by Bud Connell
“I hope––” I left my wishful thought hanging as I signed and pushed the paper back at the woman who could pick me up and throw me across the room at about thirty miles an hour if she wanted to.
She reached under the counter and produced the remains of my captive life, an envelope containing my ID and wallet, and handed them to me with a smile.
“You’re free to go, Mr. Oaks.”
I nodded and walked toward the front door while extracting stuff from the envelope and reorganizing my life, cramming the evidence of it back into my coat pockets.
I began to think how amazing freedom is, and how easy it is to lose it.
74 – If I Had a Life Left
The black Lincoln with the dark windows sat in the Passenger Loading Zone, but I couldn’t see inside. My heart beat faster with every step, and I couldn’t wait to touch Katya, to kiss her, to hold her tight and not let go, and to pop the question for the umpteenth and last time. Last, because if she didn’t say ‘yes’ today, I’d have to get over it and get on with my life, if I had one left after the upcoming trial.
I grabbed the passenger door handle and pulled the door open, and there she sat, in the driver’s seat all smiling and dimples. My heart leaped nearly out of my chest to see her in an almost skin tight tropical print with greens and reds and lavender flowers, and birds of every color. Her lipstick matched her shoes and the red in her dress, and her perfect hair framed the most beautiful, most precious face I’d ever seen. This woman was everything I hoped for; and here she was, about to be mine if she accepted my proposal.
I tossed the empty envelope over the headrest into the back seat.
“Geeze, I missed you, baby doll.” I slid in. “You driving, or you want me to take over?”
“You’ve been through enough, Joe. Relax and I’ll keep the wheel.”
I leaned over the center console and kissed Katya’s cheek. She showed dimples and let out a little soft laugh, but kept her eyes on the street.
“Where’re we headed? You hungry?” I asked.
“No. You?”
“I had a tray a few minutes ago.”
“A tray?”
“In jail. They dump everything on a metal tray and shove it at you.”
“I didn’t know and I don’t ever intend to see it.”
Katya’s priorities were straight.
“They’re probably watching my every move, doll baby, so we still can’t go near the banks. How much do we have left?”
“There’s thirty-three thousand in your suitcase. I spread it out so there are no bulges in the lining.” Dear Katya, thinking ahead, another reason why I love her so.
“That should be enough for an attorney.”
“They’ve got to put Darragh away, put him away for the rest of his life,” she said. “He tried to kill you! I’ll go state’s evidence with you. I’ll tell them everything I know.”
The unselfish willingness from my precious doll made my heart seize up and squeeze. I believed with every fiber of my being that Katya’s testimony would earn me a ticket to freedom and salt ol’ Darragh Cahoone away where he could never hurt us.
If this is what love is, I am sick in love from the ground to the top of my head and everything in between.
“Okay. Here’s my titanic moment,” I announced with a flourish befitting only an actor about to play the biggest, most important part of his life. “Here it comes…”
“Go ahead and ask me, Joe, so I can say ‘yes’!”
Well, that took me quite a bit by surprise. I’m sure my jaw hit the floorboard of the Lincoln. Here’s this luscious, blond doll-baby of a woman leading me into saying what I want to say, and giving me her answer in advance.
“Will you… will you marry me, Katya, Catherine Lucille?”
“Joe?”
Uh, oh. Surprise time. Probably ‘no for now’, or ‘I will after you get out of prison’ or…
Thank heaven, there was nobody behind us because Katya slammed on the brakes and looked at me square on. She smiled and said, “Yes, yes, Joe. I will.”
I leaned over the console and pulled her into me and we kissed for what seemed an eternity and I drew into me her fragrance of flowers and candy– and love.
After the kiss to last a lifetime, I leaned back and just looked at my doll. She was so beautiful and I was so drained. After the buildup in my mind, after worrying out all the possible outcomes, my dream proposal came out perfectly, just the way I wanted it to be.
“If you didn’t ask me, I was gonna ask you,” my doll said. “And I knew you’d say ‘yes’, so I’ve already planned where I want our honeymoon, but I’m going to save it as a surprise until I get back.”
“Until… what?”
“Until I get back from Detroit. I’ve got to tell my folks, and I want to do it in person; not on some old cold telephone call.”
Well, sure. A woman has got to do woman things, or girl-girl things, I reasoned. I’d miss her like hell, but a marriage is about compromise.
“How long will–”
“Just a couple of days, Joe-baby. Just a couple of days.”
+++
We got a sack of assorted Taco Bell delicacies in Boynton Beach and stowed away in our motel room for the night, and what a night; the very best night of my life. She loved me in ways I’d never been loved before. An off-the-charts consummation of marriage before the marriage! We did things with the human body that I didn’t know were possible.
At two o’clock in the morning, we finally fell asleep in each other’s arms, and it was the best sleep I’d ever had in my entire life.
75 – Right Over My Heart
I shook off sleep three hours before Katya’s flight, and shaved and dressed and watched my gorgeous doll get ready, so I’d have a fresh memory of her doing all her feminine things, dressing and stuff, to last me until she returned from Detroit. I honestly didn’t think I could make it without her for two whole days.
