The Big Get-Even

by Paul Di Filippo

  “For what?”

  “Look at the plaque near the door, dummy.”

  There was the familiar player piano above the legend:

  NANCARROW LOGISTICS TRUST MANAGEMENT, LTD.

  “It’s his HQ,” said Stan. “Ol’ Algy likes to go to lunch every day about now. I want you to see him, fix him in your mind. Think about how you’re gonna take him for that big wad. I’d like to get up in his face and spit in his eye for sending me to the joint. But I’ll just stay down here outta sight and contemplate my delayed gratification.”

  We sat, not speaking, for about fifteen minutes. Sandralene opened her purse and took out a word search booklet and a pencil. She very slowly circled her vocabulary finds. The first time she licked the tip of the pencil, I almost groaned.

  As I once told Stan, I had been at a party with Nancarrow before, so I recognized him when he came out.

  Shorter than average, his trim build honed by many dedicated gym hours, sporting a thick shock of blond hair that looked unabashedly dyed, Barnaby Nancarrow, née Algy Teague, wore a very nice linen summer-weight suit and expensive brown shoes. The sculpted planes of his salon-tanned face radiated a kind of self-satisfied smugness best captured by that German word Backpfeifengesicht, meaning “a face that demands to be slapped.”

  Two large mooks, one African American, one Caucasian, looking like Secret Service agents fired for moral turpitude, flanked Nancarrow like the bookending New York City Library lions. But instead of being named Patience and Fortitude, they might have been dubbed Suspicious and Hostile.

  “He’s got his security with him, right?” said a recumbent Hasso. “White guy is Buck Rushlow. Black guy is Needles Digweed. You don’t wanna know how Needles got his nickname. Different generation, but both outta the Gulch, just like me and Algy, for built-in reliability and loyalty. I could take either one, but not both at once. Hope you’re up to handling whichever one I might have sudden cause to delegate.”

  “Will it really come to that?”

  “Not if we’re lucky. But luck’s not something you can count on, as we well know.”

  Sandralene let out a loud squeal then, and across the busy street, both Buck and Needles glanced our way, assessed our threat rating instantly, and, finding it acceptably low, moved on with their boss.

  “I just found ‘exuberance’!” Sandralene explained.

  “You sure did, just like always, honey. Okay, Glen, let’s hit the highway. Those goddamn snakes and bears aren’t gonna wait on us forever.”

  13

  Despite our best intentions to make good time, darkness and fatigue overtook us as we approached Bigelow Junction. What passed for the center of our nominal town, that densest concentration of miscellaneous communal buildings included in our five-hundred-acre purchase, clustered around Nutbush Lake. Those structures, which we had seen only in some grainy old black-and-white photos at the offices of real estate agent Martin Bookstaver, would serve as our base of operations during the scam.

  Scattered across the rest of the unincorporated land were maybe a hundred citizens in forty or fifty isolated private households. They all leased their individual plots of land from whoever owned Bigelow Junction, namely, us.

  After being informed of this setup, Stan had declared, “Man, it’s just like being an earl or duke or something outta the Knights of the Round Table. King Hasso receives his loyal peasants, lining up with tributes of chickens and cows and potatoes and women. Hey, if we start to run low on operating funds, maybe we can just raise everybody’s rent!”

  “Listen, Stan,” I said, “we are not going to monkey with the existing arrangements and maybe cause a public stink. That’s the last thing we need. Besides, you said Nancarrow would approach us with an offer for the land before too long, and then we’ll be gone. Our money should hold out till then, so no need to go flogging the serfs.”

  “Well, that’s my prediction, not a guarantee. Best to be prepared for anything.”

  * * *

  Our trip north had started off well enough. We had gotten out of the city before rush-hour traffic, with Stan behind the wheel and Sandralene sidled up close to him. I gratefully stretched out in the back seat.

  “Sandy, babe, get some tunes going.”

  From her capacious purse, Sandralene took a sleek cylindrical Bluetooth speaker that fit in her palm and set it on the broad padded ledge under the slope of the front windshield. She turned it on, then took Stan’s phone and scrolled through his music app.

