Authors: David Putnam
He held out his hand. “You got Jumbo's word.”
I took his hand and gave it a good squeeze, gave the bones a little grind. He maintained his smile. It looked like he'd just pulled one over on me. Like he knew it would go this way all along. Jumbo never played the dummy, never. He had something else lined up. I'd played right into him. I would have to keep my eyes open. “Where do I get on?”
“Gyp, and hooligans, what kind of words are those? You slay me, you know that, you really slay me.”
I waited.
His grin lost some its shine. “Okay, continue on down this road until it veers right. Stay on it another mile and three-tenths. There's an orange cone in the road by some juniper trees at the base of the grade.”
“Where do I get off?”
“Same as before.”
“You got to be kidding me, that's an extra sixty or seventy miles.”
“Eighty-eight, that'll give you another hour and ten for the job. I'm paying you two hundred big ones. Don't start your bellyaching now. You're going to have to earn your money this time. Get going. You got,” he looked at his watch, “twenty-one minutes to get set up.”
I hesitated, again thinking something was wrong. I had somehow walked right in and got blindsided. It scared the hell out of me. He stood facing the west. The dying sunlight turned his face orange and contrasted greatly with his jet-black hair. He waited, comfortable, knowing no matter what, he had me. I would do it the way he wanted. I got in the car and headed out, going around his Beemer, spinning sand in a rooster tail. He scrambled out of the way. In the rearview, he brushed sand off his Tommy Bahama, mad enough to stomp his feet and kick at imaginary minions. I couldn't put it from my mind. I couldn't help thinking like a two-bit sneak thief. I imagined all the money before I even had it in my hand. Enough money to do it all the right way. I couldn't wait to tell Marie, show her, and watch her eyes light up. Not from greed but from what the money could do for the children.
I passed the rock-strewn mountain and looked to the right. In a little rock alcove were fifteen or twenty four-wheel-drive vehicles, with three to four men each, a small army of thieves to support me in my endeavor to make Jumbo a kingpin thug. They all stood ready, overly animated in their anticipation. They stopped talking and watched as I kept going on by, their faces too far away to distinguish features. Jumbo was right, I didn't want them to see me.
I drove. Just as he'd said, I came upon an orange cone. I turned and followed the railroad tracks south. I came to a bunch of salt cedars as the sun switched off all the yellow, the ground turned red, then quickly into long shadow. In the head
lights, on a branch among a clump of salt cedar, hung a canvas bag weighted down with heavy tools. I didn't have to check my watch. The bright light from the train to the north heading south cut through the clear night air, through the vacant desert all the way to where I sat watching. I shut off the headlights and pulled in behind the salt cedar. I didn't have time to contemplate the act. Jumbo planned it this way. I got out, pulled the bag of tools from the branch. I scrambled along the right-of-way a hundred yards to the base of the grade where the train would have to slow. I found a good place just off the right-of-way, and lay down among some sage. As the massive freight approached, the ground started a soft rumble and grew as the behemoth rose up larger. I should've been scared, but I'd done this before and knew how it would play out. I opened the canvas bag, took out the cotton work gloves, put them on, and then took out the small set of bolt cutters. I put the powerful flashlight in my back pocket and the pry bar in the back of my belt.
The long, black train engine roared by at fifty miles per hour as it tried to gain enough momentum to climb the grade. I watched the cars. This time Jumbo didn't say anything about the markings. I assumed it would be obvious. The cars were all transport car carriers, sea containers, and tankers with chemicals, all with bright paints of local gangs from across the country. Mobile billboards tagged with graffiti as it came through their town. All the cars except one, a newer cargo car.
The speed of the train bled off as more of the long train hit the grade. In no time the train was down to a crawl. The wheels clanged over the tracks.
The boxcar I waited for came chugging along in the moonless twilight. I started to get up to make my move when a dark figure jumped off from in between two cars and landed on the
ground without falling. He'd done this sort of thing before. Many times. It had been a dangerous place to ride unless he'd been on the roof of the car carrier and had climbed down. He was security, a train bull who knew the train's cargo was the most vulnerable on the grade. He was there for no other reason than to check for the likes of me.
