Page 28 of Billion-Dollar Ransom
AT FIRST, RUBIN Padilla thought it was a scam.
Had to be.
It was a lot of money for doing practically nothing. Couldn’t be anything but some kind of con game—and Rubin was expert at spotting those.
At the time, he was barely scraping together an existence in Oxnard, and his former cellmate Ramiro insisted (metaphorical hand on an imaginary Bible) that it was legit.
Just be on such-and-such a corner in Santa Barbara at such-and-such a time, wait for something to happen, then call a number on a burner when it did. That was it.
Had to be a scam.
But sure enough, seconds after he confirmed that, yes, some rich bitch had been snatched right in front of her hair salon on Figueroa Street, the money had appeared in his account.
Twenty-five grand in less than a minute!
By the time the sun set, Rubin had hightailed it out of Oxnard to the one place he knew he could lie low and make that money last—Sin City. He waited for the other shoe to drop.
It didn’t.
A few days later, Julia caught wind of his good luck and showed up at his place in Vegas.
She wasn’t interested in him when he was broke, but now she was cozying up to him?
But Rubin didn’t care. Julia was hot. Ramiro’s loss was his gain.
(Never mind that ladies usually fell for Rubin.
Hell, even that sweet-looking FBI agent who’d shown up a few weeks later wanting to ask some questions seemed really into him.)
The money was enough to cover, among other things, a few months’ rent on a Spanish-style bungalow just south of the Strip on Whispering Palms Drive.
Rubin put the rest of his windfall to work.
He was good with cards, especially in the less glitzy joints up on Fremont Street.
Bet modestly and leave early —that was his mantra.
He was even better at scamming out-of-town tourists, which, unlike poker, was a sure thing.
Soon, life settled into routine. Sleep till noon.
Have Julia cook something to fill his belly.
Hit Fremont Street by three for either poker or conning middle-aged soccer moms from the Midwest out of their vacation money.
Come home by dawn with more than he’d left with.
Play some Fallout, get drunk, get high, get naked with Julia, sleep till noon the next day, and start all over again.
Meanwhile, his tidy little stack of cash hidden in the crawl space above his bedroom continued to grow. If Julia knew about his hiding place, she didn’t let on or touch a single dollar.
That’s how things had been going for more than a year now.
But today was different. Today when Rubin woke up, Julia was gone, no food was prepared, and she didn’t respond to his texts.
That wasn’t like her. And up on Fremont Street, Rubin felt like he was being watched by people instead of the other way around.
He ended up losing money at the tables too. Was his whole night jinxed?
But when Rubin saw the same two faces watching him in two different casinos, he knew the other shoe had finally dropped.
Somewhere around four a.m., Rubin slipped out of a side exit and weaved his way through the Fremont Street crowds until he was sure he wasn’t being followed, then he boosted a car from the valet lot at the Plaza and raced all the way down I-15.
He texted Julia their code for “Get the eff out of town”: Fly . Maybe she had already. Maybe she was why Rubin was being followed.
When he pulled onto Whispering Palms Drive, the sun was just starting to come up. He half expected to see black-and-whites parked on his front lawn.
But there was no one. There was still no sign of Julia either—the house was empty. Rubin didn’t care about her, but he was ready to throw up at the idea that she’d stolen his money and made a run for it. Maybe all the way back to Ramiro.
Rubin pulled over his gaming chair, stood on it, pushed aside the panel, and shimmied up into the crawl space.
The money was still there—all of it, as far as he could tell—packed inside a Nike Cortez box. His relief was so profound, he couldn’t help but laugh out loud. The worry had all been about nothing.
And then came the pounding at his front door.
“Rubin Padilla! We need you to open up right now !”