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Hot Plastic

Page 18

by Peter Craig


  Daniels became a great source of information about the outside world. He solved the riddle of the bullet, relaying news that the entry wound was in Kevin’s back, which seemed to have dishonorable implications for both of them.

  “Does it mean somebody fucked you over?” asked Daniels.

  “No,” said Kevin. “It means I finally got caught.”

  Probably against orders, Daniels admitted that police had no idea of the whereabouts of the other two suspects in his “posse,” and it was Daniels who brought him the exciting news that his fingerprints had turned up a list of warrants across America and even overseas. They were two active men forced into inactivity, and Daniels seemed to admire Kevin after realizing that he was more than a casual thug.

  “But your crew, man—they sure left you for dead, didn’t they? Personally I’d be pretty POed if somebody did that to me.”

  “They’ll be here.”

  “Oh, yeah, right. Like you’re going to bust out of here, huh. Good luck.”

  “There’s just you and some hospital security.”

  “But you can’t even get up to piss, man. Give me a break.”

  They played a few hands of gin (he was a miserable card player, who moved his lips while he considered his moves), until a nurse came in to announce the arrival of Kevin’s mother. Daniels said that she had already given a statement to the police. Kevin found all of this baffling, and said that if it was his mother, he was somewhere in the afterlife. “Stepmother,” said Daniels. “Whatever.”

  Melody came into the room on platform shoes, taking tiny shuffling footsteps. She carried a picnic basket with novelty balloons tied to it, each in the shape of some medical device: a syringe, a bottle of aspirin, and a thermometer. Kevin asked if her theme was the Jersey shore, and she responded only with a humming sound. She hugged him, catching a balloon between them, and immediately she began pitching her new line of fortune cookies to Daniels.

  She offered the entire picnic basket to him while describing them as “cooperative cookies,” or “riddle cookies” (she hadn’t yet landed on a name). Kevin had been around this cop long enough to know that he would tear through them like a grizzly. He was drawn to sugar, and would leave his post only when some passing orderly announced that there was birthday cake on another floor. Right away he began stuffing fragments into his mouth, explaining with his mouth full that he hadn’t eaten all day. It took him a while to notice, however, that his fortunes didn’t make any sense.

  Melody squealed at his discovery and told him the concept. Individually they were meaningless. But each scrap of paper was part of a larger, more elaborate fortune. “I mean, who eats one fortune cookie? So this way, you have the space to say something meaningful—not like ‘You will face a tough decision someday.’ You get to treat it like a puzzle. You’ll love this message, by the way. It’s one of the best.”

  Daniels took the puzzle and began laying out snippets of the fortune on the empty bed. When Melody finally turned to Kevin, her lip was quivering. “Oh, Douglas. They searched my house, they searched my kitchen. They confiscated all of your father’s office equipment. They took everything but the junk in the garage. You lied to me. Whenever you’re around, something terrible happens to your father.”

  “I think it’s a reciprocal thing.”

  She handed him a single cookie and whispered loudly, “Don’t eat it.”

  “What?”

  She made a throat-cutting gesture, then nodded rapidly and pointed at the cookie, beginning to walk backward out of the room. “It was nice meeting you, Officer.”

  With his mouth full he wished her luck with her company, then turned back to his disordered fortune.

  Kevin smelled his fortune cookie—it was embalmed with sugar and some other form of shellac. The slip of paper read “8:15,” which he initially thought was some biblical reference. But on the opposite side he saw his father’s handwriting, shrunken and cramped: “Cop immobilized. Security clear. Be ready.”

  BOOK FOUR THE LAM

  1986–1987

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Colette sold the arrangement like this: they were professionals now; they respected each other’s accumulated skills; anything they did to support themselves on the road needed to be safe and discreet; and there was no way that any romantic entanglement could work. The speech came in staggers through airports and dark flights, and sounded so rehearsed to Kevin that he nearly laughed. Time had given him perspective, a sense of Colette’s unendurable emotional baggage; and secretly, he swore never to trust or forgive her. After two years, she was more composed, more competent, and perhaps more clever and attractive. But he was no longer helpless beside her. If anything, he felt lingering embarrassment from those days, as if having awakened with a hangover and only a vague memory of some shameful act. For some reason, Colette simply needed to set limits on their “working relationship,” a clumsy preemptive strike that assumed complete love and devotion despite his slanted mouth and chuckle of disbelief.

