Rumrunners

by Eric Beetner

  “Oh, good. You’re up,” Calvin said.

  “What the fuck is this?” Hugh demanded.

  Tucker dropped his box and raised the gun. “Shut up and sit down.”

  Hugh lifted his hands and glanced around, wondering if he should sit there on the bottom step.

  “In here,” Calvin said, and led them all in to the family room. The large room fit two couches comfortably around a large fireplace. Tucker switched on an overhead light fixture as they stepped in and Calvin placed the box of money he carried on an antique coffee table with dovetailing.

  “You two wait here and chat while I get the rest, huh?” Calvin seemed to be enjoying his part in all this. He certainly was better than Tucker at speaking up. Tucker didn’t know what to say and any thoughts he had were crowded out by the details of the plan cycling through his head over and over like a washer on spin cycle. Frankly, he hadn’t expected to make it this far.

  He didn’t say a word to Hugh in the time it took Calvin to stack all eleven banker’s boxes in the living room before the burgundy velvet couch Hugh sat in, his robe cinched tight and his feet stuffed into lambs-wool slippers.

  Earlier, as they were detailing the plan, Calvin had explained to Tucker and Milo about Hugh Stanley’s ex-wife. About ten years before she had finally gotten sick of his sleeping around with younger women. Her wrath came to a head after Hugh contracted genital warts and gave them to her. She tried to use that as grounds for divorce and even went as far as to hire a lawyer. Three weeks later she went missing and her body was never found, headless or otherwise.

  Hugh lived alone in the house ever since, a chef in the mornings and a single bodyguard his only companions.

  “So you know what this is, right?” Calvin said as he tapped a finger on a three-box stack.

  “You brought me my money back. About time.” Hugh eyeballed the stacks. “Seem to be one short.”

  “Had to, uh, pay off a certain someone. Couldn’t be avoided.”

  “I see.”

  Tucker kept the revolver at hip level, aiming at the seated man. “We went to see Kirby, you know.”

  “Did you now?”

  “Yes, we did.” Tucker grew bolder as Hugh grew more arrogant. “Your theory that he was the one who killed my dad, that’s kind of out the window, huh?”

  “I guess so.”

  “So it was you.”

  Hugh crossed his legs like he was waiting to be served tea. “I haven’t killed anyone in thirty years.”

  Calvin lifted the lid on the box nearest him. “Oh, we met the man who pulled the trigger. He done blowed up though.” Calvin grinned as he lifted two stacks on bills out of the box. He walked over to the fireplace and with his foot, turned a key that started a slow hiss of gas. “You got any matches around here?”

  Hugh swallowed. Calvin did a quick scan of the mantle area and found a fancy wooden box in Chinese lacquer. He opened the box and inside were stacks of long matches like chopsticks with tiny blue tips. He lifted one out and struck it against the stone mantle. A flame sparked to life.

  Calvin turned to Hugh as he tossed the lit match behind the fireplace screen. The built-up gas ignited with a whoomp and the blast of heat moved through the room like the ghost of fires past. A pile of fake logs glowed orange.

  “So we’re guessing you need this money pretty bad. Good plan, by the way, laundering through Canada.”

  “It’s not laundered. It’s a loan. It’s not even my money. You do anything foolish and you’ll be pissing off a hell of a lot more people than just me and mine.”

  Calvin raised his money-filled hands to his face and made a faux scared face. “Ohhh, Canadians. Look out. I’m so terrified, eh?” He finished his performance with a laugh.

  Hugh clenched his jaw. Calvin tossed the two stacks of cash into the fire then opened his empty hands as if the money had vanished and he had no idea how.

  Tucker tipped over a box and dozens of tightly wrapped bundles of money spilled onto the Oriental rug. “You see, we’re not going to kill you.”

  “Unless you make us,” Calvin clarified.

  “We’re not that kind of guys. You thought we’d kill that guy you sent into the woods, but we didn’t. You did, but that wasn’t our fault. That’s not to say we don’t want you to suffer.”

