The real world freed me from hell, and I came around to find myself lying on my back on the sidewalk in front of the blue bungalow on Raymond Street. I had one of my feet in the gutter.
They hadn’t even bothered to hide me or dump me any real distance from their lair. A gnarly old dog with a rope around its neck entered my field of view and sniffed my crotch. I tried to brush it away, but when I moved my arm, pain froze me. Then a filthy hand holding the other end of the rope leash came into view, followed by an old, bearded, dirty face. Sun worn and craggy, the dog’s owner looked as though he’d lived many years on the street.
“You okay, fella?” he asked, revealing a mouthful of brown teeth. “You looked pretty beaten up.”
I grunted, got to my feet, and staggered to my car.
You killed me for nothing, Walter’s ghost whispered.
For the twelve thousand bucks I’d given Toni, plus the money for the Range Rover, I countered inwardly, but the dead man was right, I’d lost everything else to weakness.
I would have cried if my eyes had any tears left to give. I was too sore and swollen for sorrow. What kind of idiot had I been to walk into a place like that and try to appeal to the better natures of men who had more in common with jackals than humans? I’d been desperate, but desperation is the barroom buddy of stupidity.
The drive home took twice as long as it should because I had to pull over a couple of times to wait for the pain to subside and catch my breath. Finally, I pulled into my driveway and climbed out of the car into dust bowl heat. My legs buckled as I staggered toward the house, but I kept myself upright by veering toward the mailbox and using it as a leaning post. I knocked my elbow against the little raised flag and saw the tail of a package poking out of the hatch. I looked around to make sure there was no one else on Edgebrook, took it out, and stumbled into the house as fast as my battered, weakened legs could carry me.
I went through the broken front door and grabbed a wooden chair from the living room, put it against the door, and lowered myself onto the seat with gasps and groans. Once I’d settled into a position that made the pain bearable, I took a couple of deep breaths and tore open the package. I reached inside and found two thousand-dollar bundles of fifty-dollar bills. I understood the significance immediately. This wasn’t just money; it was a life.
At the bottom of the package was a slip of paper with a web address. I typed the URL—a mix of numbers and letters again—into my phone and was once again taken to a page that contained nothing but an audio recording.
I pressed the sideways play triangle, and the machine voice that had given me my first set of instructions said, “You proved yourself with Walter Glaze. I know I can trust you, and you know you can trust me. Farah Younis works for Ruben, Dozal, and Taft. She’s a San Diego lawyer who launders money for arms brokers and drug dealers. Two hundred thousand dollars for her.”