Inside, he found a carton of lukewarm beer that had been removed from the fridge before the moving men took it. The place was empty, all blond wood, polished. No dead man smell anywhere. He popped the tab on one can and took a long swallow. He thought of engaging a charter for some deep-sea fishing off Islamorada the next morning. He’d take his time filling up the trailer with his own furniture. No rush, no rush at all...
He was raising the can to his lips for another sip of beer when a thought struck him like ice in the belly. No, not that. He rushed to the back window and flipped the curtain aside. The blue tarp was gone, as well as the car beneath it.
He unscrewed the vent in the bedroom and removed his gun. He slipped it into his belt and raced to the park manager’s trailer. He banged on the door.
A smell of marijuana drifted out when it opened. The manager’s pale chest and pot belly clashed with the skinny, sunburned arms; his nipples peeked from behind an unbuttoned shirt like a pair of mismatched rosettes.
He drew an imaginary line bisecting them and imagined the bullet going in there punching everything to mush before it exited his spine.
“My car...” he choked out, “my car is... gone.”
“Them boys asked me if they should take everything, like you told me, and I said, yeah, it’s all got to go. I let’em use the phone to call for a tow truck.”
He bent low, sick to his stomach, and punched himself in the forehead with his fist. No act of self-abasement; he had to dispel the tsunami of rage and panic. Killing this idiot standing in front of him was not going to get his money back.
Calmer now, his hands shaking, he asked him where the stuff had been taken.
The manager handed him a card.
“I forgot to give you this when we was talking out front just now.”
It had the name of a storage facility: Bonefish Self-Storage. Marathon, FL. Someone had written in block letters the word UNITS and two numbers: 149, 150.
“Nothing closer?” he asked, some of his spit flecking the manager’s bony chest.
“All’s I know is they say they got a contract from the owner.”
His hand swung around to his belt and stopped.
No, not him. It might not be too late. Think, think—
“Give me your car keys,” he said.
“Hunh?”
“Give me your fucking car keys, asshole, and a bolt cutter. Right now!”
He drove and wept, big sobs erupting unbidden from his throat. Mile markers on the Overseas Highway were a blur, the sunlight dazzled him, but he stared dully through the windshield. The glint off the windshields of opposing traffic heading north created a mirage of dazzling light and flashing chrome, a snake unwinding beside him, its belly full of happy tourists whose faces appeared in his peripheral vision. He blanked out all thought as if he were on a caper. No thought but one now: find the car, get the money, ignore the world.
He took in at a glance that the facility in Marathon was surrounded by a cyclone fence and closed-circuit cameras mounted on poles.
The lock snapped. The metal folding door rattled on its castors. The car was backed into unit 149. The first thing he noticed was that both doors were left wide open and the trunk lid was up, like a giant metallic insect unable to take flight. He forced himself to look inside.
He snapped the lock of the next unit and saw the dead man’s items neatly arranged. They’d done the unloading first; the trunk was popped merely to see if there was anything of value that could be taken and not be missed, such as a tire lever, maybe the whole jack set, asserting the scavenging rights of the unskilled laboring class.
He had only the money in his wallet he’d taken with him that morning. Not enough to track the thieves, certainly, and more pressing, not enough to sustain him for more than a few days in his empty trailer.
He expected to find the police waiting for him back at the trailer park. Instead, the manager — shirt undone as before, but high on weed from the odor wafting toward him — snatched his keys back, grumbled something derisive and obscene, and then slammed the door in his face.
He couldn’t bear walking back to the trailer. He headed mindlessly in the direction of the marina and soon found himself on a sandy path that cut through saw grass down to the shoreline. Sand fleas hovered around his shoes with every step; dust took away the mirror polish as he trudged along.
He waded into the water up to his knees, uncertain. He should make the Grand Gesture: curse God and die.
He took out the Glock, thinking This is as good a place as any—
He placed the barrel at his temple. He looked down at the refracted image of his legs, his dress shoes submerged in muck. The warm air and salt-scented tang of the open sea was a balm, a belated gift after the torment of those last several hours. The gun seemed to lower itself of its own weight. He stuck it back inside his belt and stared again over the flat sheen of the gray-green waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Sandwiched between two oceans — the Atlantic just on the other side of the key — he felt small and insignificant. God wouldn’t care. His suicide might make the paper in Key West, but not in Miami. That is, if his body didn’t go out with the tide and get nibbled to a skeleton by fish.
He heard a noise behind him and turned around. A small white-tailed deer stood there calmly staring back at him.
He laughed. Bob, sending me a fuck-you message...
“If you came to see me off, you’re in for a disappointment,” he told the deer.
The tiny creature bolted as soon as he began plowing back to shore and disappeared into the thicket. His heart was a lump of ice despite the heat. He could survive. The country had other disgruntled employees, plenty of inside men. Meanwhile, he was going to have a long talk with the park manager. He may know more about that tow truck operation than he had volunteered.
The island wasn’t all that big, and they had to expect someone would come looking before too long. He wondered if they’d expect it would be someone like him.
Ted White
Burning Down the House
from Welcome to Dystopia
They burned down my block today.
I saw them. They had flamethrowers, big tanks on their backs like backpacks, and black nozzles that spurted flame. I was across the street, just coming home, when I saw them.
They were big men, more than a dozen of them, dressed in black. They’d kick in a door and then torch the place. They were efficient, systematic. In less than ten minutes, that whole side of the street was burning.
I ducked into an alleyway on my side of the street. No sense letting them see me. I saw what they did to the people who ran out of the burning buildings or dropped from windows to the street. They shot them. They do that every time they burn a block.
It was all going up in flames — my little hideaway, with my cache of paper books, so very flammable, tucked away in the center of the block. My home.
Suddenly a grimy arm locked around my neck from behind and I felt myself being yanked backwards and nearly off my feet.
I thought I recognized the arm — and the smell that enveloped me. It was the smell of primroses.
He pulled me into a narrow doorway and whirled around to close the door with his butt, flinging me loose to stumble toward a dilapidated armchair. I almost sat in it before deciding it probably had bugs.
“Well, missy, there it all goes!” he said, gesturing in the direction of the street. “How long till they do this block, huh?”
Rudolph was a deceptively stringy-looking man, shambling in appearance, but very strong. He could probably pick me up with one arm. He dowsed himself with cheap fragrances because he never bathed.