  Tucker bent down and scooped up eight stacks of money and dumped them into the fire like coal into a train engine. The bundles caught quickly and burned bright.

  “You see,” Calvin said as he picked up three bundles in each hand. “You can shit on us McGraws for a good many years, as you have done. You can pay us less than we’re worth. You can put us in harm’s way. Truth of it is, we’d do the work for free, it’s so damn fun. But you had to go and kill one of us.” He tossed his load into the fire. “Your biggest mistake though, Hugh. You didn’t kill all of us.”

  Calvin kicked out and toppled the stack of three boxes. Tucker overturned two more. The floor became piled with green bricks of hundred dollar bills. In the flush times the pile would have been to fuck three or four underage girls on top of. Right then, it looked like piles of thick green vomit all over his twenty thousand-dollar rug.

  It became a game, a little competition between Tucker and Calvin to see who could scoop the money into the fire faster. The men smiled and Tucker had a fleeting memory of a snowball fight when he was seven years old.

  The men were so focused on the burning of the money that Hugh saw an opening and lunged forward from the couch to make a grab at Tucker.

  The gun still in his hand, Tucker turned and shot, catching Hugh in the foot and dropping him immediately face-down onto a pile of money.

  Calvin and Tucker both helped him back onto the couch then went back to their task, ignoring his moaning and the clenching of his foot. Those lambs-wool slippers were ruined.

  Calvin held the last stack of hundreds. He looked at the bulging fire, the flames threatening to overrun the fire screen. He reached out the stack and offered it to Tucker, giving him the honors. Tucker stepped up and threw the last of Hugh Stanley’s millions onto the pile to burn.

  Grandson and grandfather exchanged a look of pride in accomplishment and Tucker began thinking about phase two of the plan: get the fuck out of Iowa.

  At any other time in his life Calvin relished the sound of tires squealing. Right then, it meant trouble.

  31

  Tucker’s mind had been sufficiently preoccupied that he hadn’t allowed himself to think about his son out driving around being chased by a gun-wielding thug. The scream of rubber on the driveway brought Milo back to the forefront of his thoughts.

  If the commotion was his son returning to drive them all away then the plan had worked, if not then it could mean something awful. He didn’t have time to dwell on possibilities before more pressing issues once again spun his mind to focus on only what was right in front of him.

  Heavy footfalls sounded in the hallway after the front door came crashing in. Tucker tightened his grip on the .38 in his fist, but it felt quite small and he wouldn’t have been surprised at all if he pulled the trigger and a flag with the word BANG! came flopping out.

  Four of Stanley’s suited men came thundering into the room. Each held a gun in their hand.

  As if he only had one chance left to do it, Calvin reached down and punched Hugh across the jaw. The snapping bone sound reached Tucker’s ears a second before the first gunshot. Lost in the sudden explosion of gunfire was Calvin saying, “That felt good.”

  Calvin fell to a knee and slipped around the side of the couch as two bullets joined the party with Hugh’s foot injury. The new shots were to his chest and from a much larger gun. Hugh slumped flat on the couch, running out of places on his body to clutch in pain.

  Tucker ran for the second couch, but had to come forward to make it around the high arm and nearly ran into one of the gunmen charging forward. Whatever they had been told to get them to come out to Hugh’s place they were prepared for much more of an army than an o
ctogenarian and his insurance salesman grandson.

  In a very short time they had fired enough bullets to drop a SWAT team, but Calvin and Tucker made such small targets they had gotten away unharmed.

  Tucker found himself bumping into a young man with a shaved head and a tattoo on his neck of some Gothic symbol Tucker didn’t know the meaning of. Tucker clamped his arm down over the young man’s gun hand, pinning it between Tucker’s chest and arm. He spun and the man had no choice but to spin with him. Tucker lifted his arm at the apex of the turn and like a ballet dancer the young man spun off and did a full rotation before crashing through the fire screen.

  A bullet came past Tucker close enough that he felt the wind move on his cheek. He ducked and fired the .38 blindly. His tiny bullet caught the kneecap of the suited man shooting at him and the man cried out.

