Moving Day: A Thriller

by Jonathan Stone

  The American grifter tradition—he smiles at the notion. The criminal’s need to glorify his craft, to make it more than it is—he recognizes and suppresses that impulse in himself. He doesn’t deceive himself. He’s smarter than that.

  Oh, he’s no highbrow, and no evil genius, but he’s no idiot either. He’s a species that he’s quickly come to see is exceedingly rare—an intelligent criminal. Intelligent enough, anyway, to stay out of jail long enough to get good at it. Intelligence is the exception in his world. But there are a few who possess it, and he’s one.

  Growing up in deprivation (a deprivation that, in truth, was not so much a daily trial of living as a suffocating flatness of life), he was always fascinated by finer things. A sculpture—inexplicably unscarred by graffiti—in the park where he’d meet his dropout friends. An ornate stained-glass window in the sorry church he was dragged to, before he refused to go anymore. The elaborate pewter chalices on the altar. Who possessed the time, and patience, and talent—who knew the safety and serenity in life—to create such intricacy? To craft these subtle pleasures?

  Such objects were like missives from some other, greater, twinkling civilization he was drawn toward across a noisy, seething universe. And this—this cargo, this dark highway, this ingenious little system of his—was the way he’d found in adult life to deal in that civilization’s glittering currency.

  Growing up in deprivation, he saw that he frightened people with his intelligence. It was unwelcome, out of place, belonged in that paint-peeling foster home and that faded neighborhood even less than he did. It made his sour, dull foster parents nervous (hell, as a kid it made him nervous—this difference), and they said no good would come of it. And were they right? Hard to say.

  It’s his intelligence and his yearning, he knows, that have landed him in this truck and in this life, though he can’t sort out whether it’s his intelligence or his yearning that has the upper hand. Though there is a third trait that is a by-product of both and may override them both: his essential aloneness.

  Which probably accounts for his success at this as much as anything, he thinks. As one who is adjusted to his own aloneness, he feels no impulse to boast, or confide, or share—all fatal flaws in the life of crime.

  By now he’s accepted his aloneness, his predilection for self-distance and isolation. And this is just right for a loner. The long, silent hours. The wide-open spaces. The continual movement. Rather than, for instance, standing on the same street corner day after day, peddling drugs, in broad view on an urban stage, expected to entertain and impress the locals. Or sealed up in some apartment, waiting for untrustworthy buyers where they can always find you, like a sitting duck.

  It’s low-tech, too. In these freewheeling days of cybercrime, of stealing information off the Internet, of complicated telecom scams, of digital identity theft, it’s about the last low-tech scam he knows of. That’s admirable, he thinks. It’s simple. It relies on the American highways. The glittering black ribbons of interstate. Like black ribbons wrapping the gifts America is offering.

  And it’s safe. Old people, for Christ’s sake. It’s self-selecting: these people are selling and moving in general because they can’t manage their current lives anymore. Nobody gets hurt. Not physically. Not even financially. Except the insurance companies, of course. People like this are all insured, but the insurance companies are so big, one operator like Nick hitting randomly, irregularly, isn’t enough to get them to mobilize. As far as the police go, well, nobody’s gotten killed, after all. Not so far, anyway. The only injuries are psychological. The stolen memories—that’s the part the old people want back most—and cops don’t have the manpower to go after memories.

  And there are so many rich old people in America. Every single town in America has its little establishment of them. Go into any stinky little American town anywhere, and it’s got its fancy section, its local wealth. Pockets of money, whatever pocket of America you’re in. The amazing thing isn’t that there are wealthy people—it’s how many. The sheer number! Literally thousands upon thousands.

  America! What a stupendously successful experiment it’s turned out to be. So many rich. Scattered so vastly. That’s why Nick is never caught.

  Like sheep spread across an immense meadow—and a wolf emerges periodically from the woods to pluck them at will, Nick thinks.

  Driving west, into the setting sun.

  It’s highway robbery, redefined.

