“It’s not about the idea. It’s not about the number. It’s about what you want. You want the kid safe? How much is that worth? What’s the number you’d put up for that? You want to do it cheap, do it yourself. You know where that would get you. This way it’s done right and you don’t have to worry. All we did was talk. Everything else gets done right and you get what you want. You get that idea, right?”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

I looked down at the plate. Everything was gone except smears of ketchup. The waitress placed the bill face down on the table. “I would have got yours,” I said.

“I took care of it,” Froehmer said.

We stood up and left and Froehmer walked for a few steps into the parking lot.

“Don’t call me,” Froehmer said. “You’ll hear from me soon. If you don’t, don’t call me. But you’ll hear. This is nothing to worry about.”

“You should come see my father. He’d like that.”

“I’d like that too,” Froehmer said. He wouldn’t go see him. Three times a week. Who wants to see that? He hadn’t seen him in a long time, before he was sick. It was better to leave it like that. Three times a week, hooked up to a machine, is that how he’d want to be remembered? “Tell him I’ll come by soon.”

—

I’d been working for Froehmer for a couple of months, paying back what I owed him. He had me stealing stuff from construction sites around town, tools, equipment, material, whatever he told me. Then he called me and wanted to meet back at the diner, but we didn’t go in. We sat in his car, which is always a bad sign, right?

“You think you could get something for me?” he said.

“Sure.”

“It’s an inside job. You’d have to get into some guy’s house,” he said.

“Tell me what it is and I’ll get it for you.”

He wrote down an address with a pencil on a scrap of paper and handed it to me.

“Pieces of silver,” he said.

I thought he was joking but I didn’t laugh.

“It’s in the guy’s office, in his house,” Froehmer said. “They’re in a wooden box, about the size of a pencil case. It’ll be on his desk or in it, or on his bookcase, some place like that. It’s a wooden box. Make sure the coins are in it. You’ll know the box when you see it. It’s an easy job.”

“What if it’s in a safe or something?” I said, immediately regretting saying anything.