by Mike Faricy
“You know, as a kid in high school, I made keys,” Hub said.
Val looked at him, genuinely surprised.
“Yeah, Steven’s Hardware, back in Blue Earth. Worked there for a summer, and then nights during high school, before I got my class C license and started driving trucks. I was hauling—”
“You know how to copy keys?” Val interrupted, incredulous and not really caring about Hub’s truck driving career after high school.
“Yeah, nothing to it. You get the right blank, clamp that sucker in place next to your original. You know, it takes maybe a minute, minute and a half, to cut a key. You could pick up a used cutter for maybe a thousand, twelve hundred, tops. Get your blanks. You wouldn’t need that many, just doing house keys. Blanks run you maybe twenty-five cents apiece. Oh yeah, it’s easy, really easy.”
“Okay. Here’s what we do. They come in. We lock their purses in a room, so they’re safe. We copy the keys, don’t do a thing with them that night. Just hang onto them. We find out when these folks go to work or to the beach, something like that, so it can’t be tied back to us. Then, while they’re out of the house, in we go, grab what we want in a couple of minutes, and then quietly leave.
“No one even knows because we just take a few things, things that won’t be missed right away, if ever. It’s all sold up in Atlanta within a week or two. We store it someplace where it can’t be traced to us. You could handle any house alarm systems we would run into, right?”
Hub scratched his chin, thinking about alarm systems. “Yeah, the beauty of home systems is usually the brand of the particular system is advertised right on a little sign in the front of a house. You know, telling bad guys, hey, we got an alarm, go next door. Of course, it would also tell me if it was a system I could bypass. They’re all pretty basic, usually no cameras and stuff in a home, just motion detectors, contacts being broken, that sort of simple, basic stuff.”
“Think you could do that? Bypass the alarms?” Val asked.
“Yeah, they’re all pretty standard. There’s usually some sort of manufacturer’s bypass code, and I got a book full of manufacturer bypass codes right behind you in a box. I’ve got to dial up and all, but I could use a cellphone, tell them I’m bypassing for a new install, an add on, something like that. I used to do it all the time. It’s what I did all day long back at Home Tech.”
“Hmm,” said Val. “Need a lot of special equipment, special tools?”
“Na, not really, in fact, nothing I don’t have in the back of the truck right now, sitting in my toolbox.”
Hub thought Val’s idea didn’t sound half-bad. I mean, it wasn’t against the law just to talk about it, and who’d miss a couple of things, anyway? He still wasn’t going to mention the money, or the gun, from the liquor store.
Val was deep in thought as they drove south. What had he been worried about? Hub was turning out to be quite the dark horse. He didn’t seem surprised at anything Val had told him or suggested. Maybe this idea might just work.
Chapter 9
They rolled into Tampa a few hours later. Hub had written the directions on the back of a final notice envelope from the power company. Jimmy and Deanna were living in a development named Gulf Breeze Court.
“Just keep going south,” Jimmy had told him. “You can’t miss it. It’s a gated community. Take the first right, then the next right, 2748 Jackson. White place with a big tree in front.”
“Jimmy must have his hands full with three kids and Deanna parading around all day. I remember her as a lot of high-maintenance work. Great looking little thing, but there was a lot there you had to put up with,” Hub said.
“Well, right now, Hub, I don’t care if he’s got a dozen of the little rug rats running around. A hot shower, clean sheets, a couple hours of decent sleep, and not waking up next to you in this truck will go a long way to makin’ me a happier boy. Maybe we can sweet talk little old Deanna into cooking something up. It’d be nice to watch her strut her stuff around the table.”
They drove past a billboard advertising Gulf Breeze Court. “I hope that sign looks that bad because the sun’s done something to it,” Hub said. Val remained silent, staring out at the dilapidated buildings. About four miles later, they saw the turn for Seminole Boulevard and the entrance to Gulf Breeze Court. Gulf Breeze Trailer Court. Hub was doing a mental scramble for a way to put the best face on this, but things seemed to be heading rapidly downhill as they drove into Jimmy’s gated community.
