Hot Plastic

by Peter Craig

  The names behind the wire transfers had distracted him; there was a more specific meaning in her choice of numbers. That winter she moved in zigzags through Quebec and Ontario, through a chain of high-priced hotels with their own ATMs in Toronto, her movements looking like a primer course for a young fugitive, until eventually she snaked back across the border between Windsor and Detroit, and the account went into a brief hibernation. Had she made amends with her foster care mother? Or had she been arrested?

  One night, while he had been mulling over the numbers, an idea came to Kevin with such force that he cursed himself for not having seen the possibility right away. That awful day in Madison, Colette had given him a police scanner as a parting gift. He realized that each deposit was a police radio code. 952: Please report on conditions. 10-20: location? 10-67: person calling for help. They came like digital smoke signals. When the account had awakened a month later, she was back in the eastern corridor, becoming more elaborate with her messages, until a two-week period in Baltimore read like an encrypted diary: 10-11 (visitors present, exercise caution); 10-45 (what is the condition of the patient?); 5150 (emotionally troubled); 910 (can handle this detail alone). Had this been a partnership that went awry? Was she running sweetheart cons?

  He hoped she was still on the other end to find a returning message; but when he deciphered the final series of deposits, he became depressed. Over a week in Manhattan, she relayed: 484, 484, 484, a day-long space—like a dash of punctuation—and 487. Then she disappeared. For the last seven months there had been only the vegetal growth of interest. The sequence probably meant that she had been charged with three counts of credit card fraud (say, theft, forgery, and illegal use). The list’s emphatic ending, grand theft, Kevin thus took as the heaviest charge, the one for which she was likely to serve the most time. Had she gone upstate, taken the hit? Or had she jumped a bond and now considered the account too dangerous to use? He was trying to read a splash from the way ripples struck the shore.

  He imagined the frustration Colette must have felt transmitting for so long without a response, and his mind filled with morbid images: Colette in an orange jumpsuit and shackles; Colette as a frazzled, amnesiac hitchhiker first seen in the Florida panhandle, later found in a mangrove swamp between tentacle roots, nail polish still bright on soiled toes. He took his board out, rode in the cool nighttime air with his eyes closed, and meditated on the best possibilities for her: she was in Florence, touring the museums, or shopping in Rome, robbing that better class of people. There would be no denotation of lira small enough to match a police code. With all the cash and positive witchcraft he could summon for the moment, he skated to an ATM outside their favorite hotel in downtown Minneapolis—and deposited two unwieldy clumps into the account: $104 (message received), and $108 (in service).

  Then he walked inside and purchased a room, the final transaction in the short resurrection of Douglas Herman.

  Dismally lonely that night, he wandered through the escalators and bridges, and eventually into a wide upscale clothing store in a cove off the skywalk. While flirting, he anonymously bought an entire wardrobe for a shopping woman and made the attractive saleswoman promise not to reveal him. He watched the women joke about a secret admirer, then, as the saleswoman closed up shop, he lingered and asked her out for a drink.

  In a hotel lounge that he remembered well, they shared a bottle of wine and talked about their careers. They moved upstairs, crossing the marble floor, kissing and giggling in the elevator behind gold-plated doors, and ravaging each other in a sweep of tangled covers, booze, and room service. Suddenly Kevin, delirious with a disconnected feeling of love and loss, told her the truth about his life. “My name is actually Kevin Swift.” She lay naked beside him with wide eyes. He said he was a thief and a con man, hoping to someday rival the great work of his father. He said he had been in love in this hotel like never before in his life, and probably never again. He had never been in jail, but he had committed well over a half-million dollars in fraud, and he had been involved in a few million more. Was he a rich man? No. They spent it faster than they stole it. They burned it off like kindling in an oil drum, like coal down in a train’s fire hole. Quietly the woman rose, dressed in the faint light, bra, skirt, blouse, and shoes. She thanked him for an interesting night and left the room. Kevin had a hunch she would call the police, but for some fatalistic reason, he rolled over into the sweet-smelling dent in the pillows and fell asleep.

