The Replacements (18 page)

“How can we make a deal with you?” asked Marie. “The first chance you get, you're going to try and hurt us again. You've already tried twice.”

“Ask your man here why. He knows. I can tell he knows. He's been to the joint. I can smell it on him. In the joint there's a code we live by. I give you my word, I'm good for it.”

Marie looked at me for confirmation. I nodded. “That's true to a point.”

“I give you my word, it's my bond. You can ask anyone.”

“Fifty-fifty,” Marie insisted.

I waved the gun. “We're not here to negotiate. That's ridiculous. The amount's not going to matter. We need what we need to trade for the children. We don't need any more than that. So it doesn't matter what the split is.”

“You're telling me you don't care about the money for yourselves? Is that right?”

“That's correct,” Marie said.

“And you're doing this only to help out some little shit-assed kids?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Okay, now we're getting somewhere. What's up with these kids? What do you need the money for?”

“Someone from my husband's past is trying some sort of revenge thing and has kidnapped three children,” she said. “He won't give them back until we give him the money.”

“Some piece of shit has kidnapped your kids? I wouldn't give him any money. I'd cut his nuts off and stuff them—”

“They're not our kids.”

“Wait, they're not your kids, and you're doing all of this for someone else's kids?”

“That's right,” I said.

Drago thought about that for a moment. “How much does this piece of shit want?”

“A million.” The number came out low and without confidence. The amount sounded beyond absurd.

“A million dollars for three kids, are you shittin' me?”

How had our forward momentum been derailed and degenerated to talking our problem over with this prince of humanity?

“You don't have the million, do you?” asked Marie.

Drago looked at me, then at Marie. He offered his hand
to me, splotched with his drying blood, and held my gaze. Blood-borne pathogens came to mind again, but I didn't look away.

“You shake with me and make a deal before I go any further,” Drago said. “Before I tell you any more.”

“Don't do it—don't get that close to him,” Marie said.

Drago didn't move, didn't say anything, and continued to stare.

“What's the deal?” I asked.

“Bruno Johnson,” warned Marie. “You get close to him and I'll—”

Drago's mouth dropped open. “You're Bruno Johnson? You're
the
Bruno the Bad Boy Johnson?”

I wanted to look away, ashamed at my reputation, but continued to hold his gaze. “That's right.”

“You did a couple of bullets up at San Quentin on B block.”

I nodded. “No, only a year, then was transferred down to Chino.”

“Yeah, yeah, but you're the guy. You're the guy who killed his son-in-law for killing your grandson, am I right? You're the guy who saved all those kids in Los Angeles. You're a friggin' legend, my man. You go to prison now, you'll reign as king. It might almost be worth it to go back to the joint for something like that.”

In prison, and on the street, all criminals live by a code with few rules. Anything goes as far as crime, robbery, murder, and even mayhem. All except one. You don't mess with children. You don't harm or molest them, or you are automatically sought out and killed. And, if you, as a prison inmate, as a non-K-Nine, a non-keepaway, have the opportunity to kill a “baby raper” and don't, then you, too, are marked for termination. That's why “baby rapers”—the K-Nines—are kept segregated, lumped all together and kept away from the general population. Anyone who took aggressive action against those degenerates by enforcing that rule was considered a hero.

Drago held out his hand with sincere vigor. “I don't usually
hold with no nig—I mean, well, you know what I mean, man. But I still want to shake your hand, bro.”

I needed something from him, so I handed the Glock to Marie and stepped in close, bracing for the worst. He took my hand and shook it, strong and unyielding. Power and strength emanated from this guy, the most formidable person I'd ever come across. I would not stand a chance empty-handed against him. Not one chance in hell.

He let go. “Okay, here's the deal. You help me get the money, and then I'll help you get the kids back.”

“That's not going to work,” I said. “We need the money as flash—”

“There's not enough money, is there?” Marie asked again.

I stepped back with Marie. Drago looked at her, then back at me. He shook his head.

“How much is there?” I asked.

“I don't know.”

