The Loot

by Schaefer, Craig

  He sawed into his steak. “I’m all ears, my dear.”

  “If my father ever contacts you, you don’t take his bets. Ever. You and him are done. Talk to him again, for any reason, and there will be consequences.”

  He looked up from his plate. He didn’t say a word, searching for something in her eyes.

  “It’s not a threat,” she told him. “Just a fact.”

  Whatever he was looking for, he found it. He nodded.

  “Reckon you believe that,” he said. He tugged the paper bag a little closer to his side of the table. “And this concludes our business. Do drive safe.”

  Life fell into a rhythm. Charlie spent a little of her cash on the first payment for a used car. Sturdy, cheap, nothing outside her pay grade. Jake put her onto a new assignment, working security for a local talk show host who had worked a little too hard at riling up his audience. The worst threat she’d faced so far was someone pelting his front door with rotten eggs. The gig was almost blissfully boring.

  Her father came home from the hospital. She’d been apartment hunting, and she was ready to move out, but not until he was 100 percent better. She helped him as he hobbled around, moving from a cane to walking on his own feet, and went out on grocery runs while he rested up at home.

  The job kept her away from the house for a couple of days when the client managed to drop a racist slur on a live microphone and suddenly needed twenty-four-hour security. “I don’t think it was an accident,” Sofia told her. “He just likes the attention. Remember what I always say about our clients—”

  “They create their own worst problems,” Charlie said.

  When she finally got back home, a familiar black Mercedes was pulling out of the driveway.

  She scrambled with her keys and raced through the front door. Her father was fine. Sitting in his armchair, slumped, red eyed and drunk next to a pyramid of empty beer cans, but unhurt. This time.

  “How much?” she asked him.

  “It’s not your problem—”

  “How much?”

  “Just . . . just a couple of grand,” he said. “It’s fine, Charlie. I just wanted a taste, you know? I wanted to end on an upswing. I can still get ahead—I just have to place the right bets, you’ll see—”

  She didn’t even hear him, after that. She walked into her room and threw her clothes into a duffel. She scooped up the brown paper bag from the closet floor, laced her boots, and headed out again.

  “Don’t leave,” her father said as she put her hand on the doorknob.

  She took a slow, deep breath.

  “I meant what I said, when you were in the hospital,” she told him. “You’re sick. You know you’re sick. You always knew, even when I was a kid and you were gambling away the grocery money. Now, I’ll do what I can to help you get better. I’ll drive you to meetings, all that twelve-step stuff or whatever kind of program you want to get into. I’ll be there for you, all the way. But you have to try. It’s your responsibility, not mine. And I’m done watching you kill yourself, Dad. I’m done. If and when you’re ready to get your shit together, you can call me.”

  She opened the front door.

  “And now I have to make a liar out of myself,” she told him, “because I said I wouldn’t bail you out again. But this is the last time.”

  The next morning, the bartender at Deano’s got a call from a blocked phone number. He toted the house phone out from behind the bar, ferrying it over to Jimmy’s table.

  “For you,” he said.

  Jimmy frowned at the phone. His regulars all contacted him on his own line. He put it to his ear.

  “Yeah?”

  “We had a deal,” Charlie said.

  “The deal,” Jimmy said, “was that you’d pay what your father owed me. Anything else was just you dictatin’ terms. I never agreed to a thing. You forgot my little fairy tale. We all act according to our natures. Your father’s a scorpion. And so am I, I reckon.”

  “Oh, I didn’t forget,” Charlie said. “That’s why I’m watching you from across the street with a pair of binoculars. I had to make sure you were sitting down in your favorite booth before I called you. Tell one of your boys to crouch down and look under your seat.”

  From her perch in the alley across the street, lenses fixed on the bar’s plate glass window, Charlie watched Grillo get down on all fours. The thug was the size of a thumbnail from here, but she could still see how the blood drained into his feet and turned his sweaty face sheet white.

  “Remind me,” Charlie said, “what happens at the end of that story? Oh, right. The scorpion did something self-destructive and thoughtless. Then he drowned.”