We left in plenty of time and I drove slowly on the way to the airport stealing glances at the beautiful woman in the passenger seat who would soon be my wife.
“What time’s your return flight?” She’d already booked everything and picked up her itinerary from a kiosk at the motel while I picked up breakfast.
“Oh, Joe, I’ve told you three times, meet me about ten minutes after noon at US Air baggage claim. If there’s any change, I’ll call you on your cell. Okay, sweetheart?”
“Day after tomorrow, ten after noon. I just wanted to make sure I got it right. It’s gonna be pretty lonely.” I was already feeling empty, like a big hollow space was somehow appearing and enlarging just below my heart and reaching down into my whole lower body. I must’ve shown it, because Katya kept her eyes on my drooping face and she read me just right.
“I’ll be at my mother’s or my sister’s,” she said. “And you’re gonna be just fine. It’s only two days.”
“Give me their numbers so I can call you.”
Katya gave me kind of a sweet smile, and took a beat before rummaging through her purse for a pen and something to write on.
“Here,” she said, handing me their numbers.
I stuffed the folded scrap of paper deep in my shirt pocket right over my heart and patted it secure.
She went quiet for a while and seemed to drop into deep thought. I let her have her space.
This morning, I’d also decided to spend the next forty-eight hours on my immediate future doing whatever possible to help me be free for Katya and our life together.
She broke her silence. “You’re a decent guy, Joe. You don’t belong around certain people.”
I let a few seconds pass. “Ramon?”
She didn’t reply, but she knew I felt guilty about his for-all-practical-purposes forthcoming lifetime sentence, and that there was little I could do. So I made up my mind right then and there not to stress about Ramon, or to try to contact him. What was happening to him was the result of his entire past, not just my little window of time
with him. He’d been dealing drugs most of his life, and I guess he’d be paying for it with the rest of it.
Shithouse mouse, I was lucky to get out of the business before it ate me alive.
We drove into the departing passengers area, and I got out and opened the car door for Katya and unloaded the luggage for the skycap. She handed him her ticket and pulled me back toward the car for a long lingering kiss, into which I melted.
She pushed me away. “Now, just go, and don’t make me look back or I’ll cry,” she said.
I honored her wishes, watched her prance her way back to the skycap that was holding her ticket out in her direction. She snatched it out of his hand and pranced into the terminal. She never turned back in my direction, and that was okay with me– or I would have cried.
76 – Into Places I’d Never Been
The trip from Miami International to Boynton Beach took a lifetime, or seemed like it. Without Katya I felt empty, drifting, kind of weird in the stomach in a lonely sort of way, until my cell phone vibrated. I fumbled it and answered the incoming call from Travis Macintyre.
“Joe, a question’s come up. I want to caution you that whatever you say can be used against you. Understand?”
“Yeah.”
“The issue is your bail money. Where’d you get it? Where’d it come from?”
I hadn’t fully thought that out in advance, and the long pause after Travis asked the question probably was making me look pretty suspicious. Then I said something dumb.
“I don’t know. Savings, I guess.”
“Savings? You guess?”
“–My girlfriend, her savings. I owe her plenty.”
“The Cahoone girl?”
“Yeah.”
He took a short pause. “Okay, it was just a question.” Then a longer pause. “Good enough. Stick around close so we can reach you.”
“Wait. I got a question myself.”
“Go ahead.”
The most important few words of my life were about to be presented to one Agent Macintyre, and I had to get ‘em just right.
“Travis, I want to help put Cahoone away for the rest of his life, and the same for his friends. If I do my part, will you help me get off? Really get off? I want to be a good citizen, raise a family, be a normal guy.”
I held my breath waiting for a response, and finally Travis made a grunting noise before coming back.
“I’ll talk to Rosy. No promises though.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it.” I didn’t beg. I presented my plea. That was all I could do.
+++
I completed the drive to Boynton, parked the car, let myself in the room, and flopped down on the bed. About now, Katya would be arriving in Detroit. I never had somebody I loved flying around without me, so I had to know if her flight arrived safely. I called information for US Air’s number and dialed it, and punched Operator until I got a live one.
“Did the flight from Miami to Detroit arrive on time?” A few seconds later I got my relief; the agent said it arrived ten minutes early. I decided to give Katya time for greetings and hugs, and to get to her mother’s place before I called. My heart was actually hurting. My first time to be this deeply in love had legs of its own, and they were leading me into places I’d never been.
While lying on the bed where we made love for most of last night, I recreated the peak moments until I relaxed and smiled at the feelings and images, moving, gyrating, pulsing in my mind. I fell asleep.
77 – I Just Couldn’t Help It
When I awoke, the sun was lower in the sky, sending a shaft of luminous yellow through the window’s sheer drape. Glittering dust particles moved slowly in the brilliant light as my awareness came on line. I looked at my watch. I’d been asleep almost two hours. Way longer than I intended.
