by Nat Kozinn
“No, because I was gracious enough to provide you with a large amount of cash when you came to my door, pockets turned out of your pants. You are, in turn, supposed to think of a gesture you could perform that might display your gratitude, such as talking about anything past the year 2000.”
“But I don’t want to tell you what I need the money for. Do you really want to make me?”
“Don’t be so dramatic. Come on. Throw me a bone. Give me something just a tiny bit uncomfortable. I know Carter is out,” Alexis said and then quickly turned her eyes to the floor to avoid David’s heavy glare. “But there’s got to be something. You don’t want to talk about what you need the money for, but how about why you need money in general. How’d you end up in your financial, uh, situation.”
“Times are hard for everybody.”
“Yeah, but most people didn’t get a two-million-dollar award when they received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And everybody has to pay taxes, except you. And no Cost of Living Obligations for you, too, so where did it all go?”
“You know the answer.”
“I know what was in the papers years ago, and that wasn’t much. We can assume our readers don’t even remember that much. Would you be willing to fill them in?” Alexis asked and tapped her pen on the notepad.
“Fine, where should I start?”
“If we’re talking about how you lost it, let’s start with how you got it in the first place. What was your reaction when you found out you were getting the money?”
“Shock. Complete shock. I didn’t know I was going to get the money until they announced it at the podium.”
“See, I didn’t know that.”
“I knew I was getting the medal,” David said. “They brought me all the way to the D.C. Metro Area, after all. Well, they didn’t bring me all the way there. They invited me. I jumped there myself. By then I had made myself a path across the country, so I knew where to jump without killing anybody. I was coming up short on my jumps on that trip. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but in retrospect, I had already started getting weaker.
“I made it to the boundary of D.C., and they had a private Slug train waiting to take me to the metro center. They put me up in a swanky hotel. Soft sheets and gourmet meals are wasted on me, but I still appreciated the gesture.
“The next morning, they brought me out onto the National Mall in front of the giant lake. There was a pretty good-sized crowd, which was nice. I hadn’t done much work in the D.C. Metro Area, but people still came out to show their appreciation anyway. There were some Sapienists protesting, but they were showing up any time I had a public event, so I had gotten good at ignoring them.
“The stage was full of government officials, and there was a brass band playing. Then President Davies came out. He gave a speech where he thanked me for my service and said I was an example that everyone should try to emulate. That the whole country was lucky to have me. I’ll admit I was too awe-struck to remember the specifics. Then he called me up and presented the medal. They had a stool set up so he could reach up and put it around my neck. I got a huge round of applause. Then the president walked backed to the podium and announced that I would receive the money as a symbol of gratitude for my service. I said some sort of thank-you. It wasn’t eloquent.
“When I got back to Seattle, I read about the ‘Thank You Act,’ which was passed by Congress. It exempted me from the Different Acts and also forgave any taxes I might owe in perpetuity—even Metro Area-level taxes. It’s all of them, too. If I keep track of my sales tax receipts, they’ll write me a check, but I never bothered with that. It’s not like the government is flush these days.
“As soon as the money came through, I did the same thing every athlete does when they get their first check: I bought my mother a house. Well, an apartment. Top floor near the water. Not having to pay any taxes on the sale helped with that. I rented myself a much cheaper place close by to my mom; I was still coming and going back then, and like I said, most luxuries are wasted on me.
“I put the rest of the money into my non-profit: the Step Forward Fund. I wanted to do something for the Outer Areas. I wasn’t even living in the slums yet, but I knew how bad it was. It was—it is—brutal out here, and the people are just stuck. There aren’t any stores, so there aren’t any jobs, so there isn’t any money, so no one can open any stores. I wanted to break the cycle. I thought I could use my money to set up a fund that would loan money to entrepreneurs. Good people who the banks would never lend a dime to. Then they could open stores, or factories, or anything that sounded like it could bring jobs to the community.
