AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Evan handed him a manila envelope stuffed with bundles of hundreds, and Tommy shoved it in the front of his camo pants without counting for once and dangled the truck keys off the stubof the finger he’d lost at the first knuckle. He smelled like chewing tobacco and Old Spice.
“Stash this in the garage a few days?” Evan nodded at his backup car, a battered Civic from the Diamond Bar safe house. “I’ll pick it up when it’s over.”
“On your way, then,” Tommy said, turning to go. “Don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya.”
“One more thing.”
From a cargo pocket, Evan withdrew a small black velvet pouch containing what was perhaps his only truly personal possession. He’d pit-stopped at home to grab it from his bureau, where he kept it hidden beneath a stack of precision-folded boxer briefs and the false drawer bottom. He let the item within tumble out to glimmer in Tommy’s callused palm.
“Pump the brakes,” Tommy said. “I don’t do this kind of delicate shit.”
“You’re plenty delicate,” Evan said. “And I don’t trust it to anyone else.”
“What do you need?”
Evan told him.
Tommy gritted his teeth audibly. His shrug was higher on the left side, no doubt due to a pinched nerve. “When you need it by?”
“I’ll wait.”
Tommy rolled his eyes to the heavens. “Lord, give me patience. Because if you give me strength, I’m gonna need bail money to go with it.”
He turned crisply on his heel and lumbered inside.
Evan followed him. The interior was dungeon-dim and smelled of gun oil. Weapon crates and machinery loomed: test-firing tubes and old-fashioned bank safes, cutting torches and gunsmithing lathes. Through the clutter of equipment, narrow pathways had been cleared, scored with greasy wheel marks from Tommy’s rolling chair.
Tommy collapsed into an Aeron with a groan and kicked his way through the labyrinth to a workbench. He shoved a clip-mounted magnifier light in front of his face, his eye enlarged to the size of a Frisbee, and examined what Evan had given him.
“Got any vodka here better than SKYY watermelon?” Evan asked.
“No.”
Evan high-stepped over a pallet of Chinese stick grenades and reached beneath a witch’s cauldron of a coffeepot gurgling atop a dilapidated cabinet. “That’s why I stashed something.”
He retrieved Kauffman Vintage from the cabinet where he’d hidden it behind a plastic tub of saturated gun-oil wipes. The bottle was peak elegance, silver and glass curves that brought to mind the silhouette of a penguin. In here it stuck out like a Royal Delft vase in a junkyard.
“You don’t happen to have glassware?”
“I got a Solo cup.” Tommy picked up a red plastic cup, sniffed it, then squinted into it. He’d slung a pair of welding goggles around his neck, and they dangled from their elastic band. “Nope. This one’s fulla Skoal juice. Should be a coffee mug somewhere over by the rifle-cleaning rods. You can wash it out in the bathroom.”
Evan grimaced.
“Sorry the service ain’t up to your standards.” Tommy reached below his workbench, came up with a bottle of Beam, and took a sip of bourbon. He closed his eyes.
“Tommy?”
“Huh.”
“Do you think guys like you and me, that we’re archetypes?”
“Where’d you hear a thing like that?”
“Guy I’m up against. Brainy.”
“I don’t trust intellectuals,” Tommy said. “They think too much.” The magnifying glass cast a contained glow, bringing out the sags of skin beneath his eyes. “And besides, deep down everyone’s an archetype of one sort or another. Most folks just prefer to cover themselves up in modern bullshit and pretend otherwise.”
“How do you mean?”
