Don't Ever Get Old (20 page)

I cocked one eyebrow. “What?”

“You know, like, you have to go on the quest, because, deep down, you're a romantic. But I thought we'd never find anything, because there isn't ultimately any sense to be made of it.”

I snorted. “That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Gold is gold, and there it is.”

He crossed his arms, and annoyance flickered across his features.

“I guess I felt the same way, kind of,” I said. “I didn't think there was any way this was ever going to work out for us.”

I picked up a gold brick. It was small, a little bigger than a candy bar, and it fit easily in my hand. It was heavy, though. I guessed it weighed somewhere around twenty-five pounds.

“But it's real, and it's here, and now, it's ours,” I said. “So, let's bag it up and see if we can haul it out of here without getting arrested.”

 

32

Gold bars never looked too heavy in the movies; seemed like people on television were always throwing them at each other and stuffing them in jacket pockets.

But carrying the real ones around was a little tougher. Four ingots, half our haul, stacked together, took up about as much space as a hardcover book but weighed as much as a set of encyclopedias. So the rolling bags had been a good idea.

We emptied the box—I grunted with exertion each time I lifted a bar—and gave it back to the teller, locked. He must have noticed it was two hundred pounds lighter, but it was none of his business.

I was relieved but not surprised by his lack of comment; the bank's service to a box renter was to keep other people from ever looking at the box's contents. Whatever went in or out of the box was the owner's affair, not the bank's. They'd accepted me as the owner, so now they would look the other way.

It took Tequila two trips to drag the duffel bags through the lobby, wheels squeaking under the weight of the cargo. In the parking lot, I helped him heave the bags into the trunk of my Buick. Exhausted from the effort, he leaned, gasping for air, against the side of the car.

“How much do you think that weighs?” he asked.

“Maybe two hundred pounds, total,” I told him. “Possibly more.”

He wiggled his eyebrows at me and then slid with a grunt into the driver's seat. I climbed into the car as well.

As the Buick rumbled out of the parking lot, it looked like we had gotten away clean: no sirens or flashing lights on the horizon, nobody rushing out of the bank behind us.

We'd be prominent players on their security videos for the day, between the scene we'd made getting into the box and dragging the heavy bags through the lobby, but that was a worthwhile risk, considering the reward.

“There's sixteen ounces in a pound,” Tequila said. “And gold is trading for around nine hundred and fifty dollars an ounce on commodities markets.”

“So that's a pretty decent haul?”

“A little over three million dollars, although it may be less if we have to sell it to some sort of shady fence,” he said. “Still, not a bad morning's work.”

I glanced in the rearview. “We may not be done working yet,” I told him. “I think we've made a friend.”

Following a few car lengths back was a black Chevrolet sedan with dark windows. He'd picked us up as we'd pulled away from the bank, and he had been behind us since.

“Are you sure?” Tequila asked.

“I think I saw him yesterday as well.” The traffic light up ahead was about to change. “Quick, take the left.”

“But I'm using MapQuest directions. I'll get lost.”

“Shut up and take the damn turn.”

We fishtailed through the intersection, going pretty fast, just as the light changed from yellow to red. My seat belt yanked itself taut across my chest as my weight shifted against the momentum of the car, and I knew I would be bruised later. The sedan ran the red light. Somebody coming across had to slam his brakes to avoid hitting the Chevy, and we heard a chorus of protesting car horns behind us.

“We've got ourselves a tail all right,” I said.

Tequila glanced at me nervously. “Should I call the police?”

I snorted. “With three million dollars' worth of stolen gold in the trunk? Yeah, that's a good idea. Let's do that.”

“Okay, so what am I supposed to do, then?”

“What do you think?” I asked. “We shake him.”

Tequila glanced in the rearview and mashed down on the pedal. “I've never been in a car chase,” he told me. “I am not sure how to handle this.”

He swerved the Buick through a gap in traffic, narrowly avoiding a beat-up Plymouth hatchback.

