Full Ratchet: A Silas Cade Thriller Hardcover

by Mike Cooper

  But no one was around. The truck’s wheels were sunk a few inches into the dirt. They might have started the job yesterday or a week ago, impossible to tell.

  I closed my eyes and reviewed the mental video.

  One younger man, two older. Barktree Welding looked even shabbier in daylight, the paint peeling and stained. The pickup was still there, not moved from last night—it was a Ford, hard used, shocks done in. Split wood tumbled into a heap near the back of the building. The three bays were open now, doors pulled up, but shadowed inside and I didn’t see much.

  A canvas-top Jeep was new, parked square in the middle of the lot. The Jeep pulled an odd trailer: an open, rusty iron box about twenty feet long.

  Two customers and the shop’s owner, talking about a job. They’d driven out. Maybe it wasn’t ready. Maybe, like Ryan’s employer, they weren’t happy with the result. Who knows?

  Dave was the young one, the owner.

  I waited five minutes. Only one vehicle passed the whole time. I kept my head turned away, pretending to stare pensively into the woods, though I’d twisted the rearview mirror so I could watch its passage. Finally I put the gear into drive and turned back.

  I had the window halfway down, so I could hear the yelling as I came up and into the lot, bouncing on the rocky gravel.

  “I’ll fix it right now.” Dave Ellins flipped an aluminum hose running from a pair of red welding tanks, apparently rolled from the garage. It was connected to a torch in his other hand, and he wore heavy leather gloves. “Not my fault you ran it over the rocks at the park, and it wouldn’t have broken at all if you didn’t leave it out to rust all summer. Look at that—the spar just pulled right away from the old weld. That’s crap work.”

  “That’s your work.” One of the older guys, in overalls and crusty boots. All three glanced over at me, then turned back to the trailer.

  They had business. I was nobody they knew. Fair enough.

  “Nuh-uh. I fixed the axle, not that panel.” He picked a face shield up from the ground and slipped it on, then fired the torch. Both other men stepped back from the loud, hissing flame.

  “I’ll patch it, but that’s all.” The welder’s voice was muffled behind the mask. “Take it back to—who built this piece of shit anyway? Bale?”

  “Naw, it was Charley. Ten, fifteen years ago now.”

  “Figures.” He bent over the trailer, studying the break.

  “Shouldn’t you clean it up first?”

  “You ain’t never cleaned this in fifteen years, why bother now?”

  The older man shrugged. “It’s a barbecue trailer, that’s all. Lots of grease dripped down there over time.”

  Now that he said it, I could see the grills, folded down to one side. They must tow the thing to festivals and picnics, cook hundreds of hamburgers or chickens at once.

  All three continued to ignore me.

  “Two minutes,” said the man from his mask. “Then you haul it away and I never see it again.”

  He tapped a length of welding rod inside the trailer, considered a moment longer, then aimed the torch. Sparks showered out.

  WHOOOSH!

  The entire base of the trailer burst into flame, flaring out yellow and black. Smoke billowed. The welder was knocked backward and the two old guys about fell over themselves from laughing.

  “Haw, Dave, you dumb cluck!”

  “Look at that shit.”

  Dave got to his feet, flipping up the mask and shaking his head.

  “Okay, I wasn’t going to charge you,” he said. “But that’s extra work I done there.”

  “Extra work? What’re you talking about?”

  “Cleaned out the pan. Fifteen years of grease, wasn’t that you said?”

  “Haw.”

  “Anyways, that’s it for me. Tell Charley to fix his own damn fuckups.”

  It was strange, watching him move. Like seeing yourself on video—close, but not quite right.

  The fire burned down quickly. Smoke drifted my way, smelling of burned meat and barbecue sauce. I coughed.

  “You racing Saturday?” asked the man in overalls.

  “Might be.” Dave started coiling the hose. “Car’s fixed up.”

  “You decide to run, you let me know. I’ll put some money down with Van.”

