CHAPTER FIFTEEN

When Asher finally showed up, the others had been waiting nearly an hour.

“I got lost.” First words, shoving the motel room door closed behind him. “Who picked this dump?”

They were inside room 15 of the Glenville Motor Court, nine o’clock at night. Finn had paid cash earlier in the day, returned after dark, and sat in his truck until Jake and Corman appeared. The place had seen better days—in about 1964. Threadbare quilts, a twelve-inch cathode-ray television with cracked knobs.

“The Hilton was booked,” Jake said. “Wipe your boots off, for fuck’s sake.”

Corman stood by the wall holding a plastic bag of baby carrots, almost empty. He held out the last few to Asher, who gave him an incredulous look and dropped into the room’s only chair. Jake sat on the bed with a half-eaten, paper-wrapped Italian sub in one hand, the smell of salami and pepperoncini strong.

Finn kept station at the door. The last he’d seen Asher, he was being hauled into a New Mexico State Patrol Humvee, bruised and bloody after not cooperating fast enough to suit the troopers. Corman—the same, though he’d been sufficiently docile, despite his size, to avoid a beating.

Seven years. Hard years, someone comparing before and after might think. Asher in particular, the beard still cut to a point but scraggly, the rest of him even more gnarly.

Corman had gone completely bald, though his massive pro-wrestler’s build seemed undiminished. Only Jake was edging gracefully into middle age, still handsome, even dignified.

“All right,” Finn said. “Jake and I have been studying on this for a week.”

He unrolled a property map. Corman leaned forward, attention immediately drawn by the distinctive network of rail yard rights-of-way. Finn pointed. “There,” he said. “A hundred yards from the street.”

“Trains?” Asher, in disbelief. “We’re robbing a fucking train again?”

Jake laughed. “Not quite.”

Finn ran through it. He described the vault, what they’d seen. The high-tech security. Jake pitched in now and then. It didn’t take long.

He stopped and waited. Jake finished his sandwich, crumpled the paper, and tossed it vaguely toward the bathroom door. Corman stood impassive, looking at the map.

“So …” said Asher, “some rich guy wants us to rip off his pal’s gold supply.”

“Rhodium,” Finn said.

“And we’re not supposed to take anything ourselves. All that trouble—”

“Four hundred fifty large,” Jake said.

Asher shrugged. “A hundred each? Nice, but whatever; I could earn that in the oilfields.”

“Tax free?”

Snort. “You’re reaching.”

Finn nodded. “Once we’re inside, it might be kind of stupid not to take the metal after all. For ourselves.”

“Fuck yes!” Asher didn’t hesitate. “That’s more like it!”

Corman’s raspy voice was more measured. “I never dealt with rhodium before.”

“It ain’t radioactive.” Asher, suddenly an expert.

“Not what I meant.” Corman looked at Finn. “You?”

“No.” He thought he knew where the big man was headed.

“What’s the market?”

“What’d you say, two thousand dollars an ounce?” Asher said. “People paying that kind of money, it won’t be any problem finding buyers.”

“No,” Finn said. “Corman makes a reasonable point. Gold, silver, sure, we could fence it anywhere. But rhodium—I don’t know who buys it, who uses it, how willing the buyers are to consider, ah … alternative sourcing. Hell, I don’t even know what it’s used for.”

“So what do you think we can get? Twenty percent?”

“In there.”

“Fifteen? Twenty-five?” Corman moved his massive hands slightly, a small so-what gesture.

“I hear you.” Jake joined the thread. “The payoff’s not as good. Finn’s guy is willing to pay us clean. Versus having to haul out God knows how much metal, plus the trouble—and risk—of selling it.”

“Seventy pounds.” Finn had done the math already.

“What?”

“Seventy pounds of rhodium, nineteen hundred an ounce, at an eighty percent markdown. That’s all it takes to net us the same as Wes is offering.”

“Seventy pounds?”

“About.”

“That’s all?” Asher didn’t need to hear anything more. “I could carry it out myself.”

“And,” Jake said, “it appears to me there’s no reason to stop there.”

“Right.” Corman seemed almost to smile.

“How much is in there?” Asher said. “Total?”

“Minimum seven hundred fifty kilograms.” Finn let them start to figure the arithmetic themselves.

“Motherfucker.”

Grunt—an impressed one.

“Of course, some of it’s fake,” Finn said. “But our client is convinced his neighbor in the vault has at least enough to make up the difference.”

That’s all it took. Even Corman.

“Need a heavy truck to get that out, though,” he said.

“We’re not going to drive in.”

“Then what?” Asher frowned, his dream of easy riches suddenly balked. “No way we can tunnel, they’ll have motion sensors every two feet around the walls and floor.”

“No.” Jake leaned forward to point at the plan. “It’s inside a rail yard. A hundred trains a day go in and out of there. Big, heavy, long trains …”

“Hah.” Corman made a surprised sort of laugh.

“Right,” said Finn. “Rumbling the ground around the clock. Vibration sensors would be useless.”

“I’ll be fucked.” Asher looked more closely at the plan. “What’s the scale?”

“Three-sixteenths.”

“A hundred twenty-five meters from the warehouse to the vault,” Jake said.

“The road,” Corman said. “And two sidings. In between.”

“That’s right. The tunnel would run under all of them.”

“A long-haul locomotive weighs two hundred tons.”

Jake leaned back again, hands behind his head. “We’ll shore it. Heavy timbers, maybe concrete pipe. We can manage.”

More questions, most still unanswerable. Corman said little.

Finn wound it up. “We won’t do it if it’s not possible. Like always.”

“No motion sensors,” Jake said. “Other monitoring equipment, though. We need to find out exactly what’s in there.”

“Sure.” Finn nodded. “But, again, like always, cameras and computers and whatever else are only as good as the people watching them.”

“Yeah.”

“They’re humans, and humans make mistakes.”

“We’re humans, too, you know,” Jake said.

“Not us,” Finn said. “We never make mistakes.”