Stuff to Die For

by Don Bruns

  I grabbed one as she offered the tray. It appeared we weren’t going to drink on the front porch by the pool, but at this point it made no difference. An iced alcoholic beverage was a beverage from heaven no matter where we drank it.

  Em came out the door sipping hers. She’d kept Jackie company while we did our dirty work. James and I sat down on the small concrete porch and the girls joined us. I closed my eyes and tilted the glass, draining a quarter of it in one gulp. Sweet syrup with a bite. I could immediately feel the relaxing warmth in my veins. I would have settled for just this drink. James seemed interested in more than the drink or the money.

  “I don’t want to sound like I’m coming on to you, but—”

  Jackie smiled. “But you are?”

  “Skip and I can keep this in the truck overnight and unload it tomorrow.”

  Which was new to me. I’d thought we were going to unload it tonight at the storage unit and be done with it.

  “So,” he continued, “would you like to grab a bite to eat after I get cleaned up?”

  “You’re cute.”

  “You said that already.”

  “Yeah. It hasn’t changed. However, I really don’t think going out with you works.”

  James was in his selling game. “Jackie. Is it a class thing? You’re rich, I’m poor? Or is it an age thing? Because you can’t be more than a year older than I am and—”

  She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “You’re a charmer. However, I really don’t want to be seen with someone new at this point. My attorney cautioned against it. It’s that simple.”

  And that was it. We finished our drinks with some mild banter and hopped in the truck.

  James had the address for the storage building and we drove away.

  “So that’s the line. ‘Want to grab a bite to eat?’”

  “She has some class, and some money, bro. I couldn’t use my standard line, ‘Wanna fuck?’”

  The storage unit was in a small industrial park about seven miles from Indian Creek by the map and about ten million miles from Indian Creek by the status of the community. What the hell, it reminded me of Carol City. We drove through the narrow drives dividing the single story units until we saw number 352.

  “Are you going to back it in?”

  “We could just park it alongside.”

  “It’s going to be a lot easier if you back it in.”

  “All right. Get out and guide me.”

  I didn’t envy him. The space between the two buildings was narrow and I would guess even an experienced driver would have a tough time. He stuck his head out and surveyed the concrete area in front of the unit.

  “How close am I?”

  “Cut the wheel, more.”

  “It only cuts so far, pardner.”

  Now he was wedged. The truck was cockeyed in the space.

  “Straighten it out and start over.”

  He hit the gas, still in reverse. If I hadn’t jumped about four feet sideways I would have been smashed. Instead, I landed hard on my ass as I heard him yell, “Shit.”

  The truck rammed the building and I heard a thud and a crunch as the side of the building and the back of the truck buckled.

  “Skip, are you all right?” He jumped from the driver’s seat and jogged to the rear as I picked myself up. I patted myself down, checking to see if anything was broken.

  “Oh, shit.” James covered his eyes with his hand.

  I walked over to the truck and surveyed the building. “Man, you caved in the side of the unit.”

  “I don’t give a damn about that. Look at the truck.”

  “We’ll get it fixed, James. What about the building?”

  He gave it a quick glance. “We’ll unload and take off. Nobody can prove we did the damage.”

  Of course, he was right. The aluminum siding was damaged, but it could be repaired as well.

  James reached into his pocket and took out the key. He turned it and gave a tug as the garage door opened into the cavernous storage space.

  I fought with the heavy metal latch on the truck, finally forcing it open. The sliding back door eased up as dozens of boxes and envelopes spilled out onto the concrete apron.

  “Shit.” James stared at the four weeks’ worth of mail strewn across the front of the unit.

  “Help me pick this up.” I gathered an armful of envelopes and put them back into an open box.

  “What the—” James picked up a manila envelope.

  “We’re not going to make much progress one envelope at a time,” I said.

  “Something is wet and sticky here.”

  “Did you break something?” I didn’t see how that could matter. Someone was probably going to haul this stuff away in a couple of months and sell it or take it to a dump.

  James examined the envelope, then tore it open. He peered into the opening and froze.

  “What?”

  He didn’t speak, just kept staring.

  “What is it?”

  “Oh, shit. Oh, shit.” He dropped the envelope and shuttered.

  “James.”

  I picked up the envelope and glanced inside.

  “Take it out.”

  “Oh, God. You take it out.”

  “No, man. It’s gross. It can’t be—”

  I shook it out of the red-stained envelope and it fell to the concrete. Coagulated blood covered the stub of the severed finger. A blue-stoned class ring circled the knuckle. I shook the brown envelope again and a smaller gray envelope fell out. I stared at the finger, wanting to believe it was something else. Wanting to believe it was a magicians trick or a joke that James was playing. But deep in my stomach I knew it was real. Someone in Miami was missing a finger and we were the lucky guys who had found it.

  I lost my Long Island Ice Tea on the cement.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THERE’S A LINE IN THE MOVIE The Mexican that says, “Guns don’t kill people, postal workers do.” Despite James’ affinity for that quote, he had a belief that bank tellers would be the next group of employees to go ballistic.

