The Box by Jeremy Brown (ebook reader play store txt) 📕

straight northwest. The street sign said Pine, but Bruder didn’t see any pine trees.

It was their third time checking the road, and after a minute or so of nothing but corn stubs and the occasional distant tractor sitting idle, Bruder said, “You’re sure this is it?”

It was the third time he’d asked it, once on every trip, and Rison tried to sound confident for the third time.

“It has to be, right?”

“Go through it again.”

Rison sighed.

“The way Tug told it, they make their rounds, collect the cash, and meet up at the family compound, some farm out here they bought legally. Then they count it all and pack it up in the armored car and drive it through town like a one-truck Romanian pride parade.”

Bruder looked out his window at the lunar landscape. There was nowhere to hide out there, no corners to duck around or doorways to slip into. Not even a pine tree to stand behind.

“And he told you it was northwest of town?”

Rison nodded.

“He said it was a road like a runway, nothing but crops all around, and the armored car would rumble down it to the highway. So if they were coming toward us from their farm out here, they’d be going down, like southeast, right?”

“Is that how Romanians talk about directions? Up is north, down is south?”

“How the hell should I know?”

Rison was getting snappy, tired of the questions he didn’t have straight answers for.

A shape appeared in the road ahead. It turned into a flashing stop sign, and beyond that was the berm and railroad overpass with the one-lane passage beneath.

Rison stopped at the sign and made a show of looking left, right, behind, and ahead. Nothing else was moving except a gaggle of geese hunkered out in the corn stumps.

Rison pulled forward, and right before they slipped into the mouth of the tunnel Bruder said, “Stop.”

He looked at the concrete retaining walls and the overpass and the way it all funneled into a man-made chokepoint. He got out and took some photos of it with a small digital camera, then took a short video, turning a full 360 degrees.

He walked through the tunnel taking more photos, then did the same routine on the northwest side of the tracks.

Rison idled behind him, watching for any inbound traffic, and when Bruder got back into the car Rison said, “You like this spot?”

“It has potential.”

Rison nodded, happy about anything that looked remotely like progress, and picked up speed as they moved away from the overpass.

Bruder watched the scene shrink in his side mirror.

If Rison was right, and this was the road the Romanians used…

“We’re going to need some explosives.”

Rison glanced over, alarmed.

“You want to blow the bridge?”

“Not quite.”

The endless fields of harvested corn and soybeans were eventually broken by a dirt road angling off to the west.

The sign called it 64th Street, not even important enough to get a real name.

Bruder could see a tree line down that way, and beyond it the tops of what looked to be silos with grain elevators.

Rison coasted to a stop but didn’t turn. He looked off to the left toward the silos.

“Might be the Romanian compound.”

Bruder checked straight ahead, then looked to the right.

Nothing but more fields and tree lines off in the distance. The field outside his window had been left to grow wild and was ragged with tall grass and fading yellow wildflowers.

Rison hit the left turn signal, then looked at Bruder with raised eyebrows.

Bruder shook his head.

“Look around. If it is them, we’d be the only car to drive past all day. And if any of the muscle from Len’s is standing around outside, and they recognize us, we’re blown. Let’s see what’s further down this road.”

Rison killed the blinker and pushed the car forward.

“I’m gonna take a wild guess and say corn.”

They drove for five more miles and saw one other farm, sitting right on the stretch of two-lane road they were on.

It had a tall white square of a house surrounded by a few mature trees. Massive barns sheathed in ribbed sheet metal loomed behind the house, in the middle of an immaculate lake of crushed concrete.

Three men stood outside one of the barns next to a machine that looked to Bruder like it belonged on the surface of Mars. It dwarfed the men, who turned from looking up at the cockpit and studied the lone car going by.

“That’s a sprayer,” Rison said.

The three men stared, and Bruder raised a hand to the window.

The three men waved back, an automatic response, but they seemed unsure about who they were waving at.

“That’s not the Romanians,” Bruder said.

“No beards?”

“That yard and the equipment are pristine. The Romanians aren’t here to farm, they’re here to steal and intimidate. I bet they don’t even mow their lawn.”

He looked through the windshield and saw more fields. There weren’t even any power lines along the side of the road.

“Go another mile or so, then turn around. Let’s head back to town.”

“If those farmers are still out there they’ll see us go by. Might be weird. Even more weird than you waving at them.”

Bruder shrugged.

“We’re two packaging equipment guys from Jersey who got lost driving around while waiting for lunch time.”

“Oh, it’s lunch time?”

“It will be by the time we get back.”

“More like dinner time,” Rison said, grousing. “I need to look at this road on a map, see where it goes.”

“Northwest.”

“No, I mean how far. Because if it goes all the way to South Dakota, or Minnesota maybe, we could use it to get away after the job. Straight shot, right outta Dodge.”

He chopped the air with a hand and left his fingers pointing through the windshield to demonstrate.

Bruder said, “I don’t like it.”

“Why not? If this is the right road, and the Romanians are back there somewhere and they try to take their damn armored car through town, we hit them before they get there and take their back trail all the way here and keep