Bad Penny

Prologue
Coalville, Utah

JESUS GOROZA, the man with tats running over his limbs like demons, thought the woman they were following on this deserted piece of interstate was FBI.

Ed Meese, the driver, the man with the scar on his neck, didn’t think that was the case at all. She was in her early-twenties, a bit young for the FBI. And she was driving an old 1990s Buick without another soul in sight. Wouldn’t the Feds have sent backup at the first sign of trouble? Of course, maybe she’d convinced her bosses she was clear, convinced them that the big FBI agent had everything in hand, and they’d pulled back the cavalry.

Meese shook his head. Cops were idiots.

The two men had been keeping back, playing it safe, giving the woman plenty of room. It was just after four a.m., the sun still more than an hour off. Hardly a soul out here. Just them and her driving in the dark, the two men waiting for her to make her mistake.

Up ahead the woman slowed, then took the exit to a small out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere Utah town called Coalville. In a big city, there would have been cars. There would have been some bustle. There would have been witnesses.

There were no witnesses here. Not on these streets.

There were hardly any homes. Meese figured there were at most a few dozen, and they were all strung out along a main road that stretched for ten miles or more. All of the houses were dark. A bunch of hick farmers dreaming about cows.

A brightly-lit Best Western hotel and a Texaco gas station stood on one side of the interstate. A lone Sinclair gas station stood on the other. The woman came to a stop then accelerated up and across the overpass toward the Sinclair gas station on the other side, the side that you couldn’t see well from the interstate. The side she obviously thought might give her cover.

“Bingo,” Jesus said.

In a big city, the Sinclair would have been ready for business. In this know-nothing town, it was dark and locked. The pumps, of course, were on. And the station’s sign with a green dinosaur on a white background towered above the place and shone out into the fading night.

But there was no attendant standing guard over the cash and cigarettes to observe the woman. No one to see her stop and start the pump. No one to see her go try the bathroom door around the side. No one to see the two men pull up to the station a few seconds later.

Meese said, “Looks like your offerings to the White Lady paid off.”

Jesus opened the glove box and pulled out the semi-automatic. “I told you she wanted mescal.”

Prayer, mescal offered up in a glass five days in a row, and cigarette smoke blown into the Lady’s skeleton face.

Meese pointed at Jesus’s gun. “You remember: this whore isn’t worth anything to us dead.”

“She’s worth
less
dead,” Jesus corrected.

“A lot less. Hand me some ties.”

Jesus reached into the glove box again and came up with a bundle of long white plastic zip ties and a roll of duct tape. These weren’t garden variety ties; these were nice and fat and designed for human wrists.

Gas stations always had cameras. Meese spotted two here. So instead of rolling up into the well-lit area by the pumps and the woman’s car, he pulled around the corner into the dark night shadow below some trees, threw it in park, and cut the lights. He and Jesus put on their ball caps and pulled them down low so their faces would be in shadow. Then they got out and quietly hustled up to her piece of crap Buick just to make sure nobody was in it, then silently moved to the side of the building to surprise her when she came back from the bathroom.

Meese slipped the ties into his back pocket and took a position by the corner. Jesus stood back with his gun to head her off in case she tried an end run.

High above them the green and white dinosaur sign buzzed with electricity. In the distance, someone in a pickup with some pipes got a little frisky and floored it. The roaring motor echoed from the other end of the still town. Whoever it was might have had the opportunity to witness the one exciting thing to happen in that farming town that day, but they were headed in another direction, and the roar of that motor faded in the distance.

The woman came around the corner. She saw Jesus. Her eyes went wide. She turned to flee, but Meese was right there. He lunged for her.

She swung for his face. Connected. But he had taken plenty of blows from men a lot bigger and stronger. He’d taken harder blows as a kid.

He tackled her. Right there on the asphalt. Slammed her down hard. She was a fine little thing, slender, and strong.

She cried out, threw an elbow, kicked, almost wriggled free. But he outweighed her by at least seventy pounds. And he was strong. Years of strength built up in prison.

Meese grabbed her by her dark hair and smacked her head into the asphalt.

She screamed, but Meese rolled her over and punched her hard in her slim gut. A pounding blow like a sledge hammer that knocked the air right out of her.

The scream cut short. Her eyes went wide with the shock and pain.

Meese reached around and grabbed one of the zip ties. It was almost eighteen inches long. It took him only a second to loop it around her ankles and feed the one end into the locking mechanism. Took him no time to yank it tight.

By this time the woman had her breath back, but she wasn’t going anywhere. He rolled her back onto her stomach, wrenched her arms behind her back, and zip-tied her wrists.

The woman screamed.

“Tape,” Meese said.

Jesus ripped off a length of duct tape, then knelt down and slapped it over the woman’s mouth.

She tried to scream again, but found it just didn’t work the same when her mouth was shut. Sounded more like a growl.

Meese patted her down, checked her pockets. No guns, no knives, no hidden microphones. Just a man’s wallet with a driver’s license and a piece of plastic. Where was her phone?

