by Eric Beetner
He straightened and stepped away from Jones before hurling the key ring out into the black water. Over the truck’s urgent engine he never heard them splash.
“Two words come to mind—cluster and fuck.” Calvin sped south on 72 passing signs for the Red Lake Indian Reservation.
“Did that really happen?” Tucker asked.
“Sure as shit did. It happened and then some.”
A gas station glowed ahead, a beacon in the blackness around them. Tucker had started to feel there wasn’t a blacker state in the union than Minnesota. A gust of wind shook the truck like the whole state was elbowing them in the ribs to get the hell out.
Calvin stopped anyway.
He eased the truck into the lot away from the pumps and out of the circle of yellow light that haloed down from a high pole. He shut off the engine and they both sat in the stillness, trying to let the quiet fill their lungs.
Calvin broke the silence. “So Stanley tried to kill us.”
“Looks like it. But which one? Kirby or Hugh?”
“Does it matter?”
“Kind of. We made a deal with Hugh. If we deliver the truck to him maybe he can call off his brother.”
“Ain’t no calling off a rabid dog.”
“So what do we do?”
Calvin kept his hands on the wheel, staring out into the trees looking for answers. His stomach made a loud gurgling sound both men ignored.
“I’m gonna look at it.”
“At what?”
“The cargo.”
Tucker watched the profile of his granddad’s face. “I thought that wasn’t allowed.”
“Yeah, well, all bets are off, I say.” Calvin opened the door and a gust of night air filled the cab. Tucker slid out of his side and they both walked to the back of the truck. Tucker checked the parking lot for anyone watching, but there were no signs of life.
Calvin paused with his hand over the latch to the roll door. He was about to break a hundred years of protocol no McGraw had ever broken. The decision required a moment’s thought. A moment was all he gave.
The door rolled up and both men squinted in the dim light to see inside the cube. A dozen banker’s boxes were stacked neatly and lashed down so they wouldn’t move. The load would have fit in a regular van so there was space enough to move a friend’s couch if they called and throw in an unused treadmill while you were at it.
The boxes were unmarked. Tucker studied Calvin’s face but saw only puzzlement. The breeze made a hollow sound against the open hole of the door, the kind of sound an empty mineshaft might make. Calvin gripped one of the chrome handholds and hoisted himself inside the cargo space. Tucker stayed behind.
Calvin lifted the lid on the topmost box and peered in.
Tucker stood on his tiptoes to get a look, but it was pointless.
Calvin continued to stare into the box. He opened the one next to it, and the one next to that until the top row of four boxes stood lidless.
“Tuck,” Calvin said. “You know when I was saying about seeing an opportunity and taking it?”
Tucker didn’t know where this was headed. “Yeah.”
“Well, this here is opportunity presenting itself.”
He lifted a small bundle from a box and held it up for Tucker to see. It took his eyes a moment to register what the object was. A small stack of money wrapped with a loop of bank paper denoting the denomination, which Tucker couldn’t read.
Calvin tapped a foot against the bottom row of boxes confirming that they weren’t empty.
“Get up here and help me count this.”
22
Twelve million dollars in cash.
They each struggled to figure why the Stanleys would move that much cash down from Canada, but the why didn’t change the situation.
“Laundered. That’s what I figure,” Calvin said. The coffee at the truck stop was strong—trucker-grade diesel—and the eggs smelled like heaven. They’d stopped south of Minneapolis once they felt like they’d hit civilization proper. Tucker couldn’t stop throwing glances out the window to the truck, feeling certain he would see somebody come along and slim jim the door and take off with it at any second.
Their booth was two seats away from the nearest person but Calvin kept his voice low. “They send the profits up north, mix it around, change for those funny dollars and back again and bingo—it comes back clean as they day it was minted.”
“You think so?”
“Best I got right now.”
“So what do we do with it?” Tucker ignored his coffee. More jitters was not what he needed.
“What we got out in the truck are twelve million little bargaining chips. That bastard wanted us dead. Now we got the best thing in the world—leverage.”
“So what do we do?”
“I tell you what we don’t do. We don’t give it back to them right away. We find out the truth behind Webb’s murder. Then we get a few promises, then we take our share and get out of Dodge.”
“Where to? Omaha?”
“You could do worse.”
“What about Milo?”
“Send him a check. Look, this changes things. Twelve mil is a hell of a lot of money. Not to mention the two bodies we left behind up there.”
“Only one body.”
“Tucker, if you think that boy is ever coming out of that water again you’re dumber than I thought.” Calvin took another sip of coffee.
Tucker turned his eyes down to the chipped Formica table. He pressed his fingertip over individual sugar crystals spilled there, picking them up and then brushing them off.
“So, what, we drive up to Hugh Stanley’s office and start making demands?”
Calvin put his mug down with a clank. “I ain’t worked out the details yet. If you’ve got any suggestions I’m open to hearing them.”
Tucker continued pressing sugar crystals in the grooves of his fingerprints. “We could run.” Calvin pinched his eyebrows together, confused. “Just take the money and go. Twelve million, I could get Milo and split. We could get lost with that much. I could pay off Jenny.”