He looked up and down the desert on my side. I ducked, face planted in the sand. No way was I going to get caught. Too bad, Jumbo. The money in my pocket had already turned warm and comfortable against my leg. If I didn't earn it, I'd have to give it back.
I cautiously took a peek. The boxcar went by. The security man scrutinized the lock and seal with a bright light, then reached up and tugged on it. He walked alongside of the slow-moving train and checked the empty desert again one more time, a mother hen protecting its chick from all the evils of the outside world. When a break in the cars caught up to him, he climbed up in between. This was strictly against railroad policy. I knew this because I had researched everything about cargo trains before pulling the first job. The computer chip or insurance company was paying the security folks a lot of money for this sort of service, the reason Jumbo wanted me for the job.
The train was still climbing the grade. Three more boxcars and the one carrying the train bull would go past and then it would be too late.
I thought about the money in my pocket I would have to give back, and the other hundred and twenty-five grand, how useful it would be. I got up and ran in the sand alongside the
train. Not in the cinders where it would make noise. I hoped the train bull didn't stick his head out from between the cars to look.
I caught up with the boxcar as it started to gain speed. I entered onto the cinder and ran alongside juggling the bolt cutters, tripped, and almost went down. I regained my balance and got the bolt cutter teeth on the lock, but the speed of the train was almost too fast for me to keep up and manipulate the handles at the same time. This lock was the same sort I encountered before and not a beefed-up one. They didn't want to point out the value of the cargo with fancy hardware. The lock snapped.
The train continued to gain speed, going faster and faster. I was out of shape and had already gone two or three hundred yards. I tossed the bolt cutters. I didn't have much left. I grabbed the handle and pulled, my legs a blur, moving quicker than they were made for, the handle dragging me along. If I let go, it was going to be ugly. The door wouldn't budge. The other times it had come right open. In the dark, I had forgotten the small lead seal. I pulled the pry bar and raked the lead seal off. My lungs burning, I was light-headed to the point of going down. One last effort was all I had left. I yanked the handle. The door squeaked and slid open. I hung on, stunned. The boxcar was loaded floor to ceiling with wooden crates. There wasn't any room at all to climb in. I jumped up on the foothold and grabbed onto the crates. The timing was off. The crews wouldn't be in place to recover the load so I couldn't throw them off yet. And the train was still too slow. There stood too great of a chance of being seen. I hugged the wood crates in a precarious perch and tried to catch my breath.
The boxcar this full, Jumbo would make a fortune, two mil easy, closer to four or five. He'd make enough from this
one haul to retire. No wonder he didn't balk at the two hundred K.
Up ahead the front of the train hit the summit and started down. My half of the train was still going up but the weight on the other side of the mountain pulled the train along faster. The cool wind dried my sweat-soaked shirt. I shouldn't have looked down at the passing cinders that now turned into a blur as I clung like an insect, my nails digging into the wood. If I fell, I'd break too many bones to walk out.
I reached as high as I could and pulled on a wood handle of a crate. There were too many crates stacked on top of it. I pulled myself up until my toes were on the boxcar floor's edge. My forearms swelled as I held on with fingertips. With one hand I reached higher for a handle farther up, got it, and yanked. This time, one moved. I yanked again. It moved a little more.
My boxcar made the crest and started down. The black night whirled by. I yanked hard one more time. All of a sudden the crate came free and damn near jerked me off the boxcar with it. I swung back too fast and banged my face. I clung there for a long moment thinking that if I had fallen, what would Marie have thought? After all I had promised her. How would she feel when she was told I died committing a burglary?
My face flushed with anger. From the now open slot, I pulled off crates fast and furious until a spot opened up for me to climb up and rest. This train was picking up speed, faster than the others I had worked. Another facet of security. I had to get going.
