"There's lot's of bikers. The place will be jammed." Burgess moved back to the bed. "Where did you go after you left the interstate rest area?" Dean continued. "To a Parkside motel?"
"Yeah. I guess I sort of passed out on him after the piss stop. Byrne didn't know what to do with me so he rented me a motel room-I didn't have any money with me 'cause I was supposed to stay with my wife. I'd forgotten all about the bags I put in his trunk."
"It was after midnight so the registration said the next day," Dean said. "Why did Byrne use a fake name?"
"I don't guess he even knew my name at that point."
"When did Byrne discover the suitcases and the money?"
"When he got home and opened his trunk to get his luggage. He figured the bags must have been mine-they were still unopened. When he came back to the motel in the morning to drop them off, I told him how I'd found them. He got upset and opened them to see if there was a name. When we saw the dough, we both damned near flipped. We weren't sure he wasn't followed or something-we whispered like a couple of kids and couldn't wait to sneak out of there. He wanted to run straight to the police. I talked him out of it."
"How?"
"I convinced him he'd get in trouble with the cops and maybe the people who really owned the money-we knew it was nothing legal. Then he wanted to dump them back at the rest stop. I told him we'd get caught or maybe shot. He'd be putting his wife and family in danger. Then I said I'd turn the bags in, back in Scranton-told him I had a lawyer friend or something. He finally agreed and took the day off to drive me and the money back to my place and we crept out of there."
"But you had no intention of turning in the money."
"Are you kidding? My wife just left me, I had a shit job.… You think I was going to give away a fortune like that?"
"What made you think Byrne would believe a cock-and-bull story like that? He'd have to have been pretty naive."
"You've got to understand the guy, he didn't want to have anything to do with the dough. He was scared half to death. Like out of sight, out of mind. When he left me, I don't think he cared what happened to the money as long as he wasn't part of the picture."
"What changed his mind?"