There was a muttering, a shuffling of feet. Eventually, the mechanics each ponied up a fifty.
Lime collected the money from them, keeping his movements slow, and then added the contents of his own wallet. “Okay,” he told the man. “Now: put down the gun, take the money…and find some other way to pay your bills. Because I guarantee: if you care about your family, getting yourself locked up or killed isn’t going to help them.”
The desperate man was silent as this sank in. Lime held out the money. The man stared at it hungrily, then began to reach out. As he did, Lime withdrew slightly, nodding at the gun. Slowly, hesitantly, the man knelt, placing the weapon on the dirty linoleum—and then, with remarkable speed, he rose, grabbed the money, and darted out the door, disappearing in the dirty glaze of the window.
For a moment, everyone remained frozen—stunned not only by what had just transpired, but by how abruptly it ended. One of the mechanics finally cursed under his breath. The clerk wiped the sweat from his forehead with a sleeve, then closed the till.
One of the mechanics stepped forward, picked up the gun, tried to rack the slide. “Hey,” he said. “This is a fake.”
Lime reached out and caught the gun as the auto worker tossed it over. Sure enough: it was a fake, a replica actually, of a World War II–era 1911. Pretty good one, too: even the weight felt right. Idly, Lime wondered where the man had found it. Or if, perhaps, his grandfather had been a vet.
“What did you do that for?” the elderly customer demanded. “You threw away your money…and you let him go!”
Lime turned toward him. Strangely, he felt angrier at this aggrieved Joe Citizen than he had at the would-be criminal.
“Did you get hurt?” he asked. “Lose any money?”
The man shook his bald head.
“Then you’ve got nothing to cry about. Maybe that guy deserved a second chance. If he’d gone to jail, his life would be ruined—and costing taxpayers a hell of a lot more than three hundred dollars.”
He went back outside, tossed the replica into the muddy creek, then walked over to his car and opened the hood. Sure enough: the timing belt was about to go.
When he walked back in, nobody had moved.
“Aren’t you going to call the police?” the fat old man asked, voice full of righteous indignation.
“About what?”
“Armed robbery, of course.”
“Nobody got robbed,” Lime said. “And nobody was armed. But you can do what you want…now that it’s over.” And with that, he walked the mechanics into the body shop and asked if they could fix his timing belt while he was at work.
One of them walked with him to the Subaru, glanced at the engine, then nodded. As he did, Lime noticed a small tattoo of crossed sabers on the webbing between the mechanic’s thumb and forefinger.
“First Cav?” he asked.
The man nodded again. “You?”
Without responding, Lime pulled out his phone. He was close enough to work now to order a taxi without it costing him an arm and a leg.
A few minutes later, his ride arrived—a yellow Subaru, not unlike his except five years and a hundred thousand miles younger. Lime said goodbye to the mechanics and got into the back of the cab.
“Where to?” the driver asked.
“Pentagon, please,” Lime replied. “River entrance.”
As the driver pulled out into traffic, Lime sat back in the seat—but not before removing his Glock 19 from his waistband and slipping it into a more comfortable location, farther away from his spine.
6
TAPPAN LED NORA out of the Quonset hut into the afternoon light. The entrepreneur had spent much of the day showing her around the site, ending up here, near where they’d begun. Skip had stayed behind to help unpack Bitan’s library and organize the books on the shelves. The sun was lowering in the sky, casting long shadows over the desert grasslands. A scattering of April flowers dotted the mesa with spots of color. In the distance, white dust rose from the dry lake bed, and beyond that stood some hills and canyons leading into a range of purple mountains.
“At night out here,” Tappan said, sweeping his arm, “there isn’t a single light. This has got to be one of the most remote areas in the lower forty-eight.”
The landscape had a Zen-like emptiness that Nora, too, found enchanting.
“They call this Diablo Mesa; nobody knows why. In Spanish days there was a watchtower on this mesa, where they kept a lookout for Comanches heading west to raid along the Rio Grande. That vast area beyond is called the Plains of Atalaya, and the white area in the middle is Dead Lake. Those distant peaks are called the Horse Heaven Hills. The buttes beyond are Los Gigantes, the giants, and the mountains on the horizon are Los Fuertos: the stronghold.”