  In mid-Pennsylvania, just before Harrisburg, they pull off the interstate. Now, near midnight, they make their way along service roads, past a line of industrial buildings whose exact function is unclear in daylight and utterly oblique at night. But it is a path on which an eighteen-wheeler at midnight is not the least bit suspicious. It is a corner of industrial America where an eighteen-wheeler is merely part of the landscape, even at this late hour. Particularly at this late hour.

  The night. It’s one of the things Nick likes best about the scam. One of its simplicities. You load up all day, then take off and drive all night with the advantages of darkness. The advantages of speed, and relative invisibility, and law enforcement at low ebb. It’s a time when truckers dominate the interstates anyway.

  They make a right turn and head toward a row of warehouses. Nick takes his cell phone out of his uniform pocket, dials, waits patiently until it is answered.

  “It’s Nick,” he says. Which is sufficient, he knows.

  Nick pulls the white truck in behind the row of warehouses, turns in toward one warehouse among them. He stops at the shut chain-link gate. Atop the gate and along the entire chain-link fence, razor wire perches thickly coiled, glistening like a snake of menace in the moonlit night.

  A small metal shack stands inside the gate. A stocky Hispanic man pokes his black-capped head out from inside it.

  The chain-link gate opens electronically, with an initial jolt. Nick cajoles the truck carefully into the huge lot. There is a handful of other sixteen-wheeled-trailer bodies, cabless, in the lot already. Slumbering allosaurs of the American road.

  Nick pulls in slowly, brings the big truck to a halt behind one of the trailers.

  His crew piles out. LaFarge. Chiv. Al. All three take out cigarettes. No smoking in the cab with Nick.

  The black-capped Hispanic—Jesus (Hay-sus) is his name—hustles out from the guard shack, carrying a large, deep carton awkwardly in front of him and struggling with a stepladder hooked over one shoulder. He is pockmarked, sorry-eyed, indigent-looking. And with his graying hair, he is older than one might expect for this kind of rendezvous.

  For greeting, Nick merely nods.

  Jesus bends down to the carton. Lifts out an industrial paint-sprayer, wriggles the apparatus onto his back.

  Whereupon LaFarge stubs out his cigarette, comes over and bends down to the carton, and hitches on a second paint-sprayer. Besides Jesus—an auto-body-shop spray-painter by day—LaFarge is the only one allowed to do this work. Any of the others, including Nick, would make a mess of it.

  First, three strips of guide tape are placed, quickly and expertly, down one entire flank of the truck, demarcating two white strips between them.

  And then the paint sprayers—smoothly, wordlessly, hissing mildly—are walked by Jesus and LaFarge down the flank to make two thin red stripes.

  Now, above the double stripe on one side, using the stepladder, Jesus tapes up the stencil he’s already cut, to carefully spray the big, simple red letters in a glossy metallic quick-dry lacquer that will do its final drying on the road.

  It’s a nice, dry, beautiful night.

  In rain, they would have pulled the truck into the warehouse. Would have had to wait a couple of hours for the lacquer to dry. A little riskier. A little longer. Lights on. But tonight is dry.

  Chiv scurries up into the cab of the truck. Emerges with a flattened paper bag, from which he pulls two STATE OF OHIO truck license plates. He hunches down at the rear of the truck to switch the license plates.

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��ve never had any trouble. Not an ounce. But better safe than sorry, to keep it that way, is Nick’s philosophy.

  Now Jesus and LaFarge stretch the guide tape along the other side.

  They spray smoothly. LaFarge—a former tagger in the Bronx—is the only guy Nick can think of for whom that offbeat skill has translated into actual, if not legal, employment.

  Now Jesus tapes up the stencil on this side. In tiny, graceful arcs begins to spray.

  “You fuck!”

  The word from Nick is like a rifle shot in the previously still night.

  “How the fuck do you spell ‘Ohio’!?”

  The spray-painter jumps back from the truck, turns to Nick, stricken. His eyes wide, as if swollen, a broad cartoon of utter fear.

  Nick smiles wide. Shakes his head. “Naw, it’s right. Just messin’ with your wetback brain. You got it right.”

  LaFarge, Chiv, Al, laughing, choke and wheeze out cigarette smoke.

  Nick looks up at the side of the truck and finds himself actually feeling a note of pride. Ohio Produce. A fine concern. Tonight, they are Ohio Produce.