“Go as fast as you can,” I told him. “And try not to hit anything.”

Tequila zipped the car through another yellow light, and our shadow ran through behind him.

“I'm not sure I can lose this guy,” he said.

I opened the glove compartment and found my sidearm. I thought I could take out our pursuer's tires or maybe just punch a slug through the windshield and plant it in the driver's face. I started to roll down the window.

“What are you doing, Pop? You're going to get us arrested. Or killed.”

He was probably right. I wasn't a cop anymore, and hanging out of a car window shooting into traffic would be considered indiscreet. I holstered the gun and grabbed my memory notebook, to have something to hang on to.

“Let's try to lose him on a corner,” I said. “Do you know how to drift with your hand brake?”

“Uh, I think I did that in a video game,” Tequila said.

The kid had never learned to drive properly; Brian had let Fran teach him. I tried to keep my voice calm and steady. I didn't want to scare him any more than necessary.

“You're going to enter the turn at speed, then you're going to cut your wheel hard, and pop the hand brake to lock the back wheels up. That should cause them to lose their grip on the road, and the back of the car should spin into the turn. You're going to be cutting the wheel back in the opposite direction, to control the spin, and when you are facing the right way, you release the brake and punch the gas. Understand?”

“I think so,” he said with a total lack of conviction. He glanced in the rearview, eyes wide with panic, and almost clipped the side-view mirror off a Range Rover. “Which intersection? When do I do it?”

I looked around. I had known St. Louis pretty well once, but I hadn't been able to maintain my grasp on that information. I had no idea where we were.

“Doesn't matter. Whenever you want to turn. You're not trying to go anyplace particular, except away from that Chevy. If you do the drift turn right, he'll go right past as we swing around the corner.”

“Okay. I'm going to do this. Fuck me, I'm going to do this.”

He gripped the brake. I could see his hand was shaking. His teeth were clenched, and he was sweating. He couldn't drive well enough to shake our tail, and if he tried, he would wreck the car and we would die.

“Don't,” I said.

“What?”

“It's too dangerous. It was a bad idea.”

His eyes flicked away from the road a moment to look at me. “I can do it, Grandpa.”

“Getting into a chase is more dangerous than dealing with anybody who could be tailing us,” I told him. “And if we get arrested for traffic violations, we will lose the treasure anyway. Slow down, and drive the speed limit.”

He eased off the pedal. “So what do I do, Pop?”

“Pull in someplace up ahead.”

Tequila maneuvered the Buick off the road, into the near empty parking lot of an Applebee's restaurant, and swung into a space. I stepped out of the car and so did Tequila.

“Put your hand in your jacket, like you have a gun,” I told him.

The dark sedan pulled into the lot behind us and slowed to a stop. The windows were tinted dark like the lenses of sunglasses, even the windshield, so there was no way I could see who was driving.

I unzipped the front of my sweatshirt and let it swing open, to show the driver what was strapped to my side.

For a moment the Chevy sat, idling, its engine growling at us. I moved my hand to the butt of the .357. I didn't want to die in a car crash, but I didn't want to die like Lawrence Kind, either.

Standing there, squinting across a strip-mall parking lot, in a hopeless showdown with a ton of Detroit steel, I felt old and obsolete, like a cowboy whose frontier had turned into outlet stores and golf courses. If the driver hit the gas, he would flatten me. I wasn't fast or agile enough to get out of the way, and standing my turf and drawing down on the son of a bitch would be ineffective and ridiculous.

I was going to die, and there was nothing I could do about it.

So I held my ground, one hand on my last, feeble mode of protest, waiting for him to make a move. And then the driver shifted the black sedan into reverse, backed into the street, and drove away.

“Did you see his license plate?” I asked Tequila.

“No, I never saw the back of the car,” he said.

There had been no plate on the front bumper. Missouri required drivers to display a license on the front and back of the car, but Tennessee required one only on the rear.

