Deception

by Dan Lawton

  Billy brushes past me and tends to Frank, who moans on the ground. He whispers something into Frank’s ear then pats him on the head like a dog. Frank pushes himself to the sitting position, then he slowly climbs to his feet with a big smile on his face. Billy must have said something nice to him for once. Maybe he praised him for his contribution.

  Snake’s motionless body is face down in the hallway. I’ve never seen a dead body before, but I read somewhere that it’s supposed to release its bowels upon death, so I expect to see a puddle of urine or smell a pile of feces as I get closer to the body. I do not. Billy crouches beside Snake’s body and searches for a pulse.

  “Well, he’s not dead yet,” he says. “But he’s barely alive.”

  “You want me to take care of him?” Frank asks.

  Billy hesitates a bit, seeming unsure. I’m guessing he expected Snake would already be dead. “No, not yet. I’ll tell you when.” Billy’s voice fades toward the end as he walks over the body and enters the bedroom. Frank and I follow him.

  Everything is basically the same as I remember it. The mattress still rests on the floor without a frame and has a dirty sheet half falling off of it. An old wooden nightstand rests in the corner with a vintage alarm clock on top. The giant canvas still hangs on the wall on the other side of the room. I’ve never been much into art, but now that I’m able to actually look at it, this one has my attention. It’s a farmland landscape, which is basically everywhere everyday Kansas, or at least the area that I’m from. There is a cow drinking from a small lake or a big pond in the background, which I’ve never actually seen before. The artist must not be a local. The piece is comforting though; it reminds me of where I’ve been and where I want to go.

  Facing the wall, Billy wraps his hands around the sides of the mural and lifts it up, removing it from its hook and exposing a small stainless steel safe behind it. It seems rather small, probably not much more than a foot long. I’m not sure how much cash can fit in something that size, but it can’t be that much. It has a combination dial on the right side with a steel handle just to the right of that. Billy fiddles with the dial briefly before turning to leave. I approach the safe with the steel bar that I’ve had in my hand and wait for the signal.

  From outside, I see the light from Billy’s flashlight shine into the room. He knocks it on the glass, which tells me he’s ready. Using the steel bar, I repeatedly hit the front of the safe so it pings through the wall. I do this until I hear a tap from outside, confirming that Billy has found the location. I make my way outside to join him.

  By the time I get to Billy, most of the vinyl paneling has already been torn off the side of the house and the wooden studs are being chipped away. Frank is out front on guard duty. Billy tosses the last of the panels to the ground, which exposes the rear end of the safe. He removes the first vial from his pocket and pours some of the reddish black powder into the palm of his hand. I observe as he begins to rub the powder on the exposed safe.

  The powder, as was explained to me, is thermite. It’s not an explosive material, but it can get hot enough to burn through steel. In a larger quantity it’s powerful enough to completely collapse a sky scraper that has steel beams or to cut through railroad tracks. How he got his hands on the stuff, I don’t know, and I don’t ask. It’s probably better if I don’t know.

  “This thing is going to ignite when I touch the magnesium to it, so I’d back up a few steps,” Billy says as he rubs on the last of the thermite powder.

  “Can’t you just use a lighter?”

  “No, it’s not hot enough. It needs to get to about 2500 degrees.”

  I step back as Billy removes the strip of magnesium from the second vial. He pulls out some gloves from his back pocket and puts them on for protection. He crouches down low and holds his hand above his head with the magnesium strip aimed toward the thermite powder. As the two make contact, a spark forms and is quickly followed by a bright red flash of light. Billy drops the magnesium and runs toward me as the flame ignites.

  We watch as the safe begins to melt.

  It takes a few minutes, but the liquid steel from the safe begins to drip down the vinyl paneling that remains and onto the grass below. A cloud of white smoke forms above the house as the rear of the safe slowly caves in on itself until the flame dies out.

  Hearing the commotion, Frank joins us on the side of the house. Billy uses the mallet to smash over the cracks of the warped steel, which breaks off small chunks at a time until there is a hole big enough for him to slip his arm inside. He reaches in, appears to feel around a bit, then pulls out a small box. He shines his flashlight into the hole for a second look.

  “Where’s all the cash, boss?” Frank asks.

  Billy holds up his hand to shush him. All eyes are infatuated with the box that sits in the palm of Billy’s hand. After a brief pause, Billy opens the lid and exposes a brass key and a small ripped piece of paper. He reads the note aloud, “282w53s.”

  “Uh, what does that mean?” Frank mutters.

  Billy snaps the box shut and slides it in his pocket. Without saying anything, he pushes past us and barrels around the side of the house. Frank and I chase after him.

  Billy goes on a rampage inside the house, tearing apart and flipping over every piece of furniture in his path. “Bullshit! This is fucking bullshit! There has got to be another safe in this shit hole,” he yells. He tosses furniture wherever there is space until everything in the house has been touched. “I know he has the cash, I know he does. He just took another job. Fuck!”

  Frank and I watch Billy in awe.

  With nothing left to destroy, Billy settles down. He scans the room and assesses the damage. He looks like he feels better now that that’s out of his system. Before leaving, Billy whips the mallet across the living room and implants it into the drywall. Exhausted, he points to Snake’s body, which is still face down on the carpet. “Get rid of him.”