  Jimmy’s voice trembled around the edges. “You listen to me—”

  “No. You listen to me. I broke in last night and installed a pressure trigger inside your seat cushion. You stand up, that block of C-4 goes up, and you’ll be taking bets in hell. Now that I’ve got your undivided attention, this is just a taste of the consequences I warned you about. I could have put a bomb in your car’s engine, under your pillow where you rest your head at night, anywhere. Or I could have just not made this courtesy call and let nature take its course. You’re only alive right now because I chose to let you live.”

  “Stupid choice,” Jimmy said.

  “More like mercy. There’s no tricks here. It’s a simple pressure switch, no funny wiring or backup fuses or anything sneaky. You probably know somebody who can come out and disarm it, or if worse comes to worst you can call 911. Now here’s what you’re going to do: You’re going to forget my father’s debt. You’re going to forget about my father entirely, and about me.”

  Charlie held the phone tight to her ear. Her binoculars zoomed in on Jimmy’s face, tight enough that it felt like they were standing eye to eye.

  “Because if you don’t,” she said, “I will kill you. That’s a promise. Oh, and once you take care of that present I left for you, you’d better think hard. Is that the only bomb I planted, do you think? Maybe there’s more than one. Maybe they’re hidden all over your little world, and I can end you anytime I want, with the push of a button. Or maybe they’ll go off if I go missing for some reason, and I don’t push the button once every twelve hours or so. You just don’t know, do you? You’re a bookie, Jimmy; you calculate odds for a living, so I don’t need to tell you the smart-money play here: stay away from me and my family, and you get to keep breathing. It’s a sure thing.”

  “You just made a very bad mistake,” Jimmy breathed.

  “I guess that’s the problem these days,” Charlie said. “Everybody’s a goddamn scorpion.”

  She hung up on him.

  Something else Jimmy had told her, the first time they’d met, had stayed with her. “Never fight another man’s war for him,” he had said. Thinking back on it, Charlie supposed she’d spent her entire life fighting other people’s wars, for love or for money. As much as she’d denied it at the time, Saint was right about her. Charlie was a mercenary. Tomorrow was another mission, another battlefield, and she didn’t know how to live any other way.

  She was comfortable with that.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  While I’m mainly known as a dark fantasy writer, crime novels and thrillers were my first love as a budding reader. I was enraptured by the styles of Elmore Leonard, Lawrence Block, Richard Stark, and others, an influence that still shines through in my more occult-themed stories. When Thomas & Mercer gave me a shot at working in the same wheelhouse as those giants who inspired me, I jumped at the chance. The Loot was the result. Thank you so much for taking this journey with me.

  No novel is the work of a single person. I’d like to thank Jessica Tribble and Carissa Bluestone at Thomas & Mercer, Clarence Angelo for his help with developmental editing, Riam and Leslie for their work on copyedits and proofreading, Morgan Blake for their assistance with Boston navigation, and the great folks at Battlefield Vegas for their firearms advice (and the range time). Last but not least, thanks to my ordnance b
uddy who requested not to be named (for reasons), who both checked my work and advised me on certain items that should probably be swapped with fictional counterparts (also for reasons). All of these people did an amazing job; all successes are theirs, any remaining errors are mine.

  If you’d like release notifications when my books come out, I have a newsletter over at http://www.craigschaeferbooks.com/mailing-list/. If you’d like to reach out, you can find me on Facebook at http://facebook.com/CraigSchaeferBooks, on Twitter at @craig_schaefer, or just drop me an email at craig@craigschaeferbooks.com.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2014 Karen Forsythe

  Craig Schaefer writes about witches, outlaws, and outsiders. Whether he’s weaving tales of an occult-shrouded New York in Ghosts of Gotham or the gritty streets of Boston in the Charlie McCabe thriller series, his protagonists are damaged survivors searching for answers, redemption, or maybe just that one big score. To learn more about the author and his work, visit www.craigschaeferbooks.com.