by Gavin Bell
***
WELCOME TO HALFWAY AZ, FOUNDED 1888
POP. 336
“PLEASE DRIVE CAREFUL”
I eased off the gas and slowed to a crawl as we passed the sign you could read as a welcome or a warning. The needle on the fuel gauge was starting to nose the red, so I was glad to see there was a gas station right on the edge of town. If you could really call it a town, that was; the place looked as though somebody had started to build a set for a western, then not bothered to finish. Halfway was barely more than a main street with a few ancillary streets leading off of it. There was no one on the street, but in the hundred degree heat that didn’t exactly surprise me. We passed some quiet-looking stores, a hotel, and a church that was shuttered and dark; maybe because it was a Monday, maybe not. A worn sign above the door quoted from Romans in loud capitals: EVERY ONE OF US SHALL GIVE ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF TO GOD. I turned us around at the far end of the main street and headed back to the gas station.
I parked alongside the pumps and killed the engine. We all settled back in our seats for a second, grateful to have reached a point where we could stop. Travis was surveying the main street with distaste.
“He better find us,” he said, echoing his own comment from earlier. When no one said anything for a minute, he spoke again, his voice losing a little of the hardness: “You think they made it out all right? I mean, the Lincoln wasn’t shot up too bad. And they had time to change the tyre, right?”
I nodded. “Stan said he could handle it.”
“Maybe we should have…”
“They told us to get going,” I said, cutting him off. “We didn’t have room for all five of us, and anyway the plan was two cars.”
“A lot of things didn’t go according to plan,” Tony said. No one argued.
“The deal with Frank’s guy, the fence…” Travis began.
“Mitch,” Tony said. I hadn’t known Tony long, but he was a man with a good memory for details. A listener.
“That his name? Mitch,” Travis said, nodding. “The deal with Mitch, is it still gonna be the same?”
I shrugged, “I don’t see why not. We still have a product that he wants.”
“You think we could up the percentage a little?”
I craned round and looked at Travis over my sunglasses. “Up from forty percent?”
“Yeah,” he said, a defensive note creeping into his voice. “I didn’t want to say anything to Frank but forty seems like a real good deal for the middle man, considering we’re doing all the work.”
“You haven’t done this before, have you?” It was just an observation, I wasn’t trying to show him up, or question his professional abilities, but Travis wasn’t giving me the benefit of the doubt.
“What the hell? I’ve been doing it for twenty years you…”
“Calm down, all I meant by that was, you’re obviously new to this, specifically fencing precious stones in quantity, am I right?”
Travis paused a second, still reading my face to see if I was intentionally disrespecting him. “Yeah,” he allowed, finally.
“That’s fine, no reason you should know about how it works. Believe it or not, forty percent of retail on stolen diamonds is excellent. It’s the reason I said yes to this job. Either Frank has a great relationship with this guy, or he has some compromising pictures of his wife.”
Travis looked at Tony for verification. Tony nodded. I wondered what the big man’s background was, doubted I’d ever get a good enough conversation going to find out.
“Think about it, we’re talking about…” I looked around. The forecourt was deserted. I lowered the volume right down anyway. “…we’re talking about stolen goods. What are you going to do with them? Walk into a pawnbroker with three million bucks worth of rocks? Go to a hundred pawnbrokers in a hundred towns with smaller amounts? Sooner or later you’re going to get busted, and even if you didn’t, best case scenario, you’d be lucky to get a tenth of what they’re worth.
“This way we get to offload the whole bundle in one go, to someone who’ll take all that hassle away from us. The way you have to think right now is that what’s in the trunk isn’t money, not yet. What it is right now is a problem. As soon as Frank gets here, we hook up with Mitch. As soon as we make the handover, the diamonds are Mitch’s problem, and he’s far better equipped to deal with that problem than you or I will ever be.”
Travis didn’t say anything. I popped the lever for the fuel cover and thought about that problem in the trunk, about how it had somehow grown into a bigger problem in the last half hour.
