by G. M. Ford
He reached for the bag and pulled back the long central zipper. Blocks of compacted white powder filled half the interior. Bundled in plastic wrap and sealed in freezer bags, the blocks emitted a vaguely medicinal odor, something like ether maybe.
The other bag was full of money. Hundreds, all banded up nice and neat into thousands, then those rubber-banded into ten thousands. Lots of them.
He took hold of the tab and pulled, but the zipper stuck. He leaned in and brought his other hand to bear. That’s when he noticed each brick of cocaine had a stiff cardboard tag tied to it. He turned the nearest tag. Read the cramped script. Property Room, Dade County Police. A name, an intake date, a court date, a case number, the whole nine yards. He zipped the bag and slammed the trunk with a bang.
“Lotta bad motherfuckers gonna be lookin’ for us, dog. Doan nobody be walkin’ off’n Tyrone’s coke and live to talk about it.”
Randy pushed the green button. “Get in the car,” he said.
This time the kid did as he was told.
The Excelsior Palms Hotel was three blocks off the beach; a crumbling remnant of the Rat Pack period, it professed an Art Deco motif, which was accurate only insofar as one never looked closely at anything in particular, and thus never quite internalized the degree of decay present in nearly every object.
Acey had wanted to simply get dressed. Randy had to work to convince him of the abrasive nature of sand and that a shower was in order. Apparently, the warm water had loosened his thought processes. When he came out of the bathroom, his eyes were hard as gravel. “They gonna kill our ass fo’ sure.”
“Not if they don’t catch us.”
The kid was shaking his head before Randy finished. His lower jaw was shaking, but it wasn’t from the cold this time. There was panic in his voice. “They gonna kill my mama.”
“Why would they do that?”
“’Cause they know where she is, dog.”
“She didn’t have anything to do with this.”
“Doan matter to these people, dog. They gotta send a message. ‘Nobody fucks wid Tyrone.’ Period. End of fucking story.”
“I thought you were through with her.”
“Fuck that,” he spat. “She’s my mama.” He was about to cry. “These people…they can’t find you…they kill everybody you know. They doan give a shit. They gonna keep killing people till dey get what dey lookin’ for.”
“First thing in the morning,” Randy said.
The kid thought it over. “First thing,” he said.
Randy looked him in the eye. “First thing. We get you to your mama and we get rid of that car.”
“What about the rock and the cheese?”
“We find someplace to stash them. The dope and the money are all we’ve got to bargain with. They find us and we don’t have them…it’s…” He didn’t want to say it out loud, so he let the thought peter out.
The kid’s eyes narrowed. “Smart dog. Hella smart. How you know all that shit? How come you always one step ahead of everybody else?”
Randy threw up his hands. “I don’t know. I just do.”
He walked to the window. Four floors down, the streetlights were on, and the neighborhood denizens had begun to make their evening rounds. Through the lattice of the iron fire escape, he watched as they exchanged furtive greetings.
He turned back to the room and walked over by the phone. He picked up the padded Guest Services book, thumbed his way to room service, and handed it over to the boy. “Let’s call room service and get us some dinner. I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry as hell.”
He turned back to the window. It was the off-season. Things were slow along the boulevard. A guy in a wheelchair was rolling himself across the deserted street.
A grotesquely elongated shadow on a palm tree fell awkwardly across the street. Randy rubbed his forehead and tried to get a handle on things.
No way Berry could have reported his Mercedes stolen, he decided. Not an eighty-thousand-dollar ride with the trunk full of stolen cash and dope anyway, which meant nobody knew what they were driving. So all they really had to worry about for the time being was Berry himself and the folks at the other end of the drug deal. As long as they didn’t attract any attention to themselves, they should be good with the cops.
When he turned back toward the room, Acey was still staring at the room-service menu. “You figure out what you want?” Randy asked.
The boy didn’t answer one way or the other. He seemed to be staring at one particular entry. Randy smiled. “Can you read?” he asked.
Acey shrugged and turned his face away.
“Can you?” Randy pressed.
“Not so good,” the boy admitted.
Randy held out his hand. The kid handed the menu over. Randy read it to him.
Spaghetti was Acey’s choice. Apple pie with chocolate ice cream for dessert. Randy ordered a steak with french fries and a bottle of Heineken.
By the time Randy set the ravaged tray on the carpet outside the room, it was nearly ten and Acey was stone asleep.
Randy flicked off the TV. The Road Runner faded to a dot. The green-and-white stand-up card on the nightstand announced FREE WI-FI. He went to his bag, fished around inside, and pulled out the laptop. Another foray into the bag produced a handful of wires.
Acey began to snore lightly as Randy sorted his way through the maze of wires, and eventually figured out it was “idiot simple.” Every wire only fit one receptacle. You couldn’t fuck it up. Two minutes of button pushing and he had the mail program open. Big old long list of messages to Brittany. Nothing for Alma, which, Randy mused, was probably just the way she wanted it. The message on the top, though, was a bit more of a problem. Paul/Randy, it read. The sender was [email protected]. The subject line read…all caps…NAZI BASTARDS.
