sense of place with a few deft strokes . . . He moves effortlessly between dark comedy and moments that pack a real emotional punch, and he’s got a knack for off-kilter characters who are completely at home in their own personal corners of oddballdom.”

  —TANA FRENCH, author of The Trespasser

  “Johnny Shaw calls Dove Season a Jimmy Veeder Fiasco, but I call it a whole new ball game; I enjoyed this damn book more than anything else I read this year!”

  —CRAIG JOHNSON, author of the Walt Longmire Mystery series

  “Dove Season is dark and funny, graceful and profane, with beating-heart characters and a setting as vivid as a scorpion sting on a dusty wrist. Debut author Johnny Shaw is a welcome new voice. I’m already looking forward to Jimmy Veeder’s next fiasco.”

  —SEAN DOOLITTLE, Thriller Award–winning author of Lake Country

  Praise for Big Maria

  Winner of the 2013 Anthony Award for Best Paperback Original

  “Comic thrillerdom has a new star.”

  —Booklist Online (starred review)

  “This is one you’ll soon be recommending to your friends. It’s lighthearted but not lightweight, funny as hell but never frivolous. Shaw writes like the bastard son of Donald Westlake and Richard Stark: There’s crime, and criminals, but there’s also a deep vein of good humor that makes Shaw’s writing sparkle. Combine that with his talent for creating memorable characters (the supporting cast, including a mute, severed head, often threatens to steal the show), and you get one of the best reads in recent memory, an adventure story that might just make you mist up every once and awhile, especially during the book’s moving finale.”

  —Mystery Scene magazine

  “Funny, fist-pumping, rockin, right-on, righteous fun.”

  —BARNES & NOBLE MYSTERY BLOG

  “Shaw has invented ‘dust bowl’ fiction for the twenty-first century. Funny, sad, madcap, compulsively readable, and ultimately, so very, very wise.”

  —BLAKE CROUCH, author of the Wayward Pines trilogy

  “Johnny Shaw has an incredible talent for moving from darkness to hope, from heart-wrenching to humor, and from profane to sacred. His latest, Big Maria, is an adventure story that’s equal parts Humphrey Bogart and Elmore Leonard, with just a little bit of the Hardy Boys thrown in. I loved every page.”

  —HILARY DAVIDSON, author of Evil in All Its Disguises

  “I loved every page of Big Maria. You don’t often read a gutbustingly funny book that manages to maintain its fundamental seriousness and badass sense of plot. This proves what many of us suspected after Dove Season, that Johnny Shaw is one of the majors already.”

  —SCOTT PHILLIPS, author of The Ice Harvest

  ALSO BY JOHNNY SHAW

  The Jimmy Veeder Fiascos

  Dove Season

  Plaster City

  Imperial Valley

  Stand-Alone Novels

  Big Maria

  Floodgate

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Johnny Shaw

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503900738

  ISBN-10: 1503900738

  Cover design by Ed Bettison

  For David Downing

  Thank you

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  Call him sentimental, but when Axel Ucker planned a robbery, he thought about his old man. Larceny had been one of the few things they had in common.

  Sitting outside at the Mexican restaurant El Rey de Los Chingones, Axel put down his well-worn copy of Emotional Alcatraz: Breaking Out of the Prison of Your Past and again turned his attention to the other side of the street. He’d read the Tony Rogers book twice and knew passages by heart. At present, the book acted as a prop to appear inconspicuous. A man reading a self-help book was as threatening as a three-legged kitten.

  He spooned more guacamole onto his plate and made notes in his pad. Decked out in his Wilke Rodriguez suit, Axel blended in with the downtown lunch crowd. No one would suspect that he was casing the Little Grass Shack across the street as he dined luxuriously on his carnitas burrito and mandarin Jarritos.

  The medical-marijuana dispensary did brisk lunchtime business. Because the Little Grass Shack was a cash-only enterprise, Axel considered it an upside-plus target. According to the May issue of High Times, it was one of the top three dispensaries in the San Diego metropolitan area. Five cannabis leaves out of a possible five. Only Global Chillage and Planet Hollyweed ranked higher.

  Well fortified with the same precautions as a pawn shop in a lousy neighborhood, the Little Grass Shack stood prepped for attack. Barred windows, razor wire on the roof, and security cameras where you would expect them: two in front, two in back, and six inside. No security guard, but there would be firepower under the counter. Marijuana dispensaries drew mostly amateurs. The robberies that Axel had read about were uncreative smash-and-grabs that lacked finesse. A good thief knew a gun was a precaution, not a plan.

