Moss waits on the corner of Caroline and Bell Streets watching vehicles being paused on red lights and shoved on by green. He looks at his cell phone. Nobody has called him yet. Maybe they were lying to him about the GPS tracking device. Glancing skyward, he looks into the blue white-welted sky and wonders if satellites are watching him now. He’s tempted to wave or flip them the bird.
A stretch limo pulls up at the curb and a black chauffeur gets out and tells Moss to spread his legs and brace himself against the car. The chauffeur runs a metal detector up and down Moss’s front and back, along his arms, and between his legs. Moss left his .45 under the front seat of the pickup, wrapped in an oily rag, alongside a box of shells and a Bowie knife that Lester threw in for free.
The chauffeur nods to the car and the rear door opens. Eddie Barefoot is dressed in a dark suit with a flower in his lapel as though he’s going to a wedding or a funeral. He could be anything from twenty-five to fifty, but his yellow curls and spindly legs give him an antique look, like someone who has stepped from a sepia photograph.
A former Miami wise guy who came to Houston in the late eighties when the Bonanno crime family was expanding its interests away from southern Florida, Eddie built up his own crew, making a fortune from bank and mail fraud, drugs, prostitution, and money laundering. Since then he’d diversified into legitimate businesses, but there was still no serious action in eastern Texas that didn’t get pieced to Eddie Barefoot. You paid your respects or you paid a percentage or you paid with broken bones.
The limousine is moving.
“I was surprised to hear from you,” says Eddie, adjusting the lapel flower. “According to my sources, you are still in the big house.”
“You might want to change your sources,” says Moss, trying to appear relaxed, but scared that his voice might betray him. His eyes are drawn to the depression in Eddie’s forehead. According to the story, a ball-peen hammer did the damage. And the man who delivered the blow, a business rival, was later buried up to his neck in sand and forced to swallow a live grenade. This could be a myth, of course, but Eddie had done nothing to correct the record.
“I also heard you went squeaky. The brothers thought you might have found God.”
“I went looking, but he’d left early.”
“Maybe he heard you were coming.”
“Maybe.”
Eddie smiles, appreciating the banter. His voice is steeped in the Deep South. “So how did you get out?”
“State let me go.”
“That’s very magnanimous of the state. What did you give them in return?”
“Nothing.”
Eddie removes something from the back of his teeth with his little finger.
“So they just let you walk?”
“Maybe it was a case of mistaken identity.”
Eddie laughs. Moss decides he should join in. The car is speeding along a freeway.
“You know what’s really funny,” says Eddie, wiping his eyes. “You think I’m buying this bullshit. You have precisely fifteen seconds to tell me why you’re here before I throw you out of this car. And just to be clear—we won’t be slowing down.”
The smiles have gone.
“Two days ago, they dragged me out of my cell, put me on a bus, and dumped me on the side of the road south of Houston.”
“They?”
“I don’t know their names. I had a sack over my head.”
“Why?”
“I guess they didn’t want me recognizing them.”
“No, moron, why did they let you go?”
“Oh, they want me to find Audie Palmer. He broke out of prison three days ago.”
“I heard.” Eddie flicks a finger against his hollowed cheek, making a popping sound. “You’re looking for the money.”
“That’s the idea.”
“Have you any idea how many people have tried?”
“Yeah, but I know Audie Palmer. I kept him alive inside.”
“So he owes you.”
“Yeah.”
Eddie’s face breaks into a smile and he looks like he should be on TV playing a pimp or a drug lord on Law & Order or The Wire. The limousine is heading toward Galveston Bay, passing freight terminals and train yards and acres of containers stacked like children’s building blocks.
“What’s supposed to happen when you find Palmer?” asks Eddie.
“They gave me a phone.”
“And then what?”
“My sentence is commuted.”
Eddie laughs again, slapping his thigh, hoedown style. “You just take the fucking cake, boy. Nobody is going to give you a get-out-of-jail-free card with a record like yours.”
Despite the disparaging abuse, Moss can sense that Eddie is trying to figure out who would run an operation like this without his knowledge. Who had the juice to get a convicted killer out of prison? It had to be someone with serious connections—a government employee in the Justice Department, or the FBI, or the state legislature. A contact like that could be valuable.
“If you find Palmer, I want you to call me first, understand?”
Moss nods, in no position to argue. “What do you know about the Armaguard truck robbery in Dreyfus County?”
“It was a clusterfuck. Four people died.”
“What about the gang?”
“Vernon and Billy Caine were part of a crew out of New Orleans. Brothers. They knocked over a dozen banks in California and then came east to Arizona and Missouri. Vernon was in charge. They had another regular, Rabbit Burroughs, who was supposed to be part of the armored truck job but he got picked up for a DUI the weekend before the robbery. They had a warrant out for him in Louisiana.”
“Who else was in the crew?”
“They had someone on the inside.”
“A security guard?”
“Maybe.”
“What about Audie Palmer?”
“Nobody had ever heard of him. His brother Carl had a reputation for being a screwup. He was dealing rock in the projects at seventeen—Mexican brown and crank, you name it—a finger in every pie. Later he ran with a crew in West Dallas, mainly cash-machine scams and mail fraud. Served five years in Brownsville. Came out with a bigger drug habit than when he went in. A year later he shot an off-duty cop in a liquor store. Vanished.”
“So where is he?”
“That, my black friend, is the seven-million-dollar question.”
Eddie seems philosophical rather than aggrieved. Usually he’d know about a robbery of this size in advance, but Vernon and Billy Caine were out-of-towners and Carl and Audie were small fry who probably scoped out the job.
Eddie pinches his nose as if clearing his ears. “You want my opinion? The money has long gone. Carl Palmer is either a mound in the desert or he’s spent the millions trying to stay hidden. Either way he’s been picked cleaner ’n a wishbone on Thanksgiving Day.”
“Where can I find Rabbit Burroughs?”
“Mostly he’s operating on the straight, but he still has a couple of girls hooking out of a Laundromat in Cloverleaf. He also works part-time mopping floors at a school in Harris County.”
A button is pressed. The limousine pulls over to the curb. Massed water looms on three sides. They’re on the edge of Morgan’s Point, next to a container terminal with an industrial corsetry of cranes and derricks.
“This is where you get out,” says Eddie.
“How do I get back to my pickup?”
“Fifteen years inside, I thought you’d appreciate the walk.”