  He walks out.

  Frank struggles, but he’s able to scoop up Snake’s limp body and toss him over his shoulder. He opens the door in the hallway and hurls Snake down the wooden steps and into the basement. Snake’s lifeless body lands on the cement floor at the bottom of the stairs and a pool of blood forms beneath his fractured skull. I listen for the release of his bowels, but it never comes. Frank slams the door and we leave out the opening where the front door used to be. Billy is already half way back to the van.

  No one checks the body, but I’m sure Snake’s dead. If he wasn’t already dead from the extended exposure to the carbon monoxide, he surely would have died from the impact of the cement floor on his head.

  He must be dead. I’m sure of it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  BILLY

  By Monday morning, everyone has calmed down and things have gone back to the way they were before. No one has spoken of the incident, if that’s what you want to call it, and we work on preparations for the next phase of the plan. Alicia is distant, which I’m sure is a combination of the realization of what she has gotten herself into and her trying to come up with a way out of it. What she doesn’t know is that there is no way out, not alive anyway. She’ll figure that out sooner or later.

  Alicia has essentially moved in with Frank and me as a way for me to keep her under my supervision. She has to earn back my trust before I’ll let her be that far away from me now. It’s difficult for me to let her go into work this morning as usual, but it’s a necessity to progress everything forward. I drive her into town for 8:00 A.M. and drop her off a couple of blocks away from City Hall. We need to keep things as normal as possible to avoid people trying to snoop around and blow everything up, so it needs to look like she’s still walking into work. I don’t watch her walk up the steps and go into the building, but I call the office every few hours during the day and hang up at the sound of her voice just to make sure she’s still there.

  At 4:30 P.M., I drive back into town and park the van in front of her apartment complex. I arrive a few minute
s before 5:00 P.M. and wait for her. She needs to gather some more personal items from her apartment if she’s going to be staying with me, she told me, which I find to be a reasonable request. After twelve minutes of waiting, I finally see Alicia approaching the complex as I peer in the mirror outside my window. We make eye contact as she walks past me, and I wait five more minutes before exiting the van and entering the building behind her.

  Inside the building I buzz her apartment, number twenty-three, and she unlocks the security door without saying anything over the loud speaker. I open the door to a long hallway and make my way up three flights of stairs which sit to my left. The hallways are all carpeted and are home to numerous stains and tears. The stairs are soft and rubbery like those in a high school, and the soles of my shoes squeak with each step as I climb them. A single fire hydrant hangs on the wall about halfway down each hallway, and the air is stale. As I reach the third floor, I can smell someone burning their dinner behind one of the locked doors. The building lacks care, as evident by the strong aroma of Indian food that fills the entry ways.

  Number twenty-three is the last door on the left. There is another door which is held open by a door stop just past Alicia’s door, which leads to another staircase on the other end of the complex. I stumble over a pair of children’s sneakers as I walk past, which prompts me to kick the pair halfway down the hall. With my knuckle, I lightly knock on the door where the crooked two and three hang, and I expect the three to fall right off the door. It doesn’t. Moments later, footsteps approach behind the door and I can feel an eyeball looking at me through the small peephole. The dead bolt disengages and the door is cracked. I push it open the rest of the way and slide inside.

  Alicia’s apartment is small and nearly empty, but it’s orderly. It has a tiny bedroom and bathroom that are attached to the eat-in kitchen, which has outdated finishes and appliances. One of the linoleum tiles on the floor has cigarette a burn in the center. There is no nice way to put it, the place is a piece of shit.

  “It’s not much, I realize,” Alicia says, her tone implying I have a look of dissatisfaction on my face, “but it’s cheap and close to work. It was only supposed to be temporary.”

  I nod and try not to laugh at the ever-worsening cosmetics, but I can’t resist. I burst out laughing and toss saliva all over the kitchen. I lean forward and place my hands on my knees to help my balance. Most people would be offended at my lack of self-control, but Alicia soon joins in and starts to laugh too. It’s the first time I’ve seen her smile like this, and it’s the first time I’ve laughed so hard since my father died. It helps to release some of the unspoken tension between us. We take turns pointing out the flaws of the place, everything from the ceiling fan with a missing light bulb, to the busted sliding door that barely covers a ripped screen. It’s a good laugh that feels great, and it’s needed. I wipe the tears from my eyes as I regain myself and my composure.

  “What is it that you needed again?” I ask.

  Alicia wipes her face as well, although much less aggressively than I as to avoid smudging her makeup. “Just the rest of my clothes mostly.”

  “Show me where they are, I’ll grab them.”

  She walks across the linoleum and into the carpeted bedroom, leading me to a pile of clothes that are on plastic hangers and neatly stacked on the bed. I brush past her and haul the clothes from the bed, tossing them over my shoulder. I quickly turn around and nearly bump right into Alicia, who is standing much closer to me that I thought. Our faces are close, although hers significantly lower than mine due to the height difference, and we hold the position for a moment. Her chilled breath steadies against my neck and it makes me tingle. I wonder what she is thinking at this moment, and I’m hopeful she has put George right out of her mind. A part of me wants to toss the pile of clothes back on the bed, throw her on top and tear hers off, but I resist. She’s still trying to wrap her mind around all of this, and I really need to get her back on my side if this is going to work. There will be a time for me to make my move, but now’s not it, despite the desires that reside within me. Instead, I smile at her with sincerity, which she returns with the same.

