$200 and a Cadillac

by Fingers Murphy

  Victor watched the side of the house, waiting to start the car, when he noticed something strange. “Wait a minute.” He perked up, blinked his eyes to clear his vision, and said, “Who the fuck is this guy?” Victor pointed and Tom turned and saw it too.

  A very fit man in his late forties scaled the rear section of the chain link fence like a professional and bounded across the yard and up against the house. He wasn’t dressed like a burglar, and his movements were swift and smooth, as though his actions required no thought at all. The man went flat against the wall and turned quickly to peek in through the glass window in the back door. Seeing no one, he sent his gloved hand through the glass and was turning the knob from the inside in half a second. And then he was gone, disappearing into the house. Textbook moves, Victor thought.

  Tom stared at Victor and asked, “Who the hell was that?”

  Victor returned the stare and shrugged. They waited another minute. Glancing back and forth from the house to each other. But with every second, Lugano was getting further away. They might lose him. Finally, Victor started the car and pulled away.

  “Fuck it,” he said. “If the bastard’s getting robbed, it only proves there’s justice in the world.”

  “Karmic fate,” Tom laughed.

  “Fuckin’ A.”

  XXVII

  All night, the pieces churned inside him: the dog’s piss running through the dust on the tire; the wheel ruts in the sand in the desert; the tee-pee of baseball bats in the corner by the door; the curvature of the dent in the aluminum frame of the dead man’s backpack. Then there was Ron’s strange and nervous tone. The conversation replayed itself in an infinite loop, posing the same question over and over: Why would a forklift driver move from Houston for a job driving a forklift? Surely there were forklift jobs in Houston. Loading and unloading trucks had very little to do with the oil industry. All of it seemed connected in ways that made no sense, but persisted nonetheless.

  After a fitful sleep, Mickey lurched up from unconsciousness knowing immediately that it was Ron, without entirely knowing why. He sat upright in the bed, wondering why he hadn’t seen it sooner. And almost as soon as it seemed clear he was overwhelmed with doubt. Didn’t it seem absurd? How could he be sure? There was nothing about Ron Grimaldi that seemed suspicious—certainly nothing that suggested he was a killer. What would the motive be? It made no sense at all.

  But Mickey couldn’t help thinking about it. At his kitchen counter, making coffee, he ran through everything he knew about Grimaldi, which he realized was next to nothing. The guy moved to town a few years before. He worked at Monarch. He coached baseball. He was quiet and kept to himself and never caused any trouble of any kind. In nearly every way, Ron Grimaldi was a model citizen, at least by Mickey’s standards. Keep your mouth shut, keep to yourself, don’t bother anyone. If only everyone were like that.

  In the Suburban, he thought about the footprints in the sand memorializing the young man’s final moments. Then he remembered the stink of the rotting body. Mickey winced at the thought of it. Disturbing memories of death floated through his head. He shook them off as he ran into his office to grab the file.

  Jimmy looked up from the counter and checked his watch. “Bit early for you, isn’t it, Chief?”

  Mickey grunted and went through to the back, snatched the file off his desk, and flipped through it on his way back down the hall. There was virtually nothing in it but a few grisly Polaroids, a brief medical report from Dr. Kramer, photocopies of the kid’s ID, the background check, the parents’ address, and the notes from the brief but painful conversation he’d had with them.

  Jimmy looked up again when Mickey came back into the room. Mickey lingered at the end of the counter, thumbing through the file, and then closed it and asked, “What do you know about Grimaldi? The baseball coach?”

  Jimmy scratched at his wide, square jaw and then folded his arms across his chest. “Seems like an alright guy. Guess I never thought about him much. Quiet. Keeps to himself.” Jimmy raised his eyebrows and shrugged. What else was there to say?

  “You remember when he came to town?”

  “Not really.” Jimmy took a drink from a Remington Firearms coffee mug and added. “Been here four or five years I guess. Something like that.”

  “Yeah. I guess it’s been about that long.” Mickey set the folder on the counter and put his hands on his hips. “You hear about the 911 we had last night?”

