Cash Landing

by James Grippando

  “Why did you lie, Ruban?”

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have tried to trick you into buying a new car. I’m just tired of driving that old piece of junk. But I promise I wasn’t going to use any of Jeffrey’s money to buy a new one. I swear. We’ll talk about it tomorrow, okay? Sweet dreams, honey.”

  Lies to cover lies. Damage control was becoming a way of life. This lie was the littlest of all, about their stupid car, but it was the most worrisome. For the first time, Savannah had set him up. She was trying to catch him off guard. An ambush.

  Piss me off.

  Ruban rolled out of bed and pulled on his jogging shorts, T-shirt, and running shoes. Over the summer he’d started a fitness routine to get in shape for the heist, but he hadn’t gone running since. He hated it. His sole motivation had been the fear that something would go wrong at the warehouse and that they would have to flee on foot. Day after day, even in the unbearable heat and humidity of August and September, he’d hit the jogging trail. Without fail, a side-stitch would kick in around the one-mile mark. To push through the pain, he’d tell himself that he needed to outrun the cops; but an even louder voice in his head would tell him to quit, that in any getaway he only needed to outrun Jeffrey.

  He followed his usual route from his driveway, down the street and into the park. He’d never reached the point where running was effortless, not even when he was running every day. This morning was like starting over. He continued onto the “heart trail.” The wood-chip path was easier on his knees, and there were fitness stations along the way where the ambitious could stop and do chin-ups and other challenges. He passed several stations, no time to stop even if he’d wanted to. At 10:30 sharp he had a meeting at the sit-up station.

  He arrived a minute early and waited. An old man jogged past him. Ruban waited another minute, walking with hands on hips as he caught his breath. Sweat was soaking through his shirt. The breeze felt good. Then he heard footsteps on the trail. Another jogger was approaching. One look and he knew it was her. She was exactly Octavio’s type.

  She stopped at the station, climbed onto the inclined sit-up board, and started crunching her abs. She spoke without breaking her rhythm.

  “I know you can’t come to the funeral,” she said. “And I know why.”

  Ruban didn’t react. Jasmine had said the same thing at midnight, when she’d called him at the restaurant—right before she’d told him that they needed “to meet and talk business.” Ruban had chosen the time and place.

  “I wish I could be there,” he said.

  No break in the sit-ups. Jasmine was a machine. “Octavio told me a lot about you.”

  “Like what?”

  “All the things you would expect. And maybe a few more.” She stopped in the up position, her eyes locking with Ruban’s. “About nine or ten million more.”

  If there had been a reason to wonder what kind of “business” she’d been talking about on the phone the night before, all doubt had been removed. “What do you want?” he asked.

  “Octavio’s share.”

  He scoffed, almost chuckling. “You expect me to hand it over, just like that? A half million dollars?”

  “Nice try,” she said. “I know it was a million. I want all of it.”

  “And what if I tell you that I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about?”

  Jasmine started another set—down, up; down, up—speaking without effort. “The FBI came to see me yesterday.”

  “Who was it?”

  “The same woman who interviewed Octavio at Braxton. Special Agent Andrea Henning.”

  Ruban made a mental note; he’d heard plenty about a female agent, but this was the first time he’d heard a name. “What did you tell her?”

  “Nothing,” she said, getting in a few more reps before adding the qualifier: “Yet.”

  “What did Henning want to know?”

  Jasmine counted off the last few—“forty-nine, fifty”—then stopped and caught her breath. “She was pretending it was all about the hit-and-run accident. But you and I both know what it’s really about.”

  Ruban didn’t answer.

  “Anyway,” said Jasmine. “Henning asked me to pass along the name of any of Octavio’s friends who should be at the funeral but don’t show up.”

  Ruban considered the logic; Henning wasn’t stupid. “Are you planning to give her my name?”

  “I haven’t told her a thing about you,” said Jasmine.

  “That wasn’t my question. I asked, are you planning to.”

  Jasmine shrugged. “Are you planning to give me my share?”

  Her share. He wasn’t even buried and it was no longer Octavio’s share. “What does it get me?”

