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A Little Place Called Heaven
Date: 9/28/2015, Categories: Humor, Author: WritersFriend, Rating: 1, Source: LushStories
It sounded easy, but wait till I tell you. Me and Jake O’Leary had just finished up a short-time bid for a bad-check beef at Warm Springs, a min-security bucket in Carson City, and through some scams we’d scraped together close to three thousand bucks, but we needed seven thou to buy into a major credit-card grift. We brainstormed and cogitated, trying to think of a way to top up our funds, and then Jake mentioned Benny Loomis, an inmate at Warm Springs who had recounted to us a scheme to snatch the wife of a minor despot in a little hick town down in southwest Nevada. The place was far off the radar of the state Highway Patrol, Benny said, and the county sheriff was “a lazy low-life Republican who don't give two good damns about nothin’, least of all humankind.” “The trick is to not be greedy,” Jake told me. “Keep the ransom low so the old miser can pay it out of petty cash rather than go to the trouble of getting the law involved.” His logic sounded questionable. “I don’t know, Jake,” I said. “It’s a big leap from running cons to kidnapping. If things go south we’ll be looking at hard time, and not in a cushy joint like Warm Springs.” “You got a better idea, Cap?” Jake said. I didn’t. So we bought an old junk-bucket Taurus, stole us a license plate, and set off south to scope out the deal. The place, it turned out, was the hottest hellhole this side of Death Valley and was called, of course, Heaven. The mark owned a small ranch on the outskirts of town where it appeared he ...