Victor raised his eyebrows as though the question was absurd. “Tom, we have no idea what kind of people these guys are. We’re going to have to do some snooping around before we know who we’re dealing with. We damned well better be prepared.” Tom caught a wild glint in Victor’s eye and felt a sudden sense of worry come over him.
“Can I try them, Dad?”
“No, Danny. You go back in the house now.” Victor put the night vision goggles back in the case and put the case back in the bag. Then he switched off the Geiger counter.
“Shouldn’t we leave the stakeout work to the local police?” Tom was beginning to wonder what kind of guy Victor might be. He’d only ever been around him in the sterile confines of the office, listening to his ridiculous war stories about life at the FBI. Maybe Victor was just a nut. Tom had no way of knowing.
“Tom,” Victor laughed, “c’mon man, first thing you learn at the Bureau is never to trust some backwoods police department to get it right. You know who ends up in places like Nickelback? Guys who could never hack it in a real police department. Now, if it was the LAPD or something like that, that’d be different. But there’s no telling what kind of hayseed hicks we’ll find out in the desert.” Victor shook his head, almost as if he were arguing with himself. “No way. We gotta do this ourselves, put the case together and call the local boys in only at the last minute. You have to hand guys like that a complete case, wrapped up with a little bow on top, or they’ll fuck it up for sure.” Then Victor added, “You probably don’t have a gun. Do you?”
“Jesus Christ, Victor, you’ve got to be kidding. This isn’t a game.”
But Victor was already opening the garage door and heading for a cabinet along the back wall of the garage. “Danny, you go inside and help your mom,” he called out to the boy. “Hurry now. Go on.” The boy did as he was told, disappearing through the front door to where his angry mother surely waited, thinking of some new argument she could make to her husband.
Victor unlocked the cabinet. “I don’t want the kids to know what’s in here, at least not until they’re a little older.” Tom was lumbering up from behind, slowly, with apprehension. He watched Victor swing the doors wide open, revealing a heavily stocked armory filled with rifles, pistols, shotguns, ammunition, holsters, straps, and harnesses of every kind. Victor stood to the side, beaming like a proud father.
“Son of a bitch! Are you out of your mind?” Tom was beside himself. “You expecting the end of the world sometime soon?”
“Hey, you can never be too safe. You haven’t seen the kind of shit I have. Believe me, if you knew what kind of crazies are out there, you’d be armed to the hilt too.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“Look man, you don’t know what we’re gonna find up there. I sure as hell hope it’s nothing.” Victor pulled an automatic pistol from a hanger on the door and tossed it to Tom. “But I damned sure ain’t going to see you get into something you can’t get out of.”
Tom scrambled to catch the gun. He fumbled with it, surprised by its weight. He’d never held a weapon of any kind before, let alone shot one. He turned it over in his hands, at once both fascinated and repulsed by the prospect of carrying it around. He held it in his right hand, assessing the feel of the grip. It was solid, filling his entire palm. His fingers wrapped around it, falling into the grooves in the grip like it was made for him. He pointed it at the wall, closing one eye, trying to aim it. It was heavy and difficult to hold steady.
Victor was already sizing Tom up for a shoulder holster. He sorted through several and then turned back to see Tom standing there like a kid. He smirked and walked over to him, snatching the gun from Tom’s outstretched hand.
“Stop trying to aim the damned thing like that. You look silly.” Victor held the gun like it was an extension of his body. “Just pretend like you’re pointing your finger at something.” Victor pulled the slide back and cocked the pistol. Then held it up quickly, pointing it and pulling the trigger. The hammer clicked on the empty chamber.
“You see? Quick like that. Just raise it up, point like you’re pointing your finger, and pull the trigger without thinking about it. It’s an automatic, nine millimeter, you got fifteen rounds to go through. If you miss, just pull the trigger again. Keep doing that until you hit something or you run out of ammo.” Victor handed the gun back to Tom. “Try it.”