  From out of the fire the shaved headed man stood, his jacket burning. He slapped at his head and his ears as he tried to get his arms out of the flaming suit coat. He ran forward, dropping the jacket on the Oriental rug as he aimed himself like a torpedo out of the room. He blasted into the chest of one of the two remaining standing men, who both watched the human torch with slack jaws.

  The not-on-fire man whuffed out all the air from his lungs as the shaved head of the first man punched into his stomach. The 9mm he carried bounced quietly on the rug and he went down with it.

  The shaved-headed man stumbled out of the room still slapping at any exposed skin on his body putting out sparks and embers that clung to his flesh. As they burned, the deeper they scorched him, the more stubborn they were to remove.

  Calvin reached for the dropped 9mm and fired two shots into the ceiling over the lone standing gunman. He threw his hands up over his head as if the plaster dust was the most dangerous thing in the room, never mind the loaded weapons and open flames, before he turned and ran back out.

  Tucker stepped to the couch and peered over Hugh Stanley’s writhing body to Calvin on the floor behind the sofa.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, you?”

  “For now.”

  Tucker looked down to see the flaming jacket becoming a fire you’d want to roast marshmallows over.

  Outside a car horn sounded. Three times in rapid succession. Milo’s signal.

  Tucker looked from the fire spreading around the room to Stanley on the couch. “Guess we’re even now.”

  Hugh Stanley could say nothing. His lungs struggled to find breath, his jaw hung loose.

  Tucker held out a hand and Calvin took it. The two men rushed out of the room.

  Back in the hall, Tucker was struck by how much cooler it was. The heat from the fire had been building slowly as they added stack after stack of money and he hadn’t noticed how hot the room had become. Now as they ran toward the open front door he felt the six a.m. cool from outside.

  Whether the men on Hugh’s rescue team thought they were outnumbered or simply hadn’t fully woken up yet after whatever five a.m. emergency call they’d gotten, Tucker was grateful they’d turned out to be such idiots. He understood a little of why the McGraw men had been such a valuable commodity over the years. Reliable, good at their job and took pride in the work. A rare combination these days, especially in the crime world.

  The Mercedes was a welcome sight. Angled across the lawn with two thick black gashes carved out of the grass behind it. Calvin had never been more happy to get into a German car.

  The passenger door already stood open and Milo beckoned them from inside. Calvin slid in and Tucker opened the door to the back seat. Before his door was shut Milo had the tires spinning on the dew-covered lawn.

  “Everyone okay?” he asked.

  “Everyone that matters,” Calvin said.

  Milo controlled the wild fishtail of the Mercedes’ back end as the tires gained grip on the wet grass. Two new cars were parked in the driveway, Hugh’s rescue squad. Calvin did hope they got him out of the burning house. At least so he could suffer through the healing of his broken jaw. He smiled to himself as he rubbed the knuckles of his right hand.

  Milo bumped the Mercedes onto the street and they were met by the shrill whine of sirens and the red and blue flashes of police cruisers in the pre-sunrise gray.

  “Shit.” Milo spun the car and the tires chirped along the pavement as he gunned the engine in the opposite direction. Calvin almost blurted out driving advice, but he didn’t see anything he would change about how the boy was doing.

  “How you feeling there, boy?”

  “It’s better than pussy.” A wide grin joined the intense look on concentration on Milo’s face.

  “Let’s not get carried away now.”

  Tucker slid from one side of the back seat across to the other as he struggled to get a grip on a belt that would fix him to the seat.

  One police cruiser angled into Stanley’s driveway while the other continued on after the Mercedes.

  Calvin secured his own belt. “Well, Milo. You’re really going from zero to McGraw in one shot tonight. Tell you what, cops and our family are like magnets and wood—they don’t stick. Lose this son of a bitch and we’ll add your name to the wall of honor.”

  Milo blasted through a stop sign in the quiet suburban neighborhood. A sprinkler cut on in a yard as they barreled past.