Val had a stunned look on his face. Seminole Boulevard was initially gravel before quickly petering out to hard-packed, rutted dirt. The first right took them past some pretty dismal looking trailers. Faded metal siding was peeling off. Broken windows were covered with cardboard. Hay bales were stacked around the base for insulation. They passed more than one car up on blocks.
“Not a lot of what you might call lawn work taking place around here,” Hub joked. A couple of shirtless fat guys, sporting multiple tattoos, huddled under the faded hood of a late model Mercury. “You think all those guys work the night shift?”
Hub turned onto Andrew Jackson Trail. Midway down the road, he recognized Jimmy’s faded red Bronco parked in the shade of a big tree. The address on the mailbox looked to read 2746. Upon closer inspection, he noticed the upper portion of the 8 had peeled off.
Two dogs were chained to an old tire laid over a large metal stake that kept the tire more or less in place. They were large, drooling, and barking nonstop. The dogs growled and bared their teeth. Long, thick gobs of drool dripped out the sides of their mouths. Two grimy plastic salad bowls lay upside down in the dirt. A dirty little boy with a shaved head and wearing grayed underpants nibbled at the remnants of a cookie as he sat on the tire.
“Howdy,” Hub called to the boy over the growling and barking.
“You ever see the movie, Deliverance?” Val said.
Hub knocked on the door. “Hey, Jimmy, Deanna! You guys in there?”
Deanna had been a drop-dead gorgeous, blonde Norwegian farm girl from out around St. Peter, Minnesota. That was back in 2012. This morning, she filled the doorway from left to right, wearing frayed cut-off blue jeans and a Florida Seminole’s T-shirt. She blew cigarette smoke from under hair dyed a reddish color not found in nature.
Her arms looked like overstuffed sausages alongside slabs of pork. Her breasts and waist appeared to be a distant memory. Her bare legs and arms, where they weren’t bitten by insects, had a pinkish cast.
Jimmy oozed in behind her. As a younger man, he had never been considered what you might call good looking, and not much had changed with time. He was large, though not as big around as Deanna. He looked strong from forty-plus years of hard, physical labor, big, broad, and rock solid.
Jimmy’s flushed face was framed by a full, unkempt, mostly dark beard. A shiny bald head and thick glasses, recently upgraded to bifocals, forced him to move his head up and down to focus. He was wearing blue-jean cut-offs, similarly frayed and slightly smaller than Deanna’s. Thick legs with calves the size of melons stood like fence posts set into unlaced work boots. A stained, dingy grey T-shirt completed his ensemble. He was slurping from a can of diet Pepsi and nibbling a chocolate donut, holding both in his left hand.
“Well, Hub Schneider,” Deanna said and blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. “Look what the cat dragged in.”
“Hub, buddy, how’s it going, man?” Jimmy said, spitting donut crumbs onto Deanna’s shoulder. “Wondering if you were ever gonna make it. Come on in, man.”
The dogs continued to bark, growl, and strain at their chains. Val hung close, figuring he would only have to outrun Hub should the dogs break loose from their chains. He’d been half-kidding when he asked Hub about the movie Deliverance. Now, he wasn’t so sure.
“Looking good, man,” Jimmy said and jammed half a donut into the left side of his mouth. “Glad you finally made it down here. We were beginning to wonder what happened to you two.”
Jimmy looked over Hub’s sh
oulder at Val, wiped his hand across his T-shirt, and thrust it in Val’s direction. “Hey, man, I’m Jimmy. You must be Hal. Nice meeting you.” He tilted his chins down toward his wife. “This here’s Deanna. Baby, meet Hal.”
“Val! Val Harwood,” said Val, shaking Jimmy’s sticky hand. He nodded toward Deanna, not wanting to touch her. “Hub’s been talking about you all the way down.”
With Hub, Val, Jimmy, and Deanna, there was barely enough room for the four of them to stand around the doorway. Val grew more wide-eyed by the moment. He wasn’t about to spend the night, let alone two or three nights, in this place.
