And they wanted it.
If Jesse hadn’t been there, Luis would have killed Savage on the spot and then spent the rest of the night tearing the bank apart for the map.
Jesse, though, was just a bit brighter.
Jesse knew the map might not be hidden in the bank. It might be hidden somewhere else. Or, it might be at the bank but in the vault.
Jesse knew that by killing Savage too soon, they might lose any chance they had of finding the map; and therefore getting any more of the treasure left out there.
Luckily, Luis was at least smart enough to stay calm and to follow his brother’s lead.
Savage, for his part, had no clue the brothers might be plotting against him. He was too blinded by his own greed and mesmerized by the treasure which lay before him.
He simply forgot that he told the brothers he had an accurate accounting of the loot and would be checking to make sure none of it was missing.
And he didn’t realize the implications should he fail to do so.
His mood had changed from one of paranoid fear for his life to one of giddy anticipation in the course of a minute.
And it might just be his undoing.
“Don’t just stand there, my friends. Have a seat. This calls for a celebration.”
The term “friends” was used rather loosely. Savage had no friends. He had business acquaintances. He occasionally had allies; other ruthless and soulless men who, like himself, put money over all else.
But he had no friends.
Jesse wouldn’t call him on it, though.
He smiled broadly and sat in a chair in front of Savage’s desk.
Luis did the same.
Savage took his eyes off the prize just long enough to take a bottle of Maker’s Mark… the good stuff… from a drawer along with three whiskey glasses.
“I hope you gentlemen like your whiskey neat. I somehow forgot to fill up my ice trays this morning and have no ice.”
“No ice is fine,” Jesse said. Truth was, in a world where ice was exceedingly rare he’d have liked to have some just for its novelty. But he was trying his best to stay civil.
Even though he hated the fat man across the desk from him with a passion.
“Yeah,” Luis said. “Neat is fine.”
Savage poured three glasses, leaving his a little less full than the other two.
It didn’t escape Jesse’s notice.
He pretended to sip, but took none. When Luis raised the glass to his own lips, Jesse reached out and placed a hand on his brother’s forearm.
The glass came back down.
It was only after Savage took a generous swallow from his own glass and suffered no ill effects that Jesse removed his hand and let his brother partake of the sweet elixir.
“Now then,” Jesse said. “Our cut is ten percent. How do we go about separating it?”
“I have a scale in the other room,” Savage offered. “We’ll separate it all first. Then we’ll weigh all the silver. If it’s twenty pounds, you can select two pounds of it. We’ll do the same for the gold. Fair enough?”
“Fair enough.”
Jesse was a bit puzzled at first that Savage wasn’t trying to rip them off. He’d expected the dishonest banker merely to set aside a small pile of the loot and proclaim it the brothers’ share.
In Jesse’s eyes that only meant one thing.
That there was so much more out there Savage knew he’d be rich beyond belief, even by playing it straight with his partners.
-45-
Jesse’s glass was barely touched when he lifted the bottle of whiskey to refill all three.
Savage didn’t notice.
Nor did he notice that Jesse poured much more into his glass than the other two.
Savage was starting to relax. He was starting to feel he was on friendly ground, with men who’d do him no harm. And why should they? They wanted to be rich as much as he did. And they were totally reliant on him to tell them where the remaining treasure was buried.
He was letting his guard down.
His paranoia was starting to fade.
They went about the job of separating the gold and the silver, then weighing each.
Jesse couldn’t help but notice the little brown envelope full of diamonds somehow disappeared during the process, no doubt being slipped into Savage’s pocket while his back was turned.
He wasn’t particularly happy about that, but he wouldn’t raise the issue.
He fully expected to get the diamonds back at some point anyway.
It took the better part of an hour to separate each precious metal and get a total weight, then for the brothers to pull out ten percent of each pile.
Savage was exceedingly pleased with himself, both for being able to hide the diamonds and for ripping the brothers off in another way as well.
Savage knew the difference between platinum and silver. Neither Jesse nor Luis had ever laid eyes on platinum before.
Savage saw this early on, when Luis picked up a platinum bracelet and asked why the silver was so discolored.
Savage played it off as being tinted by a chemical process for fashion purposes.
They seemed to buy it, so Savage was careful to place all the platinum pieces beneath the silver in the silver pile.
And it worked. The brothers chose their ten percent of the “silver” from the top of the pile and left the more valuable metal for Savage to sort out later.
The scam allowed Savage to feel like the cat that ate the canary and made him let his guard down even more.
He filled his glass a third time, and was feeling just a bit of a buzz then Jesse asked him, “So. Where do we go to get the next batch of your buried treasure?”
It was a fair question, and Savage couldn’t blame his associates for being just as anxious as he was to get the next batch.
The fact he’d let his guard down and trusted the brothers was a mistake. Savage didn’t realize it, but his paranoia was his friend. He’d let it get away from him before, but shouldn’t have discarded it completely.
