In this biz, appearance counted for a lot. Who’d pull over Ma and Pa Yeehaw in their RV with Missouri plates for anything but a traffic ticket? And Ma could talk her way out of that by making a cop think about his sweet little ole granny. And if the cop got really horsey. Pa would cap him with the.40 SIG he kept under the seat.
Tad Bershaw was Drayne’s age, well, actually, he was a year younger at thirty-one, but he looked fifty, rode hard and put up wet, like Drayne’s grandma used to say. Tad was black-haired, skinny, pale, and had dark circles under his eyes, a real heroin-chic kinda guy. He always wore black, even in the middle of summer, long sleeves, long pants, pointy-toed leather boots. And sunglasses, of course. He looked like a vampire or maybe one of the old beatniks, because he also had a little patch of hair under his lip.
Drayne, on the other hand, looked like a surfer, which he had been: tanned, sun-bleached dishwater blond hair, still enough muscle to pass for a gymnast or a swimmer. He had to admit, they made an odd-looking couple when they went out. Not that they went out that often.
Drayne put the finished cap down and picked up another empty. He had enough mix for six. Five for sale and one for Tad. At a thousand bucks each, it wasn’t a bad day’s work, not bad at all, given that their costs were about thirty-five dollars a cap.
“You heard about the guy in Atlantic City?” Tad asked.
Drayne worked on the third cap.
“Olivetti?” “Yeah.” “No. What happened?” “Hammer ate him. He ran amok, tore up a casino, beat the shit out of some rent-a-cops and local police before they cooked him. DOA.” Drayne shrugged again.
“Too bad. He was a good customer.” “We got a guy coming from NYC says Olivetti referred him. Are we interested?” Drayne finished the fourth cap. Found one of the special-special empties for number five.
“No. If Olivetti is dead, the reference is dead. We don’t sell to him.” “I figured,” Tad said.
“Just checking.” “You shouldn’t have to check. You know the deal. A vetted customer vets a newbie, always. First time we get a guy we can’t check out, that will be a narc, you got to figure it that way.” “I hear you.” Drayne finished the fifth cap, reached for Tad’s empty.
“How are you working today’s produce?” “Three off the net, FedEx Same Day as soon as we get the payment transfers to the dissolving account. One is a pickup, three-messenger drop. One is hand-to-hand.” “Who’s the hand-to-hand?” “The Zee-ster.” Drayne grinned.
“Be sure to tell him we want tickets to his next premiere.” “Already in the pipe.” “Okay, here you go. Last one is yours, be sure the double-special, that’s number five, goes out.” “You’re crazy, you know that,” Tad said, as he took the caps. J “Yeah, so what else is new?” The two men smiled at each other.
“What’s cold?” Drayne said.
“I need to sit on the deck and watch the waves roll in.” “Got a bottle of the Blue Diamond, one of the Clicquot, and one of the Perrier-Jouet in the little fridge. Dunno what’s in the garage.” “The Diamonte Bleu, I think,” Drayne said.
“You want a glass before you take off?” “I’m not rotting my liver out, thank you.” They laughed again.
“I’m gone.” “See you later,” Drayne said.
Tad left, and Drayne went to open a bottle of champagne. He had three-quarters of a million cash in a suitcase hidden in a floor safe under his bed, another two hundred and some thousand dollars in a safe-deposit box in a bank in Tarzana, and five cases of assorted but all high-quality champagne in the cool room downstairs.
Life was pretty damned good.
Tad swung his souped-up, reconditioned Charger R/T Drayne had given him out into the road the locals called the PCH and stomped the gas pedal, heading south toward Santa Monica. The big motor roared and laid five hundred miles worth of expensive rubber compound behind it, tires squealing and smoking. Tad grinned as the car accelerated.
No big deal. The radials were good for fifty thousand miles, and he didn’t expect either the car or himself to be around when the tires” warranty ran out.
He never expected to live past thirty, maybe thirty-five, max. Depending on how you looked at it, he was either four years shy or a year overdue for the big sleep, and it didn’t much matter to him which it was. He’d been on borrowed time for years.
He roared past a white four-runner with out-of-state plates, a middle-aged couple in the front, and a pair of big old German shepherd dogs looking out the windows in the back. Goddamned tourists. He cut sharply in front of the car, but the tourists were too busy looking at the ocean to even notice. Dogs were probably smarter than the people in that car.
That Bobby, now there was a smart one. He was a certified fucking genius, no shit. IQ way up in Mensa territory, one sixty, one seventy, something like that, though you’d never guess he was anything more than a big ole dumb surfer dude by looking at him. He could have gone into any kind of legit work and made a mint, but he had these quirks: One, he hated his old man, who was a retired FBI agent, and two, the guy he most wanted to be like was some flower-power drug guru from the sixties, a guy named Owsley, who came out of the psychedelic movement. Owsley was so long ago that when he started making LSD, it was still legal.
Problem was that he kept making the stuff after it got to be illegal, and got busted, but Bobby thought the sun rose and set in the guy’s shadow.
Bobby wanted to be the Owsley of the twenty-teens.
An outlaw to the core.
Tad patted his pocket for the fourth time, making sure the five caps were still in there. The other cap– his cap-was tucked away in his private stash bottle in the special pocket in his right boot, right next to the short Damascus dagger he carried there.
He lit up a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and coughed. His lungs were bad, never had gotten much stronger after the THIS was cured and he got out of the sanitarium in New Mexico, and smoking only made “em worse, but the hell with it, he wasn’t gonna live long enough for cancer to get him anyhow.
The air conditioner blasted the smoke away as he reached for the music player to crank up some volume.
Something with a lot of bone-vibrating bass, but none of that techno-rap junk the kids were listening to today.
He glanced at his watch. Still had half an hour before he had to make the first delivery.
He rolled the window down, took a final drag off the cigarette, and thumbed the butt out the window.
He couldn’t do the Hammer today, too much work, so it would have to be tonight or tomorrow. He knew when he needed to drop to get off. He didn’t want to miss that window. Sure, Bobby would make him another, but it would be such a waste there was no way Tad was gonna let it happen.
Tonight, definitely. He could become Thor, and he would swing the Hammer high, wide, and anywhere he damned well pleased.
Oh, yeah-Some asshole in a low-slung Italian something or the other whipped around Tad, caught rubber as he upshifted, and blew past.
Guy looked like a movie star, might even be one: tan, fit in a tank top, designer shades, and a big expensive smile when he flashed his caps to show Tad there were no hard feelings.
The way he felt right now. Tad wouldn’t bother chasing the guy. Even if he caught him, the guy would certainly be able to stomp his butt for his trouble.
Come back and see me tonight, pal. See how your SoCal pretty-boy tough-guy act plays when I’m swinging Mjollnir high, wide, and repeatedly. Be a different story then, old son, a whole different story.
On 1-95, Approaching Quantum, Virginia Michaels was on the way to his office when his virgil blared out the opening chords for “Mustang Sally.” He smiled at the little electronic device. Jay Gridley had been at it again, reprogramming the attention call. It was one of Jay’s small delights, to do that every so often, usually coming up with some new musical sting Michaels never expected.
He shook his head as he unclipped the virgil –for virtual global interface link–from his belt and saw that the incoming call was from his boss, Melissa Allison, director of the FBI.
Her image appeared on the tiny screen as he said, “Answer call,” and activated the virgil’s voxax control.