  I gritted my teeth, expecting the most noxious hardcore hip-hop to emerge, full of gangster boasts and driven by an unrelenting bass beat.

  Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to hear down-and-dirty gutbucket blues guitar riffs, followed by a mournful yet energetic male croon.

  If trouble was money, babe, I swear I’d be a millionaire.

  If worries was dollar bills,

  I’d buy the whole world and have money to spare.

  I said, “Is that Robert Cray?”

  Clearly, Stan had been awaiting my reaction. He looked briefly away from the road and back over his shoulder at me with a broad grin. “Shit, man, Robert Cray is for the Brie-and-Chablis crowd. That is the one and only Albert Collins.”

  “You like blues?”

  “It’s all I listen to, man. What, you think just ’cuz I grew up in the Gulch, I got no taste?”

  “Stan, my man, you never cease to amaze me.”

  “That is as it should be, Glen boy.”

  Stan’s phone featured a wide assortment of artists, including some worthy blueswomen.

  “Oh, dig this new kid, Samantha Fish. Just in her twenties, but can she play! And a looker, too. Not enough meat on them bones for me, but still pretty foxy.”

  Let him go the way I should.

  My heart lies underneath the hood.

  Roadrunner, roadrunner,

  I’m picking up and making tracks.

  When the dust settles I ain’t coming back.

  Despite the high-intensity soundtrack of soulful lamentations, I soon drifted off to sleep. The events of the past week and a half had really caught up with me. I awoke only when the car was pulling into a shady little picnic grove. I got stiffly out of the car and followed Stan and Sandralene to the pine-sap-sticky wooden table next to a cold fire pit littered with empty beer cans.

  The sandwiches Suzy Lam had packed for us turned out to be her specialty: chow mein on a torpedo roll. The bread had softened, soaking up all the liquid, and it was like slurping down a delicious Chinatown dinner, circa 1948.

  “Man, the only thing that could’ve improved that meal woulda been a beer or three. But your uncle’s squeeze was right: no sense giving any cops a leg up on us.”

  Heading back to the car, I said, “Want me to drive?”

  “Naw, I’m good for hours. Besides, you drive like an old lady in a full-body cast.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Anytime.”

  Again on the highway, I said, “Tell me more about our fellows in crime.”

  “You know they’re meeting us at the Junction tomorrow. Driving up together from Trinidad Falls. That’s where they both live.”

  “One’s a woman.”

  “Yeah. Varvara Aptekar. I just call her Vee and she don’t seem to mind. Vee’s folks were from Belarus, part of that wave that came over in the early nineties, after the Commies went under. She was born here, though.”

  “And her story is?”

  “Nancarrow took on her father as an early partner. Unlike a lot of these ex-Commies, Aptekar managed to get some money out of the old country, and he was interested in real estate. The American way to riches, right? That made him just the kind of sucker Nancarrow loved. Aptekar thought he was sly. But he wasn’t sharp enough to handle Nancarrow. Algy swindled him dry—left him hanging with a lot of solo debt that was righ
tfully both of theirs to bear. I wasn’t there at the time, but I learned about it later.

  “Aptekar took what he thought was the only honorable way out of his troubles. Real Slavic. Shot his wife, then himself. Only reason Vee survived was that she was at a sleepover. She was five years old at the time. Went through a lot of foster homes. When she got old enough to learn what had happened to her family, she worked up the biggest mad-on for Nancarrow that was humanly possible. You think I’m pissed at the guy? She’s like a goddamn volcano of hate. She’s nursed it for ten years now, with no way of getting back at him. When I knew we were gonna need some arm candy to make Nancarrow a little loopy and easier to hook, I looked her up. Of course, Algy has no idea this gal was once the five-year-old orphan he created. She signed up faster’n a shark can take off your leg.”

  “She sounds like a soured soul.”

  Sandralene spoke up. “I’ve met her, Glen, and she’s not a bad person. She’s just wound pretty tight.”

  I wondered how easy it would be to work with this woman. But I guessed I should reserve judgment till we met.

