The Box

by Robert Swetz

  “Why?”

  “I really don’t know, except that we ran just one of the names from the driver’s licenses in that box, and now the FBI is going crazy about it. That’s all I know.”

  --- §§§§§§§§§§ ---

  In Washington D.C., Special Agent Rockford picked up his phone again. Within fifteen minutes, a dozen different people in his building had been alerted to the fact that Francesca Bianchi had last been seen in New York, and that the information from there had come from one of the local street gangs, the Scorpions.

  Half an hour after that, one of those FBI people casually walked out of the headquarters building where he walked along the street making a private phone call. “I just wanted to let you know, a driver’s license for Francesca Bianchi was found in New York not long ago. It’s an old license though, but it was in the possession of some street gang called the Scorpions. I just thought you might want to look into it.”

  “Indeed,” the man he had called replied.

  --- §§§§§§§§§§ ---

  He went up to the attic again. He had no real reason other than since he got back from that church, he had been sitting in the house too much. With his mother softly snoring below, he crossed over into the other building and went down the ladder built into the main air duct. He got out at the first floor and crawled through the ducts until he got to his favorite watching spot. He didn’t expect to see anything interesting, but he did. As he looked below him, he saw three men in nice suits walk towards Frank. Two of the men stayed a short way back from the one in the middle. Even from his perch, he could tell that everyone in the room seemed to be on edge.

  “Who…the hell…are you?” Frank asked in an amazingly nonchalant manner.

  “Someone you don’t want to mess with,” the man replied.

  “Huh!” Frank grunted. “I’ll mess with anyone I like. You’ve got quite a nerve walking in here, now what do you want?”

  “We got word today that a driver’s license was found.”

  “Well goody-goody,” Frank replied. “So you came here to us?”

  “The word we got was that it came from a box of them that you had.”

  Frank suddenly sat up straight. “Where the hell did you hear that?”

  “From around.”

  “Around where?”

  “I can’t say because I don’t know. The word came from someone else. They asked us to check on it.”

  “How do you know it was our box?”

  The man chuckled. “You just confirmed it yourself by the way you acted.”

  “You know, you could get shot just for being here,” Frank told him.

  “So could you. And trust me, if you shoot me, you’d be bringing down more trouble on you and everyone in your silly little gang than you can believe.”

  “Who you callin’ silly?”

  “You,” the man replied. “You and all your tiny little friends.”

  From his perch above them, Brian noted the anger increasing in the Scorpions. He also noted Little Paul putting his hand on his gun.

  “What is it you want?” Frank asked.

  “I need to know more about one particular driver’s license in that box.”

  Frank’s gaze seemed to turn all around the room as if he didn’t believe this guy would ask such a thing. “You want to know about one stupid thing in that box? Do you have any idea how we got that stuff?”

  “No, but I’m guessing you somehow managed to lose it.”

  Frank ignored that point. “We rip off old ladies. We grab their money and go. We don’t take the time to introduce ourselves. We get the job done and get out of there. We have no idea whose junk was in that box. We try the credit cards a few times. If they work, great, if not, we forget them. That box contained nothing but junk.”

  “Not…quite,” the man replied.

  “You mean there was something else?”

  “No, just a driver’s license for one particular woman. We’re looking for her. We’ve been looking for her for a long time. We want to know if you’ve seen her around.”

  “Who?”

  “Her name is Francesca Bianchi.”

  Frank laughed. “I don’t know no Francesca Bianchi. Not around here. To me that sounds like some kind of high-class name, for some high-class dame. Have you looked around you? There ain’t no high-class anybody livin’ here.”

  “But she must have been here sometime since you had her license.”

  “Shit!” Frank exclaimed. “We ain’t got no idea who we’re rippin’ off. We don’t know, and we don’t care.”

  “I think then,” the man replied, “that you would be wise to make it your business to find out if the woman is in the area. In fact, you should try looking through every place possible in the entire city.”

  “Huh!” Frank grunted. “Don’t make me laugh.”

  “I’m serious,” the man replied. “You ripped the license off, which means she must have been around here somewhere. Now you find her!”

  “Forget it!” Frank said as he got to his feet menacingly.

  The man took two steps closer to Frank. From up above, Brian suddenly saw Little Paul pull his gun and hold it sideways, aimed at the man.

  “Don’t move!” Little Paul threatened.

  “Put that away little boy, before you get killed,” the man told him.

  “Like hell!”

  Brian suddenly heard a gunshot and watched in disbelief as Little Paul hit the floor with a bullet hole in his head. He saw both of the men that had come in with the stranger pointing guns at the other Scorpions. “Oh shit!” Brian breathed. The gunshot might wake his mother. She’d find him missing. Before he could move, there were two more gunshots from below. When he looked down, the man who had been talking to Frank had his gun aimed right at Frank’s head. Worried about his mother waking up, he didn’t have time to see if anyone else had gotten shot. Panicked, he moved as fast as he possibly could to get back to his room.

