by Preston Lang
They drove along—dry corn fields and telephone poles. They passed through a small strip of stores, dead like a ghost town in the middle of the night. Cyril did a few pointless loops and then headed back west along the corn fields again. The brown Lexus was nowhere to be seen.
CHAPTER 27
The tracker had gone down for a few minutes at a time before, but that hadn’t been a problem when they were moving across the country. It had been out now for close to an hour, and Danny was shaking the thing as he drove.
“Come back to us, little buddy. Come on back,” he coaxed.
“Is the battery dead?”
“No, the battery is not dead.”
“Because if you don’t make sure that you’ve got—”
“Hey, Tesla, it’s not the batteries.”
They came to a crossroads in the middle of nowhere. Danny stopped the car and got out. He climbed onto the roof and held the tracker as high as he could reach. When that didn’t seem to work, Danny jogged to the side of the road and climbed on top of a fence post. Again he held the tracker over his head. Marcus climbed out of the car.
“I don’t think—”
“Would you shut up,” Danny shouted. Then he hopped once, and again. The third time he lost his footing and came down hard along the barbed wire. He ripped his jacket open.
“Are you all right?”
Danny removed his jacket. The barbed wire had ripped through his shirt as well as the jacket, but it had stopped just short of his skin. He balled up the jacket and heaved it to the side of the road. When he looked back at the tracker the car was moving again.
CHAPTER 28
Cyril would have missed the turnoff if Willow hadn’t seen it and poked him in the shoulder. They’d passed a golf course and some upscale homes. The turnoff was a narrow dirt path alongside wooded properties. They stopped just short. At four in the morning there was nothing moving for miles. On the map, the path came to a dead end. The only way in or out was this slender lane.
“So they’re penned in?” Willow asked.
“You could think of it that way.”
“Let’s go.”
“I can’t take you in there.”
“Why not? You just say I’m your partner.”
“We can’t do that.”
“So I’m supposed to just stand here on the side of the road? In the dark?”
“You want me to drive you back somewhere and try to find a twenty-four hour diner?”
“No. I want to go in there with you.”
“I’ve already been a little unreliable. I missed three phone calls, remember? Then I show up with a strange armed woman? What are they going to think?”
“I just want to be there when they hand you the money.”
“I told you it’s not money.”
“We’ll see.”
If he went in alone, Willow would lose almost all her leverage.
“How about this—I keep the car, you walk in,” she said.
“I can’t walk in.”
“Why not?”
“They’ll want to know where my damn car is.”
“You tell them it’s parked back up the road.”
“Because I just wanted to walk half a mile in the dark?”
Willow punched the back of Cyril’s seat, hard.
“Please. Trust me that I’ll come back to you. And I’ll have a trunkful of heroin. We’ll take off to a ski lodge or something.”
“You think skiing is stupid.”
“I won’t ski: I’ll just hang out in bars and sell junk by the bag.”
“And you think it’ll get us killed.”
“Probably not. We do it quiet—a little at a time. When we’ve sold it all we go to Belize. By New Years we’ll be sitting in your beach house with a pile of cash, eating crab with some real hip Mennonites. We’ll figure it out from there.”
She wasn’t all the way sold, but she wanted to be.
“Willow. I don’t always feel safe around you, but you do something to me that’s kind of crazy. You get that, right?”
“Yes.”
“And we’re in this, you know? So let’s do it.”
“Okay,” Willow said quietly.
“The reason why I’m good at what I do is because I’m normal, no surprises. I’ve got dealers who tell Tony not to send anyone other than me, because I look like an insurance salesman. Handovers are tense enough. I don’t want to make it strange. You heard how the guy sounded just because I missed a few phone calls?”
“If you don’t come back, I will find you.”
“There’s nowhere else I can go other than straight back here when I’m done. Then I pick you up and we head for Colorado or wherever it is they keep the snow.”
“All right,” Willow nodded. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” Cyril said, and he kissed her, mashing her back against the passenger window, on a quiet road in the very early hours of the morning in a small Iowa town. She pushed back and then hopped on top of him, sliding down her pants and fumbling with his belt. They pressed together and came quickly, awkwardly.
“That’s for good luck,” she said.
She stepped out of the car, but—they both knew—she still had the gun. He started the engine and drove down the narrow path.
It was dark, but Willow was able to see with the flashlight, and she could smell a faint rotting scent from the woods. A few drops of rain came down, but they seemed a little hesitant. It wasn’t about to pour. She was warm in her sweatshirt and jacket, and for just a moment, she felt like a teenager—overcome with love and adventure.
It was a nice moment, until she thought about it and decided that Cyril was about to die.
CHAPTER 29
Cyril was stopped at the head of the driveway by a short muscular man straining with two dogs on a leash. It was nothing Cyril hadn’t seen before, but he still hated dogs, especially snarling pit bull mixes like these that kept barking, like someone owed them a lot of meat.
“Shut up. You will do what I say,” the man screamed. “You’re going to do it now. Shut the hell up. Now.”