I sat up quickly in bed, dug into my pants pocket for my cell phone, and hit Katya’s speed dial number.
There was a long pause, and then I got a recorded operator that said something about it not being a working number. So I dialed it again, and after a little pause, got the same thing. She probably forgot to pay the bill since the phone was working yesterday.
I felt in my shirt pocked for the paper with Katya’s family phone numbers, pulled it out, unfolded it and smoothed it out on the bed. I carefully punched in her mother’s telephone number, checking each digit as I input it on the phone’s tiny screen against Katya’s handwriting.
A gruff sounding guy answered, and I asked for Catherine Lucille.
“There’s no one here by that name.”
“Is this the Bobo residence?” I began to breathe shallow and a little rapid.
“Who? Naw. Wrong number!” He hung up.
I sat on the edge of the bed with the phone to my ear, not believing what I just heard. No, something is wrong with my dialing or–
I tried the alternate number, Katya’s sister. There it was on the paper in Katya’s own handwriting. It rang four times and an answering device picked up and a male voice made an announcement.
“You’ve reached Tony’s Plumbing. If you have an emergency or you’d like to schedule a maintenance appointment, leave your name and number and we’ll return your call within an hour.” Katya’s sister was supposed to be a single girl who lived alone.
By then I was sick, really sick, feeling like I was about to throw up; but I forced the urge down and took a deep breath. There were two other things I had to do, had to do right now.
I searched through the notes in my coat pockets and found Herbert Benson’s telephone number; Benson, the South Beach hotel manager I talked to before I was arrested. He answered right away and I asked him who made the complaint about the noise and the smell coming from our suite the night we were arrested. He said it was not from a hotel line, and that the call was made directly to 911. He further said the police told him that the trouble call came from a cell phone inside the hotel.
I hesitated before I asked. “Did the police identify the number?”
“If they did, they didn’t tell me; but the captain did say that when they called back to verify location, all they got was a weird karaoke version of ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’.
I couldn’t speak because of the fist-size lump in my throat, so I hung up and sat in the spot of sun on the edge of the bed for I don’t know how long.
I tried to be a man about things, but no matter how hard I tried on this one, tears still leaked out and flowed down my face. I just couldn’t help it.
I dragged myself to the bathroom, splashed a little cold water around my eyes and cheeks and toweled off. One last question burned in my mind, but I already knew the answer.
I had four banks to hit between Delray Beach and West Palm, and I had an hour-and-a-half before closing.
+++
I felt like an empty shell, no, like a dead husk, during my mindless drive between banks.
My worst fears were true. All four safety-deposit boxes were empty. A note in Katya’s handwriting was in the bottom of the box in West Palm Beach.
“Sorry, Joe. ––Kat”
+++
Thursday morning, I drove slowly to Miami International and by noon I was standing in front of US Airways baggage.
I waited an hour-and-a-half after every last female passenger picked up her luggage from the arriving Detroit flight.
I had to give her, and myself, that one last chance.
78 – In Several Hundred Years
The next several months passed, and with each day I recovered a smidgen more of my self-respect, but at that rate it would take several hundred years to put ol’ Joe back together. Resigned to my fate, I ate and slept, and stayed scarce to everyone except the DEA guys. Whenever they called, I delivered whatever they wanted; and by mid-fall, my testimony, along with that which was coerced out of Ramon Rodriguez, had put Darragh Cahoone so deep into a Federal penitentiary that he probably wished he’d gotten the death penalty. The feds gave Ramon a reduced sentence; fifteen years, shaving a full decade-and-
a-half off his scorecard. That meant he’d be eligible for parole in twelve years and three months, which included the time he’d already been in the clink.
I fared much better. I got off as a first time offender with time served, two years parole, and a five thousand dollar fine. My Miami lawyer with the funny name, Justin Kase, said he was a bargain for a fee of only twenty thousand simoleons, which took all my available cash except for enough to scrape by on until the court returned forty-two thousand five-hundred of the fifty grand bail.
Also, I finally got around to closing out my California apartment; and with my reputation shot to hell for promoting pop music, I looked around for another way to make a living, but found the job market in sad shape, matching me perfectly.
79 – Share My Story?
Saturday afternoon in mid-October on one of those perfect South Florida days, I drove around with the top down on my new, actually old, Mustang that I bought outright for a few grand off a used car lot. I almost bought a Toyota, but I realized that every time I got into it I’d think of Katya, not something I wanted to do, especially since figuring out that she, and perhaps a former Cahoone lieutenant she was conning, maybe Louie himself, were somehow behind the shootout at the airport and my first little black Mustang turning into a fireball a few weeks ago.
Anyway, I was enjoying the perfect Florida sunshine when I passed a mega-church on Biscayne Boulevard with one of those big reader board signs stuck out near the street. I read the message twice before it sunk in.
“Share Your Story, Validate Yourself, Meet New Friends. 11 AM Sunday”
Well, God knows I got a story to share, and sure as hell needed a new set of friends. I decided to show up Sunday morning and start a new life.
At least I’d investigate the possibility.