  “Carl said something about it when I came in. Said it was an erroneous call or something. No big deal.”

  “It was at Grimaldi’s house. We went though the place. Didn’t find anything. But he seemed kind of strange. I guess it got me thinking about the guy and I realized I really don’t know anything about him.”

  Jimmy rubbed one of his cheeks with the palm of his hand. Thinking. Feeling the stubble that was already coming through the skin at eight in the morning. He was the kind of guy who had to shave again in the evening if he was going out. “That’s not so strange. I mean, what do you know about anybody really?”

  “Where would you guess he was from?”

  Jimmy thought it over. “Back east, I guess. New York … New Jersey. Looks like a guy from Brooklyn. Not that I’ve ever been there. But you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah. I know exactly what you mean.” Mickey squinted and shook his head. “But he told me he moved here from Houston, for a job at Monarch, driving a forklift.”

  Jimmy laughed. “Man, times must be hard in Houston.”

  “That’s just it. I’m not so sure they are. It’s not like he’s an oil rig guy or something like that. He’s a forklift driver. There weren’t any jobs driving forklift in all of Houston?”

  Jimmy took another gulp of coffee and smiled. “What’s got into you, Chief? Maybe the guy likes peace and quiet. All kinds of weirdoes end up out here.” Jimmy motioned toward Mickey with his chin and smiled. “Hell Chief, you’re living proof of that.”

  Mickey chuckled and turned to leave. “Fuck you, Jimmy. And stay near a radio in case I call. I’m going to check out our friend Grimaldi a little more. Something’s not right.”

  It was a twenty minute drive out to Monarch and Mickey tried to piece it together, but couldn’t. Why would it be Grimaldi? What reason could there possibly be? So a guy moves from Houston to the desert and drives a forklift. So what? It was like Jimmy said, lots of strange people ended up in Nickelback.

  He pulled into the big parking lot and drove up and down the rows of parked cars. He found Grimaldi’s truck on the far edge of the lot, parked up against the fence, facing out at the wide desert, like a prisoner staring freedom in the face. Mickey pulled up behind it, blocking it into the parking space, as though the empty truck might somehow make a break for it.

  And then he sat, staring at the back of the truck, thinking through the implications of what he was about to do. It was the same problem police officers around the country faced every time they had a hunch. Every time intuition suggested something they just couldn’t shake, they were confronted with one simple fact: intuition wasn’t evidence. Probable cause to do a search required evidence and the evidence couldn’t be gathered without the search. The policeman’s Catch-22.

  Mickey tried to come up with something. He studied the tread on the tires. It could be the same tread he saw in the dust in the desert. But how many other trucks in this same parking lot had the same tires? Half of them? Hell, they all bought their tires at the same place.

  He thought about the stack of baseball bats near Grimaldi’s door. He thought about moving across the country for a job driving a forklift. Speculation. Nothing more. Intuition wasn’t evidence, it was only a suspicious guess. Mickey knew he didn’t have probable cause to search the truck. He knew if he found anything inside it, he wouldn’t be able to use it in court.

  Mickey looked through the chain link fence, out across the desert. It was a big place. A lot of things could happen to people out there. He thought it through again. There were
ways to deal with evidentiary problems. This wouldn’t be the first time he had to deal with something like that. Justice came in many forms in the desert. “Fuck it,” he whispered under his breath. Then he opened the door and got out.

  He jimmied Ron’s door and had it open in about five seconds. He did a quick visual survey of the inside of the cab. Nothing on the bench seat. A little trash on the passenger side floor. A map and some other papers on the dash. All the surfaces were coated with a film of dust, which was normal in the desert. Most people made little effort to keep their cars clean. There was no point.

  Mickey leaned in across the seat and opened the glove box. It was crammed with typical stuff, a stained owner’s manual, a wad of napkins, nothing of interest. Then Mickey ducked his head under the steering wheel and looked under the seat. He moved an empty beer bottle and an old baseball bat rolled out onto the floor mat.