While he had resolved not to read Brittany’s e-mail, this missive seemed both of an urgent nature and aimed at directly him, so he clicked at it until it opened.
Boy, do you ever know how to leave a trail behind you. I’m down at Hadley’s using one of the house machines hoping you receive this message before the Nazis get to you like they got to us. About a half hour after you left, they were all over us like weevils. Whatever it is you got or know or did, these NSA dudes want you real bad. Sorry to say but everybody here told everything they knew. Seemed like there wasn’t nothing else to do. We talked about it afterward and everybody agreed if we had it to do over again we wouldn’t tell them a damn thing. Hindsight’s twenty-twenty I guess. We all wish we’d done you better, but as it is, you better get rid of that car as soon as you can. Best of luck in your quest. Alma.
P.S.: Danny says to tell you he deleted your picture from the system even before the Nazis got here, so they got no picture of you. That’s something anyway.
PP.S.: I guess we weren’t who we thought we were either.
Take Care. Alma
Randy read it twice, then unplugged and shut down the computer. So it meant what? he asked himself. These guys were watching every e-mail anybody sent everywhere? Nothing…not even a simple Google inquiry sent from Buttfuck, Alabama, was safe from interception. The notion further boggled his mind.
After stashing everything back in his bag, he walked over to the bed and shook Acey’s shoulder. The kid’s eyes blinked open.
“I’m going out for a while,” Randy said.
“To that house, huh?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Something about it…” He couldn’t finish.
The boy marinated the idea. “What if you doan come back?”
“You’ve got lots of money. Hit the bus station.”
His small brow furrowed. He seemed genuinely puzzled.
“Why you gotta go back there?”
Randy thought before he answered. “It’s all I’ve got,” he said.
“I can dig it,” the kid offered. “It’s like that wid me an’ my mama.”
“I’m not gonna take a room key with me,” Randy said. “That w
ay…you know, if something happens, they won’t know anything about anything.”
“Smart,” the boy said in the moment before his eyelids fluttered shut.
“Hey,” Randy said. The heavy lids opened wide. “If I’m not here when you wake up…I’m not coming. You hear me.” Acey said he did. The look in his half-closed eyes said Randy had just joined the legion of fathers and uncles and johns and Tommys and Bills who’d walked out of Acey’s life on one pretext or another never to return. Randy stopped in the doorway.
“Hey,” he said.
The kid sat up in bed.
“I’ll be back,” Randy said. “You hear knocking on the door, it’s me. Open up.”
His face said he didn’t believe a word of it. “Yeah,” the kid said.
Randy turned out the light and eased the door closed.
The garage attendant pointed to the sign on the wall. “No in and out,” he read.
Randy grimaced and handed him a twenty.
“A lot like my first wife,” the guy said with a grin.
27
You get what you pay for, and in this case what the locals paid for was peace and quiet, so it wasn’t surprising that, by ten forty-five on a Friday evening, Water Street was closed up tighter than a frog’s ass, which explained why Randy parked the Mercedes at a Circle K convenience store half a dozen blocks north and walked into the neighborhood, because the way he saw it, he’d already gotten lucky with both the cops and the private security patrol, and another Mercedes sighting was surely going to attract more attention than he was looking for.
Rounding the corner of Burgess and starting down Water Street, he picked up the pace, walking quickly, making sure he didn’t look like he was running. He was sure of two things. This time of night, tales of visiting friends weren’t going to float, and whatever was going to happen for him tonight had better happen quickly.
He’d made this journey before; he was sure of it. He’d walked this same street at this time of night, and yet he was equally certain this wasn’t his home. “Home was…” He couldn’t say. Someplace like this. That’s all he was sure of.
The pictures were coming slower now, and had, for the most part, been replaced by a voice. The same voice he’d heard earlier this evening, the voice telling him to watch the woman as he’d stood in the doorway. The voice Acey had noticed the day before. His voice, Randy felt certain. The voice of the person he used to be…confident, street-smart, with an uncanny sense of what to do next. The experience was seriously schizophrenic, like doing a real-time voice-over for his own life.
A dull glow behind the drapes made 432 Water Street the only house on the block showing light on the ground floor. The faint illumination was secondhand, as if a light somewhere in the back of the house was on. Randy stood for a moment and listened. He thought he might have heard a hiccup of conversation but couldn’t be sure.
Randy broke into a trot. The attached two-car garage blocked access to the backyard at the near end of the house, so Randy quickly cut across the lawn and checked the security arrangements at the far end. Better. A chain-link gate. Six feet high. Locked from the inside by nothing more than a thumb latch. The net of spiderwebs said nobody ever came this way. Probably means they don’t have a dog, the voice-over said. People with dogs would use the gate more often.
He did a couple of knee bends, put his hands on top of the metal rail, squatted, and gave it all the leg drive he could muster, propelling himself straight up, high enough to lock his elbows and then to throw a foot on top of the gate. From there it was easy. In one smooth move, he vaulted himself over the gate and landed gracefully on the other side. He stood still and listened. A car rolled by in the street. Must have had the window down. Something hot and Latin. Guy playing trumpet so high only dogs could hear.
The minute the music was gone, he heard the voices. Hers at first.
