The Take Read online

  Val continued gripping Eddie’s shoulders. “Hey, listen to me, man. We did what we had to do. It was them or us.”

  “But I just shot that fucking Salazar right where he sat. His blood — it was all over that fucking car seat.”

  Val grew firm. “Yeah, you shot him right where he sat, all right. You see what he had in his hand? Well, it damn sure wasn’t his dick, buddy boy. It was his fucking piece. And he was fixing to blow your Irish ass to kingdom come.” He softened for emphasis. “Look, you did right, man. Like I said, it was him or you.” Then he returned to the couch and added, “Besides, they were just lowlife Mess’can drug dealers. We oughta get a fucking medal.”

  Felina looked at Eddie, then back at Val. “All right, now do you want to tell me what the hell happened?”

  The air conditioning had quit. Eddie could see sweat trickling down her throat, disappearing beneath her halter-top. He fought the urge to lick it.

  Val ran it all down for her, downplaying the carnage. He concluded by standing the suitcase upright on the floor.

  “And right in here’s what we came for. This’s the star of the show.” He messed with it some more trying to open it, then said to Felina, “Get me a screwdriver.”

  She went to the kitchen and returned, long phillips head in hand. Val attempted to pry the case open, but it wasn’t happening. He cursed the case.

  Eddie had a thought. “Hey, maybe the thing’s wired. You know, if you don’t know the combination and you try to force it open, it blows up or something.”

  Val brushed that aside with a glare. “We got anything stronger around here?”

  Before Felina could answer, Eddie said, “We could try the tire iron in my trunk. It’s got one end on it like a crowbar.” Val nodded and Eddie went out to his car. Moments later, he was back with the tool.

  Val pushed the case against the wall for leverage and wedged the sharp end of the tire iron into its opening crevice. After a couple of tries, it popped open. There was no explosion.

  But there was money. And plenty of it.

  A ton of cash, all packeted in bank wrappers, filling the suitcase right to the brim. The trio gasped all at once, as they sat down on the shag carpet in a semicircle, then fell silent, while the loot glittered before them, begging to be touched.

  Felina reached first, fingering one of the packets, flipping the cash, all hundreds. It didn’t bite, so she pulled it out to hold it in both hands. Then she held it up to her face, caressing her cheek with it, and started counting.

  Only one packet, and so many more stuffed inside!

  Then Eddie and Val gingerly reached out. They each touched a packet, hesitating at first. Then Val buried both hands deep inside the case, pulling out dozens of packets. He let them fall from his hands onto the floor, as he laughed out loud.

  “Holy shit! Look. Will you look at what we got.” He threw the packets up in the air, no longer afraid of them. “Look at this shit, will you?” He laughed and laughed.

  Eddie had never seen so much money in his life. Not even anything close. And he was used to seeing lots of cash. But this — shit, this was something else altogether.

  The only thing he could think of at this moment was, This is more money than I’ve ever seen, but it was just a routine twice-a-month delivery for Chico Salazar. The thought that Salazar’s successor would be hauling another load like this one down to the islands in just two weeks was overpowering.

  He reached into the case and pulled out some wrapped bills, banded wads of twenties, fifties, and hundreds.

  Jesus, I don’t believe this.

  Felina lifted the case and overturned it, allowing the remaining money to tumble out, while the three of them giggled. The giggles crescendoed to frenzied laughter as they all rolled around on the green carpet, wallowing in the packets of the green dough, tossing them into the air.

  Felina continued counting the hundreds in her packet. On completion, she announced: “Five thousand. There’s five thousand bucks here in this one little packet.”

  The two men stopped what they were doing. Slowly, they turned and looked at her, then at the packets of money strewn around on the carpet. They gazed at each other in thick silence, all three of them holding their breaths, until Val finally whispered, “Let’s count it.”

  It took over forty-five minutes. Although each packet contained fifty bills — some twenties, some fifties, a few tens, but a lot of hundreds — each was counted. When they finished adding everything up on Eddie’s calculator the total came to one million, nine hundred seventy thousand dollars.

