by Katy Munger
I leaned back in my seat and slept for a few hours until dawn woke me and the neighborhood started to show signs of life. The residents were early risers in that area, probably hardworking people up at dawn for their factory jobs or to retrieve the school buses they drove to get other people’s children to school. It was a blue collar neighborhood and his mother could probably have moved out a long time ago, but Rats said she'd resisted all attempts to buy her a bigger house. That was why I knew I could trust her. Money wasn't the most important thing in life to her.
A light in the kitchen went on right at 7:00 AM. As soon as the street was empty and I knew I would not be seen, I grabbed my knapsack and walked quickly up the driveway and around to the rear of the house. I knocked softly on the back door and an old woman peered out from between yellow checkered curtains, her hair done up in those pink foam curlers that ladies walked around in fifty years ago. Idiotically, I waved at her, which did seem to reassure her that I was not some ax murderer who had come a’callin’. She opened the back door a crack and looked out at me.
"I'm a friend of Sammy’s," I told her. "My name is Casey Jones. I did odd jobs for him, you might say." I wasn't sure what else to add.
She opened the door. "I've heard of you." She had a deep southern accent that reeked of hushpuppies and green beans cooked for days with bacon. "Come on in. I can offer you a cup of coffee."
If it seemed strange to her to see a friend of her dead son’s on her doorstep so early in the morning, she did not show it. She bustled around the kitchen, pouring coffee and adding cream, not seeming to notice when I placed my backpack in the middle of the table. I unzipped it and began pulling out piles of hundred dollar bills, stacking them carefully in the middle of the kitchen table.
She stopped, a cup of coffee in each hand, and stared.
"Sammy would want you to have this," I told her. "I found it in his club. You don't need to worry about who it belonged to. They weren’t very good men and they definitely don't deserve to get the money back."
For a moment, I thought she might reject the cash. Stranger things have happened. But instead, she sat down and handed me my coffee. She stared at the money, hypnotized by the sight.
"How much is there?" she asked, her voice catching. I knew she was thinking of the bills they had fallen behind on since Rats had died, of the dreams of college for her grandchildren that had faltered, of the medical bills that would no doubt need to be paid one day, even if she was a tough old bird.
"A little over $300,000," I told her. "That's an estimate. But I think it's pretty close."
She swallowed hard. "Did my son hurt anyone to get this?"
"No ma’am," I assured her. "Some men were trying to use him to launder their money, and he got killed before he could process this batch. I don't think you should feel guilty about taking it. The same men were responsible for him being killed. Call it justice and take the money."
"I will," she said. Her voice was stronger. "Are you the lady detective Samuel told me about?"
"I am," I said, oddly touched that he had mentioned me to his mother. I liked her. She was one of those birdlike southern women that are tempered like steel and unafraid to grab life around the neck, with both hands, every day.
"He liked you," she told me. "Though he did say that you scared him a little," she added with a laugh. "But there’s a reason for that. He always married those dumb women with fake boobies and big hair. I think it made him feel like a man to be smarter than they were and have them depend on him. But he liked you because you weren't like that. He said that you were strong. He said you could kick any man's rear end with one hand tied behind your back." She stared at me. "I think maybe I see what he meant."
"Sammy said that about me?"
"He sure did."
"I'm honored," I told her. "He was a good man. He was my friend."
She nodded as if she knew what I really meant.
"He never really had a daddy," she explained. "He was bad news and always in and out of prison. So Samuel was the man of the family, even when he was little. He always felt so responsible for taking care of us. I felt bad when that responsibility really did come to him, but I was grateful to have a son like that. To have a son who was the kind of man who stepped up and did what he had to do to take care of his own."
"Sammy knew a lot about the world," I said.
"He sure did. He had a saying, you know. You probably heard it from him yourself. He used to tell me that life was made up of fire and rain. The fire could kill you, and the rain could sustain you, but the real trick was knowing which was which. He said that once you could figure out what was the fire, and what was the rain, that you’d be okay. You just had to learn to recognize the difference.”
"I think he might be right," I said to her. "Sammy was a very smart man.”
"Not many people would come here and give me this cash,” she said. “Most people would have taken the money and run."
"Not me," I told her. "Like I said, your son was my friend."
"Than he was lucky to have had you as a friend."
I swallowed back my tears. "You have to be careful about how you spend the money," I told her. "People will start to notice. Take a few packs to a casino, but not the same casino every time. Spread it around.” I explained to her how to buy and redeem chips so that her cash came out clean at the end. She listened carefully, nodding at times. She was a practical woman who recognized what had to be done and was willing to do it. “Just don’t get the fever or you might lose it all,” I warned her at the end of my instructions.
“That’s not likely to happen,” she said firmly and I believed her.
“Spread the job around the family, if you can, so you don’t bring any attention to yourself. Do you think you can trust them to keep their mouths shut?"
She nodded. "A handful of them, anyway."
"Okay, good." I stood up to go. "If you ever have any trouble with it, or you need more advice, I want you to know where to find me.” I put my business card on the kitchen table. "Just give me a call and I'll be there."
She started crying then, perhaps overcome with the magnitude of the piles of cash in front of her. "We need this real bad,” she explained through her tears. “Everyone's been so scared since Samuel died. I don't even think we've been able to grieve, we've been too worried about paying the bills and it’s going to be a long time before they’re going to let us sell his buildings."
"Well, now you can grieve. Because you won’t have to worry about paying your bills for much longer. And maybe not ever if you get a good enough price for his properties. Don’t you settle for the first offer you get, hear me?"
“Oh, don’t you worry about me, baby girl,” she said firmly. “If I’d let people take advantage of me, my kin would have starved long ago. I’m not going to start letting them now.”
She walked around the table and embraced me. I patted her on the back. "I'll never forget your son," I told her. "I promise you that I will never forget him."
"That means more to me than the money," she said. And I knew she meant it.
●
As I drove away from the little house where my friend Rats had been born, and where his people had gathered after seeing him buried, I thought about his philosophy on life. Fire and rain indeed. I had learned something profound over the past few weeks. I had learned that I was not the kind of person content to sit around waiting until the rain came. Not me. I knew that I wanted to walk through the fire, that I wanted to defy the flames like Firewalker Coombs. Because when life calls you, you answer. It’s as simple as that. I needed the heat and the pain and the glory. I’d remember that the next time I got the call. I only hoped the world was ready.
But, for now, there was a good man in the mountains waiting to hear from me. And this time, I’d be the one to make the call.
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About the Author
Katy Munger is a North Carolina-based mystery author who has written sixteen novels. She is the
author of the Dead Detective series, writing as Katy Munger (Angel Among Us and Angel of Darkness) and as Chaz McGee (Desolate Angel and Angel Interrupted); the Casey Jones crime fiction series, writing as Katy Munger; and the Hubbert & Lil series, writing as Gallagher Gray. The Dead Detective novels take a deeper look at both life and death than most commercial mysteries and have been described as serious with some comic overtones. The seven books in the Casey Jones series are humorous, semi-hardboiled novels set in North Carolina, featuring a female unlicensed private investigator and numerous recurring sidekick characters. The Hubbert & Lil series takes place in New York City and has been called “a cozy series with attitude.” Munger was also a book reviewer for the Washington Post’s Book World and served as North Carolina’s 2016 Piedmont Laureate.
For more on the author, visit www.katymunger.com.
