“Back then, me and Clay Warfield was prospects, we were buds. Back then. Now he’s the president of SS International. You believe it? President of the world. Man, did he get lucky or what?”
No luck had entered into Warfield’s ascendancy to infamy. He rose in the ranks of the most dastardly outlaw motorcycle gang in the world through blackmail, tyranny, mayhem, and cold-blooded murder. The FBI wanted him worse than any other crook, almost more than the top man in Al Qaida.
Drago continued on, “Another buddy a mine, he worked for a big-time locksmith, an affiliate of the SS. I helped him install the clubhouse safe, this big double-door monster. Weighed at least two thousand pounds.”
“You hid three hundred thousand dollars in the safe of the Sons of Satan clubhouse?” I asked.
“No, not exactly. Okay, look, I guess I’m gonna have to explain the whole thing.” He paused, waiting for us to tell him to go on, to beg him.
Marie put her hands on her hips and turned and walked away a few steps to cool off.
“Come on, Drago, keep going,” I said.
“What kinda bug flew up her ass?”
Marie spun around and pointed a finger at him. “I do not like this man.”
“Drago.”
“All right. All right. Look, I did the armored job with this other bud a mine. And later that same week he took a fall for his third B and E. I knew he was gonna flip and give me up. I knew I was goin’ in for a good long jolt because of the thing with the guard. So I needed a safe place to hide the money, a place that was going to still be there when I got out. You ever see the movie Thunderbolt and Lightfoot? The dude hid the money in the wall of the old schoolhouse, and they moved the whole damn schoolhouse. You see that movie?”
“Drago.”
“Man, you’re worse than a woman on the rag. Okay, so I think, what better place to-”
Marie stepped back over. “We got all that. You hid it in the clubhouse safe, great. How do you know they haven’t already found the money? Why wouldn’t they find a big bag of money like that? This doesn’t make any sense.”
“The guy who helped you out on the armored car job,” I said, “his name was Stanley Granville?”
“Yeah, that’s right. How did you know?”
Granville, aka Big Grandy, had been Drago’s second murder victim, the guy he killed his first time out on parole. “Go on,” I said.
“I’m with ya about them finding the money, but not a chance in hell,” said Drago. “They haven’t found it, guaran-fucking-teed.”
Marie shouted, “Why?”
Drago looked at her, paused, then said, “Because I thought this whole thing out, believe me. Listen to this, I bought gold with the money, melted it down into this big doughnut-ring-looking kinda thing, and painted it black so it looked like steel. My bud, who I helped put the safe in, didn’t even know it was gold. No one knows it’s gold. We had to anchor the safe to the floor, to these large bolts, preset in concrete. I told this bud o’ mine that the doughnut was like a washer, a spacer kind of thing between the safe and the floor so the safe wouldn’t rock. I did it with the SS standing right over us watching the whole time. The dumbasses.”
The simplicity of his plan was brilliant and at the same time ballsy. No one in the world would find his stash. But what made it safe, made extraction a problem. Getting the doughnut out while keeping your skin. The caper’s plan now went from a sneak and peek to running into a lion’s den with five or six hungry lions in residence, grabbing a forty-pound haunch of lamb, and escaping without getting your ass eaten.
While I pondered Drago’s grand design and the consequences of failure, my mind worked subconsciously. “Wait. Wait a minute,” I said. “You bought gold twenty-five years ago? How much was it an ounce?”
“What? Hell, I don’t know. I knew this fence who traded me gold for the cash. Gold melts real easy. I mean not real easy, but with not as much heat as you’d think you’d need. I used a blowtorch and poured it into a sand mold, little at a time. Took forever.”
“How much? What was the weight?”
“Forty pounds. You’d have thought three hundred thousand would have bought more than a measly little forty pounds. You should have seen how small forty pounds was.” He made a motion with his hands indicating a small pile. “It was sad, man, I’m telling you, a damn shame, really.”
“So, this doughnut thing you smelted, it weighs forty pounds?”
“Yeah, that’s right. What’d I just say? In fact, the fence discounted the money ’cause it was hot. He wouldn’t give me the whole three hundred thousand in gold. He said the cash was hot. What a bunch of bullshit. But what could I do?”
Marie had caught on to where I was headed with my questions and jumped in. “So, you’re sure about the forty pounds though, right?”
“What’s the matter with you two idgits? That’s what I said. Two hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars, after Mad Mike took his cut, got me right around forty pounds, give or take an ounce.”
Marie looked away as her mind went to work. I stepped closer. Her brainpower far surpassed mine. So as not to disrupt her, I quietly said, “Sixteen ounces in a pound, how many ounces in forty pounds?”
“Six hundred and forty,” she said. “What’s the price per ounce today?”
“Seventeen-fifty.”
When you lived with a bunch of expats who watched commodities like a kettle of hawks, you tended to pick up on that sort of mundane minutia.
Drago’s voice went up to just short of a yell. “Wait. Wait. What’s seventeen-fifty? No way. You’re sayin’ an ounce of gold is going for seventeen hundred and fifty dollars?”
Marie waved her hand for us to be quiet as she tried to compute the large figures in her head.
“I thought gold went up and down a little,” Drago said, “but stayed pretty close to the same price. That’s what Mad Mike Farris told me. He told me that twenty-five years ago when we made the deal, that gold stayed pretty steady.”
“Sssh,” I told Drago.
Marie looked up.
“Well?” I asked.
“One million, one hundred and twenty thousand.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“A million two?” Drago yelled. “You’re shittin’ me, right? That can’t be right. A million two.” He started to mutter to himself.
I pulled Marie far enough away from the van that Drago couldn’t hear, but close enough to keep the Glock on him. “What do you think?”
“I’m no good at this kind of thing, Bruno. I don’t know.” She thought about it for a moment. “What was that thing about Granville? What was his first name?”
“Stanley Granville, Big Grandy. I didn’t put it together until just now. I asked Mack why the Feds were involved in watching Drago. He said the money from the armored car was federally insured. That story didn’t sound right, not for a twenty-five-year-old robbery, but I went with it. Granville pulled the job with Drago.”
“At first Drago said a bud, and didn’t give a name,” said Marie.
“Right. He’s trying to keep the details down on the fabricated part of the lie so it’s easier to remember. Drago went in for twenty-five to life for the armored car robbery and got out on parole the first time after doing twelve years. He came out, killed Stanley Granville for ratting him out, and went back in for another twenty-five to life, did another twelve and got out this time.”
“Okay, and?”
“Twelve years ago, Granville was the president of the SS.”
“Honey, I know I’m missing something here, so just spell it out,” Marie said.
“Drago was the FBI’s staked goat. They were waiting for Clay Warfield, current president of the SS, to order the hit on Drago for killing their past president and for the hit to be carried out. Then they would have a dead Drago, no loss there, and a conspiracy to commit murder with a RICO violation on the Sons of Satan. The FBI could dismantle a large chunk of the SS and make a huge splash in the news.”