“Well, come on in, clear a space, and set your ass down,” Deanna said and waddled into the kitchen area. She shoved her cigarette into a corner of her mouth, tilted her head sideways to avoid some of the smoke, and moved a pile of clothes from a plastic and chrome kitchen chair onto the table, clearing a spot for herself. Jimmy followed her and tossed a mound of clothes in the direction of a worn, green recliner edged with duct tape. The clothes landed partially on the recliner, a couple of items spilling to the floor. Jimmy’s diet Pepsi splashed in the process, but neither he nor Deanna seemed to notice.
Hub watched as Deanna pushed a plate encrusted with what remained of fried eggs toward the center of the table. She had never been much in the way of cleaning, and it appeared Florida had done nothing to improve the situation. He grabbed his own mound of clothes and handed them to Jimmy, who simply tossed them in the general direction of the recliner.
Val remained standing, hands safely in his pockets. He leaned against the kitchen counter, trying not to touch anything else. There were five grimy, egg-smeared plates littering the Formica kitchen table. A small stove was buried under half-full pots and pans. Val figured that, unless they had spaghetti for breakfast, it was yesterday’s mess on the right front burner. The smell of garbage mixed with cigarette ashes hit him and seemed to gain strength the closer he leaned toward the sink full of dirty dishes.
“Well, we just wanted to stop in and say hi before we moved on,” Hub said. “We’ve got a meeting later today with some folks in Tampa but didn’t want the two of you worrying ‘bout us.”
Val didn’t blink, but he could have kissed Hub. He made a mental note to pay any motel bill for the next couple of nights, meals, gas, anything, just as long as they didn’t stay here.
“In fact, I kinda hate to run, but we probably should be heading out. We’re not exactly sure where we’re going. Just wanted to let you know we made it down here all right,” Hub said and rose out of the chair. He gave a quick look, but Val was already in motion.
“Well, thanks for letting us know you’re okay,” Jimmy said. “Now, once you guys get settled in, you give a call. We’ll plan on supper here and a night of taking it easy with a case or two of beer.”
Deanna nodded and sucked the last of her cigarette down to the filter before crushing it out in a puddle of congealed egg on one of the plates.
Val kicked the door open with his foot, still not touching anything with his hands. “Great meeting you two,” he yelled over his shoulder, jumping down to ground level and half-running for the truck.
The dogs had never quite stopped barking, but the sight of Val riled them up again. They strained against their heavy chains. The stake holding the tire wiggled back and forth but fortunately remained in place. The dirty, barefoot little boy in underpants continued to ride the tire up and down. He remained trance-like, oblivious to the dogs growling and straining for Val.
In seconds, Val was in the truck and immediately locked his door. Hub hung back a moment. He walked toward the truck, chatting with Jimmy and Deanna, steadily moving toward the driver’s door. He waved a final time through the windshield as they backed onto the rutted, dirt-packed, Andrew Jackson Trail.
Val waved and said through his toothy smile, “Lord in heaven! Hub, I’ll tell you right now. I promise I’m picking up the tab for a motel room the next two nights. We’ll figure something out. But thank you for not making me spend another moment in that place. I just want to go somewhere and hose myself off.”
“Yeah, you gotta wonder what Deanna and Jimmy do with their time,” Hub said.
About twenty minutes later, they dragged their suitcases and trash bags up the outside staircase and into a powder blue and cream-colored room at the Gulf Side Red Roof Inn. Hub made a second trip to retrieve the case of Dixie and get it out of the sunlight. He tore open a warm Dixie, drained a third of the bottle before he stretched out on the bed. Despite the title ‘Gulf Side’, there was no Gulf or beach to view, just a parking lot with parking spaces and a navy blue dumpster.
“Where’s the ocean from here?” Hub asked.
“It’s the Gulf, Dipshit,” Val said just before he drifted off to sleep.
Hub woke several hours later. He tiptoed into the bathroom with his gym bag. He had stuffed the chrome .45 and the bank bag into his blue high school gym bag. A pair of scissors from Monica’s sewing kit had somehow ended up with his shaving gear, and he used them to cut open the green nylon bank bag.
