Thirty minutes later, Michael was stopped at a red light on Route 106. A hand reached in the open passenger window, pulled up the lock button, and TJ climbed in.
“There’s no seat here.” TJ crouched, like someone would be right along to bolt a seat to the floor underneath him.
“Close the door and sit on the floor. Get down, will ya!”
“People are supposed to see me so you can say you were hijacked.”
Michael had no answer to that, so he just glared straight ahead. The light turned green, the truck lurched, and the matter was resolved by TJ falling on his ass.
At Route 18, they headed south.
TJ stretched to see the sideview mirror. “Is Larry still behind us in the van?”
“Silly bastard is so close I can’t even see him,” Michael said. “It’s like he’s skid-hopping me.”
“Boy, you’re a real grouch. Is it because you’re hungover? Or not drinking?”
At the Middleboro Rotary they picked up Route 44 west and had the road almost to themselves.
“That the sign?” Michael took his foot off the accelerator.
“That’s it,” TJ affirmed. “Weir Brothers Saw Mill.”
Michael checked his mirrors, braked, then geared down the transmission and pressed the fuel pedal, swinging into the turn.
“Man, you took that fast. It’s a miracle you didn’t tip this over.”
“We were going too fast to slow down. You go into a turn on the brake and you wreck.”
They bumped along a wide asphalt road until it became a single-lane cement dust strip. At the end, in the middle of an enormous hangar wall, was a rusted corrugated sliding door, twenty feet high, forty feet wide.
“We’re supposed to drive right in.”
“I vote we open the door first,” Michael said. He rolled the truck up near the door and stopped.
“Paul said we should drive right in.”
“He may have assumed that between us we’d figure out what to do if the door was closed. I think we should try to open it first. I can always crash the truck through it, you know, if nothing else works.”
Thomas Jefferson Moran jumped out like a parachutist, landed, and walked toward the door, turning a 360 as he went, glancing in all directions. He grabbed the handle on the metal door with his right hand, leaned all the way to the left, using his weight to slide the door open. He almost fell when the door rolled easily. He turned and gave his accomplice the finger.
Michael put on his headlights to see a wide cement floor inside the hangar. He played the clutch out, and the truck crept inside, TJ walking along beside it. Michael hit the high beams and about a hundred yards off, at the back of the hangar, he could make out piles of unfinished picnic tables. He swung the steering wheel left and right, using the tractor like a giant flashlight, looking for the empty rental trailer that was supposed to have been left inside. Back in the van, Larry had lengths of metal rollers they were going to use to convey the freight from the Triple-T trailer to the rental box. But all Michael saw in front of him was the inside of a cavernous, abandoned saw mill.
Larry pulled the van inside the building, up near the front of the trailer. He stopped and was getting out when Michael jumped down from the tractor.
“Where’s the empty trailer?” Larry asked. “They were supposed to leave it by last night at the latest. What’s the story?”
“How would I know?” Michael answered.
“Should we just leave this trailer here?” TJ said. “Should we unload it?”
“I don’t know,” Michael snapped. He walked back to the trailer doors, took out a jackknife, and sawed at the seal until it broke. He opened the doors carefully in case the load had shifted. There was always a chance something could fall out and land on your head. But not today; the trailer looked almost empty, other than some cartons he could see in the nose. “Aw, shit.” Michael climbed in the trailer and walked up to the nose. When he returned, he went to the back end of the trailer and looked up at the number stenciled in black at the top inside corner. “Forty-five seventy?” he said.
He jumped down, grabbed the trailer door, pushed it closed, and stared at the four-digit number affixed to the door: 5432. He pulled at the corner of the number on the outside of the trailer door, peeled the decal off, and revealed a different number underneath: 4570.
“He put phony numbers on.”
“Who?” TJ asked. “How?”
“How’s easy. There’re cartons full of number decals in the repair shop.” Michael looked at his watch. “Let’s go. Quick.” He gestured to Larry. “Give me the van keys.”
Michael drove the van, Larry rode shotgun, and TJ sat on the floor between the seats.
“What was up in the front?” Larry asked.
“Eight pallets of Cocoa Puffs.”
Michael pulled the van into one of the spaces in the drivers’ parking lot at Triple-T Trucking.
“You gotta say something, man,” Larry mumbled. “What are we doing here?”
Michael looked at his watch. “Good. Five of 8.”
“So,” TJ said, “are we surrendering or what? You got a plan?”
Michael pointed toward the terminal building, a monstrosity the length of three football fields that had dock doors numbered 60 through 140 on the side facing them.
“See the ramp? And all those red Macks parked in rows? At 8, it’s going to look like a jail break. About fifty guys are going to come down that ramp, jump in those tractors, and start driving around, all over the yard. Some will hook up to trailers backed into the dock doors, the rest are headed to the trailer pad in the back to hook up out there. I’m going to go in the repair shop and get a dupe key from the cabinet. Jimmy, the Waltham driver, is on vacation this week and nobody will use his tractor. He eats his lunch in it and throws the bags on the floor. It smells like a restaurant dumpster.”
“Why? What are you doing?” Larry asked. “Why don’t we call Paul?”
“On what? You and him got shoe phones?”
“On a pay phone,” Larry said.
“Okay. Where is he? Where do I call?”
“I don’t get what we’re doing,” TJ said.
“These guys don’t screw around. If we want to keep breathing, we need those cigarettes.”
“What cigarettes? That’s my answer,” TJ said. “We don’t have none. Never did.”
“Which guys? Who we’re stealing from? Or selling to?” Larry asked.
“Both, probably,” Michael speculated.
“I knew this was a bad idea,” TJ said. “My grandmother was right. First time I got pinched, she said, ‘Thomas, be careful. Life’s going to be tricky for you because you’re a complete fuckin’ idiot.’ I said, ‘Me? No way.’ She had me pegged.”
“Why do you think the load is here?” Larry asked.
“What’s a better place to hide a forty-five-foot Triple-T trailer?” Michael said. “They’re on 4570. Not the real one, but one here with that number on it. Look, you want to, go home, I’ll keep you guys out of it.”
“Screw you,” Larry said. “We stick together.”
Larry looked at TJ, who closed his eyes and nodded. “It’s what we do.”
The receiving department for Pat’s Vending was around the back on a side street. Although cars were parked on both sides of the road, there were No Parking signs posted near the receiving doors so Michael had plenty of room to draw the trailer up along the curb. He pulled out the plunger on the dash and the engine shuddered and died. He turned the key off and jumped out.