“Howdy,” the man said as he approached. He offered his hand. “Name’s Wortham. Are you Mr. Smith?” he asked Jonathan.
Actually, Jonathan had no idea what name Venice had given the guy. He chose to say nothing and just shook the man’s hand. “Good afternoon,” he said. “Are you the car guy?”
“I am,” Wortham said. “I knew you was the two I was supposed to meet when I saw this big fella here.” He offered his hand to Boxers as well. “The nice lady on the phone told me to look for him and I’d find you. That was your wife, was it? The lady, I mean.”
“A colleague,” Jonathan said. “That truck’s in good working order, right?” He started walking that direction. The longer they stood in one spot, the more likely a security camera would pick them up. Not that they were doing anything particularly camera-worthy, but he didn’t like to dawdle.
“I’d say it works pretty good, yeah,” Wortham said. “I’m the only owner, got all the scheduled maintenance done on time, and never missed an oil change. I got the receipts in the glove box if you want to see them.”
“Your word is good enough for me,” Jonathan said.
“Me, too,” Boxers growled in his deepest, scariest tone. Translation: You don’t want us to find out you sold us a lemon.
“It’s just exactly as I say,” Wortham said. He darted around them to get to the back lift gate. “I’ll open this up for you,” he said. “All that stuff will fit in there with room to spare.”
They laid the bags on the bed and proved him to be right.
“Now I believe I owe you some money,” Jonathan said. In addition to duffels with weaponry, Jonathan also carried a soft briefcase with cash. Hundred-dollar bills were often even more persuasive than a firearm. For convenience, the bills were banded in stacks of $1,000, and Jonathan pulled out first four packs, and then another four. “There you go,” Jonathan said. “Eight thousand dollars.”
Wortham’s eyes flashed. As he accepted the cash, he said, “You know, I’ve been on this earth for quite a few years, but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen eighty hundred-dollar bills all at one time. But I got to tell you, the actual price was only seventy-eight hundred.” He thumbed through a stack, isolated two bills, then peeled them off and handed them back.
Jonathan reminded himself where he was. In this part of the world, honest people took their honesty very seriously. Venice had told him that the negotiated price was exactly what Wortham said it was, but for Jonathan, that was a rounding error. To present it as such to a man who made his living the hard way could have been a huge insult.
“Thank you,” Jonathan said, accepting the two Franklins.
“Don’t you want the title?” Wortham asked.
Actually, he didn’t. Just as he didn’t want a receipt, a bill of sale, or any other paperwork. Still, he understood that some states took the transfer of personal property more seriously than others. “Sure,” he said. “I was just getting to that. Do you have it with you?”
Wortham pulled it out of an inside pocket of his jacket, and as he did, Jonathan caught a glimpse of the pistol he’d suspected was on the man’s hip. In Ohio, this was not necessarily a source of concern. “You just fill out your name and address right here,” he explained, pointing to the appropriate blocks on the title.
Jonathan made stuff up to fill in the blanks, random numbers and names for the street, but concluded with the real city, Coronado, California, 92118. The only way he was able to pull that zip code out of his ass was because of a Navy SEAL buddy who lived there. He listed his name as John Smith and signed accordingly.
As Jonathan handed the title back to Wortham, the other man hesitated. “I don’t believe you’re who you say you are,” the old guy said.
Jonathan felt a tug of something uncomfortable. “Is that so? Who do you think I am?”
“I think you’re a man who doesn’t ask nearly enough questions before handing over this kind of money.”
Jonathan shrugged. “What can I say? You look like a trustworthy guy.”
“Bullshit,” Wortham said. He looked at the title. “John Smith? Really? You don’t even have more imagination than that?”
Jonathan felt Boxers shifting behind him, growing uncomfortable. “Maybe you need to count that money again, Mr. Wortham. Those bills are all real. It’s more than anyone else will pay you, and I’ve filled out the form. You’ve done everything that the law requires. I think we should leave it at that.”
Wortham hesitated. “I don’t like this,” he said. “I think you two are heading for trouble. That doesn’t bother me so much, but if you get in trouble, that might pull me into trouble. I don’t need none of that.”
“You know what, Mr. Wortham?” Jonathan said. “I haven’t been navigating the planet for as long as you have, but I’ll share one of my big lessons with you. Sometimes, the best information comes from the questions that go unasked.”
Wortham thought about that.
Jonathan continued, “At this point, everything is completely legal. You’ve done what you need to do, and I’ve done what I need to do. If, hypothetically, I have lied in my paperwork, then that is my problem, not yours. Are you catching my drift?”
Wortham took a long time answering. “Where did you two serve?” he said, at length.
“Excuse me?” Jonathan asked. It was mostly a stall for time.
“You both have a military bearing about you,” Wortham said. “An awareness and a look in your eye. I know that sounds like romantic bullshit, but there you go. I trust romantic bullshit. Where did you serve?”
Jonathan cast a look back at Big Guy. How much dared they share?
“I only ask because I’m a vet myself,” Wortham continued. “Back-to-back gunship tours in Vietnam. Got the shrapnel to prove it.”
“Thank you for your service,” Jonathan said, and he cringed at his own words. “Jesus, that sounds clichéd and simple, but I really mean it. Thank you.”
Wortham smiled. “You’re welcome, Mr. John Smith of Coronado, California. Those are nice words. But you still haven’t answered my question. Where did you serve?”
Before he could say anything, Jonathan heard Boxers make a growling sound again. It was Big Guy’s way of warning him not to engage. Wortham could be the nicest guy in the world, but he still had no need to know.
“Let me put it this way,” Jonathan hedged. “You had the military part right. Now, think about every hot spot in the last thirty years or so, and there’s a really good chance that we were there.”
“Are you guys Special Forces or something?” Wortham asked. The facial reactions he saw confirmed it. “Ah. Okay.” Wortham rubbed the back of his head for a few seconds, and then when he looked back up at them, his face was frozen in a place between pain and curiosity. “One thing,” he said. “Just promise me that if I knew what you were doing, I’d be proud to tell people that I’d sold you my car.”
Jonathan smiled. He held out his hand, as if to seal a bet. “That’s a deal, so long as you promise never to tell your friends anything like what you just said you’d be proud to tell them.”
Wortham shook on it. “I miss it, you know,” he said. “It’s terrible to be a man my age and think back and realize that my life was most exciting when I was twenty-two years old.”
Something tugged at Jonathan’s gut when he heard that. It was the secret that civilians could never grasp: As hellish and bloody and deadly and overall awful as war was, nothing outside the battlefield could come within 10 percent of the adrenaline rush.
“Either way,” Jonathan said. “I promise on a stack of Bibles that my friend and I are on the side of the angels.”