The Carrier Read Online Free

she going to
do, take the car apart? Why did everything have to be so difficult?
She peeked under the car briefly, turning her back to Cyril for
just a moment. When she whirled back on him, he hadn’t
moved.
    “ Okay,” she said, “I’m
taking the car.”
    The money had to be in here, didn’t
it? It couldn’t be anywhere else. Or could he have stashed it
somewhere? If so, then all she was doing here was stealing an old
Toyota. She’d waste a day figuring out how to rip it apart, while
he slipped the money out of the wallpaper and laughed his way
home.
    “ You really have to take my
car?” he asked.
    “ No. You could give me the
money—then you’ll get to keep your car.”
    “ There’s no money in the
car.”
    “ I think there is. I’ll
drive it somewhere and take it apart until I find the money. And I
will find it.”
    “ You’re going to take apart
my car?”
    “ Why not just tell me where
it is now? Then you get to keep your car and your wallet, and I
save a few hours.”
    Cyril looked at her
carefully.
    “ You’re not really a student
at the college here, are you?”
    “ Maybe you should stop
talking to me like I’m stupid.”

CHAPTER 5
     
    Marcus found himself defending Danny
Chin to Saida.
    “ He didn’t do—anything. Not
really.”
    “ They put him in
prison.”
    “ Yeah, okay. He got arrested
for sensual assault, yes. But that was a mistake.”
    “ It’s sexual
assault.”
    “ What did I say?”
    “ Sensual assault. You can’t say sensual
assault.”
    “ All right, fine. Sexual
assault.”
    “ No, I mean—you can’t go
into the world and talk about someone committing sensual
assault.”
    “ They said he pressed up
against a lady on the train. I mean, is that sensual enough for you? Can I just
explain—”
    “ So that’s your friend?
That’s the kind of guy you like to watch football with?”
    “ It was a setup.”
    “ A setup? Marcus, every man
who ever got put away says it was a setup.”
    The following Monday after an overtime
victory by the Chargers, Marcus again found himself pleasantly
drunk on Danny’s couch.
    “ What would we do without
football?” he asked.
    “ Man, I don’t know. Soccer?
If they ever ban football, they’ll try to fob soccer off on us.
They’ll even insist we call it futbol. I had a friend inside who
tried to get me into soccer—didn’t happen.”
    “ You made a lot of friends
in there?”
    “ Really just Luis. Some
people started calling us Cheech and Chong. Because, you know,
there’s an Asian guy and a Latin guy.”
    “ What’s Cheech and
Chong?”
    “ Cheech and Chong made these
movies about two guys running around trying to get stoned. So some
people thought we were called Cheech and Chong because we could get
drugs. And as it turned out, we could. So we started to do okay in
there, but it’s hard to really be sure that you’re getting your
cash when you’re inside. Luis is still in there, and he’s getting
dicked around by his people on the outside—so I’m in the cold,
right? But his daughter is this real sharp girl, Inez. And she
found out about some money that’s going to be easy to grab. She’s
going to set it up, and I’m going to take it.”
    “ Whose money is
it?”
    “ It’s ours.”
    In the three weeks Marcus had known
him, Danny had nearly always been light, telling jokes or accepting
whatever Marcus threw at him in stride. But now Danny showed the
face of a man with a serious side, not just a silly little guy with
bright clothes who liked to fondle women on mass
transit.
    “ So this guy
Cheech—”
    “ Let’s call him Luis,” Danny
said.
    “ Okay, Luis. He brought the
drugs in, right? He had the connection outside?”
    “ Right.”
    “ What did you do? Why did he
want you for that? You’re not a big guy or part of a gang or
anything, right?”
    “ I was his friend. We had
some really deep conversations about religion and spirituality,
like about whether animals have souls. But the main thing