by Jeremy Brown
Chapter Three
Six Weeks Earlier
“Fourteen million dollars?” Bruder said.
Rison spread his hands, like he couldn’t be held responsible for the shocking amount.
“Give or take.”
He had called Lola and left a message to have Bruder call him, which led to Bruder flying to Vegas the next day.
They were sitting in the shade of a comped cabana at the Mandalay Bay pool. A DJ played music for the people in and around the pool, all of them drinking and yelling and turning red under the early afternoon sun.
Bruder and Rison sat close enough so they wouldn’t have to shout, but there was no chance of anyone listening in.
Bruder took another Corona out of the ice bucket and used the opener hanging from the bucket’s handle to open it.
“In Iowa?”
Rison nodded.
“Iowa.”
Bruder drank some of the beer and stretched his legs out. It was hot inside the cabana, but the ceiling fan kept the air moving and the sun and colors around the pool were pleasant to look at from behind his sunglasses.
He hadn’t worked since the summer, when he and Kershaw and some others had pulled two and half million dollars out of an Escalade in the Financial District. As it turned out, the money belonged to an organization called The Labyrinth, and Bruder had kept his head down waiting to see if there was going to be any fallout from crossing them.
So far so good—they knew his face but not his name, not even an alias—and even though he still had plenty of his share from the job and several jobs prior, he was ready to get back to work.
“Convince me,” he said.
Rison said, “I was in a private card game with a group of guys, this thing we do whenever we’re all in LA at the same time. It’s mostly pros, but word gets around and sometimes we get some rich amateurs. Celebrities, Silicon Valley dorks, some organized crime but not too often. They have their own setups.”
Bruder took another drink of the beer.
Rison said, “But at this game about two weeks ago there was a guy named Tug. He—”
Bruder said, “Tug?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Tug.”
“Is that a nickname?”
“I don’t know. He was Romanian.”
“Romanian?”
Rison blinked. “Well, yeah, but that’s skipping ahead.”
Bruder sat back. “I’ll shut up.”
“So this Tug, he lost a lot of money. I mean, a lot. He talked a big game and thought he knew what he was doing, but he was coked up to his eyebrows and couldn’t focus, plus he kept showing his cards. Even without that, man, he was chum in the water. This one hand, he—”
“I don’t need the card details,” Bruder said.
“Right, right, sorry. It’s just, us card guys, we can geek out on that stuff all day.”
“He lost a lot of money,” Bruder said, getting things back on track.
Rison nodded.
“A lot. And he covered his debt, good for him, but he was torn up about it. He kept saying it was everything he had. He and I were sitting in this rooftop jacuzzi, big as a freaking bus, and we were the only ones left in the penthouse. This is like, four in the morning. Everybody else from the game had left. He would lean over and put his hand on my shoulder and in this thick accent—Romanian, like I said—‘Rison, my friend, I am as broke as a joke,’ then he’d laugh and cry at the same time. Over and over. I felt bad for him, but what are you gonna do?”
It was a rhetorical question, so Bruder didn’t answer.
Rison said, “And then he lays his head back on the edge of the jacuzzi and closes his eyes and goes, ‘Fuck, now I have to go to Iowa.’ I didn’t think I heard him right. Because Iowa, you know? Iowa? But then I think, oh, maybe there’s someplace back home that sounds like Iowa. Like, E-Y-E-O-J…whatever. So I go, ‘Where’s that?’ And you know what he said to me?”
Bruder waited.
“He goes, ‘It’s right in the middle of your fucking country, you idiot.’”
Then Rison burst out laughing and drank the rest of his beer. A server in shorts and a bikini top strolled past the front of the cabana and pointed at the ice bucket with raised eyebrows.
Rison said, “We’re good for now sweetie, but can we get some food? Some of those barbecue sliders, and the fruit plate thing.”
“You bet, hot shot.”
The server, a pro, glanced at Bruder and saw there was no point in chatting him up for a bigger tip and moved on.
Bruder said, “Iowa.”
Rison cracked another beer for himself.
“Right, Iowa. I ask him why in the hell he has to go to Iowa. And he starts rambling about his cousins and uncles and farms and I’m thinking, boy oh boy, this poor bastard is so broke, he has to go back to his family farm and shovel cow shit until he gets back on his feet. I almost felt bad about taking his money.”
A group of young women with pale skin and full drinks shuffled past, looking for a place to set up camp. Bruder could see the lingering marks from an airplane neck pillow on one of their cheeks.
Rison called out to them, “Not now ladies, but come back here in one hour. One hour!”
They laughed and leaned into each other to make comments, but most of them looked back and Bruder made a note to be gone within the hour.
Rison leaned back and said, “So he’s yammering on about farms and shit, and then he said something that set off some alarm bells. Maybe you have this too—it’s like a program running in the background, a passive monitoring system, and it’s always listening and watching. Maybe somebody says something, or you notice somebody come and go through a side door and now you know it isn’t locked. Or you see a security guard with their holster all jacked up, like pushed around to the back, and you know that damn gun is welded in there with cobwebs and the person toting it around sure as shit never pulled it, let alone fired it. The monitoring system notices stuff like that and you go, huh…”
“Sure,” Bruder said. He wouldn’t call his version of it passive, but he knew what Rison was talking about.
