* * *
“Excuse me, sir. This is the last stop for this line,” the male voice came as he repeatedly poked at Lenny’s shoulder. “You can connect at 11th Street southbound.”
Lenny didn’t respond.
“Sir, wake up. You’ll need to get off. It’s the end of the line,” the conductor said again, this time, waking Lenny.
“Where am I? What happened?” Lenny said, confused and extremely groggy.
“If I had a dollar each time I get asked that,” the conductor laughed. “The best nights out are the ones you can’t remember. Perhaps you’ll recall once you sleep it off. But, as curious as I am, you can’t be doing that here. Come on.”
The man helped Lenny to his feet and swung his arm around his waist to help him off the train.
“No wait, I’m not drunk,” Lenny said as he resisted. “The package, where’s the package?” He turned back to look on the seat when he didn’t find it inside his jacket where he’d put it.
“Sir, please, you need to get off now.”
“Someone took it. I was drugged. Someone drugged me and took the envelope,” Lenny announced in a befuddled panic.
“I’m sure you left it in the last bar you were at. Now please go.”
Now fully aware of the situation, Lenny ignored the conductor’s pleas and dropped to his knees to search under the seats. But the package was gone.
Panic rushed through his body and sank to the bottom of his stomach as he reluctantly stepped off the train. The platform was quiet. His watch told him it was three a.m. When he’d got on the train earlier that day it wasn’t even noon. He paced up and down the empty station, rubbing at the throbbing at his temples. Why would someone intentionally drug him to steal the package from him? How did they even know where he was? Was he followed? Nothing made any sense. Absentmindedly his hand reached for the itchy spot on his neck where he thought an insect had bitten him.
“Oh you stupid fool!” he shouted at himself as his fingers rubbed over the dried blood, realizing that it must have been the athletic man who had sat down next to him who had drugged him.
Now in a full-blown panic, he reached for the burner phone. There were five missed calls and more than a dozen messages. Beads of cold sweat perched above his worried eyebrows. He was a walking dead man. How could he have been so careless?
“Okay think, Lenny, think,” he said out loud as he anxiously paced back and forth. “Just tell them the truth, that’s all. This was not your fault. Nothing you can’t talk yourself out of,” he said out loud again then turned to head to the stairwell. As he prepared to head up the stairs a raspy voice came from the dark shadows beneath the stairwell and scared him witless.
“You can run but he’ll keep coming for you, you know.”
The words stopped Lenny dead in his tracks.
“Who’s there?”
“You can feel it, can’t you?”
“If you have something to say come out and face me like a man! I’m not afraid of you,” Lenny shouted, still paused at the bottom of the stairs.
The voice went quiet and Lenny stepped back onto the platform. Convinced it was one of Diaz’s men, he struggled to control his breathing. Every cell in his scrawny body was on high alert, his body tense with fear. When the voice remained silent, he decided to move toward it, briefly looking behind him to make sure he wasn’t being ambushed. But the station was completely deserted.
Bent at the waist he anxiously searched the dark corners beneath the stairwell, his heart pounding hard in his chest. In the shadows, he spotted the figure of a man lying on the floor against the wall. For fear of it being a trap, he paused a long second before he bravely took another two steps toward the shadowy nook beneath the stairs. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness he saw that it was just a homeless person sheltering there for the night. Annoyed at the distraction he made a clicking sound with his tongue against his teeth and turned back toward the stairwell.
“It’s all planned, you know,” the homeless man’s gentle voice echoed behind him.
Again it brought Lenny to a halt.
“What do you want, huh? Money? Stand in line, pal! I don’t have any okay?” Lenny shouted out in frustration.
“He can help you if you let him.”
“Oh come on, old man. Stop talking crazy. I have better things to do than to listen to this.”
Lenny was irritated, and he spat a few more unsavory words at the man. But as hard as he tried to turn away and run up those stairs, he couldn’t. It was as if an unknown, invisible force had paralyzed his legs. Wanting him to hear more. Angry frustration bubbled up inside his body as his soul wrestled with his mind. Exhausted and confused he leaned his head toward the staircase’s railing and rested his head on his broken arm.
“Bones will grow back by themselves, but it’s what you’ve got hurting inside that needs true healing,” the drifter said referring to his broken arm.
“Is that so?”
“It is. It’s time to face the truth.”
“Yeah well, the truth is exactly what’s going to get me killed.”
“Sometimes we have to go through the desert before we get to the Promised Land.”
The man’s statement forced Lenny’s emotions into overdrive and he flung his body back to come face-to-face with the vagrant under the staircase.
“Now I know you’re insane. You’re talking as if you know what I’m going through. Well, you don’t! My entire life has been a desert. One big, barren, godless desert! This was my chance to get to this Promised Land fools like you always talk about. Mexico was my Promised Land. And now I’ll never see it. It doesn’t matter how hard I try to get there, I never do! I’m tired of this life and I’m tired of listening to your psychobabble as if you know what you’re talking about. You don’t, okay! We live off scraps, like the scavengers at the bottom of the ocean, just to survive. Just so the big sharks of this world don’t have to go through the deserts. Newsflash, old man. There is no Promised Land. And there never will be for people like you and me!”