  “I think I can handle it,” he said.

  From the moment they touched down on foreign soil, passed nervously through customs with authentic passports, and moved outside into the clutter of taxicabs, crowds, and ancient ruins, Kevin knew he could ignore any condescension from his new partner. No matter the risks, no matter the constant worry about Interpol notices, he had found an irresistible new playground. The Acropolis. The Parthenon. They were the birthplaces of common thieves, and he saw in the thousands of passing tourists, a predator’s destiny. No matter where they traveled, Kevin reaped wallets from the predictable herds of Americans, following them like a wolf alongside migrating caribou. Beginning in Greece, crossing to Italy, and moving along a northerly trail, he was amazed by how it appeared that the same browsers from shopping malls now turned up outside the Medici Chapel, or jostled for cheap religious icons around the church of San Lorenzo. Young couples in matching anoraks stormed through chapels in hiking boots; the old couples, with T-shirts tucked into the waistbands of zipper-covered shorts, snapped pictures of spires with their pockets spilling. Because he looked Italian (to anyone but an Italian), he fashioned himself a convincing ID badge for a fictional tourist council and sold bogus citywide passes to all the museums. He discovered another athletic talent in his pursuit of the fanny pack (which seemed to have proliferated across the globe). Scissors tucked into his sleeve like a pincer claw, with a quick bump and a scusi he would snip them loose from their owners. It was even easier in a crowd jostling its way through a turnstile. Back to Colette, he carried the bounty of packs like a spear fisherman, piling the cash into the center of ruffled bedcovers among traveler’s checks, passports, mints, pocketknives, sunglasses, birth control pills, asthma inhalers, and miniature phrase books.

  “Sono incinta ed ho l’asma.”

  “I know you think it’s easy to run away after this kind of hooliganism, but there’s probably a line forming outside the American Express office right now. We should get going before they sic Karl Malden on us.”

  They disagreed about the safest ways to scrape together a living. While Kevin argued it was best to accumulate small thefts amid crowds of gawking tourists, Colette believed that the sweetheart con was her only meal ticket. A week later, as they passed through Cannes, Colette began dining with a minor French director, having fabricated her own racy autobiography (a Mississippi childhood, a censored adult film, and a breakthrough role in a low-budget feature). The gull was probably in his mid-fifties, but looked far older, with a giant shock of unkempt white hair and small bewildered eyes on a weatherworn face. Strolling arm in arm with Colette, he seemed deliriously charmed by his young prize and her twangy accent, while Kevin waited nervously for the payoff. As he stood outside restaurant windows and watched, Colette lay her chin on clasped hands in a posture of enthralled listening. Her earrings like shards of a fallen chandelier, gown glimmering for a palace reception, Kevin was heartbroken by the beautiful and deceitful sight of her. After all the groundwork,
all the dinners and gifts, the ruse was a simple credit card heist that milked the old man’s accounts for a few extra francs, blurring the line between crime and simple gold digging. When Kevin criticized her for wasting a good mark to buy evening gowns and shoes, she replied, “Would you rather I bought nothing but oranges and waffle mix?” Swiveling to view herself in dressing-room mirrors, she wouldn’t stop talking about the mark’s incredible palate for wine, or his ability to quote poets and philosophers. He was everything she coveted on earth—so why take him for anything more than the tasteful gifts he was already willing to buy her?

  “Oh Jesus,” said Kevin. “Please tell me you’re kidding. You want to run off with some senile frog who thinks you were an underage Mississippi porn star. Good idea.”

  “Well, I was—sort of.”

  “You’re Elizabeth Olsen from Saginaw, Michigan.”

  “Why do you always have to bring her up? I’m sorry I ever confided in you, Kevin. If I ever have two happy nights in a row, you remind me that I’m secretly a cow.”

