Something for Nothing Read Online Free PDF Page A

kept looking at Martin and didn’t smile, just raised his eyebrows, serious, waiting for a reaction, Martin realized that it wasn’t a joke at all. Instead (and this was something Martin had thought later on, as he was driving home, reeling, trying not to steer right off the freeway), Val’s calm expression was one that said “Now you know.”
    He’d only done it a few times so far, he said to Martin. Five or six. And it had been a while.
    â€œIt was when we were in Tijuana for some races,” he said. “We drove it up in the trailers. It was mixed in with the hay. Besides, my connection down there had some contacts at the border, so we really just got waved through.”
    But Val went on to tell him about how in the past six months Nixon had issued orders for stepped-up border security, and that now it was too fucking risky to drive. People were getting caught left and right.
    â€œIt doesn’t matter how many bribes you pay, or if you hide the shit in your car door or in a fake gas tank or wherever.” They had dogs that would sniff it out, he said. Or they’d just randomly stop you and search your car, take it apart, find your dope, and lock you up.
    But a plane was perfect. You could fly at night; you’d be invisible. You could haul lots of it. And there was nice money to be made.
    Val had given him a vague account of how he’d gotten into it, something about some horse clients who were from Mexico, an old family with connections. Ramirez, or something like that. He was a horse breeder—he and Val had been working together for years. But Martin didn’t press it. In fact, once he realized that Val was serious, and that some of Val’s money was in fact drug money (that was the term,
drugmoney
), Martin had gotten quieter, thinking about the various questions Val had been asking him for the past few months about small craft planes. How far can you fly on a tank of gas in one of those things? How much weight does a light aircraft hold? And how regulated is small plane flight, anyway?
    Yep, Martin thought as he walked toward his car, sipping from his coffee. Now I know.
    But he also knew that it had been two weeks since Val had approached him, and that it was time to make a decision. In fact, Val had given this week as a deadline: no later than Monday or Tuesday.
    â€œJust tell him I need an answer,” he’d said to Ludwig when he called the office on Friday. “Yes or no. Tell him to use one of those skywriting planes if he doesn’t want to talk to me.”
    Ludwig had asked what Val was talking about. “He sounded kind of pissed off,” he said. Martin had told him that it was about whether or not to enter Temperature’s Rising in a race down in Southern California, but he could tell that Ludwig wasn’t really buying it.
    Martin set his coffee, the
Racing Form,
and the donuts on a news box (as usual, the
Chronicle
had headlines about Nixon, gas lines, and Patty Hearst). He fished his car keys out of his pants pocket. He heard the sound of a plane engine and looked up. It looked like a Cessna 177, and it was gaining altitude as it moved off inland, to the east. Even from where he was, Martin could tell it wasn’t one of his planes, but he wondered where it was going.
    Huh, Martin thought. Maybe it’s a sign.
    But a sign of what? He wished he knew, because he still hadn’t decided what he was going to say to Val.

CHAPTER TWO
    B y two-thirty Martin and Ludwig were in Martin’s Cadillac, zipping north along the freeway toward Golden Gate Fields. The clouds hadn’t cleared and you could feel the fog closing in, but it was still a nice day. The high couldn’t have been more than sixty-five degrees, which to Martin was amazing, because he knew that just over the hills it was probably eighty.
    The guy with the 240z had been a no-show, and Martin had worked all morning to contain his frustration.
    â€œFucking