  When he awakened there were two guns on him, and three more officers digging through luggage scattered around on the floor. Kevin lay naked on top of the sheets. The radio alarm was playing a classical station, escalating from a forlorn violin solo to a clatter of cymbals. “Don’t move,” said a cop. “Stay right there, buddy.”

  “Can somebody throw me my boxers?”

  Flashlight beams were moving across the carpet, until finally someone turned on the lights.

  “Hold your horses, kid. We’re still tracking ’em down.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  After the arraignment, Kevin was transferred from the courthouse into the Hennepin County jail to await trial. Passing through reception, he listed and stored his possessions (jeans, chain necklace with diamond wedding ring, four hundred and fifteen wallet pictures); he took his mandatory shower in a tile chamber echoing with the animated conversation of two guards; he filled out paperwork; and when he carried his folded blankets and pillows down the walk, keeping his feet inside the yellow line, he felt time slowing to a narcotic drip.

  After a night of intermittent sleep under permanent fluorescent lights, taking turns on watch detail with two young drug dealers and a jittery car thief, Kevin was granted his phone call. He considered calling a bail bondsman in Minneapolis, but he could think of nothing legal to offer as collateral. Melody was his last resort. When he reached her, she was on her way out to work and he heard loud television commercials in the background. Kevin explained that he was in jail and she made a bleating siren noise into the phone.

  “Really, Doug,” she said. “I always expected this call, sooner or later. Just not this much later.”

  “Don’t get preachy on me, Melody—you were in on every vacant lot.”

  She made a buzz like an angry wasp. “Wrong answer. Your father was doing that to fund the company. If you were around for anything, Doug—”

  “You knew everything, you liar.”

  “Yes. Ding. You’re correct. That doesn’t mean I’m a criminal.”

  “Yes, it does. You were convicted of a crime.”

  “What do you want, Douglas? You want to apologize to me for all the headaches you caused?”

  “Look, we don’t need to pretend that we like each other. But we’re family, and I need help. I need you to talk to some bail bondsmen around town here, in Minneapolis, see if you can scrape together enough to get me out of here. My bail is a lot higher than I expected, and they’re going to need collateral.”

  She made a whistling sound to simulate a cartoon character falling off a cliff, but the splat never came. “I don’t have any collateral, Doug.”

  “You have your business.”

  The television shrieked in the background.

  “Melody? Are you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Melody—I’m going to take this like a man. I’m no risk to you.”

  “Doug? Or Kyle or Keith or whatever your actual name is—can I just explain a teeny-weeny, itty-bitty little thing to you? My business is my life. And let me tell you why—”

  “Can you just think about it?”

  “I will think about it. But the problem is, Doug—I’m better now. Your father is better now. We’ve learned our lessons—”

  “You put an ounce of marijuana up your ass!”

  “Did Jerry tell you that? Oh my Lord. I can’t believe he said that. Whooo-weee, what a day, what a day. I’m going to be late—I have community service Tuesday mornings.”

  “Melody, please. I’m just a pett
y thief. I’m a pickpocket. I’m a gentleman. I can’t fight worth a damn, and I’ll never last in here.”

  “I’ll think about it, Doug. Okay? I have to go—honk-honk, that’s my carpool.”

  He boiled and brooded, hating Melody and her catalog of jittery cartoon sounds. One night at the end of the week, a group of wolves, stirred by some undercurrent of restlessness, circled around the bunks looking to start a war, wanting to test the newcomers. Kevin fought badly and hard, earning some Pyrrhic respect by continuing to shout and kick and defend himself, by refusing to “punk up,” taking his beating and never surrendering even when the kicks and jack-hammering fists began to seem life threatening. The next day he moved like an old man, his joints aching, his face soggy, his left eye swollen shut. Ribs tender, jaw misaligned. When he heard his name on the overhead speaker, his first instinct was to be furious with Melody for waiting so long.

