The Downside

by Mike Cooper

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  THE DOWNSIDE

  Mike Cooper

  For my father,

  an inspiration and a model, always

  PROLOGUE

  SEVEN YEARS AGO

  The hobo was no particular surprise, but when Finn saw a dust plume coming up the canyon, he knew they had a problem. They were deep in the New Mexico desert, railroad tracks disappearing into mirage in both directions the only mark of civilization.

  “What the fuck?” Jake’s voice crackled in Finn’s ex-military Racal headset.

  “Don’t know.”

  Air brakes hissed and couplers banged as seventy freight cars’ worth of slack bunched up. The train jerked to a rough, grudging stop on the siding. Finn figured the engineer probably would have done a better job if Jake wasn’t pointing a gun at him.

  “Two guys here,” said Jake over the comm. He sounded calm, which didn’t mean much. Finn had known Jake since high school, a million years ago, and had never seen him rattled. But he was surely in control. Even with his face covered up—probably using a bandanna, romantic that he was—Jake had People magazine looks and charisma to spare.

  “That’s all of them.” Finn ticked a mental box. Like all the big railroads, Union Central kept their crews at a minimum. “Put them out of the way.” Jake would plasticuff them in a corner and stay in the locomotive to handle any calls from the dispatcher.

  The hobo had found a nice spot on the deck of a grain car, shaded by the hopper’s slanting steel wall. By coincidence, the grainer was only two cars away from the ore gondolas. So when the old guy stuck his head out into the bright desert glare, the first thing he saw was the Deere excavator, still chained down to its flatbed, pulling up right alongside the track.

  Finn jumped down from the flatbed’s cab, leaving his door open. A blast of diesel sounded as Corman, who was sitting at the excavator’s controls, swung its arm up and over the gondola. Corman was a huge man, his partially bald head almost brushing the cab’s roof. But his hand was delicate on the levers.

  Another rumble as Asher pulled up in the open-trailer semi. His own style was less careful, and his truck slammed to a stop alongside the flatbed. Still, close enough. The excavator’s scoop rose, full of molybdenite, and Corman swiveled it around to dump into Asher’s trailer.

  Asher stuck his head out the cab window to look back. No mask. Finn grimaced. It probably didn’t matter—no one was around to see and Asher could always shave off his ridiculous musketeer’s beard if he had to change appearance—but still. Asher did things his way, fuck you anyway.

  Thirty seconds, and they were already unloading. Finn organized a tight schedule and generally managed to make it stick. His own version of just-in-time logistics.

  Guys on a payroll could fuck around. When you were stealing the delivery, efficiency mattered.

  “Get off there,” Finn called over the engine noise to the hobo. The man crawled out, obviously stiff from sitting on the jouncing metal platform for hours.

  “This ain’t Alamogordo.” Grime had worn deeply into his face. Apart from the mainline and a battered metal shed, the siding was surrounded by emptiness—dirt, sand, and scrubby yucca, with a few low mountains purple in the distance.

  And the dust from an approaching vehicle. Only a few minutes away now.

  “Nope.” Finn himself wore a painter’s mask and sunglasses—the practical outlaw. “Sorry to do this, old-timer, but you got to go sit out of the way. There’s some shade by that shack down there.”

  The hobo reached back to get his bindle off the grainer’s porch. Finn noticed he had a metal spoon, the handle bent over and tied to his belt with frayed twine, and a plastic soda bottle filled with water.

  “You’re robbing the train, ain’t you?” He cackled briefly. “I didn’t think that ever happened anymore.”

  “On your way, now.”

  “Sure, Butch.” He started to walk toward the shack but turned his head back. “Can I ask you something?

  “No.”

  “Is there a lot of money in that? In a truckful of rocks?”

  Finn shook his head. “Don’t pay any attention to us.”

  Back in the truck’s cab, Finn pulled his binoculars from the pack and peered at the unexpected company, coming up fast. His hands were sweaty inside the latex, but combat gloves were fingerless, which was an obvious problem.

  “Two pickup trucks,” he said over the radio. “Or … no. One pickup and an SUV. I can’t see faces.”

  “Say who they are?” Asher’s voice.

  “Not la migra.” Border Patrol vehicles were white with lightbars. These were black and unmarked. “Keep loading.”

  “I locked the engineers in the toilet,” Jake said on the radio.

  “Stay there and keep your head down.” Finn wished he had a long gun, but they only carried sidearms. Big weapons were just a pain in the ass.

  Until you needed them, of course.

  A half minute later, he put the binocs down because the trucks were now clear enough.

  “Uh-oh.” Asher wasn’t paying attention to his job.

  “Shit.”

  “Motherfuck.”

  Well, Finn couldn’t blame them. Three men were standing in the bed of the pickup, holding the roll bar as the truck bounced along the dirt road. The SUV had a sunroof, and another man stood through it, arms and torso free.

  All four held assault rifles.

  “Keep working,” Finn radioed as he opened the door.

