by Brian Hodge
“Achtung, baby,” she said when Kristophe answered Blayne’s cell phone. “Are you guys ready to wrap up the little vacation you’ve had and get some work done?”
“You hate us…you hate us!” Kristophe squealed. “Send us to this stinkhole and leave us here to wither!”
“Listen up, then, because all that’s about to change.”
“We are shells of men! And never have I seen so much turquoise jewelry in my life!” He lowered his voice to a panicky whisper, as if hunkering down and checking over his shoulder. “And Blayne…Blayne has gone mad. He twice a day shaves his chest now. Out of boredom. He’s in the bathroom now, lathering up again.”
“As long as he doesn’t try to shave yours, you’ll be fine,” she said. “Now shut up and listen. You’re going to Sedona. If things go halfway right, you should be able to wrap all this up tomorrow. So you need to get there sometime tonight. It’ll take you maybe three hours to get there. Longer if you stop to whine every thirty miles.”
“Don’t be nasty.” Nahhsty, he pronounced it. Ever with the accent. He had won, in his way, through persistence and denial—there were times when even she forgot it wasn’t genuine. “We are the two wrong guys for you to be nasty with right now.”
“And I’m just that much more impressed by you for telling me. Call me after you’ve gotten settled in down there and I’ll fill you in. But use a land line, okay? Not the cell.” Melissa tapped a fingernail against her desktop, returning to one of her lunch meeting’s more constructive disclosures. “And until then, here’s something to think about: When you do the job, can you two pretend to be some sort of ultra-right-wing death squad?”
25
THE argument could be made: This was insane.
Never mind what he had or hadn’t done so far. For everything up to this point, there were plenty of extenuating circumstances. Now, though—tampering with the mail? Couldn’t that earn you a long look at the inside of a federal prison?
Duncan had been right about this much, at least: Jamey hadn’t had more than a few moments to dwell on how far away tomorrow morning seemed.
Turned out that Duncan had scoped neighborhoods and mail routes early in the week, even before Jamey was up and around. Always on the job, that was Duncan. His was not the life of perpetual leisure it first appeared. And his criteria were strict: upscale neighborhoods—no shortage of those in Sedona—and houses set far back from the street, with plenty of trees and other concealing greenery. Plus the fewer signs of life after the daily mail delivery, the better.
Half an hour ago, Duncan and Dawn had made a run past the circuit he would be covering, showed him the spot where they’d pick him up, and looped back around to drop him off a cautious distance from the start of the target zone.
“What if I blow it?” he’d asked. “If someone catches me and doesn’t buy the story?”
“Then scoot your ass away as fast as you need to and no faster,” Duncan had said. “When you’re in the clear, ditch the coveralls and everything else, act like you’re out just enjoying the day, and we’ll meet up in the parking lot of the supermarket I pointed out. And until then, avoid cars with lights on top.”
Dawn had tipped her head forward, peering over the top of her shades. “So it’d be a lot easier not to blow it in the first place, wouldn’t you agree?”
He was on his sixth house now and so far, so good, even if on the first five he’d yet to turn up anything resembling what they’d sent him after. And was this really all that different from acting? So far, not one bit. Submerging into character, establishing authority in who and what he was. Wardrobe helped, of course—clothes could carry you halfway into a role, and today, maybe even farther. It really was true that a guy in coveralls and matching cap, carrying a clipboard, could walk anywhere and be almost invisible while he did it.
House number six resembled a Spanish mission, three stories of tile-roofed adobe. It sat at the end of a long, winding drive lined with evergreens. Jamey crossed over from the backyard of the fifth and assessed. Seemed as clear as the rest had been.
He paced around back, pretending to check the gas meter while jotting illegible notes. Just in case anybody had, unnoticed, been watching.
He circled around front, still pretending to focus on the clipboard, but behind the Oakleys his eyes were on full pan-and-scan. Stop near the front door. Anyone in the windows? No. How about self-doubt and recriminations? Plenty. This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever let myself get talked into doing and I can’t believe I’m here.