  Axel ate more chips and went over his calculations. Carrying out the robbery on a Friday would increase the odds of success by thirty-two percent. Closer to thirty-eight if it was a three-day weekend. Plus or minus three percent depending on downtown traffic. Plus or minus two percent depending on the weather.

  Jackson Armored made its pickups on Mondays and Fridays. The money from weekend business would be larger—maybe by double—but the size of the haul wasn’t nearly as important as the not-going-to-prison part of Axel’s plan. The armored car drivers on Monday were police-academy rejects who took their jobs too seriously, gun range bros with trigger fingers itching for something other than paper targets.

  A good plan hinged on finding t
he weakness in the security measures: a low-quality safe, an outdated alarm system, a disgruntled employee. No matter how seemingly impenetrable a wall, a patient thief could find the fissure. In the case of the Little Grass Shack job, that crack was ten feet wide with a “Take All the Money” sign at the entrance. That crack went by the names of Stanley Pruitt and Steven McCrary.

  “Hello, boys,” Axel said as the banged-up GMC Griffin armored truck pulled up to the loading zone in front of the Little Grass Shack. One wheel went over the curb, the truck bouncing when it came off the sidewalk.

  The two Jackson Armored drivers never showed up on time and looked stoned when they finally arrived. For a month, Axel had witnessed the pair leave one of the car doors open, get in a shoving match over whose turn it was to drive, and almost forget a bag of cash on the curb. Stanley was the senior employee of the two. In his mid-forties, he walked like his ass hurt. An otherwise thin man with a tight beer belly that made him look like a boa constrictor digesting a globe. Steven’s bodybuilder physique made his arms float at his sides like a marionette’s. He looked like everything confused him, and he never managed to tuck in his shirt all the way.

  Exiting the armored car, Steven—true to form—tripped on the sidewalk. Stanley called him a “butt collector” and farted loud enough for Axel to hear across the street. The sound made a passing French bulldog bark uncontrollably.

  “Unbelievable,” Axel said.

  Even if these two couldn’t be coerced into abetting—which he was confident they could be—their incompetence would be enough to create a workaround.

  Stanley buzzed the intercom outside the Little Grass Shack. Steven pushed on the door, but it didn’t budge. Stanley shook his head and pulled the door open, pointing at the “Pull” sign.

  Axel flipped through the thirty pages of notes in his pad. Calculations, timelines, drawings, questions. For weeks, he had spent hours on research—background information about the dispensary employees, sketches of the armored car route, three trips to the county planning office for building specs, analysis of traffic patterns. He had monitored both armored car drivers over the last week to finalize the plan.

  There wasn’t any more research or planning left to do.

  Axel finished his orange soda, paid the bill, double-checked his tip, added another dollar, and walked onto the sidewalk. He stared at the Little Grass Shack and nodded to himself, satisfied that he had thought of everything.

  It was time.

  He wrapped a thick rubber band twice around the notebook and dropped it in his bag. He would put it with the other robbery notebooks that he had written over the years. Hundreds of robberies that no one would ever perform. Knowing that he could successfully rob a place was victory enough.

  What didn’t make sense to him was why he was planning yet another robbery. He usually only did it as an outlet for stress, but everything was going well in his life. He had an incredible girlfriend, a new house, and an upcoming promotion. The only plan that mattered was the plan he had made for his life.

  Axel turned the corner, looked up at the thirty-story building, and walked through the big glass doors. Working in the skyscraper made him feel like a grown-up. He pressed the call button and waited for the elevator. He had broken loose from his hometown, his past, and the stigma attached to his family. Nobody treated him like he didn’t belong. He no longer looked like he owned a pair of camouflage pants.

  But if he was going to really move on, Axel needed a new hobby. Regular people didn’t case joints and do background checks on strangers. They didn’t sit in their cars in front of armored car drivers’ homes, pissing in Gatorade bottles. They did other things. They went to the gym. They played fantasy football. They were alcoholics.

  Axel decided to buy a crossword puzzle magazine on the way home from work. Or maybe sudoku.

  The Little Grass Shack would be his last hypothetical robbery. His days of thinking like a thief were over. To commit to the future, he had to let go of the past—which not coincidentally was the verbatim ad copy on the cover of the Tony Rogers book in his bag. It had been staring him in the face all along.

  CHAPTER 2

  Axel might have been the brains of the family, but Axel’s sister, Gretchen, had the balls.

  When they were teenagers, she found his notebooks full of elaborate schemes. She had used one of the plans, without his knowledge, to steal a box of Playboy magazines from Mr. Hernandez’s garage. The “Women of Mensa” issue had been integral in the discovery of her sexual identity. That first burglary had catapulted her onto her current career path.