“Well Tug says this one thing, and my system starts going off like a slot machine. Bing, bong, bing!”
Bruder wondered if Rison was going to get to it before the pale horde returned.
Rison said, “Tug, he goes, ‘The boys in Chicago would never notice a missing bag.’”
He raised his eyebrows at Bruder to emphasize how intriguing the statement was.
“But the way he said it was kind of rueful, like he knew that was bullshit. The boys in Chicago, whoever they were, would absolutely notice a missing bag and Tug knew it. And at this point he has my full attention but I don’t want to spook him. So I say something lame and distracted, like, ‘A bag of what, manure? Ha ha ha.’”
Rison leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, getting into the story.
“Tug, he just laughs. Then he jerks up off the concrete ledge like he got hit by lightning and goes, ‘Hey, do you know any farmers?’”
He frowned at Bruder, showing how confused he had been by the question.
“Now, I know some guys who grow a bit of weed, but if I know any real farmers it would be a newsflash to me. But I can tell saying no to Tug will close this road we’re going down, so I tell him ‘Yeah, I know some farmers. What’s up?’ Then he goes, ‘Do you care if some of them get killed?’”
Rison held the beer bottle in both hands and stared past it at the concrete between his sandals, making sure he got the details right.
“The way Tug explained it to me, Romanian organized crime figured out a scam with farming subsidies. You know what those are?”
Bruder said, “The government pays money to farmers to help them grow crops.”
“Right, basically. Sometimes it’s because the land is flooded and they can’t grow anything, or just to keep them in business so we aren’t relying on foreigners for our corn and wheat, you get it. So the Romanians, they find a rural
area with a bunch of farms and they move in, then start spreading cash around to the farmers to get them to claim all of their land—whether it’s trees, parking lots, swamps—as farmable. Then the farmers list all that land on their paperwork to the government and get paid more in subsidies.”
Bruder frowned. “A bunch of home-grown farmers jump right into bed with Romanians to screw the government?”
“Well, some of them aren’t so happy with Congress, or the president, or their local hack, or the post office, or whatever. Others, yeah, they have big ‘ol flags waving in their front yards no matter who’s voted in, and they put up a fight, which is why Tug asked me about the killing part. These Romanians, they aren’t shy about getting rough if they have to.”
“So the farmers get paid by the government to farm land that isn’t actually arable.”
“Arable?”
“Farmable.”
“Right, yeah. And Tug said they also get the farmers to double-down on the land they’re already claiming, sometimes getting paid two or three times for the same acreage.”
Bruder said, “Nobody from the government ever comes out and actually looks at these farms?”
“Man, do you know how much farmland is out there? And how many people the government has working in these departments?”
“No, I don’t.”
Rison squinted out at the pool.
“Well, neither do I. But it’s a lot of land and not a lot of people. If Tug is right about it, all these bureaucrats do is push paper around and listen to lobbyists and rubber stamp these claims when they come through and cut the checks once a year.”
“Checks?” Bruder said.
“I know, I know, but don’t worry about that. These farmers like their money in banks or in cash, usually the latter. They go in to look at a new truck and pull out a fat roll and buy it right then and there, cash money. It’s pretty baller, actually. But that’s not the point. The Romanians, they know when the checks are coming, and they make the farmers cash them, then take everything except what the farmer would have coming to them legitimately.”
“So the farmers keep whatever subsidies they should be getting, and the Romanians take the fraud end.”
“Exactly.”
“And that fraud money ends up at fourteen million dollars,” Bruder said.
“Give or take.”
Bruder scanned the pool area, not really looking at anything, just letting his mind work through it.
“The Romanians collect it all at once?”
Rison grinned.
“You’re catching on. I wondered about collecting from the farmers before the Romanians get to them, but it’s too messy. All these people have guns right next to the front door, and all they’d have to do is call around after we left—assuming they didn’t shoot us—and we’d be in it up to our necks. So yeah, you nailed it. The Romanians make the rounds and put the cash, get this, in an old armored car they got their hands on.”
“You’re kidding.”
Rison shook his head.
“I know. These Romanians are crazy, man. From what Tug said, they act like an occupying army out in this little corner of Iowa. I guess the whole scam is something they’ve done back home and around Europe for a while, now they’re trying it here. They load up all the cash and drive it to Chicago and deliver it to the big boss.”
“And the job is to hijack the delivery.”
“Bingo,” Rison said.
“When do the checks go out?”
“In about six weeks.”
Something was gnawing at the edge of Bruder’s thoughts.
He said, “And Tug just came out and told you all of this?”
“Like I said, he lost a lot of money. He was trying to recruit me into giving up these imaginary farmers I knew so he could start his own scam going. Or go tell his cousins about them, who knows. I told him I was going to have to see this thing in person before I went in with him. So he laid it all out, man. We set up a time and place to meet so I could watch it all go down.”