Tom held it up and pulled the trigger. He could see the point of what Victor was saying, but questioned whether he could really hit anything like that. He repeated the motion a few times. Then it dawned on him that he was standing in a garage pretending to shoot at the wall with an automatic pistol, and he said, “This is fucking crazy. I can’t believe we’re doing this.”
“Believe it,” Victor said over his shoulder, locking the cabinet and tossing several more guns and several boxes of bullets into another bag similar to the one that was already in the car. “You may be surprised what we end up doing by the time this is over.” Victor closed the garage door and the trunk of the car and the two of them drove off. Victor didn’t say good-bye to anyone.
XX
The closest gun shops were in Vegas or Barstow. But that didn’t mean there weren’t any guns for sale in Nickelback. A guy just had to know where to go. The high desert catered to criminals and self-proclaimed outlaws, and firearms were plentiful. The trick was knowing people you could trust well enough to not shoot you the minute you came near them. That was where a couple of local kids had an edge over an outsider.
When Eli returned from his run to Long Beach, it was nearly four o’clock and Eddie was already done filling his tank for the next morning’s run. He parked the truck next to the cinder block warehouse and got out, stretching his arms up over his head to loosen up from the five-hour drive.
“Two runs in one day. Not bad,” Eddie said, coming around the side of the building.
“No shit. That’s one way to make twenty grand.” They laughed. It was too easy. Then Eli shook his head and said, “Now, if we could just avoid sharing it with Ron, we’d have it made.”
Eddie didn’t say anything. He just nodded. He could see that Eli was still convinced that getting rid of Ron was the only way. Eddie had spent the day thinking it through. He knew Eli was probably right, as a practical matter, but he was still having trouble accepting it. Eddie turned and walked toward the car. Eli followed.
They drove off in silence. When Eddie finally spoke, his tone was measured, careful, as though he was hesitant to give the topic serious discussion. “If we were to get rid of Ron, how could we be sure we wouldn’t get caught?”
“I spent all day thinking it through,” Eli began. “The hard part is going to be getting Ron out to the warehouse. The rest is going to be easy. The way I got it figured, we get him to come out here after work. We tell him we need to talk to him about something. Tell him we got his money. We’ll come up with something. Then, when he gets out here we just plug him. Just don’t even think about it. Just do it. Then we bury his ass. We wait until the middle of the night and drive his car back to his house and leave it there. Shit, it’ll be two weeks before anyone even starts looking for him.”
Eli turned onto the main road and headed for town. Eddie thought it through. It didn’t seem like much of a plan. “What if someone sees us dropping his truck off?”
“Who’s going to see? It’ll be the middle of the night. And hey, we don’t even have to drop it off at his house. We could drive it to Vegas and leave it in the parking lot at Caesar’s Palace. By the time anyone finds it, they’ll think Ron went to Vegas and disappeared. No one will even suspect murder.”
“I like that plan better.”
“I do too.”
“So how can we make sure he comes out there?”
“We’ll just tell him we got his money.”
“But we just told him we couldn’t get it that fast.”
“That greedy fucker is already convinced we’re lying to him. Let’s prove him right. We tell
him we’ve got his money, he’ll come for it.”
“What if he wants to see the money though? We don’t actually have it.”
“We’re not going to give him time for that. But we can get what we have, just to make it look good, just so we have something to show him. Shit man, who can tell the difference between thirty or forty grand and a hundred? It’s just a big pile of cash.”
Eli had an answer for everything. The more he talked about it, the more realistic it all started to sound. Ron probably would come out to the warehouse if they had the money. They probably could fool him if he wanted to see it—at least, fool him long enough to shoot him. They could dump the truck in Vegas. It would probably be awhile before anyone looked for him and found the truck and figured out he was missing. It was probably just that easy to disappear for real, so people wouldn’t assume right away that he’d been killed.
“Okay, so how do we get the money? We can’t just go to the branch here and withdraw that much. Everyone in town will know about in an hour.”