  He heard his mother yelling for him before he got halfway through his own attic. He jumped down the hole and nearly fell off the stepladder. His mother was going crazy out in the rest of the apartment calling his name and looking for him. “I’m here Mom!” he called.

  She ran into his room and grabbed him. “Where the hell have you been? Something woke me up and then I heard gunshots…and I couldn’t find you!”

  There was no way he was going to let his mother know what he had been doing. “I was in the attic,” he told her.

  “The attic! What the hell were you doing up there?”

  I couldn’t sleep. It was too hot. It’s a lot cooler up there.”

  “It is? I would think it would be worse.”

  “Not over by the air vent. It’s higher up than it is here so the breeze that comes through is cooler.”

  “How did you find that up there?”

  He shrugged. “I got bored one day while you were at work.”

  She looked at him, then grabbed him and hugged him. “I was so worried that something had happened to you. I heard…gunshots! I just know it was those kids from next door.”

  “Yeah, probably,” he agreed. “Let me look out the window so I can see what’s happening.”

  “No! You don’t go anywhere near that window! You stay here, stay safe.”

  “I’m safe,” he replied. “It’s just the window. I look out it all the time.”

  “But not this time,” she told him. “Not now.”

  He got the impression that there was something more that was eating at her than the usual things. “Mom? Is there something wrong?”

  She hugged him. “No Brian. Not really. Not anymore. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

  She had said no, then told him there was something wrong. “What is it Mom?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “Just something I lost when my purse was stolen.”

  “What?”

  “Just something I was keeping for…the future.”

  �
��What?”

  “Nothing dear.”

  “It couldn’t have been nothing. What was it?”

  “Something from a long time ago,” she said. “Just one of my old driver’s licenses. Don’t worry about it, I’ve got a new one now.”

  “Oh. Why did you keep it?”

  “No reason,” she said. “It was just something I wanted to keep. But it’s gone now, and that’s that. No use crying over it.”

  The two of them sat there together for a few minutes until the sound of police sirens filled the air. Sirens that continued to come closer. Brian knew where they were going. The only time the police ever showed up was for a murder, and he had seen Little Paul get shot in the head.

  Despite his mother not wanting him to, he ran to the window to look out. He saw the first police car pull up right in front of the Scorpion’s building. By the time the two officers in it got out of the car, two more cars were arriving. More than one police car. That was unusual.

  He realized his mother was right there by his side, watching it all too. “I hope they killed each other. I hope they’re all dead!” she muttered.

  Only he knew that there had been someone else there. Three people that he hadn’t seen before. And he knew for a fact that none of the Scorpions had known who they were. With his mother hovering over him and holding his shoulders, they watched as eventually three different bodies were pulled out of the building and carried away. Three bodies! He had only seen Little Paul get shot but he had still been there when those men had fired two more shots. He wondered who else had been killed. Was it the strangers? That was his bet. Except he was pretty sure that they were the only ones to do any shooting.

  It was a long time before the police cars were gone and the night returned to normal. Except nothing felt normal now. As he had watched the goings on below, his mind had kept thinking about the strange things his mother had told him. She had lost another driver’s license. An old one that she had wanted to hang on to for some reason. Why? According to Mr. Giovanni, when you lost your license, you could always get another one. And his mother had already done that. It was an old license. So why did it seem to upset her so much? He couldn’t figure that part out.

  Eventually, there was nothing at all to watch and the two of them went back to bed. His mother to her room, and he, to his. If only he’d known about that other driver’s license before he gave the box to Father Joseph. But he hadn’t seen another driver’s license for his mother in that box. Of course, he hadn’t looked through everything in the box, but according to what his mother had said, he was sure it had to have been there. He just hadn’t looked through the box far enough. First thing tomorrow, he was going back to that church so he could get that box back. If he could find that license for his mother, he knew she’d be happy to get it. He just had to figure out some way to give it to her so that she wouldn’t know how he had found it. That was going to be a problem.

  In his mother’s room, she was lying on her bed, but she couldn’t sleep. There were too many troubling things going through her head. Not the least of which was Brian. What had he really been doing up in that attic? Was there a vent there that blew cooler air? She doubted it. She also doubted that she would ever get a straight answer out of him. He was too much like his father, always coming up with some kind of excuse to cover up the truth.

  But that wasn’t the only thing on her mind. She had told him about her old driver’s license. Not that it made any difference anymore. It was gone and that was that. No use crying over spilled milk. What was done, was done. What was gone, was gone. And it was her fault it was gone – all of it. She should have done something else with it. She should have put it someplace safer than hidden in her wallet. It was all her fault! As bad as things were, at least Brian would never know. He would never have a clue that all her dreams for the future were gone. A hundred and twenty million of them.

  Chapter 6

  He was up early the next day with only one thought on his mind – get the box back. Or at least go through it and find his mother’s old driver’s license. He should have spent more time looking through the box, but since it looked like all his mother’s things had been on top, he hadn’t seen any reason to bother digging much deeper.