He slid up to the mailbox beside the front door, eased up the lid, and scooped out most of the contents, leaving behind a magazine and some sort of cheap newsprint flyer. Always leave something as a just-in-case, Duncan had coached. Jamey eased the lid down again and backed off a few steps, then began to shuffle through the stack.
Cable TV bill, multiple species of junk mail, a postcard…and near the bottom of the pile, an envelope fatter than the rest. The return address in the corner, Bank of America Arizona. Exactly what he was looking for.
“Is that my mail you’re going through?”
He glanced up. Caught. She stared at him through the screen of a storm door. Tall, wearing a pressed blue denim shirt with rolled sleeves. Striking against the blue was her long silvered blonde hair. She was maybe ten years this side of retirement age, but sometimes it could be hard to tell, given the harshness of the sun around here.
“Yup, sorry.” Jamey trying to sound nonchalant, all in a day’s work. “I saw it on the ground here, thought I’d make sure it was yours before I stuck it in the postbox.”
The storm door popped open and through the opening she gave him a hard stare. His heart began to thud. Break and run, call it a loss? No, not yet…
Even if she’d seen him on TV this past week, would she recognize him? He was betting against it. The cap and shades were surface distractions, but before they had left the condo, he’d torn strips from a paper towel, rolled them tightly, and contoured them inside each cheek, along the jawline. Nothing obvious, no Marlon Brando/Don Corleone pouches, but enough to give him more of a square-jawed look.
“And you are…?” she said.
“Utility comp’ny, ma’am. There’s a minor gas leak in the area, just trying to get her isolated.”
“Is it dangerous?” Concerned now. Fireballs trumped mail every time.
“Outside, naw.” He started to relax into the role again, waving off her worries. “It’ll just dissipate like a fart on a windy day. More wasteful than anything.”
Satisfied, the woman checked her mailbox, a half-dozen silver and torquoise bracelets clattering along an arm spattered with brownish sunspots. She pulled out the magazine and flyer he’d left behind, rolled them and smacked the tube into her palm. “Oh, that’s nice. Half of it in the box, half of it on the ground. I suppose they figure if they just get it on the property…”
Jamey got bold and nudged the bank envelope under his board’s clip before stepping closer. Just to see if he could pull this off right under her nose? He supposed that had to be it. She took the rest of the stack from his hand and thanked him. With the kindest smile he’d seen from a stranger all year. Then vanished into her home.
He had to fight himself now, squash his urge to bang on the door, thrust the bank envelope at her, and tell her she’d left one behind. Because she had a face now. She had eyes. She had skin damage and a heart. Look at the envelope and there would be her name.
But in this neighborhood, she would have a lawyer, too.
At the end of his circuit, Dawn cruised up to the pickup point and he slid into the back seat. She pulled away from the curb again as if hardly slowing at all.
Duncan turned around in the front seat. “How’d we do?”
Jamey handed over the three envelopes he had managed to collect, then dug the soggy wads of paper towel from his mouth to deflate his jawline back to normal.
“Two statements in three blocks, that’s excellent.” Duncan ran his
fingers along the final envelope, felt the same rectangular shape Jamey had noticed. “And a credit card!” He slapped them onto the dashboard and looked back again, deadpanning. “I’d kiss you, you know, but Dawn’s here.”
“Oh, huh,” she said. “Like I wouldn’t watch some of that action.”
“Did you run into any problems?”
“I got caught once, but it went fine. Another minute or two and she would’ve invited me in for coffee.”
Duncan regarded him with an easy favor. “If this acting thing doesn’t pan out, you might want to consider…”
“I don’t know,” Jamey said, then had to laugh. “But if I did, I wouldn’t be the first thief to come out of Hollywood.”
***
Back at the condo, they wasted no time getting to work. Duncan put some music on the boombox and they sat around the dining table, bottle of mead poured in a three-way split. Out of the coveralls and in regular clothes again, Jamey was still in the dark about what they could actually do with these banking envelopes. The benefits of the credit card were obvious—activate it, use it up fast, then toss it. Dawn slit that one open first.