  When he passed through the last swinging doors and out into the slanted autumn light, his face patched with crisscrossing surgical tape, he needed to wait a moment on the steps to let a gust of illness pass. He sat on the balustrade to recover himself. The wind was cold. His skin was wet and clammy and he was shivering inside his clothes. He looked out at the terrain of passing traffic, sidewalks, bare trees full of brawling finches, a plane cutting the sky overhead, the gutters and the weeded lots filled with trash; and he wished he could curl up in an abandoned lot and sleep for a year. Where was the bail bondsman Melody had sent? Was there anyone carrying a message from her? Stopping in the middle of the steps with the flow of pedestrians around him, his white shirt flapping in the wind, he looked everywhere and didn’t see a soul. He waited and massaged a cramp in his neck, and it was by mere accident that his eyes rested on a woman across the street.

  In the broken spaces between moving cars, she stood motionless, one high-heeled shoe crossed over the other as the wind sculpted a black dress over the outline of her hip. To hold down a wide-brimmed hat, she had placed a single fingertip on top of her head in a pose like a wind-up ballerina. When she took off her hat and gripped it in both hands, he recognized the girlish swaying in her shoulders. He moved down the last steps to the curb, where he faced her as if across a wide river. She looked down at her fluttering dress and traced her own contours with the swooping hand of a magician’s assistant, as if to say, amazing, but true. It was Colette.

  She nodded at him, then hailed a cab with the hat. Just as he stepped onto the street, a gasoline truck pulled between them, showing him his own warped reflection. When the truck pulled away, she was gone, and he wondered if everything had been a mirage formed out of sleeplessness and paranoia. But the cab approached from the opposite direction and stopped in the middle of traffic. The door swung open and she slid back to give him room. He lowered himself onto the seat, springs scraping and popping, and she saluted the driver with two fingers.

  From her shorter and sharper haircut, a splash of blonde, to her makeup (the faint layer of base that covered her freckles and eyeliner that circled cold green eyes), from her fluttering black dress to her upright posture, she seemed like a different person. While she was more beautiful than he remembered, her scent filling the car more lavishly, she seemed icier, with an expression of warlike intensity.

  “Do you need something for your face?” she asked quietly.

  “I’ll live.”

  They rode for a while in silence, glancing at each other, and she gave him a look that he didn’t remember or recognize—her tongue moving behind her lips, her ropy muscles flexing along the jawline. With strained calm, she said, “Aren’t you going to ask how I found you?”

  “Don’t expect me to kneel down and kiss your feet, Colette. You scorched us. You have no idea what you did to us. My dad went crazy after that—forging deeds to old dirt lots and moping around all day. You killed us.”

  Her reaction was baffling to him, for she looked over and nodded along, as if forced to humor a lunatic, then she calmly lit a cigarette in the breeze through the open windows. “Let me ask you a question. I’m sure you’re angry, but just try to listen to this.”

  Kevin crossed his arms and rotated to face her in the backseat, determined not to fall victim to any flurry of sweet talk. She took a long, meditative puff, the smoke gathering and spilling from her mouth, and then she asked, “At what point did you fall off your skateboard and damage your brain completely?”

  So shaken by her unexpected tactic, Kevin was silent, while she looked forward over the driver’s partition, chin high in the air.

  “What are you talking about?” asked Kevin.

  “Are you now the dumbest person that’s ever lived? You must be. You’re going across every state closing down my old accounts. You even forged my aliases to close down a few of them. Do you think I didn’t know which safe deposit boxes were being watched by the feds? Do you think I was just forgetting money here and there? I’ve worked my ass off to stay in front of this shit and you just gave the feds a fucking dot to dot of everything we’ve ever done.”

  Kevin’s swollen lips and cheeks began throbbing. He said, “I didn’t realize—”

  “Let me tell you my situation, please. Our old friend the professor, the perfect mark, he hired a private investigating service; and so did the jeweler, and so did Visa and Carte Blanche, and everybody else. They put together a hell of a rap sheet on that little alias, Esther Barrick: she’s wanted in every fly-over state, and I’m not talking about fraud and forgery. I’m talking about a long rap sheet of larceny charges. This is one of those times, Kevin, when you got buried in a little game, a little technical procedure, and didn’t pay any attention to the big picture. You just took a bunch of dead ends and turned them into a blazing hot trail of pixie dust right to my perfect ass.”