  “What are you doing?” Asher didn’t sound happy.

  “They don’t look like law enforcement to me.”

  “All the more reason not to talk to them.” Jake was the voice of reason, as usual.

  “Maybe we have common interests.”

  Finn walked out with his hands halfway up in the air and stopped about a hundred feet from the train. A minute later, the pickup skidded to a halt on his right. The SUV continued another dozen yards, then stopped abruptly. Dust blew across the scrub. Four rifle barrels pointed over.

  A moment of silence. Behind him, Finn heard the diesel engines idling. Corman and Asher were obviously waiting to see what happened.

  “¿Quíen diablos eres tú?” one of the new arrivals called from the pickup.

  “Sorry,” Finn said. “How about in English?”

  “¡Tú hijo de perra!”

  Well, it was obvious enough now. Somewhere in these seventy railcars was an undeclared shipment, FOB the middle of fucking nowhere. Customs in El Paso couldn’t inspect every car even if they wanted to, and the railroads weren’t going to cough up for extra security. If Finn’s crew hadn’t arrived first, these jokers probably would have simply bled a brake line for a ten-minute delay, unloaded their bales of whatever, and disappeared before the engineers even noticed.

  The man who’d spoken now hopped lightly from the pickup’s bed and walked closer. He wore a baseball cap backward on his head and an Abercrombie T-shirt tucked into faded black jeans. Just like any NMSU college student—except for the M16.

  “What are you doing?” A mild accent, and he seemed more curious than upset.

  “Transferring cargo.” Finn looked back at the gondol
as for a moment. “You, too?”

  “We’re not interested in rocks. Will you take that mask off?”

  “Sure. Can I tell my guys to go back to work?”

  “Are you in a hurry?”

  “No more than yourselves.”

  Just a couple of general contractors working out a problem. And Finn still thought everything would be fine. They could make an arrangement and go their separate ways, never to meet again—because, really, they were in completely different lines of business. The guy even offered him a cigarette while they stood there, talking it out.

  Jake, a quarter mile down at the front of the train, must have heard the new problem first.

  “Uh, boss?” he said quietly into the radio. But it was too late. Heads were turning in the pickup, and a moment later Finn recognized the sound.

  A helicopter.

  “¡Desgraciado!” Finn’s new friend swung up his M16. “¡Oye, eres policía!”

  “No!”

  The guy might have pulled the trigger, but they both noticed new towers of dust on the other side of the train. The choppers were approaching in an attack vector, three abreast, and suddenly, a line of vehicles was banging out of some hidden canyon, red and blue lights flashing.

  Finn ran toward the flatbed, expecting a shot in the back any moment. Gunfire sputtered, almost lost in the rapidly increasing noise of the chopper. Sirens rose in volume, dopplered by the speed of the approaching cars.

  The cavalry had arrived.

  “Shut it down,” Finn said into the radio before rolling under the truck, arms over his head.

  He hoped the hobo had sense enough to stay out of the way. He hoped his guys wouldn’t do anything stupid. Two months of planning shot to hell, but forget that; they’d be lucky if they didn’t spend the next decade in prison.

  Bullets spat into the dirt around him. An explosion. Dust flew everywhere, raised by rotor wash and vehicles skidding near the train. A man shouted nearby, the words lost.

  Finn closed his arms over his head, holding back an urge to burrow into the dirt. In the chaos, trying to figure out what was happening, his mind couldn’t let go of one nagging question: Had the police arrived for them—or for the narcos?

  And if it was Finn’s crew, how had they known?

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Postrelease counseling.”

  The clerk slid a photocopied sheet of paper through the slot under his reinforced window. The lexan was scratched and nicked, making the clerk’s face blurry. A circle of quarter-inch drill holes in the window had been covered over with a newer slab of polycarbonate, held in place by lag bolts. Finn wondered what exactly some inmate had shoved through the holes when they were open.

  He looked at the sheet, two columns of nearly unreadable small type. “What’s it say?”

  The clerk shrugged. “Don’t fuck up, or we’ll see you back here.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “If you can’t read, you can listen to a recording.”

  State law must have mandated counseling. Socorro Correctional was a contract prison, run for profit, and they tended to follow the minimums. New Mexico legislators certainly didn’t care.

  “I don’t think I forgot how yet,” said Finn.

  Behind him, the escort guard grunted and leaned against the door, clunking it against the wall. The clerk had turned away, digging through a heap of paper and plastic on his side of the counter. He found a one-gallon ziploc and shoved it through the slot along with another form.

  “Sign the paper and give it back,” he said.

  The bag bulged with a wallet and phone and loose change and a length of light steel chain. Finn’s name had been scrawled on the outside in heavy marker.

  “What about my clothes?”

  “Sign the form,” said the clerk again. “We only store clothing eighteen months. You can keep what you’re wearing.”

  Finn looked at him a long moment. “Okay.” Cheap denims, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and canvas shoes. Before pocketing the wallet, he looked inside: a few hundred dollars and nothing else.