With his cursing words still echoing through the empty station, torment lying shallow in his eyes, Lenny turned and escaped up the stairs. Never once looking back, never once stopping.
Chapter Five
Lenny’s feet hit the quiet sidewalk with force. A force driven by decades of anger and pain. He ran as fast as his weak body would let him. But try as he might, he couldn’t get the vagrant’s words out of his mind. Like a lingering sore pestering his soul, it ate away at him. Stride by stride. And even when his lungs burned from the icy winter air, and his legs threatened to give way beneath his exhausted body, he couldn’t stop running. He didn’t quite know what or who he was running away from, or where he was running to, but he kept going. Perhaps it was his own demons chasing him. Or perhaps he thought he could run his way into the Promised Land. All he knew was that he didn’t care anymore. Something deep inside him had given up.
When his body finally collapsed and he fell to the cold, hard ground like a puppet whose strings had snapped, he sobbed uncontrollably. He sobbed about his childhood, about his miserable life, and the desert he could never seem to escape. Until he had no more tears left to cry. And when he finally found the will to pick his near-frozen body up off the sidewalk, the first golden rays of the morning poured onto his face. And though he couldn’t be certain, he thought he heard the same male voice that had rescued him from the side of the road, tenderly whisper in his ear, Everything will be all right.
Desperate to believe in life, in hope, in something, Lenny clung to the gentle words that were spoken as he made his way back to his home. And even though he knew trouble would surely be waiting for him, he also knew he had nowhere else to go. If Dutch’s men, or perhaps even Diaz himself were there waiting for him, he’d let them have their way. But he couldn’t run anymore. He had nowhere left to hide. He’d take whatever cards life now dealt him. Even if it was death.
Just a few blocks away from home, when his mind was
still occupied with what to do once he got there, he briefly let his guard down. Taken by surprise, a black minivan screeched to a halt next to him. In the flurry of movement two burly men whose faces he didn’t see, pulled a black hood over his head, and threw him into the van. They didn’t speak at all. Just shoved him hard against the steel floor. When he tried to straighten up a strong hand shoved a wet cloth over his mouth, pressing it down over his jaw.
And Lenny was once again forced into a transient world of darkness as the chloroform took affect.
* * *
There was a brief moment when disappointment flooded his insides as Lenny opened his eyes to find himself alive. But there he was again. The one who keeps surviving. His eyes scanned the space around him. It was poorly lit with a few rays of sunlight spilling in through the cracks of three brown-tinted windows. Positioned at the top of the wall where it met the thick steel rafters of a pointy roof, the window let just enough light in for him to take in the room. He was tethered at the waist to a single wooden chair that stood in the middle of what appeared to have once been some kind of old clothing factory; an assumption he made when he spotted several damaged dress forms piled on top of each other in a corner. Next to them was a large table upon which about half a dozen industrial sewing machines sat crammed together. The filthy tiled floor had broken and missed tiles in several places, and the space smelled moldy. He listened for voices or movement of any kind, but there were none. He was alone. He peered up at the broken windows and saw that the sky was hues of bright amber. Concluding it was probably nightfall, he tried wriggling his body to loosen the several strands of chains that were twisted around his torso and legs, then around the backrest and legs of the chair. They didn’t budge.
He was stuck, confined to a chair, helplessly waiting. With his hands tied together in his lap, he tried to twist his arm to see what time it was. They had taken his watch—or perhaps it got lost during his capture. His eye caught the slightest bit of one of the red letters on the tract that somehow had managed to stay in its hiding place inside his cast. Every morsel of his being wanted to rip it to shreds. Just thinking about it made him angry all over again. Ever since he had found it, all it had done was mess with his mind, caused his luck to change.
Eager to force his mind away from the piece of writing, he leaned back to look over his shoulder. In the far corner, he could see a door; plain, and made from ordinary plywood with no lock. He thought of shuffling the chair to the door and attempting to open it with his mouth, but decided against it. It would be pointless since he’d still be in chains and had no way of knowing what awaited him on the other side of the door.
So he decided to wait it out.
* * *
He had no idea how long he had been sitting there. The amber sky had turned to midnight blue and the temperature inside the building had dropped to what he felt was near freezing. If nothing else, that alone was torture. Freezing to death, and the relentless waiting for the unknown. But eventually, he managed to fall asleep only to be woken by the slow pouring out of a bucket of icy water over his face. The cold sent shockwaves through his entire body and left behind a dull pain in his forehead. It took several attempts for him to catch his breath and rid his aching eyes from the water. Soon after the bucket had run empty, and he could finally see again, he lifted his head. Standing in his long black wool coat and shiny black shoes, he recognized Diaz’s tall silhouette towering over him.
“You just couldn’t help yourself now, could you, Lenny?”
“I didn’t do it.”
“Oh, but you did, Lenny. And here we are, right back where we started.”
“Diaz, I swear, I didn’t take it. I was drugged and—”
“Save it, Lenny. You’re a greedy, little snake, and I told you I’d kill you myself if you ever took from me again. Didn’t I?”
