Heaven's a Lie

by Wallace Stroby

  “Aldo pulls his own nine, then it gets crazy in there. Your boy lets off a couple, but he misses. Ricochet goes right by my head. Aldo didn’t miss.”

  “Where was he hit?”

  “Stomach, I think. Drops his gun, grabs the bag with the money, runs out the door.”

  “You let him go?”

  “Too public. Bad enough that shit’s happening middle of the afternoon. Aldo wanted to go after him, but I said, ‘Let him go his way.’ We had to shut the place down, turn off all the lights. Thought somebody might have heard the shots, called the police.”

  “All that money and you let him walk?”

  “More trouble than it was worth. I just wanted him the fuck gone.”

  “What did you do with his gun?”

  “In the river. Had to do Aldo’s piece the same way. Your boy put us through a lot of stress and anxiety, man. Very unprofessional. We were all a little upset by it, no joke.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “That’s too bad. But he brought it on himself.”

  “He did.”

  Travis can picture it. Tommy coming on hard, a gun in his hand, then panicking as things went bad.

  “You were right about the money,” he says. “He was holding it until we set up the next exchange. He decided to try to swing the deal himself.”

  “That’s some in-house shit. Your problem. Not ours.”

  “I agree,” Travis says. “So where’s that leave us?”

  “Leaves me thinking we should chill on this for a while, reevaluate our relationship.”

  “We still want what you got. I just need a few days, get the money together.”

  “What happened to the cash your boy was carrying?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Chano sits back, strokes his beard. “You think we took it?”

  “Didn’t say that.”

  “Would have been justified if we did, way he acted.”

  “You would have been.”

  Chano smiles. “You white boys think we need you, because you can sell to people down there won’t buy from us. But you’re small-time without us, homes. We both know that. I knew it the first time your boy came to me, wanted to hook up.”

  “Didn’t stop you from saying yes. You made some good money with us.”

  “We did. But I knew it wouldn’t last. Some people, they get a good thing going, and they can’t help but fuck it up. It’s their nature.”

  “That’s why I’m here. Get things running smoothly again.”

  “Get it straight, though, man. You need us, but we don’t need you. Everybody wants what we got. Buyers get in line because our shit comes pure, from China. I’m talking about people that do business in a calm and reasonable manner. They can’t get enough. I could sell your package tomorrow for twice what you were paying. Why put up with this hassle?”

  “No hassle. Two years without an issue between us. Tommy made a mistake. He’s gone. No need to let that disrupt our arrangement.”

  “Your boy already disrupted it. And if we do business again, I think that price needs to go up. For our trouble.”

  He wondered how long it would take to get to that, knew it was coming.

  “That’s what the ten’s for,” he says. “Smooth things over.”

  “Ten, man. Ten’s nothing.”

  “That’s above and beyond what we’ll go for the next package. We agree on a price, I’ll let you know when the money’s together. You want to do the deal then, we’ll do it. You don’t, we both walk away and leave it at that. You keep the ten for your trouble.”

  To Aldo, Chano says, “Check that.” Then to Travis. “No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  Aldo takes the single pack of hundreds from the belt, counts the bills.

  “Only reason we’re even talking is because I respect you,” Chano says. “And the business we’ve done together.”

  “I know,” Travis says.

  “Es bueno,” Aldo says. He puts the money back in the belt.

  “Right now I need to take a leak,” Travis says. “Had a long drive up in traffic. Bumper-to-bumper on Seventy-Eight.”

  Chano looks at him for a moment, then points to an open door at the back of the office. Travis goes around the desk and into a narrow bathroom. A string brushes his face. He pulls it to turn on the overhead bulb, illuminating a single toilet and a small sink. Graffiti on the walls. The smell of urine and cleaning fluid.

  The door closes on its spring behind him. He props a work boot on the toilet seat, draws up his right jeans leg and pulls loose the little Ruger .380 taped above his inside ankle. He eases back the slide to make sure there’s a round chambered, then flushes the tape down the toilet, his foot on the lever.

