$200 and a Cadillac

XXVIII



Eli kept the gun in his lap as he drove. He ran his fingers over its textured grip as the truck crept down the freeway. He pictured how it would go over and over again. He would do it without hesitation. It would be automatic.

Ron would show up a little after four o’clock—just after his shift—and Eli would pull out the gun and do it the first chance he got. Would he just walk up to the cab of the truck? Would he wait for Ron to get out and walk up to him? He could do it either way. He ran through the various scenarios in his head.

Eli remembered a motivational speaker who’d once come to the high school in Nickelback to talk to the students. The guy had been a prisoner of war in Vietnam and told them that all he did for the two years he lived in a cage was imagine playing golf over and over on the course in his hometown. When he was finally rescued and made it home, the guy went out to play a round and shot a seventy-six.

Visualize success and you can achieve it. That was the old guy’s message. Eli smiled. He was visualizing success all the way home. Visualizing Ron’s wide-eyed face, frozen at the instant of recognition, at the moment he realized both his own assassination and his impotence to stop it. A hand clutching at his chest, the shot already through him, and the glimmer of awareness fading from his dying eyes. The son of a bitch was going to learn and learn good. Killing him would be easy.

The biggest problem Eli had was getting on and off the freeway to hit the banks on the way back home. The tanker truck was big and slow and wasn’t designed to weave in and out of traffic or snake its way through parking lots so its driver could make half a dozen withdrawals in the course of an afternoon. Worse yet, Eli was in a hurry. He needed to make it back and be ready to go before Ron got there.

The first stop went smooth. He stood in line inside the bank. Went to the counter. Filled out a withdrawal slip for five grand, and handed it to the cute little Mexican gal behind the counter.

He was staring at her tight torso and smooth, milky brown cleavage, thinking about f*cking her, when she asked, “How do you want it?”

“Excuse me?”

“Twenties? Hundreds?”

It was an interesting question, and he thought it through. Twenties would make it look like a lot more cash. “Twenties,” he said.

She brought it back like it was no big deal. Eli walked out and felt a relief run through him that surprised him. And then he thought, why should I be tense, what’s the big deal, it’s my money? And then he realized it wasn’t getting the money that made him tense at all. It was the impending act of murder looming at the end of the afternoon.

In a few short hours, he would expect himself to kill a man. He drove the truck to the next bank, fingering the gun and wondering if he would really be able to do it. Somehow, the cash piling up in the little knapsack he’d brought along to carry it in made the whole ordeal real in a way it hadn’t been before.

At the second stop, he added another five grand. Two hundred fifty twenty-dollar bills in a three-inch stack. He sat on the bench seat of the truck and stirred the cash around in the bottom of the sack, tossing it like pasta in a sieve. What was it about money that made people kill? The clusters of green paper, bouncing in the bag, didn’t seem to care one way or another who owned them.

But regardless of why, the fact of the matter was that people did kill for money and Ron Grimaldi had beaten an innocent stranger to death with a baseball bat merely to prove a point. And the point was clear. Grimaldi would do the same to Eli or Eddie if they didn’t start producing some profit.

Eli tossed the knapsack on the seat beside him and held the gun in both his hands. The stainless steel was warm in the midday heat. Eli ran his index finger down the four-inch barrel, over the ridges in the cylinder, and then pointed it at the floor and stared down the sights. He could see the bullets in the chambers. Six of them. And he planned to use them all.

He started the truck and hit the freeway, his resolve strengthened. He told himself it wasn’t really about money. Eli rubbed his face where the bruises had formed from Ron’s kick to the head. He ran his tongue along the inside of his lips where the flesh was rough and torn from being ground into his teeth. It wasn’t about money at all. It was about revenge. And somehow, that seemed to make it easier to contemplate.

They’d all made a deal and Ron was trying to change it after the fact. It wasn’t right. Ron couldn’t do it without them and he knew it. It might have been Ron who dreamed it all up, but it was Eddie and Eli who were essential to the plan’s success. What did Ron know about the oil business?

Eli pulled off and went into another bank. He was getting tired of the process. It was making the return trip entirely too slow. This time he asked for ten grand and they gave it to him. He studied the balance on the withdrawal slip on the way back out. Fourteen thousand. Eli stood on the sidewalk, reading it over. Fourteen, plus the twenty he had, made only thirty-four total.

The runs from today wouldn’t be in yet. Hell, Eddie was probably still emptying his truck back at the yard. But the runs from yesterday should have been and they weren’t. There were a million reasonable explanations for a delay, but there were a ton of suspicious ones too.

When he got back to the truck he felt the bulge of the cash in the bag. It looked and felt like a lot of money now. Twenty grand in twenties. He smiled into the bag. He wouldn’t think of giving it to Ron.

He thought again as he drove. Other than the run-ins with Ron, the last week had been smooth. The routine was worked out. No one new had been coming around. Nothing strange had happened. No one suspected anything. The reason the money wasn’t in the account was probably due to a processing delay, an electronic glitch or something. Things like that happened everyday. If it wasn’t in the account on Monday, then he would start to worry.

The only problem was that now they wouldn’t have the fifty they’d promised Ron. Would they have to explain that? Eli smiled as he pulled onto the freeway again. There wouldn’t be time to explain it. Ron was never even going to see the money. The only thing he was going to see was his life flash before his eyes. All those years of doing whatever kind of shit he’d done. Driving a damned forklift around or whatever.

The thought came back to him again as the freeway climbed up into the high desert and began to crawl across the wide-open nothingness of the Mojave. What did Ron know about the oil industry? For a guy who worked at Monarch, and who claimed to come from Houston, where he’d worked at a refinery, the guy was awfully ignorant. He didn’t seem to know much of anything about any of the equipment, the way the oil was transferred through the pipelines, the way it was sold. Nothing. He didn’t know a damned thing.

And yet, the day he’d come out to the warehouse to talk through some kind of deal, he picked up on the pipeline buried in the ground right away. He asked all kinds of questions about it and came up with the plan right away. Maybe he was just a criminal mastermind, Eli thought. He sure seemed to come up with the plan awfully fast.

When he finally took the exit to Nickelback, he felt a flutter of nerves. He checked his watch. It was just after one. He’d be out at the warehouse before three. Ron got off at four. That would mean an hour or more of waiting around, thinking it through, getting ready for it.

Would he be able to do it?

Eli gripped the gun again. This time his palm was sweating and it felt loose in his hand no matter how hard he squeezed. Jesus. Take some deep breaths. He set the gun on the seat next to the sack of cash. With the money Eddie would get they’d be sixteen thousand short. They’d probably have to kill Ron to keep him from killing them.





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