  Shaking, Kevin pointed to the cabdriver.

  She said, “No, don’t worry about Luther. Luther is getting a cut of my last dollar. Aren’t you, sweetie?”

  Luther waved from the front seat.

  “You’re lucky to God I have connections giving me the story here, Kevin—so we can put a stop to this. You checked into our old hotel using the same fucking name! And that’s not the worst of it. You tried to put two ATM deposits into a frozen account. From the same hotel where you were staying! I would think that someone who grew up on the fucking grift would have a little more wits about him than that.”

  “I got nervous thinking about you—about all of this. You’re right, I lost my head.”

  “A while back, in New York, I pled no contest to fraud and theft charges, with Colette as my name—and they never made this connection. I did ninety days, Kevin, and it was like a whole separate lifetime. If I go back down for any of this showboating two years ago, I’m looking at six, maybe ten. I’m looking at a prison matron I call Mommy until I’m thirty. Now let me ask you one thing: in your opinion, why is there a new warrant out for me, one that’s got the lovely Esther Barrick listed as a key alias? That’s right—because you put it together for them. In back-to-back fucking days you cashed out accounts from both names, and you did it all over the country like that. Thank you very much, Kevin. I’m sorry about hurting your father’s ego—but you just finished me off.”

  Kevin was trembling, unable to sort out his rush of different emotions. He turned and steadied himself against his open window, closing his eyes into the gusts of wind, until he had a clear thought and turned back to her. “Then why are you here? Why would you hire somebody to cover my bail, and take all these chances? If the trail is so hot now, why didn’t you just leave?”

  She crossed her legs in the other direction, rearranging the folds of her dress like a tablecloth.

  “Because two years ago you were trying to impress me and I was trying to impress your father, and we didn’t think about how hard these people would follow up on big boosts—not chainsaws or video games—but the big shiny stuff. And because, when I was down for three months, I realized that I’m not going to have too many friends in this life. I might as
well go help the one I used to have, even if he is some kind of blithering idiot savant.”

  Kevin shook his head, dizzy, feeling his heartbeat in the swelling under his eyes. His mouth was so parched he needed to lick his lips and teeth. He said, “I don’t know what you’re saying to me.”

  “Let me put it to you this way, darling. I’m all out of options. I cashed my last working account and the rest have just been frozen. There’s an APB out for me and anyone else with a clever name who looks like me, and I’m not going to prison again. All I’ve got is one clean passport, a tub of hair dye, a taxi driver here who’s willing to talk to bail bondsmen and keep his mouth shut, and—maybe—an old friend who doesn’t want to face six years because of the scams he did with me. Minneapolis might not be clean, but I bet we can fly from Duluth to Winnipeg, connect anywhere else from there. Do you have a passport? It can’t be Douglas Herman.”

  The cab merged onto the interstate and they sat in a crosscurrent through open windows, rigid amid fluttering clothes and flapping hair.

  “I have a perfect one, brand new.”

  “Then I think we should try to outrun this mess—somewhere, somehow.” She rolled up her window and took out a compact, tracing a pencil along the edges of her lips. “After all this time, Kevin, you’re finally going to get what you asked for. We’ll run away together.” Her mouth looked angry under the strokes of the pencil tip, and then she slammed the compact shut. “But something tells me it won’t be a dream vacation.”

  VISITING HOURS

  Daniels so hated his assignment of guarding a hospital room that he would unburden himself to any sympathetic ear. By Friday, the staff was tired of him, preferring his counterpart, a grim LAPD detective who read financial magazines and never spoke. Kevin was the only person left who would endure his tirades, and soon a kind of stranded friendship formed between the wounded suspect and the fidgety young cop. They watched the mounted television together, groaning at sports bloopers, commenting on women or arguing about politics (the criminal was in favor of gun control, the officer opposed).