“Easy. Each of us just stops a few times on the way home tomorrow. Just go into a Wells Fargo and withdraw four or five grand. Piece of cake. Shit, there’s two of them in Barstow. Stop at each of those and then stop at the one by the mall in Riverside. Between the two of us, that’s six stops. No one will notice anything.”
They drove into town, past the Super 8, past the Golden Dragon, through the stoplight. Then Eddie said, “Okay, fine, we’ll do it tomorrow. We’ll call him up, have him come out tomorrow night and just get it over with.”
Eli grinned. “Now you’re talking. Look man, this guy can’t be trusted. It’s him or us in this deal. And I ain’t about to let him chase after me with his baseball bat.”
“There’s just one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“We need a gun.”
“I’m one step ahead of you.” Eli pulled into the parking lot of the service station. Cookie stood in the doorway of the open garage bay, staring up at the Subaru wreckage still dangling from the hydraulic lift. They parked next to the old gas pumps and got out. Cookie remained standing with his back to them, staring up at the cascade of wires and hoses. Eli called out to him, “Hey, Cookie?” But there was no reaction.
Eddie said, “I swear, every time I see him, he seems to have killed even more brain cells.”
“Hey, Cookie,” Eli tried again, walking up to him this time. “Hey man.” Cookie noticed Eli when he got right up beside him and reacted with surprise, turning around to see Eddie coming toward him as well.
Eddie raised a hand and gave him a slight wave. “What’s up, Cookie?”
Cookie responded with a grunt of sorts, nodding his head. Eli asked him where Leo was and Cookie motioned around back. They thanked him and headed down the side of the garage. Cookie remained behind, staring out at the street.
At the back of the building was a locked door. Eli banged on it and they waited for a response. After a minute, Eli knocked again. This time they heard noise coming from behind the door. A few seconds more and it opened a crack. Eli saw an eye emerge from the darkness behind the door and then it opened further and Leo poked his head out, squinting at the daylight.
“Sorry guys, I had to see who it was through the peephole first. Sometimes Cookie’s not the best at keeping watch, you know what I mean? Yeah, sure you do. What do you guys need?” Leo’s pinpoint eyes darted back and forth from Eli to Eddie.
“Can we come inside for a second?”
“Oh, hey, sure man, sure, no problem. It’s fucking bright out here anyway. I can’t think out in the sunlight. It hurts my eyes.” Leo grinned at Eddie and stepped back, opening the door to let them in. They walked past him and down a steep set of stairs to a basement storage room converted into a makeshift laboratory. “Hey,” Leo called after them, “be careful not to knock over the bucket of benzyl chloride at the bottom of the stairs.”
The room was lit by three naked eighty watt bulbs strung in series across the joists that ran beneath the floor of the garage above. Metal racks of auto parts lined the walls. In the center of the room were two full-size banquet tables holding an elaborate display of beakers, vacuum tubes, and Bunsen burners. The air was acrid and Eddie and Eli felt their eyes water around the edges. They stood around the tables, watching fluid bubble in one of the glass cylinders.
Leo came down after them. “Check this shit out,” he snickered, and retrieved a large silver mixing bowl from a table along the wall. He held it out for them to look inside, grinning like a proud father. The bowl was nearly full of a white, crystalline substance of very fine grains that gave off a slightly bluish hue. They knew what it was, but Leo offered the information anyway. “Pure fucking crank, man. Five pounds. Costs about a thousand bucks to make. I can move it wholesale in LA for ten grand a pound. That’s some serious shit, man.” Leo laughed and put the bowl back on the table.
“Sweet,” Eli nodded, not knowing what else to say.
Immediately, as if threatened, Leo pulled a large revolver out of the front of his pants and pointed it at the two of them, almost screaming. “Fucking right, it’s sweet! Now don’t fuck around, man. What the fuck are you two doing here?”
“Jesus Christ, Leo, calm the fuck down.” Eddie backed up toward the bottom of the stairs, but Eli held his ground, with his hands up in front of him.
