Page 140 of Guarding Grace
I leaned forward. “Put your hand on the table.” It was an old oak piece I’d fashioned with numerous gouges and dark stains.
“What?”
“You heard me. Hand on the table.”
He complied. “Why?”
“Because a wrong answer is going to cost you a finger.”
He threw up into the bucket, right on cue.
While he did that, I refolded the knife and put it away. I’d made my point. “Now, start from the beginning and take it slow. How did this go down?”
Rudi wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Elliot and I had been talking a while about getting together enough money to go down to this place my family has in Colombia.”
I nodded. That part at least matched Elliot’s story.
“Elliot heard there was a big courier gig coming up.”
I got up and grabbed a pad of paper from the corner table. “How big?”
“Ten million?”
That matched what Russo had said he’d told everybody, although he’d admitted to Lucas and me that the real number was twenty million. “Go on.”
“Elliot said this was our chance.”
I returned to the table and wrote the ten-mil number down. “It was Elliot’s idea?”
“Of course. Except it was really Paulo’s idea to do it. But Elliot got the case and decided to do Paulo’s idea himself.”
“Who’s Paulo?”
“The dude who was assigned to make the delivery. At least that’s what I heard. He was the one who thought of it.”
“And you just went along for the ride?”
“Uh, yeah.”
The hesitation in his voice prompted me to bring out my knife again.
Rudi’s eyes went wide. “Okay, okay. I mean, I agreed that it sounded like a good idea—a lot of fucking money.”
I put the knife down, still closed. “How did a fuckup like Elliot end up doing such a big delivery?”
Rudi smirked. “He and Paulo went out the night before. The morning of the job, Paulo calls in sick with food poisoning.” He snickered. “Pretty unlucky for Paulo, huh?”
I nodded. “Meaning Elliot took his place to get his hands on the case?”
He nodded.
“You willingly participated?”
“For that much, sure.”
“How did you figure to get into the case?”
His face lit up. “That was the easy part. Elliot brought one of them home with him one night. It had been opened, so I took a look at how it was wired. They did a good job of gluing a mass of crossed trip wires on the inside so you couldn’t cut into it. Cut one of them and—” His hands went up in the air. “Kaboom.”