I pulled crates and tossed them out, aiming past the cinder right-of-way, trying for the desert sand dunes. It felt as if hours had passed. I had not completed half the car yet. My shirt, soaked, stuck to my skin, my muscles screamed for let up. The
sutures in my hands under the bandages ached. I took a breather, walked to the door, tried to get my bearings, and checked my watch. I'd been at it thirty-three minutes, so I figured we'd be just outside Barstow. I went back at the stack again, this time not worrying so much about where the crates were landing, shoveling them out like cordwood. There wasn't time for finesse. With a load this large and the train's speed, Jumbo was going to have some breakage; the cost of doing business.
At my next breather, it looked as if the train had made it through Victorville. An hour had passed. Only another twenty minutes remained before the train hit the Cajon Pass. I wasn't going to make the entire load. If I didn't shag ass, a full third would be left behind. I went at the stack again. I wanted the whole hundred and twenty-five thousand and didn't want Jumbo to have any recourse to say otherwise.
I started checking the open door as the train approached the jumping off point. The backup thieves in their four-wheel drives were only going to drive so close to civilization before they pulled off. My back hurt, my hands ached, and I was out of breath the same as if I'd run a marathon. Ten more, then I'd go. Ten crates flashed out the door. Ten more after that went out.
And then ten more after that.
Only one row remained against the back wall. I was fast approaching where I needed to disembark. I went to the open door, climbed down on the foothold and hung on watching for my point to bail. I was about to jump when up ahead I caught a glimpse of something, a reflector to a taillight, right where'd I normally jump. I swung back and held on, the wind drying my hair. The train passed the reflector that belonged to a car. A '63 lowrider with a lot of chrome. A car I recognized.
It belonged to Crazy Ned Bressler, Jumbo's main man, his
enforcer. He waited at the spot to reclaim Jumbo's seventy-five thousand dollars. Not his primary goal. He would also silence the star crook who could put Jumbo away forever.
I waved as the train flashed by him.
I grabbed a few minutes' sleep behind a dumpster at an AM/PM market on Denker Avenue off of Santa Barbara and made it to court the next day, banged up and so fatigued I had to fight the urge to lay down on the wooden bench and nap. Court got underway, the cases called. To watch as a bystander and not as a cop gave me a new perspective on the judicial process. The court setting gave off an air of pretentious arrogance. When I'd been on the other side of the banister, in the “good guy chair,” I was a part of their little performanceâthe DA, Public Defender, the judgeâas they bandied back-and-forth. All the while the poor slob whose life hung in the balance, stood by, hands crossed at the waist, watching his future wander around the room in the form of words he didn't understand. Today, I again realized how intimidating it could be as a bystander in the audienceâuntil the bailiff brought out Johnny Wayne Bascombe. Then I just didn't care about anything else.
Johnny Wayne Bascombe wore all orange, with “LA COUNTY” in large, white block letters across his back. His hands were shackled to his waist, and the leg irons forced him to shuffle. His arm was in a cast up to his shoulder, and his face was under reconstruction in various shades of swollen purple and reds in between railroad tracks of sutures. He stood there as a sawed-off version of Doctor Frankenstein's monster.
They kept him in the partitioned-off section of the court, behind bulletproof glass. Not because he was so damn dangerous and a threat to public safety, but for his own protection from that same public, who if given the opportunity, would tear him apart. I forgot about my fatigue, sat up straight, and thought about the overwhelming satisfaction I would derive from five minutes alone with him. I'd do more than rearrange his face like the last lucky guy. I began to glare, trying to get him to look my way, to give him the stink-eye treatment, scare him, make him realize he had nowhere to hide, inside or out of his barred walls.
The judge called the case, the DA announced she was ready.
A hand on my shoulder startled me. I jumped and turned. Robby Wicks stood in the aisle, suit coat rumpled, tired, a smile on his haggard face. “Hey, Bruno. What the hell you doing here?”
He must have followed me. He knew all about the caper in the desert, probably saw the whole thing from the air with infrared and was laughing at the irony of taking me down in a courtroom.
“I ⦠I ⦠wanted to talk to you about something,” I said, quickly, with nothing else ready to feed him.