$200 and a Cadillac

XIX



Tom stood in the yard, listening to her yell from inside the house.

She screamed, “What do you mean you don’t know when you’ll be back?”

“It’ll only be a couple days,” Victor protested. “You know how it is.”

Tom tried not to listen, but the more he tried the more he heard. He looked around the yard and up and down the street at the other houses. He was surprised at the size of the housing development. It stretched for miles in every direction, a labyrinth of cul-de-sacs, red tiled roofs, and anemic palm trees no older than the houses themselves. The homogeneity was depressing, and there was little about it to distract him from the conversation in the background.

“You’re not in the goddamned Bureau anymore, Vic.” Tom could hear Victor’s muffled voice responding, straining to sound calm and reasonable. The whole scene made Tom glad he wasn’t the kind of guy who would ever get married. He wouldn’t trade his condo on the beach and his lifestyle there for anything resembling Victor’s life. He nearly leaned against the car to wait but caught himself. He didn’t want to crease his pants, or get them dirty. Then he heard a small voice behind him.

“Are you a friend of my dad?”

Tom turned to see a little boy with a small bicycle, wearing a helmet and elbow pads. “I work with your dad,” he answered. Kids made him nervous, they always had. A silence fell between them.

Then the kid asked, “What’s your name?”

“Tom. What’s yours?”

“I’m Daniel. I’m six. My mom makes me wear this helmet when I ride my bike, but my dad thinks the helmet is stupid.”

“Oh yeah? What do you think?”

The kid shrugged. “I dunno.”

Finally, the front door opened and Victor came out of the house, carrying a gym bag and a long, hard plastic case. He handed the bag to Tom and fished in his pocket for the keys to unlock the trunk. Daniel asked, “Hey, Dad, can I go with you?”

“Sorry, buddy, not this time, I need you to stay here and look after things.” The kid looked deflated. Victor grinned at Tom as he placed the plastic case in the trunk. “Toss that bag in here too.”

Tom set the bag next to the Geiger counter and heard the headphones begin to roar with white noise. “Is that thing on?” Victor asked.

“Yeah, what the hell is in this bag?”

Victor grinned. His eyes lit up. He reached inside the bag and pulled out a large canvas case. He unsnapped the case and withdrew a set of lenses that looked like a pair of binoculars on steroids. “Night vision goggles. I guess the crap inside them is a little radioactive.”

“Christ, man, what do we need those for?”

Victor raised his eyebrows as though the question was absurd. “Tom, we have no idea what kind of people these guys are. We’re going to have to do some snooping around before we know who we’re dealing with. We damned well better be prepared.” Tom caught a wild glint in Victor’s eye and felt a sudden sense of worry come over him.

“Can I try them, Dad?”

“No, Danny. You go back in the house now.” Victor put the night vision goggles back in the case and put the case back in the bag. Then he switched off the Geiger counter.

“Shouldn’t we leave the stakeout work to the local police?” Tom was beginning to wonder what kind of guy Victor might be. He’d only ever been around him in the sterile confines of the office, listening to his ridiculous war stories about life at the FBI. Maybe Victor was just a nut. Tom had no way of knowing.

“Tom,” Victor laughed, “c’mon man, first thing you learn at the Bureau is never to trust some backwoods police department to get it right. You know who ends up in places like Nickelback? Guys who could never hack it in a real police department. Now, if it was the LAPD or something like that, that’d be different. But there’s no telling what kind of hayseed hicks we’ll find out in the desert.” Victor shook his head, almost as if he were arguing with himself. “No way. We gotta do this ourselves, put the case together and call the local boys in only at the last minute. You have to hand guys like that a complete case, wrapped up with a little bow on top, or they’ll f*ck it up for sure.” Then Victor added, “You probably don’t have a gun. Do you?”

“Jesus Christ, Victor, you’ve got to be kidding. This isn’t a game.”

But Victor was already opening the garage door and heading for a cabinet along the back wall of the garage. “Danny, you go inside and help your mom,” he called out to the boy. “Hurry now. Go on.” The boy did as he was told, disappearing through the front door to where his angry mother surely waited, thinking of some new argument she could make to her husband.

Victor unlocked the cabinet. “I don’t want the kids to know what’s in here, at least not until they’re a little older.” Tom was lumbering up from behind, slowly, with apprehension. He watched Victor swing the doors wide open, revealing a heavily stocked armory filled with rifles, pistols, shotguns, ammunition, holsters, straps, and harnesses of every kind. Victor stood to the side, beaming like a proud father.

“Son of a bitch! Are you out of your mind?” Tom was beside himself. “You expecting the end of the world sometime soon?”

“Hey, you can never be too safe. You haven’t seen the kind of shit I have. Believe me, if you knew what kind of crazies are out there, you’d be armed to the hilt too.”

“I can’t believe this.”

“Look man, you don’t know what we’re gonna find up there. I sure as hell hope it’s nothing.” Victor pulled an automatic pistol from a hanger on the door and tossed it to Tom. “But I damned sure ain’t going to see you get into something you can’t get out of.”

Tom scrambled to catch the gun. He fumbled with it, surprised by its weight. He’d never held a weapon of any kind before, let alone shot one. He turned it over in his hands, at once both fascinated and repulsed by the prospect of carrying it around. He held it in his right hand, assessing the feel of the grip. It was solid, filling his entire palm. His fingers wrapped around it, falling into the grooves in the grip like it was made for him. He pointed it at the wall, closing one eye, trying to aim it. It was heavy and difficult to hold steady.

Victor was already sizing Tom up for a shoulder holster. He sorted through several and then turned back to see Tom standing there like a kid. He smirked and walked over to him, snatching the gun from Tom’s outstretched hand.

“Stop trying to aim the damned thing like that. You look silly.” Victor held the gun like it was an extension of his body. “Just pretend like you’re pointing your finger at something.” Victor pulled the slide back and cocked the pistol. Then held it up quickly, pointing it and pulling the trigger. The hammer clicked on the empty chamber.

“You see? Quick like that. Just raise it up, point like you’re pointing your finger, and pull the trigger without thinking about it. It’s an automatic, nine millimeter, you got fifteen rounds to go through. If you miss, just pull the trigger again. Keep doing that until you hit something or you run out of ammo.” Victor handed the gun back to Tom. “Try it.”

Tom held it up and pulled the trigger. He could see the point of what Victor was saying, but questioned whether he could really hit anything like that. He repeated the motion a few times. Then it dawned on him that he was standing in a garage pretending to shoot at the wall with an automatic pistol, and he said, “This is f*cking crazy. I can’t believe we’re doing this.”

“Believe it,” Victor said over his shoulder, locking the cabinet and tossing several more guns and several boxes of bullets into another bag similar to the one that was already in the car. “You may be surprised what we end up doing by the time this is over.” Victor closed the garage door and the trunk of the car and the two of them drove off. Victor didn’t say good-bye to anyone.