  The persistent siren clung to them like body odor. Milo took a sharp right turn, the back end swinging out and squealing tires. The cop car followed. Ahead, a station wagon with fake wood panels cruised slowly down the middle of the street straddling the hashed yellow lines. Every other house a newspaper would sail out the open windows from one side or the other to slap like a dead fish on the lawn of a subscription holder.

  Milo hugged the right curb, recalculated the space he had then swung over to the left curb. Neither would be enough. The wagon drooled along no faster than a bike, how the job used to be done, and Milo had to brake hard to avoid driving up his tailpipe.

  “To the right. Fewer trees,” Calvin said.

  Milo cut the wheel and aimed the Mercedes into a driveway then veered off across the front lawn, crushing a newspaper under a tire as he went. The police car paused behind the wagon and waited for it to pull to the side like an obedient taxpayer.

  Milo crossed flower beds and one weedy overgrown lawn before he turned a sharp left and leapt the curb back into the street, clipping a mailbox as he went.

  “Good job, boy. Every teenage boy needs to take out a mailbox at some point.”

  They’d managed to put an extra block between them and the police car, but the siren still stuck solid to their bumper.

  “What do I do?”

  “We wait for an opportunity to present itself,” Calvin said.

  “Parking lot!” Tucker said. “Over there.”

  The residential street ran out at the end of the block and a supermarket stood at the corner framed by a liquor store and a dry cleaners and fronted with a sprawling parking lot. Milo aimed the Mercedes toward it.

  “Parking lots I can do.”

  Through another stop sign he drove across four lanes of a crosstown street and scraped the front end on the incline as they entered the nearly empty lot. The supermarket was twenty-four hours so a small cluster of cars grouped near the entrance, but otherwise the area was a wide open expanse of empty spots divided by medians, light poles, shopping cart corrals and the occasional stray cart that had wandered away from the corral.

  “I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Calvin said.

  “I’m open to better ones,” Milo said as he wove the Mercedes in and out of the aisles.

  The police car followed and chased Milo down as he carved out a maze through the white lines, around the medians, looped around forty-foot light poles before starting all over again at the other end of the lot.

  The cop car was so close now Calvin could see the angry faces of the two officers inside. He thanked God for small towns with little or no backup, especially at six a.m. when the budgets had wreaked havoc on overtime a
nd night pay.

  Milo maintained meticulous control befitting the German automobile as he snaked through the maze again, creating his own pattern of hairpins turns and cutbacks.

  Tucker began to feel queasy.

  The police car came tantalizingly close and the smell of blood in the water made him try for several moves out of the cop manual. He tried to get a bumper on the rear panel of the Mercedes and force him into a spin, but Calvin saw the attempt coming and warned Milo to swerve.

  He tried to anticipate a turn and aimed to be there when Milo made his move, but again Calvin noticed the change in follow patterns and warned his great-grandson.

  “Okay, I’m about done with this shit,” Calvin said. “Milo, when you get to the end of this row cut over two and when I say the word you turn as hard a right turn as you can in this Nazi can of bolts.”

  “Okay.”

  “Here you go now. Listen to me and do what I say.”

  Tucker grabbed hold of the strap above the door. Something in him felt it would be a good idea.

  Behind them, the cop car made the screeching turn and followed down the row of empty spaces.

  “Good. Now three…two…one…turn.”

  Milo cut the wheel all the way right as Calvin pulled up hard on the handbrake. The Mercedes spun in a tight circle Calvin was grudgingly impressed with and wound up facing back toward the police cruiser.

  Calvin dropped the hand brake back down. “Gun it.”

  Milo did. The Mercedes accelerated toward the cop car which squealed its tires as the anti-lock brakes struggled to hold.

  “Now ease off.”

  Milo did. The Mercedes bumped noses with the cop car and the jolt sent all three men tightening against their seat belts.

  “Now, full throttle. Push him into that light post.”

  The eight-cylinder engine growled as it pushed the police car backwards, the two men inside disoriented and struggling to turn and see where they were being forced to go. After the long chase the brakes on the cop car were spent and did little to stop them from being pushed.