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Chapter Eleven
Nate felt the eyes of every single person in the bank on him while he waited for the withdrawal to go through. Of course, there wasn’t a problem, and the woman who brought in the envelope smiled at him like he was one of their VIPs.
In her eyes, he was. He absolutely was, with how much money he had here at the bank and how close his father had been to the man behind the desk in front of him.
“It’s all there?” Sam Wiseman asked.
“I’m sure it is,” Nate said, slipping the envelope into his briefcase. He was planning to leave the whole thing in the locker in the mall, and he’d started praying last night that Ginger wouldn’t ask him about the absence of his briefcase after the drop.
He didn’t see how she wasn’t going to ask. The woman saw everything. So much, that Nate wondered if she had eyes in the back of her head.
She knew everything that happened around the ranch, because she had people everywhere. They all reported to her, and she seemed genuinely interested in their lives as well as making sure they did their jobs to her satisfaction.
His stomach squirmed as he stood and shook hands with Sam. “Good to see you again,” he said, though he didn’t really feel that way. He and Sam had an interesting relationship, because neither of them wanted to see the other ever again.
But they had a partnership that had to be seen through to the end, and Nate had started praying that end would come sooner rather than later.
Sam said nothing, and Nate left his office on the second floor. His briefcase handle felt too hard, but it was probably the way he was strangling it. He felt ridiculous carrying the briefcase at all, but he couldn’t carry around an envelope big enough for a clipboard filled with cash. It had to be concealed somehow.
He also had to get Ginger to the mall somehow. He’d been stewing about it all week while he studied the blueprints for the bird blind and then started to build it. He worked on it alone, so thankfully, when he did something wrong, there was no one there to witness it. He’d put things together, realized they weren’t right, and taken them apart at least ten times over the last few days.
In truth, Nate was tired. So mentally tired. He’d been thinking about this drop for far too long, and he realized another thing prison had afforded him: Peace from so much thinking. Out here in the real world, he had to deal with things he’d left behind previously.
“Hey,” he said when he met Ginger on the first floor. “Can we run to the mall real quick? I need to get my sister a birthday present.” Not entirely a lie. Bethany’s birthday was coming up, and the mall was a perfectly logical place for him to find a gift for her.
“Sure,” she said. “I got a call while you were upstairs though. Can you just run in while I deal with something?”
“Absolutely,” he said, his face filling with a grin. “Something I can help with?”
“No.” She sighed as they left the bank. “Just some paperwork with…something.” She looked at him, clearly flustered by this paperwork.
“That’s so vague,” he said, teasing her.
“Yeah,” she said, sighing again. “It’syourpaperwork, Nate. The BOP is saying they didn’t get it, but I mailed it weeks ago.”
“That’s not good.”
“No, it’s not.” She went around the hood to the driver’s side. They got in the truck, and she added, “I didn’t make copies.”
“So we’ll just do it again,” he said, knowing how important paperwork was to the Bureau of Prisons.
“We might have to,” she said. “I’m going to call them again. We got cut off when…we got cut off.”
“Fight?” he asked.
“How did you know?”
“Everything stops when there’s a fight,” Nate said, looking out his window, his mind automatically moving far away from his present situation. “Even phone calls about important paperwork.”
She drove the few blocks to the mall, and Nate jumped from the truck. Every step felt like he was committing himself to something deceitful and wrong. He felt like everyone was looking at him strangely, like they knew what he concealed in his briefcase and that he’d served hard time in prison.
He entered the mall and hurried now. There was a virtual reality experience in the mall, and they didn’t allow purses or bags inside. Thus, a couple of rows of lockers had been installed just around the corner from the experience.
He quickly found an available one and put in the quarters required to unlock it. He placed the briefcase inside, checking over both shoulders. His stomach hurt from how clenched it was, and his pulse raced through his veins. No one seemed to care what he was doing.
After closing the locker, a ticket got spit out from the machine, and Nate quickly snapped a picture of it. He wadded up the ticket and threw it in the trash can, then ducked around the next row of lockers and texted the picture to Oscar, along with the wordDone.
Then he got the heck out of there and down to the bath store, where he could find something citrus-smelling and soothing for his sister.
