No Friends Here

Chapter 1: The Cranston Job

The armored car was three minutes late, which in Bobby Noonan's line of work might as well have been three hours.

He sat behind the wheel of a stolen Dodge Charger, engine idling, parked in the loading dock shadow of a carpet warehouse on Phenix Avenue. The car was dark blue, deliberately ordinary, the kind of vehicle that disappeared into traffic the moment it pulled onto any road in Cranston. Bobby had picked it himself from a long-term lot at Green Airport two days ago, swapped the plates with a junker behind a body shop in Olneyville, and driven it here at four in the morning to let it sit and become part of the scenery.

He watched the side mirror. Nothing yet. The street was empty except for a delivery van idling outside a restaurant supply company two blocks down.

Bobby was forty-five years old, and he'd been doing this for eleven of those years. Not continuously—there had been stretches of legitimate work, warehouse jobs and a stint driving a bread truck for a bakery in Pawtucket—but the math always brought him back. The math of owing people money, specifically. The math of a life that cost more than it paid.

His phone buzzed once in the cup holder. A text from Joe Regan: *On schedule?*

Bobby typed back: *Truck's late. Holding.*

He set the phone down and flexed his hands on the steering wheel. His knuckles were dry and cracked from the cold. It was mid-November, and Providence had already turned that particular shade of gray it wore from Thanksgiving through April—the sky the color of old concrete, the wind coming off Narragansett Bay with a damp bite that got into your bones and stayed there.

In the passenger seat, Steve Pike was fidgeting. Steve was always fidgeting. He was a big man, six-two, with a broad face that had gone soft around the jaw and eyes that moved too quickly, like a dog watching for someone to drop food. He had a Glock 19 in his waistband and a ski mask rolled up on his head like a watch cap.

"Three minutes," Steve said.

"I can tell time."

"I'm just saying."

"Don't."

Steve shifted in his seat, the leather creaking under his weight. He pulled the Glock out, checked the magazine, slapped it back in, and tucked the gun away again. Bobby had seen him do this four times in the last twenty minutes.

"You want to keep playing with that thing, do it somewhere I can't see it," Bobby said.

"Relax."

"I am relaxed. You're the one treating a loaded weapon like a stress ball."

Steve didn't answer. He pulled the ski mask down over his face, then pushed it back up again. His forehead was shiny with sweat despite the cold.

Bobby checked the mirror again. Still nothing.

The plan was simple, the way Joe Regan's plans were always simple. The armored car—a Loomis truck running the weekly payroll route for three businesses along Phenix Avenue—would pull into the loading dock of Coastal Linen Services at approximately 10:15 a.m. One guard would stay in the cab. The other would take the delivery inside. When the second guard was through the door, Gus Stiles would be waiting in the loading bay, having picked the service entrance lock twenty minutes earlier. Gus would hold the guard, Steve would come around the front and handle the driver, and Bobby would bring the car up to the dock for the transfer. Two minutes, maybe three. Then Bobby would drive them south on Reservoir Avenue to a garage in Warwick where they'd switch vehicles.

Joe Regan himself wouldn't be anywhere near the scene. Joe never was. He planned, he organized, he took his cut, and he maintained what he called "operational distance." Bobby had worked with him long enough to respect this, even if it sometimes felt like Joe was playing chess with other people's freedom.

At 10:18, the armored truck appeared at the far end of the block.

Bobby's stomach tightened. Not from fear, exactly. More like the feeling before a dental procedure—the knowledge that something unpleasant was about to happen and you'd already committed to sitting through it.

"There it is," Steve said, leaning forward.

"I see it."

The truck lumbered past them, heavy and white, the Loomis logo on the side catching the thin November light. It turned into the Coastal Linen parking lot and backed toward the loading dock with the slow precision of a vehicle that made this stop every week at the same time.

Bobby's phone buzzed. Joe: *Go on the second guard.*

He didn't respond. He didn't need to.

The truck stopped. The engine kept running. After a moment, the passenger door opened and a guard climbed down—a heavyset man in a navy uniform, carrying a gray lockbox. He walked around the back of the truck and up the short ramp to the loading dock door.

The door was already open. Gus had done his part.

The guard stepped inside.

Bobby counted to five, put the Charger in drive, and pulled out of the carpet warehouse shadow. He drove the two blocks at normal speed, signaled his turn into the Coastal Linen lot—an old habit he couldn't break, signaling during robberies—and swung the car around so the trunk faced the loading dock.

Steve was out before the car fully stopped, mask down, gun up, moving toward the cab of the armored truck. Bobby heard him shouting—"Don't move, don't move, hands where I can see them"—and then the muffled sound of the cab door being wrenched open.

Bobby popped the trunk and got out. The loading dock was ten feet above the parking lot, and he could see Gus up there, a thin man in a black jacket and ski mask, standing over the guard, who was face-down on the concrete with his hands zip-tied behind his back. The lockbox was open. Gus was pulling out banded stacks of bills and tossing them into a duffel bag.

