Moving Day: A Thriller

by Jonathan Stone

  He looks up, and Grady is standing next to him. “We’re ready. You want to check it all?”

  Peke shakes his head no.

  “Beautiful Mercedes there, sir, if you don’t mind my saying.”

  Peke smiles. It is, isn’t it?

  “We’ll be at 3901 Pacific View Tuesday morning,” says Grady brightly.

  “We’ll be there to let you in,” Peke replies.

  They smile briefly, diffidently at each other. It’s proving easier than either of them expected.

  “I’ll close the gate after you,” says Peke.

  Grady frowns, clearly uncomfortable with Peke’s staying behind. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea. These people will be back.”

  Peke pats him lightly on the shoulder, never dropping his gentle smile. He can play old and wise when he needs to. “I’ll only be a few minutes behind you. It’s OK.”

  Peke watches the truck pull out. White and gleaming against the landscape, its surfaces playing games of light with the afternoon Montana sun.

  He walks one last time into the big wooden barn.

  The outside light is cast at an angle against the old Mercedes convertible, tucked into the side of the garage bay.

  He opens the door. Settles into the richly familiar driver’s seat. Inserts the spare Mercedes key that is still on his own key ring.

  The car coughs twice and turns over. He pushes a button on the burled-walnut dashboard. The top lowers, smoothly mechanical.

  He pulls his car carefully out of the barn, into the sun.

  It has been so easy. So fluid, so smooth. So quiet, so dreamlike. An old man casually strolling the enemy’s lair. He is suspicious of how easy. But he is suspicious of everything. Maybe it is simple at last. Maybe there is a balance here. That in a life in which what should have been easy was so brutally hard, it is time for what should be hard to be easy.

  A rich, bald old man drives past Freedom Café in a vintage Mercedes with the top down.

  The three skinheads sitting in the cafe look out and notice.

  Out here at the crossroads of Freedom Café, it rates as an unusual event. You don’t see that kind of thing. It is only a moment. A dream.

  There is something loosely disconcerting, something annoying, about it.

  One of the skinheads thinks vaguely of an old man who wandered into the cafe a few days ago. But that guy had a cowboy hat.

  The big white Mid-South Partners truck pulls past the gate, past the pickups and trailers, past the farmhouse, across the mud fields, and around to the overhead doors at the far end of the barn. Home. Transitory, dust-crusted, roughly kept, but home. Forty-two hours after the fact, Nick is still stewing about the poor Miami Beach taste of the widow. Eccentric modern furniture, too distinctive, too difficult to move. But there were some paintings. Christ—all that money, all that leisure time, and no taste, thinks Nick. No taste.

  Nick hears the dogs barking but doesn’t see them. They usually come greet the truck, scrabble and dance excitedly around its tires as it pulls in. Maybe they’re around the other side of the barn, chasing something in the woods.

  LaFarge hops out of the truck and trots over to the overhead doors to unlock them while Nick maneuvers the truck around, backing it into position. It was a tiring, all-night drive. He’s thinking they can unload later in the day, leave it all in the truck for now, break open the beers, pop on the stereo. Although it’s hard to gather everyone back to the job after a few hours of drinking, after they’ve been off the clock.

  He hasn’t yet moved out the previous goods. Still too early. He’ll have them put this load in next to them. Once dealers are found, it’ll be more efficient anyway to deliver the marketable parts of the loads together.

  “Hey, Nick?”

  “Hey what?”

  LaFarge stands looking up at the cab with a stricken expression on his face. Like he’s done something horrible. Fucked up big.

  “Some of our stuff . . .”

  “What about it?” says Nick irritably.

  LaFarge can barely believe it even as he says it. “It ain’t here.”

  Nick stands looking at the empty space just inside the huge barn’s garage bays.

  He paces the dirt-pack floor. Looks down, stares, as if waiting for the goods to reappear.

  Someone’s found him. He’s deep in these goddamn woods, where he lives with no one and nothing, exists like some grumpy fairy-tale character, like some miserly ogre or banished warlock, yet he’s been found.