  “Why didn’t you just get Sandralene to act as bait?”

  Stan seemed honestly hurt. “Number one, I don’t go pimping out my woman, not even for five million. Number two, Sandralene is not Nancarrow’s type. I had plenty of occasions to see what kind of broad he favors, and Vee Aptekar is his personal wet dream come true.”

  “So when Nancarrow comes to visit us looking to buy the land—”

  “You are going to befuddle his brain, and Vee is going to tie his gonads in a bow.”

  “That’s some kind of tag team. Now, this computer kid …”

  “Ray Zerkin. Vee’s ex-student. That’s how I got turned on to him. I mentioned to Vee that we needed someone who could finesse the internet, and she brought his name up as a perfect choice.”

  This new vocational aspect of the woman was unexpected. “She’s a teacher?”

  “Specializes in the oddball kids—the feebs and simpletons.”

  “Staaan-ley!”

  “All right, all right, the differently abled or whatever they wanna be called these days. Special ed. So this Ray Zerkin is some kind of genius with computers, but he’s got that wonky brain and personality condition—you know, like Rain Man.”

  “Asperger’s or autism?”

  “Yeah, whichever one leaves you mostly functional but still creepy.”

  “And we’re really going to cut him in for a quarter of the take? What’s a kid like that going to do with five million dollars?”

  “Well, you know, I was thinking along those lines myself. I mighta been talking through my hat earlier. We’ll see how it plays out. Maybe Mr. Zerkin can be work for hire, and we’ll split the remaining pot three ways.”

  Talking about the money made it suddenly seem more real. I said, “What are you and Sandralene planning to do after we collect?”

  “Well, my first priority is to get someplace Nancarrow can’t find us once he catches on. Another country, I figure. And probably one without an extradition treaty with the good ol’ USA. I got a few candidates lined up, which I will be happy to share with you.”

  I hadn’t really given much thought to how Nancarrow was going to feel about getting ripped off for twenty million dollars. But it quickly made a lot of sense that the less of a handle he had on who had scammed him, and their whereabouts, the better off our tender hides would be.

  “Thanks, I’d appreciate it.”

  Suddenly, the hideous stench of burning rubber filled the car, and from under the hood emerged noises like those of a robot committing suicide by letting a robot weasel eat out its mechanical guts.

  Stan pulled over to the breakdown lane. He got out cautiously as high-speed traffic whizzed past us. He opened the hood, peeked under it, and got back in.

  He said, “It’s a goddamn belt. I thought you had this heap in good shape.”

  “Well, I attended to troubles when they popped up, but I didn’t really do preventive maintenance. This wasn’t even my car until a couple of days ago!”

  Stan retrieved his phone from its wireless hookup with the music speaker and used it to find the nearest mechanic.

  Long story short, the repair took five hours. Belts for old Impalas, it seemed, did not grow on trees. At the garage, we consumed endless sodas and chips from two vending machines and perused every grease-fingerprinted issue of Car and Driver from 2011 to the present.

  And so now, as we pulled into the center of Bigelow Junction—under a black sky with more stars than I had ever seen, and not one source of artificial illumination outside of our car headlights—I contemplated how easily the best-laid plans could go off the rails. A warning for us to have plenty of fallback options to our scheme.

  We all got out of the idling car and stood looking at the unknown structures around us. Rustling noises came from the nearby forest undergrowth.

  “Fuck it,” said Stan. “I ain’t up for investigating a bunch of dark moldy rooms at this hour, just to sleep on some old cot full of mouse shit. I’m for spending the night in the car.”

  Sandralene and I voted likewise.

  “I’m gonna take a leak, then go to sleep,” said Stan.

  “Me too,” said Sandralene. She removed some tissues from her purse, then stepped outside the cone of light. I went off in a different direction, but could still hear her pee laving the gravel.

  Back in the car, we tried to get comfortable.

  I had been assigned the driver’s seat, since I was “the dinkiest.” Stan hogged the other two-thirds of the front bench seat, while Sandralene’s virtue was preserved by her having the whole luxurious back seat to herself.

