Page 360 of Devil’s Disciples

“That’s not how I negotiate. I offered you thirty-five hundred. You didn’t want it. You lost your chance. Now, I’m at thirty-two hundred.” I cocked my hip. “Do you want my money, or do you want to negotiate some more?”

“Jesus. Uhhm. Shit.” He rubbed his beard while he performed mental mathematical calculations. After a moment, he appeared to have an epiphany. “Okay, I’ll take it. All I need from you is thirty-two hundred bucks and a copy of your driver’s license.”

“Night vision isn’t a regulated piece of equipment. I’m not giving you my driver’s license.”

He shrugged his camouflaged shoulders. “It’s just procedure.”

“My procedure is to pay cash and walk away.”

“I’m going to need to write down a driver’s license number.”

“Write down your own. Or, get the one from the next dipshit that comes in here, and use it. Thirty-two hundred. No receipt. No DL. You can make one up. Take it or leave it.”

He forced a sigh. “Fine. I’ll be right back.”

In a moment, he returned with the device. I opened the case, inspected everything, and paid him in cash. “We’re done, right?”

He thumbed through the hundred-dollar bills. “Guess so.” He chuckled. “Don’t go rob a bank, or anything.”

I grinned and turned away without speaking. A bank? I wasn’t going to rob a bank. Banks had tens of thousands at best. The place I had in mind should have much more cash than that.

Millions, if my information was correct.

130

Goose

“I don’t need every dumb fucking idea under the stars thrown at me,” Baker complained. “I need something that’ll work. We’ve got a fucking detective nosing around, and his curiosity with us is keeping us from moving forward on the Bakersfield job. We need to get this resolved, and we need to agree.”

I found it amusing that Baker’s opinion on matters changed drastically after talking to me about the situation with the dead cop. In the past, I’d been referred to as skittish, scared, and over-the-top when it came to precautionary measures.

My caffeine intake was typically to blame, at least according to Baker. He claimed my all-day consumption of coffee left me “on edge” and jittery, which, in turn, caused me to believe everyone was after me.

I didn’t believe “everyone” was after me. Only the ones that were clearly after everyone, me included. I was informed. At times, I wish I wasn’t. If the general public knew what I knew about the government’s listening and watching abilities, it would make them skittish, too.

“Reno’s idea wasn’t terrible,” Tito said. “But the existence of DNA remains, albeit diminished, when a body is decomposed through the use of acid. The acid must be disposed of somewhere, and wherever that somewhere is, the soil could be sampled, any DNA would be present. Dumping acid in the Mojave Desert isn’t a great idea.”

Cash grinned from ear to ear. “What if the acid was dumped in the ocean? That shit would be diluted in a fuckin’ minute.”

“Only problem with that is gettin’ the acid on a boat,” Reno retorted. “It’d have to be a 55-gallon drum. Loading something that big on a boat will raise a lot of eyebrows. ‘Round here, they’ll think your either smugglin’ a body, or smugglin’ dope. Either way, Coast Guard would be on you like shit on a wheel before you got that shit dumped.”

Reno was right. A vessel large enough to house all the body parts would be huge. Loading it on a boat wouldn’t go unnoticed. Secondly, we didn’t own a boat.

“A 55-gallon drum filled with fluid would weight five hundred pounds,” Tito declared. “It would be impossible to dolly it down the boardwalk and get it loaded without being noticed. Half of San Diego bay would be calling 9-1-1 before the boat left the dock.”

“And, you’d have to wear one of those suits to keep that shit from splatterin’ on ya,” Reno added. “All the whale huggers would call the EPA if nothing else.”

“I know you all think I’m overly cautious, but I can only come up with two plans I like. One is cremating the body. We don’t have access to a crematorium, so that’s pretty much out. The second is loading the concrete blocks onto a boat, taking the boat twenty miles out, and tossing them. We could carry the body parts onto the boat in beer coolers. Act like we’re taking a fishing expedition. The water’s two and a half miles deep out there. The only problem is we’d have to buy a boat.”

“I like it,” Baker said. “Why don’t we rent a boat?”

“Any rental boat would have a GPS on it,” I said. “They could use that data to take them right to the location where we dumped it. If we bought one, it wouldn’t have to be fitted with anything. As long as we don’t take our cell phones on the trip, they’d never know where we dumped the shit.”

“As vast as the Pacific Ocean is,” Tito added. “The odds of anything being found would be in the trillions to one. Actually, taking depth into consideration, it would be incalculable. That’s the best idea, so far.”

Baker looked at each of us. “Anybody have a connection at a mortuary?”

“Crematory,” Tito said, correcting him. “A mortuary may organize the cremation service, but the crematory does the act.”