Thirteen Million Dollar Pop

78

Waddy Dwyer was completely arsed up. Hurt and alone, ribs crushed, the soft tissue of his legs shredded and his face blown up, burned, and peppered. The kind of damage he’d managed to avoid his whole career, and the kind a man never fully comes back from. He’d be completely unable to cash the $62,000 check he’d made Shug Saunders write him. He’d need to stay away from banks and most public places with cameras, especially during the day, being so recognizably disfigured now. The whole trip was for naught. Gantcher had run dry of funds and there was no one left to squeeze for his payday. It had become a complete fucking debacle. And now he was doing something he hadn’t in his whole bloody life: he was running.

One of them, probably the younger of the two, had mined the ground near the rear steps. He’d used something fragmentary and incendiary that was homemade yet effective and would’ve killed him outright had he not felt the hard metal underfoot and dove away just in time. Dwyer should have been looking for it, or something like it, after seeing they’d killed his SAS boy. Only true players could have done that to Rickie. What was it that Ruthless had said? When pros lock up, everyone gets hurt.

Dwyer’s own arrogance, the way he’d taken Behr lightly and only thought of killing him and not the reverse, was the true sign of his age. Suddenly his belief in his skills outstripped his ability. Miraculously, he’d made it to the car, used a sweatshirt to blot his tattered face, and drove out of there before any police had arrived.

Now, at a rest stop off I-65, he rinsed his torn-up thighs with bottled water and used the rest to wash down half a dozen codeine and acetaminophen and two Adderall. He was far off the road, away from the abandoned car park, tucked into thick trees where he fed Rickie’s belongings into a fire he’d built in a metal rubbish barrel. The clothes were burning well, already beyond recognition or provenance, the same with the Elvis glasses, which melted immediately when he tossed them into the flames. He added the GSM mobile jammer, along with the rest of his equipment, to the mix. It was time to travel light. Finally, he dropped Rickie’s passport in and watched the crimson cover curl, peel back, and liquefy, revealing the photo page. Black ringed holes spread across Rickie’s young, unsmiling face, before he disappeared altogether.

Dwyer limped back to the car and used the map feature on his smart phone to plot his route: straight north to Lake Michigan, then northeast on I-94 to I-196, until Route 31 would take him straight into the wilderness country of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, to Traverse City if he could make it that far on land, where he’d boost a boat and steer it around Mackinac Island into Lake Huron and Canada. From there, depending on how and if his face healed, he could bus over to Nova Scotia and catch on with a merchant ship headed for the UK, or maybe even a flight to London if the heat dissipated enough. Dwyer sketched the route in detail on paper, then texted home a coded message: kits in dens. That would give Sandy an idea of what was going on and what to do. Then he took the SIM card out of the already clean phone and cracked it into pieces and let them blow away on the post-rain breeze.

He started the car. He would have to dump it soon and switch into a stolen one for the second half of the drive. He had so far to go, but all he could think about was getting back to Wales. All he could picture was Sandy, her fine hands treating his face with boric acid solution and spreading calendula and comfrey salve over the burns on his legs. He pulled out of the rest area, back onto the interstate, and started traveling.