Salty beads streamed from his forehead and dripped into his eyes. He wiped them away with his forearm. They kept streaming down as he went on reaching into the belly of the Buddha and taking out the stacks of bills. In all, there were fifteen stacks. The total amount was one million five hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars.

Chapter 15

Chapter 15

It’s real, he was thinking. It’s genuine United States paper money, certified legal tender, endorsed officially with the signatures of the Treasurer and the Secretary of the Treasury. And that makes it gold. Pure gold.

All right, that’s one thing. And the other thing is, it’s yours. Did you hear what I said? I said it’s yours.

That is, if you want it.

You kidding? Of course you want it. That’s why you aimed the gun at his chest instead of his wrist. In that split second you didn’t know what you were thinking, and even now you’re wondering what was running through your mind; but it musta been you got the message from that certain fundraising organization, The Friends of Corey Bradford.

With the message saying that fifteen grand was a nice fat round figure, and yet you didn’t hafta settle for no measly fifteen grand. Not when you could add two zeros to that fifteen grand.

It musta been finance and nothing but finance that made you aim the gun just a little higher, the line of fire slanting up above the wrist and above the ribs, your finger on the trigger getting the relay from your brain. Because it musta been you were checking again with Nellie, with Nellie saying it was just a fairy tale, saying that Rafer was up there in the clouds and his talk was all cloud talk, the coke aspirin stuff causing him to jabber way out of his head. For instance all that jabbering about the Chinaman—

So in that split second it musta been that your brain was revving like a jet engine, and you were telling yourself that Rafer’s Chinaman was somewhere not very far away, and all you hadda do was find the Chinaman and hit him, for the gold. But it’s always first things first. And what you hadda do first was get assurance there’d be no interference, no complications later on. And you got that assurance, you damn sure did. You got it when you pulled the trigger, knowing exactly where the bullet would go, knowing it would put Grogan in the grave.

You know what you are? You know what you deserve?

The hell with that. You wanna preach, go take it someplace else. What we got here is a million five plus sixty-five. What we got here is the impossible and you still can’t hardly believe it, but here it is. And it’s yours. It’s all yours.