A little paranoia would have been acceptable when dealing with men like Jesse and Luis. For although neither of them had ever killed anyone, they were capable.
Just as all men are under the right circumstances.
When Savage cast his paranoia to the wind, he opened the door to those circumstances.
The alcohol clouded his judgment even more.
The men were still in Savage’s outer office, where the scale was located, admiring various pieces of their loot.
Savage excused himself, assuming the brothers would stay there.
And they did… stay in the outer office, that is.
But Jesse moved to the doorway, out of sight in the shadows, and watched as Savage went to his desk drawer, removed a tiny tablet and leafed through its pages, then placed it back into his drawer.
Then he took a pen and jotted something onto a piece of paper, and headed back Jesse’s way.
It wasn’t the treasure map Jesse had expected to see Savage consult. But it was apparently the next best thing.
That the outer office was dimly lit by only a few candles made it easy for Jesse to return unseen to Luis’s side.
Savage returned to the outer office not knowing he’d been watched.
He handed the paper to Jesse and made a great show of explaining to Jesse what it meant.
“On this paper is a number: 393. It’s a mile marker, but not on Highway 281. It’s a mile marker on Interstate 20. 281 will connect with Interstate 20 about a hundred miles north of here. You’ll head east on I-20, and mile marker 393 will be just a few miles up the road.
“It’ll take a few days to make the round trip, but it’ll be worthwhile to all of us.”
Jesse chuckled. “It’ll be worth the trip to Luis and me. You, not so much.”
His tone was ominous, but Savage didn’t catch it. The alcohol was starting to make his mind fuzzy.
He didn’t see that the tables had just been turned on him.
-46-
The group finished separating and fondling their loot. The brothers placed their share back into one of the backpacks and Savage left his on the table. Later, he figured he’d sort it out and lock it away in an extra safe deposit box.
They returned to the banker’s office and got comfortable once again.
While Savage was pouring himself another glass of whiskey, and not even bothering to ask whether the brothers were in need of a refill, Jess stood up and announced, “I need to take a leak. Where can I go to do that?”
Savage very proudly answered, “The restroom back there works. It’s gravity fed through a big water tank set eight feet off the ground behind the bank. I have Tad refill it with pond water every couple of months. Smells a bit fishy, but it beats going out into the alley.”
Jesse chuckled and said under his breath, “Only you would think of something like that.”
Only Savage didn’t hear the slight. Savage had just finished downing his glass and was refilling it again.
Jesse had slipped off his boots, hidden from Savage’s view by the semi-darkness of the candle-lit room and the old man’s massive desk.
Savage didn’t even notice that as he walked away he made almost no sound at all on the hardwood floor.
It would make it much easier to sneak up behind him.
Jesse did indeed use the pond water-scented restroom. His bladder was barely full, and he could well have waited. But using the restroom wasn’t just an excuse to sneak up on his prey.
It was also a chance to calm his nerves.
Jesse Martinez was not a perfect human being. He’d been in the joint, he’d been involved in gangs. He’d used a variety of drugs and he’d run with tough crowds.
But he’d never killed anyone. And there was a good chance he would do so tonight.
He tried to tell himself he wouldn’t go that far. He wouldn’t need to, he reasoned.
Surely Savage would willingly give the information he needed without a fight, once he realized the only alternative was death.
Savage wasn’t a smart man, by Jesse’s estimation.
But he wasn’t a fool either.
He finished doing his business and debated whether washing his hands with pond water was any better than not washing them at all.
He opted not to.
Instead, he took a deep breath and walked as silently as possible back into Savage’s office, entering the room from over the banker’s left shoulder, and using his brother’s conversation to distract him.
He skirted the wall until he was standing directly behind Savage before taking a garrote from his pocket.
He crossed his forearms before dropping the looped wire over Savage’s head.
He wasn’t sure why, exactly. Perhaps someone in jail told him the proper way to use the weapon. Or maybe he’d read something about it on the internet once upon a time.
Wherever he got the knowledge, he somehow knew that by crossing his forearms before he applied the weapon instead of after, he’d have much more leverage to choke the life out of his victim.
Not that he expected it to go that far.
But anything worth doing is worth doing right.
Savage’s hands immediately went to his throat in an effort to get the… whatever it was, off of him.
It didn’t do him any good.
The wire rope was tight enough to make it hard for Savage to breathe, but not enough to kill him.
Within seconds a coughing, wheezing Savage knew he was at the mercy of Jesse Martinez.
His eyes opened wide. The eyeballs seemed to Luis to protrude from the sockets, but that might have been just his imagination.
His face was definitely starting to turn red, but that might as well have been from rage as from the garrote.
Because he was most certainly not happy.
He was, however, surprised.
“Why?” he wheezed. “Why are you doing this?”
