by Sweet, Dell
He had simply pretended that he was looking both ways for traffic and continued on, passing the street by. He walked up the street, circled back around the next block up and then made his way back to Richard Dean's house. He forced the side door that he had locked behind him and slipped back into the garage. He searched the dead girl and came up with a thick wad of cash and the keys to the Camaro.
Usually Jimmy never took anything with him, but he decided on the spur of the moment that the Camaro and the cash were his. He was sure that there was more inside: If he took his time he could probably come up with a lot more cash. He thought about it for a few seconds but not too long. It was free money after all. There was no sense in passing it up. In any case he had been forced to come back, or he would have left it. It was like fate or something, he told himself as he pulled the side door shut tighter to hide the damage. He headed back into the house.
He left an hour later with close to a quarter million dollars in cash in two small, black gym bags and two new prepaid cell phones. Richard Dean had, had dozens of them in a cupboard over the sink. His old one, another prepaid throwaway was in his car that he had had to leave. His second one, the one that held his contacts, the one that the people who knew him had the number for, was securely in his pocket.
He sent the door up on its track after covering the dead girl with an old piece of carpet, and then backed the Camaro out into the driveway. He ran back in: Shut the door down and then exited the side door. He closed the side door as well as he could and then walked back to the Camaro.
He called Tommy: He drove as he explained the situation, waited for Tommy to make the call.
"I could have someone there to do it. I know people, but I want you there, Jimmy. Get a flight out of Syracuse and fly down there: Rent a car, take care of things," Tommy told him.
"On my way," Jimmy told him. He rattled off the phone numbers for the new prepaid phones and then hung up. He drove the Camaro to route 81 and called the airport for reservations once he was on the way. He had three hours before he had to catch his flight. That gave him time to drop the car at his place; a small farm in Central Square. That would give him time to shower and change clothes again; he could drive his SUV to the Airport and leave it in the long-term parking lot.
He turned on the radio, tuned it to a classical station and listened as he drove. Life was good, Jimmy decided. Life was very good.
Lagrange Kentucky
Billy Jingo
The rest of Ohio went quickly and they were cruising through Kentucky, the traffic light, talking to each other to keep themselves awake.
"We don't have to drive straight through," Billy said.
"I think I'd like to get some sleep then," April admitted.
She pulled off interstate 71 in Lagrange and they took a room for the night.
Once they got everything into the room it was after 9:00 PM according to April's watch. She stripped down and curled into Billy's side. She was asleep before Billy had even closed his eyes.
Watertown New York
Sammy and Don
"We got a warrant," Sammy said. He was standing outside the car talking to Don. He had left with another officer to get the warrant. He'd come back with a flat bed hauler. Don got out of the car, straightened his rumpled shirt and coat, lit a cigarette, and walked over to watch them load the car.
Don was good with numbers, names, he memorized them almost instantly. He had gotten a bad vibe about the guy at the Shop and Stock and that had caused him to look at his car. He had remembered three numbers. Other than that he hadn't even been able to remember the make and model. The kid manager had though. He had noticed it was a Buick Century. He had also noticed the bumper stickers as the guy had turned around and drove out of the parking lot. He had told him that one said, "My other car is a Cadillac," the other sticker was a parking permit for some garage. This car had matching bumper stickers. And the first three digits from the license plate number had matched the ones he had remembered.
Unfortunately the plates were registered to a silver Chevy Impala: Same year and so the two cars probably looked a little alike, both GMC Products. When they ran the plates they were reported as stolen just a few nights ago in New Paltz, a little place up in the Catskills.
The VIN number came back as junked. They would probably come up with very little from the car. But if they did get something they would have the warrant to make it all legal.
The mechanic used a slim Jim to unlock the car and an electronic lock pick to turn the ignition and slip the car into neutral. A few minutes later he was winching the car up onto the flat bed hauler.
Sammy climbed back into the unmarked car with Don and they followed the truck back to the garage in silence. They were both down, both tired. It had been a long day. Sammy had predicted it might be a long day earlier that morning. It didn't make him happy that he had been right.
Sunday morning.
He held her and listened to her breathe. He felt her soft breaths against his chest. Her skin against his skin: Her warmth.
Billy was worried. He was worried that somehow he would miss something: Even now he was trying to think around every angle and corner. He was afraid they would fail to see some little thing and it would be their undoing. It would most probably kill them: Literally.
He was mostly flying blind; trusting to the same instinct that had kept him alive for all of his life: Steered him away from the bad guys; caused him to be somewhere else when the bad shit went down. Not every time, not for everything, but most of the time, for most things in his life.
He didn't know what to call it so he called it God. Or, he thought, he believed it was God: As close as he could come to understanding God anyway: If God was anything else he didn't know what that could be.
All he wanted was to get to Mexico with April. Find a place to live and the money was the only thing that could make that happen: It couldn't happen any other way: If it could happen some other way they could simply have walked away from the whole mess. Leave it for someone else. Make their way to Mexico like she wanted to and just stop.