  When he announced this figure, no one moved a muscle. Their jaws went slack, as though it were all a cruel joke and the slightest movement would make the money vanish, shoving them back into the real world. Their wide eyes glazed over, and Felina had a tear on her cheek.

  After a few seconds of this, she said in her lowest, throatiest voice, “This is almost two million bucks.”

  “Holy shit!” Eddie exclaimed. “What’re we gonna do?”

  Val took charge. “We’re gonna split it up. Now.” He took the calculator and started figuring.

  “But I mean, what’re we gonna do?” Eddie insisted. “We can’t just take all this to a bank.”

  Val chuckled. “No shit, Sherlock. One thing’s for sure, though. The government won’t be on our asses. They don’t even know about this dough. It ain’t like robbing a bank where the bills are red-hot, with their numbers all recorded and shit. This is drug money, buddy boy. You know what that means? It means it doesn’t have to be fenced. You can take one of these C-notes and go out right now and spend it, and nothing’s gonna happen, you dig? Shit, man, you could even bring it to a bank and get change for it.”

  “Then this money is worth …” Eddie began.

  Val stood up. “One hundred percent of its face value. Every penny of it.” He was holding a packet in one hand, slapping it into the palm of his other.

  Felina put it a better way. “We’re millionaires.”

  “Nine hundred eighty-five thousand apiece,” Val announced. “Not bad for a night’s work, eh?”

  Eddie was still near speechless. “We-we’ve …”

  Val leaned down low over Eddie’s shoulder. “We’ve hit the fucking jackpot, buddy boy.” Eddie sat stunned while Val straightened up, adding, “But we’ve gotta be careful not to go attracting a lot of attention. Y’understand, Eddie? No big buys. No jewelry, no new Caddies, none o’ that shit. You can be sure that Salazar’s goons’ll be lookin’ high and low for this bundle. I don’t have to tell you what they’ll do to us if they find it.”

  He sat on the sofa, then crooked his finger at Felina. She moved over to him, curling up under his outstretched arm, holding a packet of hundreds to her lovely breast.

  “Oh, baby,” she cried. “Now we can get out of here. Maybe go to Mexico, just like you said we could.” She just couldn’t lose that beautiful smile that covered her face.

  “Sure, honey, sure,” he replied, his mind elsewhere.

  Eddie moved numbly into the recliner. The money stayed on the floor next to the empty suitcase, still commanding lots of attention.

  “What can we do with all this? Like you said, we can’t spend it. We can’t put it in the bank, we can’t do shit. We can only …”

  “Hold on to it,” said Val, turning up the intensity in his eyes. “And make sure it’s … safe.”

  A subtle chill touched the back of Eddie’s neck, like little cold needles. Suppressing a shiver, he suddenly wanted to get out of there. “Let’s divide it now.”

  The split didn’t take nearly as long as the initial count. Eddie scooped his share up from the filthy shag carpet.

  “I’ll take the suitcase,” he said.

  Val nodded, as Eddie sealed it shut with a few strips of duct tape. Then he was gone.

  The ride home took forever, or so it seemed. Salazar’s men would surely be aware of things by now, meaning the hunt would be on.

  What if he and Val h
ad slipped up? What if they’d left something behind that could ID them? What if there were witnesses? He didn’t remember any, but what if there were?

  His insides tightened as he drove down McCarty. The dark fear of his future squeezed his stomach, hard. Knots began to form all through his insides. Struggling to catch a breath, he opened his driver’s side window to the Houston humidity, as he took stock of his situation.

  Knocking over a Mexican for thirty or forty thousand apiece sounded easy, like it could be pulled off if you planned it right.

  But two million bucks? That moved everything into the big league. A league where violent men routinely kill each other in large numbers, and often for a lot less. A complex league of money launderers and fat cat bankers and Lamborghinis and life above the law.

  Eddie Ryan had never seen himself in that world, but there he was. Right down in the god damn middle of it. Wanted, not only by the law, but by the most ruthless cowboys this side of Colombia.

