Free No Safe House by Linwood Barclay

Joseph asked.
    Now Vince looked at him. “What?”
    “A head. A head would fit in a bag like that. Let’s say we had a guy’s head and we needed to save it for something later, could you tuck it away for us?” Joseph grinned. “If we wrapped it up, like, so it didn’t smell?”
    Logan said, “We don’t have a head.”
    Vince said, “Let’s start counting.” He pointed toward the cheap dresser, the laminate on the top and drawers heavily chipped. Sitting on it, next to an old, nonflat television that had to weigh three hundred pounds, was a currency-counting machine that looked, at a glance, like an oversized computer printer.
    “Why do you need to know that?” Logan asked.
    “When you go into your local Bank of America branch with a stack of cash, do you just tell them how much it is and they say okay?”
    Logan grunted. He put the backpack on the bed, unzipped it, and reached in with both hands to bring out stacks of bills held together with rubber bands.
    “Each stack is a thousand,” Logan said. “There’s seventy of them.”
    “Seventy grand,” Vince said flatly. “I thought you said it was a lot.”
    He shook his head, grabbed three stacks at random. If they each came out to a thousand, Vince wouldn’t bother counting the rest mechanically. He slipped off the rubber bands and set the stacks, one after the other, into the machine. Once he had the bills nicely tucked in, he hit the button and the bills fanned like tall grass in the wind.
    After he’d checked the third stack, Vince said, “Okay. Now we’ll see that we have seventy of them stacks.”
    It didn’t take Vince long to count them, making them into seven piles of ten. Gordie didn’t help. As he’d been instructed, he was there to watch, and besides, it was hard to count bills with a gun in your hand.
    “Now what?” Logan asked.
    “I take my service charge,” Vince said, pocketing five thousand-dollar stacks. “That covers you for six months.”
    “Motherfucker. That’s high. What if I want it back before the six months is up?”
    Vince shook his head. “Minimum charge.”
    “Fine,” Logan muttered. “I’m outta options. The police may be watching us. Last week, they had a warrant to search our warehouse. Didn’t find anything, the fucks. But they know what properties we own. And Swiss banks aren’t what they used to be, either.”
    “No,” Vince concurred. “I think we’re done here.”
    Logan appeared uncertain. “Aren’t we supposed to get something?”
    Vince cocked his head. “A toaster?”
    “A receipt?”
    Vince shook his head. Vince had brought some brown paper Whole Foods shopping bags to put the money in, but Logan pointed to the backpack and said, “You can keep that.”
    Joseph said to his brother, “Check it out.” He was pointing at Vince’s crotch. “Guy’s pissed himself.”
    Vince bent his head down to examine himself, saw the dark, wet stain to the side of his zipper. “Son of a bitch,” he said under his breath.
    Gordie bit his lip. This happened occasionally, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted to point out to the boss. At least not in front of others.
    Joseph took a step toward Vince. “Hey, I was out of line pointing that out. Sorry about that. Don’t be embarrassed. My uncle, he’s older than you now, but there’s been times when he’s had the same problem. Thing is, though, those times it happened, he was three years old.”
    He flashed that grin again. Vince turned his head away from Joseph and fixed his eyes on Logan.
    “Your mother still alive?” he asked.
    “Huh?” Logan said.
    “Your mother. The one who pushed you and your brother out her cooz. She still alive?”
    Logan blinked. “Yeah. She is.”
    “What are you gonna tell her?”
    “What am I gonna tell her about what?”
    “What are you gonna tell her when she asks why you didn’t do more to save your brother? Why you didn’t get him to control his mouth? Why you let him get himself killed by being an