Short Cut (The Reluctant Hustler Book 2) Read online

  Why hadn’t I waited? Beet would be all right for a few more days. Too much crap going on.

  “Tomorrow, okay?”

  “Now. Okay.” NOT a question. The guy didn’t seem concerned about witnesses here and his hands came up like he was going to push me through the back door if necessary.

  A big part of me wanted to have it out right then and there, but like with the car outside, a brawl, even if I took the goon down, would flatten the place like we were a couple fleshy wrecking balls. Then the ensuing police action would surely see the thumb drive into an evidence locker. These assholes didn’t know anything about it, so unless I was frisked, as far as I knew all they wanted was money and I happened to have some of that.

  “Fine. I hear out back is nice this time of year.”

  Tank rolled on and I made my way to the rear of the place to avoid getting run over.

  At the back door the hallway was so narrow both of us needed to turn our shoulders a bit to get past. The door squeaked and the low sun’s orange light speared into my eyes.

  A whiff of rotting garbage from a dark green dumpster hit my nostrils like a cheap-shot uppercut.

  “You came back quickly. I like how fast you can move when motivated.”

  I recognized the voice but had to squint to see Milosh outlined in the blinding orange light. One more step back and I’d be against the dumpster.

  “You have a real flair for ambience.”

  “If that is another word for privacy, thank you. So, you were serious about the marker?”

  “I’m deadly serious about looking out for my friends. And they feel the same way.”

  “Yes, I know, Mr. Logan. I know all about it.”

  “I doubt that.”

  Milosh came closer and I could see his face. “If you like my office you will love my research department.”

  I figured that the prick would do a background check. But what would this guy be able to dig up? I was a screwed-up truck driver with a shady friend or two from the old neighborhood.

  “Whatever. Yes, I have the marker.” I patted my jacket. “How about you take this and leave Beetle alone?”

  Milosh gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “It is done. On one condition.”

  “Condition?”

  “Keep your cash. Instead, you’ll owe me a favor.”

  “Huh? I got his marker. That means I owe you money, and if I pay up, that’s that. Where did you go to loan shark school?”

  “I consider it an investment. If you don’t agree, then the debt is still with your precious Beetle.”

  Precious was an interesting description for Beet, but none of this made any sense. “You don’t seem stupid. Maybe this is a language thing. If you say he has to pay you, then what stops me from just giving him the cash and he settles the debt?”

  “Maybe I prefer to let him be an example after all, or perhaps I’d rather Beetle work off his debt.”

  “That’s a nonstarter.”

  “Nonstarter? Does that mean you will work off his payment instead?”

  I reached into my windbreaker and the Tank gripped my arm. Every instinct screamed for me to twist out of the grip and elbow the goon in the jaw. A voice in my head, sounding like a squeaky version of Rollie, chanted, “Thumb drive, thumb drive, thumb drive.”

  I tolerated the grip. “It’s just an envelope. Why don’t you take this and go run your damn coffee shop, huh?”

  Milosh smiled and backed further into the alley. Tank grabbed my other arm and guided me away from the back door.

  “Sometimes ‘damn coffee shops’ are more work than they appear. The marker is covered and your friend is safe. For now.”

  I shrugged off the goon’s grip and held my ground. I’d never been bounced from a stinking alley and wasn’t going to start today. Thumb drive or no. “And what’s that mean exactly?”

  “I’ll be in touch. A man with your contacts and connections can be useful.”

  “If that touch includes Beet, I’ll put you both in the ground.”

  I should have expected their smirks.

  “Entirely up to you.”

  They walked back into the shop.

  * * *

  Rollie’s Place

  I made it back to Rollie’s house without additional incident though I’d kept my head on such a swivel that my neck was beginning to cramp. I couldn’t shake the feeling I was about to get jacked and I wanted to get in touch with Beet just to try to explain the situation. That is, if I could get it all untangled myself. About the only thing I really understood was that whatever had just happened wasn’t good, which was par for the course for my life these days.

