Page 26 of Billion-Dollar Ransom
“You’re thinking this is the part where, if we appear to cooperate, they’ll do us a solid down the line?”
“Notappearto cooperate. Why notactuallycooperate? Tell ’em what we found. If they use it to find Boo Schraeder, great. They’re welcome to the glory.”
“Texting him now.”
By the time they reached Nicky’s modest house in Koreatown, her mental gears were working overtime. “Rubin,” she said to herself.
“Is that a name,” Mike asked, “or are you saying you want a midnight snack?”
“No, Rubin Padilla. From the Santa Barbara job.”
“Seeing as my jurisdiction is the City of Angels, you’re going to have to walk me through this one, honey.”
“Rubin Padilla was the one piece that wouldn’t fit. People identified him as a witness to the abduction of the trophy wife, but when we brought him in, he claimed to have seen nothing. When I sent a junior agent back to him a few weeks later with some follow-up questions, he was evasive. You know the drill—we moved on to other cases, and a long-shot witness like Padilla wasn’t exactly a top priority. But I’m thinking that if this is the same kidnapping team and they’re in the habit of using spotters to confirm a grab, Padilla would be in a position to tell us something.”
“So you’re going to feed him to Tighe as a goodwill gesture?”
“Like you said, Capital has the bodies to throw at this thing, so why not let them scoop him up?”
“You’re a genius.”
“You’re buttering me up.”
“Both can be true, Agent Gordon.”
DAY TWO
CHAPTER 28
Thursday, 6:03 a.m.
AT FIRST, RUBIN Padilla thought it was a scam.
Had to be.
It was a lot of money for doing practically nothing. Couldn’t be anything but some kind of con game—and Rubin was expert at spotting those.
At the time, he was barely scraping together an existence in Oxnard, and his former cellmate Ramiro insisted (metaphorical hand on an imaginary Bible) that it was legit. Just be on such-and-such a corner in Santa Barbara at such-and-such a time, wait for something to happen, then call a number on a burner when it did. That was it.
Had to be a scam.
But sure enough, seconds after he confirmed that, yes, some rich bitch had been snatched right in front of her hair salon on Figueroa Street, the money had appeared in his account.
Twenty-five grand in less than a minute!
By the time the sun set, Rubin had hightailed it out of Oxnard to the one place he knew he could lie low and make that money last—Sin City. He waited for the other shoe to drop.
It didn’t.
A few days later, Julia caught wind of his good luck and showed up at his place in Vegas. She wasn’t interested in him when he was broke, but now she was cozying up to him? But Rubin didn’t care. Julia was hot. Ramiro’s loss was his gain. (Never mind that ladies usually fell for Rubin. Hell, even that sweet-looking FBI agent who’d shown up a few weeks later wanting to ask some questions seemed really into him.)
The money was enough to cover, among other things, a few months’ rent on a Spanish-style bungalow just south of the Strip on Whispering Palms Drive. Rubin put the rest of his windfall to work. He was good with cards, especially in the less glitzy joints up on Fremont Street.Bet modestly and leave early—that was his mantra. He was even better at scamming out-of-town tourists, which, unlike poker, was a sure thing.
Soon, life settled into routine. Sleep till noon. Have Julia cook something to fill his belly. Hit Fremont Street by three for either poker or conning middle-aged soccer moms from the Midwest out of their vacation money. Come home by dawn with more than he’d left with. Play some Fallout, get drunk, get high, get naked with Julia, sleep till noon the next day, and start all over again.
Meanwhile, his tidy little stack of cash hidden in the crawl space above his bedroom continued to grow. If Julia knewabout his hiding place, she didn’t let on or touch a single dollar.
That’s how things had been going for more than a year now. But today was different. Today when Rubin woke up, Julia was gone, no food was prepared, and she didn’t respond to his texts. That wasn’t like her. And up on Fremont Street, Rubin felt like he was being watched by people instead of the other way around. He ended up losing money at the tables too. Was his whole night jinxed?