“Relax, Leo.” Eli spoke in a calm, steady voice. “You know we’re not into that shit. C’mon man, you know us better than that.”
Leo stood in a firm position, knees bent, ready to start shooting any second. He moved the gun back and forth from Eli to Eddie, pausing briefly on each of them. “Yeah, I know you guys. Sure, I know you. But how fucking well do I know you? That’s the question.” Leo clenched his jaw and then opened his mouth wide, trying to loosen the muscles in his face.
“C’mon Leo, mellow out man. You’ve known us your whole life. We all went to school together. We all used to go out to the monument and take shrooms together. You remember that? We did that a hundred times.”
A glimmer of recognition crossed Leo’s face and he released the hammer on the revolver. Then lowered the gun to his side, the tension melting away from him almost as quickly as it had taken hold. “Ah, shit guys. I don’t mean to freak you out or nothing. Sometimes I just get a little wired, you know?”
“Hey, it’s cool, man. Don’t worry about it.” Eli kept his hands up in front of him, just in case.
Leo seemed to feel bad about his sudden rage and began talking loosely about the pressure of the business and how he felt like he couldn’t trust people and he never knew who his real friends were and how Cookie was just getting to be more and more of a burnout lately. Eddie and Eli listened attentively to his catharsis, but kept their eyes on the gun as Leo waved it around, using large hand gestures as he talked. He seemed completely unaware that he was still holding it.
Eli was shaking his head sympathetically, saying, “I know man. It’s a lot of pressure, running your own business.” Eddie felt his foot bump something on the floor and looked down to see a bucket of sloshing liquid.
“Oh, hey man,” Leo cautioned, “careful with that, it’ll eat right through your clothes.”
“Sorry.” Eddie shuffled to the side a couple of steps.
Leo, finally calm, seemed to realize for the first time that he had no idea why the two of them were standing in his lab. “So, if you guys aren’t interested in some crank, what are you looking for?”
“Well, funny you should ask.” Eli motioned toward Leo’s hand. “What is that anyway? A forty-four?”
XXI
Victor wouldn’t shut up.
Tom spent the whole afternoon listening to him carry on about the kinds of people who lived in places like Nickelback. “The only reason a person lives out there is because they’re up to no good,” he would say, in various forms. “Everyone is either armed or on drugs, or both,” was another of his favorites. Yet despite his conviction that they “had to be prepared
to deal with the problem themselves,” Victor agreed to stop in and enlist the help of the local police as soon as they got there.
The sheriff’s office wasn’t hard to find. When the two-lane road through the desert finally came to an end at the only intersection with a stoplight for a hundred miles in any direction, there was only one brick building that looked like it could be a government office. It held the entire city government and still only had two floors. The police station had its own entrance on the ground floor. The police cruiser parked out front gave it away. They stood in the parking lot for a second, stretching from the long ride. Finally, Tom said the only thing he could think of to say. “Goddamn, it’s hot,” and then, after looking in both directions a minute more, he added: “This place is a dump.” Victor agreed it was.
They went into a small reception area with a high counter and some ratty furniture for waiting around while the local government worked at its usual brisk pace. The room smelled of industrial cleaner and the lighting flickered, ugly and florescent. A young cop stood behind the counter filling out paperwork. He looked up when they came in. “Help you?”
“I hope so,” Victor said with a smile, doing his best to look like a friendly and concerned citizen. “We’re here to see the sheriff, if he’s in. We’re from Southern Petroleum.” Another big smile, teeth and all.
“He’s got somebody in his office now, but I’ll go see if he can see you.”
The kid disappeared through a doorway and they were alone in the waiting area. Tom studied the notices on the bulletin board. They were the usual kinds of things: facts about employment law, a picture of a missing dog, an announcement that the next city counsel meeting would be held on the twenty-sixth. Tom wondered what they would have to discuss at the city counsel meeting. Burning the place down and starting over, perhaps? He was about to make a joke about the city counsel meeting to Victor when the young officer returned.
“You can go on back. Just go straight on through, all the way down the hall.”
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