“You saw something,” came the voice.
“Yeah, that armored truck thing. Let me in, Norman. I’ll tell you about it. It’s good, I promise. It’s got a lucrative aspect to it.”
Half a minute went by before he started opening his locks. There were five of them and they were damn complicated.
Eight-thirty at night, the hallway was empty. A couple of broken lightbulbs, some gang graffiti spray-painted in red and blue down at the end of the corridor. Still, it was twice as nice as her building across Second Avenue.
Emma was still in her white shirt from work, short cutoff jeans, showing a good deal of thigh. Bra-less, with the dark buds of her nipples clearly visible through the thin cotton. They weren’t huge breasts—on the downside of average really, but they were firm and perky, and not one guy had ever complained.
The shirt was dry now, but from eight in the morning till quitting time every afternoon, it was saturated with sweat and chlorinated water from all the pools she cleaned. Her route was in the southwest part of town, big expensive houses where people paid a couple hundred a month for Emma Lee to scoop the leaves out and dump in the overpriced chemicals. The company supplied her with a blue pickup, which they let her drive home, and all day she got to work out in the sun and fresh air and stand around in rich people’s back yards, so all in all it wasn’t a bad job, though it didn’t pay but a dollar above minimum wage.
Always in the past when she’d come to Norman Franks’s door, she’d made sure she was wearing a bra. Emma didn’t like mixing business and sex, especially with a scary guy like Norman. But on this one occasion, she was going to make an exception. Perilous as it might be to get the wild ox excited, this was a situation that called for full deployment of Emma’s weapons.
The last chain came undone and the door swung open.
“Hey, Norm. What’s happening?”
He didn’t blink, didn’t move, as if it took all his concentration just to keep that heavy head upright.
“Look, I’m sorry to bother you, but I knew you’d be interested in this.”
He’d seen her a hundred times before, but he still looked her up and down as if she were a stranger, starting with her muscular legs, working up the flare of her hips, lingering on the dark raisins puckering against the cotton, then taking in her wide mouth, her hair, which was scorched to bright blond by the sun. She had pale blue eyes that showed up well against her caramel skin. Jamaican mountain coffee with four shots of heavy whipping cream—that was her color. Emma’s father had been a red-haired Irishman; her mother, a tall, elegant woman from the barrios of Trinidad. Emma didn’t look much like either of them. Abandoned on the doorstep by some passing gypsy—that’s what Emma guessed, though her mother always denied it.
“It’s some pretty amazing shit, Norman.”
The big man made a face. Maybe he was interested; maybe he wasn’t.
“I wouldn’t bother you otherwise. Knowing how valuable your time is.”
He turned and waved Emma into the apartment; then he shut the door and took a few moments to rebolt it. He wore an undershirt and green trousers. He was only five-ten or so, but he was almost as wide as he was tall. Bull-chested. He was more than twice Emma’s age, somewhere in his middle forties.
She hesitated a second, then followed as Norman Franks padded barefoot across the one big room to the bath. He picked up a can of shaving cream, shot out a dollop of foam, spread it on his cheeks, and picked up his razor.
He had olive skin and jet-black hair that he wore slicked straight back, and his eyes were so black and fierce, they looked like they belonged in a falcon. He had an extremely heavy beard and mats of hair on his upper back. His shoulders were wide as a doorway and his biceps were huge. Not the shapely muscles of bodybuilder types, but beefy, almost-swollen arms, the kind of mass Emma’s daddy once had. Not good for the dexterity sports and not all that attractive to look at, but the kind of muscle you’d want if you needed to lift a freight car.
Though she’d been doing business with Norman for three years, this was the first time she’d been in the guy’s apartment. Ordinarily, business was conducted in the hallway. Couple of words, hand over the merchandise, receive your cash, and get the hell out of there.
