Full Ratchet: A Silas Cade Thriller Hardcover by Mike Cooper

know if I mentioned, I did a stretch some time back. Eleven months at Houtzdale.”
    “Why?”
    “Why? Bad fucking lawyers, that’s why.” But he laughed and popped open the beer. “Criminal conversion of a motor vehicle, if you have to ask.”
    “Borrow the wrong car?”
    “Nope. Stole it myself.” Once again not boasting, just stating a fact. “I admit, kind of a dumbshit thing to do. You been inside?”
    “No.” Not really. Not counting an MP holding cell in, well, let’s just say, a major American military facility in another country.
    A very dusty country. They told me I can’t ever discuss what I did in the service.
    “Nothing to do all day but lift weights and talk shit. You think
accounting
’s boring . . . anyway, some of the guys, I see them now and then. In the city.” Pittsburgh, I assumed. “Silas Cade has a reputation.”
    “Some other Silas.”
    “Like, some company’s got a problem with the numbers, cash disappearing from bank accounts, bent accountants and all that—you’re the go-to. Mr. Fix-It.” He stared me in the eye. “CPA with a bullet.”
    “Huh.” Not a bad description, actually.
    “So.” His grin was gone. “True?”
    Outside a light rain began to fall, pocking the dirt, pattering on the shop’s metal roof. So much for the beautiful day we were supposed to have. The interior was dim and dank, the only other sound a hum from the refrigerator’s compressor. I sat still in the wooden chair, hands on my knees, staring back.
    “What do you want?” I said.
    “You’re my
brother,
Silas.” He leaned forward. “My whole life thinking I’m alone in the world, and then I find out I have a brother. Ain’t that something to celebrate?”
    “Why did you track me down?”
    “You’re here, right?”
    I shook my head. “I’m leaving.”
    “You and me—we can do stuff. We can get some shit
done
.”
    Great.
I got some ideas,
he’d written.
    “What are you talking about, exactly?”
    “Let me tell you.” He leaned back, grinned again, and picked up the beer. “I got
plans
.”
    And what plans they were.
    “It’s just lying on the ground, most of these places. I can show you seven steel mills, all shut down in the eighties, all no more’n twenty miles from here. Every one of them, the pipe is sitting there like, like, I dunno, apples on the tree. Or ground. Whatever—we just got to drive a truck in and pick it up. Copper and steel and iron. Tons of it! You know what that kind of metal’s selling for? China wants it, they’ll pay anything.”
    I looked at him. “Let me get this straight—you want to steal
scrap
metal?” I thought about the scavengers you see in the Bronx, rolling shopping carts piled with plumbing and doorknobs ripped out of abandoned houses, off to trade at the recyclers for ten or fifteen bucks.
    “It’s an idea. Something, you know, I work out here all day, sometimes nobody comes by. I got time to think.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Whatever. It’s just a start. Capital formation. Right? I saw a show on the cable about that.”
    It only got better. Once the initial investment was assembled, Dave figured we could finance the guns and cars and maybe some helpers . . . and start knocking over casinos.
    “They’re everywhere, you notice that? Over in Chester, or the Meadows, even right on the river in downtown Pittsburgh. Everyone goes in with their wallet full up, comes out flat. All that cash money, piling up.”
    “Um.”
    “They drive it over to the bank in the morning. Or maybe in the middle of the night. It’s not like, I mean, those places don’t
ever
close. But in between, it just sits there. Waiting.”
    “Dave—”
    “Easy, right? And we’re a perfect team. I got the connections around here—set it all up, no problem. You, we can trust each other, see? So we don’t need nobody else.”
    Trust?
    I didn’t know where to start. “Look, they expect—there are thousands of idiots thinking exactly the same thing. Hey, let’s