Free Four Kinds of Rain by Robert Ward

Juan who hung at the jungle bodega? And what would Jesse do all day, hang out with the sloths in the trees? Become a nature nut who went out with tourists to see the coatimundi or the howler monkeys? Face it, he was too old now to start over on some beach with a bunch of moronic peasants and parrots jabbering at him. They’d be worse than his patients.
    No, three million wasn’t going to make it and there was no way he was being selfish or greedy here. The truth was just a lot more complex than he’d ever considered. He had a younger woman now, one who thought she was moving up the food chain by latching onto a big-time shrink as a boyfriend. She wasn’t going to dig some place where the chief social activity was taking a canoe trip down a river to find the Sacred Caiman.
    That meant that the very third world countries he had always fantasized about retiring to were totally out of the picture.
    Face it, he was an urban guy and he needed an urban environment. Well, most of the year anyway. What they really needed were two homes. A city home and a little hideaway, a shack by the sea.
    And the price of houses being what they were in any place that anybody who was anybody would want to live was going to be exorbitant.
    Three wasn’t going to make it. Hell, you buy the two houses and boom, you’re broke. It was going to take four, at least four.
    But then there was the car problem. For years he’d driven a piece-of-shit, ancient Volvo, like the good, nonmaterialistic lefty he was, but he couldn’t expect a young girl like Jesse to share this sentiment. She wanted to have a fashionable car, one she’d be proud to drive around in, and hell, to be perfectly honest, he wanted her to have a cool car, too. As an older man with a younger woman he had to keep her happy. She wasn’t going to be into making sacrifices for “the people.” Hell, she
was
the people. She was from funky Beckley, West Virginia, and she’d done all the “sacrificing” she was ever going to do with Dwight. She loved Bob, he was sure of it, but he was a meal ticket, too, and that was cool. It made him kind of a patriarch, okay, a patriarch without kids, but a great older man nonetheless. A man with a mysterious past, a man with a swell-looking blonde babe, a man with two houses and cool cars. Maybe a two- or three-year-old Jaguar would do. For her. But he
also
had to have a car. Maybe a slightly battered but still great-looking Porsche.
    So four wasn’t quite right, either. Nah, it would have to be five. Five million was the price and the truth was, he wasn’t really sure if they could get by on that.
    But he didn’t want to price himself out of the market.
    No, five was really rock bottom. He had to get five or he’d have to find another guy to buy the damn mask. Whoever that might be. And he had to think about that, too. Jesus, there was a lot to consider when you became a criminal. It wasn’t an easy gig. Not at all.
    Emile had already let it slip that his office was in his house. That was good. And that the mask was in a safe within the office. Probably behind a painting or something, or perhaps on the floor. In any case it shouldn’t be too hard to find it. But before you could get to the safe you had to get by the guards. Two guards. And then there was the alarm. Somehow you had to detach it, something he knew nothing about. But even assuming you could get rid of the alarm, sneak by the guards, and find the safe, how the hell would you ever crack it? In movies guys listened to the tumblers on some kind of microphone and they just knew. Well, Bob could stand there listening for twenty years and have no idea what he’d heard. And then there was the little problem of finding this Colin Edwards person. And making the deal with him. Not to mention somehow actually collecting the money. After all, what was going to stop Colin Edwards from taking the mask and giving Bob a suitcase full of newspapers? Or for that matter, giving Bob counterfeit