  He feels the invasion. He feels the violation. He is aware of the irony, that this is precisely how his victims must feel, but his thinking for the moment is occupied by more practical concerns than irony. Data; information; implications; revenge. Irony is shoved far to the side.

  He thinks first of the locals, of the crazy neo-Nazis he’s coexisted uneasily with, the nuts in the woods, seeing him go in and out with his truck, unable to resist anymore, sneaking in to share the spoils. His fury rises. They’re fools. He’ll find them.

  He soon sees, though—his overorderly, overclerical mind almost immediately notices—that the only items taken are items from the last job. Nothing else touched. In another couple of weeks, depending on buyers, the items would have been intermingled. But they weren’t yet.

  The neo-Nazis would have cherry-picked, grabbed only what intrigued them. Or ransacked it, leaving a trail of mess. One or the other. But this is neither.

  He looks again more closely, considers. Other quick theories and visions—of petty pilferers and local teenage adventurers and reckless hayseeds—drop away.

  It’s only the items from the last job.

  Including, he now sees—feeling its absence like a physical emptiness inside him—the silver Mercedes.

  It’s as if—carefully, considerately—the owner has come and retrieved his things. That old man with the accent.

  Nick feels his stomach clenching. He’s aware of a throb at his temples. He feels his brain winding tight, seizing like a broken machine.

  That old man.

  It would explain things, except for the fact that it seems impossible. From two thousand miles away? How would the old man have found them? Could the truck have been followed? Nick would have noticed. He was looking. He is always looking out for being followed. He could not have been followed day and night across two thousand miles by an old man.

  Did it happen when he went back to the safe-deposit box? That seems more likely. But he hired locals, was so cautious. He can’t imagine that he was even seen. He was never in the bank himself, and if seen, then—again—certainly not followed. Not—again—across two thousand miles. He would have noticed—careful Nick. Alert, aware, spending his professional life looking in the rearview mirror.

  He is instantly and sickly aware that if he has been found like this, then very possibly the police have been informed, have maybe taken a look already, and have been patiently, watchfully waiting for his return.

  In which case they will be swooping in, noisy and overstaffed and overarmed and overarrogant, any moment now.

  But all is quiet. They do not.

  And if the old man were going to contact the police, he would not have taken his things back like this. If the police were involved, this is not how it would go—one person’s possessions retrieved, others left. The police require evidence. Procedure. Equal treatment of the victimized.

  No, he realizes, at least for now, there seems to be no police involvement. The police have not been called. Did not call the cops. He tucks that away.

  As he begins to accept that it might actually be that old man, he gets angrier. Angrier that the old man has somehow pulled this off. The clenching in his stomach spreads, becomes a heat surging through his body like a chemical, like a medicine gone bad, sitting hot in the bottle too long.

  He’s alone in the barn. The others huddle outside—they know to move away when Nick is angry.

  Nick moves slowly out of the barn, still stunned, confused—the ange
r still spiraling upward.

  He notices only now that the dogs are in the pen. The pen is closed. How did he do that? How did the old man get them in there?

  As Nick opens the door of the dog pen, his dogs come bounding out, released, freed, jumping around him, exultant.

  He kicks the first one in the jaw. It yelps and recoils.

  He kicks the second in the side, before it can move away in confusion, in instinctive defense.

  “What the fuck good are you?” He goes to kick them again, but they are faster than he is; they steer clear, scurrying away across the field.

  He runs at them, tries to land a few more kicks, but they manage to stay a few steps ahead of him, adeptly avoiding him until he stalks the other way.

  If he has to be with them to give the attack command, what the fuck is the point?

  Nick inspects the garage-door mechanisms. The side-door lock. The career thief reconstructing how he was robbed. Bringing an expert’s perspective.

  Nothing damaged.

  He sees car tracks in the dirt. The Mercedes tracks.

  He stalks up the farmhouse’s back steps, sees the broken pane.

  He toes the broken glass off the wooden landing.