  “Ready to go?” I ask.

  Alicia nods.

  With the pile of organized chaos draped over my shoulder, I follow Alicia down the long hallway and into the same stairwell that I entered from earlier. We pass a group of black teenagers on the way out the door, and all four of them look her up and down. She pretends not to see them as she makes her way to the van. Based on her reaction, I wonder if they’ve had some sort of altercation in recent days, perhaps they tried to come on to her and she rejected them. I catch the eyes of the tallest one with acne scars and we stare at one another as I walk past.

  Without a confrontation, I make it safely to the parking lot and join Alicia near the van. She opens the back doors and I toss the clothes inside, disregarding the mess that covers the floor. She hops in the passenger’s side and buckles herself in, then I hop in the driver’s side and do the same. I catch the eyes of the same kid one more time before I pull away.

  “How did today go?” I ask as we pull up to a four-way stoplight.

  “It went fine. Everything’s in place, just as we planned. I have the deed in my purse.”

  ---

  I pull the van into the driveway and park it in the center. I grab Alicia’s clothes from the back and lead her into the house. I bring the pile of clothes into my bedroom, which will continue to be hers for a while, and toss them on the bed. Alicia has the small stack of papers already prepared on the table when I re-enter the kitchen. I take the pen from her hand and sign Sheriff Jack Hearns’ name on the lines after the x’s. I flip through the stack and try to make the signatures as clean and as consistent as possible in case it’s audited. I’m not authorized to sign for anything on behalf of the Police Department, and someone would certainly recognize my name if I did.

  You can add forgery to my soon to be lengthy list of wrongdoings.

  It’s common knowledge around town that my father was the Sheriff and that his son of the same name didn’t follow in his footsteps after he passed. I guess that’s one of the negatives of having a well-respected man for a father and having certain expectations to live up to. The truth is, I never wanted to follow in his footsteps and pursue a career in law enforcement, but with no plan and constant nagging, I begrudgingly obliged and went to the police academy when I graduated from high school. I did reasonably well in the classroom and was at a near expert level with the accuracy of a firearm, and it was good enough I guess.

  Shortly after I graduated, a veteran officer retired in Topeka, so naturally, my father offered me the position and I’ve been there ever since. The local news loved the father-son heartwarming story initially, but it soon dissipated and I basically fell off the radar. I had a few questionable arrests when I first started, and my father had to make more than one deal with the prosecutors so they wouldn’t sue the entire Police Department. Most officers would have been fired certainly, but my situation was different with my father being the Sheriff and all, so I was just assigned to basic traffic duty for much of the last twelve years instead. It was only in the last two when I started doing some actual police work and moved inside and off the streets.

  I only scan the documents for keywords as I sign: Grantor, grantee, notary, deed, Topeka Police Department, State of Kansas. I’m not a lawyer, but the documents look official enough to me. I’m going to give Alicia the benefit of the doubt and trust that she knows what she’s doing. Frank enters the room just as I finish signing the Sheriff’s name on the final page.

  “What you guys doin’?” Frank asks.

  “We had to take care of some administrative things,” I say, brushing it off.

  “Like what?”

  “Just some paperwork, boring stuff.”

  He looks at me like he is expecting more, but I plan to end it with that.

  Alicia jumps in, “We just had to get the property transferre
d over so we have access to it.”

  Frank nods.

  I glare at Alicia, who pretends not to notice. Frank knows the plan as he was awake and semi-engaged when we were going over it, but he doesn’t know specific details. The fewer details he knows, the better, as it reduces the chance of a slipup.

  “What do we do now?” Franks asks.

  It’s a good question.

  I look to Alicia and wait for her to respond, as this is one of her parts of the arrangement.

  “I’ll complete the property transfer in the system in the morning and we’ll be good to go,” she says. “I’ll intentionally misfile the documents just to be sure, which will buy us some time.”

  “Tell me again,” I begin, “what are the chances this gets back to the Sheriff?”

  “It will eventually, I have no doubt about that. The city has over 125,000 people in it though, and property tax time is just around the corner, so that’ll keep everyone busy for a while. I’m sure the City Administrator will find it and question it during audit time. She’ll ask the Sheriff about it and then an investigation will ensue. The Mayor will likely get involved too. It’ll be a big mess for the city.”

  “How long is a while?”

  “Three or four months anyway, minimum. Audits are typically done quarterly, so it could be longer than that before they actually figure out what happened. But by then, we’ll be long gone.”

  I nod and smile. “Corruption in City Hall.”

  “And in the Sheriff’s Office.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  GEORGE

  “Where we goin’, boss?” Frank asks as Billy drives through the night streets. He sits alone in the front while Frank and I ride in the back. “Hey, boss, where we-”