The smoke, blood, and smell of shit was overpowering. He gripped the bags and hustled in a fast scissor-walk back the way he had come. The long corridor seemed to stretch out in front of him like in that nightmare he’d had with the wolves. He made it outside. He was sweating, his knuckles turned white gripping the heavy garbage bags. He heaved one, then the other into the trunk, tore off his jacket and shirt, and replaced his outerwear with a Vikings jersey and ball cap. A chorus of sirens erupted from the nearby interstate. His timing was nearly perfect.
He didn’t count the money until he had put three states between himself and Minnesota. It was less than he had hoped — $184,000 — but a good haul nonetheless.
Lying on a bed in a Valdosta motel that night, he wondered about himself and the distance he had come since childhood. Why had he never used his spatial gift to make something of himself — say, as an architect or a designer? Why crime? He had never killed anyone on a job before this. Murder was unforgivable, it provoked God’s wrath. An act of contrition on his deathbed could still save him from damnation. He just wanted out, to be safe now from SWAT crashing through his door at dawn. The money would give him that. He felt calmer than he had since he’d left Minnesota. His only worry was Tom expecting too big a share now that he was national news.
His reverie broke just as a movie came on. The screen flashed a warning for parents: “Intense Sequences of Violence, Gore, a Scene of Sexuality, and Cigarette Smoking.” Sounded like his house when he was a boy.
His fate was linked to his saint’s medal in some serpentine way he did not fully understand. They had cheated him too. St. Christopher had been booted out of the community of sainthood. It wasn’t for his early years of dissipation, drinking and brawling in taverns, it was because church investigators had recently deemed his miracles had not been true ones — at least, they said they could not be verified by modern methods. The Vatican had revoked his canonization and knocked him down a peg to the “blessed” category where he would remain for the rest of eternity.
He felt tired and his skin itched. Just nerves, Pine thought. His stomach roiled with acid. He knew he would be on the six o’clock news and he wanted to wait for the update. He needed to see how close they were.
Maybe I can still turn it around, he thought. Maybe I don’t have to stay a criminal.
I never wanted to be this way.
I never chose it.
This whole life... it just... happened to me.
They say the devil knows his own.
The man whose real name was Christopher but who had recently called himself Steve Pine lay on his bed and meditated, his mind doing its own riff through his past — those early failures followed by the successful robberies where the money was good but never lasted. Those bodies on the floor back in Minnesota intruded. It would have been unthinkable when he started down this path — to take a life so easily. Bob was an easy one, a pragmatic decision. That wasn’t even Pine’s doing because Bob wrote that part for himself. He felt nothing inside for him or any of them. Suicide, they told him, was the only irredeemable sin. He took off his St. Christopher medal and laid it gently on the pillow beside him. He took the Glock out of his ankle holster, brought the barrel to his mouth, and applied a pound of pressure just to see what it felt like to pull the trigger. Except for the taste of bluing in the metal, he had no other sensation, no fear of ending his life in an abject squalor of brain and blood on a headboard in a highway motel. The money in the trunk of his car had all the meaning that mattered now.
He trusted his instincts. Key West was too risky — too many snowbirds from up North came down and he’d stand out to local cops and bar owners. He’d save it for later like a good middle-class citizen deferring pleasure until circumstances were more in hand. First things first: a place to stay, nothing flashy like those deluxe resorts at the tip of Little Torch Key. A small trailer park on the leeward side of Dolphin Marina fit the bill; a decrepit sign stuck between a couple of palm trees declared lots, trailers, and rentals available, inquire with the manager. He introduced himself as “Keith Reynolds,” financial-services consultant, out of Chicago.
The park manager was a Vietnam vet with tobacco-stained teeth and shoulder-length gray hair. He said a retiree named Jefferson had just brought his double-wide down from South Dakota and “then, by God, dropped deader than Julius Caesar from a massive coronary” after only a week down here. He looked inside, nodded, asked the manager about the price and was told it could be his at a huge discount because “the old boy’s family, they don’t want to pay a big-ass fee to have it hauled back home.”
He agreed to the price, asked to pay cash — he planned to open up an account at a bank in the Lower Keys tomorrow.
“I’m sure the family will let you have all his stuff at a good price,” he said.
“No thanks,” he replied.
The manager said, “No problem, man,” and then said he’d arrange with some moving people to have the furniture carted away to a storage facility.
He thought of his St. Christopher medal back in Valdosta, now most likely the property of a motel maid. He wasn’t free of all superstition, but he didn’t want anything a dead man had touched hanging over his new life.
He thought he felt his luck changing. He began to breathe more easily and stopped looking over his shoulder so often. The sunshine, the ocean breezes, the postcard sunsets were everything he dreamed of back when he was languishing in his prison bunk. He drove his car close to the back of his trailer and threw a blue plastic tarp over it in case somebody glimpsed the out-of-state plate and got curious. One night was spent counting and sorting his money. He decided it was safe inside the trunk for a couple more days until he could dispose of the car. Just to be sure, he let the air out of the tires.
His first goal was to find a bank to begin depositing small amounts of money. Banks were required to report deposits of $10,000 or more; he suspected they reported amounts much lower, so he planned to stagger his deposits in odd amounts. The park manager suggested the bank on Islamorada Key, and he made plans to go there the following day. He’d box up $50,000 for his sister in Iowa and ask her to mail Tom a few bucks, have her get the message to him he’d catch up on old times with him soon.
He wore the suit and new shoes he’d picked up at a mall in Homestead on his way down to the Keys. He practiced the story he intended to roll out of an eccentric aunt who died suddenly and left him cash. He practiced it in the rearview mirror until it sounded natural.
The assistant manager told him he himself had been called by an elderly woman just the other day who wanted to know if she could cash “a gold bar” at the bank. He laughed along with the man, playing an amiable nitwit, joking like a squarejohn with a man he’d have snarled at and put a gun in his face not so long ago.
“She was a dear soul but very much belonged to a different time,” he told him, assuming the role of an amiable nephew.
When he returned that afternoon, his bone-white shirt was damp behind the collar and his silk was folded up in his pocket, its job completed.
The manager was raking lava rocks around the palm trees out front.
He stopped raking when he saw him exit the Uber car.
“The two moving men was here while you was gone. They got your place cleaned out,” he said. “Refrigerator and everything.”
“That’s fine.”
He had no further interest in the man or the topic and headed down to his trailer.