  “Seriously, Skip,” he had said one afternoon on the patio. “Tellers stand there for six or eight hours and watch people come up to their windows. Some of these people have nothing, and the teller feels sorry for them. They’re taking out every last cent they’ve got and the teller knows they have nothing left. After a while they start to feel really bad.” He sucked on his green bottle and puffed on a cigarette. With Psychology 101 behind me, I’ve always felt he has an obsessive personality.

  “Then, they get all these rich assholes who come in and deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars. Or take that much out. They tell the teller that they’re making a down payment on a yacht or a cottage in the South of France, or whatever. After a while, these bank employees should go nuts. They’re making what? Ten bucks an hour. More than the poor people and a whole lot less than the rich.”

  “What’s your point?” I asked.

  “Bank tellers are going to start to kill people out of frustration.”

  “Who? Which class?”

  “The rich people. They’re going to start shooting the wealthy.”

  I got to thinking about that. In a way, Rick Fuentes was a banker. He arranged financing for business people. He’d raise the money, make the loan, and collect the interest. Maybe the people who gave him the cash weren’t happy with the way he was lending it. Or maybe a client who had borrowed money from Fuentes wasn’t happy with the terms. Seriously, maybe this was a banker thing.

  We’d found a neighborhood bar about a mile from the unit. In a back corner booth we nursed our drafts. I hoped that this drink would stay down.

  “Read it again.” I waved at the bartender and he pulled two more Buds from the tap.

  James pulled the letter from the small gray envelope.

  “We ask you to reconsider your decision. If you agree with us, we will give you the rest in relatively good shape. Jesus, Skip, what the hell does it mean?”

 
; “It means we should go to the cops.”

  He shook his head. “No way, compadre. It’s a federal offense to open someone else’s mail.”

  “James, my God. It’s someone’s finger.” I left the rest of our discovery hang in the air.

  “Not just someone’s finger.” James wasn’t going to leave it alone. “Someone who graduated from St. James High with us.”

  “Yeah, there’s that.” We were both silent for a moment. The St. James ring with our graduation date engraved on it was firmly planted on the severed digit.

  “And, Skipper, now that our fingerprints are all over the fucking envelopes and the letter, we’re going to get our asses kicked. The cops will fuck us, man. I have experience—or at least my old man had experience! I think we take it back to Jackie Fuentes and explain what happened.”

  “What? That you don’t know the difference between forward and reverse with a fucking automatic transmission?”

  He looked at me through half-slit eyes.

  “I’m sorry. Now isn’t the time to start on each other. You’re probably right. We need to go back to the Fuentes house and give her the finger.”

  James smiled, the first time since he’d wrecked the truck.

  The bartender brought the two beers, picked up the money and silently walked back to his bar. Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffet sang It’s Five O’clock Somewhere on the juke box, and two good-old-boys in cowboy hats at a table up front sang along. Other than that, there was no one in the room.

  “Well, I want it out of my truck. I sincerely do.”

  “Let’s go back to Jackie’s right now.” It was way past five o’clock.

  “I’m ready.” James slammed the full glass down on the table and stood up. I’ve known James Lessor since third grade and I have never, ever seen him leave a full beer on the table or anywhere else for that matter. This time he did, as he headed for the door. I remember taking a fast swallow and following him out. After all, I’d paid for the beer.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE GUARD ASKED FOR OUR IDs and James opened the rear of the truck.

  He gazed up and down at all the boxes. “Someone moving in?”

  “We’re moving some stuff back to the Fuentes house.” James kept nodding his head.

  “Nothing on the sheet here. I’ll have to call the house.” He picked up the phone and closed the door to the booth. We waited, not saying anything to each other. We’d been in trouble before. That was nothing new to us; however, it had never been this serious. The guard opened the door.

  “Mrs. Fuentes said she is not available for dinner tonight. She said that would be clear to you.”

  James opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

  “Can I speak with her?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry, she said she can’t be bothered any more this evening. Perhaps you could call her tomorrow.

  James had fire in his eyes. “Look, bud, I’ve got something of hers that she needs and I need to get back there and give it to her.”

  “You look, bud.” The guard frowned. “We have our own police force here, and with one touch I can summon a patrol car that will be here in sixty seconds. Would you like me to do that?”

  “Cops?”

  “Cops.”

  “No. I’ll call Mrs. Fuentes later.” James spun on his heel and I followed him. I checked on the rear door latch to make sure it wouldn’t spring open and we got back in the truck.

  “Want me to call Em?”

  “Why?”

  “She can call Jackie.”

  James was hot. I could almost see steam rising from the top of his head. “Honest to God, Eugene, no one else can know anything about this. Do you understand the severity of what we’ve got here?” That’s about as serious as I’ve ever heard him.

  “I don’t have to tell her anything. I can just ask her for Jackie’s number. Tell her you left your cell phone behind or we’re missing something.”

  He thought about it for a moment. “No. It’s not Jackie Fuentes’s mail, is it?”

  “Technically, no.”

  “Whose mail is it?” James was pissed.

  “It was addressed to Rick Fuentes.”

