“What’s he all about?” Coffey asked.
“We’ve got a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash, and we didn’t want you robbing us,” Hawkes said. “Maybe you noticed, we don’t entirely trust you.”
“Yeah, I noticed.”
“So let’s see the stuff.”
“Okay, but we’ve got to hurry,” Coffey said. He grabbed a box and carried it into the garage, where he said to Hawkes, “Grab those small boxes, they’re not so heavy.”
There were five heavy boxes. Sawyer didn’t help unload, but stood by with his rifle. Even so, the truck was empty in three or four minutes, and they pulled down the garage door with the three of them inside.
“Gotta hurry now, gotta hurry,” Coffey said. He used a pocketknife to cut the tape on the top of the four heavy boxes, and began lifting out bricks of C-4. “The smaller boxes are the timers and the detonators. You use them like I showed you, like you made those videos with your phone. It’s all here and that’s all I got to say.”
He looked at his watch. “Time’s about up. Gimme the money.”
“What are you talking about?” Hawkes said. “Why the rush?”
“Because you got the guy with the gun here. I thought you might decide there wouldn’t be any more money . . .”
“And . . .”
“I snuck into your yard fifteen minutes ago and buried a brick of C-4 next to your house and it’s going to go off in . . . eight minutes. There’ll be a hundred cops here five minutes later. If you shoot me, or don’t give me the money, that brick is gonna blow the ass off this house, and probably the neighbor’s,” Coffey said. “If the shock wave is strong enough, it could detonate this stuff inside here and then the whole block will go up. So . . . I gotta run . . . When I get in my car, I’ll call you and tell you exactly how to find the C-4 and you can pull the detonator and the timer. Not hard to find.”
“You motherfucker,” Sawyer said, pointing the rifle at Coffey’s chest.
“Gimme the money,” Coffey said to Hawkes.
“How do we know you’ll call?”
“Because if I didn’t, the brick will blow and the cops will come and you’ll probably tell them who sold you the stuff . . . I sure as shit don’t want that to happen, but it won’t make any difference to me if gunboy shoots me.”
Hawkes shook her head, then said to Sawyer, “Lift up the door.”
She ran inside, got the manila envelope off the kitchen counter, ran back out, and thrust it at Coffey. “Maybe you’d like to count it later?”
Coffey thumbed the money in the envelope, then hurried out to his truck. He got in, leaned his head out the window toward Hawkes and said, “Fuck a phone call. The brick is right at the back corner of the garage. There’s a white plastic poker chip sitting on top of it so you can see it. Pull the detonator, yank the timer off like I showed you. You got . . .” He looked at his watch. “About five minutes.”
They found the poker chip in one minute and pulled the detonator and then the timer. Coffey hadn’t been bluffing; the time showed 3:45 when they killed it. Hawkes began to laugh: “Didn’t see that coming. He’s a smart guy, to set us up like that.”
“I’m not laughing,” Sawyer said. “Scared the shit out of me.”
“Yeah, well . . . Let’s go talk about Roscoe Winks.”
Sawyer said, “I gotta move if I’m going to get there tonight. One good thing—I was at Ironsides until an hour ago, so I got a built-in alibi. Bartender can put me here in El Paso.”
“You might like this killing thing too much,” Hawkes said.