  Previously, Western Auto Supply. Before that, Iowa Growers Transport. Metro Distributors. Bailey Industries.

  Sometimes the red stripe, sometimes two green ones, other times blue. That and the logo did the job. You didn’t have to paint the whole goddamn truck.

  Though they did that, too, once a year. One time, yellow. Another time, sky blue. For promise. For clear sailing.

  Ohio Produce. Western Auto Supply. The made-up corporate entity, the manufactured manufacturers, existing only for hours. Then, on safe arrival, scraped off.

  Iowa Growers Transport. Metro Distributors. The corporate names like a bland song of the American road. Nick and his crew had been employed at each of them for only a day or two. Can’t keep a job. Unreliable fuck-ups, aren’t we? Nick smiles.

  In twenty minutes, Jesus stands back, unshoulders the spray-painter.

  The paint is tacky to the touch. It will air-dry, final-seal, over the next hour, air-assisted on the road. That’s the new technology.

  Nick stands up. He likes this quick stop in industrial America. An industrial America his privileged victims generally never see, or understand, or even think about. That’s part of why he likes it, he knows. Because this is his, and not theirs.

  Now, for payment. Nick opens the right-side back gate of the truck. It swings out and clangs against the truck side, echoing against the night as he rolls the interior horizontal gate open. Jesus, suddenly less sullen, suddenly shedding years, climbs up. He and Nick disappear inside the dark truck as if into a narrow shop at a Middle Eastern bazaar. Merchant and buyer.

  With the low assistance of Nick’s flashlight, Jesus browses the truck. When he looks toward items that are covered, Nick describes them to him.

  The auto-body spray-painter settles quickly on the Nakamichi stereo sitting between two Louis XIV chairs. Nick can see it: the glum spray-painter arriving back at his ghetto walk-up with the brushed-aluminum Nakamichi, listening to salsa on it, the bland, unquestioning look of his worn-out wife. A stereo like this is arguably a lot for painting a name and some stripes on a truck. It’s worth a lot and easy to move. But in this case, Nick knows, it’s easy to be generous. The Louis chairs are probably worth ten times as much. But of course the paint-sprayer doesn’t even consider a chair. Chairs are just to sit in.

  No cash changes hands. A deal that’s cleaner than cash. Nick likes that, too.

  In another couple of minutes, after savoring last tokes of tobacco, they are all back in the truck cab, out the gate, hunched shoulder to hunched shoulder, a military night operation. The truck painting is probably unnecessary, but Nick doesn’t discount its symbolic value—demonstrating to the crew the importance of being careful. To protect their franchise. In that alone, the effort might be worth it. If trouble ever comes, Nick knows, it will more than likely arise from some unforeseen incompetence of LaFarge, Chiv, or Al.

  While the painting may be unnecessary, it’s almost traditional by now, a ritual part of the trip. Like a favorite roadside stop on a family outing. At a certain point you just do it because everybody expects it. It’s simply part of the journey.

  He looks at them—Chiv, LaFarge, Al—in the rearview mirror. Some outing. Some family.

  Pulling back out onto I-80. Heading west.

  Peke still has the Mercedes sedan. He still has money in the market and in the bank. He still has his wife. He still has his kids, and their futures, and their quick, easy smiles and comfort in the world, and his grandchildren with their bright eyes and adorable faces. He still has what he was wearing the day before.

  “Oh, Daddy,” his daughter Anne says on hearing.

  The others, Daniel and Sarah—she from some far-flung terminus of modern life, he in an office Peke can picture precisely, each of them reduced to a slight, tinny voice over the wire—simply listen, stunned, offering suggestions hollowly, knowing their ever-competent father already has it as well in hand as anyone could. He is wordlessly proud that none of his three children indicates any thought of selfishness—of heirlooms gone, of their rightful inheritance of expensive artwork looted. They seem to be concerned primarily and genuinely with the effect on their parents, and with nothing beyond that.

  All three have been living their own lives for years now, as Peke and his wife have always hoped and wished for them. Their parents’ life is remote to them. They all accept that at this moment, oddly, there is nothing more for them to do.