  “Exactly. Fuck Jackie Fuentes. She won’t see us, we’ll go to the end user. Remember Em telling us he’d moved into a condo over in Bal Harbor?”

  I did.

  “We’re taking it back to Mr. Fuentes.”

  “Jesus, James. That complicates things. We’ve got a load of his stuff in the back of the truck, and our client is his estranged wife. Now you want to go to the old man and admit that we not only have his stuff, but we’ve been opening his mail?”

  “Whose mail is it?”

  “Come on, man. This is so fucked up. You can’t be—”

  “Whose mail is it?”

  “He’s going to be so pissed. And Jackie is going to be in trouble, and Em is never going to let me forget this.”

  “Whose mail is it?”

  “Rick Fuentes’s.”

  He swerved, avoiding an almost invisible pothole in the road. “I think it’s time we deliver Mr. Fuentes’s mail. Come on, Skip, it’s the only thing that makes any sense.”

  “We put it in the storage unit.”

  “Can’t. Fingerprints are all over it. Jackie knows we were carrying the mail.”

  “We go to the cops, James. Now.”

  “Like hell! My whole life was fucked by the cops. Because my old man’s business partner split with the money, the cops arrested my dad. The cops threw him in jail when he didn’t know a goddamned thing. They convicted him and put him in prison for five years, Skip. Five ball-breaking, rip-your-guts-out years. That’s the way it was. You think I want to go to the cops with my fingerprints all over this thing? You think I want to put this finger and envelope in that storage unit so somebody can come back and claim we were involved in some sort of mutilation or murder? You think I want one damned thing to do with the law? You’ve got another thought coming. Mr. Fuentes is going to get his mail. Tonight. You on board?” He kept his eyes straight ahead, driving, as far as I could tell, without a destination. Steam was just about rolling out of his ears.

  For some reason I thought about our young Bahamian friend, Angel. Angel seemed to be high on drugs most of the time or totally blown away on alcohol, but we both considered him a friend. He’s learned to function in society in spite of his addictions, or as he calls them, his afflictions. Regardless of what they are, or in spite of what they are, Angel has a pretty good head on his shoulders. Angel can be very philosophical at times and I lay it on his intelligence and intuitive nature. He also reads a lot and memorizes these passages. They often have relevance—unlike James’s movie quotes. James says it’s the drugs he takes, but I think Angel is brilliant.

  I’ve heard Angel spout off philosophical sayings, and most of those times I’d have to agree with James. It was the drugs. However, one of Angel’s aphorisms immediately came to mind when James asked if I was on board.

  “No task is a long one but the task on which one dare not start. That task becomes a nightmare.”

  I know, it’s a stretch to believe a person high on chemical substances can think like that or remember it from verse, but he does. That’s Angel. But I was still confused how he knew about the hauling job. James must have mentioned it and then forgotten. There were many nights when that was more than possible.

  “All right. I’m on board. How do you propose to find this Rick Fuentes? I mean, we could call Jackie and—”

  “No. Can’t call Jackie. Let’s keep her out of this.”

  “All right. We know he lives in the Bal Harbor area. We could—” I was out of ideas.

  “Call information.”

  I stared at James as he concentrated on the road. We were headed down to the Bal Harbor area. I recognized the well-lit streets with high-end shops, perfectly groomed palms planted at regular intervals, and elegant high-rises that looked out over the harbor.

  “Dial it.”

&nb
sp; 411.

  “City and state please.”

  “Miami, Florida. Bal Harbor—a listing for Rick Fuentes.”

  It was a recording. The operator picked up. “Miami?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Name?”

  “Rick Fuentes.”

  “Please hold while we dial that number for you.”

  Son of a bitch. That charge would show up on my bill. Minutes and information charges, these things kept adding up.

  The phone rang. “Shit, James. He’s actually listed. What the hell do I say to him?”

  “The truth.”

  “What?” I was near panic at this moment. Rick Fuentes could pick up the phone at any second and I’d be left going, “Ah, uh, ah, uh. . . .”

  “Can you just tell him that we have some of his mail and we’d like to deliver it? Would that be so hard?”

  “No. I can do that.” Well thought out. I had to hand it to my man.

  James pulled over to the side of the street. We were in the area. Neither of us had a clue how to navigate in this well-to-do neighborhood. I’d been here once with Em. We shopped at Saks Fifth Avenue. She shopped at Saks Fifth Avenue. I didn’t spend a penny except for the six bucks for parking and the forty-dollar lunch. Two sandwiches and a shared salad. This was one expensive neighborhood.

  “Hello. We can’t come to the phone right now. Please, leave a message and we’ll call you as soon as possible.”

  Was there an original message anywhere in the world? One that said. “Hey, taking a crap, but once I’m done, I’d love to talk to you.” Or one I’d almost done at our apartment in Carol City. “We have caller ID. We know who you are. If we wanted to talk to you, we would have picked up, but obviously we didn’t. If you have anything at all that’s important to say, you’ll have to say it on the machine.”

  “This is Skip Moore. I have some mail for Mr. Fuentes. If you’d like us to deliver it to you please call me back.” I left the cell number.

  “We could sit here till next summer.”

  “He’ll call back.”