The bag was stuffed with a stack of checks paper clipped together, an adding machine tape, and three thick wads of cash. He sat on the bathroom floor and counted the cash four separate times. Each time coming up with a different result. He read down the adding machine tape and caught the number $5455.00. That was close to dead center of his four counts, and so he went with that amount. The chrome .45 was a bit of a disappointment because it was unloaded.
He stuffed everything back into the gym bag, jammed the gun in on top, and zipped it closed. He flushed the toilet for good measure.
Val rolled over on his side, more asleep than awake. “You okay?” he asked, keeping his eyes closed. He returned to snoring before Hub had a chance to answer.
Hub quietly buried the gym bag in his large suitcase and stretched back out on the bed. He immediately fell back asleep, content with just over five grand.
Chapter 10
Jasper Denton was a commercial real estate broker. Born and raised in Tampa, he’d been in the commercial game for over thirty years, and in all that time, had never dealt in what one would call your Class A commercial properties. Jasper dealt more in things like the dingy little brick building he was standing in front of just now. It had been a failed grocery, a failed hairdresser, a failed building contractor, and, most recently, a failed insurance office.
He was shaking his head at no one in particular, mopping the sweat from his brow and wondering how bad things could get. Good Lord, even the damn insurance office had failed. Thirty years in real estate had made him more than a little bit superstitious, and just now, he was mulling over the thought that this building was jinxed. The grocery, contractor, hairdresser, and insurance office were just the four most recent failures. That didn’t count the fourteen months it had remained vacant, nor the six months’ rent Jasper never saw after Patti the hairdresser ran off in the middle of the night. Come to think of it. Jasper couldn’t recall anything ever working at this location. The little corner seemed to be a revolving door for bad business ventures.
He had just finished leaning two red and white ‘Jasper Denton, Real Estate Broker’ signs against the inside of the grimy window facing Fremont Avenue. The signs represented the sum total of advertising dollars Jasper intended to spend on the building.
The building had one large, open front room with a coffee-stained carpet. Two connecting offices snaked off the front room, leading toward the rear of the building. The larger of the two offices featured a small bathroom, so small it was almost impossible to turn around once inside.
Behind the smaller of the two offices, way back in the rear, sat a tiny dead space. Jasper described the space as the work area. The space was far too small to serve as a workshop, far too small to do any real work in. Cut into the rear wall of this space stood an ancient, heavy, wooden garage door that opened onto the dirt alley.
Jasper was standing out front on the sidewalk, thinking about a
lot of things, not the least of which was how good the hot sun felt. He needed another vacant property now about as much as he needed another hole in his head. He wondered where, in God’s name, he was going to find someone crazy enough even to look at this outdated, useless, not up to code piece of property. Let alone someone foolish enough to rent the damn thing.
Val and Hub were on day four in Tampa and day three of looking for dance studio space. Between the Tampa heat, missing street signs, wrong turns, poor locations in strip malls, they weren’t having much luck. Val wasn’t exactly sure what he was searching for. He just knew he hadn’t seen it yet. About all they had accomplished after three days was pushing one another’s buttons and shortening their respective fuses.
“Hub, we were supposed to go left, not right.”
“Listen, it ain’t exactly a picnic driving around a strange town. Here’s a clue. You got the map, so when you’re giving directions, tell me about a block ahead of where I’m supposed to turn, not when I’m in the middle of the intersection.”
They rolled past the brick corner building, searching for a wide spot in the road to make a U-turn.
Val glanced out the window at Jasper standing on the sidewalk and caught the signs in the window. “Whoa, whoa, back up, Hub, back up, man.”
“What do you mean?”
Val was sliding down, attempting to catch the building in his sideview mirror. “No man, look, I think I just saw it, what we’re looking for. Turn around, Hub, turn around.”
The building, at least from what Val could see in the sideview mirror, could be exactly what he was looking for. His imagination was racing ahead of him as he jumped out of Hub’s pickup and ran to the large window, completely ignoring Jasper standing in the sun. He took a corner of his T-shirt and wiped a small area of the window clean and peered inside. He saw a front room large enough to serve as a dance floor with two doors at the back of the room.