“No. First I’d have to pay off Harvey, the twenty-five. The other twenty-five, that’s what we’d split.”
“Oh. So now I’m down to one-eighth.”
“Listen, your take would be twelve-five. For driving a forklift. You could forklift the entire stock of nine Wal-Mart stores and not make that kind of dough. And this is cash. No deductions, no taxes, no out of pocket expenses.”
His eyes narrowed. “So what’s it all about?”
Benny cleared his throat and sat a little closer. “You know anything about pay phones?”
“I know you put a quarter in them, you can make a call.”
“That’s about what most people know. Did you also know they’re nothing short of a gold mine?”
“They only hold a few coins.”
“That’s what most people think.”
“They think that because it’s true.”
“Sure, but that’s just one phone. There’s thousands of them. On collection day it’s big money.”
“I’m listening,” Beemer said.
“You know the phone company?” Benny said. Beemer waited for it. “Well,” Benny said, “this guy I know is going to find one of their collections.”
“He’s going to find it? They’re gonna lose it, but they just don’t know it yet?”
“I don’t have the details. Anyway, he’s going to need some help.”
“Before or after he finds it?”
“After.”
“So what does he need help for?”
“To move the stuff. Coins are heavy.” Benny pointed at the till. “Got a roll of quarters there?” Beemer took a roll of quarters out of the till and set it on the bar. Benny picked it up. Hefted it. “Forty quarters. Ten bucks. What do you think this weighs?”
Beemer took the roll and hefted it a few times himself.
“I dunno. Five, six ounces.”
“Close,” Benny said. “But you’re a little light. One quarter weighs 0.567 grams. Forty of ’em is eight ounces. That adds up fast. It’ll take three guys to shift this load the guy’s gonna find.”
Beemer put the roll back in the till and slammed the drawer shut. “This isn’t no armored car robbery you’re talking about, is it? ’Cause if it is—”
“You’re asking is it Brinks?”
“Brinks or whoever else. Those guys will shoot you.”
“Well, it isn’t Brinks. It doesn’t work that way. How it works is the telco makes its own collections. They sort the coins, roll ’em, enter the proceeds on the books. Then Brinks picks up the money and delivers it to the bank.”
“Why doesn’t Brinks just pick it up from the phones in the first place and take it straight to the bank?”
“That’s what I asked. But that won’t work. Each phone is just peanuts, sending Brinks around would be too expensive. Besides, the telco has to know how much money they collected, they can’t take somebody else’s word for it. So they count it first and then make the deposit.”
Beemer didn’t say anything.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Benny said. “It’s still just a few quarters, right?”
“And dimes. And nickels.”
Benny grinned. “That’s the good part. This guy is only gonna find the quarters.”
“Oh, well then. The big money.”
“Listen, you got to look at the wider picture. I don’t know how many pay phones the telco has but they’re everywhere. Say they got five thousand of them and they average a hundred bucks a collection, each one. That’s half a million dollars.”
“Okay.”
“Cash.”
“Sure. But hold on. You said one hundred large.”
“For the whole telco, half a million. This is just one route collection.”
Beemer thought a minute. He walked down the bar, picked up some coins and the empty Coke glass left there by the old guy, put the glass on the wash rack, and came back to Benny, counting the coins in his hand.
“I was wrong. He tipped me a quarter. Prob’ly decided he won’t need a new pair of earmuffs for awhile.” He dropped the quarter in a jar by the till, and sorted the rest of the coins into the cash drawer. “So when would you need me?”
“Soon,” Benny said. “And we’ll need your brother’s truck.”
“That looks like him,” Benny said as they drove in, nodding out the windshield at a three-ton rental parked at the far end of the Tim Hortons lot. Beemer guided the Chevy pickup across the asphalt and into the next slot. As they got out, the driver of the three-ton slid out of the cab and came around the rear of the vehicle.
“Beemer, I want you to meet Metro Schalke,” Benny said, leaning his head at the driver, a tall, big-boned guy with a high forehead, a mane of thick dark hair, deep-set eyes, and pale skin that made him look like Bela Lugosi in the role of Dracula.
“Pleasedameetcha,” Beemer said.
Metro Schalke said something that sounded like “Biffle!” looked Beemer up and down, and turned back toward the three-ton.
“He don’t shake hands, this guy?” Beemer said. They watched Schalke climb back into the cab.
Benny shrugged, explaining in a low voice, “His mother was Romanian, his father was German, he’s from Uzbekistan.”
“He could be from Planet X,” Beemer said. “What he looks like is somebody I saw on a late movie. This guy that sucked the blood out of you and flew around like a bat.”
They drove out of the lot together, all crowded into the cab of the three-ton, Dracula at the wheel, Benny in the middle, Beemer looking annoyed with his elbow out the passenger’s window.
“This warehouse you mentioned,” Beemer said testily, “where is it?”
“Up in Burnside,” Benny told him. “Close.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Beemer said.
They took the new bridge across the harbor, which at the other end, after the toll booths, led into the Burnside business park area. The warehouse was tucked in deep between an auto impound lot and a ceramic tile company. Hard to see from the road. They drove around to the rear and backed the three-ton up to a loading door.
Dracula had a key to the place. He knew where the alarms were and how to operate them and went right to them and switched them off. The only light came from a small lamp over a desk, the big overhead fluorescents all dark. He pressed a button and the loading door rattled up.
Dracula pointed.
Off to one side of the room, against a wall, stood a white commercial-duty van with the telco logo on the side, its rear doors thrown open. Inside was a mound of black boxes. Each box was about two feet long, a foot high and a foot deep, and each was secured with a heavy padlock. Benny counted twenty of them.
“Bingo,” he said, grinning.
Beemer studied the black boxes. “So how,” he said, “did they come to be here, all the way from the telephone company, no dimes and no nickels?”
Benny shrugged. “Ask him.”
“Mizzle,” Schalke told them.
“Oh, well then, that explains it,” Beemer said. He rolled his eyes.
Beemer found a forklift somewhere far back in the darkness, an electric one that you drove by standing in a slot at the rear and steering with a small hand-wheel like a crank. It could turn on a dime. He came shooting out of the shadows on it, and in five minutes he had the small black boxes neatly stacked in the back of the three-ton.
Schalke locked up and they left, stopping by the Tim Hortons so that Beemer could pick up his brother’s truck. Then Schalke led the way to an address out on Windmill Road, Beemer trailing behind in the pickup. They left the verge of the city lights and arrived at a barn out behind a hill with lots of trees pressing up around.
“Kinda dark here,” Beemer said, getting out of the half-ton. “Now what?”
“Now,” Benny said, “we divvy up. Load our share into the pickup and we’re outta here. You’ll have to move the pickup back to back with the three-ton.”