“Gotta get to Utah ASAP.”
“Guy can’t wipe his nose without you.”
Brady just shrugged.
“What, he forgot his Tic Tacs?”
“Got an errand he wants me to run.”
Dennis turned, trying to make eye contact with his brother. It wasn’t easy. Brady was six foot four, a good five inches taller than his brother, and would have to deign to look down. “What kind of errand?”
Brady turned, met his brother’s eyes, and scowled.
Dennis held up his hands in surrender. “You will do what you will do.”
“I have a job.”
Thom paid Brady $260,000 a year, which at first had sounded like a lot to Brady, who was former San Francisco PD, the son of an ex-cop himself, and wasn’t used to a six-figure salary. But after taxes and the exorbitant rents in the area—Thom had insisted Brady live within a ten-minute drive of him—Brady found he was no further ahead financially than he had been when he was walking a beat in the Tenderloin. Sure, there were perks, like the car, the kickass health insurance, and an enticing retirement package, but he still had less than $30,000 in savings, at the age of forty-seven. It was a less-than-terrific feeling, especially when he looked around the garage at Thom’s house and counted seventeen vehicles of various models and types, the vast majority of which were never driven.
“What do you really get out of that job?” Dennis asked.
“What do you get out of foreclosing on people?” Brady responded, and so the matter dropped.
Had Brady answered his brother’s question honestly, “proximity to unspeakable wealth and power” might have been the most accurate reply, but that was a kind of clarity that was only sporadically available to him. Even if it had been on the tip of his tongue, his millionaire brother was the last person he’d have shared that insight with, because he knew the absurdity of it. What good was being close to unspeakable wealth and power, what possible gain was there in it, for anyone? It was rubbernecking, that’s all, peering over the rich neighbor’s fence. Brady’s was a job that was the employment equivalent of slumping on your couch watching the Kardashians.
Sure, you could look. You could pick up stories that your friends wouldn’t believe, if you hadn’t signed an NDA and could actually tell them. Or you could, as Brady and innumerable others in his position often did, lie awake at night occasionally, dreaming that the wise and kind billionaire, their wise and kind billionaire, would die unexpectedly, leaving you lavishly remembered in their will. Brady knew of no specific examples of sudden billionaire death and excessive employee inheritance, but that didn’t stop a person from hoping.
Mostly, though, Brady just did his job, as his father had taught him to. He performed the tasks that were required, he did them all the way, and he left no mess for anyone else to clean up afterwards. To Brady’s mind, driving a quarter million dollars in cash across the country to deliver to Thom’s sister was no different from cleaning out the garage when he was a kid. Make sure everything ends up at the curb, tightly bundled in black trash bags. Leave it broom-clean.
Same thing here. Deliver the money safely, wish the lady well, and return.
And let no one stop you from doing your job.
Once or twice over the years, Thom had made unseemly requests; he’d asked Brady to do jobs that were not the sort of thing that could be talked about in polite company. Or anywhere, for that matter, except perhaps in the confessional. There were payoffs, of course, and in the past couple years there had been mild intimidations that he was asked to perform. His size made it easy, and most of the time they had it coming. On those occasions Brady had made certain to tidy up his eternal soul afterwards.
After he’d said his goodbyes to his mother and brother, an emotionless experience Brady was used to by now, he went directly to Thom’s house. He was waved through the gate by security—how long would those guys stick around if this thing lasted as long as he’d heard it would, Brady wondered—and went to the massive garage. He had no intention of making a cross-country drive in a gas guzzling Chevy Suburban, no matter how comfortably tricked out it was. Gasoline itself was going to be a major problem, as would finding an open recharging station for an electric car. He needed to have both capacities and knew the exact car he wanted from Thom’s fleet.
The black BMW X5 hybrid had a twenty-four-kilowatt-hour battery that could return up to fifty-four miles on a single charge, as well as a three-liter turbocharged gasoline engine that added another three to four hundred miles to its range. There was a spare battery in the trunk, kept fully charged and rotated three times a year, and a lead-lined spare fuel tank that had been custom-built into the wheel wells, with its line running beneath a false floor of the trunk. The modifications didn’t leave much in the way of trunk space, but as an emergency vehicle built for crisis evacuations, it was ideal. The combined reach of the car, without any refueling or recharging, was nearly seven hundred miles, if you knew how to change a battery. Which Brady most certainly did. He would need to gas up exactly once, which he would do halfway through the 781-mile drive to Utah, at the refueling station they’d established near Battle Mountain, Nevada. Stopping was a risk he was prepared to take. Go get the cash first, then figure out how to get to Illinois with it and not get robbed or killed in the process.