"How much?" Bobby called up.

Gus didn't answer. He was moving fast, his hands efficient. Gus Stiles was fifty-three years old and had been picking locks since he was fourteen. He was quiet, competent, and had the emotional range of a parking meter. Bobby liked working with him.

Steve came around the side of the armored truck, pulling the driver by the arm. The driver was young, maybe twenty-five, with a crew cut and wide, terrified eyes. Steve pushed him to the ground next to the dock.

"Stay down. Don't be a hero."

The driver stayed down.

Gus appeared at the edge of the loading dock with the duffel bag. He dropped it to Bobby, who caught it—heavier than expected, which was good—and swung it into the trunk. Gus climbed down the dock ladder and got in the back seat. Steve followed a moment later, breathing hard, his mask already off.

"Mask," Bobby said.

"We're in the car."

"There are cameras on the building across the street. Put your mask on until we're on Reservoir."

Steve pulled the mask back down, muttering something Bobby didn't catch and didn't care about.

Bobby drove out of the lot, turned south, and merged into traffic. He kept to the speed limit. He used his signals. He was, to anyone watching, a man driving a blue Dodge Charger on an unremarkable Tuesday morning in Cranston, Rhode Island.

Seven minutes later, they were in the garage in Warwick, and the doors were closed behind them.

*

The count was disappointing.

Joe Regan arrived at the garage forty minutes after the job, driving his own car, a silver Lexus that he kept immaculate. He was a trim man in his early fifties with gray hair cut short and the careful, measured movements of someone who never wanted to appear rushed. He wore a dark overcoat over a button-down shirt and pressed slacks. He looked like a regional bank manager, which Bobby suspected was deliberate.

Joe sat on a folding chair and watched Gus count the money on a workbench under a fluorescent light. The stacks were smaller than they should have been.

"Thirty-one thousand," Gus said when he was done. He said it the way he said everything—flat, factual, as if reporting the temperature.

Steve, who had been pacing near the back of the garage, stopped. "That's it?"

"That's it."

"That's supposed to be three payrolls. Three businesses. That should be sixty, seventy at least."

Joe held up a hand. "Two of the businesses switched to direct deposit last month. I confirmed the route but not the payload. That's on me."

Bobby leaned against the wall and said nothing. Thirty-one thousand, split four ways plus Joe's organizer cut, meant he was looking at maybe five thousand dollars for a job that could put him in prison for fifteen years.

Five thousand dollars wouldn't even cover the interest on what he owed Sal Grasso.

"This is garbage," Steve said. He'd taken off his jacket and was standing in a sweat-stained T-shirt, his face flushed. "I put a gun in a man's face for five grand?"

"You put a gun in a man's face because that's what you do, Steve," Joe said. "And the split is the split. We'll do better next time."

"Next time. Sure."

Gus said nothing. He was repacking the money into neat stacks, his face unreadable.

Bobby pushed off the wall. "I need to go."

Joe looked at him. "Everything all right?"

"Everything's fine. I've got to pick up my kid."

This was a lie. Bobby's son, Danny, was with his mother in Woonsocket, and Bobby wasn't picking him up until Friday. But he needed to be out of this garage, away from Steve's anger and Joe's calm and the disappointing pile of money on the workbench.

Joe nodded. "I'll have your share by tomorrow. Come by the bar."

Bobby drove the switch car—a beige Toyota Camry, the most anonymous vehicle on American roads—out of the garage and back toward Providence. The sky had darkened, and a thin rain was beginning to fall, the kind that didn't so much come down as hang in the air, coating everything in a fine, cold mist.

He drove through the familiar streets of his city. Past the industrial blocks of Olneyville, where the old mills had been converted into artist studios and breweries, the kind of gentrification that made the neighborhood look different without actually changing anything that mattered. Past Federal Hill, where the restaurants were setting up for lunch and the smell of garlic and olive oil drifted through the rain. Past the State House, white and domed and sitting on its hill like a wedding cake no one had been invited to eat.

Bobby had been born in Providence and had never lived anywhere else. The city was small enough that you could drive across it in twenty minutes, which meant you could never really escape anyone. The people you owed money to lived six blocks away. The people you'd wronged sat next to you at the diner. The cops who wanted to talk to you drank at the same bars.

This was, Bobby thought, both the best and worst thing about Providence. It was a city where everyone knew everyone, which meant there were no strangers, which meant there were no friends either. Just people you hadn't figured out how to deal with yet.

He parked the Camry in a lot behind a Dunkin' Donuts on Atwells Avenue, wiped it down, and walked three blocks to where his own car was parked—a ten-year-old Honda Accord with a dent in the rear quarter panel and 180,000 miles on the odometer. He got in, started the engine, and sat there for a while, listening to the rain on the roof and thinking about five thousand dollars and what it would and would not buy him.