His place was a musty one-room efficiency with a little bathroom. On the wall at the head of his bed, a Confederate flag was mounted upside down, and on the opposite wall were a bunch of framed photographs and paintings. A big oil painting of Jesus with his hands folded in prayer and, beside it, a black-and-white photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr., another of Elvis, and Liberace and Robert Mitchum, a few other Hollywood types she didn’t know. All the faces, including Jesus, had their eyes scissored out and others glued in. Whole wall was filled with photos like that. Four rows of five. Twenty photographs with transplanted eyes.
Next to the bed was a green leather couch, and across from it sat a television on a plastic milk crate. Norman slept on a king-size water bed with a black bedspread and headboard of walnut. Lined up neatly beside the TV, there were about half a dozen cardboard cases of vodka, and beside them was another stack of boxes full of Yamaha amplifiers. Common knowledge around the neighborhood: If it was still in the carton, Norman Franks would pay top dollar. Loose items—jewelry, coin collections, handguns—you might as well deal with the pawnshops. In addition to fencing, word on the street was that Norman did wet work, too. Downsizing with a capital D.
Emma’s old man, Roy, used to do business with Norman before he died. He’d bring home a few women’s shoe boxes or several purses from Burdines, where he worked as a janitor, and he’d go over to Norman’s after supper and come home an hour later with a handful of green. Emma’s mother was always bitching about how long it took to handle the transaction. Going on and on about Norman Franks like she had some personal vendetta against him.
“I like the guy, Evonne. He’s somebody I can talk to,” her father used to say.
“You want to talk to somebody, then you should attempt conversation with your wife and child, instead of developing a buddy-boy relationship with that man.”
Same scene almost every time.
But that hadn’t stopped her father. Norman was the only thing close to a friend her father’d had, only guy in the neighborhood didn’t make cracks about a white guy marrying a black island woman. Rest of the neighbors giving him shitty looks every time he passed by.
When the old man died of stomach cancer three years before, Emma took over for him, started bringing Norman the loot she’d plundered from those ritzy neighborhoods where she worked. Bicycles, tools, boom boxes, all kinds of amazing shit those people just left sitting out in their yards or right inside their sliding glass doors. Time after time, he gave her better prices than she found anywhere on the street. But despite all the business she’d done with Norman, their relationship never budded beyond thirty seconds on the landing. Hand over the goods, wait for the cash, and go. Norman kept it brisk and brusque, no matter how Emma tried to charm him.
Norman didn’t mingle with the neighbors, didn’t shop at the local Quick Mart, or Liberty Liquors, Big Mary’s Barbecue, didn’t sit out on the stoop in the evening and drink beer like the rest of the men. It wasn’t just that he was white. There were a couple of other Caucasians living on the block, and they all hung out with the brothers, more or less accepted in that society of outcasts. But Norman didn’t socialize. Wouldn’t even return a “yo, Norm” on the street. Just walked around in that lethal trance, people stepping out of his way like he was a freight train rolling mindlessly down the tracks.
Norman stopped shaving for a second and turned those dark eyes on Emma.
“So?”
“So I was coming home from work and I saw the Brinks thing going down and I stopped and watched. You heard about it, right?”
“I heard.”
Norman rinsed away the last traces of shaving cream and patted his skin with a thick yellow towel. He looked at her again, a dark twinkle of interest.
“Well, w
hen I was sitting there watching, a person walked up to the side of the armored truck and tapped on the window.”
Norman uncapped his deodorant stick and rubbed the white stub against his hairy pits.
“A few seconds later out came two white sacks. And the person who took them lugged them away.”
Norman looked at himself in the mirror, recapped his deodorant, and set it down on the lavatory counter. He continued to look at himself for several moments, his chest rising and falling. Then he reached out and ran some more water and scooped up a double handful. He splashed it on his face and rubbed it in, then used the towel to pat himself dry again.
He shook out a couple of shots of Old Spice and rubbed it into his cheeks, then slicked the remains against his thick black hair.
He nodded at his reflection, a strained smile rearranging his face briefly, then disappearing into the gloominess of his normal expression.