  Gretchen Beetner fancied herself a second-story man, but due to her sex and the preponderance of ranch houses in the San Diego area, she was more of a sliding-glass-door gal.

  She looked at the list of names and addresses that she had culled from her other brother’s computer, all the nerds that shared his love for role-playing games.

  Disappointment followed. No danger or thrills today. Run-of-the-mill thievery. No laser tripwires or Indiana Jones–style booby traps. None of them even owned dogs, due to allergies and/or asthma.

  The scores were lucrative, but Gretchen needed to reevaluate the long-term potential of stealing comic books. It was just too damn boring. She wanted to feel like a Viking warrior plundering a city for its spoils, not a petty thief stealing funny books from geeks.

  With Comic-Con in full swing and the entire nerdiverse in attendance, there were a lot of empty houses waiting to get hit. This was her third burglary of the day, and it wasn’t even eleven o’clock. If she got to all the addresses on her list, it would be a new one-day record.

  The next name on the list was Chandler Price, a.k.a. mrawarrior6969 on 4chan, a.k.a. @redpillpopping on Twitter.

  Gretchen sat in her Honda Civic in front of Chandler’s parents’ house at the end of the cul-de-sac in La Jolla. Huge house, huge yard, huge view. She wondered if Chandler got an allowance to mow the lawn or if that stopped after he turned thirty. Who was she kidding? Residents of La Jolla didn’t mow their own lawns. Mexican people did.

  Chandler’s father was performing root canals. Chandler’s mom would be at her yoga class after dropping her son off at the convention center. The house would be empty.

  Gretchen got out of the car, put on her backpack, and walked straight for the house. She held a flyer that she had pulled from a nearby telephone pole. If anyone stopped her, she was looking for Rascal, a missing calico cat.

  Most sliding glass doors came standard with bolt locks. But locks didn’t do any good if homeowners didn’t engage them. In less than ten seconds, Gretchen had the back door open. Nobody would ever know she’d been in the house.

  At the end of a long hallway, she found the door to the “comic book room.” It wasn’t difficult. A life-size poster of Deadpool greeted her with “Keep the Fuck Out” in a word balloon. Not heeding the sign, Gretchen walked the fuck in.

  She stepped into the grand hall of the Museum of Stunted Maturity. Action figures and small statues of superheroes and monsters lined the shelves. At the center of the room sat rows of folding tables with long cardboard boxes on top and underneath, each of them full of clear plastic bags and titled dividers like you would find in a record store: Action Comics, Adam Strange, Adventure Comics, and so on. A dehumidifier hummed in the corner.

  Posters adorned the walls, either of women with impossibly huge tits and eternally erect nipples, or of men with muscles where muscles didn’t exist bulging beneath skintight primary colors. Overcompensation at war with homoeroticism. Except for Evel Knievel and Prince, few straight men could pull off a cape. Not even Samuel L. Jackson on a good day.

  De rigueur for any collector, the comic books were organized first by publisher, then alphabetical by title, and finally chronologically by issue number, with annuals and special issues in back. It was like looking for a needle in a clearly labeled package of needles. It would take Gretchen less than ten minutes to find the issues on her list, throw them in her backpa
ck, and be in her car on the way to the next house.

  Her comics du jour were bronze age Marvel, a stable commodity with good resale. The titles were familiar to her. The Amazing Spider-Man #129, Daredevil #158, The Incredible Hulk #181, Marvel Spotlight #5, The Tomb of Dracula #10, and The Uncanny X-Men #94 were the biggies, but there were plenty of second-tier books that fetched good coin. Chandler wouldn’t own all of them, but all serious collectors had a few key issues.

  Wasting no time, she flipped through the comics and pulled out Iron Fist #14—a 9.4 CGC copy that could fetch as much as five hundred bucks.

  A car pulled up outside. Without rushing, she stowed the comic in her backpack and moved to the window. A middle-aged woman and a well-built young man with a man-bun and Capris got out of a Ford Explorer. They grabbed their yoga mats and headed to the house.

  Gretchen remained calm and went back to quietly flipping through comics, no doubt in her mind that Chandler forbade his mother from entering his sanctum sanctorum—which was definitely what he referred to the room as. A few minutes later, she had found fourteen of the comics on the list. Nobody had discovered her presence or tried the door, but she still had to get out of the house.

  Sometimes you have to win ugly. She walked to the window. There was enough foliage between the house and the street that even if a nosy neighbor was snooping, she could exit unseen.