Big Stupid (POPCORN) Read Free Page B

he fucking with me? But he just sat there chewing like a gigantic milk cow, eyelids at half-mast.
    Saber Security and Armored Transport was the armored car company who’d dropped the ball. A local company founded in 1981, they now did business all over Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas.
    They had offices off Airline Highway. I asked Big Stupid if he knew where that was, and he said he did. Ray had said something about an inside guy at the armored car company orchestrating everything. Maybe that was a place to start.
    The file said the owner was a guy named Martin Prescott. Okay, go ask him some questions. A place to start.
    I looked at Big Stupid’s tray. The food was gone. He dabbed at his face with a paper napkin.
     
     
FOUR

    It was a fairly nondescript office complex just off Airline Highway, lawyers, accountants, insurance brokers and the corporate headquarters for Saber. I told Big Stupid to wait in the Humvee, and he nodded without comment.
    Inside, I paused at a large circular desk. The receptionist was pushing sixty and looked up from a Better Homes & Garden with a distressed look on her face like she was realizing she’d actually have to deal with somebody today.
    One of these old southern gals who majored in prim and proper at college. I could see her mentally scrolling through the list of possibilities as she sized me up, blue jeans, black T-shirt, work boots.
    Did we call the plumber? Is this guy the exterminator?
    She asked doubtfully if she could help me. I said I was investigating this and following up on that and flashed my bullshit private eye I.D. like it was a Disney World fast pass.
    This exchange ended with her turning away from me and speaking in hushed tones into the phone like she was ordering a pizza covered in porn.
    Then I was following her down a hall, and she ushered me through a door as she said, “Mr. Prescott, Payne Kirby is here to see you.”
    She left abruptly, probably to rush to the sink and wash the taste of my name out of her mouth.
    The guy behind the big desk was robust, red-faced, mid-sixties. Lots and lots of hair, all white. Teeth like a horse. He wore an expensive blue suit, but it was rumbled every which way, and his tie was pulled loose.
    There was a tumbler full of ice with a wedge of lime on his desk. A bottle of Bombay Gin sat next to it.
    He came out of his seat and offered a big clammy hand. “Martin Prescott. I understand you’re some kind of shamus, Mr. Kirby.”
    “I work for my brother Ray. Looking into that armored car thing.”
    “Isn’t that what the police are for?” He motioned me to a seat then plopped back down behind the desk.
    “Henry Cobb jumped bail,” I said.
    “Well, I don’t have him.” He upended the bottle of Bombay and sent the ice and lime chasing each other around the inside of the tumbler. “You want a drink?”
    “Sort of early in the day, isn’t it?”
    He gave me the stink eye. “So what?”
    “So nothing,” I said. “I just didn’t know if this was business as usual or if maybe your cat died and you were drowning the grief.”
    “It’s been a pisser of a week.” Prescott gulped gin. “On top of a real shit pile of a month at the tail end of a real dick-up-the-ass year.” Another gulp of Bombay. “Is that what you wanted to know?”
    “My fault for asking.”
    He waved away my comment, splashed more gin into the tumbler. Maybe he was superstitious about letting it get empty.
    “It’s my fucking smart ass business partner. Diversify, he says. Fucker. Smartass lawyer prick. I built this company up from dust, and he had me spread my money around in Florida real estate and a bunch of hedge funds and bullshit. Fucking economy.”
    “Sorry to hear that, sir.”
    “Why you looking for Henry Cobb here?”
    “We thought he might be trying to hook up with whatever one of your employees was helping him from the inside,” I explained.
    “They got that guy already,” Prescott said.
    “They did what now?”
    “Well, they