“With the help of citizens like you, we just might,” said Sid. He took a midsize office envelope from his jacket pocket and stuffed the money inside.
“What I’m doing is putting this money in a special envelope and I’m going to mark it, and then I want you to take it back to the bank.”
Sid bent over the desk and wrote “Mrs. Hastings” on the envelope with a thick black Magic Marker. As he straightened up, he had his back to Hastings. During the brief moment, Sid switched the envelope of money with an identical envelope stuffed with blank pieces of paper that was premarked “Mrs. Hastings” with the same felt pen. God, this was too easy, he thought. It was one of the oldest scams, but it never stopped working. There was an endless supply of old people who were trusting, eager to follow rules and ready to assist authority. When would they wise up?
He held the packet out to her. “Okay, now go back to the bank.”
As Deloris took the packet, someone honked a horn outside. Spittle walked to the front window and peeked out the curtain, and he saw a green Geo parked in the driveway behind his Rambler, half hanging out in the street.
“Shit!”
The honking resumed-beep, beep, beeeeeeeeeep.
“Something’s come up,” said Spittle. “I gotta run.”
“What about catching the bad guys?” asked Deloris.
“That’ll have to wait.”
The horn outside went silent.
“What am I supposed to do now?” Deloris asked.
Sid kept glancing at the front door, starting to show the first tremors of panic. “Look, I really gotta go.”
Deloris asked, “But what-”
The front door opened without a knock, and Sid cringed.
There she stood. Patty Bodine. The seventeen-year-old runaway that Spittle started diddling last week on Indian Rocks Beach. She was a thin waif of a thing with long, straight dirty-blond hair and lots of freckles that made her look even younger. She was sorta cute, but her lower face had a nagging ursine quality that Sid couldn’t quite get around. Her loose jeans rode low on her hips and the tight tangerine junior miss top exposed her midriff and pierced belly button. She tapped one of her dirty bare feet impatiently and smoked a Marlboro red. “What’s taking so long? Come on!”
Sid’s facial muscles tightened as he clung to composure. Underage girls were such great lays, he thought, but the immature crap he had to put up with-it just didn’t seem right.
“You’re messin’ up my gig!” said Sid. “Go wait outside!”
“You’ve got the money, right?” said Patty. “What’s the big deal? Just take it and let’s go!”
“What’s going on?” said Deloris. She looked inside her envelope and saw the stack of plain pieces of paper. She looked up. “You’re not a cop! Gimme my money back!”
“Let’s go!” yelled Patty, tugging on his right arm.
“I want my money!” yelled Deloris, grabbing his left arm.
Sid was dumbstruck by the turn of events.
Before he knew it, Sid had turned and decked Deloris with a right cross to the nose delivered as hard as he could. She dropped at his feet like a fifty-pound sack of russet potatoes. Her delicate vascular network had ruptured and begun to fill out the area under her eyes and across both cheeks with a deep purple just under the skin.
“Ooooo, gross!” said Sid. He leaned over and studied Deloris as she moaned.
“What are you waiting for?!” asked Patty.
“Think we should call an ambulance?”
“Don’t tell me you care what happens to her!”
“No, I care what happens to me!” said Sid. “If she dies, this is a murder rap.”
“Fuck her!” said Patty. She reached on top of the TV and grabbed a brass statue of the gentle Saint Francis holding a songbird on his finger, and she bashed Deloris in the head. That stopped all but the slightest movement in the old woman, so Patty did it again. This time Deloris fell completely still.
“There! She’s dead,” said Patty. “Now there’s no decision to make. Can we finally go!”
“Jesus Christ!” Sid yelled, stumbling backward in shock. “You’re one cold cunt!”
“You hit her first.”
“But that was self-defense!”
M rs. Hastings never felt a thing. She didn’t die right away like Patty thought. First she went into a coma. Six hours later, about the time that brain swelling put a coda on Mrs. Hastings’s ninety years, Sid was on his fourth Corona at a table in the back of a beach dive called The Wharf Rat. Patty had made a whining pain in the ass of herself wanting to go to the beach, but Sid said he needed some beer first to settle his nerves from what he had just witnessed. He placated her with two of Deloris’s hundred-dollar bills, and Patty smiled for the first time all day.
“This calls for a suck!”
Sid looked around the dim bar. “Okay,” he said and pulled out the chair next to him, and she crawled under the table.
The Wharf Rat was the kind of place where the waitresses worked in wet T-shirts and sold five-dollar joints on the side, which was overlooked by the bartender, who sold forty-five-dollar half-grams in the men’s room. The music was too loud, the room too dark, and the only pool table was warped.
An hour later, Sid’s nerves were sanded down smooth and he was feeling pretty good about himself. He had even gotten over his anger at Mrs. Hastings. The five thousand meant he wouldn’t have to work again for weeks.
A drink arrived, and the waitress in the wet T-shirt told him it was compliments of the men at the next table. Sid looked over. He saw three sloppy-drunk losers in T-shirts. He reluctantly raised the drink in a gesture of thanks, but they were too far gone. They had an entire bottle of scotch on their table, half pouring, half spilling their own drinks. He recognized them. They were regulars, just like him. But he had never liked their looks, and they didn’t socialize.
Sid soon noticed he was having trouble getting served. At first, the waitresses merely hovered around the three drunks. Then they dropped all pretenses; service to the rest of the bar ground to a halt as every waitress stopped and joined the circle around the three men, waiting to jump at their command. Sid saw they were tipping with hundreds. The bartender came over and led the trio to the bathroom, and they all came back out smiling.
“Arriba! Arriba!” they yelled.
Sid slid his chair over to their table. “What’s the celebration, fellas?”
“We’re richer than King Tut,” said the closest one, his pupils dilated different sizes and his mouth and tongue out of synch. “We just found five million big ones!”
“Shhhh! Shhhh! Shhhh! Shhhh!” said the second, his head rolling around in its neck socket. “That’s a seeeeecret! We can’t let anybody know it’s out in the car!…Ooops!” And he covered his mouth with his hands as if they were faster than the speed of sound.
“But I’m your friend,” said Sid.
“Yesh, he’sh our friend!” slurred the third one.
L ate the next morning, the first of the car thieves awoke in bright sunlight on the wooden floor of their Ybor City warehouse apartment, where they’d passed out just before daybreak.
He looked around, groggy. What happened? Snatches of memory filtered back. He remembered some guy back at The Wharf Rat helping them into a cab and paying the driver, then the ride back to the warehouse and the inebriated struggle up the steps, the three of them leaning against each other, an unstable tripod holding itself up. They must have made it into the apartment and lost consciousness on the floor because that’s all he could remember. He couldn’t remember anything at all about…the money! Where was the money? That bastard in the bar must have stolen it!
The car thief tried to spring up from the floor but couldn’t move. He looked down and saw his entire body spooled tightly head to toe with hundred-pound-test fishing line, his arms pinned by his sides and his legs bound together. He looked over at his two comrades on the floor next to him wrapped in the nylon line.