Afterburn (55 page)

"How does that work?" asked Charlie. "I'm in the telecom business, you know."

"I think it's simple from a mechanical point of view," she said. "You need three phones, one of them cellular, and two computers. The call comes in to the first phone, which is connected to a computer. It's a regular phone line. As soon as the call comes in, the computer autodials to a second number, using an attached cell phone. The origin of this second call is not traceable by exact location. Meanwhile, the computer takes a message from the first phone call and hangs up. You can have it do two things, and we did. You have it send a regular voice message, which is digitized, then toned like a fax through the cell phone to the third phone, which has the other computer, which takes the electronic transmission, records it, hangs up, undigitizes it, and plays the message back when you want. The first computer erases its memory after it transmits the call, and the second erases itself after it plays the call to the listener. Or—and this is the part I like—"

"Jesus," Charlie said, "who thought of
this
?"

"I did."

"You did?"

"Conceptually." She poked his back affectionately. "I don't know anything about electronics. They had a guy who did the programming stuff." She took his hand in hers and kissed the scar. "I wanted to do that the first time I saw you," she said, lips against his skin.

"What was the other option?" he asked.

"We had a bunch of messages, coded by number. Like, 'I'll be late' was a certain number, maybe the number three. So the computer at the first phone lets out a tone to leave a message and the caller punches in the number three. The computer takes this number three in and hangs up. Done. Then the computer uses its cell phone to dial the third phone. Or wherever you want to be reached. There was a way to remote-program the redial number, too. The
idea
is to make enough steps that it's a puzzle that can't be solved after the fact—while you could prove
proximity
of the receiving phone and the outgoing cellular, you could not prove, using phone logs, that the phones were adjacent, or causally related."

"Unless you got hold of the computers themselves."

"Right. So in this second scenario, the computer calls you wherever you want to be and generates a fax. What does it fax? It faxes an Italian takeout menu." She paused to light another cigarette. "Looks like nothing. You get it and you say, So what. But it's the
number
of times that the computer faxes it which is the message. You get the same fax three times and three is the message. Somebody grabs that piece of paper, what does it mean? Nothing."

"But you said that this Rick guy thought this wasn't working?"

"No, it was working fine, but they had tapped in somewhere," Christina said. "They were monitoring, probably through the first phone. They weren't catching the pass-along cell call. I don't
think
. Maybe they knew about the computer and the cell phone and were waiting, using it like a trap. Rick was worried. Had to cancel a couple of things. He got edgy about stuff. But he was right, as it turned out."

He wasn't sure how the phone trickery connected to her truck story. "So at this point you have a hell of a problem," Charlie summarized. "You've got the bad guy with the heroin. You want to get out of the relationship. Lot of stuff happening."

"Sure. I was angry that Tony was making such huge money off of
my
risk. But the other thing was that this was going to be my last job, forever. I was going to do this one very bad thing and then I was going to do nothing ever again. I wanted to just get free of Rick and the rest of them. And frankly, the best way I could think of to do that was to make the job get fucked up. Get the police to arrive and find and arrest people."

"Hang on." Charlie got up to go to the bathroom. It had a phone on the wall next to the toilet so guys like Sir Henry Lai could call for help as they crapped out on the crapper. Not
me
, thought Charlie, I'm still banging around. Ellie asleep, dreaming of rosebushes. He let loose a blissful stream, then in the light over the sink he looked at his penis. Pubic hair almost all gray, the flesh under it soft. It hung there, bent left, currently of no use. All those mysterious little veins, red and bluish, thin and thick. I've been staring at this thing my whole life, he thought, still don't know what it is, exactly. Gave her a pretty good shot, by the feel of it. A good shot for him, at least. Fucking substandard sperm sample. It
was
embarrassing, even if he only had one testicle. But how many guys who'd had an M-16 round hit their scrotums actually
had
sperm samples? You survive to prosper, you live so that you can fuck. Melissa—he meant Christina—was much more vigorous than Ellie, not even close. He was out of practice, by about twenty-five years. Admit it, he told himself, you like this girl, even though she is dishonest and scares you a little. He rubbed his finger against his penis, touched his nose, and smelled her. Life keeps surprising me, he thought.

"Go on," he called, as her cigarette smoke reached the bathroom. He looked in the mirror at the gray hair on his chest and stomach, drank a glass of water, then filled it again. "I'm listening."

"So I was meeting Rick outside Philadelphia at a mall and we were going to drive into New York," she continued from the bedroom. "If I couldn't get out of driving those boxes, then at least I wanted to see them, see what it was that I was carrying. It bugged me that I didn't know. There were two chances to get at them. One was on the drive up, and one was when we arrived in New York at the loading dock in Chelsea. I thought it'd be better if I could get at the boxes before we arrived in New York. My mother and father used to live outside Philadelphia, in Chester County. I know all the roads out there. It was farmland when I was growing up . . ." Her voice sounded sad. "Anyway, I planned it with Rick that we would stop for lunch. Just pull the truck in."

He handed her the glass. "Wouldn't that be sort of suspicious for the neighbors?"

"No, not really." She sipped the water. "It wasn't exactly the high-rent district, you know, sort of the edge of the suburbs. A big rig pulled up next to their place was nothing special. My mom and dad were going to move soon anyway—someone could think it was a moving truck. So we pulled into their house and they gave Rick a big welcome. My mother made a big meal for us and everything. Afterward I told Rick that I wanted to have sex, so we went in my old bedroom and had sex, and then he wanted to sleep, which is what I expected. I told him I'd wake him in a little while. My dad was watching television. He wasn't feeling great. He was worried about money and moving down to Florida. He'd just retired. So then I went out to the truck and unlocked it. We had the keys in case we got stopped by the police. Less suspicious if they can look at the load and compare it to the paperwork. The truck was parked so that the back faced into our yard. I jumped up and took a look. The air conditioner boxes were all the same, of course. I hadn't seen how they'd packed the truck. Frankie would expect his ten boxes to be in a certain spot, but they wouldn't necessarily be the first ten boxes you'd naturally take out." She sat up and pulled on Charlie's button-down shirt, the tie still threaded through the collar. "I couldn't find the pattern, so I just started opening boxes. What the hell, right? I opened about eight or nine and then I found one of the special boxes."

