beside an eighteen-wheeler in the freight yard, clipping the security cable, and off-loading the contents. With a crew of six, he could be in and out in fifteen minutes and do a half million dollars in merchandise a night. What a world they lived in. It was just made for guys like Jeremiah Allen Berman.
The hard-asses in prison used to try to rag on him about vo-hab—try being the operative word because nobody lasted long on Berman’s bad side—but his daddy didn’t raise no fool. Daddy used to say, “This world, she’s made for the thinking man.” Then he’d spit a stream of tobacco juice and let out a screech of laughter that could raise the hairs on a dead man’s balls and add, “A thinking man that knows how to swing a two-by-four upside somebody’s head, am I right, boy?”
Jeremiah Berman slid onto the sticky barstool in front of a big-screen television and grinned to himself. “You don’t know how right you were, Daddy,” he said. “You just don’t know.”
He reached for his cell phone and swore when the movement reminded him of the pain in his hand. The damn thing was already starting to swell up. He should have shot that son of a bitch when he’d had the chance.
The bartender gave him an odd look. “Get you something?”
“Budweiser,” he grunted without looking up and carefully plucked out his cell phone with the other hand.
He’d stolen the cell phone, along with a hundred ten dollars cash, from his fourteen-year-old niece, who knew what he’d do to her if she told anybody. Not that she didn’t deserve it, anyhow, prancing around the house all dressed up like a twenty-dollar whore on New Year’s Eve. And what the hell was his brother thinking, giving her a cell phone that cost more than one of them fancy new flat-screen TVs when he was always groaning about how he could barely make the mortgage and drove a six-year-old pickup? Well, he didn’t exactly drive it anymore, since Berman dumped it in the mall for a Honda with a spare key hidden in the wheel well. But still, he deserved what he got. Just how often had that son of a bitch come to see him when he was upstate, anyhow?
On the other hand, the M14 his brother kept locked away in a steel gun cabinet in the basement was a pretty good consolation prize. He could let a lot slide for the satisfaction of knowing that baby was going to be by his side if he needed it.
Nobody messed with Jeremiah Allen Berman. Hadn’t he just proven that? It had taken twenty years, but he’d settled the score, fine and good.
The cash was almost gone, but it didn’t matter. He’d get more. Now that he’d taken care of business, he had plenty of schemes. And none of them involved knocking over gas stations for a handful of cash, either. He was smart, now. He was using his head. And those tar-faces up at Marion who used to jeer at him about his computer classes were laughing out the other side of their asses now.
There was a computer in every public library. Anybody could just walk in and connect to the Internet. You could sit outside a coffee house or a book store or a hundred other places and nobody would ever know who you were while you stalked them on Facebook, stole their bank account numbers, ripped off their credit cards, sent them threatening e-mails, and one day, maybe even showed up at their door. It was a world wide open. And it was waiting for him.
So he paid for his beer with a twenty, logged into Facebook, and scrolled back through his recent history. There she was outside the Pembroke Host Inn sign in her baseball cap and dog sweatshirt with a big yellow dog at her side, posting, “Ready to take every blue ribbon in Pembroke, SC!” More pictures of the yellow dog, more stupid posts. Some black and white dogs, more posts. There she was in her baseball cap and dog shirt with the black and white dog. More pictures of dogs. More pictures of the hotel. He just smiled.
“Sayonara, baby,” he murmured and then he looked up and there she was on the television.
At first he couldn’t believe it. The television news had to be wrong. There it said in bold caption over the video of some woman with a dog, talking to a reporter: Hotel guest Raine