Wild Card

“Describe ‘nothing’ to me.”

Raul took another breath. This was some kind of scary hombre he’d picked up, not that he’d done it by choice. Wore a black jacket and pants with all kinds of outside pouches and shit, besides having one of them SWAT cop masks, or hoods, or whatever it was called, pulled down around his neck. Except Raul was pretty convinced he wasn’t a cop.

“Ain’ no houses, no stores, nothin’,” he said. Then hesitated, thinking. “ ’Cept, you know, the junkyard.”

“What kind?”

“Huh?”

“What kind of junk gets dumped there?”

Raul grunted his understanding.

“All kinda parts for cars,” he said.

“You’re sure.”

“Right—”

“You have some reason for not mentioning this yard to me before?”

Raul shook his head. The motherfucker never got tired of grilling him, asking the same questions over and over in different ways…

“Wasn’t keepin’ no secrets, that what you mean,” he said. “Thought you was askin’ about buildings.”

The guy didn’t answer. Raul glanced at him in the rearview mirror, saw a look on his face that he’d already noticed more than once. He’d gone perfectly still, his head kind of tilted to the side, his upper lip curled back a little, his eyes far off and at the same time right there and honed in… the way a cat looked when it was waiting for some rodent to crawl out of a hole so it could pounce and tear it apart. It was like he was reading signs in the air Raul couldn’t see, or listening to sounds he couldn’t hear, scary as hell.

Raul wondered what he was thinking and planning, asked himself if he could have ever seen that face before tonight and somehow forgotten it. It was long, thin, pale. Black hair combed straight back from the forehead, eyes dark as the night outside. Still as could be when that weird, focused-on-his-own-thing look came over him. Not a face anybody could read. Or forget.

The guy was a stranger, Raul concluded. A total stranger.

He lowered his eyes from the mirror, afraid his passenger would notice the close scrutiny.

“Let’s get back to Armand Quiros,” the guy said barely a moment later. “What makes you so sure he’s going to be at the garage tonight?”

Raul chewed his bottom lip. He’d figured they’d come around to Armand again, wasn’t stupid enough to think the guy was finished asking about him. That hadn’t stopped Raul from hoping, but you had to expect it, know what was going down here.

“He hands on,” he said with reluctance. “Like bein’ the one does the payout.”

“The payout in drugs.”

Raul felt his insides tighten up. “Look, man, I been straight with you alla way. How come we got to run through this again—?”

“You boost a set of wheels, deliver it to Armand’s chop shop heaven, he pays with crack,” the guy said. “Yes or no?”

Raul continued to hesitate. He was thinking bleakly about the deal he’d had going with Jose, thinking what an unbelievable piece of luck it had looked to be when they met through Raul’s sister, who had been seeing Jose for a while before she hooked them up a couple weeks back. Since then they’d pulled some inside jobs that had been worth a bundle… especially with their terms being wheels in exchange for crack, like the man in the backseat had put it. With flat cash you couldn’t turn it over to double or even triple your profits.

Now Raul took a breath, held it, blew it out his mouth.

“Yeah,” he said finally. Even his voice was quivering now. “That how it works.”

There was another period of silence, this one longer than the last. Blackness swarming the SUV’s windows, no other vehicles in sight, Raul drove on toward what he felt would be certain death, trying to figure how things could have gone downhill for him so fast. That first time at his sister’s place, Jose explained he was a salesman at a dealership in some rich gringo suburb, place with a huge fucking showroom and lot, and that he had access to whatever Raul needed to jack a carriage nice and easy — keys to the building, codes for the gate alarm protecting its outdoor lot, electronic car door openers and starters, even dealer temps and registration documents for him to wave around if he got hauled over by cops. Just as sweet, he could tip Raul to the delivery of a new consignment, give him a chance to roll out a few of the vehicles before they were entered into the computerized inventory.

Raul had really gotten his ass stoked when Jose told him about the expensive Navigators that had arrived, two of them, both cherry and loaded right off the double-decker truck. This was just the other day when they arrived with a big shipment, and he’d known he could drive one from the lot, and that nobody would notice it was gone for at least a month, six weeks. It would probably be another month afterward until the dealer and factory sorted out whether it had been delivered to the lot, or hauled to the wrong one by mistake, or disappeared somewhere else along the way from the production line… no way the setup could’ve have been sweeter. Taking carriages from the dealership was a slam compared to looking for them on the street, where you had to get lucky and find a target that had been left with its door unlocked, or make sure you knew how to bust its antitheft system if it had one, maybe even a GPS tracker — and that was while having to look over your shoulder for its owner, the five-oh, or just some busybody asshole solid citizen who couldn’t keep his eyes in his head where they belonged. Raul had almost never worried about being pinched since he’d got down with Jose, and wouldn’t in his worst nightmares have thought he’d find himself in the spot he was in right now. The thing was here… the thing was that the chop shop would show in his headlights soon, and then what was he supposed to do?

Raul drove through the night, not the slightest clue in his mind, seeing only the worst in store. He had driven maybe another quarter mile toward their destination before the questions started coming at him again.

“Tell me how many of Quiros’s men I can expect,” the guy in back said.

Raul clutched the wheel with whitening knuckles. This was a subject they hadn’t touched on yet, and it had rated high among his wishes that they would not get to it. It wasn’t enough that the hijo de puta had set a trap for him at that streetlight, forced him into taking this suicide ride. He had to keep digging him a deeper hole.

“Can’t be sure,” he said

“Tell me how many,” the guy repeated. “And where they’ll be.”

“Listen, man, please, I don’ know—”

Raul suddenly felt a cold, circular pressure between his neck and the base of his skull. He stiffened with fear, not needing to look around to know his passenger had jammed the silenced barrel of his.45 semiauto into him.

“Give it up,” the guy said.

“I don’ wanna die,” Raul said.

“Don’t be stupid. You already brought me this far along. You think it’ll square things with them if you don’t tell me?”

“I don’ wanna die.”

“Then prove you’ve got an ounce of brains that isn’t fried, Raul,” the guy said. And then paused a moment. “That’s your real name, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You wouldn’t have lied to me about it.”

“No, man, I swear.”

The guy nudged his head forward with the gun barrel.

“Understand this,” he said. “I start to think you did lie, I can’t trust your word on anything else. And that would make you useless to me.”

Raul felt his stomach lurch.

“It my name,” he said. “Swear to God it my name.”

A second or two lapsed. Raul felt the weapon easing back from his head.

“All right, Raul, I’m about to pass along some free wisdom,” the guy said. “Armand won’t care if I hijacked