Emma moved away from the doorway. The big man was just standing there, his face slack, staring into the mirror.
“No one else saw this?”
“I don’t think so, no. Everybody was so busy in all the helter-skelter, going after the money.”
“Why’re you here?”
“I thought you might be interested. Like in an extracurricular sense.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Like moonlighting, a second job. There’s this money floating around out there. You and me, if we act fast, maybe we could snatch it from the snatchers.”
“You tell anyone else?”
“No.”
“Male or female?”
“Huh?”
“Person with the money.”
“Oh, that. Well, I’m not sure. It could’ve been a man or a woman. Person was wearing a raincoat, one of those London Fog types, and underneath he had on a hooded sweatshirt, and the hood was up and he had on sunglasses.”
Emma took a breath of air heavy with Old Spice.
“Two bags?”
“Two, yes.”
“Where’d he go?”
“To a car parked beneath the overpass. A blue Honda Accord. It had rust damage on the rear panel and dark windows.”
“You followed?”
“For a little while, but then I lost it in traffic.”
“You see the plate?”
“Yeah, I noticed it.”
Norman drew his shoulders back a fraction. Still frowning at his features in the mirror, as if thirty years later he still wasn’t used to how ugly he was.
“In fact, I remember the plate number. I remember it perfectly. I got it stored away in here.” Emma Lee tapped the side of her head.
“Give it to me.”
“Whoa, there, Nellie. Not so fast.”
Emma stepped away from the doorway. She looked back at the living room, the Confederate flag, the pictures of Jesus and Martin Luther King, Jr., Marlon Brando, the guy who played Archie Bunker on TV, and one of Marilyn Monroe. She noticed a large hunting knife, its shiny blade stuck into the back of the apartment door. His quick-strike defense system.
“We need to talk a little first. Establish a rapport. If we’re going to be partners, we should know about each other.”
When she turned back, Norman was standing in front of her. His lips were thick, and Emma could see from so close-up that he’d missed a couple of places on his neck, two dark patches of stubble. Below his collar line, there was a neat circle of bushy hair where he stopped shaving, then that thick shadow of beard rising up almost to his eyes. The eyes seemed uninhabited most of the time, like a man who’d had one too many lobotomies.
“Partners?” Norman said.
Emma stepped out of range of the Old Spice.
“Maybe I should leave,” she said. “Go down to the police station, report what I saw. That’s what a model citizen would do.”
Emma pulled a coil of hair off her cheek. She did the thing with her left eye she’d learned to do. Not a wink really—a little flicker that came and went so quickly, nobody could be sure if she’d flirted with them or not. It was something her mother had mastered, a trick of the streets, and for years Emma practiced it in the mirror. So far, she’d tried it out in real life a few dozen times and it worked in every instance. Like throwing bloody meat into the shark tank.
Norman swallowed, his big Adam’s apple bobbing, but that was the extent of his reaction.
Emma let a small smile steal across her lips and said, “I was thinking about why there was no mention on the TV news of reward money, and I think it’s ’cause people at Brinks don’t know they been robbed. They know they had a truck in an accident and they know their money was pilfered by a bunch of poor folks. But they don’t know they were the victims of a felonious robbery.”
Norman swallowed again and turned back to the mirror.
“I’m listening.”
“Why’d you cut the eyes out of those photographs, doctor them up like that? You a weirdo of some kind I should know about?”
Norman swiveled his head slightly and stared at Emma. Then he lifted his eyes and peered over at the photos.
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe you were thinking they’d be better off if they could see out of each other’s eyes. They’d benefit from the multiple viewpoints.”
“I was drunk.”
“Martin Luther King could have one of Liberace’s eyes, one of Marilyn’s. Like that, all of them getting to see a part of the world they never would otherwise.”
He didn’t reply, just kept staring at his handiwork.
Emma took a half step to her right and looked back across the bedroom.
“You got a spooky side to you, Norman. You got eerie dimensions.”
“What’s the plate number?”