  Mickey’s face hovered above it, staring at the cracked, weathered wood. He had to remind himself that it wasn’t uncommon for someone to keep a bat under their seat. In his years as a cop—especially in Los Angeles—he’d seen a thousand of them. He’d even been chased by a few. But in all those years, he’d never found one more interesting, never wanted to see one so badly.

  Mickey stood up and studied it in the bright sunlight. The wood was porous. It would absorb all kinds of stuff: water, sweat, grease, oil, blood. Anything it came in contact with. Mickey grinned, stuck the bat in a plastic bag, and went to find Paul Kramer.

  XXVIII

  Eli kept the gun in his lap as he drove. He ran his fingers over its textured grip as the truck crept down the freeway. He pictured how it would go over and over again. He would do it without hesitation. It would be automatic.

  Ron would show up a little after four o’clock—just after his shift—and Eli would pull out the gun and do it the first chance he got. Would he just walk up to the cab of the truck? Would he wait for Ron to get out and walk up to him? He could do it either way. He ran through the various scenarios in his head.

  Eli remembered a motivational speaker who’d once come to the high school in Nickelback to talk to the students. The guy had been a prisoner of war in Vietnam and told them that all he did for the two years he lived in a cage was imagine playing golf over and over on the course in his hometown. When he was finally rescued and made it home, the guy went out to play a round and shot a seventy-six.

  Visualize success and you can achieve it. That was the old guy’s message. Eli smiled. He was visualizing success all the way home. Visualizing Ron’s wide-eyed face, frozen at the instant of recognition, at the moment he realized both his own assassination and his impotence to stop it. A hand clutching at his chest, the shot already through him, and the glimmer of awareness fading from his dying eyes. The son of a bitch was going to learn and learn good. Killing him would be easy.

  The biggest problem Eli had was getting on and off the freeway to hit the banks on the way back home. The tanker truck was big and slow and wasn’t designed to weave in and out of traffic or snake its way through parking lots so its driver could make half a dozen withdrawals in the course of an afternoon. Worse yet, Eli was in a hurry. He needed to make it back and be ready to go before Ron got there.

  The first stop went smooth. He stood in line inside the bank. Went to the counter. Filled out a withdrawal slip for five grand, and handed it to the cute little Mexican gal behind the counter.

  He was staring at her tight torso and smooth, milky brown cleavage, thinking about fucking her, when she asked, “How do you want it?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Twenties? Hundreds?”

  It was an interesting question, and he thought it through. Twenties would make it look like a lot more cash. “Twenties,” he said.

  She brought it back like it was no big deal. Eli walked out and felt a relief run through him that surprised him. And then he thought, why should I be tense, what’s the big deal, it’s my money? And then he realized it wasn’t getting the money that made him tense at all. It was the impending act of murder looming at the end of the afternoon.

  In a few short hours, he would expect himself to kill a man. He drove the truck to the next bank, fingering the gun and wondering if he would really be able to do it. Somehow, the cash piling up in the little knapsack he’d brought along to carry it in made the whole ordeal real in a way it hadn’t been before.

  At the second stop, he added another five grand. Two hundred fifty twenty-dollar bills in a three-inch stack. He sat on the bench seat of the truck and stirred the cash around in the bottom of the sack, tossing it like pasta in a sieve. What was it about money that made people kill? The clusters of green paper, bouncing in the bag, didn’t seem to care one way or another who owned them.

  But regardless of why, the fact of the matter was that people did kill for money and Ron Grimaldi had beaten an innocent stranger to death with a baseball bat merely to prove a point. And the point was clear. Grimaldi would do the same to Eli or Eddie if they didn’t start producing some profit.

  Eli tossed the knapsack on the seat beside him and held the gun in both his hands. The stainless steel was warm in the midday heat. Eli ran his index finger down the four-inch barrel, over the ridges in the cylinder, and then pointed it at the floor and stared down the sights. He could see the bullets in the chambers. Six of them. And he planned to use them all.

  He started the truck and hit the freeway, his resolve strengthened. He told himself it wasn’t really about money. Eli rubbed his face where the bruises had formed from Ron’s kick to the head. He ran his tongue along the inside of his lips where the flesh was rough and torn from being ground into his teeth. It wasn’t about money at all. It was about revenge. And somehow, that seemed to make it easier to contemplate.