  Five minutes after his mother disappeared down the street, he was out the door. He wanted to run to the church to see Father Joseph and get the box back, but he couldn’t get in until lunchtime – hours away. Instead, he went as far as the Scorpion’s building next door and that was it. The police cars were gone now, but there was some kind of yellow plastic tape blocking the door. Even the Scorpions couldn’t get in, unless they ripped the tape off, and he wouldn’t put it past them. He looked through the glass window of the door, but he couldn’t see anything.

  Unable to find any information that way, he went back up to his room and back into the attic. He crossed over between the buildings and went down the air shaft. All the way down to the hole behind all the stuff leaning against the wall where he could get out. The first thing that he noticed was that the pile of junk where he had found his mother’s purse was gone. All of it. That wasn’t good. With everything gone, he had no chance of finding his mother’s old driver’s license there. If it wasn’t in the box, then it would be gone forever.

  He poked his head out into the main room and saw no one. He wandered out. There certainly wasn’t much to see. He went over to where Little Paul had been shot. There was a dark red spot on the floor there. The blood spot was much smaller than he imagined it would be. He wandered around a bit, searching the floor, and found a much bigger one. He searched his memory, but he thought that was about where Cougar had been. He didn’t find the third blood spot until he was all the way on the other side of the room. Who had been there? It was a place that had been out of his sight.

  From the placement of the blood spots, none of them could have been from the strangers. But he already knew that. The only people to do any shooting had been the strangers. Little Paul, Cougar, and someone else had died because of them. Brian didn’t feel the least bit sorry for any of them. If only those strangers could have shot a few more Scorpions. Like maybe all of them.

  Not finding anything else, he went back to his room. He needed that box now, especially since the pile of junk was gone. That box was the only place left where his mother’s old driver’s license might be.

  --- §§§§§§§§§§ ---

  Was it a coincidence? But Crosby didn’t believe in coincidences – much. He was late getting into work because he had caught the gang shooting last night. The problem was that it was the Scorpions. Ever since he had gotten that box from Father Joseph, the only thing he kept hearing about was Scorpions. Coincidence? He was finding it hard to believe. Even the FBI were interested. And it all had to do with an old, out of date, driver’s license for some woman from Chicago. Did the gang shooting last night have anything to do with that? It didn’t sound likely, but he was afraid of coincidences.

  What other gang in New York would be that interested in the driver’s license, or at least the woman it belonged to? There was no use considering anything other than another local street gang. That’s who committed ninety percent of the murders in that area of town. Usually, it was one gang shooting another. It happened so often it was hard to keep track of it all. Turf wars! But a driver’s license wasn’t a turf war. So maybe it was all just a coincidence. It had to be!

  Three members of the Scorpions had been shot and killed last night. He hadn’t seen any blood spots anywhere else, but it had been late. He’d go out in a few minutes to check the scene again. The Scorpions had been around for a long time. He knew for a fact they could protect themselves, so why were there only three dead Scorpions found and nobody else? That worried him.

  He turned to one of his assistants. “Put out a call to the hospitals. We may have another gunshot victim out there from that gang shooting last night. I can’t believe that three Scorpions would get shot and they wouldn’t manage to kill at least one
of whoever did it.”

  He would go back to the crime scene again this morning and search it more thoroughly. After that, he would pay a little visit to all the gangs in the area. One of them had to have done it. It was all just coincidence. This was just another in a long line of gang related problems.

  As he got up from his desk to head down to his car, he noticed three strangers coming into the busy room. Two men and a woman. Just looking at the nice suits they were wearing caught his attention. Feds. He had no doubt. He stopped and watched as one of the men spoke to someone near the door. That person stood up and pointed directly at him. Yup. Feds. That FBI agent on the phone yesterday had said they’d be stopping by. Well, he didn’t have much at all that he could tell them.

  He waited until all three of them walked through the room to his desk. “What can I do for you?”

  “Detective Crosby?” one of the men asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m Special Agent Rockford. We spoke yesterday on the phone.”

  “Yeah. You said you might stop by.”

  Rockford turned to the other man with him. “This is Agent Sargetti.” He turned to the woman. “And Agent Casper.”

  “Great,” Crosby said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Can we see the driver’s license you found for Francesca Bianchi?”

  Crosby pulled out a desk drawer and picked up the card. He handed it over to Rockford. He watched as Rockford studied it briefly, then passed it around to the other agents. He also noticed that Rockford wasn’t giving it back to him. “Can I have that back?” he asked. “Something happened last night, and I need to be sure that card isn’t evidence.”

  “Evidence?” Rockford asked. “For something that happened last night?”

  “A gang shooting. But this time three of the Scorpions were killed. I was just about to go down there to search for more blood. It doesn’t make sense that a gang like that would lose three of their members and not manage to kill at least one of the other gang in the process.”