  Rollie opened the door like he was a parent waiting for a child who’d stayed out past his curfew. And it wasn’t even late.

  “Don’t scare me like that, kid. You okay?” Rollie let me in and I glanced around the living room. Rollie guessed why. “He’s gone. The little guy is a real pest. Thought I was going to have to throw him out before he made me promise to call him when you got back.”

  “Tom can be a little intense,” I said as I plopped into a seat. “I’m fine, but it has been one strange afternoon.”

  “Do tell.”

  So I did. I told him everything, very glad Tom wasn’t around.

  “So where do you stand with that commie shylock?” Rollie’s face scrunched up to mirror my own confusion. “He’ll be in touch? What does that mean?”

  “Clear as mud, isn’t it?” I shrugged. “One disaster at a time. I have the drive. Let’s see what’s on it. I’m guessing we might need to decode some of the contents.”

  “No call first? What happened to ‘trust Tom,’ like Ryan said in his letter?” Rollie’s eyes crinkled like he was holding back a smile.

  “Yeah, well let’s see what the hell is on this thing before we show our cards. You’ll notice the safe deposit box wasn’t in his name.”

  “Fire up the computer. I’ll get my glasses and that stupid dictionary with the microscopic print size.”

  * * *

  As expected, the text on the drive was awash in codes, but at least it all used the same dictionary cipher. There was a whole section specifically labeled for the Mr. Beautiful Project. I copied it onto a separate stick and made sure to exclude all the other material.

  After the drudgery of transcribing the letters and numbers it didn’t take long to realize that it was mostly a list of names and phone numbers or locations, just like Ryan had described in his note to me. Sometimes he added a short explanation as to what the people meant to him. We also could see Ryan’s gold-standard metric. “FV” was simply short for favor. Those who owed Ryan and the few he owed. He even added a number, as if it was some sort of ledger complete with account balances. I guess that’s exactly what it was and it gave a good measure of how closely Ryan had worked with someone. He also listed the sort of service or the nature of the relationship.

  “Busy bastard, wasn’t he?” Rollie said. “When did he find time to earn an honest buck?”

  I let my eyes scan down the list. Most I’d either never heard of or had no idea Ryan dealt with them. Most, but not all. “We know this guy.” I jabbed at a contact in the middle of our hastily cribbed translations.

  “Crocker?” His eyes lit up in recognition. “Doc Crock? The one who stitched you and Bishop up?”

  “The one and the same.” The unlicensed, disgraced alcoholic sawbones didn’t ask questions and only took cash, but I couldn’t criticize his work after the Ryan fiasco six months ago. His bedside manner sucked, but I guess you get what you pay for. He represented healthcare in Ryan’s underground economy crib sheet.

  The other guy Doc Crock had patched up, Bishop, was also on the list. He was a corrupt cop I knew from the last scheme and a long-time colleague of Ryan’s, if that was the right word. He was back at the Pennsylvania State Police barracks, still managing the property room, last I heard.

  And on and on. The list had places to get cars, fake IDs, hacking services.
And this was interesting: a couple other doctors. But they weren’t there to treat gunshot or knife wounds that would be inconvenient to report. These names had notes like “Off the record Scripts, NOT opioids.” Or, “Pain meds okay but last resort only, not a regular source.”

  I started to understand. Ryan was no dealer. These were sources for compassionate, albeit illegal as hell, medicine. And I again saw the man that had come to the door asking on behalf of his sister. He’d even told me the liquor store where he worked.

  I also remembered my own mother, long ago, during her own battle with cancer and getting screwed over by her insurance company. We were only in high school, but Ryan, a born hustler, had already built a network. He’d taken the old bottle of the drugs that had been helping Mom and a week later brought her a refill, along with making us both swear we didn’t know anything about where we got it.

  Mom probably lived a year longer because of those drugs and I almost decked the smug doctor who’d sung the praises of the crap substitute drugs the insurance still covered.

  Ryan never asked me for a dime.

  I thought again of Beet, and how there was no way Ryan could be making money from lending such small amounts with such favorable terms.