Except, then what? Then what always came up. No money meant no land. No house. No way to live. No anything, so it came full circle; right back to the money. No money was a bad idea. The exact opposite of what they wanted. So here they were dragging fourteen and a half million dollars across the country. And enough illegal drugs to put them both away for a hundred lifetimes if they got caught with them. The amounts just boggled his mind. He would start to think about it and get all tangled up in the numbers.
She moved against him, mumbled something low in her throat, and then quieted again as he stroked her hair with one hand. He pulled the blanket up further to keep her warm.
It was early. He had no way of knowing how early, but the traffic from the interstate sounded sporadic: Too early to get up. He held her and a few minutes later his eyes slipped closed and he drifted back off to sleep himself.
Watertown
Don and Jenny
Don batted at the alarm clock and its incessant low beeping, finally hitting the snooze button and silencing it for a few more minutes.
"You have to go right now?" Jennie asked in a sleepy voice from beside him.
"Soon, Jen, soon," Don said. He let one hand roam down her side, felt the swell of her hip, her breasts heavy against his side.
Her hand came across his belly and ran through the tangles of hair on his chest. His own hand slipped over her hip, and stroked the length of her upper thigh.
"Stay a while, Donny... Just a little while?" she asked. She rose up on one elbow and let her hand drift back down across his stomach.
He shifted his weight and pulled her over onto him, his mouth finding her breasts and suckling at her nipples as she rested her thighs on his hips.
Richard Dean's House
Brian and Liv
Liv Spencer had never known Rich not to answer his door. She had called him twice and someone did pick up the phone, but had said
nothing. She was worried, but more than that, she needed some heroin. She needed it. Rich always took care of her. Not only did she need his help, she had no idea where else to go for help like his... Caring like his.
She stood outside in the cold predawn rain for fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes. That had seemed like forever. Fifteen minutes was all the time in the world when you needed to fix. It was every clock, every watch in the world ticking away. Hell it was everything in the world. There was nothing else. Fifteen minutes and she finally started trying the doors. Front door, back door, locked. She hadn't really thought about the garage door, but finally she tried it. It was unlocked and it was also badly damaged at the lock set. That had made her stop.
The rain had stopped. She stood on the wet blacktop by the door thinking what she could say...
"The door was unlocked, Richie... I found the door unlocked, Rich... I just touched the handle and it turned, Rich... It was busted... It was already broken, Rich. I turned the handle and it just sort of fell open... It fell open, Rich. I needed you, Richie, the door was unlocked... I needed a fix, Richie, where the fuck were you?"
She practiced more excuses in her head, but finally it didn't matter that the door had been broken. She shut down the little alarm in her head that had begun to jabber about that. All that mattered was that the door was not locked and she needed to fix. She finished turning the knob and stepped into the garage.
The garage was lit, but only dimly. She made her way to the door that lead into the house, nearly tripping over a bunched up section of carpet someone had left laying by the door, and tried the door to the inside of the house. It wasn't even closed all the way and began to swing open as soon as she touched it.
"Rich?" she called. Her voice was a rusty croak. "Richie!" She stepped further into the shadowy kitchen.
"Richie? The door was open, man. I called... The door..." She stopped when she saw the bodyguards lying in the hallway. They seemed tossed aside like big overstuffed rag dolls.
"Oh God," she moaned; and immediately two things began to fight inside of her: The need to turn and run, because something was definitely fucked up here at Richie's house: There was absolutely no doubt about it; and, the need to get fixed. To stop the itch, even if it was only a little: Even if it had to be coke to tide her over... Something... And it didn't look like anyone here was going to try to stop her... No... Nobody...
Run...? Stay...? Run...? Stay...? She stepped into the hallway, took a shaky breath and stepped carefully over the bodyguards.
The exercise room was off the living room. It was glass walled, you could exercise and watch TV on the big screen, or you could watch TV and the exercise room too. No one used the exercise room except the bodyguards and Richie's oldest daughter. But this morning the view through the glass was anything but normal, and it took some time for her mind to wrap itself around it. When it did she bent over and threw up on the deep pile rug of the living room.
She looked back up from the carpet, staring through the glass for what seemed like minutes to her, wondering who would do things like that to another person; to people who were walking around, breathing, talking, living their lives just a few days ago when she seen them last. She'd never seen anything like it. Not even in the horror flicks she liked to watch.
She bent over double and threw up again. She continued to heave until nothing came up; not that there had been much to throw up in the first place. She staggered back into the hallway, got one more look at the two bodyguards, Karl and Geezer, still dead she saw: Karl's brains were leaking out of the side of his head like some gelatin creation. She looked away quickly and staggered into the kitchen. She sat down at the stools that lined a small counter. The place she usually found Richie sitting. She sat there for a few seconds and then remembered the small counter was also a bar and sometimes rich kept a little something else back there too.