  Entering, looks at the key ring on the nail by the door. It’s there, where he always leaves it. But returned there, he is sure, by the old man. The old man who saw the key ring and knew. Keys to the kingdom. Maybe even thinking, You found my brass key. Now I’ve found yours.

  Sullenly, wordlessly, Nick heads for his office.

  Sits down at his desk.

  Opens the second drawer.

  Of course.

  The jewelry is gone.

  Nick feels it. The old man sitting here. The fury rises in Nick, a fresh wave of it, washing over him.

  He pounds his fist on the desk. Spins in his chair and yanks open a file drawer behind him. Riffles through it frantically, until he stops at a folder. He stares at the folder a moment, before pulling it out and opening it.

  The old man’s signature has been ripped off the top sheet. Nick took it to make copies, sending the copies of the signature to the safe-deposit box actors, for them to practice from.

  But the rest of the fake pink form is still there, with the address: 3901 Pacific View, Santa Barbara.

  Is the old man really taking his things there? Is he that arrogant? But he is arrogant enough, after all, to come collect his things deep in the Montana woods.

  Will he now try to hide from Nick? No—he will go on with his life, certain, probably, that Nick wouldn’t risk an escalation of events. Wouldn’t tangle with someone so clearly and completely onto Nick. Someone crazy and determined enough to cross the country, to somehow find his way here, in order to retrieve his things. Or maybe the old man figures Nick has already tossed the original delivery address. But even if Nick didn’t have it, he could probably still get the destination address from Dolly, his moving-company contact, to confirm it—that’s where the Pekes’ name came from. It’s probably still in Dolly’s computer. The old man must have guessed at Nick’s having some mechanism, some system, like that. Or maybe the old man simply figures Nick would never jeopardize his whole enterprise by coming after one old man, one particularly stubborn mark.

  In which case, the old man—pretty good at figuring, apparently—has finally figured wrong. Smart old man. Stupid old man.

  You can’t just come in here and steal my things, thinks Nick.

  I’m gonna get my things back.

  Nick sits inside Freedom Café. The three skinheads are seated around him.

  He’s asked if he can join them, speaking to them directly for the first time, and they sense that this has significance, that this is an occasion. Nick senses they’ve been itching to know what it is he’s doing with that big white truck on that property out there. Maybe they’ve even come by, aimlessly curious, but have seen the gate, heard the dogs, and thought better of it, though it’s probably only fed their curiosity.

  Nick’s been thinking about the old man, and that gracious, tasteful house, and that accent that Nick heard in the few sentences he exchanged with the old man.

  That accent. That beautiful house.

  You don’t want to leave anything, he’s explained to his crew, punctuating the lesson by tossing the carton of pictures into the green Dumpster. You want to take everything. You need the annihilation to be total, so they know what they are dealing with. So they’re not tempted to tangle.

  He has explained, demonstrated all that to his guys, and look what happened.

  He’s been thinking about it all night. Thinking about the old man’s show of friendliness. Thinking about his own crew—Chiv, Al, LaFarge. The trick with them is, they’re real movers. They look like they are, feel like they are. They have a simplicity of spirit about them not to arouse any suspicion. They make the marks feel relaxed. In part, he knows, because they’re not, at heart, mean guys. Nick knows very well that he is the mean one.

  For this, he needs a little more meanness than his guys have.

  “I’m Nick, by the way.”

  “Dustin,” says one of the skinheads.

  “Lee.”

  “Pork,” says the third, with a hard, hungry body, and an expression that says, Don’t ask.

  All curt, militaristic.

  This could work.

  He sits with the skinheads and tells them exactly what he does. Tells these peculiar, dangerously disconnected near-strangers exactly how he makes his living. How he bought the farm. Tells them about the operation. All about it. They are rapt, fascinated, drinking it in, their eyes lit like children’s at Christmas, twinkling in the light of the tree. Visions of sugarplums. Nick tells them so that they trust him.