“Yours,” she said, and flicked it across the table to Duncan. “You look more like a Phillip than I ever will.”
“There’s our new DVD player,” he said. Had his pen poised on the signature strip, then stopped and looked at Jamey. “Unless you want it. It was your find.”
“All yours,” Jamey said. Even if this wasn’t his first impulse. The windfall waiting in L.A. was still theoretical, not to be trusted until contracts were inked and Sherry Van Horn forwarded him his 90%. This was tangible, the sort of thing he’d daydreamed about when there was too little work and too much deprivation.
He looked at the other two envelopes. Haley Anne Prentiss, the silver-haired woman he’d talked to. Seeing her name—she was complete now—brought on a plunging sensation of guilt.
“This is the place where she caught me,” he said.
“Got away with it right in front of her? You do have the gift,” Duncan said. “Too bad we can’t use it now.”
“Why not?” And wasn’t this just the most peculiar reaction—relief, for Haley’s sake, but at the same time it was like being chastised for failure.
“Because when a big deposit shows up in her account that she knows she never put there,” Dawn said, “and she realizes she never got her monthly statement in the mail…guess what encounter she may remember?”
Okay—now he was totally confused. “If she hadn’t caught me, you’d be putting put money into her account?”
“Got to leave some behind to get some back,” Duncan said. “If you could only see the look on your face right now.”
“Well, you are missing the other half of the equation,” Dawn said, and from her handbag on the floor she pulled out a checkbook. “Seems as though yesterday while I was out for a walk—” she flipped the book open to peek at the top check “—Hank Atkins, of Scottsbluff, Nebraska, lost his checkbook. And I found it in his car. When will people ever learn that checkbooks and vacations don’t mix?”
Duncan slit open the other bank envelope, pulled out its statement and batch of cancelled checks.
“In the meantime,” he said, “Avery and Muriel Wilkinson, from right here in Sedona, have a balance of eighty-two hundred dollars in their checking account.”
“And don’t we love them for it.” Dawn blew a kiss to the paperwork, then reached for the cancelled checks and chose the one Muriel had signed using the darkest ink. Dawn then ripped free one of Hank’s blank checks and walked them over to the deck doors, aligned them, and braced them against the glass so the sun would shine through and Muriel’s signature was illuminated beneath the blank check.
“She’s got a pretty good hand for this,” Duncan told him as she copied the sig.
And this was finally starting to make sense.
Dawn brought the pre-endorsed check back to the table and gave it to Duncan.
“Now what Hank’s going to do,” Duncan taking another pen and bending over the blank, “is write out this check for…oh, let’s say forty-eight hundred and thirty-six dollars and nineteen cents. Nice specific amount. Looks like it’s really for something, right down to the penny. And then Hank, being the generous soul that he is, turns that check over to Muriel—”
Dawn raised her hand. “That’s me.”
“—and doesn’t have to think another thing about it.”
“Thanks a ton, Hank.” Dawn grabbed Duncan by the shoulders and yanked him close for a kiss. “If we hadn’t just met, I’d slip you the tongue.”
“So you take that to Muriel and Avery’s bank,” Jamey said, “and—no, wait, you don’t just cash it, because there’s a deposit, right?”
“Right,” Dawn said. “If I tried to cash it for the whole amount, there’s a much greater chance they’d ask me for an I.D. So instead I fill out a deposit slip after I get there. Because we’ve got the account number now.” Dawn tapped the statement. “Deposit fifteen hundred, say, and take the rest in cash. Thirty-two hundred bucks drawn against what’s already in the account. Whose balance we know is more than adequate to cover it. So the teller’s cool about handing it over. And then Muriel goes on her way and turns into me again the second she gets outside the door.”
“But what if the teller’s friends with Muriel and Avery, and knows you aren’t either one of them?”
“That’s what we call an occupational hazard.”