  “Everything you had with Octavio.”

  “Why should I trust you?”

  “What choice do you have?”

  She made a compelling argument. “All right,” he said. “But we do have a slight problem. Octavio had his share with him in a backpack when he was hit. It was stolen.”

  “That’s not my problem,” said Jasmine. “That’s yours.”

  “I’m saying that I don’t have his money.”

  “I’m telling you to get it.”

  “You’re quite the ball buster.”

  “Yes, I am.” She resumed her sit-ups. “Let’s meet again next week. Same time, same place. Now get lost.”

  Ruban watched her rip off another twenty reps, fast and furious. She looked capable of sustaining that pace well into the hundreds. There was nothing more to say anyway. He started down the wood-chip trail and headed home.

  He wasn’t sure how she expected him to come up with Octavio’s million dollars in a week. She seemed to think she had him backed up against the wall, and she’d asked a legitimate question: What choice do you have?

  Ruban didn’t know Jasmine. What was even clearer was that she didn’t know him.

  Ruban always had choices.

  Chapter 39

  It was Party Animal Night at the Gold Rush. Jeffrey arrived at ten p.m., a cross between a drunken hyena and a coked-up teddy bear.

  “Party, party, party,” said Jeffrey as he entered. “Here come the party.”

  His pockets bulged with cash again. Ruban had been dead wrong about El Padrino refusing to give back Jeffrey’s money. All it had taken was one visit to the “church” and two hours of whining and blubbering. His godfather had coughed up two vacuum-sealed packs just to make him go away.

  Jeffrey slipped the hostess a couple hundred bucks for a good table. She led him through the crowd, right up to the edge of the runway. Dance music blasted. Jeffrey had not only replaced the bottom row of caps, but he’d finished out the top, and his gold smile glistened beneath the flashing colored lights. He’d promised Ruban that he would never return, but that was bullshit. The Gold Rush wasn’t dangerous. The danger was Ruban, who’d hired that Jamaican bartender to scare him. The bartender’s friends, not the folks at the Gold Rush, were the problem. The club was like home.

  “How’s this?” asked the hostess.

  He settled into a bench seat that was designed to fit three across. In Jeffrey’s case, it was just barely big enough for him and the dancer of his choice. “Perfect,” he said as he handed her another fifty bucks of gratitude.

  “Party Animal” was Jeffrey’s favorite theme night, the T-and-A version of a big-cats circus act. Pole dancers wore tiger-ear headbands and spiked collars, hissing and pawing at the crack of a dominatrix’s whip. The guest “trainer” for the night worked the runway from end to end, dressed only in a black tuxedo tailcoat, top hat, and five-inch heels. The lounge was packed, and the crowd was overwhelmingly male, but there was a smattering of women who’d avoided the cover charge by agreeing to wear the fox tails or bunny ears supplied at the door.

  A dancer wearing a zebra-striped bow tie and nothing else stepped down from the stage and sat right beside him, letting Jeffrey feel the warmth of her bare arm against his. Her accent sounded Russian, bu
t she could have been one of the women from Romania or Slovakia who seemed to flood into the Gold Rush every November.

  “How about a bottle of Cristal, cutie pie?”

  That would set him back about ten Benjamins. No problem. “Make it two,” Jeffrey said.

  Zebra Girl signaled to the bartender, an exaggerated gesture that made her breasts rise before his eyes. Jeffrey would have liked to pull her even closer, but club rules forbade any physical contact that wasn’t dancer-initiated. It was strictly enforced—which Jeffrey had learned the hard way.

  “I’m Sylvia,” she said.

  Jeffrey mumbled his name, and Zebra Girl told him what a “big, strong” name it was, how cute his eyes were, how much she loved his gold caps and tattoos—all the things men heard from naked women who worked for tips. Jeffrey wanted to enjoy it, but his head was buzzing. Too much cocaine. He’d never actually overdosed, but he frequently overdid it, which made him sweat, which made him stink, which turned off the dancers. He could feel the dampness building in his armpits. The odor couldn’t be far behind. The polite thing would have been to excuse himself and slather on the overpriced cologne sold by the attendant in the men’s room, but he didn’t budge. He wasn’t trying to impress Zebra Girl. She was hot, no doubt about it, but he was looking for someone else.