“I love it,” Emma said. “A money truck breaks open; all our good neighbors are scrambling and grabbing and celebrating. A pot of gold fell out of the sky and, by God, they’re going to get what they can. They stand right up and look in the TV cameras and they grin and say what luck it is that truck busted open.
“Because if that same goddamn thing happened out in the suburbs where I clean swimming pools, well, those fine people would never in a million years think of getting down on their hands and knees to scrape up dollar bills and nickels. No sir, they’d call up their lawyers, have them do it for them.”
Norman’s lip twitched, like he was trying to remember how to smile.
“You don’t talk very much, do you, Norman? I mean, I’ve noticed that about you. You’re very laconic and terse.”
Norman just looked at her, face blank.
“I take it that you’re one of those less-is-more kind of guys. Max out at four, five words. Never uttered a compound sentence in your life, never used a subordinate clause or a participial phrase. Like with that Hemingway guy in school, those fucking hard-assed stories of his. All his people talk like you, Norman. Three, four words are all they can manage at one time, like every goddamn syllable is a kidney stone they’re trying to pass.
“Well, hey, that’s fine. That’s okay. I talk enough for two people anyway. So don’t worry—that’s not going to annoy me or anything. I can deal with it just fine. Maybe I should try that sometime, an experiment, ration myself to three, four words a sentence, see if I could get by for a day or two.”
Norman was silent, looking at her as if she were making him sleepy.
“Know what has eighteen knees and white blood?”
“White blood?”
“Yeah, eighteen knees and white blood. It’s a riddle.”
“I don’t know.”
“You just going to give up? Not even hazard a guess? Oh, come on, Norman. Think. Imagine. Sounds like some kind of space creature, doesn’t it? Eighteen knees and white blood.”
“Space creature?”
“Wrong,” she said. “Not a space creature. One of these.”
She raised the flap on her shirt pocket and fished the cockroach out by the green thread she’d glued to its carapace, one e
nd knotted to the top button of her shirt—its leash.
“Norman Franks, I’d like you to meet Amy. I call her that. It’s how my name would sound if you spelled it backward. Not that I couldn’t have come up with another name. I mean, I’m plenty creative enough to invent a better name than that, but it just seemed appropriate. Emma the human, Amy the roach.”
While it waved its long antennae, Emma lowered it by the thread to the black spread covering Norman’s water bed and let it roam over the folds. Right away, Amy zipped into a crevice beneath the pillow and Emma had to reel her in before she burrowed in too deep.
“You got any problem with roaches, Norman?”
He looked at her for a moment, his eyes so vacant that he might be made of wax.
“Lots of people have biases against them. But that’s just because they’re uneducated about the finer points of cockroaches. The more you know about them, Norman, more you respect them. Blattida, that’s their taxonomic classification; genus and species Periplaneta americana. American cockroach. They’ve been thriving on earth around four hundred million years and they’ll probably be here four hundred million years after we’re gone.
“The entomologists call them ‘subsocial,’ which means they’re loners. Not like termites or ants or bees with all their caste systems, workers and drones and soldiers and all that. Subsocial is supposed to be bad, like it’s some kind of lower evolutionary form. But we know better than that, Norman, don’t we?
“‘Cause you and me, we’re subsocial omnivorous scavengers ourselves. We’re loners; we eat what we have to so we can survive. Doesn’t matter what it is. We’re the bug people, living in dark cracks. We’ll eat the paint if we have to, chew the paste on the wallpaper. We’re out of sight, only come out at night. People look at us and go ‘Ugh’ and try to crush us underfoot, but we’re too quick for them. We scurry off, carry off our crumbs with us. We know about that, don’t we, Norman? We’re the baddest fucking cockroaches in all of Miami.”
She dangled Amy over her open pocket and lowered her back inside, then buttoned the flap.
Norman Franks stared at her, then let his gaze drop to her breasts. Saliva crackled as he opened his mouth to breathe. When he spoke, his voice was full of the hot sludge of his agitation.
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