  Colette stayed too long with the man, became too enamored of his stories, and only when she discovered that the director was married did she leave town with Kevin. She boarded the train, and, once inside the swaying ligature between cars, she confessed: “You’re right, okay. I’m getting too attached to the marks. I know that—couldn’t help it. He was just so supportive of my work.”

  On a listless morning, they moved westward past seaside villages, crossing a narrow spit of raised sand between the ocean and the glassy marshes, all the way to Bordeaux, where Colette succumbed to a lingering head cold. Kevin suspended his work to take care of her, bringing oranges, aspirin, and secondhand books. In the evenings, while she sniffled on a mound of pillows, he read to her from The Arabian Nights, and she was so inspired by Scheherazade that she made him read until his voice broke, sinking down onto her side, eyes as open and attentive as a child’s. She believed that several chapters proved conclusively that women were superior swindlers. Scheherazade was really the first great hustler. “That was just a sweetheart con,” she said. “If they taught women things like this in college, instead of reading about all those hysterical housewives throwing themselves in front of trains, well, then we’d really be somewhere. She played that con every night. That’s the kind of patience we need over here, Kevin. One day at a time.”

  The theory bothered Kevin not because of any reverse chauvinism, but because she had now developed the sweetheart con as a career. Even worse, their agreement to steal discreetly meant that she now seemed more interested in flattery than money; and the compliments that had most delighted Colette infuriated Kevin like a wallet full of prepaid tour vouchers. She was the “prettiest gal” some Texas oilman had ever seen. That wasn’t a tribute, Kevin said, it was a pageant score. Pretty wasn’t the adjective for Colette. She probably wasn’t an adjective at all, but a verb, a zigzagging line traversing an old movie map, a rise of the chin and a crooked march in uncomfortable shoes.

  When she had finally recovered from her illness, Kevin stole eleven wallets, risking a beating from the local thieves; and after pooling his take with their last francs, he bought pearls for the twenty-fourth birthday of her new primary alias. During a last dinner in Bordeaux, once she realized that the gift was safe, that he had legally purchased them, she blushed all the way past her neck and into the cleft of her dress. She thanked him, and perhaps for the first time they stared at each other like two resourceful adults. She lowered her head to clasp the necklace, then glanced up at him with a fearful expression.

  He knew then that if he touched her, she would rear back as if stung. Maybe she would disappear into smoke, he thought, leaving a pile of rings, bracelets, and clothes on the chair, with the pearls nested in the middle.

  TWENTY-SIX

  After a loop through Spain and two frenetic weeks in Barcelona, working the crowds amid flame spitters and street vendors, they headed for the border with France. The train had moved fretfully all afternoon, until finally, far from the last village bells and lights, as evening changed every window to a mirror, it gathered speed for a final descent through the mountains. Passing between cars, an American tourist struggled ahead with his bags. Assuming he would disembark in minutes, Kevin bumped him, picked his pocket, and continued back to his compartment.

  There amid the unpacked bazaar of hanging clothes, Colette was sketching an old Spanish woman across from her. Kevin sorted through the plunder. He found a postcard from Valencia folded into the wallet and began writing a note to his father on it. Suddenly the train stalled on the cliffs with a hiss of air. After a few minutes, clanks and hollers came from underneath the wheelbase. Colette saw some nervous flush on his face and said, “Don’t worry. They’ve got a crack team down there fixing it with a rock.”

  For an hour they were stalled in the cliffs, Colette loyally shading every wrinkle in the old woman’s face, and Kevin straining over how much to tell his father in the cramped space of the postcard. Without looking away from her drawing, Colette said, “Dear Dad, I hope you’re making a lot of new friends in there …”

  Kevin stopped and looked up at her, his ears and cheeks burning. “Don’t. I mean it. You’re not allowed to say a word about him.”

  “My God, Kevin—such animosity. I bet he’s even gotten over it by now.”

  “As far as you’re concerned I don’t have a father.”

  “I’m not entirely sure you did. You know, you should say something—just so he doesn’t think you’re all alone.”

