“He hands on,” he said with reluctance. “Like bein’ the one does the payout.”
“The payout in drugs.”
Raul felt his insides tighten up. “Look, man, I been straight with you alla way. How come we got to run through this again—?”
“You boost a set of wheels, deliver it to Armand’s chop shop heaven, he pays with crack,” the guy said. “Yes or no?”
Raul continued to hesitate. He was thinking bleakly about the deal he’d had going with Jose, thinking what an unbelievable piece of luck it had looked to be when they met through Raul’s sister, who had been seeing Jose for a while before she hooked them up a couple weeks back. Since then they’d pulled some inside jobs that had been worth a bundle… especially with their terms being wheels in exchange for crack, like the man in the backseat had put it. With flat cash you couldn’t turn it over to double or even triple your profits.
Now Raul took a breath, held it, blew it out his mouth.
“Yeah,” he said finally. Even his voice was quivering now. “That how it works.”
There was another period of silence, this one longer than the last. Blackness swarming the SUV’s windows, no other vehicles in sight, Raul drove on toward what he felt would be certain death, trying to figure how things could have gone downhill for him so fast. That first time at his sister’s place, Jose explained he was a salesman at a dealership in some rich gringo suburb, place with a huge fucking showroom and lot, and that he had access to whatever Raul needed to jack a carriage nice and easy — keys to the building, codes for the gate alarm protecting its outdoor lot, electronic car door openers and starters, even dealer temps and registration documents for him to wave around if he got hauled over by cops. Just as sweet, he could tip Raul to the delivery of a new consignment, give him a chance to roll out a few of the vehicles before they were entered into the computerized inventory.
Raul had really gotten his ass stoked when Jose told him about the expensive Navigators that had arrived, two of them, both cherry and loaded right off the double-decker truck. This was just the other day when they arrived with a big shipment, and he’d known he could drive one from the lot, and that nobody would notice it was gone for at least a month, six weeks. It would probably be another month afterward until the dealer and factory sorted out whether it had been delivered to the lot, or hauled to the wrong one by mistake, or disappeared somewhere else along the way from the production line… no way the setup could’ve have been sweeter. Taking carriages from the dealership was a slam compared to looking for them on the street, where you had to get lucky and find a target that had been left with its door unlocked, or make sure you knew how to bust its antitheft system if it had one, maybe even a GPS tracker — and that was while having to look over your shoulder for its owner, the five-oh, or just some busybody asshole solid citizen who couldn’t keep his eyes in his head where they belonged. Raul had almost never worried about being pinched since he’d got down with Jose, and wouldn’t in his worst nightmares have thought he’d find himself in the spot he was in right now. The thing was here… the thing was that the chop shop would show in his headlights soon, and then what was he supposed to do?
Raul drove through the night, not the slightest clue in his mind, seeing only the worst in store. He had driven maybe another quarter mile toward their destination before the questions started coming at him again.
“Tell me how many of Quiros’s men I can expect,” the guy in back said.
Raul clutched the wheel with whitening knuckles. This was a subject they hadn’t touched on yet, and it had rated high among his wishes that they would not get to it. It wasn’t enough that the hijo de puta had set a trap for him at that streetlight, forced him into taking this suicide ride. He had to keep digging him a deeper hole.
“Can’t be sure,” he said
“Tell me how many,” the guy repeated. “And where they’ll be.”
“Listen, man, please, I don’ know—”
Raul suddenly felt a cold, circular pressure between his neck and the base of his skull. He stiffened with fear, not needing to look around to know his passenger had jammed the silenced barrel of his.45 semiauto into him.
“Give it up,” the guy said.
“I don’ wanna die,” Raul said.
“Don’t be stupid. You already brought me this far along. You think it’ll square things with them if you don’t tell me?”
“I don’ wanna die.”
“Then prove you’ve got an ounce of brains that isn’t fried, Raul,” the guy said. And then paused a moment. “That’s your real name, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You wouldn’t have lied to me about it.”
“No, man, I swear.”
The guy nudged his head forward with the gun barrel.
“Understand this,” he said. “I start to think you did lie, I can’t trust your word on anything else. And that would make you useless to me.”
Raul felt his stomach lurch.
“It my name,” he said. “Swear to God it my name.”
A second or two lapsed. Raul felt the weapon easing back from his head.
“All right, Raul, I’m about to pass along some free wisdom,” the guy said. “Armand won’t care if I hijacked my way into this cart, or you wore white valet gloves letting me through its door. One makes you a foul-up and a loser, the other a sellout. Either way he’ll have you capped without even thinking about any second chances.”
“An’ how ’bout you?” Raul said, fighting down panic. “We get to the garage, you gonna give me one?”
“I have a cross-country Greyhound ticket and expense money in my pocket that says so,” the guy said. “Ride this out with me, you can hop on a bus, visit some relatives far away from here. Or sell the ticket and buy a whole lot of stuff to fill your crack pipe. No skin off mine whatever you decide.”
Raul felt the slow heavy stroke of his heart in the short silence that followed.
“Ain’t got no shot at makin’ it,” he said. “Gonna get myself hurt, don’t care what you say.”
There was another silence that lasted perhaps half a minute. Then the guy in the backseat leaned forward, coming so close Raul could practically feel his lips brush against his ear.
“It’s long odds,” he said. “But I’m all that stands between you and crapping out.”
The Navigator rolled over the snaking, undivided blacktop. In its cargo section, Lathrop glanced out the front windshield, and then through the limotinted windows to either side of him. The chop shop was just ahead to the left. A little closer up on the right he saw the junkyard, its orderly rows of scrap metal hills stretching off into the darkness.
He let his Mark 23 pistol sink below Raul’s headrest.
“You look jumpy,” he said. “Relax.”
“Been tryin’, man.”
“Try harder,” Lathrop said. “If Armand’s guards smell you’re scared, we’ll never get past them.”
Raul inhaled. “What gonna happen after we in the garage? Happen, you know, to me?”
Lathrop shrugged.
“Just worry about bringing us in,” he said. “And about making sure I can believe what comes out of your mouth.”
Raul shook his head, his nervous, rasping breaths very loud over the smooth hum of the engine.
“Why you got to be doubtin’ me like that?” he said with a kind of fearful indignance. “I swore to God, man. Can swear on my mother’s life, you wan’ me to—”