  Through the door, he hears them speaking Spanish, voices low. He tries to picture where they are in the room.

  Another plane approaches. He waits for the rumbling to grow louder. When it’s directly overhead, he shoulders open the door.

  Jorge is closest, about four feet away. Chano stands at the desk, his back turned. Aldo is on the other side of it, near the exit.

  When Jorge turns toward him, Travis raises the .380 and shoots him through the right eye.

  The noise is a sharp crack, loud in the confines of the office. Aldo pulls up the tail of his jersey, tugs at the gun in his waistband. Travis drops him with a forehead shot.

  Chano reaches toward the drawer. Travis locks an arm around his throat, drags him back, the chair falling over. He aims the Ruger at the office door, waits. Pounding feet on the steps. Travis times it, fires twice through the shade, blowing out the glass. He hears the dreadlocked man fall. The shade flaps and rolls upward.

  “Don’t do this, homes,” Chano says. “We can talk about it, work this out.”

  “You got more people outside?”

  Chano doesn’t answer. Travis touches the hot muzzle to his cheekbone. He flinches, tries to twist away. Travis tightens his grip. “Anyone outside?”

  “No.” Angry now. “Why you do this?”

  “Simpler this way,” Travis says, spins him around and shoots him in the face.

  Gunsmoke hangs in the air. He goes to the door, stands to the side as he opens it. The dreadlocked man is facedown on the steps. Travis fires once into the back of his head.

  He waits, listens for the front and side doors. The jet noise has faded. All he can hear is the wind, the slow ticking of the clock on the office wall.

  It takes him a few minutes to find all the shell casings. One’s on the desktop, near the photo. Drops of blood are spattered on the glass.

  He cinches the money belt around his waist again, pulls on his jacket, uses a sleeve to smudge the office doorknob. He hasn’t touched anything else.

  At the side exit, he takes a rag from a workbench, uses it to undo the locks, then pushes the door open, the gun already up. Cold wind blows in. There’s no one in the alley.

  The gun at his side, he walks down to the empty street. It’s clear. He gets out his burner cell, calls Cosmo. “I’m turning onto Mulberry. Pick me up.”

  “How’d it go?”

  Travis ends the call. Another plane crosses low overhead.

  He pockets the gun, draws in the night air, counts six slow breaths. At the next corner, he stands under a streetlight, raises his right hand in front of his face, fingers spread. He holds it there until it’s perfectly still.

  EIGHT

  Joette wakes with a feeling of dread. It’s formless, seems to fill her, command her. The same thought again: Get it out of here.

  By eight-thirty she’s in the car, a zippered shoulder bag full of money on the passenger seat. She left behind $10,000 in hundreds in the suitcase. For emergencies, she told herself. Later, she’ll find a better place to hide it. She’d burned the two charred bills in the kitchen sink the night before, washed the black ashes down the drain.

  The first bank is a PNC in Toms River, about thirty miles south. She rents a safe-deposit box, fills it with $63,
500 in strapped bills. Another $9,000 goes into a checking account. She knows a cash deposit of $10,000 or more would be reported to the IRS and red-flagged by Homeland Security.

  Three more banks, and the bag is empty. She feels better now, safer. She’s running late, but instead of heading to the motel, she drives east on Route 33 to the shore. She parks in Ocean Grove, in one of the diagonal spots along the boardwalk. All the others are empty.

  Wind moves the dune grass. She walks out onto the empty fishing pier, hands in her vest pockets against the cold. Two surfers in black wet suits are paddling out past the breakers. On the horizon, a container ship makes its way north to New York Harbor.

  Waves crash against the pilings below. She hasn’t been here in years, but the memories come back sharp and clear. Walking the boardwalk with Troy, hand in hand. Lying on the beach in summer, his head in her lap, watching banner planes drone by overhead. The two of them swimming out as far as they could, until the lifeguard’s whistle called them back.