  “Is Bambi here tonight?” he asked.

  “She’s your girl, isn’t she?”

  He almost blushed. “I just wondered if she was here tonight.”

  “Sorry to break your heart, cutie pie, but Bambi doesn’t work here anymore.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “She decided to join the convent. But here’s the good news. She told me to take care of you while she’s gone.”

  The bachelor party at the next table was getting louder. Two drunks staggered over to Jeffrey’s table. The short one had something to say, but his tongue was almost too thick to get the words out. “Hey, beautiful. I’m getting married tomorrow.”

  “Congrats,” she said.

  He leaned forward, palms flat on the table, barely able to stand. “Lemme ask you this,” he said with a goofball grin. “I seem to be lost. Can you tell me how to get to Pussy Lane?”

  Zebra Girl was deadpan. “Yeah. Stick your tongue down the best man’s throat and make an immediate U-Turn.”

  The groom grabbed his wounded heart, as if punched in the chest, and fell back into his chair. The entire bachelor party erupted in laughter. They had their story. Jeffrey had a new crush.

  “That was fucking awesome,” he told her.

  She reached under the table and laid her hand on the wad of cash in his pants pocket. “Stick with Sylvia, cutie pie,” she said as her fingers slid between his thighs. “Who needs Bambi?”

  The bottles of Cristal arrived. The bartender delivered them himself. It was Ramsey.

  “Are you crazy, mon? What you doin’ bok at dis place?”

  Sylvia removed her headband and put the zebra ears on Jeffrey. “He’s a party animal. Can’t you see that, Ramsey?”

  He placed the bottles on the table. “Yah, mon. I see very clearly.”

  Ruban smelled garlic. It penetrated the kitchen walls, wafted through the duct work, and filled the restaurant’s business office.

  The Wednesday-night special at Café Ruban was “Garlic Shrimp under a Fur Coat,” a signature salad in which Cuban camarones replaced herring in a traditional Russian dish of layered seafood, potatoes, egg, and mayonnaise, topped with shredded beets. The culinary marriage worked, except when one of the line cooks lost the ability to discern between a garlic head and a garlic clove.

  I smell like a Brooklyn pizza parlor.

  His attention returned to the computer screen. All evening he’d been trying to find fifteen minutes of alone time, and finally he’d managed to get away to the office. He just wished the government website would load a little faster.

  Come on, come on . . .

  One of the last things Octavio had told him was that a good-looking female FBI agent had interviewed him at Braxton. He knew from his homeless crew that a “hot” FBI agent had visited the accident scene and shown them a photograph of Pinky. Jasmine, too, had spoken to a female FBI agent. She’d even given him a name, but he needed more specifics on what this Agent Henning looked like.

  He was scrolling through the FBI’s official website, which had a separate menu button for “Women in the FBI.” In its apparent eagerness to shake the image of a boys’ club, the FBI liked to showcase some of its two thousand female agents. There was a mother-daughter profile, a testimonial from the first female member of the Underwater Search and Evidence Recovery Team, and more. It seemed crazy to put the faces of FBI agents out on the Internet, but the search engine had taken him directly to this site: “Henning” had to be there. He scrolled down and, sure enough, he found her name: Special Agent Andrea Henning. She might as well have had her own Facebook page.

  The FBI is stupider than Jeffrey.

  There was just one sentence written about her, but it was enough to confirm that she hadn’t been selected at random. She was “the most recent female agent to make the ‘Possible Club,’ an informal honorary fraternity for agents who shoot perfect scores on one of the toughest firearms courses in law enforcement.” The woman could shoot, which earned Ruban’s immediate respect. The bio didn’t mention what type of pistol she used, but he pegged her for high performance with interchangeable grip sizes and trigger lengths to suit her needs and hand size. Probably a Sig Sauer. Maybe the P250?

  He clicked on the thumbnail, and her image filled his computer screen.

  Damn. A shooter and a babe.