  The other man shook his head. “Van thinks you pulled that race,” he said. “Two weeks ago.”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it.”

  A shrug. “Sure. Just saying. They were talking about it, down at the VFW.”

  “They got something to say, they come say it to me.” Dave jammed the hose coil onto the tank’s handle. “Assholes.”

  “We know you wouldn’t do anything like that.”

  When the Jeep drove off, Dave muttered, watching them go, then walked over to me.

  “They’re gonna burn out the Rotary one of these years,” he said. “Hell of a barbecue though. What can I—?”

  He stopped dead, staring.

  I shrugged.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “It’s you!” He grabbed me in a bear hug, the blackened leather gloves ruining my shirt. “I’ll be goddamned! It’s you!”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Ain’t you never looked in a mirror? Plain as the nose on my face.” He laughed. “Hell, it kind of is the nose on my face, right? Not just twins, we’re like identical twins.”

  “I don’t know.” Close up our differences seemed stronger—different lines in the face, different hair, different habits of movement. “Didn’t you say you were born two years later?”

  “Yeah, I guess. But anyway I got the records, and the state don’t lie. I mean, not about shit like that. Paper going back twenty, thirty years. Want to see the copies?”

  “Maybe later.”

  “Sure.” Dave drank off half a Rolling Rock and clanked the bottle onto the toolbox by his stool. “You should of told me you were coming.”

  “I travel around,” I said. “Work. I had a job nearby and I thought I’d look you up.”

  “Travel, huh? That accounting business, I figured you sat in an office all day. Keeping the books.”

  “It’s just as boring as you think.”

  His hair was on the long side. I’d been in Kentucky a few years ago, chasing a penny-stock fraudster who liked the horses, and back then every guy in the region seemed to have his head shaved down to stubble. It looked like boot camp. Now the style pendulum was apparently drifting back to the 1970s.

  Besides that: my height, maybe no surprise, but ten or twenty pounds more muscle and most of that in the belly. In the country men carried their weight with pride. When we shook hands, his felt hard and calloused—from manual labor, not the makiwara.

  “You ain’t drinking. Want coffee or something?”

  “It’s a little early.” I put my own beer on the workbench. The shop was crowded inside, tools and mysterious engine parts dark with grease cluttering every horizontal surface. That distinctive smell of gasoline and differential lube was cut with an ozone tang—the welding equipment, I assumed. An inexplicable frame of steel pipe sat half assembled on the concrete floor.

  Beyond it, just inside the bay door, a decades-old muscle car gleamed black. Unlike the rest of the garage, a two-foot space was cleared all the way around—no junk, no tools, even the floor swept perfectly clean. The hood was up, with a cloth draped over the side panel and into the engine compartment, so you could lean in without marring the finish.

  Dave saw me looking. “1969 Charger.”

  “You keep it in good shape.”

  “Grandpa’s axe, right? Rebuilt from the pistons out, and more than once.” He smiled, his eyes on the vehicle. “That’s a work of beauty in a world of sin.”

  Through the open doors I could see the clumpy field with the old tractor, between the road and the hill behind Dave’s shop. In daylight it was even clearer the mower had been abandoned halfway into the job: half the field was cut down to turf, and half had wild grass and we
eds two feet high.

  Dave seemed to have trouble keeping up with everything except his car.

  “You race it?”

  “On occasion. Dirt track, on the weekends. I told you that, didn’t I? In the letter?”

  “You any good?”

  “Yeah.”

  I waited, but he didn’t say more, just drank the rest of his beer and tossed the bottle toward the back of the shop. It landed in a wooden box of empties, somehow not breaking.

  “Silas?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is that your real name?”

  “Sure it is.” Which wasn’t quite lying. That’s what people called me.

  “Because I asked around. Some of the answers . . .”

  “Around?”

