Wild Card

my way into this cart, or you wore white valet gloves letting me through its door. One makes you a foul-up and a loser, the other a sellout. Either way he’ll have you capped without even thinking about any second chances.”

“An’ how ’bout you?” Raul said, fighting down panic. “We get to the garage, you gonna give me one?”

“I have a cross-country Greyhound ticket and expense money in my pocket that says so,” the guy said. “Ride this out with me, you can hop on a bus, visit some relatives far away from here. Or sell the ticket and buy a whole lot of stuff to fill your crack pipe. No skin off mine whatever you decide.”

Raul felt the slow heavy stroke of his heart in the short silence that followed.

“Ain’t got no shot at makin’ it,” he said. “Gonna get myself hurt, don’t care what you say.”

There was another silence that lasted perhaps half a minute. Then the guy in the backseat leaned forward, coming so close Raul could practically feel his lips brush against his ear.

“It’s long odds,” he said. “But I’m all that stands between you and crapping out.”

* * *

The Navigator rolled over the snaking, undivided blacktop. In its cargo section, Lathrop glanced out the front windshield, and then through the limotinted windows to either side of him. The chop shop was just ahead to the left. A little closer up on the right he saw the junkyard, its orderly rows of scrap metal hills stretching off into the darkness.

He let his Mark 23 pistol sink below Raul’s headrest.

“You look jumpy,” he said. “Relax.”

“Been tryin’, man.”

“Try harder,” Lathrop said. “If Armand’s guards smell you’re scared, we’ll never get past them.”

Raul inhaled. “What gonna happen after we in the garage? Happen, you know, to me?”

Lathrop shrugged.

“Just worry about bringing us in,” he said. “And about making sure I can believe what comes out of your mouth.”

Raul shook his head, his nervous, rasping breaths very loud over the smooth hum of the engine.

“Why you got to be doubtin’ me like that?” he said with a kind of fearful indignance. “I swore to God, man. Can swear on my mother’s life, you wan’ me to—”

“Save it,” Lathrop said. “ ‘Long as I’m the man with the gun, I figure your word’s probably good.”

He was of course telling an outright lie of his own.

Lathrop watched the Nav’s headlight beams creep toward the edge of the parking lot, thinking it didn’t matter how many times Raul swore up and down to him, or on whom or what he did his swearing. All Lathrop really trusted was what he’d known firsthand about Armand Quiros’s operations before tonight. This included the answers to most of the questions he’d asked Raul on the way here, answers he had compared against Raul’s responses to get an idea of whether or not he was being purposely deceptive, almost as if he’d been setting the baseline for a polygraph test… though it couldn’t be forgotten for a minute that the kid was a pathetic, strung-out crackhead. When the squeeze got too tight, he would say anything he thought might help buy him some wiggle room.

Still, Lathrop had learned enough about the garage from his reconnaissance. Learned its location, its size, its outward appearance, and its immediate surroundings. He had also tracked Armand’s normal patterns of movement in and around Devocion. Found out how many guards usually traveled with him from San Diego, and the number of lookouts — mostly young men from town — he kept hanging around the garage and its lot. As Raul had said, though, the place was windowless. Since Lathrop hadn’t yet learned the trick of seeing through solid walls from Clark Kent, he’d obtained no advance knowledge of its interior layout, or where Armand would sit down to take care of his private business.

Assuming the kid hadn’t tried to sucker him, he knew now.

Lathrop peered out through the windshield, saw several parked cars in the lot, and noted the shadowy figures of Quiros’s lookouts in the cast of the SUV’s lights. There were five, maybe six of them hanging around near the building’s corrugated steel roll-up doors.

“Turn on the rearview video,” he said.

The kid was shaking his head again.

“That ain’t gonna work while I got us in Drive,” he said. “They make it for when people goin’ backward, you know. When they can’t see what’s behind ’em inna mirror—”

“Go ahead,” Lathrop said. “Turn it on.”

Raul obliged without further comment, reaching over to push the dashboard LCD’s control button. Its cover panel slid up above the screen.

Lathrop thought for a second, still looking out the windows.

“Okay, Raul, listen close,” he said. “Here’s what you’re going to do next…”

* * *

Raul stopped at the parking lot entrance, his window about halfway down like the man behind him wanted it. Then he waited in silence as a couple of the lookouts outside the garage strode toward the Navigator. He recognized the first to approach as a dude named Pedro.

“Hola, Papi, what’chu bring tonight?” the lookout said, mixing Spanish and English. He was a little older than Raul — around twenty-three or twenty-four. Lived right in town, hung out with Raul and his cousin at the cantina every so often.

“Ain’ no Matchbox toy, man.” Raul forced a grin.

Pedro grinned back at him, came around to the driver’s side, clasped his hand through the window. Tall, skinny, he wore a two-tone gray basketball warmup suit and a bright purple-and-yellow paisley skullcap with a long, flowing neck shade that made him look like some kind of flashy Arab camel herder. There was a small diamond stud in each ear, another in his right nostril. On a band around his arm was a gum-stick MP3 player.

He pressed a button on the audio player, plucked out a stereo earbud, and let it dangle over his shoulder, leaving the other earbud in place.

“Es un machin mas barbaro,” he said, admiring the vehicle’s shiny new flank. “This high line merch.”

“Si, Pedro.”

“She somethin’ else, bro.”

“Si, eso es.”

Raul rested his left elbow over the upper edge of the window and leaned against the door, struggling to look calm, look relaxed like the crazy man in back had put it, while intentionally blocking Pedro’s view of the Nav’s interior with his upper body.

“Armand still around?” he said.

Pedro nodded over his shoulder at the garage, his eyes still admiring the vehicle. “Bet she tricked out nice —”

“Armand gonna wan’ to see her.”

The lookout was in no apparent hurry in spite of Raul’s growing insistence. He leaned against the car, propping himself against the driver’s door with both hands.

“Like to be havin’ a look inside on my own,” he said. “A ver, how ’bout you let me see…”

Raul drew erect. His head ached and his pulse was racing in his ears. He had the vehicle in Reverse, his foot on the brake pedal to keep it from slipping backward and, more important, to keep its rear lights on. According to Crazy Man, they would give off enough brightness for the cargo hatch’s built-in video camera to serve some kind of purpose.

But he couldn’t just sit here with Pedro getting ready to climb in front with him. If he could have just taken a hit off his pipe before he got here, one hit, he’d have been able to handle things without feeling like the walls of his skull were closing in around his brain, mashing his brain to a pulp.

“Que pasa?” he said. “Been drivin’ all night, know what I’m sayin? Wanna take care’a my shit.”

A moment passed. Another. Raul’s head kept throbbing to the accelerated beat of his heart.