"And?" Charlie asked. "Drugs?"

She looked at him. "It wasn't heroin."

"What was it?"

"
Cash
."

"Cash?"

"Old hundreds and fifties. Two-inch stacks with red rubber bands. Kind of smelled. I carried my mom's bathroom scales out and weighed a box and one of the regular boxes with an air conditioner in it. They weighed the same."

"What did you do then?" Charlie asked, beginning to worry.

"I totally freaked
out
, what do you expect?" Christina said. "I thought about my dad sitting in there, worrying about how they were going to make it on his pension in Florida. He was sick and had worked his whole life and all he had to show for it was
me
, who'd dropped out of Columbia University, for God's sake, against his wishes, against his
hopes
, you know, and I thought I could just do
something
for him for once."

Suddenly she was crying, and despite his wariness, he pulled her toward him. "Oh, Charlie, it was
so
stupid, so incredibly stupid. I sort of panicked, which isn't like me! I just thought how much I'd disappointed them. I mean, I was the girl who got a five on her goddamn AP history test, and now I have some boyfriend in there with huge arms and an earring, you know?" She coughed, voice thick. "My
mother
didn't care, she
liked
Rick, she made a puddle whenever a man
smiled
at her,
she's
probably the orgasm queen of
all time
, but my father was actually sort of classy in his quiet way. He used to sit in his old chair and read books on the Civil War and everything and I—"

"Okay, now," Charlie said.

"—I was his only child, his
only
daughter, and I'd already disappointed him so much. And I was so afraid that he was dying and that he wouldn't have—I haven't told
anyone
this, I just couldn't—it took me a long time in prison to understand what I did—I was so,
so
stupid. I didn't want to cause any trouble. . . I've just always had this streak of
something
, anger and defiance and feeling that I would do everything
my way
, and my father was always so gentle with me, like
you
, so caring, he never got angry, he let my mother be the one who got angry, I guess. So all these things were in my head, and I was standing there with this big box of cash and not thinking like I should have been."

"What'd you do?"

She stood up nervously and edged toward the window. "I found another box with cash in it and put the two of them down on the driveway. Then I arranged the outer rows of boxes in the truck to make it look like nothing had been disturbed. You wouldn't be able to tell there was a problem until you removed a complete row of boxes. Then there was a gap."

"You were out of your mind."

"
I know
," Christina said, touching a fingertip to the glass. "I carried the boxes to the garage. My father had this old Mustang convertible that he fixed up. The upholstery was still original, with the thin steering wheel. My mother wrote me in prison that after my father died her boyfriends wanted to fix it up but she'd never let them."

"Like a shrine." Ellie's closet for Ben.

"Sort of, yes. I knew they were planning to have it taken down to Florida with them. I knew they'd just roll it into the garage down there and leave it. My father was going to be too sick to actually fix it up again. The back was full of spare engine parts. I took them out and put in the two boxes. I don't know how much was there."

"Could be a million bucks," Charlie said, thinking of the forty thousand he'd given Lo in Shanghai, how he'd been able to slip that into his breast pocket. "Easily, in fact."

"Could be
more
," she said. "I think it is."

"You never counted it?"

"No, I never had the
chance
. We had to go, we had to deliver the truck. Rick woke up, said we'd be late . . . so on the way back to New York I'm worrying about what to do. If Tony finds out, then—I don't know, we're in trouble. The delivery was going as planned, though. I could have the truck arrive, but this guy Frankie was going to be the first to unload and would figure out two boxes were missing within a few minutes. First thing he's going to do is call Tony, right? So I'm thinking about it and smoking a million cigarettes and looking out the window and thinking, How am I going to do this? I have to get
out
of this somehow . . . I realized that if the police arrive, then Tony can't do anything to me. I actually
want
the police to arrive. I want us to get busted, but I don't want
myself
to get arrested. I want to get away at the right moment. The problem with
that
is that there would be other guys from the crew there, and if they get arrested and I don't, one of them will talk. The police will come right after me. I'm not controlling the situation that way."

He was listening anxiously now. "You wanted it the
other
way?"

"Exactly," Christina said. "I realized that I had to get
myself
arrested, not the other way around. I get myself arrested and the others go free. And if I don't talk,
at all
, maybe Tony calls the whole thing square. Maybe I'm okay. I could wait a few years if I knew I was safe from Tony and my parents would have the money. It seemed like an okay trade-off. I mean, it was stupid to think that, but I was desperate. We were going to drive in there and everything was going to be fucked up. I'd rather deal with the police than with Tony. He has a sadistic streak."

"But if you got
yourself
arrested—"

"And no one else, then I
am
controlling what is going on, right?" Christina asked rhetorically. "If I could figure out a way to get arrested sometime during the job, then actually I'm in pretty good shape, right? This is what I'm thinking, at least. Because if I don't identify anyone else, they can't get anyone, not if I plan it right. And maybe I only get eighteen months or two years, something like that. I know that sounds like a lot of time. But it'd get me out from under these people. I'd just read a lot, so I thought. My mother could send me books and I'd read a lot. It doesn't make sense
now
to think about it, but this is the way I was thinking. Maybe I also knew my dad was going to die and I couldn't face it. Also, I really was scared of these people. Tony had somebody killed every year or two. It was a fact. Prison sounded like the safest place I could be."