Colin Harrison - Afterburn

"I got these worked out in an order," Morris began. "Give us the answer and we'll all get out of here soon as we can." He put a tape recorder on the table. "First thing, please tell me everything you know about Christina's method of encryption that you and she used."

"Okay." Rick tried to control his breathing, hoping to sound cooperative. "We had these trucks that we-"

Morris frowned, slipped off his watch, and took the drill from Tommy.

"Fuck, wait! Wait!"

The drill went into the outside of his left ankle, just above the boot. It was worse this time, the bit grinding into the joint capsule until it punctured through the tendons on the other side, then continuing through the flesh until the spinning tip spurted through the inside of his ankle. "Oh, God, please," Rick cried, gripping the table and squeezing his eyes. "Oh! Fuck, fuck!" He tried sitting up, and when they punched him he kicked furiously and even bit Jones's palm until Tommy choked him with both hands and he went slack.

The drill burned into his ankle again. "Fuck! Fuck!" He twisted in agony, hollering incoherently.

"You ready?" yelled Morris.

"Yes, yes! I'm ready!"

Morris pulled the drill out, blood spackling Rick's pants and shirt, Morris's arms and face.

He lay rigid on the table, not yet believing it, knowing it was true, his hands shaking as he tried to breathe through his nose to calm down. His ankle felt destroyed. He sat up. Blood filled his boot now. He bent forward and grabbed it, squeezing against the wounds. Right through everything, tendon, bone, the sock. His back was drenched in sweat and he smelled piss. A warm stain spread across his crotch.

"That's fine, just catch your breath." Morris wiped himself off while Tommy held the drill. "Just catch your breath and then tell us, Rick."

Everything except where she is, he decided. Everything but that. I promise you, Christina. They can kill me and I won't say it. "We had trucks," he began, clutching his ankle as tightly as he could. "We had to get into the city… The problem was-this fucking hurts — the problem was the cops had all our phones tapped, which we knew, we could deal with that. Also, maybe the pay phones around our truck dispatch office. We knew we couldn't trust the phones… Also, Tony didn't want to get the cellular phones that encrypt the call, okay? He didn't trust them. So I was explaining this to Christina one day and she said she could come up with a system." He didn't know what he was saying. "Tony kind of liked this idea. But he said he also wanted it done so that as few people as possible had the information. He didn't want to have to know it, because he didn't want to have to give it up, okay? Like that." He moved one hand to his foot wound. "So the system-we worked it out-was this. Let's say it was with Frankie, one of Tony's regular fences-"

"We were busy with Frankie after Christina got arrested."

"So?" Rick cried anxiously.

"So we thought he was the one who did it," said Morris.

"What?" He looked into the faces of Jones and Tommy. Nothing. Men waiting for a late train.

"You don't get it?" Morris asked.

"No." His foot felt stinging, hot. "What? What?"

Morris smoothed the front of his green shirt. "He didn't do it. It took a long time to figure that out."

"What?"

"Like you don't know, or who."

"Who?"

"Maybe you, maybe Christina."

"What? No! No way!"

Morris rubbed the face of his watch. "All right, keep talking."

"The shipments were monthly… we couldn't risk any more than that, we were always trying to be careful. So Christina and the fence had to both know where the shipment was coming in. We had a numbered list of drop-off spots. Warehouses and loading docks that were safe. We were usually using a plain thirty-foot truck, not a tractor trailer, so we could actually get it in during the day, which is actually better, you don't look so fucking suspicious…" He stopped. What else did they want? He pulled the lace out of the shoe of his good foot and tied it tightly around his ankle above the wounds to pinch off the blood flow.

"That's smart," Morris said. "Not too tight, though."

"What we wanted was a way so that Christina and the fence knew which drop-off place. We needed what Christina called a 'random number generator.' That's a real term, you can look it up. The number you got gave you the drop-off place. We needed a way for each to get the number, the same number, without talking to each other. It had to be a public place. That way, if you have guys watching you, all they see is that you're walking around some public place, looking at all the things everybody usually looks at." He felt a little calmer. "What we needed was-Shit, can I at least have something to drink?"

"Tommy, get the man a drink. We got some stuff in the car."

"All right."

"Will you at least put that thing down?" Rick pointed at the drill.

"More talk, Rick, we need more talk."

He nodded in miserable compliance and drew a breath, but not a good one. "Also, it had to be a reasonably big place, because that way Christina and the fence are not close together. So Tony liked the idea, but he said they couldn't go to the same place each time. They had to go to a different place. So Christina had to come up with different public places in the city, in Manhattan, where you could get a random number generated." He looked at the men, told himself to keep talking. Fill up the room with talk, you bastard, and make sure you don't tell them where Christina is. "So what you do is you agree ahead of time what day you're going to both be there looking to get the number. Same day, same exact moment. You also had to have a number that stayed the same for a little while, like at least ten seconds, to account for human error. But you also wanted the number to change pretty frequently, too, so that it would be difficult to catch, so that if Christina was standing in front of the generator for like a minute, then maybe five numbers go by and somebody watching her can't tell which one it is."

"Go on."

"I am, I fucking am," Rick breathed, trying to move his foot. Impossible. Still bleeding, but not dangerously. Tommy returned and handed him a bottle of iced tea. Why was he talking so much? What else would he say? "It's been a few years, you know? So Christina explains this and he says, Fine, but come up with a bunch of different places, I want a way so that you and the fence don't have to talk to each other. So Christina figures that one out, too."

"But how do you know what time to go to the same place?" said Morris. "You got to decide on that every month."

"You could just set it at a regular time… but that makes you predictable. So Christina put a wrinkle in for that, too. You get the time and day from the numbers themselves. You combine the last number with the new number," he remembered out loud. "The last number gives you the hour and the new number gives you the day. So if the old number was three and the new one was four, then you met at three o'clock on the fourth day of the next month to get the next number."

"What about the numeral zero?" Morris looked at his piece of paper. "How do you handle that?"

"Zero was ten. Also, she made a rule that numbers seven through nine were a.m., zero was 10:00 a.m., and numbers one through six were in the afternoon… that way she was always out when lots of other people were around, didn't look strange. Now, with the date, zero was also treated as ten. So that gave you the date of the next meeting. It was always in the first ten days of the month, that way."

"What about the time and date of the drop-off? You can't just make that any old time, with traffic and parking and all. Plus fucking parades and shit."

"That's true. She had some kind of trick for that."

"You could just set a regular time for a particular date, taking into account the traffic for the truck."