Antsy groaned and scrambled straight ahead, still tangled in the hedge, and Lucas vaulted the low chain- link fence around the neighbor’s backyard and ran up as Antsy finally staggered to his feet, clutching at his crotch, blood bubbling out of his mouth, around his broken teeth. Lucas hit him as hard as he could right between the eyes.
Antsy went back in the hedge and this time didn’t move. Jenkins came running out of the house and said, “Goddamnit, you didn’t wait for me.”
“He’s a violent man,” Lucas said, breathing hard, shaking out his hand.
But the movie wasn’t over, quite. Antsy’s mom came out of the house, screaming, fat, Lithuanian, they’d heard, from the Old Country, hard lard, not soft, waving the butcher knife. “His mother made him what he is,” Jenkins said, quoting a country song. Mom had fixed on Shrake, and charged him, and Jenkins swatted her in the face with the butt of the shotgun and she went down.
There were sirens, had been sirens, and then a uniformed St. Paul cop looked back around the house, saw them, ran up and said, “Whoa. Resisting arrest,” and kicked Antsy in the ribs hard enough to knock him back out of the hedge. More steel- toed shoes.
St. Paul arrived in force, and they dragged Antsy out of the hedge and propped up his old lady, who started crying, and Antsy said, “You motherfuckers are gonna pay for this. We got more goddamn guns than you do and Siggy’s coming back, you motherfuckers. You beat up our mom, you motherfuckers.”
“I hope he’s coming back,” Jenkins said through his teeth. “That cocksucker will look good on the end of my shotgun.”
Antsy spit blood at him, but missed, and the St. Paul cop said, “Maybe we oughta put a spit shield on him."
"What a buttwipe,” Shrake said. “Problem with a spit shield is, sometimes it covers their eyes so much that they can’t see the car roof when they’re getting in, and they just knock the shit out of themselves,” Jenkins said.
“Siggy’s gonna fix your asses,” Antsy said, but he didn’t spit again. His mom said, “I didn’t know Antsy was coming home, I didn’t know, not my fault…” Antsy said, “Shut the fuck up.” His mother was bleeding heavily from her nose, and the cops helped her up and started her toward the car. “You criminals,” she mumbled. “You criminals…”
LUCAS DIDN’T GET back to the office until four-thirty. Carol, his secretary, looked at him and said, “You’ve been taking some exercise.”
“Yeah.” He felt pretty good, in fact, except that his right hand hurt.
The Tomses were both at Regions hospital in guarded condition, with a few broken bones and blunt trauma between them, and Antsy also had about a million tiny thorns sticking in him. “Don’t know what we can do about that,” a doc said. “Let them work their way out, I guess. Gonna itch like fire, though.”
“We’ll have to find a way to live with it,” Shrake said.
“I GOT THAT stuff from Dan Hall,” Carol said. “He faxed a subpoena to Fidelity and they sent back a fax of the canceled check. Frances Austin had a checking account at Riverside State Bank.”
“Huh.” The Antsy episode had temporarily kicked the Austin case out of Lucas’s frontal lobes. He wanted to go around and punch walls, and talk about the bust, and maybe have a couple of beers and kick cans down the street and laugh out loud.
“I got you a subpoena for her Riverside records,” she said, and handed him a piece of paper with his own signature at the bottom. “They close at five. The records will be ready when you serve the subpoena.”
Lucas looked at the paper, felt the high leaking out. “I think I should have been there… you know, to sign it?”
“You were, in spirit,” she said. The Riverside State Bank was not on the side of the river, but in one of St. Paul’s downtown skyways, an obscure bank, one that you didn’t think about. Lucas left his car on the street, got a bag of popcorn, and wound his way through the skyways, replaying the Antsy Toms fight in his head.
How did some people grow up to be pieces of shit? They didn’t have to be-they just were. They liked it. What was the Kid Rock song? “Low Life”? Like that.
The bank was painted in tints and shades of brown; if you didn’t look at it carefully, it might not have been there-in a fantasy novel, it would have been the gate to an alternate reality.
The vice president in charge of the branch, a tall, balding man with weasel- like teeth, took the subpoena and produced a piece of paper, an account file.
“This is it?” Lucas asked, turning it over. “One side of a piece of paper?”
“An unusual account,” the vice president said. “What do you think she’s up to?”
Lucas shook his head. “She’s dead.” The vice president’s hand went to his lips. “Not… She wasn’t withdrawing… Somebody wasn’t taking out…?"
"No, no. She was killed after the last withdrawal. A month or so afterwards. And this is still open, right?” He held the paper up. “Nobody’s gotten in touch about an estate?”
“No. There’s nothing in her file at all. No notations. We did issue a check- cashing card.”
“And it’s open."
"It’s still open, but only has a hundred dollars in it. The fifty-thousand-dollar deposit was withdrawn in cash, starting two weeks after it was deposited. Then nothing more.”
“Hmm."
"That’s what I thought, when I saw it,” the vice president said. “Of course, this is all automated, and it’s not big enough to draw any particular attention. But, look here…”
He reached out for the file, and Lucas let it go, and the vice president put it on the desktop, upside down from himself, so Lucas could read it, and used a pen to point out the individual lines of the withdrawal records.
“We have five branches: this one, plus one at Maplewood, one at Signal Hills, one in Woodbury, and one down at Midway. The money was taken out twenty- five hundred dollars at a time, in cash. Twenty withdrawals, one a day. Look at this code-this tells you the branch where the withdrawal was made. The first was taken out here, the next in Maplewood, the next at Midway, the next at Signal Hills. And so on. Every week for four weeks.”
“Why would they do that?"
"My thought was, she didn’t want to be seen taking out too much money at once,” the vice president said. “I looked in my computer records, and I can tell you that she never saw any teller twice. Since we only have two or three working at a time, that doesn’t work out statistically.”
“So she was avoiding the tellers she’d seen before,” Lucas said. “That’s my idea,” the vice president said. “Thank you,” Lucas said. He started away, then turned back. “The fifty thousand wasn’t the first deposit?"
"That’s on the paper,” the vice president said. “The account was opened with five hundred dollars. There were two one- hundred- dollar withdrawals on the check card, then nothing for two months, then the big check, then nothing for two weeks, then four weeks of daily withdrawals.”
Fifty grand. What had she been buying? Maybe nothing. Maybe she was putting together some case money, a stash. Shit, maybe she was a terrorist. A rich Caucasian Goth terrorist, buying RPGs. Maybe she was going to war against the Republicans. Lucas smiled to himself: maybe not.
So what had she been buying? Or why would she need case money? He couldn’t remember the names, looked in his notebook: Denise Robinson, Mark McGuire. Hung out with her, might have wanted to start a business. Wanted her for the money? Something to push.
HE WENT HOME for dinner, the kitchen warm and smelling good, like potatoes and salmon, Sam making a hash of his hash, Letty working on algebra while she ate (“If a train is going sixty- five miles an hour to the east, and another train is going forty- five miles an hour to the west…”), and took time out to grouse about not getting a cell phone, because everybody else had one, and Weather, quiet, amused, and at the same time, tired from a seven- hour- long operation, talking about going to bed early. A happy moment: if he’d ever thought of commissioning a painting of his family, that would be the moment.