  There were plenty of fences on the list for stolen merchandise. I also saw another sort of list with things Ryan apparently knew that others wanted. He was a sophisticated middleman.

  Rollie traced his finger down the list.

  “I know this guy,” he said. “He’s a second-generation hitter for the Irish. I knew his old man before he went career goon right when I joined the service.” Rollie pointed to another name, with plenty of notes: “Likes dominant women, growing coke habit, can go too far on a job.” Then a star next to “Collects baseball cards, needs Yastrzemski rookie. Can use bottles of Green Spot 10-year-old to soothe pissed off O’Briens. Don’t get him weapons, be careful, MEAN guy.”

  There were more, but I saw a couple of patterns now. Ryan was always looking to help people who could help him, if not now, then down the line. And then there were a good number of other people who couldn’t have been of any imaginable use to Ryan; sometimes, it appeared, he was just being a nice guy.

  Rollie shook his head. “What the hell are you supposed to do with all this?”

  “Beats me, but you’re looking at a lifetime of networking.” I was impressed, and more than a little freaked out. He couldn’t have reached out to all these people and mentioned me, could he?

  “That little pest will be back before you know it. I can feel it,” Rollie said. “We ought to get him back here and check out the stuff for this project.”

  “I suppose so.” It was ten o’clock at night by then. My head was reeling. I put away the list Ryan had made for me and called Tom.

  Chapter 8

  Rollie’s House

  Tom must have been circling the block, as quick as he reached Rollie’s front door. I’d have mentioned for him to be careful in this neighborhood, but I knew better than to worry. He lived in war zones and never got a scratch.

  “Took you long enough,” he said. “I was beginning to worry there was a different code nobody had ever heard of.”

  Rollie stretched and yawned. “I’m an old-fart triggerman, not a hopped-up cryptographer.”

  “Fine. Thanks for all the work, chap. What does it say?”

  I spread out the papers on the dining room table. “It looks straightforward, at least as far as it goes. The goods …,” I paused. “What are we talking about here? If it is drugs or something like that, you can forget it.”

  Tom looked like he was going to fly apart with all our clumsy delays. “No, of course not.”

  I waited for him to go on and when I saw he didn’t intend to I felt my temper come on hot. “Listen, you little twerp. Stop playing games. What the fuck is it that’s so worth all this crap?”

  “If this is how you behave now, I can’t imagine how Ryan thought you could help under fire.”

  “You know better than that. If I really lost my temper, you’d be headed for the emergency room.”

  “Don’t be a mug, it doesn’t suit you.” Tom shook his head. “A real professional would know better than to ask, but if it helps, it is a satchel, and inside are dozens of cracking big diamonds, large fat untraceable gemstones worth a fortune. That bling is what makes Mr. Beautiful such a lovely.”

  Ah.

  “And before you get on some high horse about ‘Now just you wait a cotton-picking second here, sport …’” Tom always could do a really funny, Southern American accent.

  “Cotton-picking?” Rollie said.

  “I never said that.” I smiled. “Hey, relax. However he made his dough is sand down the hourglass, or whatever they say. I don’t care that much and since you brought it up, I am NOT a professional.”

  Tom frowned. “Yes you are, mate, but you have a lot of work to go on your game.” He returned his gaze to the paper. “Right. Me, I make sure the package gets out of the Sand Box. It will come here, hidden inside a truck, and wait for us in the Philly port.”

  “And then?” I pointed. “You and I access the port and the Delivergistics section. You’ll have the paperwork needed?”

  “Yes, yes.” Tom sounded impatient. “That’s been arranged.”

  “Sounds so simple. You could just mail the stuff,” Rollie said. “They once did that with the Cullinan diamond. They—”

  “What a gripping yarn that must be,” Tom cut in. “If only we had time to hear every detail.” He rapped the table. “There’s nothing simple about getting the package here, but yes, this part should be routine.” He looked expectantly at me.

  “Okay. And then we remove the package and the truck driver acts as courier?”