They hauled her up. Meese hefted her slight weight over his shoulder. He was happy their quarry had turned out to be a woman, and not some fat cholo with a death wish.

Jesus ran to the Nissan. Meese followed, lugging his cargo through the light by the pumps to the dark street.

Jesus opened the trunk. The trunk light came on, and Meese stuffed her inside. She fit pretty well. A lot better than some big guy would. But she was going to kick and growl and that wouldn’t do. It would be annoying if nothing else.

“You ready?” Meese said.

Jesus fished around in his shirt pocket then nodded.

Meese said to the woman, “I’m going to rip this tape off. This is your last opportunity to scream for help. I figure you deserved a sporting chance. Here we go.”

The woman looked up with desperation and anger in her eyes.

Meese grabbed her by the forehead to hold her face firmly in place. “One, two, three,” he counted and ripped the tape back.

The woman opened her mouth to scream, but Jesus was there with a bottle of grape flavored Benadryl. He deftly grabbed her nose with his fat fingers and pinched it shut, then he glugged a great quantity of the medicine into her open mouth.

The woman choked and swallowed and coughed and came up for air like she’d almost drowned.

“You think that’s enough?” Jesus asked.

“It will have to be for now,” Meese said, because he was starting to feel the prickles on the back of his neck. Starting to feel his early alert system sounding a warning. “Time to go.”

Meese wiped her mouth roughly with the sleeve of his shirt to clean off the Benadryl, and then he brought the duct tape back across the woman’s mouth and sealed it shut. Jesus snapped the trunk down.

The woman bumped and growled inside.

“We’re going to have to drop her car,” Meese said. If they didn’t, whoever opened this station up would see the car, wonder about it, and go to the camera recordings to see who’d left it. And then they’d call the police. On the other hand, a car dropped on the side of some road far away from the station might not attract any attention for days. And when it did, chances were nobody would be thinking of looking at gas station recordings.

Jesus put the Benadryl back in his pocket.

“Keep your prints off that car,” Meese said. “Use a couple of those blue towelettes above the squeegee bucket.”

Jesus nodded and turned back to the Buick. Meese skirted around the back of the Nissan. His alarms were in full swing now, sounding like a fire drill. He threw open the driver’s side of the Nissan, slid in, and shut the door, safe behind the dark tinted glass.

A few seconds later the Buick appeared in his rearview mirror, bumping out onto the road. Meese put his car in gear, made a U-turn and headed back toward the main drag, Jesus following in that Buick. Fifty yards later he came to the intersection and signaled with his blinker as a good citizen should to make a right turn. As he did, an old guy in an old pickup approached the intersection from the cross-street, turned, and drove right past him. Meese waited and watched in his rearview mirror with curiosity.

A few moments later the pickup’s brake lights flared. And then it turned into the Sinclair and pulled up to the pumps.

“Cheese and crackers,” he said. He did have a sixth sense alarm. No doubt about it.

Meese smiled, gave the car some gas, and made his right turn.

They dropped the Buick a few miles away on the curb by a church then rode south for a few miles to the next little hickville and found another entrance to the interstate. Jesus fiddled with the woman’s phone, trying to force it to reveal its secrets.

The woman in the back kicked.

“That’s going to drive me crazy,” Jesus said.

“Twenty minutes and the Benadryl will chill her out,” Meese said. “If not, we’ll take care of it. The next hour we’ve got miles and miles of empty road.” He was thinking of her slim hard body. Thinking of what she might be wearing underneath. Thinking about how sweet she’d probably feel. They wanted her alive and ready to talk. Meese could deliver that and still handle the merchandise. He hoped she was a cop because that would just be the frigging cherry and whipped cream on top.

Jesus reached into his bag of Red Vines, pulled out a couple of whips, and took a bite. “How’s the temperature?” he asked.

Meese looked at the gauge on the dashboard. “It’s out of the red for now, and that’s all I care about.” Then he turned and accelerated along the on-ramp. He switched on his blinker again and pulled out onto the dark freeway.

Miles behind him one pair of headlights moved toward them along the interstate. Miles ahead of him a pair of red taillights zoomed away. Alongside the interstate, the town slept on. The whole thing had lasted all of fifteen minutes, in and out, and not even the cattle in the fields had taken notice.

* * *

In the trunk, the woman breathed in through her nostrils and tried to calm herself. Her heart was beating like a bird in a cage. She fumbled around behind her with her zip-tied hands for the emergency trunk release and found nothing but the bones of the car.

It was close and dark like a coffin. Except you wouldn’t smell motor oil in a coffin. You wouldn’t hear the drone of the tires on the road or see the pinpricks of red leaking around the housing for the rear lights. But it was a coffin nevertheless.

She’d known they’d find her. Eventually. Just as they found the others. The faces of those she’d worked with appeared before her and stabbed her with a pang of regret.

She adjusted her position, took slower breaths, tried to keep the panic away. She told herself she’d known the risks—they all had. Told herself she’d do it all over again. Told herself this wasn’t over until it was over. Then she prayed to the Holy Mother. Prayed for eyes to see her chance.

Prayed the men would make a mistake.