“The problem was that running a non-profit was a lot of work—the kind of work that takes reading business proposals and studying ledgers, not something I had any experience with, considering the bomb hit when I was fifteen. It didn’t help that I was still traipsing around the country all day. I needed help, and I was not well-equipped to find any.
“Help found me one day when I was out in on the east side. Despite my incompetence, I had somehow managed to fund a vocational program, and they had me out for a ceremony to thank me for all I’d done. That’s when I spotted my cousin, Lewis. He wasn’t there to see me. He was there digging through a dumpster because the ceremony had a lot of food.
“I didn’t come from a very big family. My mom was an only child. My dad did have a sister. She was divorced by the time I knew anything, but she did have a son. My cousin Lewis. We weren’t close growing up, but we did spend some time together. Holidays and birthdays, whenever the parents would get together. The truth is, I never really liked him all that much. He was a couple of years older than me, bigger than me, and not very nice. Whenever we’d get together, he’d make me play some sport against him where I had no chance. He’d pop me in the jaw playing one-on-one basketball or check me to the ground in street hockey. When he was sixteen and I was eleven, he made me play football against him, which meant we took turns running across the field. Either he’d be tackling me and smashing me to the ground or running over me while I was trying to tackle him. He bruised my ribs. I had to go to the emergency room.
“The truth is I forgot about Lewis for a while there. His mom died from the Plagues, even before the bomb. But by then he was twenty and living on his own. Even as things got bad, we thought we had it easier than we did. My mom was trying to keep herself and two kids afloat while the Plagues were raging and the whole world was falling apart. We didn’t see him at all after his mom’s funeral. Last I knew, he still had a job and an apartment. Then the bombs dropped and everything changed and we lost Carter and mom wasn’t really in a place where she was worrying about her nephew. But after we lost track of him, things started to go pretty bad for Lewis.
“It turned out Lewis had lost his job before he even lost his mom. When she got sick during the Plagues, he had to find some way to get food in the house and some aspirin for her, at least. And it’s not like anybody was hiring with the world going to hell. So he got the only job he could find: running the books for a gang that ran some sort of underground casino. He was always smart and good with numbers. At ten years old, he could add two five-digit numbers in his head like it was nothing.
“As things got worse and worse, things got darker at the ‘casino.’ They started having bare-knuckled ‘boxing matches,’ selling drugs, and women. Whatever seedy thing they could make money on. Lewis hated it and wanted to quit, but once you get involved with something like that, they don’t just let you walk away. And the people in charge were not the kind of people that you’d want to cross. But even still, Lewis couldn’t take it. He knew he had to get out. But he couldn’t just quit. They’d come looking for him, and considering how much he knew about the money and whatever, they would have kept after him until they found him. Lewis’s only chance was to get out of Seattle, but that was no easy feat. There was still a weekly flight out back then, but those tickets cost half as much as a house. The only way Lewis could get the money was t
o take it.
“It turns out, stealing from a gang of criminals was just as stupid as it sounds. They caught him while he was hiding out and waiting for the flight. But they didn’t kill him. I don’t know if it was mercy or extra punishment, but instead of putting a bullet in his head, they broke his legs, badly. So badly that he never walked right again. They wanted him to suffer. And he did. Things were hard for everyone back then, but if you were disabled? Come on. How was he supposed to get to the relief center five miles away? How was he supposed to go out hunting for scrap like everybody else was doing? How could he defend himself from anyone who wanted to take anything he could manage to get his hands on? He ended up begging on the street all day and taking whatever drugs or alcohol he could find at night. It was ugly. He barely survived.