  He looked at the silver suitcase on the dirty passenger seat next to him. What will they do to get it? He already knew the answer to that one.

  What can he do to protect it? He had no idea.

  He almost wished it only contained the thirty large they were originally after. But there it was, bigger than shit, sitting there with nearly a million dollars in it.

  He laughed out loud, a sardonic one-note laugh.

  Me! With a million bucks.

  Everything would be different from here on out because of this … this stroke of good luck, well, wouldn’t it? He’d waited for this luck his whole life, hadn’t he? Wasn’t this his one big break? I mean, it was good luck, wasn’t it? This kind of money doesn’t just fall into a guy’s lap every day, does it?

  Whatever, he was in it right now up to his nostrils, with no looking back. No looking back.

  Hmph, that’s a good one. I’ll be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life, starting now.

  He glanced at the rear view mirror.

  He felt like his guts were in a vise, as though some powerful unseen hand was turning the grip tighter, squeezing, squeezing …

  5

  It had stopped raining. As he turned the corner onto the busy street where he lived, Eddie scanned the landscape, looking for anything out of the ordinary for this time of night. Anyone sitting in a parked car? Anyone loitering out front? Any well-dressed Latinos around?

  He turned onto a side street to see if anyone was following him. His eyes narrowed, shifting back and forth from the rear view mirror to the parked cars on the wet street in front of him. After a nervous lap around the block, he emerged on the corner, carefully eyeing the people hanging around. Finally, he was satisfied. He was home free, at least for tonight.

  The spot in front of the greasy spoon underneath his room was illegal, ticket territory for certain, but he damn sure wasn’t about to carry that suitcase any distance. The duct tape barely held it together. He felt it could pop open on him any second.

  He rushed inside with it, up the narrow staircase, bumping it a couple of times on his way. Sticky sweat gathered under his arms as he imagined the horror of the cash spilling out onto the stairway.

  After fumbling with his key, he made it into his room with everything intact. Shutting the door, then bolting it behind him, he exhaled loudly, and fell onto the bed in the corner. The only light in the heavily shadowed room came from the flashing beanery sign just below his window. As always, the thick aroma of something deep-frying drifted in from downstairs.

  Something pinched his side. He groped the .38 still in his waistband, then removed it, placing it under his pillow. The suitcase lay on the floor by the bed, still taped. He shoved it under the bed, deciding he’d worry about it tomorrow, because by then he’d be long gone, with this dump far behind him.

  What a night. He realized how drained he felt; then sleep called and off he went.

  ≈≈≈

  The morning sky over Houston turned bright blue, as an early sun flooded Eddie’s room. He stirred awake soon after dawn, still dressed.

  The events of the night before flew back into his memory and he jerked himself upright. Looking around the bed, he saw the suitcase peeking out from underneath, right where he left it. He ran a hand across his unshaven face and through his disheveled hair, then got up.

  Walking slowly along the wall, he carefully approached the window for a peek outside. Again, nothing unusual. He really didn’t know what to look for, but from where he stood, everything appeared normal for a Friday morning.

  Friday morning! He had a date with Raymond Cannetta at noon. A fast shot of anxiety stabbed at him, but then — hey, wait a minute — his debts were no longer a problem. He would pay off Cannetta in full, then take care of his bettors as well. At last, he’d be square with the world. Everything was going to be all right.

  He leaned over the sink. As he threw water on his face, he started to organize his thoughts.

  He’d have to leave right away. The money? Well, there was no way he was leaving it in that taped-up case. He’d transfer it over to his own suitcase. A different car, too. He couldn’t keep that old Toyota much longer.

  After throwing on some clean clothes, he untaped the metal suitcase. It was still there, all nine hundred eighty-five thousand of it. Reaching inside his small closet, he pulled out his own worn-leather suitcase, secured with wide straps. He shoveled the dough into it, siphoning off a couple of grand into his pocket for scat money. He tossed a few clothes into the bag’s remaining space before buckling it shut.