  Rose’s reaction, though wordless, is the most pronounced. This was her home, her roost, as it is so often a wife’s more than a husband’s. She has gone silent. Has drawn in. She says nothing because there is nothing to say. She seems to feel nothing, because, he knows, there is too much for her to feel. She seems to be in a kind of limbo—fully recognizing the fact but not yet accepting it, functioning without feeling. It seems that she wants no discussion of the event—no grieving, no wistful philosophy, no recrimination or assignment of blame. He has always thought of her as highly resilient, but in truth her resilience has never been tested. For Rose, it seems the event is simply still too close. In truth, he can’t tell how she will handle it, because she is not handling it yet.

  A further conversation with the police brings little else. Peke learns (one of those little facts that he’s sure he will now know forever) that there are 246,000 semi tractor-trailers on the American road at any given time, and to most Americans, of course, apart from their signage, the vehicles are indistinguishable from one another. This sleek white one is likely not so sleekly white anymore, says the detective.

  “I mean, can you describe the truck to us at all? Any markings? Any distinguishing features?” the detective asks, his weariness undisguised, as if knowing already that Peke cannot. As if knowing already that Peke barely even looked at or considered the truck. “That’s the beauty of the scam,” says the officer, with a thin smile that hovers between admiration and resignation, which Peke resents.

  Stanley Peke has been shrewdly alert all his life. His shrewdness, his alertness, have indeed brought him his life. And for a moment, he was stupid. And one stupid moment, it seems, one lax moment, wipes out all the shrewdness of a lifetime.

  For days, he’s furious. He inhabits the fury, sleeps with it, wakes with it, lies in bed with it, waiting for it to burn itself out enough for him to sleep. He’s ready to get into the Mercedes and spend the rest of his years, if it takes that, driving around the continental United States, looking for them. Looking for the truck. Looking for wherever they took it. He’ll find it, too. That is the intensity of his rage. Irrational. Fanciful. Consuming.

  The slick deception returns to him in individual elements. The foreman’s concerned look. Peke had thought it was concern about his senility. Yes—checking, assuring, that Peke was senile and gullible enough. And, uh, you’re all set for tonight? With a place to stay?—the seemingly concerned questions had been only the thief noting Peke’
s schedule and plans. Staying right here? Wow. Huh. Well, enjoy it. The foreman-thief calculating that it gave him just one night’s head start until the scam was discovered, but that was plenty, more than enough. No, sir, it’s today. The twenty-fourth. Earnestly checking the clipboard. Employing the authority of the written word. Peke relives every moment of precisely how it was done. He witnesses again every one of those smiles. Inauthentic smiles, he’d correctly sensed. But he’d thought it was only company policy, company edict, that was behind their inauthenticity. And that general cheerfulness? Perhaps the one thing that was real. The cheerful realization that their slick trick was going to work. Work again, no doubt—as practiced, as polished, as it seemed to be. The rage wells up in him again.

  Though another line of thought is always alongside that rage, on a parallel, logical track: It’s only our things. We have plenty of money. We can live simply. What have we really lost? We don’t possess our memories physically, after all, and those are certainly worth more than the rest of it, and we still have those. We have reached the stage of life where we want—need—to simplify our lives. Doesn’t this do just that? Force it, accelerate it, but simplify nonetheless?

  Of course, he knows that this criminal—this thief—probably counts on exactly that attitude. (Rage needs focus, and the focus of his rage has narrowed to the quick-grinning, too-earnest foreman, presumably the ringleader.) Peke can imagine that the man preys exclusively on the elderly. It’s so easy, and the elderly never press the police very hard; the elderly respect the system. Accept, resign themselves to the loss, collect the insurance. Remind themselves that they haven’t been physically injured or even threatened. This criminal, this thief, probably counts on all that, and it works, and that infuriates Peke anew. Fans the flame.

  And something else. Something else tucked into his rage and frustration that he knows he can’t separate out. An extra texture to the crime, to his victimization, that he pushes away, that he is not yet ready to confront. The uniformed men. The empty house. His rage, he knows, covers it over and consumes it, for now. A rage that he knows is beyond this event. A rage that is visceral and primal. The uniformed men. The empty house.