She got up and went to the sink, ran the water, drinking right from the tap. She swished the water around in her mouth and spat, and then did it a few more times. She bent closer and splashed the cold water on her overheated face: Pushing the excess off her face with her hands. She straightened and walked back to the counter which, from this side, was open and stocked with all sorts of bottles of booze. All high test: All the good stuff. No bad ones in the bunch. She grabbed a bottle of imported Russian vodka. The label entirely in Russian, all the printing too: All that writing that looked like backwards writing to her that she could almost figure out. She snagged a clean water glass from the top shelf and filled it with the vodka. Her eyes fell on the small refrigerator under the shelves.
He kept some shit there; in the top: In the freezer section, she thought... Sometimes... Most times in fact that she could remember... He had said, "Wait just a second," and he had walked right over to the bar, opened the small refrigerator, and come back with what she needed... Was it every time or almost every time, she asked herself...? She couldn't remember. She was usually too fucked up to think about it, but she thought it was nearly every time. And she thought it was the freezer because it seemed to be where he reached.
She sat on the stool and sipped at the vodka; loving the fire that it ignited in her stomach. No one would know... No one would know at all... She had seen Richie's BMW in the other stall of the garage. She could take that to get away...
If the keys...
She looked over at the small hooks just inside the kitchen door. The BMW keys looked back at her. She could see the little BMW medallion on the leather fob. She licked her lips, took a deeper sip of the vodka, let it burn its way down into her stomach and now she could feel it inside, working its way down further, making her thighs warm. Hot even. She looked at the small, compact refrigerator again. She licked her lips once more, got up and swung the small door open.
Her eyes bugged out of her head. She had never seen the inside. She had only assumed that it was a refrigerator, but it wasn't. It was shelf after shelf packed tight with shit. Pot, cocaine, heroin, crack, crank and pills... Probably E, she thought; and at the very bottom stacks of money. She forgot to breathe and nearly toppled over off the stool before she remembered to take a breath again. She took several deep breaths and then went over to the kitchen sink and found the garbage bags underneath. This is not real, she told herself. It's just not real... But it was. She knew it was. She could feel that it was. She took two bags, slipped one inside the other, and then loaded everything in the refrigerator into the bag: All of it. She hefted it and then went back and got a third bag and slipped it over the first two.
She was on autopilot now. She crossed to the rack, took the keys to the BMW and walked into the hallway. Gelatin, she told herself, just gelatin, as she stepped over Karl and Geezer and then started down the steps that lead down into the garage.
She nearly tripped over the carpet again, looked down, saw one slim dusky gray hand that had slipped out from under the carpet edge when she tripped over it, and quickly looked back up before it could cause her to lose her happy thoughts again.
She opened the garage door. She had thought it would be so hard. She had been convinced it would be, but it was easy. Push the button, the door went up. She climbed into the BMW, set the black plastic bag on the passenger seat, backed the car out of the garage, and then came back and pushed the button to close the door. She stepped back out the side door, shut it as well as she could, then opened it back up, turned the knob on the handset to lock it, and swung it closed once more. It was broken, but maybe it would lock anyway, she told herself. She looked at the dented gold handle of the knob for a moment wondering what had happened here, and then turned and walked back toward the BMW. No going back, her mind said. No going back.
She was nearly to the BMW when she bent double and heaved. The vodka came back up; burning her throat raw as it did. She slammed down onto her knees, skinning them, and retched until the nausea finally passed. She got up slowly, straightening her clothes as best she could, turned, and that was when she saw the kid standing on th
e sidewalk. She tried to smile as she staggered toward the BMW.
"You okay, lady?" the kid asked.
She looked at him: Sunday morning, before dawn. The newspaper carrier bag slung over one shoulder; Sunday papers. Maybe he was 16… Maybe 17. Well built. Healthy, unlike herself: She needed to dry out. Funny, a few minutes ago all she had wanted was a fix. Now she didn't want to ever touch heroin or anything else again. Dry out, be normal: She'd been sixteen herself not so long ago.
"Are you?" the kid asked again.
She shook her head. "Probably not... But I will be... You got a girlfriend?" she asked.
The kid shrugged.
"You want to have an adventure?" She straightened up and looked at the blood running from one of the cuts on her knees. She raised her eyes to the sky and then looked back again. "Maybe get out of this crappy fuckin' town?" she asked quietly.
"With you?" the kid asked.
"Yeah, maybe I'm not so hot right now, but I clean up real well... Yeah, with me: There's no one else here. Want to deliver fuckin' newspapers the rest of your life? Or maybe get some shit-job flipping burgers someday?" she asked. She allowed a little laugh to slip into her low voice.
"No," the kid answered.
"Can you drive?" she asked.
The kid looked at the idling BMW, the driver's door hanging open. "Yeah," he said a little breathlessly. He looked back at her. She smiled.
"I'm... I'm going to be sick for a while... Kicking the shit, you understand? The big H. The big H... I'll need help... You'll take care of me... Won't run off and leave me?" She wobbled a little on her feet.
"Took care of my mother before she died... I can take care of you... You won't die though, right?" His eyes looked worried, but he shifted the carrier sack from one shoulder and let it drop to the wet pavement.