  After shoving the heater back into his waistband, he headed for the door, but the footsteps in the hallway stopped him cold.

  Pulling the .38 out, he gripped it with both hands up alongside his cheek. He froze behind the door, first heaving with tension, then, as the footsteps came closer, unable to breathe. With the cold metal against his face, he heard them stop right outside his room. His heart pounded louder than the sharp knock.

  “Eddie. You in there? Open up.” It was the delicate accent of Felina.

  Exhaling in relief, he opened the door. Her eyes smiled at him as she entered. She had never looked at him that way before. All at once, his anxieties melted away into the humid morning. Now, he was warm as the sun, loose and relaxed.

  “Holy Jesus, girl,” he said, returning the weapon to his waistband. “You scared the living shit out of me, coming up here like that. What’re you doing here?” He glimpsed the hallway. It was empty. “Where’s Val?”

  She shut the door, then walked over to the couch. Her face grew serious.

  “Did you see this?” she asked, holding out a copy of that morning’s Houston Chronicle. Eddie took it from her without taking his eyes off her lovely face. She tapped the paper to redirect his attention. He finally looked at it.

  The headline exploded at him out of the front page:

  ONE KILLED, ONE WOUNDED IN SHOOTOUT ON MEMORIAL DRIVE

  “A suspected Houston drug dealer was seriously wounded and his driver killed last night as they sat in a Rolls Royce on Memorial Drive inside Memorial Park,” he read aloud, in complete disbelief, “Leonel ‘Chico’ Salazar, 32, is listed in serious condition at Ben Taub Hospital with a gunshot wound to the stomach. The driver, Antonio Chávez, 24, was killed with a bullet to the chest and one in the head, execution- style.

  “Salazar, a Mexican-American, who says he is a foreign car salesman, has long been suspected of being one of the city’s kingpins of the cocaine trade, with direct ties to the drug cartels of Colombia.

  “Police speculate robbery as the motive. Salazar’s passport was found on his person, and a check of the airports revealed he had planned to fly last night in his private plane to the Cayman Islands, an offshore banking haven frequently used by drug dealers. It is believed he was carrying a large amount of cash when his Rolls Royce was stopped on Memorial Drive. A passing police car found the two men inside the car, probably minutes after the attack.

  “There are no suspects at this
time.”

  Eddie looked up from the paper, eyes wide, color drained from his face.

  “Son. Of. A. Bitch,” he tried to say from way back in his throat. It almost made it out.

  “The cops have it figured out,” Felina said coolly. “But like it says, they got no suspects.”

  “Christ, Salazar is still alive. And he saw us. If he puts it together, we’re dead.” Eddie looked at the paper, then back at Felina. “What’re you doing here, anyway? And where’s Val?”

  “He doesn’t know I’m here,” Felina said. “He gave me some money for cab fare and sent me to my mother’s place out in Channelview to say goodbye.”

  “Goodbye? Where you going?”

  “He wants to leave town now. He says he wants to take me with him. But I know too much.”

  “Know too much? What’re you talking about — why shouldn’t you go? You’re his woman.” A twinge of regret brushed him as he said that.

  “Eddie, you don’t understand.” Her voice sharpened. “There’s a lot of money at stake. A lot of money. This is the biggest score he’ll ever make and he knows it. He can’t afford to leave loose ends lying around.”

  “Loose ends? What loose ends?” She looked away. “I just … I just can’t go with him.”

  “What do you mean you can’t go with him? Why not?”

  She lifted her head up to look straight at him with those big, big dark eyes. “He wants to kill me.”

  Eddie dismissed this, waving the back of his hand.

  “Aw, you’re nuts. Why would he wanna do that?”

  “He wants to,” she replied. “I know he wants to. Because I know the whole story. As long as he thought he was only gonna get thirty or forty thousand dollars, he didn’t care if I knew. He thought Salazar would let the whole thing drop. But now … now, with the shootings and … and all this money. Well, Val can’t afford to have me around. With me out of the way, that’s just one less thing he’s got to worry about.”