  “I’ll tell him I’m with a porn star from Mississippi.”

  She blanched and tightened her lips. “She wasn’t a porn star—she had a desperate phase in her life. I forgive her, why can’t you?”

  Colette held up the portrait for the woman to regard and, despite a remarkable likeness, the woman shrugged. The train resumed, speeding to a lullaby motion as it traversed coastal mountains, alternating between stretches of moon-trailed sea and the recoil through tunnels. Suddenly, in the midst of a downhill turn, Kevin glanced at the corridor and saw the American stumbling ahead with an attendant, who appeared listless, worn out by the indignant tourist. They were stopping at each compartment to ask about the lost wallet. In a scramble Kevin gathered his backpack and began stuffing Colette’s things into the valise.

  “Are you having another attack?”

  “We got to get out of here. Now.”

  He led Colette to the caboose while she watched him with bewildered eyes. Kevin counted the turns of the track, snapping his fingers and patting his jeans, relieved only when he saw a hook of lights along a distant shoreline.

  “Kevin? Don’t tell me you were stupid enough to roll somebody on the train.”

  “I thought it was pulling into the station! I got homesick. I had a weak moment, okay. Here—we’re slowing down.”

  “Kevin—you’re very good at this. But how the hell are we going to make it over here if you keep pickpocketing the most aggressive tourists in the world?”

  They hadn’t heard of the little village where they stepped off, Cerbere, but the hour was so late and the station so deserted that they couldn’t find a redcap. As they wandered through, two customs officers waved them past without looking up from a card game. Outside, Kevin trailed Colette in the dark carrying her heavy valise and his backpack, while she moved erratically, stopping every few yards to survey the sparse windows and lights furrowed into stone cliffs. A dog barked from somewhere above. “I don’t even know if we’re across the border. Does that sound like a French or a Spanish dog?”

  Around the shore where each light smudged onto the water beneath, the train slid away under a trail of violet smoke. They ascended a steep hill to a plateau where the road narrowed and a homey restaurant sat perched on a high ledge. Everything was closed and locked, but in a lit window there was a man sweeping the floor around a snug arrangement of pink tables. Colette traipsed through a small garden to tap on the window. The man searched the windows as i
f a bird had flown into the glass. When he located the drumroll of Colette’s fingernails, he drooped his shoulders in exasperation. He pointed at the sign on the door. “Désolé mais on viente juste de fermer.”

  “Oh, thank God,” said Colette. “We’re in France.” The man came to the door and Colette broke into a negotiation in broken French, finally cajoling him into selling them leftover bread and some wine. She was pleased with herself, and she skipped far ahead of Kevin back downhill, the wine bottles clanking in the bag, and a single stale baguette carried like a rifle. Kevin said that they would never find a room this late; he was going to circle around the dark shoreline on the opposite side of the bay to look for a secluded beach. She didn’t want to sleep outside, but he heard her following him from the jingling of the bottles. A few hundred yards past the ambient glow of streetlights, his eyes adjusted to the blackness and the sky was a vast canopy of stars, the ghostly trace of the Milky Way along a sharp outline of cliffs. The lights of the harbor now looked like a beached constellation. They scaled boulders and slid down a chute of loose driftwood toward the listless slop of tide over pebbles. He pretended not to hear Colette’s complaining, until she called for help, whereupon he backtracked to find her clinging to a damp, slanted rock. He reached his hand out, and she said, “Not me, Tarzan. The wine.”

  Trundling the luggage and groceries, they crawled over the last wet footing to a clearing of gray, pocked sand, penned on three sides by black cliffs. Colette laid T-shirts and jeans into a quilt on the damp sand; and Kevin struggled to make a perfect circle of stones for a campfire. He splintered some old boards stranded at the top of the beach, and used maps, hotel bills, and stolen passports as kindling. “Good thing we carry around so much evidence,” he said. While Colette uncorked each bottle of wine with his pocketknife, Kevin carefully lit and fanned the fire, the map igniting through the center like an image from a war film.

 

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