Page 28 of Saxon
"Need wheels." Saxon holds up several fanned hundred-dollar bills in one hand, and the gun in the other. "Gonna get 'em one way or another."
A tall, lanky, scraggly-bearded white guy steps forward. "I got wheels. Ain’t anythin' fancy, but it'll get you gone."
Saxon trades cash for keys, with directions as to where the car is parked. "I'll park it behind Mick's Garage," he says and gives the man an address I recognize as being on the border of one of the wealthiest Boston suburbs. "Can't promise what condition it’ll be in, though."
"I know Mick," the man says. "Just don't leave no guns or drugs in it. I'm on probation."
"That I can do."
The car in question is a late 90s Cadillac El Dorado. Huge and green, with lots of rusting chrome and acres of green velour. The engine catches with a hearty, V8 rumble.
"What's she runnin'?" Tommy asks me.
"Rev it," I tell Saxon, and he guns it. "Original NorthStar V8, 4.6 liter."
Saxon quirks an eyebrow at me. "You know engines."
"My dad is a car guy. Construction just pays the bills—his real love is cars. He taught me, whether I liked it or not. I could be a mechanic if I wanted to."
"Hot." Saxon jerks the car into gear and pulls out of the alley, turning onto the main road…just as a huge black SUV squeals to a stop in front of the hotel, disgorging six more men with guns. "Fuck. Won't be long before they get an update on my location. Hold on, this is gonna be a fun ride."
And, indeed, it is. He drives like someone with evasive driving training, squealing around corners at high rates of speed, last-second braking, aggressively dodging and weaving through traffic, all on main roads…with sirens howling all around. Apparently, the attempted murder-fest in the hotel attracted a little attention.
And then onto a freeway, where he drives 65 in the slow lane. Police cars fly by with lights and sirens flashing, and big black SUVs slide past as well.
He exits the freeway and the big old Cadillac floats us along one tree-lined suburban road after another, turning at random but always heading in the same general direction. Eventually, the houses grow larger, the lawns greener and wider and deeper, and the driveways longer and windier. And then the properties stop being houses with lawns and start being estates, with gated drives and manicured fields and elaborately trimmed bushes and mansions with wings and turrets and shit. The kind of estates that have names on gold plaques on the stone gate posts and the occasional guard hut.
After trawling through one such neighborhood for several minutes—in which we pass by the same estate several times—we finally crawl to a stop some ten or twenty feet from the estate he's driven by at least four times now. He leaves the huge old Caddy in gear, idling, and watches for almost five minutes.
His expression is shut down, opaque, but he's tense—I can see it in his muscles, in the white-knuckle grip he has on the steering wheel.
"Where are we?" I ask, not quite whispering. "What is this place?"
"Hell on earth, wrapped in expensive packaging." He says this, and then growls, a long rumble in his chest. "Fuck it. Nothing here but ghosts anymore."
He pulls up to the gate, lowers his window, and punches in a six-digit code on the panel. The stone posts are ten feet tall, the black wrought iron gates more like twelve, and the wrought iron motif continues as a fence extending in both directions for what looks to be nearly half a mile. Jesus, that's a lot of metal. Just the fence costs more than I’ve ever seen in my life, and probably more than my father, mother, and I have ever made, combined.
The driveway is a black ribbon winding this way and that, lined by towering trees in full leaf, creating a cathedral-like tunnel through which the sun shines in dappled, rippling patches. Beyond the trees, acre after acre of grass, mowed in neat stripes of darker and lighter green. Off in the distance, I spy a white gazebo on a hilltop, a cobblestone path meandering from the house—a castle, more like—to the gazebo. We round a bend and crest a hill, and a gargantuan barn appears a few hundred yards off the driveway, which forks toward it. White three-row horse fence creates square paddocks enclosing dozens of acres each. Horses graze in one of them, black ones and white ones and dapples and reds and all sorts of colors.
A figure moves in the paddock containing the horses, throwing hay here and there from the back of a UTV driven by someone else.
"Is this yours?" Emily asks, her voice quiet and intimidated.
"Fuck no. Belonged to my parents. Now I guess it belongs to my brothers and me. I dunno. None of us give a fuck about it." Saxon snorts. "This fuckin' place. Jesus."
I glance at him. "If your parents are both gone…"
"Who takes care of the place?" He gestures at the horses. "It runs itself. My folks' estate, meaning their total net worth as left in the will and all that shit, is so fuckin' vast and old that the upkeep of this place is taken care of. The groundskeepers, the stable hands, the house staff, they're all still here, doing their jobs, getting paid, even though Mom and Dad are dead and in their graves and I and my brothers aren't here and won't be here except occasionally."
"So you're rich as fuck, then," Tom says.
Saxon tips his head to one side. "Nah. See, for one, there's rich, and there's wealthy, and then there's old money—generational wealth. This?" He sweeps a hand in a broad gesture. "Been here for goin' on three hundred years. The property, I mean. The estate, in this case, meaning the acreage owned by my family. The house is only like a hundred and ten years old, I think."
"Oh, is that it?" Emily snarks.
"Hey, I hear ya, but there are cabins and staff quarters on the property that are older than the country itself. My family, meaning my ancestors, have lived on this land since before the Revolutionary War. So, when I say old money, that's what I mean."
"No shit?" Emily says. "And you don't care about it?"