Page 7 of Safe Enough

“You ever seen that much cash?” he asked. “I mean, really seen it?”

“No,” I said.

“You can barely even lift it. You could get a hernia, a box like that.”

I said nothing.

“I was doing two trips a week,” he said. “I was never off the road. I wore grooves in the pavement. And there were dozens of us.”

“Altogether a lot of cash,” I said, because he needed me to open the door to the next revelation. He needed me to understand. He needed my permission to proceed.

“Like a river,” he said.

I said nothing.

“Well, hell,” he said. “There was so much it meant nothing to them. How could it? They were drowning in it.”

“A man takes a chance,” I said.

The guy didn’t reply. Not at first. I held up two fingers to the old girl in the short skirt and watched her put two new bottles of Heineken on a cork tray.

“I took some of it,” the guy said.

The old girl gave us our new bottles and took our old ones away. I said four imports to myself, so I could check my tab at the end of the night. Everyone’s a rip-off artist now.

“How much of it did you take?” I asked the guy.

“Well, all of it. All of what they get for ten keys.”

“And how much was that?”

“A million bucks. In cash.”

“OK,” I said, enthusiastically, deferentially, like Wow, you’re the man.

“And I kept the product too,” he said.

I just stared at him.

“From Boston,” he said. “Dudes up there are paranoid. They keep the cash and the coke in separate places. And the city’s all dug up. The way the roads are laid out now it’s easier to get paid first and deliver second. They trusted me to do that, after a time.”

“But this time you picked up the cash and disappeared before you delivered the product.”

He nodded.

“Sweet,” I said.

“I told the Martinez boys I got robbed.”

“Did they believe you?”

“Maybe not,” he said.

“Problem,” I said.

“But I don’t see why,” he said. “Not really. Like, how much cash have you got in your pocket, right now?”

“Two hundred and change,” I said. “I was just at the ATM.”

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