“Yeah.”
“With your stash?”
“Where else?”
“OK, OK. We walk you to the airplane and we watch you take off. Then tomorrow night Al and me, we pretend like we’ve just arrived, you know, in New York to take care of this contract on you, and we ask around and we find out, Jesus Christ, the guy left town. So we snoop around a little, we play private eye, we find out you bought a ticket to Europe. We report back to our contact. I mean the man didn’t pay us to go all the way to Europe or Africa or Hong Kong, did he.”
“What man? Who’s the man?”
“Somebody very high up. That’s all we know. Now maybe the man tells us the contract is off, or maybe the man hires somebody else to chase you around Europe, or maybe the man pays us extra bread to go find you and waste you. I can’t say what’ll happen, George. It’ll be up to you to keep your head down because God knows who might come looking for you. We ain’t writing guarantees on you—this ain’t the Prudential Life Insurance Company. We’re just giving you a head start.”
“I see that.”
“For fifty kay.”
“I ain’t got no fifty kay in my stash.”
“What’ve you got in it?”
Ramiro rubbed his eyes and finally said with infinite disgust, “Short of forty. About thirty-eight five.”
“Thirty-eight five. Al, what do you say?”
Mathieson lifted one shoulder—a shrug of contempt.
“I think maybe Al wants to waste you, George.”
“Then go ahead and shoot. I knew it wasn’t my night. Took a bath in poker. You want to turn my pockets out? I got maybe fifty dollars left.”
“Thirty-eight five, that’s a funny number. How come, George?”
“I figured I’d build it up to forty and leave it at that. I had to borrow fifteen centuries from it last week for something.”
“Al, what do you say we settle for thirty-five kay. We leave the man thirty-five hundred for his airplane ticket and expenses. What do you say?”
Mathieson repeated the shrug. The adrenaline was pumping through him, making him shake; he kept the Magnum braced against the headrest so Ramiro wouldn’t see the tremor.
“That’s the deal, George. You want it?”
“For thirty-five thousand dollars I ought to at least get a name. One name. Who put out this contract?”
“It’s not for you to make terms, George. It’s for you to accept them.”
“Yeah I know. But you guys seem to be in a mood to do favors tonight. I just figured, you know.”
“The contract came down through channels, George. That’s all we know.”
“Yeah, all right, but what channels?”
“The same channels that put paper on those guys in Oklahoma and California. The same guy on the phone who called Deffeldorf and Tyrone. More than that I can’t tell you because more than that I don’t know. You figure that’s worth your thirty-five kay?”
Ramiro kept blinking. His eyes were filled with tears. It didn’t mean anything; they’d been that way ever since they’d got into the car; but Mathieson thought he could see the ponderous slow brain working behind the ravaged face. Ramiro said bitterly, “Oh Jesus H. Christ. What the fuck. What the fuck did I do?”
“You stepped on somebody’s sore corn, I guess.”
Mathieson wiggled the Magnum. It was his entire contribution to the discussion but it drew Ramiro’s attention.
“I got a wife, what about my wife?”
“You got your life, George. You worry about that first.”
“But I——”
“Maybe two, three months go by and the heat cools. Maybe then you call your wife on the transoceanic cable and you arrange for her to come join you somewhere. How’s that sound?”
Ramiro bit his lower lip. “Can I just call’ her, tell her she shouldn’t worry?”
That was when Mathieson knew they had him hooked.
Homer said, “Think, George, use your head. No phone calls. You can understand that, can’t you?”
Mathieson wiggled the Magnum again. Homer said, “Now where’s the stash?”
“I guess I ain’t got much to lose.”
“I guess you don’t.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah, well those are the breaks sometimes, George. You could’ve been dead, you know. You still can be if you try anything humorous.” He glanced at Mathieson and winked. “And with your own piece at that. Nice piece of iron. What do you use for target practice, George? Six-inch armor plate?”
There was no resistance left in Ramiro. “Look, suppose the man finds out you crossed him. The man that put out the contract on me.”
“He won’t find out, will he, George.” Homer tapped Ramiro’s sore finger. It jerked away and Homer smiled. “Where’s the stash?”
Ramiro pursed his mouth and blew air through his lips. “Shit. It’s right here.”
“Here?”
“Where I go, this car goes. I want my stash where I can get it in a hurry, right? It stays in the car.”
“Here? In the car for Christ’s sake? You never heard of a Cadillac Fleetwood getting ripped off, George? You’re that stupid?”
“Look, why do you care if I’m stupid or not? Shit, the organizations know whose car this is, they know the license plates. The amateurs, shit, anybody busts into this car without the right key, he gets a faceful of cyanide gas.”
Homer grinned at Mathieson. “It’s a good thing we used the man’s own key, ain’t it, Al.”
“Ain’t nobody going to fuck with George Ramiro’s car,” Ramiro said, but it was only a faint dying echo of bluster. “Anyway the stash, nobody ever finds the stash. I welded it myself. Nobody’d ever spot it.”
“Where is it?”
Ramiro’s raw eyes swiveled painfully toward the Magnum. “Shit. I open it and you kill me.”
“It’s your choice, George.”
Ramiro didn’t speak. Homer said, “Now we know it’s in the car we could spend the next two years taking this car apart screw by screw. We know it’s in the car but we ain’t wasted you yet, have we? That ought to mean something.”
Totally deflated Ramiro jerked his head reluctantly toward the dashboard. “Under the radio. The whole thing. You look close, you’ll see two keyholes. Takes two Schlage keys to get into it.”
“Let’s see them.”
“My shirt pocket.”
Homer fished in it. Mathieson watched him extract two small brass keys and bounce them in his palm.
“Take it easy when you open it up. Everything falls out on the floor it’ll take you all night to get it picked up and sorted out. You slide it out easy, it comes right out like a drawer.”
Homer passed Mathieson the keys and took the Magnum from him. “Open it up, Al.”
Mathieson turned around in the seat and found the keyholes low in the metal of the dashboard, deep in shadow. He turned both locks and looked for a handle. In the back seat Ramiro said, “You leave the key in the lock. You pull with the key until it comes open enough to grab the edge.”
He reinserted one of the keys and pulled and it slid easily toward him—an entire section of the underside of the dash.
The drawer was irregularly shaped, crowded with canvas money packets. There was an empty money belt, a passport in a wallet, a leather zipper case filled with shaving gear and toiletries and an old-fashioned pineapple hand grenade.
He made sure the pin was secured to the grenade handle. It wasn’t a booby trap. If it had been we’d all be sky-high.
He looked behind him. Ramiro sat rigid with his eyes squeezed shut and his fists locked on his knees, white-knuckled. If he was going to die it would come now—that was what Ramiro had to be thinking.
Homer said, “Let’s go to the airport, Al.”
5
Through the observation panes he watched the 747 taxi away from the ramp. Homer’s narrow mouth was stretched back to the point of splitting. “Bon voyage, George.”
They walked down the stairs. Homer said, “You were beautiful. You had me scared. That wild thing in your eyes.”