Colin Harrison - Afterburn

"No."

"You don't have any communicable diseases, do you?"

She pulled the cigarette from her mouth angrily. "Hey, I've been in prison for four years, Charlie. I've had sex with one other guy since coming out, but he, unlike you, wore a rubber, okay? I don't do drugs, I'm clean, I-"

"Okay," he interrupted, standing again with his pants. "Tell me what's happening now, what the story is."

"I will. Just give me a moment. Don't leave, Charlie, please."

"I'm not, I'm cold." He went over to the air conditioner and turned it down. "Go on. I want to hear about your life of crime."

"You're not mad anymore?"

"Are you?" he asked.

"No," she said flirtatiously.

"Then I'm not, either."

"And you still like me?"

"Yes."

"You still think I'm terrific?"

"The cat's pajamas."

She was pleased. "Good." She propped herself up agreeably on the pillows against the headboard. "I told you I used to help my boyfriend deliver truckloads of stolen stuff, right? After a while he got me to plan the arrival in New York, get the buyers to show up at the right time in the right place and make the whole thing go down smoothly. I sort of liked it."

"An intellectual task."

"Right. I had a map of all the truck stops on the Eastern seaboard in case we had trouble with the truck. I had false importer's invoices printed up… false order forms from a dummy corporation, fake phone numbers, fake answering machines…" She retrieved the pillows absentmindedly and plumped them into shape. "Rick had a legitimate commercial trucker's license. We were careful about having up-to-date licenses on the outside. The way you do that is you use ones from trucks that are being repaired."

Charlie lay back on the bed. "Go on," he said. "Christina, right? Go on, Christina."

She gave him a playful punch. "You'll like me better this way, I'm telling you."

"Sure, okay."

"That is, if you want to see me again."

"If I see you again, I have to go into training first. Keep telling it."

"Simple," she said. "I got tired of it, I wanted to get out. That's all I've really wanted for like five years now, just to be left alone. I wanted to stop being involved with Rick and his people." She spoke toward the dark ceiling. "He wanted to do three more jobs, each one bigger, just to get set up, and then he was going to go legit. Maybe buy into a car dealership, a gym, a bar, something. His older brother was a mob accountant, could have set him up easily. With a really big job he would make maybe a hundred thousand. I went along with it."

"Weren't you worried?" Charlie asked. He couldn't help but run his hand over her belly.

"Three or four days a month were tense, where everybody got nervous, but once the thing went through, you sort of just hung out." She turned over and pushed him onto his side. "We usually took a little trip after a job, just to relax. But I wanted to stop. I never told Rick." She rubbed the scars on his back as she spoke. "I'd done a lot of jobs and I was tired of it. I was tired of Rick. We were going nowhere. But I couldn't get away from the… well, the sex. I wanted to… but I was stupid, I guess. I needed to break it off somehow. But if I simply walked away, then his people would come looking for me."

"You knew too much."

"They couldn't just have me floating around out there. I was scared of this guy Tony Verducci, our boss, I guess you could say. I'd always be looking over my shoulder. We had a job coming up and I spent a lot of time thinking about it. Air conditioners. The thing with these jobs is, you want to get the stuff disposed of quickly. We had to pick up the truck-that was Rick's business-and then get it into the city. The fence wanted to be able to take the cargo out in maybe half an hour with a forklift, which, if the stuff is on pallets, is not a problem, not at all, especially if you have two forklifts and guys who know what they're doing."

He pictured it. "I used to watch forklifts load huge cargo planes."

"Also, we wanted the truck back," she said. "Sometimes we'd pick up a used cab over on Tonnelle Avenue in Jersey City, where they sell them for eight, nine thousand, no questions asked, all cash, maybe use it a few times, then vacuum it, all the hair and everything, then wipe all the fingerprints off and leave it somewhere, but we wanted to keep this one. The load was just air conditioners. In the summer in the city it gets so hot, people just say what the hell and go out and buy them. Or they've been running theirs all day and night and it breaks. A small air conditioner can cost three hundred dollars. The middle of July was the best time. People've come back from the July Fourth holiday and started to settle in for the real heat. If you buy an air conditioner in the end of July, you're going to think to yourself that you made a good decision because you can still run it for another six weeks."

"You sound like a corporate marketing executive."

"I'll come work for you."

He grunted at the impossibility of it. "Keep telling me."

"You enjoying this?"

"Very exotic from my point of view."

She kicked her legs. "See, a young woman like me is very insecure with an older gentleman like you. I worry that I might not make an impression."

"That's a lie and you know it."

She laughed. "Yes. I do know it."

"You have sort of an amazing capacity, miss."

"Depends on who's on the other end." She climbed over his back and kissed his neck. He could feel her breasts, her warm belly.

"Tell me the rest of the story."

She lay next to him, talking into his ear. "Okay, so… we had five fences who were going to buy the stuff off the truck. The air conditioners retailed for eight hundred and forty-nine dollars. We were going to sell that same box for two hundred dollars to the fence, who would have no trouble selling it for four hundred. He's making fifty percent profit with no overhead, no taxes, nothing. And we're grossing two hundred dollars a box. You could fit four hundred and sixteen boxes in a forty-foot trailer. Each box was thirty-nine by twenty-six inches. Each weighed seventy pounds."

"Pretty heavy."

"Doesn't sound like a lot, but that's about fourteen tons of air conditioners. So four hundred and sixteen times two hundred dollars. That's our gross profit. Eighty-three thousand. A lot of costs come out of that, but it's not bad for two or three days' work. We had orders for five hundred air conditioners."

"Why do you take a truckload of stolen stuff into a city that moves so slowly?" he asked. "If they're chasing you, you can't get away, especially with a tractor trailer."

"That makes sense," she answered. "But the advantage of the city is its density. Dispersing four hundred and sixteen air conditioners in New York City is easy. They're there and then gone. You're never going to find them-half the stuff sold in Chinatown is stolen, right? It was a simple job… the problem was that I didn't want to do it. I wanted to get away. Just go sit by the ocean and read trashy magazines or something."

"You felt a change in the season."

She nodded against his back. "I kept telling Rick I wanted to get out, and he actually sent me to Tony, who runs a lot of businesses. He tried to keep me in, get me involved with a restaurant that laundered money, a numbers operations, things like that. Anyway, we went ahead with the air-conditioner job. They came in from Taiwan. The ship was coming in at Newport News and was off-loading something like two hundred containers."

"You told me you didn't know anything about containerized shipping," Charlie remembered.

"Because I wanted you to like me, okay?" she cried. "I'm not really so bad."

I'm crazy to be here, he thought. "If you say so."

"I do. So Rick was getting two containers-he had some deal with the shipping agent, they drop them and break them all the time. They call that 'dock overage.' Rick was going to end up with two truckloads that he and another guy would drive north. The first load they were going to sell in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Philadelphia. You just sell off the back of the truck in the black neighborhoods, North Philly… West Philly. Stuff just disappears. Cash, no questions asked."