Kevin gave the prepared answer: walking dogs. He described the schedule exactly. He had, of course, walked his dogs an hour early that day. Once again, the detective looked skeptical.
“When you bought the Impala, who was there with you?”
It hurt to do it, but it had been the plan all along. Kevin gave them Doug and Mitch’s names. He stressed that Doug had just been laid off from his job and that his car had been impounded, and he tried to think of other things to say which might give the cops a better impression of the two. Then he remembered to ask the question that only a guilty man would forget to ask. “What’s all this about? We just buried a dog.”
DOUG WAS SITTING on his couch watching television when the cops arrived. After Mitch had left, Doug made the coffee and tried to figure out the only thing he still had control over-what exactly he would be doing when they came for him. He imagined a few different poses. He could be reading. He could be smoking pot. (What difference would it make at this point?) He could be watching TV. He could be cleaning the apartment, but clearly there was no point to that, as he would not be around to enjoy the cleanliness. Why go through the misery of cleaning unless you could enjoy the fruits of your labor?
It struck him that it might be a good day to go down to the convenience store and ask out the Mexican girl. He realized that the reason he had never done it before was that he lacked the confidence of a man who knew what he would be doing tomorrow. Today, he had that confidence but he decided not to bother because it just seemed like a bad way to start a relationship.
Perhaps she’d still be there when he got out.
He finished his coffee and smoked a bowl, then hid all the bongs and bowls, and put the last of his stash in the garbage. It hurt to throw the pot away but he decided he was in enough trouble as it was, so why make it worse?
Then he settled in to watch television, one ear tuned to every vehicle turning onto the street.
Around noon, he heard it and knew right away. Two cars, both with large engines, but not large enough for them to be trucks. They were driving slowly, as if checking addresses. Doug turned the sound down on the television, which he hadn’t really been watching, just staring at it as if it were a campfire. He felt strangely serene.
The engines stopped. Doors were opened and closed.
He clearly heard one police officer walking around to the back of the house, trying to be quiet about it, but his feet crunched in the new-fallen snow. That, Doug figured, was in case he tried to bolt out the back door.
There was a hard knock on the door and he got up and answered it. A kindly faced older detective and a younger, uniformed officer stood on the front step, both looking extremely serious.
“Are you Douglas Keir?”
“I am,” said Doug. He opened the door wider to allow them in and noticed that the action caused the two policemen to look at each other, surprised. They came inside.
“Is Mitchell Alden at home?”
“Mitch left.”
The plainclothes detective turned to the young officer and said, “Check upstairs.”
As the officer walked up the stairs, his gun unholstered, the older man turned back to Doug. “Can you tell me where you were yesterday afternoon, around three P.M.?”
“Three P.M.,” Doug said thoughtfully. He screwed up his face, as if thinking very hard. The younger officer came down the stairs.
“It’s clear,” the officer said. “No one up there.”
“Yes, I remember,” said Doug. “At some point around three P.M. I think I was, uh, like, in Westlake.”
“What were you doing there?”
“I was, uh, like, robbing an armored car.”
CABS, BUSES, AND trains. He caught a cab from the convenience store to the bus station, a bus from Wilton to Pittsburgh, and from the Pittsburgh train station he got the Amtrak to Cleveland. As he was buying the ticket with cash, making sure to crumple the bills in case they looked too fresh, Mitch congratulated himself on an act of sly genius. He doubted that anyone in the history of the world had ever before fled to Cleveland.
Why, he wondered, as snow-covered Ohio farmland shot past, does security go apeshit checking your luggage at airports but just let you take any damn thing you want onto a train? You could get on a train with a ticking suitcase with wires sticking out of it and no one would care, but you couldn’t get on a plane anymore with a bottle of water. He wondered if there was some hidden agenda he wasn’t seeing. Maybe the security was all for show, the shoe removal and the metal detectors just an act in a piece of terrorist-prevention theater. As he hugged his duffel bag full of cash to chest, he figured that having everyone scared shitless was always good for whoever was running the show.
Mitch was giving the issue thought because it was making it necessary for him to take trains rather than planes. No Homeland Security doofus was going to go rifling through his bag of money, no sir. But this meant that a trip to Cleveland would take seven hours rather than one, and Seattle or LA, if he decided to go there, would take days and days. And he couldn’t leave his duffel bag alone, even for a few moments, so eating on the train was out. Still, no matter how much the ride sucked, Mitch figured that it had to be better than what was happening to Doug.
He wondered what to do when he got to Cleveland. He would get a hotel room, maybe buy some clothes and get a haircut so he looked a little more professional. Then he’d try to get most of the cash turned into traveler’s checks. He needed to see about getting a fake ID from somewhere, though that could be risky. Maybe he’d just get a job for a few months that paid under the table, wait until everything died down, and then figure something out. Maybe he’d go to Canada. Maybe to Seattle.
Despite having a bag full of money and an open road in front of him, Mitch didn’t feel as free as he had imagined he would.
AFTERMATH
SCREWMITCHAND Doug, Kevin thought. Mitch had blown town and Doug was in jail, so it was easy for them to keep their promise and not spend money in Wilton for six months. It had taken Kevin just one month of having to pay alimony, child support, and a mortgage on a dog walker’s salary before he was parked across the road from the hidden bag of money with a shovel in the back of his disintegrating pickup truck.
The rain was hammering down, so anyone who passed by would be concentrating on driving, and Kevin had taken care to park back behind the trees where the pickup wouldn’t be visible from the road. Rain made people uninterested in anything except getting home safely; it also made the ground soft for digging. He stepped out of the truck and was soaked almost immediately by the near-freezing rain, making him gasp for air. Before he even reached into the back for the shovel, the water was dripping off his eyelashes, making it hard to see. He laughed.
Ducking back through the trees, he felt a sudden rush of freedom. Despite everything, he knew when he got home to his empty house, nobody would be there to ask him where he had been. Nobody would demand that he explain why he was soaked to the skin. Linda was a good person, most likely a better person than he would ever be, but Jesus H. Christ could she ask a lot of questions. Every day with her had been like a visit to the parole board. Where? Why? With whom? Now, tell me again?
He slammed the shovel into the soft earth, pleased to see that the ground where the cash had been buried didn’t look disturbed. There had been so much rain and snow in the past few weeks that not even a professional tracker would be able to see that someone had dug a hole here. Which was good, because it was deer hunting season, so most of the people likely to walk past the spot would actually be professional trackers. He was careful not to throw the dirt, laying each shovelful gently beside the hole. After about ten or twelve loads of dirt, he felt the sharp edge of the shovel drive into the trash bag. Damn, he thought, we really didn’t bury it very deep. What if animals had burrowed into it? What if a mudslide… He shrugged. Sometimes you just had to leave things to chance. He threw the shovel down and sat on a rotting log as he pulled open the bag.