“We've gone through all of this and you don't even know?”

He shook his head again.

Marie lowered her tone, just as scared as I was, her voice cracked. “How much did you get away with in the robbery?”

If this plan wasn't going to work, what other option did we have? I started thinking about how we could get him tied up again, and dropped off where the FBI could babysit him; keep an eye on him for the sake of the public's well-being. A lion loose among the lambs. Or a hyena.

“Three hundred thousand,” Drago said.

In the joint, I had lived with lots of guys like Drago and had learned to get along with them, even got to like some of them. I needed to keep in mind that Drago had killed an armored car guard for the money we were now trying to obtain. Tainted money. Blood money. Drago fit the worst category of animal I used to chase while on the Violent Crimes Team. And yet here, I had begun to trust him, just a little. A bad move on my part? Even so, three hundred thousand dollars put in with cut-up paper might be enough to flash to Jonas Mabry. That much flash, presented properly, might give us just enough time. After all, Mabry's main objective was to get me to commit robbery and violent crimes, to further tarnish my moral compass, to get me put away in prison forever. His goal was now semi-accomplished by me kidnapping and shooting Karl Drago.

“Three hundred thousand is not nearly enough,” Marie said.

“Why tomorrow?” I asked. “Tell me why this caper has to be tomorrow.”

Drago nodded. “Like I said, I stashed it in the clubhouse, and tomorrow there's a local ride, the June ride for Toys for Tots. All the clubs in SoCal gather toys for the halfway point in the year. They do it again in December for the publicity, for all the TV cameras. Along with the toys from the June ride, they double up and look like stars, real pillars in the community. Bunch of bullshit.”

“So the Sons of Satan clubhouse will be empty tomorrow?”

“Sort of, I guess.”

Marie, with her clenched fists down at her side, took a step toward him. “Sort of? Sort of? It is or it isn't, mister. Which is it?”

“Ooh, girl, you need to take a chill pill.” He smiled, trying to get her to smile back. When she didn't, he said, “They're never gonna leave the clubhouse unmanned. Never. There'll be a couple or three prospects and a couple old heads to supervise.”

“Four or five then?” I asked.

“Yeah, four or five is all that's going to be there on Saturday.”

“Saturday?” Marie screamed. “Are you kidding me?”

“What's wrong now?” Drago said.

“No, numbnuts, it's Thursday,” Marie said. “Today's Thursday.” She turned to me. “This isn't going to work. Nothing about this idea's going to work.”

“It's all we got, it has to work,” I said.

The Black Sabbath t-shirt wrapped tight around Drago's leg had turned darker, and blood ran in a little rivulet down his leg. He didn't show any sign of pain, nor did he seem to care any longer that he'd been shot.

“Are you a member of the SS?” I asked Drago.

“Hell no, man. Are you kidding? Those old boys are some crazy, violent assholes. So what if today is Thursday, what difference does it make?”

I didn't answer and asked, “If you're not a member, then how did you get into the clubhouse twenty-five years ago to stash the money? And how do you know it's still there?”

“Okay, what? You need the whole, sad story right here and now?”

“That's right, and we're running out of time, fatso, so get to it,” said Marie.

“She's feisty. You shouldn't let her talk like that. Before too long, she'll be runnin' your game.”

I didn't want to tell him she already did, and I liked it that way.

She reached for the Glock in my hand. I put my hand gently on her chest and moved her back a step. To Drago, I said, “So, how did you get in the clubhouse twenty-five years ago?”

“Back then, me and Clay Warfield was prospects, we were buds.
Back then
. Now he's the president of SS International. You believe it? President of the world. Man, did he get lucky or what?”

No luck had entered into Warfield's ascendancy to infamy. He rose in the ranks of the most dastardly outlaw motorcycle gang in the world through blackmail, tyranny, mayhem, and cold-blooded murder. The FBI wanted him worse than any other crook, almost more than the top man in Al Qaida.

Drago continued on, “Another buddy a mine, he worked for a big-time locksmith, an affiliate of the SS. I helped him install the clubhouse safe, this big double-door monster. Weighed at least two thousand pounds.”