“I should have helped him, but like I’ve said, I was fifteen when the bomb hit. I didn’t exactly have the awareness to realize that that the unemployment rate had soared through the roof and the city was crumbling. I mean, I wasn’t an idiot, but fifteen-year-olds don’t think bigger picture. Besides, those first few years I barely stopped moving. I was bouncing around from project to project, sometimes all over the country. I helped lay the Intercontinental Rail. I built the dam. I helped install Hoover systems. All those things we’ve been talking about for weeks. The point is that I was not an easy man to get a hold of. Eventually, the army brought in somebody to help manage all my media requests and fan mail and whatnot. But there was so much of it that even if Lewis had tried to contact me, it would have been difficult to see his message among the thousands of people who claimed to have a relation to me.
“But it all came flooding back when I saw him digging in that dumpster. I called out to him. It took him a second, but then he called me Dave. He always called me Dave. I don’t like being called Dave. He was a little standoffish at first, but eventually he agreed to let me buy him a meal. Then I got him a hotel room. And we went from there.
“My government liaison helped me get him set up. While I didn’t have a salary or anything, he basically just made sure I got whatever I needed, probably so I didn’t ask for money. He found Lewis a doctor, who made him these braces for his legs. He still needed to use a cane, but he had been hobbling along on some crutches that he had made himself, so he wasn’t complaining.
“But coming back into society was rough for him. When he was living on the street, he needed some escape, and that took the form of whatever booze or drugs he could get his hands on. And even though we set him up with a place to live and three square meals a day, those old habits were a little harder to get rid of. He went through a whole program: counselors, a therapist. It took him a little while; there were a couple of false starts, but eventually he got his head on straight. And that was no small thing. His head was pretty sideways after what he went through.
“Once he I was back on his feet, I invited him to partner with me on the Step Forward Fund. He was a good match for a partner. First of all, he was around. And like I said, he was always good with numbers, and while his experience at the casino might not have made for a great resumé, money is money. And he knew how to keep track of its coming and goings. But the numbers were only part of it. We were trying to do business in the worst neighborhoods in Seattle. A place with people who didn’t mind lying cheating, stealing, or even killing for amounts of money that were a whole lot less than we were going to be dealing with. Lewis knew a bunch of the players in the neighborhoods, at least well enough to know which ones to stay away from. And even if he didn’t know anyone specific, he had managed to survive in the slums for years, so I thought I needed him to protect the fund while I was off working on my government projects.
“But he didn’t protect it for long. One day, a threatening letter from the landlord at the office space we rented for the fund found its way out to me wherever the hell I was. Rent hadn’t been paid in three months, and he was not happy. I went to check out the office, and it was cleared out. Lewis had even sold most of the furniture. The story was the same at Lewis’s apartment. The neighbors said he just disappeared one day. And I soon found out that he took all the money with him.
“The funny thing was he could have just written himself a check considering I was paying basically zero attention to the accounts, but he didn’t do that. Instead, he came up with this whole elaborate scheme involving fake initiatives. A grocery store, a building contractor, a hair salon, an urban farming program. He went all out, wrote up these fake proposals for how all how the businesses could work, revenue projections, staffing proposals. These things were legit, and nobody besides Lewis ever read them. He was the one who accepted the phony proposals he had written. Then he put them in a file cabinet, which no one besides him ever checked.
“It didn’t make sense. The proposals looked real, but if you walked by any of the addresses, they were wrecks or empty lots. The proposals wouldn’t have fooled anyone who was really checking. So I think he had another reason. It was to send me a message. He wanted to show me that he could have been something if I had been able to get to him sooner. That he had the skills to be a productive member of society. But I was too late, and the truth was he was too far gone.”
“Okay, but how come the cops couldn’t find him?” Alexis asked. “A low-life—no offense—with two million dollars cash is going to have a real hard time staying under the radar. And wasn’t he an addict?”
“The cops never found him because they never looked. I never gave them his name,” David continued.
“What? He stole two million dollars from you and you just let him walk away scot-free?”
“Lewis didn’t get away from anything scot-free. He was a broken man. Broken because I forgot about him. He was one of the few pieces of my family that were left, and I just left him out to dry. Yeah, he was a low-life and a scumbag, but that was only because he had to be. That was the only way he was able to survive in the world. If the roles were reversed and he was the one who got hit with a bomb, I could have ended up just like him.”