“How many times do I have to tell you? Don’t you ever listen?”
Wes said something, but Randy couldn’t make it out, so he began to creep forward into the yard. On the left, as he cleared the shrubbery, a gossamer lanai began to come into view, its delicate screened walls backlit by a light from the kitchen.
She was at the sink. He could hear water running. “This guy was way too tall. They can’t make people taller, can they?” Her tone said she wouldn’t be surprised if “they” could.
He inched forward. The weak fan of yellow light coming from the kitchen window did not begin to cover the backyard. He moved to his right and forward some more, moving away from the light, keeping even his shadow hidden from view.
The yard was huge; the untended acre was a graveyard of kiddie fare, as old toys bespotted the ragged lawn here and there like acne: five or six scattered lawn darts, a Big Wheels tricycle tumbled over on its side, a swaybacked swing set with a broken seat, a trampoline torn from the frame on one side, an abandoned kiddie pool turned upside down in the grass. On the far side of the yard, a long building ran nearly to the back fence. If the house had been grander or the building a bit bigger, it might have been called a carriage house. As it was, the structure must have been a work space or hobby room, something like that.
Randy crept forward into the yard until he could see the back of her head, standing under the kitchen light, leaning back against the sink with her arms folded tightly across her chest. Wes was nowhere in sight. From the next room over, maybe the dining room, Wes said something Randy couldn’t make out. Whatever it was only served to anger her further. “It was the voice, you idiot. I just thought I’d heard the voice before.” She waved a disgusted hand. “I should never have said anything.”
And then Wes stepped into view. He was redder and sweatier than he’d been this afternoon. “Sometimes with faces…” he was saying.
“Don’t you hear me?” she pleaded. “I never saw that guy before in my life. The face meant nothing to me. It was the voice I thought maybe I’d heard before. The Voice.” She spelled it out. “V-O-I-C-E.”
“I called it in,” he said.
Her voice rose an octave. “You what?” She was halfway to hysterical. She stomped around in a circle. “You just don’t get it, do you?” she said. “The minute anything’s seriously wrong, this little charade is over.”
Anger tinged his voice. “What about you?” he demanded. “Don’t think I don’t know what’s going on with you? Don’t think for a second I believe all those ‘working late at the travel agency’ stories you tell.”
“That’s none of your damn business,” she said. “Problems make us expendable. Can’t you get that into your head?”
“We’re supposed to call if there’s a problem.”
“What problem?” She was right on the verge of yelling. She waved her hands like palm fronds in a hurricane.
“Guy freaked me out, I guess.”
“Freaked you out over what?” she demanded. “It’s not like he’s coming back.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“How long ago?” she demanded.
“Five minutes maybe,” he said.
She didn’t hesitate. She bolted from view. Wes said something inaudible to her back. A minute passed and then another before she burst out through the back door, carrying a load of paperwork in her arms.
Randy froze. He was in plain view. Only thing saved him was she was so intent on running toward the shop building that she failed to notice him squatting there on her lawn. Randy checked the kitchen window. Wes was gone to wherever Weses go. When Randy turned back, she was trotting through the side door of the outbuilding. Inside the building, the light went on.
Randy knew for certain he couldn’t stay where he was. When she came back, she’d be looking right at him. He hesitated and then ran headlong across the grass, hoping like hell she didn’t come out right away, running toward the back of the shop building and then sliding into the area between the back of the shop and the wooden plank fence separating this yard from that of the neighbor.
He sidled in as far as th
e window in the center of the back wall and peeked into the shop. No sign of her. He pressed his face against the glass, trying to find her in the room…but no…all he could see were workbenches all around the perimeter. Cabinets for supplies and a nice big square drain in the middle of the floor for…for…except the drain grate had been removed, leaving a gaping black hole in the floor. His brain had just begun to work out the possibilities when she came climbing up out of the hole empty-handed. She grunted as she slid the grate back into place. After dusting her hands together, she double-timed it across the floor.
Randy stayed put as she doused the light and slammed the outside door behind her. He sidestepped over to the corner of the building and watched her hurry across the grass and up the stairs into the kitchen. He took a deep breath and thought about what he’d witnessed. Has to be one of those fifties bomb shelters, he thought to himself. Back when everybody was convinced nuclear war was inevitable and survival was just a matter of hunkering down and waiting for the dust to settle.
When the voices went suddenly quiet, Randy hurried back to the shrubbery at the corner of the house. He rested on his haunches, quieting his breath, and then in an instant, the Howards were back in the kitchen and back at it, harder than ever.
“You listen to me,” she growled. “It wasn’t in any of the house sale paperwork. If the Realtor had known about it, he’d have made a big deal about it. They don’t know one damn thing about it. None of them. If it weren’t for the girls playing in there, we wouldn’t know it was there either, so just make sure you shut up.”
“Okay, okay,” he said.
The doorbell rang. Randy watched both of their heads swivel toward the front of the house in the half second before the gate rattled, just as it had when he’d jumped over a few minutes before. He grabbed the edge of the kiddie pool, lifted it from the ground, and rolled underneath, dropping the plastic and lying still in the dank grass.