“You’re supposed to meet him when they collect the cash, precisely?”
“Well, not down to the minute. He said we’d meet up, maybe hang out for a few days and drink...Ah, shit, what was it…Rachiu, something like that. Some kind of liquor made out of plums, or pears, or something. He said if I survived, I’d never want to drink anything else.”
Bruder frowned.
“So the Romanians are expecting you to be there? You’re going on the inside?”
Rison shook his head again.
Bruder was getting more skeptical.
He said, “You’re trusting this Tug guy to be your source?”
“No, no way. He’s a walking shitshow. If I went there with him, or if I tried to rely on him for more info, I’d probably end up dead or a hostage or something worse. I didn’t even know if Tug would remember having the conversation the next morning, you know? I go up to him and start talking about Iowa and he pulls a gun and goes, ‘Who told you about that?’”
“But if he does remember, and he tells the other Romanians about you, and we take down the truck…”
Rison grinned like a wolf.
“Nah man, they don’t know shit about what he told me. It was the craziest thing. I guess Tug was so distraught, right after he got done filling me in, he got out of the jacuzzi and jumped off the balcony. Thirty floors up.”
“Huh,” Bruder said. “That’s too bad.”
“A damn shame,” Rison agreed.
The food arrived at the cabana and they both picked through it and sat chewing and watching the pool for a few minutes.
Bruder said, “We’re going to need somebody with local information.”
Rison wiped his face and fingers on a thick cloth napkin and took a drink of beer.
“Well, it won’t be Tug.”
“No. From what you’ve said, I wouldn’t rely on him even if he was still around.”
“A solid bet.”
“And from the sound of it, nobody in the Romanian crew is going to be pliable.”
Rison said, “Pliable. I like that. And I agree—Tug was a crazy son of a bitch, and he made the crew in Iowa sound even worse. None of them are going to give us an assist.”
Bruder thought about it.
“These farmers. Some of them wouldn’t mind seeing the Romanians take a hit.”
“Maybe. Yeah, maybe. I bet they’re scared though. If somebody helped us and the gang found out…And what if we approach the wrong person? We see a corn-fed Billy Bob who looks prime to work with us, and it turns out he’s filing for Romanian citizenship, you know?”
“Yeah,” Bruder said.
He was looking at the angles and holes and dead ends, trying to find a spot to pry against.
“How many random strangers show up in this place?”
“Population for the town is just over two thousand. The township website calls it a village, and it damn sure ain’t a city. The main drag is pretty much all there is to it. The rest is farms and a school and a big-ass train station where they load up grain and corn and whatever. Soybeans, maybe.”
“Have you been there?”
Rison took a bite out of another slider.
“Nah. I found all this online.”
“Let me look into it a little more. I’ll bring Kershaw in if you’re good with that.”
“No problem. Is he in Vegas too?”
“Not yet,” Bruder said.
That night the three of them were in Bruder’s hotel room at Caesar’s looking at Kershaw’s laptop.
He’d flown in from Austin with a carry-on bag that afternoon and Bruder and Rison got him caught up on the ride from the airport.
The laptop showed a map of the town in Iowa. The satellite view showed what looked like a ball of yarn in the middle of a set of crosshairs. A tight grid of roads in the center, where the town was, then a mess of old, curving roads that wandered around the countryside and somehow found their way to another piece of thread that
kept the wander going.
The only roads in and out of town were the crosshairs—north, south, east, and west.
Other browser tabs had the town’s Wikipedia page and websites for the school and some of the local businesses, including a farm machinery dealership, the granary train depot, a motel, and a bar named Len’s offering live music Friday and Saturday nights. It also had, according to the site, the world-famous Lenburger as featured on a TV show called Dash & Dine.
Kershaw clicked on the tab showing the machinery dealership. The page had a sidebar with current job openings, of which there were two: Lead Account Manager and Agricultural Service Technician.
“I still like this one,” he said.
Rison said, “What the hell is an Agricultural Service Technician?”
Kershaw shrugged.
“Somebody who works on tractors?”
“You ever worked on tractors?”
“No. But I bet I could sell you one.”
Rison looked at Bruder. “The Account Manager?”
Bruder said, “All we need is a reason to be in town. One of us can apply for that job. One of us can do the one at the granary.”
Kershaw went to that tab and read: “Second Shift Site Manager.”
Rison said, “What’s that mean?”
“You manage the site during the second shift.”
“Thanks, smart-ass.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Bruder said. “We look at the job requirements and build a resume that makes sense. Drop it off and tell them you’re in town at the motel until the next day. Drive around, scope the town. Eat at the bar. Watch the people. If you get a call, go in for the interview or don’t. Tell them you got another offer somewhere else.”
Rison tilted his head from side to side, thinking about it.
“We stagger our visits?”
“A few days in between. If we see enough out-of-towners some overlap is okay. We share what we find out so the next guy going in doesn’t have to cover the same ground.”
Rison looked at Bruder.
“Wait, what about Lola?”