“…EVER HEAR THE expression ‘don’t look a gift horse in the mouth’?”
I looked up at Travis. His choice of homily immediately brought to mind Trojan horses: not all gifts are worth it. I’d scoured the second briefcase and found no tracking device. That eased my primary concern, but in the process gave birth to a whole new set of questions. Now I was sitting on the hood of the car gathering my thoughts and wishing I smoked. Tony and Travis had partied for a good couple of minutes before they realised I wasn’t joining in. They were standing in front of me, neither one wanting me to rain on their parade.
“I’m serious, we can retire on this,” Travis said, almost pleadingly. The unexpected bonus had worked like a shot of morphine. If he was still feeling the hole in his shoulder, he wasn’t letting on.
I looked back down at the dirt. “Nobody retires,” I said quietly.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
It was true. One of the great truths I’d manage to divine in this line of work, maybe the only one. ‘One last big job’ is the great enduring myth of our profession. Nobody ever pulls one last big job and quits. Nobody takes early retirement and moves to Florida. Nobody I know, at least. Because there’s always another job on the horizon, and one after that. And the money from the last job is never what you thought it was, or it runs out, or somehow you get in deep to someone else. After all, if we were good with money, we’d be accountants.
Nobody retires.
“I’m just saying, let’s ask a few questions before we pop the champagne corks,” I said. “There is no way in hell a mid-level salesman in a mid-level firm like that should have been carrying around that kind of capital.”
“Maybe the deal we gatecrashed was bigger than we thought.”
“Maybe.” I wasn’t convinced.
“Maybe he stole it,” Tony said. That was more plausible, more along the lines I’d been thinking. The only problem was, that scenario introduced a whole raft of unknowable factors to our situation, and I don’t like unknowable factors. They have a way of rendering the best-laid plans redundant.
The sky was light blue, not a cloud in sight. The sun was so hot it felt like it should evaporate my sweat. For some reason I thought of a colder, greyer place, and about the string of happenings that had led me to this time and this place. Things had really started back there in Boston, with Zane’s problem. My skin prickled, remembering the February wind-chill and the snow, and I marvelled that that place and this could be in the same world, let alone the same country.
I snapped out of it: the past was a foreign country, wasn’t it? Here and now, we were less than five miles away from town, and the clock was still ticking.
“Come on,” I said, hopping off the hood and opening the driver’s door. “Let’s find Frank.”