The Room: A Tale of Murder in the Social Networking Age Read online

1

  1:50pm

  HALFWAY, AZ

  5 MILES

  I GLANCED AT the worn metal sign, shimmering green in the desert heat, as it flashed by at a shade over seventy. For the first time, I found myself thinking about the name of the town. Where I come from, the place names are generally obscure, antique, hard to pronounce, but usually interesting. What the hell kind of a name for a town was Halfway?

  No doubt it had come by the name because of its location, planted as it was almost exactly halfway between Gila Bend; which we had just blown through on the way from Phoenix; and Lukeville, at the Mexican border. Or perhaps it was halfway between two places that no longer existed on the map. Perhaps there was some other, more esoteric reason for the town’s name. But Halfway? Might as well just call it Nowhere. A town with a name like that had no identity.

  Still, that’s what made it an ideal place for a quiet rendezvous.

  Wiping a small waterfall of sweat from my brow, I glanced at my two passengers, neither of whom I had known twenty four hours before, and neither of whom would be alive twenty four hours from now, although neither they nor I knew it at the time.

  My passengers were both LA natives, but there the similarities ended. Tony was a big black guy: six three, shaven-headed and built like a bad dream. Despite the day’s events, his charcoal Brooks Brothers two-piece was immaculate and uncreased. Tony seemed to avoid speaking when at all possible, limiting his occasional vocalisations to half a dozen words at most.

  Travis, in contrast, was a skinny white prick in a blood-and-sweat stained vest, and he seemed to avoid silence when at all possible. He was curled up in the back seat of the convertible, his skin tone not far off the green of the road sign. I glanced over my shoulder at him.

  “How you holding up, Trav?” I was asking less out of genuine concern and more because I wanted to gauge our chances of making town before we had to take another vomit break. We’d already had to make two pit stops to let Travis review his breakfast since changing cars in Gila Bend.

  Travis clutched his wounded shoulder, which was wrapped in a strip of his discarded blue shirt, and winced. “How the hell do you think I’m holding up? I’m getting lead poisoning here.”

  I grinned at Tony, in the passenger seat. “What did I tell you about staying out of the way of those things?”

  “Go to hell.”

  I decided to change the subject. Travis’s gun, as far as I knew, was still loaded, and he was probably both vicious enough and stupid enough to shoot the driver for pissing him off.

  “Tony, whereabouts in this town do we meet Frank and…?” I left it hanging, struggling to remember the name of the young guy, the one who looked like he was on work experience.

  “Stan,” he replied. “Frank said they’d find us.” Practically a dissertation, by Tony’s standards.

  “Don’t suppose there are many places to get lost in a town this size,” I said. “We can check into a motel and wait for them.”

  Tony nodded in agreement. Not wasting a breath, or unnecessary words. Not a problem that Travis shared.

  “He better ‘find’ us. That son of a bitch has got half the take, and it’s the half you can actually spend.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. Calming Travis down was a futile hope, but I gave it a shot. “I’ve worked with Frank before, he’s a pro.”

  In the rear-view, I saw Travis giving me what he probably thought of as a knowing smile. It didn’t go with his pallor. As a matter of fact, Frank was the only member of this team I had worked with before, and although he was certainly a professional, I had my doubts in other areas. Usually I prefer to operate solo, or with one partner, max. It widens the profit margin and I know I can count on at least fifty percent of the team. Since arriving in the States, I’d had to compromise that rule as I settled in, running a couple of jobs in Los Angeles with different crowds. I’d been trying hard as hell not to think about that last LA job, but it was never far beneath the surface of my thoughts, like a dumped car that won’t sink in the swamp.

  Frank had managed to twist my arm into joining this five-man team as a late addition, recruiting me for a breakdown job just outside Phoenix. It involved a good payoff for minimum effort: almost three hundred grand cash, more in diamonds. Five men was a crowd plus two, to my sensibilities, but I needed a quick hundred Gs badly, and beggars can’t be choosers.

  A breakdown job involves a mix of careful planning and brute force. Frank needed me for the planning. Tony backed up Frank on the brute force. Better: he made it unnecessary, like a one-man nuclear deterrent. Stan was the wheelman. I’m not exactly sure what Travis’s role was. Comic relief, maybe.

  Things hadn’t gone entirely to plan, but I thought we’d handled the situation not too badly, all things considered.

  The target had been a jewellery salesman on a sales trip. Robbing a salesman isn’t as immediately risky as robbing a bank, but LA had reinforced in me the importance of better safe than sorry. Bearing this in mind, I’d helped to finesse Frank’s original plan, building in as many precautions as possible, before and after the gig.

  My first precaution post-heist: split up to make pursuit more difficult. Frank and Stan took the cash, we took the ice. My second precaution: avoid the interstate and go nowhere in particular, which was why we’d taken the smaller highways and the long way round. My third precaution: ditch the cars in Gila Bend and pick up new ones for the home stretch.

  Problem was, when it comes to this kind of job, you can plan for before, and you can plan for after, but something can always go wrong while.

  After seemed to be following the script, so far. I find that a quick turnaround is desirable when you’re working with other people, so we’d arranged to meet the others in Halfway, where we were going to hook up with a flying fence of Frank’s acquaintance named Mitch, or Rich, or something. Mitch or Rich would give us forty percent of retail for the diamonds, hop on the first flight back to Florida, and make them disappear like teardrops in a rain storm.