“Nice puppies,” Cyril said.
“Get out of your car.”
Cyril got out. He saw another man about twenty yards away holding an automatic rifle loose by his side. There was also a platform in a tree on the west side of the yard. There was someone up there, but it was hard to see if he was armed. These guys were more serious about their defense than anyone Cyril had ever visited before.
“Hi, I’m Chub,” Cyril said to the muscular man.
“Supposed to be here a lot sooner. We’ve got places to go. I’m going to pat you down.”
“Go ahead.”
The man gave Cyril a pretty thorough check. Then he took a gun out of the back of his waistband, not quite pointing it at Cyril. The dogs had calmed down.
“You like coming out here at four in the morning?”
“I just go where Top tells me.”
Cyril liked to drop Top’s name at some point during a meet, but it didn’t seem to have made much of an impression on this man. The voice on the phone had been gruff but reasonable. This guy was dumb and weird. Cyril hoped the reasonable one was inside waiting to make the deal. The man with the dogs motioned toward the house, which was set back about a hundred yards into the property.
“Go on,” he said.
Cyril walked alone, but he could feel the eyes watching him as he moved to the house. It was a handsome red brick home, probably a really nice place for a family to live. The door was open as he approached, and he saw a slim red headed man.
“You Chub?” he asked.
“That’s me.”
“You didn’t bring a bag or nothing?”
“No.”
“All right, come in.”
The inside was nearly bare. A single couch and flat screen TV sat in one end of the room, and a long Formica counter stood at the other. In between was bare tile.
“You smell like something. What have you bee
n doing?”
Cyril shrugged.
“I met you in Providence, right?” the redhead asked.
“I doubt it.”
“Then why do I feel like I know you?”
“I have a familiar look.”
The redhead thought about that a moment.
“You probably know we’re not delighted with this arrangement.”
“No one told me that.”
“We feel like we’re paying for the mistakes of a lot of little ducklings that have nothing to do with us. Jay really takes a bite, doesn’t he?”
“Who’s Jay?”
Why even ask? Just nod, take the money, and go home. Why worry about someone named Jay?
“Who’s Jay?” the redhead asked. “How can you not know who Jay is? How do I even know who you are?”
Jay, was that Top’s name? Maybe people who didn’t work for him directly didn’t call him Top; that was just military slang, gay slang, mid-sized opium trade slang.
“I think we call him Top,” Cyril said.
“Top? Maybe I should get Jay on the phone right now. If you don’t look exactly like he says you should, I put a bullet in your head.”
So much for this guy being reasonable. There were at least two guns on the man. Cyril wasn’t going to make it off the property if anything rough went down.
“If you call him, make sure he knows it was your idea. He probably doesn’t want to be woken up at five in the morning,” Cyril said.
“Some things are important.”
“Sure, but either way he’s going to think you’re an idiot.”
“What do you mean—either way?”
“If I’m Chub—and I am—then Top’s going to be pissed at you for wasting his time. If I’m some weird drifter who wandered into your compound, then you look even worse, don’t you?”
“Let me see some ID.”
“You think it’s going to say Chub on my driver’s license?”
“I don’t know what it’s going to say. Let me see.”
“I never bring my wallet in with me.”
This whole meet was messed up—twitchy, unfamiliar people in a fortified compound who didn’t trust him. Clearly the groundwork hadn’t been laid.
“Maybe I should have just said I remembered you from Providence, right?” Cyril said.
“Yeah, then you’d be playing with the dogs right now.”
“Those are yours?”
“No, I don’t go near them.”
The redhead took out his phone and called Cyril’s number. Nothing rang.
“Where’s your phone, man?” the redhead asked.
“It’s back in the car. I really didn’t think I’d need it in here.”
He hoped Willow would be smart enough not to pick up. The phone went to voicemail—good job, sweetheart.
“What’s your phone number?”
“I don’t know. I never called it.”
“And you were sleeping all those times I called before?”
“Look, it’s up to you. You don’t have to believe I’m Chub. I can leave, you can shoot me and bury me out back, or we can do what we’re supposed to do. What do you say?”
“I’d like it if you were a little fatter. Or a little slimmer. Either way. God damned 50th percentile is what you are.”
The redhead didn’t like how loose the setup was any more than Cyril did, but he also wasn’t up to defying Top. He just wanted to feel a little safer.
“Tell me someone else you know,” he said. “Give me a name.”
The first name Cyril could think of was the worthless man himself.
“Tony Braxton.”
It was probably the last time Tony would do something useful. The redhead seemed a little more at ease.
“Good guy,” he said. “I mean, all things considered, one of the decent ones. He served with my brother. Afghanistan. The first time I ever used Skype, my brother is talking to me and my mom and dad, all earnest, then all of a sudden this guy just comes on screen and moons us—like aggressive werewolf mooning.”
“Tony?”
The redhead nodded and shrugged.
“I don’t know. That shit’s funny. It just is,” he said. “Werewolf mooning. You know, with the teeth and everything.”