“It’s never happened,” Duncan said. “And tellers, low-paying job like that, in most banks I’ve seen, they tend to rotate a lot.” He shoved away from the table and stood. “Hey, is anybody else as worn-out as I am after such a long, hard day at the office? Let’s go get paid.”
****
They parked downtown, half a block from the bank, although Duncan left the car idling. As they watched her walk away, Dawn was no longer the same woman from behind. Wearing a shoulder-length black wig now, plus sunglasses big enough to cover her blonde eyebrows, and standing taller in the chunkiest heels she owned.
“She’ll be shorter again if something goes wrong,” Duncan said. “Because she’ll have those shoes kicked off and she’ll be running.”
“But it’s never happened yet, right?”
Duncan shook his head no, then looked out the windows at the low buildings, the people going by wearing everything from neckties to tie-dyed.
“Eight thousand people here, this town’s too small to pull something like this more than once at each bank…if that, even. Back in Denver, now that was perfect. It’s big, it’s spread-out, tons of suburbs up and down the Front Range. What we just set up on the dining table? Someplace like Denver, we could be doing this six or eight times over. Same deposit account, same checkbook, just hit different branches of the same bank one after the other. Three-, four thousand a stop, that’s twenty to thirty grand for one afternoon of driving.”
Funny—for the first time in Jamey’s life, these seemed like small amounts.
“And if you’re worried about Hank, and I think you are,” Duncan said, “his blood pressure may go up for a day or two, but the only ones who end up taking it in the shorts are the banks. They’ll bite the bullet and cover the loss in a case like this. So you’re still robbing the bank, it’s just a delayed reaction.”
“Low risk, then,” Jamey said. “I mean, compared to hair salons.”
“My cousin’s idea, that was. Worst mistake of my life was having anything to do with Jordy when we weren’t kids anymore. I always knew he could be mean. I guess it was something I hoped he’d grown out of.” Duncan was staring straight through the windshield, maybe through time. “We’re four years apart. I grew up in Tucson. He was from a smaller town about halfway to Phoenix called Casa Grande. We neither one of us had any brothers. He’s got a sister, but she’s a little older than he is, so if he wanted someone looking up to him back then, that was going to be me.”
“I never had a brother either,” Jam
ey said. “Younger sister. Same difference, four years.”
“That would’ve been nice. So you were the one who got looked up to, then.”
Jamey smiled at the thought of everything that could have been, but hadn’t, these things he’d never known like the phantom pain of a limb he’d been born without.
“Not really, no. I had this crooked foot. Gimped around everywhere before it got fixed. Used to get laughed at, hit, shoved—you know, every kind of human contact you don’t want in school. Those aren’t the footsteps a little sister wants to follow in. You can get tarred by association that way.”
“Yeah,” said Duncan. “They can be vicious that way, kids can.”
And were you one of them? Jamey wondered. Imagining younger versions of them, in the same schoolyard. He tried putting Duncan’s face on a gauntlet of tormentors, anyone who’d tripped, pointed, laughed, poked. It didn’t stick. Maybe it was wishful thinking but he could not see it, saw instead a kid who would stand up with you, who would share the blood and the bruises if he couldn’t drive off the mob. Who would help you limp home, ignoring the jeers at his back. If he’d been any other way, Jamey decided he didn’t want to know the truth.
“No wonder you said last night it was a better day if you spent it pretending to be somebody else,” Duncan said.
“And maybe I’m just making excuses for my sister. Maybe she wouldn’t have had much feeling for me regardless. But…I think she might be trying to get past all that, finally. Samantha seems to think everything from this past week woke her up. Sam’s pushing for it, too. She’s very big into reconciliation, no grudges, that sort of thing.” Jamey reflected on his call to Melissa Saturday morning. How worried for him she had sounded. “I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t hoped for it, throwing out all the old baggage.”
Duncan rubbed his chin. “Maybe Samantha can work something out between Jordy and me, you think?”
“I didn’t say anything about her working miracles.”