I wiped sweat from my eyes with the sleeve of Tequila's sweatshirt as I let out a relieved chuckle. “I have to say, for a minute there, I had this crazy thought that the bastard was Death, come to collect me.”

Tequila shook his head. “I may not have been the best student in Hebrew school, but I'm pretty sure the Grim Reaper doesn't drive a fucking Chevy Malibu.”

 

33

Tequila wanted to go back to the hotel.

“You must be soft in the head,” I told him.

We had spent the last several hours driving around and going nowhere in particular, watching for the black Chevy or any other car that might be following us.

“Our bags are still in the room,” he protested.

I didn't care. “We'll leave them.”

“My laptop is up there. With all my class notes from school.”

“It will be fine. The hotel people will find it. They can ship it back to you.”

He looked at me with pleading eyes. “Pop, I want to see Yael again.”

I had a feeling this was about her. I sighed. But I guessed he wasn't the first fellow I'd ever met who'd let his brain go soft over a woman.

“Billy, can't you see?” I asked him. “She was in on it all along. If that wasn't her behind the wheel of that Chevy, she was certainly working with the driver.”

“That's impossible. I didn't tell her anything about what we were doing here. She didn't know anything about Ziegler or the bank.”

Tequila didn't understand. Yael didn't need to get information on Ziegler or the bank from Tequila. She was working for Avram Silver, and he already knew about everything. He was the one who had dropped the clue that had led us to St. Louis in the first place. I'd been arrogant enough to think I'd goaded Silver into inadvertently making a major admission about Ziegler's location, but the crafty bastard had let it slip on purpose; he had been running me the whole time.

Silver had the Wiesenthal Center dossier on Ziegler. He'd conducted the original investigation, and he'd already made one failed play for the gold. I knew when I spoke to him that he had designs on the treasure, and he had almost certainly been keeping track of “Henry Winters.”

He must have known about Meadowcrest and the safe deposit box all along. But he had never been able to lay his hands on the box key; he had no pretense to get inside Ziegler's room. And even if he had been able to get the key, he had no way to persuade the bank to let him into the box.

Silver had used me because an innocuous, enfeebled old man could go lots of places other people could not go without arousing suspicion. An elderly man wouldn't look out of place visiting a patient in the locked-down dementia ward. An elderly man could pass himself off as Henry Winters to the bank's employees and get access to the box's contents. And Avram Silver had found the perfect elderly man, one clever enough to get his hands on the gold, but dumb and confused enough not to realize he was being played.

Now the Israelis no longer had to deal with the problem of getting the key; they no longer had to deal with the problem of accessing the secure vault. The gold was in the completely insecure trunk of a Buick, and the only obstacles remaining between Avram Silver and three million dollars' worth of gold were a stupid old man and his lovesick grandson.

The Israelis didn't even need to follow us; they knew where we would be going at every step, even before we knew. They had been here ahead of us, and they had probably been watching us the whole time we were in St. Louis. Maybe Tequila's girlfriend had been our shadow in the black Chevy. Or maybe she was just keeping track of our movements.

But now she was bait. And if we went back to that hotel, they would spring their trap.

“That's a bunch of shit,” Tequila insisted. “Yael is not a spy. You don't know her.”

I grabbed his shoulder and shook him a little. “For God's sake, Tequila, you met this woman two days ago. Her people will kill us for what we've got in the trunk.”

He pushed my arm away. “Don't jostle me while I'm driving.”

“You're such a jackass,” I said. But it was me who had been the ass the whole time. And the kid had too much of his father—and, really, too much of his grandmother—in him to get anything other than whatever he wanted. He was behind the wheel, and I would go where he drove.

I sighed. “If we're going back there, we need to do this my way,” I said.

“What does that entail?”

What it entailed was a reasonable goddamn modicum of caution. We did not want anyone to see our car pulling into the hotel parking lot; our pursuers would certainly be watching for us there. Yael, of course, would be giving them the heads-up anyway, but on the slim chance Tequila was right and she was unaffiliated with Silver, we needed to at least try to slip in and out undetected.