“How’d your parents like it?”
“They took it okay. I mean, that’s war, right?”
“I always thought that was made up—Tony in the army. I can’t really see him in the military.”
“Can you see him sneaking his ass into a video chat?”
The redhead reached under the counter. Cyril tensed, but if the guy were going to kill him, he wouldn’t need to draw any kind of surprise weapon. The redhead pulled out a duffel bag and hoisted it onto the counter. It rattled hard—not like paper money.
“What is that?”
“Christ, doesn’t anyone tell you anything?”
“No.”
“Look inside.”
Cyril peeked in.
“Gold?”
“Yes.”
“Are we pirates?”
“Seriously, they didn’t tell you?”
Cyril trusted the dealers not to play games—scam or shave on payment. He would act calm and trust the authority of Top to keep people in line; and so far he hadn’t had any trouble. Was this part of the plan? Because this was really the kind of thing you needed to tell your courier—it’s not money, it’s bars of gold.
“A guy we know used to do some crazy jobs. He talked about grabbing, like, Egyptian artifacts right out of museums. Or one time he dressed like a caterer and stole a crate of Lafitte Rothschild out of the cellar during a private party at Warren Buffet’s house with diplomats and hookers and shit. He brings us a bottle and says, ‘This is the finest wine in the world. Small sips, gentlemen.’” The redhead nodded out through the window toward his guys. “Rock stars out there are chasing it with Fresca.”
“How’d you like it?”
“It didn’t get me drunk. Anyway, the gold came from that guy, and his story is that he got it off a boat—one of those old Spanish galleons that wrecked in the Gulf of Mexico. Discovery channel is doing a whole expedition, but his friend and him sweep in and grab. Later they melted it all down into bars—they don’t care about history. Probably all bullshit, but the gold is real. Believe me, we checked on it. It’s good as advertised. The big ones are all 32.15. Twenty-six of them, and then a little chip.”
The redhead held up a printout. It was the price of gold as of close of business Monday. Cyril would’ve been happier with cash, but if this was real, it was almost as good. Much better than drugs. Cyril studied one of the bars. It looked a little dull, not as gleaming and yellow as he might have liked, but he doubted anyone would have him ship fifty pounds of worthless metal across the country just to make a point to Top. If they wanted to do that they’d probably just kill Cyril and let his body turn up looking ugly. No, the gold was probably real. And if all went well, he’d be living off it for quite a while.
CHAPTER 30
When the blip on the tracker’s screen stopped, Marcus thought it had frozen up again; but soon he saw that it was still receiving.
“They’ve stopped,” he said.
“Yeah?” Danny looked over. “They must have arrived.”
They were about twenty minutes away. Danny drove past the neat rows of middle class houses, past the golf club, and stopped about a quarter of a mile short of the narrow path that led to the house.
“The car is in a driveway at four in the morning. I think we’ve got our pickup,” he said.
CHAPTER 31
Cyril drove back up the dirt path with almost a million dollars in gold in the trunk. America was huge: thousands of towns and millions of people. If he was careful and quiet there was no reason he couldn’t get away with this. For just a second he felt free and hopeful, and then he saw Willow from a distance. He sped up. She stepped out into the road and waved, goofy-happy at first and then big panicked sweeps of her arms—Don�
��t you see me, what’re you doing? She didn’t have enough time to draw her gun.
He tried to hug the right side of the dirt road, but she angled herself in his path. He didn’t slow the car as he neared her, but he did try to swerve so he wouldn’t hit her. It didn’t seem like there was enough room, but just before contact, she jumped out of the way, and he swung all the way to the left of the path. Then, before he crashed into a tree he swung back onto the path and hit a log, then another, and spun off the road and into a rut off to the side. Why were there logs in the middle of the path—big ones? They hadn’t been there on the way in. Why hadn’t Willow trusted him? He tried to start the engine again but couldn’t move forward. He was about to shift into reverse when Willow smacked the window with her gun.
“Get out now,” she said.
He could start the engine again, but he wasn’t sure he had a clear way out. Carefully, he climbed out of the car.
“What . . . is wrong with you?”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You’re sorry?”
“You put the logs out there?”
“Yes, I put the logs there.”
He should have run her over. Or maybe he should have asked the redhead if he could borrow a gun and capped her when she wasn’t expecting it. No, he wasn’t wired for murder. He didn’t want her dead. He didn’t even want her dead now, while she held a gun on him.
“I am sorry,” he said.
“Did you get the money?”
“Sort of.”
“It’s not drugs. You were lying about that from the beginning.”
“Yes, I was.”
“How much is there?”
“It’s gold.”
“What?”
“It’s not cash, it’s gold. You want to see?”
“It’s in the trunk?”
“Yes. Can we drive a bit, and then do this?”
“No. Open the trunk.”
Cyril opened the trunk and took out the duffel bag.
“What’s it worth?”
“A lot.”
Cyril undid the clasp at the top of the bag and pulled down the flap. Then he reached in, took out one bar, and brought it closer to her.