  “You know.” He waved one hand vaguely, then reached over to retrieve another Rock from the stained refrigerator alongside the bench. “Don’t know if I mentioned, I did a stretch some time back. Eleven months at Houtzdale.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Bad fucking lawyers, that’s why.” But he laughed and popped open the beer. “Criminal conversion of a motor vehicle, if you have to ask.”

  “Borrow the wrong car?”

  “Nope. Stole it myself.” Once again not boasting, just stating a fact. “I admit, kind of a dumbshit thing to do. You been inside?”

  “No.” Not really. Not counting an MP holding cell in, well, let’s just say, a major American military facility in another country.

  A very dusty country. They told me I can’t ever discuss what I did in the service.

  “Nothing to do all day but lift weights and talk shit. You think accounting’s boring . . . anyway, some of the guys, I see them now and then. In the city.” Pittsburgh, I assumed. “Silas Cade has a reputation.”

  “Some other Silas.”

  “Like, some company’s got a problem with the numbers, cash disappearing from bank accounts, bent accountants and all that—you’re the go-to. Mr. Fix-It.” He stared me in the eye. “CPA with a bullet.”

  “Huh.” Not a bad description, actually.

  “So.” His grin was gone. “True?”

  Outside a light rain began to fall, pocking the dirt, pattering on the shop’s metal roof. So much for the beautiful day we were supposed to have. The interior was dim and dank, the only other sound a hum from the refrigerator’s compressor. I sat still in the wooden chair, hands on my knees, staring back.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “You’re my brother, Silas.” He leaned forward. “My whole life thinking I’m alone in the world, and then I find out I have a brother. Ain’t that something to celebrate?”

  “Why did you track me down?”

  “You’re here, right?”

  I shook my head. “I’m leaving.”

  “You and me—we can do stuff. We can get some shit done.”

  Great. I got some ideas, he’d written.

  “What are you talking about, exactly?”

  “Let me tell you.” He leaned back, grinned again, and picked up the beer. “I got plans.”

  And what plans they were.

  “It’s just lying on the ground, most of these places. I can show you seven steel mills, all shut down in the eighties, all no more’n twenty miles from here. Every one of them, the pipe is sitting there like, like, I dunno, apples on the tree. Or ground. Whatever—we just got to drive a truck in and pick it up. Copper and steel and iron. Tons of it! You know what that kind of metal’s selling for? China wants it, they’ll pay anything.”

  I looked at him. “Let me get this straight—you want to steal scrap metal?” I thought about the scavengers you see in the Bronx, rolling shopping carts piled with plumbing and doorknobs ripped out of abandoned houses, off to trade at the recyclers for ten or fifteen bucks.

  “It’s an idea. Something, you know, I work out here all day, sometimes nobody comes by. I got time to think.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Whatever. It’s just a start. Capital formation. Right? I saw a show on the cable about that.”

  It only got better. Once the initial investment was assembled, Dave figured we could finance the guns and cars and maybe some helpers . . . and start knocking over casinos.

  “They’re everywhere, you notice that? Over in Chester, or the Meadows, even right on the river in downtown Pittsburgh. Everyone goes in with their wallet full up, comes out flat. All that cash money, piling up.”

  “Um.”

  “They drive it over to the bank in the morning. Or maybe in the middle of the night. It’s not like, I mean, those places don’t ever close. But in between, it just sits there. Waiting.”

  “Dave—”

  “Easy, right? And we’re a perfect team. I got the connections around here—set it all up, no problem. You, we can trust each other, see? So we don’t need nobody else.”

  Trust?

  I didn’t know where to start. “Look, they expect—there are thousands of idiots thinking exactly the same thing. Hey, let’s go get some of that free money there! And the smart guys running the casinos? They know that.”

  “Course they do. Don’t mean they don’t get stuck in their ruts, though. Know how many times they been robbed, ever? Since they started putting in tables and slot machines, I mean—not the racetracks.” He raised a hand when I started to answer. “Zero. Never. Not one single once.”

  “Doesn’t that kind of prove my point?”

  “Proves they’re fat and happy and lazy. Like the Steelers.”