“That’s flat out stealing.”
“At this point…”
Calvin raised his coffee mug in a toast. “Told you you weren’t pretending anymore.” He slurped down the black brew with a smile.
Crossing the line into Iowa was more welcome than Tucker ever thought possible. Calvin had made his case for trying to get information out of Stanley over the phone and if that didn’t work they would run. Seemed like a decent compromise. At least it put off the moment when Tucker went from bystander and witness to perpetrator of a multimillion-dollar heist.
“Of course it could all go bad,” Calvin said.
“Yeah,” Tucker smirked. “Could go bad. Right.”
“I mean the law. Jail time. Stanley will kill us. Sheriff will put us away. Won’t be as bad for me. A life sentence isn’t all that much. For you…”
“Jesus Christ.” Tucker started out the window resting his chin on his hand, the vibration of the truck coming up through his elbow sitting on the armrest. Every rut in the road rattled his teeth. A single light glowed over the door to a silo in the distance. Farm work, thought Tucker. Simple. You got up, fed the cows, tended to the crops. You didn’t talk to anyone. The only car you drove was a tractor. Born surrounded by farms on all sides and he blew the chance to pick the simple life.
If they did run, the thing he looked forward to more than anything was changing his name.
“I did time, you know.” Calvin let that hang in the air.
“I didn’t know.”
“In 1948. For six months. Labor camp. Wasn’t easy.” Tucker had nothing to add to the story so he sat and listened. “I went in thinking it would be fun and games. Surrounded by friends, or at least people of a similar element. Warden was a bastard. Guards were bastards. Most of the inmates were bastards. Guys got in there and it’s like they didn’t give a fuck anymore. They gave up on humanity for their stretch. Wa
rden ran a tight ship, but when their backs were turned it was a fucking jungle.”
They left highway 35 and merged onto the 20, closer to home.
“I saw a guy stab another guy in the neck with a fork at mealtime. The fork still had mashed potatoes on it. He jabbed him twice real quick and then kept on eating. Potatoes had blood all over them like gravy. Caught the guy right in the artery. Some kind of wizard with that fork, knew exactly where to strike. I thought we were all on the same side in there. That’s when I learned that it’s every man for himself when the going gets tough.”
“I’d say the going is pretty tough for us right now.”
“So you get my point.”
“I think I do.”
“We got something Stanley wants. Something he needs. He’s hurting for money. He’ll play ball. I bet for twelve mil, he’ll give us his own brother. My boy—your daddy—he needs some justice right about now.”
The unmistakable smell of a hog farm swept through the cab. Smelled like home.
23
By the time they made the final turn for home light spread wide over the brown fields of dirt, spring seeds still asleep under soft manure blankets. When the sun rose Tucker finally felt sleepy. The steady buzz of What the hell do we do now? had kept him awake for the drive home, but the night was reaching out over the hours to drag him back to tired.
There had been much discussion of where to end up, what Hugh might have known, if the bodies were found yet. Was Hugh expecting a phone call after the deed was done? Was the call going direct to Kirby? Either way the two men decided a neutral place was a better choice so they drove to Webb’s house.
The lawn had the equivalent of a five o’clock shadow and the house overall had the look of a hangover with shutters.
The cube truck wouldn’t fit in the garage. Both men got out and stared at the right angles of the truck, their sleep-deprived brains unable to process the new wrinkle in the plan.
“Maybe let the air out of the tires?” suggested Tucker.
“Naw, it’s got a good three feet on the top of that door.”
They split up and each surveyed a side of the house. On Tucker’s side a tree stood on the spit of lawn leading to the backyard. They met again on the front lawn and Calvin gave his assessment.
“I can make it.”
Tucker stayed outside and gave directions with hand motions as Calvin guided the truck slowly through the high grass to the wider expanse of the backyard. Tucker braced for a neighbor to look out his window and see the cargo truck passing by three feet from his kitchen window and meeting them out back with a shotgun and a phone call to the cops, but either the family next door were heavy sleepers or they all had a few too many the night before.
Tucker ran ahead and moved several lawn chairs that were coated with dead leaves and held pools of rusty water in the seats. Calvin guided the truck to the center of the lawn and parked it at a slight angle like a display at an auto show.
Tucker walked to the back door, moved aside a flower pot filled with nothing but dirt and retrieved a spare key. They walked through the sliding glass door into the kitchen at the back of the house, their ears ringing with the phantom sounds of the truck’s engine.
“Dad?”
Both of them spun. Tucker thought they’d caught a burglar, Calvin thinking he’d found a ghost.
Milo stood in the doorway of the kitchen. Tucker let his shoulders sag, his muscles untense from their high alert.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“You said I couldn’t go to your place so…”
Calvin went to the fridge to search out a beer.
“Why aren’t you at your mom’s?”
“I told you, Dad. It sucks there.”
Tucker put both palms down on the counter, too tired to argue. Calvin twisted the cap off a long neck bottle of Milwaukee brew.
“It’s good. He can help us unload it.” Beer foam gathered at the corners of Calvin’s mouth.
Tucker tried to shoot him a withering stare but his tired face was shooting blanks.
