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"Boyd. Boyd! Wait up."
It was Kyle's voice. Boyd rolled his eyes—would this boy ever quit?—but he obediently waited up, as requested. "What is it now, Kyle? Have I not explained to you my lack of interest in your master scheme?"
"You haven't even heard the plan! Come on, just give it a listen."
"Why?"
"Why? Because … because it'll make you a mint of money."
"A mint of money, hm?" Boyd sighed. These plans never came through, not even when intelligent men of vision put them together. On the other hand, he happened to have seen a letter from Ava's bank when looking in her desk for a rubber band. If she didn't get a whole lot of cash, and quickly, she could lose her house. Over and above the fact that her house was currently also Boyd's refuge, he didn't want to see her lose everything she had because his brother had been terrible with money.
As if sensing the change in Boyd's attitude, Kyle pressed the advantage. "Just let us go somewhere quiet where we can talk. We'll tell you the whole thing, and you can help us fine-tune it, and then if you don't think it'll work, we'll—well, we'll back off."
Boyd highly doubted that, but he had ways of ensuring he'd be left alone if needed. Raylan Givens came to mind as a likely option. "All right. Ava's at work, we can go back to my place. No one will disturb us."
"Great! Great, we'll be there."
As he had anticipated, it was a simplistic plan … but there were elements he could work with. And far from requesting any fine-tuning on his part, Kyle seemed content to trumpet his own cleverness and to wait for what he appeared certain would be Boyd's fulsome praise. Also, they wanted to do it today, immediately, which meant they didn't want Boyd to take too much time thinking it over.
"Interesting," Boyd said at last.
"You're the best, Boyd. We need you. You'll come on board now, right, now you're sure we know what's what?"
The boy looked like a puppy, eager and waiting to be thrown a bone to. So Boyd did. "It's quite the plan." They didn't need him as badly as they said, though, which made him wonder if there was more to his particular role here than they were admitting to. But there was the letter from the bank … Boyd sat forward. "All right. I'm in."
"All right!" Kyle grinned in what he appeared to believe was a charming manner. His two idiot friends had remained silent through all of this, a wise move on their part, since they were hardly likely to sell the plan. "One more time. While you're taking the packets down to the splinter shaft, we're gonna transfer the cash to the truck."
"Pruitt's going to drive it down the mountain," Boyd filled in.
Pruitt looked at him, his mouth hanging half-open. Who in their right mind would trust someone like that with all that cash? On the other hand, Boyd would be inside the mine while this was going on, which left him with little to work with.
"That's right," Kyle confirmed. "And Marcus and I join you in the hole. And then—"
Behind him, Marcus said, "Boom."
"Drop the ceiling between us and the surface." Kyle looked at him, waiting for the approbation.
"Now, the man who'll be guardin' this take, I've known this man for quite some time. He will not easily part with company money."
"Who, Shelby?" Kyle stared at him, clearly not prepared for discussion on this topic. "Shit. Boyd, dude's older than shit."
"And yet, again, he's a steady hand on that 44 he keeps underneath his desk."
Kyle gave a nervous laugh, sharing a look with Pruitt, who gave a nervous laugh of his own and sat back. "You ain't gonna have to worry about Shelby," Kyle assured Boyd.
"Yeah? Why's that?"
Marcus was suddenly looming over him. "'Cause you're gonna kill him."
That was interesting. Not entirely surprising, but interesting. Boyd could think of a few ways he could turn this development to his advantage. He sat back. "Well, now, you never mentioned bloodshed. If you had brought this up earlier, I don't know if this conversation would have gone on this long."
The look on Kyle's face said the burying of the relevant information had not been accidental. "You've killed men for far less, Boyd. Let's keep our eye on the prize."
"You take Shelby down in the shaft until you set up the det. Once it's wired, you lay a shovel upside his head real hard. Cave-in'll take care of the rest." Marcus sounded pleased with the whole idea, as though he wished he would be the one wielding the shovel.
"See, that's the genius of the whole thing. Everybody'll think that he stole the money, tried to blow up the shaft behind him, but instead, premature detonation, and we was just the poor miners that got caught up in all of it."
Boyd had carefully pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, and now he gestured with it to see if any of the idiots would notice it. "Well, if this is gonna go down today, the devil lies in the details."
"You don't worry about the details," Kyle snapped impatiently. "Let me worry about the details, all right? We're countin' on you for one thing, and one thing alone."
"What's that?" As if Boyd didn't know. And someone ought to tell this impetuous young hothead that a man who let someone else look to the details was dead already and didn't even know it. No doubt he would learn.
"Powder-man, Boyd. We need you to make sure this mountain don't come down on us, and kill us."
Boyd gave a small nod, which Kyle took as agreement.
He started pulling things out from the bag at his feet, taking his eyes off Boyd, who punched a button on his cell phone and laid it on the chair behind the cushion.
"Now, once you set it we're gonna detonate remotely. All right? ATF'll be all over this thing. We don't need any extra det wire tippin' 'em off."
The house phone rang, and the room went silent.