  It turned out she snored louder than Stan.

  14

  The lineman from the power company was a pudgy, sunburned white guy named Mort Dunkel. He had introduced himself with a hearty handshake and jovial hello when he pulled up in the company truck an hour ago, as if he were a long-lost cousin arriving at a family reunion. Thrown a little off-balance by this cornpone friendliness, I had given my real name before thinking twice, then silently cursed myself. Were we supposed to be using fake names, even among the townspeople? Why hadn’t Stan and I discussed this yet? Obviously, Stan could not show his face in the presence of Nancarrow, but the real estate mogul didn’t know me or Sandralene or Vee by sight from previous encounters. He would certainly recall the last name Aptekar, though—his old partner he had screwed. So Vee would have to come up with something different. But might my real name possibly be an asset? Maybe my easily obtainable public record of criminality would serve to put Nancarrow at ease. Make him feel that he was dealing with a guy like himself, who wanted to keep everything sub rosa and who, for our mutual benefit, would never snitch on anything shady. Well, I would have to discuss all these options with Stan. But right now it was too late to withdraw my real name from Dunkel’s possession.

  Dunkel now perched high atop a ladder leaned against a utility pole that carried the electric cable in from the “main road,” as that tiny thoroughfare was called. Squinting, I watched him in the hot sunlight that flooded the tree-fringed clearing. Through the foliage, the silvered waters of Nutbush Lake glimmered like a flattened mirror ball.

  Dunkel finished fussing with a box high up on the pole, then climbed down. He wiped sweat off his forehead with a faded blue bandanna and said, “Gotta get in the main building now, Mr. McClinton.”

  “Okay, sure.” I grabbed the ring of keys from the glove compartment, and we headed toward the Bigelow Junction Motor Lodge.

  The motel was a long, low wooden structure, two wings of rental rooms connected by a central office. The faded color scheme of forest green and lemon yellow had needed a paint job ten years ago. All the adhesive-letter signage was peeling from too many hot summers and cold winters, curling up along its edges to produce a distinctive p
ostapocalyptic font. The main neon had been shattered by vandals, leaving just the painted, socket-studded outlines of the letters. The office door and the doors of the individual units all faced the gravel parking lot. The office and each rental also had a door on the opposite side, allowing easy access down several paths to the weedy lakeshore. The margin of the lake, I knew from earlier reconnoitering, featured a listing wharf, a ramshackle, boarded-up boathouse, and a short crescent of artificially created beach partially reclaimed by some vigorous aquatic plants. Across the sizable expanse of Nutbush Lake, the shoreline was unbroken but for a couple of waterside houses, each in its clearing and part of our little fiefdom.

  A short distance from the lodge, a half-dozen stand-alone “luxury” cabins offered honeymooners a little extra privacy. Another structure had once been a take-out-only food stand. No indoor seating—just a kitchen with window service for burgers, hot dogs, sodas, and ice cream. A second building of similar size had once sold souvenirs and tchotchkes and penny candy, newspapers, and magazines. An equipment garage with several roll-up doors stood discreetly behind a row of pines. It held a fleet of moldering mowers and antiquated utility vehicles, as well as a tool shop equipped with rusting implements.

  And that was our little sham empire, the supposed nucleus of what legendary high roller Steve Prynne, Vegas hotshot, saw as his newest casino venture.

  Would Nancarrow subscribe to this ridiculous fantasy? Only if I could sell it, bolstered by whatever cyberhoaxing Ray Zerkin could whip up and whatever bullshit our senator for hire, the Honorable Flavio Almonte, could dispense.

  Dunkel and I reached the sagging wood-framed screen door of the lodge’s office. I had to try several keys to find the right one.

  The place smelled of dust, age, and melancholy. Producing a flashlight from his pocket, Dunkel headed knowingly across the gaudy linoleum, toward whatever room held the circuit boxes, while I idled in the spotty half-light coming in through the flyspecked windows. I spun the guest book around on its creaky turntable and looked at the last entry: Mr. and Mrs. Bronislaw Oboyski, from seven years ago. I hoped they had enjoyed their stay.