  He never carried anything but mad money on a job. Nothing that could fall out of his pocket for a CSI tech to find later.

  “Are you closing your commissary account?” asked the clerk as he took the paper Finn slid back to him.

  “Of course.”

  The clerk shrugged again. “Some guys, they figure they’re coming right back, they don’t bother.”

  “Maybe they just can’t believe how little they made.” Finn studied the check the clerk passed him. At thirteen cents an hour, seven years of prison labor had netted him $841.31. “You withheld taxes?”

  “We do things right around here.”

  The guard led him out one more corridor, through two final sets of electronically sealed gates, and then pointed at a simple metal door.

  “Out you go,” he said.

  Finn felt an unexpected rush of emotion—elation, fear, uncertainty, adrenaline. Through a window alongside the door, he could see a parking lot, dusty and white in the desert heat, with riot wire fencing the perimeter and an empty road stretching into the scrubby badlands.

  “When’s the bus?” he asked.

  “Haw.” It might have been a laugh. “You ain’t got nobody picking you up, you can walk. Turn left—town’s four miles.”

  “Right.” Finn took a last look: a concrete floor, blank walls with broken holes leaking gypsum. The guard didn’t offer to shake hands. “Have a nice day, you hear?”

  Outside, he walked away from the building, tipped his head back, and closed his eyes. The sun blasted down, maybe 110 degrees of shadeless heat, with a few slight puffs of breeze. Behind him, faintly, the sounds of a compressor, some window air conditioners in the administrative offices, a pair of tractor trailers idling somewhere. In front of him, a slight rustling as wind pushed across the desert, and nothing else.

  A car door slammed. Footsteps.

  “How are you, Finn?”

  A female voice. His eyes snapped open.

  Dark hair, not too long, silky white shirt tucked into jeans. Average height, shorter than him. Easily the most beautiful woman he’d seen outside a magazine for a very long time.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  She grinned. “You’re late.”

  “By about seven years.” He looked around the parking lot: a few SUVs, some four-doors—nothing too small or Japanese. The cars were all empty. “I wasn’t expecting to be met.”

  “I don’t have much time.” She held up a key ring. “Come on, I’ll drive you to town. We can talk in the car.”

  “Who are you?” he said again.

  “Emily Hale.” She held out a hand.

  Her grip was firm and surprisingly calloused. Out of practice, he had to remind himself to let go.

  “Sorry.”

  “You have anything?” She looked past him at the prison’s entrance, like the bellboy would be pushing out a luggage cart any second.

  “Like what?”

  “Okay then.” She began to walk toward a white sedan parked under the do not pick up hitchhikers sign. When Finn didn’t follow, she looked back.

  “I work for Wes Schiller,” she said.

  He kept his face still, empty of reaction. Seven years had given him plenty of practice at that.

  “I’m done,” he said. “Out.”

  “Wes just wants to talk.”

  “No more jobs. It’s over.”

  “Scared straight, were you?” She put a hand on one hip but seemed amused.

  “Something like that.”

  “You don’t know what he wants to talk to you about.”

  One of the tractor trailers at the receiving dock rumbled to life—diesel coughing, a tap on the airhorn. It turned left and faded down the road.<
br />
  “I don’t remember you,” Finn said.

  “No reason you would.”

  Which was true. Wes didn’t exactly invite him in for office conferences. “How long have you worked for him?”

  “Less than you’ve been on the state’s nickel.” She lifted her sunglasses and looked at him with the deepest, greenest eyes Finn had ever seen. “You don’t really want to walk to town, do you?”

  For a long moment, Finn pretended he couldn’t decide, then shook his head slightly and said, “I guess not.”

  Her rental was an anonymous four-door, new and somehow rounder and more bug-eyed than had been the style when Finn went in. She beeped the lock and he opened the door, but he paused before getting in.

  Four people had known that Finn planned to rob the ore train. Jake, Asher, and Corman were three of them, of course. But all of them went to jail, too, just like Finn. In seven years, he hadn’t been able to think of a single reason why any of them would have turned.

  The fourth person was Wes.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Five minutes later, the air-conditioned rental brought them into town: dusty streets, dusty buildings, shuttered storefronts with dusty plate glass papered over. Emily parked on an angle on the main street, near what seemed to be the single stoplight. A check-cashing outlet, a lottery-and-cigarettes hole-in-the-wall, and a diner.

  “Something to eat?” she said.

  “Who’s paying?”

  “It’s on account.”

  He was hungry.

  An hour past lunchtime, the diner was almost empty: one woman behind the counter and an old guy in overalls on a stool. A radio on a shelf blared an argumentative talk show. Finn looked at the menu, unable to decide.

  Emily watched him. “Nothing you want?”

  “Just haven’t had to make choices for myself for a while,” he said but managed to order a pork sandwich and fries. They were in a booth at the end, alongside streaked plate glass.

  Emily sat straight, hands together on the table. “I read up on you. Wes plays it close, you know? So I did my own research.”