  He clicked the PRINT button. The old machine squeaked and rumbled as it spat out the image. Ruban retrieved it from the bin.

  Agent Henning, he said to himself, burning it into his memory. I will never forget your pretty face.

  Chapter 40

  Jasmine sat alone in the funeral parlor. The viewing had officially ended at ten p.m., but she stayed longer.

  An open casket sometimes invites drama, especially with a young and handsome corpse, but Octavio’s had been a quiet viewing. No wailing. No finger-pointing. No prayers or eulogies. Twenty-two guests had signed the registry. A half dozen of Jasmine’s girlfriends had come by to show their support. Octavio’s coworkers and fishing buddies had made an appearance but didn’t stay long. Octavio was without family in the United States, but he’d kept in touch with a sister who lived in Oriente Province in eastern Cuba. A family friend from Hialeah had brought a camera and snapped a photograph for Octavio’s sister. Jasmine thought it was weird, but Octavio didn’t seem to mind.

  The viewing was optional under the funeral package, and Jasmine’s initial instinct had been against having one. A graveside service seemed sufficient. Agent Henning’s unexpected visit to her apartment had changed her mind. It was clear enough that Henning’s interest was in the heist when she’d asked Jasmine to make a list of everyone who should attend the funeral but failed to do so. The logic, however, applied with equal force to the hit-and-run. Maybe the driver was someone Octavio had known. Jasmine had no intention of helping the FBI solve the heist, but it still seemed like a good idea to create such a list for her own use. Maybe it would reveal Octavio’s killer.

  “We need to close up for the night,” the manager told her in a gentle voice.

  Jasmine was seated in the front row of white folding chairs, ten feet away from the casket. “Just a moment longer, please?”

  He nodded, seeming to understand, and walked away quietly.

  Jasmine rose and slowly stepped forward. She stopped at the kneeler but remained standing, resting her hand on the coffin’s edge. Octavio was handsome in blue, and Jasmine had selected his favorite shirt. To look at him now, no one would ever have guessed that he’d been killed in a car accident. She’d chosen not to see the body until after the work had been done, but she’d been told that the deadly blow had been to the back of his head.

  “I lie
d,” she whispered.

  To Agent Henning, she meant. She and Octavio had talked about so much more than she’d led the FBI to believe. The heist, of course, was one omission. Octavio’s promise to marry her was another.

  Jasmine reached toward his body. Stillness was by definition a part of death, but the only Octavio she’d ever known was full of life, and it was disturbing to see him exhibit absolutely no sign of it. Her hand trembled as she laid it atop his. His skin was cold, so cold. Much warmer memories brought a tear to her eye. She wiped it away and collected herself.

  “It was a good plan,” she said softly. “A really good plan. I’m not sure what went wrong, but I promise you, I’ll figure it out. I’ll make this work. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  She leaned over and kissed his forehead. “We were a great team.”

  She sensed the manager standing in the rear of the parlor, and a quick glance over her shoulder confirmed that her time was up. She knew that the casket would be closed and sealed when she left, and she would never see Octavio again.

  “Good-bye, my love.”

  She turned away and headed toward the door. The manager expressed his sympathies again, which she said she appreciated. He offered to escort her to her car, but she declined, preferring to be alone. The moon peeked through the clouds to help her find her car key. She climbed into the driver’s seat and closed the door.

  Octavio is gone.

  It seemed unbelievable, but Jasmine could do nothing to bring him back. The best she could do was to carry out their plan and make sure the risks Octavio had taken and the work he had done were not in vain. Jasmine’s meeting with Ruban had been a good start. But what if he really couldn’t recover Octavio’s share? What if that money was gone for good?

  She and Octavio had spent many nights together thinking through the “what ifs.” What if Ruban screws you over? He’s your friend, but what if his wife gets greedy? What if they pay you less than they owe you? They’d understood the risks from the very beginning, but what really bothered him and Jasmine was the split: How did two shitheads like Jeffrey and his uncle end up with more than two million each, more than double Octavio’s take? It was an injustice that Jasmine had been working hard to correct, even before Octavio’s death. It was time to redouble her efforts.