Colin Harrison: Afterburn

"Bunch of fucking air conditioners. What's the big money?"

Paul sighed. "There were ten boxes of cash on that truck, Rick. We needed to move the cash out of Miami. It was getting hard to launder down there. It was piling up. We were behind fifty or sixty million. The guy doing it down there had some health problems. Skin cancer. Just a little black mole and the next day they say he's dying. So Tony decides to do the cash in New York for a little while. We got it as far as Virginia with two cars and switched it into the truck with the air conditioners."

"I didn't know!"

"There was no reason for you to know. It was all small bills. I mean fifties and hundreds. Old money. The boxes were marked. You couldn't just tell, you had to know what to look for. The plan was that Frankie was to pick them up." Paul slowed to let a private carting-service truck pass him. "Then the deal was fucked up, the cops started appearing out of nowhere, and we still don't know why. After they seized the truck and the air conditioners, we found Frankie an hour later, and he turned over the boxes he'd been able to off-load. He said he'd only found eight of the ten. He swore it. We believed him. We had no reason to doubt him. He was right on time, and the mileage on his van was right. We had a video camera inside the van that he didn't even know about. Also, there was a security camera outside the loading dock, down the street, and we got hold of the tape. We grabbed that before the cops found it. It showed him taking eight boxes out of the truck and then looking for the others. You can actually see him looking."

"So? I didn't know any of this," said Rick.

"You were so fucking depressed, you didn't know anything, Rick." Paul glanced at him. "It took us three months to get that tape. Frankie lived in his house the whole time, by prearrangement. He said he had nothing to hide. He gave us his car and his passport and his bank numbers. It all checked out. Then we figured that the two boxes of cash somehow got mixed up with the ones seized by the police. It took us a hell of a long time to get someone inside the evidence room to look. They had to go into a police warehouse. I still don't know where it is. They counted the boxes. Two were missing. That meant that Frankie's story didn't hold up. We told him we would kill his kids. He just fucking wept. Swore he was innocent. We decided to believe him. Maybe a cop stole the boxes, right? Maybe in the confusion they got moved. We let him go and he came back to work. So we're wondering, Where the fuck are the two boxes? Four hundred and something boxes, maybe they didn't look inside every one. Nobody heard anything about a bunch of money. So we paid the guy to go back to the warehouse and look again. This took time. We were worried the police would sell the air conditioners at a sheriff's auction. We'd have to buy them all back, maybe. So we paid the guy to actually go rip open all the fucking boxes, every one. We got him a staple gun so he could close them up again. No cash. So we went back over it, slow and careful. Christina was in prison, she wasn't going anywhere. And you were whacked out and half drunk all the time. We followed you, we knew where you were. Tony said, Let's just watch him. We knew you'd put some cash in Aunt Eva's basement, but we knew that wasn't our money. Yours was all in hundreds. We watched you out in that fisherman's shack next to the ocean, working on the boat. You were fucking some divorced housewife with a fat ass. We knew everything. We paid her to tell us everything you said. We also bugged her phone in case she was lying. It made no sense to us. You weren't acting like you had any money at all. You spent hours in your garden with the tomatoes. We checked, we watched. We bribed the prison to tell us about Christina's phone calls. Nothing. She didn't tell anyone about any money, not even her mother. Who had the money? Nobody heard anything. Usually you hear something. Maybe nobody had the money. It was a big problem. We're talking five million dollars. Meanwhile, Frankie started acting funny. Wigged out. Couldn't take the pressure. He moved to Phoenix. Started driving to Las Vegas. We followed him, checked him out. I talked to him. He said, Audit me, go through every fucking piece of paper, Paul. Turns out he kept very good records. I'm an accountant, I should know. He could reconcile every dime of expense with every dime of income. We followed it back to the origin. He was clean."

Rick watched Paul exhale, blink, their eyes avoiding each other. He knew all his mannerisms. Paul was getting old enough that he looked a lot like their father when Rick was young. We were all related, Rick thought, but not really family. We didn't know how to be together.

"So," Paul continued, moving the car toward the Manhattan Bridge, "we kept studying it. Tony had videotaped the money going into the boxes, the boxes being marked, the boxes going into the truck. Somewhere between Virginia and New York, the boxes disappeared. We didn't have a satellite beeper on the truck, because other people could track it that way. We thought that would be creating evidence. We didn't ask you because we had you being watched and we didn't want you to think we were suspicious. We knew the mileage on the truck when it left and had to find out what was on it now. We bought back the truck at a sheriff's auction. But some fucker had driven it something like three hundred miles over what the expected mileage would be. There was no time for you and Christina to put those kinds of extra miles on the truck. We figured that the police used the truck in one of their setups, and this accounted for the extra miles. Anyway, we tore that truck apart looking for something, some hidden compartment, whatever. Nothing."

Rick remembered now. They'd pulled off the interstate west of Philadelphia and eaten an early lunch with Christina's parents. Never told Tony, since he'd have forbidden it. But Christina had said, We're so close, ten miles. I miss them, I miss my father. Her father hadn't looked too good. Thin, coughing in the summer heat. But big on moving to Florida soon. Christina clearly worried about them. Rick had taken a nap in the back bedroom, tired from the drive. Maybe an hour, not much more. Then they had pulled back on the road to New York and driven right into the fucked-up situation. The cops came out of nowhere. Just a load of air conditioners, and all this.

They reached the Manhattan Bridge, which would take them into Chinatown. Bumper-to-bumper traffic. Paul cleared his throat. "She took the two boxes, Rick."

"I don't believe it."

"She took the boxes off the truck, hid them, figured out a way to flag the cops, and went to prison. You never knew. That's what we found out with your arm. You never knew. She was smart enough not to tell you."

"That's bullshit," said Rick, feeling cold and alone.

"Hey, we cut off your arm to see if you knew! I told Tony that you didn't know, but he didn't believe me! I tried to give you a way out!" cried Paul. "I gave you the card and the money. I had the card set up so I'd be informed of all your charges within ten minutes. You can set it up that way, say it's a minor's account. I thought I could track you like that, if I had to."

"That was how they got me at the fucking whorehouse?"

"Yeah, yeah. Tony insisted." Paul eased up behind a cab. "I figured sooner or later we'd find her, but you had to stay in it."

"You knew I would."

"I figured, yeah." Paul sounded tired now. He didn't like problems and messes. He liked money. You traded one for the other, round and round.

"They were really supposed to put the arm in the cooler?" Rick asked, shifting the shotgun.

"Yes."

The exhaust from the traffic was coming in the broken rear window. "They didn't."

"That was Tony fucking with me personally." Paul rubbed his eyes. "We've been having some problems. He's getting erratic."