“You said he was a jerk growing up.”
“Yeah, well, a lot of people are jerks to their little cousins. That doesn’t mean they should be tossed aside like yesterday’s paper. That’s what I did with Lewis. I didn’t want to worry about him, so I didn’t. It didn’t feel right to have the police searching for him after he stole from me. I should have gone to the police years before I found Lewis. Maybe they could have helped me find him. I didn’t do that, so it didn’t seem right to ask for help then either.”
“Okay, then I have to ask. Why are you telling me this now? It seems like you went to great lengths to protect Lewis for years. You haven’t given me a last name yet, but I can’t imagine it’s going to be hard for anyone to figure out. Why out him now?”
“You told me I owed you something juicy. I figured this fit the bill.”
“Come on, David. You’re as stubborn as you are strong. No way would you open up if you weren’t ready to talk about it for some other reason. You never told the cops who took your money—or the press before now—even though you were skewered and called an idiot for years.”
“Lewis died five years ago,” David said and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “He was in the Chicago Metro Area. They found him in an alley with a needle in his arm. Tranq and a ton of it. He overdosed and died alone.”
“Wow, that’s terrible,” Alexis said, but it didn’t really move her at all. “How did you know? Were you keeping track of him? A junky dying isn’t exactly national news.”
“I helped out this detective a little while back. He needed to know something about a guy in the neighborhood, the kind of guy most people won’t talk about because they’d be worried about what might happen to them. I wasn’t worried, so I talked. He was so grateful he insisted that he had to do something to repay me. To be honest, I think he was a bit of a fan. Anyway, I had been thinking about Lewis a lot, and I figured if anybody could figure out what happened to him, it’d be a detective. And, man, he fo
und out everything. He actually went out to Chicago and tracked down a bunch of people Lewis came across. Only he wasn’t Lewis anymore. He was Fredric Tan,” David said and paused.
“Uh, okay?” Alexis said, confused.
“You don’t get it. Fredric Tan, Fred Brown… Downtown Freddy Brown? The Sonics, the Championship in ’79?”
“Yeah, I guess. Seems like a long time ago now.”
“Well, that’s all we’ve got. The new Sonics aren’t any better than the old ones. Anyway, Fredric came to Chicago ready to spend. He got himself a high-rise apartment right in the metro center. On Michigan Avenue, no less. He was not a very good tenant. Partied till 3 a.m., music, fighting, all sorts of unsavory types. He had dozens of complaints from the other tenants. At some point, he either got evicted, or smart, or sober, or realized that even with two million dollars, he couldn’t live like a rock star forever, especially without any money coming in. He moved to a more sensible apartment, still nice, but a mile from the center. Then he started gambling. He was good at it. Actually kept himself afloat for the better part of a decade. But eventually his luck turned, or his addictions caught up with him, or a little of both, and he got in way over his head. Dug another hole he couldn’t dig himself out of and ended up back on the street. After that, the trail got a little hazy, but it looked like he spent his time begging, borrowing, and stealing—whatever he had to do to get his hands on Tranq. And one day, he got his hands on too much, and he went to sleep and never woke up. There are worse ways to go than a Tranq OD.”
“Sounds like you’ve forgiven him. I’m not sure I would have done that.”
“He died alone in an alley. Nobody would choose a life like that. He was sick. How can I be mad at him for being sick? All I feel is regret that I didn’t get to him sooner. If I had reached out, maybe it never would have gotten so bad. I mean, it’s a shame that I lost all the money. I really wanted to do something to help those neighborhoods everyone else forgets about. But hell, who am I kidding? I had no idea what I was doing with the money. If Lewis hadn’t taken it, someone else would have. You can’t leave two million dollars unattended and expect it to sit around. A fool and his money are soon parted.”