  Jesus. “Maybe, but they’re not stupid. There’s basically a private army of rent-a-cops and security and fucking assault forces, not to mention the entire law-enforcement apparatus of the state, ready to protect its tax base. You might as well try to steal the gold out of the Federal Reserve vaults.”

  “Yeah, yeah. We can figure it out.” He waved a hand dismissively. “That’s all just, I dunno, logistics.”

  I felt very tired. “You never saw Ocean’s Eleven, huh?”

  “Look. You know why people get caught? When they try something like this?”

  “Because they trip about twenty alarms and then heavily armed guards converge from everywhere and shoot them dead.”

  “No, no.” He shook his head, grinning. “Afterwards, I mean. It’s the money. Most guys, they can’t think any further than grabbing the cash and running away. Maybe they planned ahead and rented a storage locker, but most of them don’t even do that. The bags of hundred-dollar bills, that’s like the goal line.” He drained his bottle and set it next to the first. “When really, it ain’t no more’n the opening kickoff.”

  All that talking in the pen, I guess Dave thought he’d learned something. “Football doesn’t send you to jail for thirty years.”

  “But that’s where you come in! See? It’s your business. I figure you know exactly how to take a few hundred pounds of twenty-dollar bills and turn it into a nice, safe, boring bank account that the IRS and the FBI will never ever notice.”

  I stood up and turned to look out the bay at the falling rain. Mud spattered gently in the dirt lot, dirtying the welding tanks that Dave had left outside. A fresh, wet smell drifted in.

  Dave’s plan was the stupidest, most wrongheaded, misguided, moronic idea I’d ever heard.

  “Your plan,” I said, “is the stupidest, most wrongheaded, misguided . . .” I stopped.

  Dave was chuckling behind me. I turned back, and he started laughing, then harder, then so hard he wheezed and bent over with his hands on his knees.

  Usually I get the jokes tossed my way. Brothers or whatever, Dave and I didn’t seem to be very well synchronized.

  “What?” I said. He just shook his head, still laughing, and swiped at the corner of one eye. “What’s so funny?”

  “Had you going, Silas!”

  Oh, for Christ’s sake. “Are you—?”

  “You’re right, that’s all bullshit. I wouldn’t do none of that.”

  I grunted, didn’t say anything.

 
“I mean, scrap steel’s like three hundred dollars a ton now. You can make more money chopping firewood. And sticking up The Rivers, hell, only an idiot’d even think of that.”

  I stared at him. “So why are we talking about it?”

  “’Cause maybe you’d have said yes.” He got off the chair and gave me another bear hug. “Fortunately, you actually ain’t that dumb.”

  I disengaged myself. Hugging’s not my thing.

  “Fine.”

  “Some people’ll do anything, you know?”

  “Glad I passed the test.” I was still irritated.

  “Relax, man. Like I said, I got lots of time to think out here. Maybe I think too much.”

  Yeah, maybe so. I shook my head.

  Dave picked up the three bottles and dropped them in a crate already overflowing with empties, then checked his pockets. “I got something I got to do. Helping some guys up in Glassville. You want to come along?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “You didn’t tell me you were coming, right?”

  “Huh?”

  “So I promised. But it’s all right. I know they’d be happy, have someone else.”

  I crossed my arms. “Stealing cars? Bank robbery?”

  “I told you I was kidding.” He didn’t seem bothered. “A little demolition work. Half a day, eight hundred bucks. You’ll get a fair cut.”

  “Demolition.” I felt pulled along, but what the hell.

  My brother.

  “It’ll be fun.” He walked over to pull down the first of the bay doors, which screeched and rattled and slammed onto the concrete floor. “What else you gonna do today?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  We took my car.

  “The pickup ain’t registered,” Dave said, gesturing at the brokeback Ford. “And I left my other truck up the road, kinda in the middle of something.”

  “Up the road?”

  “Yeah, you see it?”

  “Might have.”