  “Not quite,” he said. “The package is built into the truck itself, so you will drive west until we stop in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. We make a stop and extract the package. After that, we meet our contact and if all goes well, we’ll proceed with the exchange.”

  Now we were getting somewhere. Or at least Tom was. “Okay. Ryan can’t be here for this great plan. You sound like you have things nicely in hand. I think if Ryan trusted you this much, you can take it the rest of the way.”

  “I don’t understand,” Tom said.

  “Shoe’s on the other foot, huh?” I hated to admit I was enjoying the moment. “Take it away, ‘mate.’ It’s all yours and Bob’s your uncle or stepfather or whatever you want him to be.”

  “Come again?”

  “You did the hard part. You might as well finish it off.”

  “This was Ryan’s part. I can’t …” Tom pinched the seam on his pant leg. Maybe even along with some skin, trying to stay calm. “Thanks to his paranoid machinations I can’t complete the mission without your help. I thought I’d been clear.”

  “It’s a straight shot from here. You said so yourself. This isn’t my deal and never was.” I raised my hand to block the next objection. “Tell you what, I’ll bring you to meet the contacts along the way. Then I will find a trustworthy driver. Shoot, he doesn’t even have to know what he’s carrying, does he?” That was a trick Ryan had pulled on me a couple times over in Iraq, taking advantage of some surplus cargo space when we carried supplies and personnel into hot zones. Once I found out, I dropped him to his knees with a gut punch. We reached an understanding after that.

  Tom frowned and spoke slowly, like he couldn’t believe his ears. “You do grasp that you are to hold on to Ryan’s half of the fee?” Tom locked his gaze on me.

  “You hold it. He trusted you this far. This is your baby.”

  “Don’t tempt me.” Now his eyes glittered in a way that told me he was already doubling the payday in his mind.

  “Go on! Live large, dream big,” I patted him on the head. “So to speak.” Then I turned serious. “Ryan never got around to asking me to do this. He was the hustler. I’m just a guy who is trying to learn from my mistakes.”

  “But your share would come to—”
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br />   “A bunch, I have no doubt.” I tamped down the greedy-but-dumb part of my brain. “But if I may waste my breath, I’d warn you that ‘easy part’ and ‘can’t miss’ are famous last words for a reason.”

  “Easy is a curse uttered by ignorant outsiders unaware of the planning that goes into one of these operations,” Tom said.

  Rollie spoke up. “And you know the one about no plan survives contact with the enemy? The kid wants out. Surely you have enough flexibility to handle that?”

  “This is the flexibility. I was supposed to be working with Ryan, remember?”

  “I think you’ve figured out his plans weren’t so perfect after all,” Rollie said.

  “Yeah, well I wasn’t involved in that, was I?” Tom’s cheeks puffed as he exhaled a long breath. “Right. Kyle, can you agree to this much? I’ll finalize the operation overseas and meet back here as soon as everything is in place. The truck will be on a transport ship and will take a week to arrive. Meantime, if the contacts over here refuse to cooperate with just me, you will join me as planned.”

  “I didn’t plan shit, but if I say yes, will you go away?”

  Tom smiled. “I wasn’t sticking around for the tea.”

  Chapter 9

  Fishtown: Two days later

  As much as I tried to pretend that Tom had gone away for good, a pressure started to build inside my skull. It didn’t help that the only news I saw about Delivergistics was bad and getting worse. The more the reports of investigations leaked to the press the less my manager or anyone with the company said. Workers like me were stuck in the dark and the paychecks that still came in were little comfort.

  As a side effect, I had more time on my hands than I wanted.

  I kept reading the list Ryan shared. My first impression held true: Half the contacts made him look like a scam artist or crooked middleman, all of which I suppose was true, but then the others made little sense if he was expecting to earn a buck. They read more like a cross between Robin Hood and the Make a Wish Foundation.

  Invariably, those perceptions led me to think about the guy we’d shooed away who claimed to be worried about his sister. I had enough of my own problems without having to add this guy’s desperate gamble. If I was his last hope … crap.