“Hasn’t been much rain.”
Rain.
Bingo.
“Who’s got my money?” she asked.
“Where’s the suitcase?”
She released the door lever, climbed out onto the wing, and dropped to the ground, the gun dangling lazily, familiarly at her side.
“You won’t need that,” one of the men said.
“Gee, I hope not,” she answered.
The desert air was a bit chilly. She wished she had on her flight jacket. One of the men was carrying a small leather case the size of a laptop. He placed it on the rim of the door, snapped it open. Another man turned on a penlight. She was looking at a lot of U.S. currency.
“A hundred and fifty thousand,” one of the men said. “Final payment. As agreed.”
“Where’s the suitcase?” another man said.
“Mind if I count it first?” Cass said.
“Why don’t we all just sit out here in the open till Customs spots us?” the third man said.
“Count it out for me,” Cass said.
“Count it out for her,” the first man said.
He was the one with the cheerful voice. He sounded a trifle impatient now, but she didn’t give a damnhow he sounded. One thing she’d learned in the Army was you didn’t back off. Not on the ground, not in the air. So far all the risk these guys had taken was to sit here in Shit Wallow, Arizona, waiting for her. She was the one carrying the cargo, she was the one whostill had the cargo sitting in a planeshe’d rented. So go right ahead, she thought,get impatient. That’smy money you’re treating so casually there.
The one who’d mentioned Customs slipped the thick rubber band from one of the packets and looped it over his wrist. There was a small tattoo on the back of his left hand. Some kind of bird, looked like a hawk, wings spread wide, claws gripping a fish. He spread the bills to show her there weren’t any pieces of newspaper cut to size in the bundle. Then he began counting them out loud, one by one, “… five, six, seven,” Cass holding the gun, watching, listening, “eight, nine, ten, a thousand. One, two, three, four …”
On and on. There were fifty bills in the packet, all of them hundred-dollar bills. When he counted out the last bill, he rubber-banded the stack again, and dropped it back into the leather case. There were thirty packets of bills in all, each of them about three-quarters of an inch thick. It took the man less than fifteen minutes to count them all out. He snapped the lid on the case shut, and handed it to the first man, who folded his arms across it and held it against his chest like a schoolgirl carrying books. She suddenly thought of Fall River, Massachusetts, where Lizzie Borden had got away with killing her father and her stepmother and where, coincidentally, Cassandra Jean Ridley had spent the first fifteen years of her life, my how the time did fly. What am I doinghere? she wondered.
“The suitcase,” he said.
Cass climbed back into the plane and pulled out the suitcase from where she’d stowed it. She carried it out again in her left hand, the gun in her right, still hanging loose. She was thinking they could shoot her dead the minute she dropped to the ground again, grab the suitcase full of dope, she was sure it was, ride off into the night with the dopeand the money they’d so patiently counted out for her.
It didn’t happen.
She revved up the engine again, the little leather case with $150,000 sitting on the seat beside her, another ten grand in the flap pocket of her jump suit. Tonight I’ll be back in the big bad city, she thought. Her heart was pounding as fiercely as it had over the sands of Iraq.
HANUKKAH WOULD START at sundown today, the twenty-first day of December. Will didn’t much care. He wasn’t even Jewish.
This was always the most dangerous time, going in. Well, comingoutwas no picnic, either, but then you could march right through the front door, say you’d been there to fix the toilet or the sink, nice day, ain’t it? Somebody saw you going in, though, that was another story. Specially when you were going in through a window on a fire escape, nowthat was a little difficult to explain.
He’d been watching the apartment from the roof across the way for the better part of a week now, knew when the lady came and went, even had an opportunity once to see her in the altogether, though inadvertently, he wasn’t no damn Peeping Tom. Redheaded as a cardinal, she was, carpet matching the drapes, a fair sight to behold and a rarity in this day and age. He always so-called cased a joint, he hated criminal jargon, for at least a week before he went in, sometimes two or three, because the one yearning he did not have was to spend any more time behind bars.
Lady was putting on a short red fox jacket now, which meant maybe there were more furs in there than he’d figured. Thing that had first attracted him to her when he was scopingall the apartments across the way was a sable coat came down to the floor, had to be worth fifty large at least. You could always tell a woman with a new fur coat, she pranced in front of the mirror with it all day long. He decided that going into the apartment for just the sable alone might be worth it, plus whatever other little goodies he might find in there. The building was on South Ealey Street in a section of Isola called Silvermine. It was a doorman building, which usually meant any other kind of security was lacking. The lady was heading for the front door now—
“There we go,” Will said out loud.
He still spoke with a Texas twang he should’ve lost after thirty-seven years on this planet, especially since he’d left the state when he was eighteen and never did go back except for his mother’s funeral. He was still a sophomore at UCLA when she died. He guessed maybe her death had something to do with him flunking out the very next year. Her dying so young and all. He sometimes wondered if his life might’ve turned out different if she hadn’t died and he hadn’t flunked out of college. He wondered if he’d’ve become a burglar, anyway. He guessed maybe he would’ve.
Will gave her ten minutes to get clear.
Then he jumped the airshaft to the roof of her building, and came down the fire escape to the ninth floor. He wasn’t expecting any kind of burglar alarm, and there wasn’t any. He jimmied the turnbolt lock on the window, and was inside the apartment in ten seconds flat. No need for a flashlight here in the living room at ten in the morning. Anyway, there was nothing to steal in this room but a TV set and a stereo and he wasn’t any junkie burglar, thank you. He went into the bedroom, went to the windows first to pull down the shades so nobody would look in and see a guy six feet tall at a buck-ninety roaming a bedroom where a lady lived alone. Only when the shades were down did he go to the wall switch and snap on the overhead lights. Bed nicely made, he surely did appreciate neat people. He yanked back the cover, stripped both pillows of their pillow cases, and then went to the closet. The door was closed. He opened it and found—well, oh my stars—not only the long sable coat but a mink stole as well, the lady reallyhad been on a shopping spree. Both were too bulky to fit inside the pillow cases, he tossed them on the bed for now, and went to the dresser.
Everything neatly laid out here, too, rolled nylons and pantyhose in one drawer, tank tops and cotton panties in another, T-shirts and sweaters, all precisely put away as if they were color-coded or something, he figured all at once that either the lady was a nurse or else she’d been in the military. In the top drawer, there was a jewelry box. He opened it. Nothing in it but a bunch of cheap costume jewelry and a long white business envelope with a rubber band around it. He slid the rubber band off, opened the envelope. What he was looking at was a whole big bunch of U.S. currency. He fished in his jacket pocket for his eyeglass case, slipped the glasses out of it, hung them on his nose and his ears, and looked into the envelope again.