Cold Wind - C. J. Box [31]
She leaned back against the grille of her pickup and felt the warmth through the back of her jacket. The mid-morning sun was just then shooting yellow shafts through the trees to the forest floor. The trampled-down grass sparkled with the last of the morning dew. The thin air had a snap to it. “What don’t you like today that you liked last night?” she asked calmly.
Silence. Both now looked at the ground. She wanted to slap them both and tell them to act like men, for God’s sake. But she waited.
Finally, Johnny mumbled, “Tell her, Drennen.”
Drennen cleared his throat. His voice was raw and thick from his hangover. “Me and Johnny don’t think ten thousand is enough to risk our lives for.”
She held in a grin. They were so . . . simple. She said, “Where do you get the idea you’re risking your life?”
“Well, Patsy,” Drennen said. “We were pretty drunk last night and it all sounded good. Especially that part about the rocket launcher. That sounds pretty damned cool. But we don’t even know this guy. We don’t know what he did.”
“He killed my husband,” she said. “What more do you need to know?”
Johnny kicked at some pine needles. “So he’s a bad guy?”
“Yes.”
“Then why didn’t the cops arrest him and throw him in jail?”
“Because they’re incompetent,” she said crisply.
Drennen said, “I hear that.”
“Look,” she said, “he’s a wanted man. That’s why he’s hiding out. There is no chance at all he’ll call the cops, because if he did, they’d arrest him. This is as safe as anything could be. Law enforcement won’t be weeping any crocodile tears if they find out something happened to Nate Romanowski, from what I understand. Hell, if any of us are ever caught, they might want to give us a medal.”
Drennen snorted a laugh, but stanched it after Johnny glared at him.
“I’m not going to beg,” she said. “You can either do this or not. You can try to make a living playing pool, or you can run back home and live with your parents for all I care. I’ll find someone else to help me.”
They stared at her dumbly.
“What about that Mexican?” she said. “You didn’t seem to have a problem with this last night.”
It took them a moment to recall the lie. Drennen said, “That was personal.”
She turned and tap-tap-tapped her fingers along the hood of the pickup as she walked around it. As she reached for the door handle, Drennen said, “We were thinking maybe twenty. Ten each. This is a big deal you’re asking, Patsy. If it don’t go right . . .”
She turned and smiled. “It has to go right. And if you follow my instructions and do everything to the letter, it will. You can be back here by this afternoon. I’ll go fifteen. No more.”
She waited.
“We got to discuss this,” Drennen said. “Give us a minute.”
While they turned their backs to her and talked, she looked at the packing crate in the bed of the pickup. It was four feet long and a foot high. Someone had stenciled the name and address of a Crate and Barrel store on the outside so no one would be suspicious. She remembered what her associate had told her about how the rocket launcher worked. It was accurate within a thousand feet, but it would be best to get much closer than that.
Next to the crate was a case of Coors she’d bought the night before and left in the back to keep cold. She called out to Johnny and Drennen, “You boys want some hair of the dog? It might help you make up your minds.”
Drennen said, “That sounds mighty good.”
While they ambled over, she lifted the lid off the crate. The weapon was short, fat, and looked lethal just lying there in the packing peanuts.
Johnny reached for a beer, but stopped when he saw it. He whistled in admiration. Drennen saw what he was looking at and whispered, “Fuckin’ A. You weren’t kidding, were you, Patsy?”
And she knew she had them.
9
Laurie Talich slowed and pulled off the two-track into knee-high sagebrush and turned off the GPS unit that had guided her there. It was nearly noon and heat waves shimmered across the plains. In the distance, the Bighorn Mountains framed the horizon.
“It’s an interesting view in