“Unload what?” Milo asked.
“Just some boxes,” Tucker said. “We need to get them into the garage for safekeeping.”
“Okay. I can help.”
“Great.” Calvin tipped the bottle and drained the rest.
Tucker could feel the question on Milo’s mind but the boy never asked it. One box each for four trips and all twelve banker’s boxes were piled neatly in the garage behind Webb’s old 1970 Buick GSX with two thick black stripes running down the middle of the hornet-yellow body. The two-car garage was filled out with an old Barracuda and Webb’s ’69 Camaro Z28 sat out front under a car cover, bird shit not welcome.
The men went inside.
“I’m gonna make a phone call,” Calvin said.
Tucker turned to Milo. “Can you give us a minute?”
“Yeah, sure.” The boy moved off down the hall to get dressed, the mystery of his dad’s secretive life becoming a new normal.
Calvin dialed Hugh Stanley’s office from a wall-mounted phone in the kitchen. He knew no one would be there.
“Hugh,” he spoke into the answering machine. “You know who this is. And you know your boys up there didn’t do such a hot job of taking us out. If you’re looking for them, have someone drag the lakes and eventually you’ll find them.” Tucker sat at a stool against the bar-height countertop that overlooked the breakfast nook. Calvin stared at the floor as he spoke. “We have your money, you son of a bitch. And that’s right, I looked. Bet you didn’t expect that. It’s a lot of green and I expect you’ll be needing it back. All we want is the man who killed my son. Even trade. And then you get out of our lives for good. Our two families have been tangled together like snakes at an orgy for too fucking long. Time to go our separate ways. We’ll be in touch.”
He hung up the phone and left his hand resting on the wall-mount. “Well, can’t get that genie back in the bottle.”
“I need sleep,” Tucker said.
“Yeah.”
Both men slumped off like zombies to pass out cold.
Six hours later Tucker bolted upright, thinking of Jenny. He took a moment to look around him. The room seemed unfamiliar and yet he knew he’d been there before. He remembered where he was and it dawned on him that he was laying in his childhood bedroom.
He threw off the sheets and walked down the hall, following the sound of a TV. Milo sat on the couch watching MTV. Tucker could remember when they played music on that channel.
“Where’s Granddad?”
“Still asleep. It’s almost two o’clock.”
“Where?”
“In the master bedroom.”
Tucker found Calvin spread out on Webb’s old bed, a steady snore in the air. He almost woke him to tell him what he’d thought—that Jenny was perhaps in danger. That they had come after him when Webb pissed the Stanleys off, they were just as likely to come after the rest of the family. He let Calvin sleep.
Tucker called Jenny from the kitchen phone. There was no answer.
He went back to the living room. “Milo? Is your mom at the store today?”
“I guess so. Why?”
“I need to reach her.”
“Shit, Dad, are you gonna tell her I’m here?”
Tucker ignored the profanity. “Yes, but that’s not why I need to reach her. What’s the number at the store?”
“I don’t know. It’s on speed dial at home.”
Tucker walked to the front door. On the wall inside the entry was a large wooden board cut on a jigsaw to look like a key with four tiny hooks embedded in it. A key ring hung from three of the four hooks. Webb was nothing if not fastidious about his cars and he kept the appropriate logo on each ring. Tucker passed a finger over a round Buick logo, a Plymouth logo and finally a gold and blue Chevy logo. He lifted the keys and went outside.
The roar of the Camaro’s engine sounded like a welcome call to an old friend and the gearshift in
his hand greeted him with a handshake.
24
Even through the nastiest, most kick-in-the-balls painful times of the divorce, Tucker never wished any harm to Jenny. He knew guys who talked openly, if facetiously, of hitting an ex in the face with an axe, but he only ever wanted Jenny to be happy with or without him. Preferably with.
After a lifetime of shifting gears to accelerate away from his family and his name he found a quiet slow-lane life with Jenny and Milo, their little sidecar.
As he rolled up on her shop, Little Big Kids, a store for four-to-ten year olds, he thought about asking Jenny to go for a ride in the Camaro. Webb had been telling him for thirty years that chicks dug cars and he’d never listened.
The front of the store was empty of people. Mannequin kids modeled new styles that reminded Tucker of hookers from the eighties. The requisite University of Iowa gear occupied one corner with Herky the Hawk flapping his wings to victory on sweatshirts, T-shirts, pants and backpacks. Around there it would be hard to get a business license if you weren’t selling at least something with Herky on it.
Jenny not sitting behind the cash register wasn’t unusual. It was midday and the door set off a digital bell in the back room if someone came in. She’d be out in a second and Tucker would have to endure the look of crushing disappointment on her face when she saw he wasn’t a paying customer and then endure a lecture-meets-WWE smackdown about Milo.
Jenny did not appear. Tucker heard voices from the back. He stepped close to the door leading to the office and storeroom.
Peering around the corner he saw Jenny flanked by two men in dark suits with their backs to him. The conversation seemed civil enough, still he tensed.
Between her two gentleman callers she spotted him.
“You!” She stood and split the men as she charged forward. “Now you got the cops looking for you?”