  Before Troy, none of her relationships had lasted long, mostly through her own fault. With Troy, everything was different. She was different. The way he made her feel, the intensity of it, she’d never experienced before.

  She hadn’t considered marriage before, but with Troy it seemed inevitable. From the day they met, she knew things had changed forever. He saved her life, but she couldn’t save his.

  The surfers climb onto their boards, catching waves as they roll toward the beach. She closes her eyes, feels the wind, imagines Troy standing next to her.

  Baby, she thinks. You won’t believe what I’ve done.

  * * *

  Lunch is a Chinese food delivery, ordered off one of the menus in the top drawer of the desk. She eats pork fried rice out of its container with a plastic fork, watching a rerun of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

  The chimes ring. Cara comes in, carefully closes the door behind her. She climbs up on a chair beside the brochure rack. Her feet don’t reach the floor.

  “Hey, kiddo,” Joette says. “What’s doing?”

  Cara shrugs, pushes a lock of pale blond hair from her eyes, looks up at the TV. “Can I turn on Cartoon Network?”

  “Where’s your mom?”

  “Sleeping.”

  Joette looks up at the clock. It’s just past noon.

  “Here. Don’t drop it.” She lobs the remote into Cara’s lap. Cara turns it around, starts to surf through channels.

  “What did you do all morning?” Joette says.

  “I was watching TV, but my mom said she needed to sleep and made me turn it off. So I finished reading my book instead.”

  “When do you go back to school?”

  “Next week.”

  “How do you like sixth grade?”

  “It’s boring. I’d rather read my books.”

  The food is heavy in Joette’s stomach, and she can feel a headache coming on. The container’s still half full when she folds the top shut, drops it in the wastebasket behind the desk. She keeps the napkins and fortune cookie.

  “You eat breakfast today?” she says.

  “Cheerios. I got them myself.”

  Joette goes into the back room, gets a box of Snickers down from the supply shelf. She opens it with a box cutter and takes a bar from one of the forty-eight-count retail cartons.

  “Heads up,” she says as she comes back out. She holds up the bar, feints a throw. Cara raises her hands to catch it, frowns.

  “What do you say?”

  “Please.”

  Joette tosses her the bar. “And?”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Don’t get chocolate on the remote.”

  Cara pulls the Snickers wrapper open, neatly peels back the paper. Joette doesn’t know the cartoon, but Cara is watching it intently, not smiling, nibbling at the candy bar. Joette feels something pull inside her.

  She unwraps the fortune cookie, snaps it in two and pulls out the strip of paper. It reads Don’t be afraid to take that big step.

  “There’s your boyfriend,” Cara says.

  A cruiser is turning into the lot, Noah at the wheel, talking on a cell phone.

  “Don’t be a smart-ass,” Joette says.

  “He is, isn’t he?”

  “No, he’s not.”

  “Then how do you know him?”

  “We went to high school together, that’s all.”

  Noah gets out, puts the phone away. The chimes sound as he comes in. “Hey, Jo. Hi, Carrie.”

  “Cara.”

  “What?”

  “My name’s Cara. Not Carrie.”

  “Sorry, Cara. My mistake.” To Joette, he says, “Was driving by, thought I’d drop in for a minute, see how you were making out.”

  “With what?”

  “Dealing with things.” He looks at Cara, then back at Joette. “From the other day.”

  “I know about the car accident,” Cara says, still looking at the TV. “My mom told me.”

  “I’m okay,” Joette says.

  “How’s the arm?”

  “Itches.”

  “You want to make sure it doesn’t get infected. Let me take you to the walk-in.”

  “I’m fine. They find out anything more about the driver? There wasn’t much in the paper.”

  “Troopers are handling it. State road, so it’s their jurisdiction. They’re not always quick to share information with the locals.”

  “He have family around here?”

  “Troopers are on it, Jo. I’m sure they notified whoever they had to.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “What else did you expect?”