I tried to put it out of my mind as I got out of the car, gratefully stretching my legs after the drive. It had already been a long day, one way and another, and I was looking forward to checking into the hotel. A thirty or forty minute nap and a shower, then I’d be ready to think about the next step. We’d almost certainly beaten Frank to town, which was good. It gave me a little time to unwind before we had to post-mortem the job itself. I yawned and asked Tony if he wanted anything from the store.
“Beer.”
“Like I hadn’t thought of that. Trav, you need anything?”
Maybe it was the pain in his shoulder returning with a bump, or maybe I’d just comprehensively killed his buzz earlier, but Travis was back to his old self: “Well let me think… oh yeah, how about some real goddamn bandages?”
“No problem, Trav.”
“I told you, it’s Travis,” he spat out the last syllable like someone had just told him he’d taken a bite out of an arsenic donut.
“Whatever you say.” I was starting to hate this guy, however you said his name. I headed to the store, removing my sunglasses as I got to the door.
My eyes took a few seconds to adjust to the gloom after the unrelenting sun of the last few hours. I was utterly unsurprised by the lack of air conditioning within. The only relief from the heat was a small fan pointing at the acne-afflicted teenage clerk at the other side of the store. The fan had obviously been working overtime; the motor let out a soft but persistent screech every few seconds. I wandered around the store, collecting a case of Heineken and a few snacks, then walked up to the counter. The clerk was wearing a turquoise T-shirt and a nametag identifying him as Pete.
“Got any bandages?”
Pete looked up from a Spider-Man comic book, plucking one earphone out of the side of his head. A tinny mix of drums and guitar accompanied the fan screech now. “Huh?”
“Bandages,” I repeated. I realised I was unconsciously tapping my shoulder as if this was universal sign language. Pete nodded at a section of shelves. I picked up a couple of packs and paid for them together with the beer, the snacks, a tank of gas, and a sky blue t-shirt that declared ‘My Heart Belongs to Arizona’. As I handed over the bills, I realised we’d need disinfectant too, and glanced back at the shelf where I’d found the bandages. Bandages, band aids and aspirin was about all they had. In marked contrast, the liquor selection on the rack behind the counter was comprehensive.
“I’ll take a fifth of your cheapest whiskey too,” I smiled.
I stepped out of the store and my breath stalled in my throat as I saw red and blue lights reflected in the glass door. A police car was parked outside a storefront a hundred yards down the street from us, the door hanging open like the driver had been in a hurry.
I reminded myself that we were perfectly safe here. We’d dumped the getaway cars, and nobody was looking for the new ones. Hell, we’d kept the radio on the whole way down and hadn’t featured on any of the news reports, so it could be we hadn’t even been reported yet. Still, in my line of work it becomes a habit to be cautious of any police presence. I walked back to the Mustang. Tony had finished filling the tank and was sitting against the passenger door, arms folded across his chest like intertwined branches, and Travis was still in the back. It didn’t look like his mood had improved any. I waved the bandages at him, hoping they might cheer him up.
“We’ll change that dressing as soon
as we get a room…” I tailed off as I noticed for the first time the state of the upholstery in the back. Luckily it was black leather, so the wet, tacky patches wouldn’t be visible from, say, across the main street of a small Arizona town. “Shit, I hope you’re going to clean that blood off Trav.” I guess it was a rhetorical hope, and that’s exactly how Travis treated it. I turned to Tony, nodded discreetly in the direction of the patrol car: “How long have they been there?”
“Showed up while you were in the store. They’re in there right now,” he said, indicating the storefront, which was identified as a barber’s by a metal sign hanging over the sidewalk. “Didn’t look twice at us though.”
The town seemed like it was coming to life, waking from a siesta. Small groups of people were assembling on the street, peering out of doors, twitching at venetian blinds. Among the crowd was the man I took to be the owner: a heavyset guy in a black apron, who was wringing his hands and throwing anguished glances at the storefront. I put my sunglasses back on, got back in the car and didn’t pull out onto the road too fast. Tony’s assurances had done nothing to dampen my apprehension. In my experience, some cops only need to look at you once to get suspicious.