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 fucking 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.
XX
The closest gun shops were in Vegas or Barstow. But that didn’t mean there weren’t any guns for sale in Nickelback. A guy just had to know where to go. The high desert catered to criminals and self-proclaimed outlaws, and firearms were plentiful. The trick was knowing people you could trust well enough to not shoot you the minute you came near them. That was where a couple of local kids had an edge over an outsider.
When Eli returned from his run to Long Beach, it was nearly four o’clock and Eddie was already done filling his tank for the next morning’s run. He parked the truck next to the cinder block warehouse and got out, stretching his arms up over his head to loosen up from the five-hour drive.
“Two runs in one day. Not bad,” Eddie said, coming around the side of the building.
“No shit. That’s one way to make twenty grand.” They laughed. It was too easy. Then Eli shook his head and said, “Now, if we could just avoid sharing it with Ron, we’d have it made.”
Eddie didn’t say anything. He just nodded. He could see that Eli was still convinced that getting rid of Ron was the only way. Eddie had spent the day thinking it through. He knew Eli was probably right, as a practical matter, but he was still having trouble accepting it. Eddie turned and walked toward the car. Eli followed.
They drove off in silence. When Eddie finally spoke, his tone was measured, careful, as though he was hesitant to give the topic serious discussion. “If we were to get rid of Ron, how could we be sure we wouldn’t get caught?”
“I spent all day thinking it through,” Eli began. “The hard part is going to be getting Ron out to the warehouse. The rest is going to be easy. The way I got it figured, we get him to come out here after work. We tell him we need to talk to him about something. Tell him we got his money. We’ll come up with something. Then, when he gets out here we just plug him. Just don’t even think about it. Just do it. Then we bury his ass. We wait until the middle of the night and drive his car back to his house and leave it there. Shit, it’ll be two weeks before anyone even starts looking for him.”
Eli turned onto the main road and headed for town. Eddie thought it through. It didn’t seem like much of a plan. “What if someone sees us dropping his truck off?”
“Who’s going to see? It’ll be the middle of the night. And hey, we don’t even have to drop it off at his house. We could drive it to Vegas and leave it in the parking lot at Caesar’s Palace. By the time anyone finds it, they’ll think Ron went to Vegas and disappeared. No one will even suspect murder.”
“I like that plan better.”
“I do too.”
“So how can we make sure he comes out there?”
“We’ll just tell him we got his money.”
“But we just told him we couldn’t get it that fast.”
“That greedy fucker is already convinced we’re lying to him. Let’s prove him right. We tell him we’ve got his money, he’ll come for it.”
“What if he wants to see the money though? We don’t actually have it.”
“We’re not going to give him time for that. But we can get what we have, just to make it look good, just so we have something to show him. Shit man, who can tell the difference between thirty or forty grand and a hundred? It’s just a big pile of cash.”