'Explain it to me.'
Crease wouldn't be able to, but he gave it a shot. 'It's part of the whole situation. He can't let me walk out.'
'Why not?'
'It's not in his nature.'
'Sounds like you boys don't play a much different game than folks around here. Than guys like Jimmy. Nobody likes to lose. It's hard enough looking in the mirror.'
It was true. The game was faster and nastier but essentially the same.
'You want to go to bed?' she asked. She started to unbutton his shirt, working her fingers in his chest hair, the way she used to do, and then over his flat, muscular belly. His stomach rumbled and she drew her hands back as if she'd been stung.
He said, 'How about a steak?'
~* ~
She had nothing in the fridge so Crease went into town again, to buy some food. The supermarket had a couple of nice sirloins.
He had just put the last bag in the trunk of the 'Stang when he glanced up the street and the heat began to crawl across the back of his neck.
A bulky guy a little too dark for Hangtree was walking towards him with his hands in his coat pockets. It threw off his swaggering walk a little. His eyes were focused down and to the left, so that Crease was in his peripheral vision the entire time. The guy only looked up when he was about ten feet away. He smiled in what was supposed to be a disarming fashion, but it gave him a kind of animal leer.
This one was the first wave of muscle. This one wasn't supposed to survive. Tucco was sending him in just to get an idea of what Crease was capable of. To see if he'd relaxed any. Tucco and Cruez would be waiting at the other end of town, near the highway, where they could bolt if they had to make a run.
Crease reached under the dash to the magnetic drop box where he kept his. 38 hidden. He plucked it free just as the guy came up very close, crossing the line of personal space. Muscle liked to get in close. They felt comfortable there, thinking they were so imposing that everybody else would just freeze in fear.
'Excuse me, buddy, but you-'
There was some foot traffic around so Crease had to be fast. He brought the butt of his gun up against the guy's forehead twice. It staggered the thug enough to make him completely pliant but didn't knock him out. His hand came free from his coat and a butterfly knife rolled down the length of his fingers and clattered on the street.
Tucco and the butterfly knives, always with the knives.
They looked cool but took too long to get out, all that whirling and snapping, and they were messy as hell to put away after being used. Crease picked the blade up quickly, pulled the guy by the elbow around to the passenger side of the 'Stang and stuffed him inside.
The thug had one wide hand clasped over his head wound and blood was seeping out from beneath it. Crease said, 'Don't bleed on the seat.'
Nobody on the street had seen anything. Crease got in the 'Stang and drove in the opposite direction of Reb's, back up to the highway. Tucco and Cruez would be around, pulled off on the side, maybe drinking tequila and listening to something with a good salsa beat. They'd look up and see Crease drive by and start laughing, give him a chase before dragging ass back to whichever motel they were holed up in. Morena would be in the back seat taking it all in, making plans of her own.
Crease hit the highway and didn't even bother to check the rearview. He opened it up and within half a minute hit triple digits.
This was a no man's land of road. Edwards and the county cops wouldn't patrol it because it was supposed to be covered by the state troopers. It wasn't worth their time trying to take bribes on the border of their jurisdiction. The troopers didn't care much about a stretch with no other major town around and hardly anyone coming through anyway. Even tourist season didn't bring in much traffic. Nobody wanted to circuit boonie turf.
Crease floored it nearly all the way back to the diner where he'd first seen Reb again, until the interstate connection came up and the trucker traffic got thick again.
The thug still had one hand pressed tightly over the wound. Blood dribbled down his face and collected in his collar. Crease found a rag under his seat and gave it to him. 'Here, staunch the flow with this. What's your name?'
'You gonna kill me?'
'You want me to?'
'No.'
Crease pulled into the diner parking lot and backed in far from the nearest car. He pulled out a cigarette and lit up, sitting there smoking while the guy watched him, trying to act like stone but the terror flitting across his face in ripples. 'What's your name?'
'Cholo.'
Cholo. A Spanish word that had come to mean a tough guy, a cowboy. Every third guy coming up from south of the border was called Cholo, and none of them seemed to get the hint that maybe the word was wearing itself out.
'I've never seen you before. Where'd Tucco outsource you from?'
'I run with Jinga's boys, sometimes.'
'I'm going to let you off here. Tucco will be along any minute, but keep out of sight.'
'Why?'
Asking the question without taking the time to try to piece it together. This one wasn't going to last long.
'Because he'll kill you,' Crease said. 'Puts the blame on me and he gets to have a little extra fun. He's probably bored and pissed off, him and Cruez taking this long drive up here. Puts him out of sorts.'
'They say he's crazy.'
'They're right.'
'They say you're crazy too.'
'They're pretty smart, whoever's giving you all this good information.'
Cholo shifted in his seat, looked over at the diner. Never even questioning if what Crease was telling him was the truth. Never thinking Crease might pull the gun again and put one behind his ear the minute he looked away. It was pretty clear why Jinga was such a small-timer, using dummies like this.
'What do I do here?' Cholo asked.
'Nobody in this part of Vermont is going to give you a ride unless you pay for it. A couple hundred bucks and you should be able to make your way back to New York with one of the truckers. Go back to Jinga and pretend this never happened.'
'I don't have a couple hundred bucks,' Cholo said, sounding embarrassed.
Crease stared at him for a while, thinking this situation was just getting goofier by the minute. 'How much was Tucco paying you to take me out?'
'Twenty g's. But only after I did it.'
'Way too much money to just ice a guy. Tucco never meant to pay you no matter how it turned out. You always get at least half the cash up front, that's how you know somebody's serious. You get it a couple days in advance so you can spread the word that you got something going on. Then, if anything happens to you, your boys know who to go see.'
Cholo's face firmed up and his eyes darkened with understanding. 'I never thought of that.'
'You might want to try another profession, maybe go back to business school or something.' Crease went into his pocket, pulled out two hundred bucks in fifties and stuck them in Cholo's hand, the one that wasn't covered with blood.
Chapter Five