  They’d all made a deal and Ron was trying to change it after the fact. It wasn’t right. Ron couldn’t do it without them and he knew it. It might have been Ron who dreamed it all up, but it was Eddie and Eli who were essential to the plan’s success. What did Ron know about the oil business?

  Eli pulled off and went into another bank. He was getting tired of the process. It was making the return trip entirely too slow. This time he asked for ten grand and they gave it to him. He studied the balance on the withdrawal slip on the way back out. Fourteen thousand. Eli stood on the sidewalk, reading it over. Fourteen, plus the twenty he had, made only thirty-four total.

  The runs from today wouldn’t be in yet. Hell, Eddie was probably still emptying his truck back at the yard. But the runs from yesterday should have been and they weren’t. There were a million reasonable explanations for a delay, but there were a ton of suspicious ones too.

  When he got back to the truck he felt the bulge of the cash in the bag. It looked and felt like a lot of money now. Twenty grand in twenties. He smiled into the bag. He wouldn’t think of giving it to Ron.

  He thought again as he drove. Other than the run-ins with Ron, the last week had been smooth. The routine was worked out. No one new had been coming around. Nothing strange had happened. No one suspected anything. The reason the money wasn’t in the account was probably due to a processing delay, an electronic glitch or something. Things like that happened everyday. If it wasn’t in the account on Monday, then he would start to worry.

  The only problem was that now they wouldn’t have the fifty they’d promised Ron. Would they have to explain that? Eli smiled as he pulled onto the freeway again. There wouldn’t be time to explain it. Ron was never even going to see the money. The only thing he was going to see was his life flash before his eyes. All those years of doing whatever kind of shit he’d done. Driving a damned forklift around or whatever.

  The thought came back to him again as the freeway climbed up into the high desert and began to crawl across the wide-open nothingness of the Mojave. What did Ron know about the oil industry? For a guy who worked at Monarch, and who claimed to come from Houston, where he’d worked at a refinery, the guy was awfully ignorant. He didn’t see
m to know much of anything about any of the equipment, the way the oil was transferred through the pipelines, the way it was sold. Nothing. He didn’t know a damned thing.

  And yet, the day he’d come out to the warehouse to talk through some kind of deal, he picked up on the pipeline buried in the ground right away. He asked all kinds of questions about it and came up with the plan right away. Maybe he was just a criminal mastermind, Eli thought. He sure seemed to come up with the plan awfully fast.

  When he finally took the exit to Nickelback, he felt a flutter of nerves. He checked his watch. It was just after one. He’d be out at the warehouse before three. Ron got off at four. That would mean an hour or more of waiting around, thinking it through, getting ready for it.

  Would he be able to do it?

  Eli gripped the gun again. This time his palm was sweating and it felt loose in his hand no matter how hard he squeezed. Jesus. Take some deep breaths. He set the gun on the seat next to the sack of cash. With the money Eddie would get they’d be sixteen thousand short. They’d probably have to kill Ron to keep him from killing them.

  XXIX

  Hank was careful not to disturb anything, but that didn’t mean he didn’t comb the house completely. He put on his skintight spandex gloves and went to town. He wasn’t looking for anything particular and it wasn’t something he normally did. Hank had always believed that the less you knew about your target’s personal life, the easier the job was. The last thing he wanted was to spend an afternoon surrounded by pictures of some poor schmuck’s wife and kids. He’d done that before, and it wasn’t fun.

  But there was no risk of that with Lugano. Hank already knew him. And at any rate, the house was strangely vacant of personal touches. Certainly no wife or kids. But no family of any kind. No parents, siblings, nothing. The walls were mostly bare, other than a few framed prints. Hank studied one, a large black and white photograph of the Manhattan skyline, probably from the 30s or 40s. It was a somber reminder of home. Hank wondered if Lugano ever went back. Snuck into town for a long weekend, soaking up the vibe, the energy of the city, and staying away from the old haunts where someone might see him.