  Travis getting winged had been a setback, nearly fucking up the whole deal. It could still prove to be a problem, but for now we were more or less on track. We had all got out alive with exactly what we expected to, and we didn’t have to kill anyone, which is the way I prefer it. Travis’s shoulder was a mess, but I reckoned he’d live; the bullet appeared to have passed through the meat cleanly.

  A low groan from the back seat made me wonder if I’d counted that particular chicken a little early.

  “Pull over?” I couldn’t keep the resignation out of my voice, but Travis was too sick to notice.

  “Pull over,” he agreed.

  Tony looked back at Travis, looked at me, then let his brown eyes roam over the Mustang’s upholstery, his mouth twitching at one side as if to say Told you you shouldn’t have picked a car you liked.

  He was probably right, but I hadn’t been able to resist when I saw her parked in Eduardo’s lot back in Gila Bend: black metallic paint glinting in the sun, standing out from the other secondhand heaps like a precious stone in a gumball machine. A Mustang convertible, one of the new ones from two or three years back. Real connoisseurs would sniff, of course, but for our purposes a genuine classic would be much too noticeable. There were enough nouveaux Mustangs on the roads that mine wouldn’t raise any eyebrows. Anyway, to me it barely mattered. New or old, they don’t make them like that where I’m from.

  Eduardo owned the used car dealership, and he owed Frank. I wasn’t privy to the details, but he paid his debt by giving us a pretty sweet deal: a few hundred bills and Eduardo agreed not to report the cars stolen until next week, by which time we’d all be in separate states.

  I liked the Mustang a lot: the way it looked, the way it sounded, the way it felt. About the only thing I didn’t like about it was that it was an automatic, and I was accustomed to a manual transmission. A year and a half in the US and I still couldn’t get used to automatic. I reminded my right hand to stay on the whee
l and leaned into the brake, pulling over and coming to a stop in a cloud of dust. Travis staggered out of the car and heaved a multicoloured torrent of vomit onto the blacktop.

  Under my breath: “Jesus, three times, where’s it coming from?”

  Tony shrugged as he watched Travis puke, almost impressed. An ageing pickup truck with an ageing male driver passed by, slowing enough to shake his head in disapproval. I flashed him a polite smile and looked back at Travis to see if he’d finished.

  There was no blood in the mix, which was a good sign. It meant that the sickness was most likely a result of shock coupled with the travelling and the heat. Travis needed a bed and some air conditioning, but the wound itself looked like it would be okay once we could clean it and get a real bandage to replace the ripped shirt.

  Watching Travis wipe bile from his lips, something occurred to me. Something that should have occurred to me hours ago, at Eduardo’s. “Tony, did you check the diamonds? When we switched cars, I mean.”

  Tony nodded slowly. “Both cases.”

  “‘Cases’?” I repeated. There had been only one case. I’d broken it, taken the contents and dumped it at the scene. We were carrying all of the goods in a single black canvas holdall. Or at least we had been when we left Phoenix. “I put everything in the bag,” I said.

  Tony turned around and looked in the direction of the trunk, as though he could use his X-Ray vision. “There was another case. Stan busted it open while you were patching Travis.”

  I remembered Stan leaning into the back seat of the salesman’s car, his floppy black hair dangling over his face. I hadn’t had time to wonder what the hell he was doing.

  “Let’s take a look.”

  Tony and I got out of the car, walking round our respective sides and meeting at the trunk. I opened it. The holdall was there. There was also a large, black briefcase, similar to the one that had carried the diamonds, but cheaper-looking. It had settled against the back of the interior. I pulled it forward and played my fingers over the broken lock. My own words echoed in the back of my head: I’ve worked with Frank before. He’s a pro.

  “What the fuck are you guys doing?” Travis had perked up, and was coming over to find out why Tony and I were staring so intently into the trunk.

  “This shouldn’t be here,” I said, to myself as much as anyone.

  I lifted the lid of the briefcase back on its hinges. The sunlight danced on a heap of loose stones, heliographing pinpoints of light against the black felt interior of the case, tossing miniature rainbows in the afternoon sun. My sinuses cleared and the hairs on the back of my neck stood to attention.

  Travis had joined us on my left side. Tony was on my right. Both were looking back and forth from the diamonds to me, waiting for an expert to interpret what they saw.

  When I didn’t speak for a minute, Travis prompted me: “That’s good… right?”

  I blinked, just to make sure it wasn’t an optical illusion of the heat.

  I spoke slowly and deliberately. “There’s got to be at least three million dollars worth of diamonds in this case.”

  No one said anything for a moment.

  Tony took a deep breath which made a whistling sound between his lips. Unsurprisingly, Travis was the one who spoke first.

  “We… are… fucking… rich.”

  He punctuated this by slapping Tony hard on the shoulder, wincing as the impact travelled back to his momentarily forgotten gunshot wound.

  The slap seemed to jog Tony out of a trance. He broke into a smile that exposed two rows of gleaming white teeth, and repeated the last word of Travis’s mission statement.

  As the other two fell back celebrating, I ran a palm back over my forehead, pushing my hair back, and kept looking at the pile of stones. Added to what we had in the holdall, that made three and a half million at a conservative estimate. Three point five mil when by rights there should have been five hundred grand. That was more than a slight discrepancy. It was like paying for a six pack and getting the Anheuser-Busch brewery.

  I mean, wouldn’t you be suspicious?

  Want to read the rest?

  HALFWAY TO HELL

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