Jorge was quiet for a long time, then said, “I already did. Go ahead. Laugh. It didn’t work.”
Tom looked sideways at Jorge. “You put the paint on eBay?”
“The day the place blew up.”
“And?”
“Nothing. Not a nibble.” Jorge’s expression changed from depressed to angry. “I can’t believe it. I mean, where are people’s values, anyway? When a moldy cheeseburger is worth more than a piece of musical history…”
Surprising himself, Tom felt bad. At that moment, having Jorge’s Plan B work out would have made him feel better.
“Like you said, timing is everything. Who knows, a year or two from now it could still go big. Prince dies, you put the paint back on eBay with all the history about Prince and First Avenue…”
Jorge shook his head. But his face changed again. He didn’t look exactly happy, but he looked pleased with himself.
“Talking to Earl just now. It made me think. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life hauling that paint around. It’ll just make me feel like a loser. I’ve got another idea.”
“Like what?” Tom said.
Tom pulled a wheeled piece of luggage behind him as he and Jorge walked down the parking ramp.
“You’re sure about this?” he said.
“I’ve spent the last week checking everything out,” Jorge replied. “Trust me. The setup is perfect for us. He’s got the Porsche parked in a special section just beyond the checkout booth. Supposed to give him extra security. But the checkout guy faces in the opposite direction, sleeps ninety percent of the time. If the Porsche was in the other part of the ramp, there’d be security cameras. But there’s nothing on the other side of the checkout booth. And it’s mostly contract parking, so not a lot of traffic going in and out this time of day. Just act normal.”
It was like Jorge said. The guy in the checkout booth didn’t even look up when they walked by him. There was a Lincoln Navigator next to the Porsche that completely blocked the view between them and the booth.
“Another piece of luck,” Jorge said, giving the Navigator a pat with his gloved hand. “You want to say something in French before we do this? Kind of like a baptism?”
“Let’s just do it and get out of here,” Tom said. He bent over and unzipped the suitcase, pulled out one can of paint, handing it to Jorge. Then he took out the second can and pried the lid off.
Together, it took maybe three minutes to cover the white Porsche in black paint. When there was maybe six inches of the thick, viscous old paint left in Tom’s can, he said, “Jorge. Check the driver’s side. See if the door’s open.”
“You want to do the interior?”
“No. I want to do the engine, if we can pop the hood.”
They were a half-block down the street when Tom noticed their boots were tracking black paint.
“Damn,” he said. “We’ve got to break our trail. Wipe down our boots over there, on that snowbank.”
Tom looked over his shoulder at the snow after they’d cleaned their boots.
“Now I want to say something in French,” he said.
“Shoot.”
“Très convenable,” Tom said.
“Tray what?”
“Very appropriate,” Tom said. “The snow back there. Where we wiped our boots. It reminds me of something that happened the first day I started working for Earl.”
BUMS
by William Kent Krueger
West Side (St. Paul)
Kid showed up at the river in the shadow of the High Bridge with a grin on his face, a bottle of Cutty in his hand, and a twenty-dollar bill in his pocket. Kid was usually in a good mood, but I’d never seen him quite so happy. Or so flush. And I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a bottle of good scotch.
It was going on dark. I had a pot of watery stew on the fire—rice mostly, with some unidentifiable vegetables I’d pulled from the dumpster behind an Asian grocery store.
I held up the Cutty to the firelight and watched the reflection of the flames lick the glass. “Rob a bank?”
“Better.” Kid bent over the pot and smelled the stew. “Got a job.”
“Work? You?”
“There’s this guy took me up on my offer.”
Most days Kid stood at the top of the off-ramp on Marion Street and I-94 where a stoplight paused traffic for a while. He held up a handmade sign that read, “Will Work For Food.” He got handouts, but he’d never had anyone actually take him up on his offer.
“What kind of work?”
“Chopping bushes out of his yard, putting new bushes in. This yard, Professor, I tell you, it’s big as a goddamn park. And the house, Jesus.”
He called me Professor because I have a small wire-bound notepad in which I scribble from time to time. Why that translated into Professor, I never knew.
I wanted badly to break the seal on the bottle, but it wasn’t my move.
Kid sat down crossed-legged in the sand on the riverbank. He grinned up at me. “Something else, Professor. He’s got a wife. A nice piece of work. The whole time I’m there, she’s watching me from the window.”
“Probably afraid you were going to steal something.”
“No, I mean she’s looking at me like I’m this stud horse and she’s a…you know, a girl horse.”
“Filly.”
“That’s it. Like she’s a filly. A filly in heat.”
I watched the gleam in Kid’s eye, the fire that danced there. “You already have yourself a few shots of something?”
“It’s the truth, swear to God. And get this. The guy wants me back tomorrow.”
“Look, are we just going to admire this bottle?” I finally asked.
“Crack ’er open, Professor. Let’s celebrate.”
Kid and I weren’t exactly friends, but we’d shared a campfire under the High Bridge for a while, and we trusted each other. Trust is important. Even if all you own can fit into an old gym bag, it’s still all you own, and when you close your eyes at night, it’s good to know the man on the other side of the fire isn’t just waiting for you to fall asleep. Kid had his faults. For a bum, he thought a lot of himself. That came mostly from being young and believing that circumstance alone was to blame for his social station. I’d tried to wise him up, pointing out that lots of folks encounter adversity and don’t end up squatting on the bank of a river, eating out of other people’s garbage cans, wearing what other people throw away. He was good-looking, if a little empty in the attic, and had the kind of physique that would probably appeal to a bored rich woman. He was good companionship for me, always eager and smiling, kind of like a having a puppy around. I didn’t know his real name. I just called him Kid.
The next evening when he came back from laboring in the rich man’s yard, he explained to me about his plans for the guy’s wife.
“She’s got this long black hair, all shiny, hangs down to her hips, swishes real gentle over the top of her ass when she walks. Paints her nails red like little spots of blood at the end of her fingers and toes. Talks with this accent, I don’t know what kind, but it’s sexy. And she’s hot for me, Professor. Christ, she’s all over me.”
Dinner that evening was fish, a big channel cat I’d managed to pull from the river with a chunk of moldy cheese as bait. I was frying it up in the pan I used for everything.
“If this woman is all you say she is, she could have any man she wants, Kid. What does she want with a bum?”
That offended him.
“I’m not like you, Professor. The booze don’t have me by the throat. One break and I’m outta here.”
“Dallying with a bored rich woman? How’s that going to change your luck?”
Kid peered up from watching the fish fry. “I got inside today, looked the place over. They got all this expensive crap lying around.”