  “To find out more, I guess. Where he was coming from, where he was headed, what he did for a living. Anything.”

  “You know as much as I do. It’s not our case.”

  “Will the troopers come back? Will they want to talk to me again?”

  “No, why would they? They took your statement, that’s all they needed. Pretty clear what happened.”

  She feels herself relax. “I was just curious. Thanks for checking up on me.”

  “You change your mind about the clinic, I’ll take you there.”

  He tousles Cara’s hair as he leaves. They watch him drive off, the cell phone to his ear again.

  “Why aren’t you married?” Cara says. She’s finished the Snickers bar.

  “You don’t quit, do you?” Joette hands her the napkins. “Here, Chocolate Face.”

  “My mom says you were.”

  “I was, once. Not anymore.”

  “Neither is my mom. She used to be, though, to my dad. His name’s Rory. He lives in Ohio. He moved there after I was born.”

  “Have you ever met him?”

  She shakes her head, wipes her face and folds the wrapper inside one of the napkins. “My mom doesn’t like it when I ask about him. She says it makes her sad.”

  “When you’re an adult, things don’t always work out the way you want them to,” Joette says. “That can be hard to get over sometimes.”

  “Maybe I’ll meet him someday.”

  “Maybe you will.”

  “How far away is Ohio?”

  “Not that far.”

  “When were you married?”

  “Give it a break, kiddo.”

  “Was it a long time ago?”

  “Sometimes it feels that way,” Joette says.

  “Did you have kids?”

  “No, we didn’t.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He got sick.”

  “Did he die?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Something tugs inside her again, sharper this time.

  “I am too,” she says.

  NINE

  I wish you’d told me what you were going to do,” Cosmo says.

  They’re in the cluttered back office of Cosmo’s laundromat, on a side street in Red Bank. He’s nervous behind the desk, chair rolled back, elbows on his knees. Unde
r his suit jacket is a Hawaiian shirt, red flowers blooming on a black background.

  “Wouldn’t have made any difference,” Travis says. “Way I saw it, there wasn’t a choice.”

  He looks up at the monitor on the wall. It shows four views of the laundromat, rows of washers and dryers. All the customers are women, most of them Hispanic. Two small children are chasing each other around the machines. The manager, a young Salvadoran woman with long black hair, sits at the counter behind bulletproof glass, looking at her phone.

  Travis nods at the screen. “I always wondered. Are you nailing her?”

  “Esme? She works for me.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “Tell me about Chano. You believed him, about the money?”

  “Far as it goes.”

  “So they didn’t take it?”

  “If they had, I don’t think he would have met with me. Or he would have had his guys pop me as soon as I walked in the door. But he didn’t. He was willing to talk. I showed him the ten grand. He knew there was more coming.”

  “Then why kill him?”

  “He didn’t trust us anymore. And I didn’t trust him. Sooner or later he would have made his move. Couldn’t take that chance.”

  “It’s a lost cause either way, isn’t it?” Cosmo says. “Maybe Tommy stashed the money on his way back, didn’t want it with him when he got to a hospital. He could’ve thrown it in the woods somewhere, was going to come back and get it. It might be anyplace. Could be somebody already found it. Whatever, it’s gone.”

  “What I’m wondering is what his plan was. If he thought he was gonna walk out of there with both the money and the product, he had to have a way to get clear fast. He wasn’t going to hang around, wait for someone to come looking for him.”

  “Whatever plan he had, it didn’t do him much good.”

  “How are you on a new connect?”

  “Working on it. Nothing yet. We’re just about out of product, too, and I’ve got buyers waiting.”

  “The Ds can’t be the only ones bringing in fent.”

  “Only ones in that quantity and quality right now,” Cosmo says. “Anyway, even if I do find someone, we need front cash. And we’re short on that at the moment, if you hadn’t noticed. Every time we solve one problem, there’s another right behind it.”