Lenny didn’t react. He wasn’t sure if there was anything he could say to convince Diaz he’d had nothing to do with the lost package.
“So tell me, Lenny. How much did they offer you, huh?”
“What? No, I wasn’t offered anything. Someone stole it from me.”
“Oh, come on, Lenny. Just how stupid do you think I am, huh? Fool me once, fool me twice, right? How much?”
Lenny’s heart dropped to the pit of his stomach.
“I didn’t get any money, Diaz. I swear. I didn’t take the package. I was on the train and a big Black guy jabbed a needle in my neck. Next thing I know I’m being woken up by the conductor at three a.m. and the envelope is gone. That’s the truth. I swear on my mother’s grave.”
Diaz turned his back on Lenny and made several sucking noises through his teeth.
“You see, Lenny. I’d have believed you if this was the first time you’d double-crossed me. But you can understand why I find it really hard to believe some strange guy on a train drugged you and stole my package.”
Diaz peered into his eyes.
“Why? Why would you steal from me again? I mean, it’s not as if the paycheck wasn’t more than substantial. Heck, it’s the biggest one on my list. And for good reason. That package carried something of significant value. So how much did it take for you to stab me in the back again, Lenny? Just how much did you value your life at, huh?”
Lenny dropped his head to his chest and then sideways onto his shoulder.
“I can prove it. Look on the side of my neck. You’ll find the injection mark. Look!” he shouted when Diaz didn’t immediately react.
Diaz pushed out his chin toward one of his henchmen who stood behind Lenny. A quick second later the man had a flashlight aimed at Lenny’s neck. A silent nod in Diaz’s direction had him confirm that there was indeed a needle mark. The man assumed his position two steps behind him.
“See, I told you. I’m telling you the truth. I didn’t take your package.”
Diaz stared silently into his eyes. As if trying to look into Lenny’s soul.
“How do I know you didn’t shoot up?”
“Drugs! Really? I don’t do drugs. I’ve never touched the stuff. Someone knocked me out, Diaz. Someone who knew I had the package. Please, you have to believe me. I needed this job, Diaz. I needed this money. If anything, they stole from me.”
Diaz let out a loud laugh.
“That’s so typical of you, is’t it, Lenny? Always an answer for everything.”
He moved closer and squatted so that his eyes lined up with Lenny’s.
“Tell you what, Lucky Lenny. Let’s see how bad you really want the money, shall we?”
He pushed his chin out again towards his sidekick who handed him a newspaper. When Diaz stood up he turned his back on Lenny and opened the newspaper as if he was going to read from it.
“You see, Lenny. When you came back begging for another job, I decided to make sure I took out a little insurance policy. Just in case you crossed me again. So I did a bit of digging around. It seems you have a lot to lose. Actually, you made it really easy for me.”
Diaz turned to face Lenny, his eyes dripping with self-satisfaction. He held up the newspaper to where he had folded it open to a big black and white photo that took up the entire top half of the page.
It was as if someone had taken their ice cold hands and wrapped them around Lenny’s neck, slowly squeezing the life out of him. As his eyes skimmed over the photo and the small caption beneath the image, shock turned to fury. But though Lenny had had a lifetime of practice to maintain a poker face, this one time that he needed it most, he couldn’t.
“Leave my sister out of this,” he said in the lowest of whispers through a clenched jaw.
Diaz folded the paper and tossed it in Lenny’s lap. As if to further emphasize his intentions.
“Diaz, I swear. You touch my sister and I’ll kill you with my bare hands. You hear me?”
But Diaz had already turned to leave the room.
“Diaz! Leave her alone! I’ll get the stinking package back, but you leave my sister alone!” he shouted after him.
&nbs
p; “You have seventy-two-hours, Lenny, or you both die,” Diaz said calmly over his shoulder as he walked away.
And when Diaz shut the door behind him, a single blow of his crony’s fist knocked Lenny’s lights out.
Chapter Six
Faint rays of sunlight poured through the broken windows high above his head as Lenny once again woke to a new sunrise. He was no longer sitting in the wooden chair. He was no longer chained up. Instead, he was lying on the filthy tiled floor next to it. As he slowly sat up, one hand instinctively reaching for his throbbing jaw, he picked up the newspaper that had been neatly placed next to him; a reminder of what was at stake. As if Lenny wasn’t acutely aware. He unfolded the paper to read the full article. The photo had been taken at a governors’ charity ball in Wilmington, North Carolina a week earlier. Carrie looked like a princess, glowing in a beaded crystal ball gown, beside her husband. Like a real-life Cinderella. Happier than he had ever seen her before. A tiny smile emerged at the corner of his mouth as he recalled her playing with the princess doll she had gotten for her fifth birthday. She had always dreamed of being swept off her feet by a prince and dancing the night away at their wedding ball. This sure came close to that. The memory left him smiling, but he quickly drew his attention back to the article. It told him that her husband was the mayor of the nearby small coastal town that went by the name of Turtle Cove. The next sentence left him ice cold.
The mayoral couple will be hosting the town’s annual Christmas Tree Switching on the Lights Festival.
Every Good Plan Page 3