  Nick sits and talks to them and looks at them with their swastikas on biceps and between Dustin’s eyebrows, like Manson. Early twenties, all of them, he’s guessing. He looks at them in their identical open leather vests, with their fierce conformity to one another. He has always known that despite their wild appearance, the skinheads out here are ultrarightists, Aryan-nation supremacists. While they all sit over a morning beer, then two, then three, getting comfortable, getting to know each other, he draws them out a little in their views, casually points to a few headlines on the front page of the Great Falls papers in the wire newsstand by the door, and he hears enough guarded jokes and sneering asides—about faggots and towel-heads and sand niggers and slants—to know they are subtly testing him, too. Poking around at the edges of his own intolerance. They’re the backwoods-Montana, American-pop version of Hitler Youth. With the same militaristic bent. With, Nick assumes, the militaristic urge for a mission.

  “So, listen,” Nick says finally, honestly, “the reason I came over, the reason I wanted to talk to you”—he leans forward, comes finally to the point—“I’ve got a job for you to do.” You freedom fighters. You super-Americans.

  Their eyes light with a new charge of schoolboy eagerness. Nick is nauseous from the ease of it.

  A Jew, Nick tells them. A Jew in California. A Jew in a Mercedes. As if the Mercedes part and the California part furnish irrefutable proof of the Jew part. He tells them what happened. How the Jew came and stole Nick’s things.

  Pork, Lee, are suddenly even more animated, shifting in their seats, excited. Hey, they saw him, driving. Shit, yeah, they were sitting right here. A half memory. As if they’ve seen the old Jew in their dreams. As if this is fate. As if their future has been put divinely and finally before their eyes by a higher, unknowable but ultimately righteous, force of justice.

  They look at one another. As if they can’t believe their good fortune. To be called to the Cause.

  Dustin. Lee. Pork. It might be the beers, but Nick finds himself warming to them. Feels a connection to them. He recognizes in them his own sharp anger, his own impatience with the world. His own distastes, his own bitternesses. It’s laughable, but he doesn’t deny it. In some strange sense, they’re his boys.

  Nick hasn’t the sl
ightest idea if the old man is Jewish. Who knows? Who cares? But for the purposes of his new partnership, he certainly is. Big-time Jew.

  And coming after his belongings like that. Finding where Nick is. Taking back only what is his. That niggling ledger-book accuracy. That sly justice. From everything Nick knows about him, seems like a Jew.

  It is a California morning—meaning perfect. The sun is bright, the sky a crystalline blue, suspended above a deeper blue and endless Pacific. A Pacific that suitably frames forever.

  Peke is on the back deck, having his pulpy, fresh-squeezed orange juice and his bowl of granola, staring out at the ocean. Rose is not awake yet; typically, she will be another hour. They are already settling into their new patterns. Their last new patterns, he knows, the patterns that will in all likelihood take them into their final sicknesses—whatever those turn out to be—and gliding frictionless and light, he hopes, into the ends of their lives.

  But the thought evaporates in the vision of the blue Pacific. In its unfathomable depth. In its rhythmic wash of eternity. It is God rendered in liquid and gases. Not merely evidence of Him. People misunderstand that. It is Him. That ocean. Peke doesn’t know if that conception of God comes from a seven-year-old boy’s untutored, wild deifications in the brutal winter woods of Poland—a protective mechanism of survival, an adaptive trick of mind. Or if it is—as he half suspects—actually a genetic inheritance, an ancient collective-unconscious connectedness that someday science will better grasp. He knows only that when he looks at the ocean—or the moon, or a redwood, or a leaf, or a stone—he feels he is literally looking at God. He’s surprised others don’t simply feel that. He knows he is like primitive man in that regard. Which is odd, ironic, given the majority of his life, a life of urbanity and sophistication and intricate judgments of art and politics. He is, has always been—in many more ways he sees as he grows older—a primitive.

  They are settled into the house. As planned, much has gone into storage now. The new house is gracious, California contemporary, teaks and redwoods, proud beams and broad glass soaring.