“You hid three hundred thousand dollars in the safe of the Sons of Satan clubhouse?” I asked.

“No, not exactly. Okay, look, I guess I'm gonna have to explain the whole thing.” He paused, waiting for us to tell him to go on, to beg him.

Marie put her hands on her hips and turned and walked away a few steps to cool off.

“Come on, Drago, keep going,” I said.

“What kinda bug flew up her ass?”

Marie spun around and pointed a finger at him. “I do not like this man.”

“Drago.”

“All right. All right. Look, I did the armored job with this other bud a mine. And later that same week he took a fall for his third B and E. I knew he was gonna flip and give me up. I knew I was goin' in for a good long jolt because of the thing with the guard. So I needed a safe place to hide the money, a place that was going to still be there when I got out. You ever see the movie
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
? The dude hid the money in the wall of the old schoolhouse, and they moved the whole damn schoolhouse. You see that movie?”

“Drago.”

“Man, you're worse than a woman on the rag. Okay, so I think, what better place to—”

Marie stepped back over. “We got all that. You hid it in the clubhouse safe, great. How do you know they haven't already found the money? Why wouldn't they find a big bag of money like that? This doesn't make any sense.”

“The guy who helped you out on the armored car job,” I said, “his name was Stanley Granville?”

“Yeah, that's right. How did you know?”

Granville, aka Big Grandy, had been Drago's second murder victim, the guy he killed his first time out on parole. “Go on,” I said.

“I'm with ya about them finding the money, but not a chance in hell,” said Drago. “They haven't found it, guaran-fucking-teed.”

Marie shouted, “Why?”

Drago looked at her, paused, then said, “Because I thought this whole thing out, believe me. Listen to this, I bought gold with the money, melted it down into this big doughnut-ring-looking kinda thing, and painted it black so it looked like steel. My bud, who I helped put the safe in, didn't even know it was gold. No one knows it's gold. We had to anchor the safe to the floor, to these large bolts, preset in concrete. I told this bud o' mine that the doughnut was like a washer, a spacer kind of thing between the safe and the floor so the safe wouldn't rock. I did it with the SS standing right over us watching the whole time. The dumbasses.”

The simplicity of his plan was brilliant and at the same time ballsy. No one in the world would find his stash. But what made it safe, made extraction a problem. Getting the doughnut out while keeping your skin. The caper's plan now went from a sneak and peek to running into a lion's den with five or six hungry lions in residence, grabbing a forty-pound haunch of lamb, and escaping without getting your ass eaten.

While I pondered Drago's grand design and the consequences of failure, my mind worked subconsciously. “Wait.
Wait a minute,” I said. “You bought gold twenty-five years ago? How much was it an ounce?”

“What? Hell, I don't know. I knew this fence who traded me gold for the cash. Gold melts real easy. I mean not real easy, but with not as much heat as you'd think you'd need. I used a blowtorch and poured it into a sand mold, little at a time. Took forever.”

“How much? What was the weight?”

“Forty pounds. You'd have thought three hundred thousand would have bought more than a measly little forty pounds. You should have seen how small forty pounds was.” He made a motion with his hands indicating a small pile. “It was sad, man, I'm telling you, a damn shame, really.”

“So, this doughnut thing you smelted, it weighs forty pounds?”

“Yeah, that's right. What'd I just say? In fact, the fence discounted the money 'cause it was hot. He wouldn't give me the whole three hundred thousand in gold. He said the cash was hot. What a bunch of bullshit. But what could I do?”

Marie had caught on to where I was headed with my questions and jumped in. “So, you're sure about the forty pounds though, right?”

“What's the matter with you two idgits? That's what I said. Two hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars, after Mad Mike took his cut, got me right around forty pounds, give or take an ounce.”

Marie looked away as her mind went to work. I stepped closer. Her brainpower far surpassed mine. So as not to disrupt her, I quietly said, “Sixteen ounces in a pound, how many ounces in forty pounds?”