John Savage had spent much of his adult life betraying others. He’d most recently done it just a few days before, when he’d pulled out a gun and killed Duncan and Gomez.
It just never dawned on him that someone might try the same thing with him.
It should have, but it didn’t.
“Stand up,” Jesse commanded into Savage’s left ear.
He did as he was told.
It wasn’t like he had any choice.
“Now then,” Jesse said, “We’re going into your desk drawer and getting that little notebook you were looking at. And you’re not gonna give us any trouble. Because if you do I swear to God I will strangle you to death.”
His last words were the most chilling:
“And I won’t even feel bad about it.”
Savage wiggled a bit, but didn’t really struggle.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to.
But it was incredibly hard to do so, when he was barely getting enough air to keep from losing consciousness.
Jesse said, “Center drawer, Luis.”
Luis dutifully reached over the top of the desk and opened the drawer.
“That’s it. That little red notebook.”
Luis removed it.
“Open it up,” Jesse continued. “See if there’s a map inside.”
“No. There’s no map. There’s just a bunch of numbers.”
“What? Bring it here. Bring a candle.”
Luis had been a lapdog to his smarter brother his whole life. He didn’t argue, didn’t delay. He immediately did as he was told.
Luis held the open notebook inches from Jesse’s face, as Savage wheezed in front of them both.
The tiny book was open to a page which read:
20A
141
90
46
17
Jesse was equal parts confused and pissed off.
“What the hell?”
The numbers meant nothing to him. They might as well have been hieroglyphics.
“Turn to the next page.”
Luis flipped the page. The next one read:
20M
107
91
57
31
Jesse grew enraged.
His attention turned back to Savage.
“Okay, you son of a bitch. You better start explaining right now what in the hell all this gibberish means.”
Savage, on the verge of passing out, his brain still addled by the alcohol, saw his one and only chance of escaping death.
“I… can’t breathe. Let me go and I’ll tell you.”
“Wrong. You tell me and then I’ll let you breathe.”
Savage had no choice. He knew if he passed out he’d likely never wake up again.
“They’re… highway numbers… and mile markers…”
Jesse eased the garrote just a bit.
He took a second look at the cryptic numbers, and this time they made sense. There was treasure buried on Interstate 20 in Mississippi. That’s what the “20M” stood for.
The numbers below the “20M” told them which mile markers to do their digging.
Jesse smiled.
-47-
Savage was able to breathe a little easier, but was far from out of the woods.
Luis was still confused and still saw no direct relationship between the seemingly nonsensical numbers and his becoming a very rich man.
He looked to Jesse and asked, “You know what that bullshit means?”
“Yes. Yes I do.”
That was good enough for Luis.
Well, maybe not.
Now that the numbers had been figured out, Luis had his own agenda to work.
He put his face mere inches from Savage’s and barked, “Now then. What’s the combination to your vault?”
Getting no immediate response, he punctuated his question by asking it again.
This time after pulling a wood-handled Bowie knife from its scabbard on his belt.
“I use this to skin animals. It’ll work ju
st as good slicing your throat. Now what’s the combination to your vault?”
John Savage never was very good at making important decisions.
If he had been he wouldn’t have made an enemy of Red.
His judgment was very frequently unsound.
On this day, it was even less so after his mind had been plied with alcohol for several hours.
In his mind, his decision to stall was the logical thing to do.
After all, if he gave these men the combination to his vault, they’d take everything. All the gold and silver he’d squirreled away. The extra set of keys to his customers’ safety deposit boxes that no one in town knew about.
They could pilfer the vault at their leisure and leave him with nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
So he tried to stall.
“It’s on a time lock… it can’t be opened until just before nine a.m.”
“Bullshit.”
“No. I swear it’s true.”
In Savage’s troubled mind, the pair would let him go. They’d let him sit and wait until nine a.m. to get their hands on all the goodies the vault had to offer.
It wasn’t much, but it was a lifeline. It would give Savage approximately five more hours to sober up a bit. To think. To find a way to somehow turn the tables on these clowns.
And once he figured out a way to do that, he’d show them no more mercy than he showed to Gomez and Duncan.
The trouble was Luis had been drinking too.
It’s been said, and it’s largely true, that there are three distinct types of drunks.
One is the quiet drunk, who drinks to ease his own sorrow. He goes silent and bothers no one. He gets lost in his own thoughts and stays there, except to order his next drink.
Bartenders don’t like them because they’re lousy tippers. But at least they cause no trouble.
The second drunk is the happy drunk.
By the third drink he’s best friends with everyone in the bar. He hugs and slobbers all over people he doesn’t even know, and is the world’s greatest dancer. He insists on dancing with every girl in the bar, although he can barely stand up. His favorite words are, “I love you, man. I really really love you.”
No Help From Austin: Red: Book 5 Page 15