Buffalo jump

CHAPTER 35

I had to say this much for the Altima: it had a roomy trunk for its size and the owner kept it clean. Nothing in there but a Sunday golf bag with half a dozen clubs and a putter, and a set of jumper cables. The carpet was coarse and the overall smell was of grease and metal, but I couldn’t complain.

Not that I didn’t at first.

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” I’d yelled.

“Admit it,” he said. “You don’t trust me. After all we been through, the way I’ve put my ass on the line for you, you think I have another agenda.”

“What do you want from me? I was raised to think the goyim have it in for Jews. So a guy like you tries to talk me into the trunk of a car-”

“Goddamn it,” he barked. “I keep telling you, you dumb fuck, if I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead. How many opportunities do I need? Your apartment Monday night, I could’ve put two in your head right there and been done with your dumb ass. Drunk the whole bottle of wine by myself. Tuesday in the park, all I had to do was keep my trap shut and Marco would have stabbed you in the heart. But no, I stuck my neck out and warned you but this you somehow forget. Which brings us to Wednesday. Where were we Wednesday? Oh yes, a soundproof room full of fucking guns. I could have done it then. Or this morning, while you were having a bad dream, moaning like a broken-down whore, I could have popped you right in your bed with a pillow on your face and nobody would have heard a sound.”

His voice was strained, his eyes dark, his fists curled tight. Then it came to me: he was hurt. Dante Ryan was genuinely hurt by what I’d said. He’d shoot me dead on the spot if I suggested as much but there it was. I slowed my breathing until my weight settled and my anxiety passed.

“Sorry,” I said. We made eye contact and bumped fists, our hands encased in tight black leather.

We spent a few minutes making me look roughed up. Shirt untucked and smeared with dirt. Face too. Hair all over the place, like Lyle Lovett on a windy day. I got in the trunk with Ryan’s metal gun case and the canvas bag that held the Remington rifle. I put my hands behind me and Ryan wound coarse yellow rope around them loosely, so it would give way with a good yank. We ran through it a few times to make sure.

“There’s three ways this can play,” he said. “One, I don’t like the odds-say there’s just too many guys inside for us to handle. I give Marco some bullshit story about setting up the Silver hit for tonight. You stay in the trunk and we drive away. Two, the odds seem in our favour. There’s no more than one or two guys besides Marco. I get Marco to come out alone to see what’s in the trunk. I open the trunk, you act dopey and scared, I pop him right there. You get out, he goes in, we go inside and take care of the others.”

“They won’t come running when you shoot Marco?”

“Not with the right tool.” He opened his jacket. Sewn into the lining was a slim sheath from which the cross-hatched butt of a handgun showed. He turned so no one at the window-shutter place could see anything and eased out a slim long-barrelled gun with a silencer threaded into the barrel. “It’s a subsonic. 22,” he said. “With the suppressor on it, all you’ll hear is the dry-fire. You could cover the sound with a cough.”

“Do we have to go inside? Can’t we just drive away with him?”

“After I’ve shown myself? Haven’t you been listening? Geller, we have to do what we have to do and not make mistakes. One shred of evidence links it back to us, we’re both dead. Tits up in a field somewhere.”

“Why would Vito care? We’d be doing him a favour.”

“He’d still have to avenge Marco. For the family’s honour, and to keep people from thinking he did it.”

“What’s the third scenario?”

“Marco wants to come see what’s in the trunk but the others come too. In which case, I’ll bring them out and open the trunk. You act scared.”

“I won’t be acting.”

“I take you out of the trunk and walk you inside. Might have to kick you around again.”

“You enjoy that part, admit it.”

“Better me than Marco. As soon as we’re in the door, you get the rope off your hands and pull the Beretta and we shoot the shit out of anything that moves.”

“You’re going to get into a gunfight with that popgun?”

“Relax,” Dante Ryan said. He opened the other side of his jacket and there under his left arm was his Glock 20 in a breakaway shoulder rig. “If we go toe-to-toe with them, fuck the suppressor. I’m not going to care who hears what.”

We tucked the Beretta Cougar in my pants at the small of my back, a load in the chamber, the safety off. I climbed into the trunk. As Ryan closed it I told him to watch for speed bumps and potholes. “You hit one with this gun where it is, the crack in my ass will have company.”

The car pulled out of the lot, made two left turns and stopped again. The driver’s door opened and closed and footsteps receded into the distance. I was in virtual darkness. The trunk was uncomfortably hot. No, hell was uncomfortably hot. The trunk was baking me like a chicken. No air conditioning. Precious little air of any kind. The coarse carpet stung my face and neck where sweat was running freely. I tried to take my mind off the discomfort by visualizing the moment I would rip my wrists free of the rope, pull the gun out of my pants and point it at whoever was closest to me.

I tried not to visualize much after that.

Then the door to the building creaked open and banged closed. Footsteps approached. I tried to determine whether there was one person or more. It sounded like one, which likely meant Ryan hadn’t liked the odds and we were calling off our raid.

I thanked God silently-a knee-jerk reaction from my upbringing. Or maybe there are no atheists in car trunks.

When the trunk opened, light burst into the pitch-black space and blinded me for a moment. I squinted at the silhouette standing over me. There was no need to act scared as I was coming by it quite naturally. But there was definitely just the one man there, and as my eyes adjusted, I could tell it was Ryan. He held out a hand to help me out of the trunk.

“What?” I whispered.

“Scenario four,” he said and started back toward the office, his black loafers kicking up swirls of dust.