Kids These Days (28 page)

At that moment I wanted badly to think only about being married to Alice, about sitting by the hotel pool with a gin and tonic in an insulated mug. I wanted to think about driving home four days later, married, walking through the front door of our same house and back into our same lives, just glued together a little more firmly now. I wanted to think about putting a roof on in a couple of years. I wanted to think about sometime we might go to Italy. And I said so, a few days after we got back. I just want to be married to you for a little while, I said. I want to do that first. She said that was fine. She apologized, even. But we'd set some kind of clock, I knew: We were headed for Collar or Cholera, Orange or Orangina. No matter what game we made of it, I was pretty sure I knew where we'd end up.

I said, “Mid, you have to go back.” He'd turned off A1A, and we were aimed inland. I was starting with reason. I felt nothing close to reasonable.

“Forget it,” he said.

“We can't go on the run in this thing,” I said. “They can probably see it from space.”

“I know that.”

“We can't go on the run at all,” I said.

“I know.”

“So we have to go back.”

There was nobody behind us. There was almost nobody on the road at all. He said, “Let me ask you a question.”

“OK,” I said.

“Do you own a gun?”

“What?”

“Easy one, Big Walter. Do you own a gun?”

“No,” I said.

“Perfect. Neither do I. So we can't really be on the run here. Nobody goes on the run without at least a pistol.”

I said, “But you can't really think—”

“This is a planning session. All we're doing right now is planning our next move.”

“Mid,” I said. “This is pretty straightforward. They'll find us, they'll set up a roadblock—they have guns, alright? That's who has guns.”

“No real need to plan, then, under your plan.”

“That wasn't a plan.”

He said, “Let me tell you something about daughters.”

“No,” I said. “No. I need you to tell me you're in there, instead. Tell me you understand what you're doing.”

He was driving with his knees. He said, “How about
you
tell
me
something about what's happening right now. How about I ask the questions?”

“You're driving away from state agents who tried to arrest you. Plus the St. Augustine Beach Sheriff's Department. You're resisting arrest.”

“I'm fleeing the scene,” he said.

“Whatever you want to call it,” I said.

“Good. That's what I thought was going on, too.”

“This isn't the kind of thing you get away with,” I said, watching gas stations go by out the window, pay phones bolted into the ground next to the air and vacuum pumps. I could dive out of the car, roll to a stop, call Alice. “Unless you plan on sailing to Cuba and living the rest of your life there. Which you're not. Right?”

“I'm not. But I like where your head is. Do me a favor and check in the glove compartment there, will you?”

“What for?”

“Open it up. I have something for you.”

“What was all that back there about a deal?”

“Just open up the glove, alright?”

I looked inside. I found the owners' manual for the car, a tire gauge, and a flashlight. “There's a flashlight,” I said.

“That's handy. We might need that.”

I held it out for him to see. “It's not that big,” I said.

He said, “Keep digging.”

I found a box, like a check box from the bank, but taller. It was about the size of a brick. “This?”

“That,” he said. “Yes. Open it.”

I felt the engine in my spine. He checked both sides of an intersection as we came up to it, ran another light. The scrub outside the window smeared by. We were the only people on earth. I opened the box. Inside were hundred-dollar bills, all stacked up. They were squeezed perfectly into the space.

“Happy birthday,” he said.

“You can't possibly—”

“What that is,” he said, “is a little something nobody can ever find. A little something to tide you through.”

“You definitely can't do this.”

“I definitely already did. Too late.”

I flipped a few corners like playing cards. “How much is in here?” I said.

“Sixty-thousand-some-odd. I wanted it to be seventy-five, but it wouldn't fit.”

I said, “Can we please stop the car?”

“Not yet.”

“You don't think whoever ends up in your books is going to see sixty thousand missing?”

“Twice that. There's a box for Carolyn, too. And no, I do not.”

“And why is that?”

He said, “Work it all the way through.”

“Because it's not on the books,” I said.

“Hey, there we are. On to the bonus round.”

“So you're in all of it,” I said. “Right? Island? The cops? The undercover shit? Have you been in it all along?”

“It's not like that,” he said.

“What is it like?”

“I'm not going to tell you. Which is better, by the way, because that way you won't know.”

I said, “I think I'm owed some kind of—”

“Listen to me,” he said. “They still don't have anything. Everything they've got is circumstantial. Secondhand.”

I couldn't get all the way to being angry with him, which pissed me off. The problem was that it left me too alone, too stranded. And there was that same blank want, back again, filling up in me like water. I said, “Are you not getting that you just left the scene of the crime?”

“That was not my crime. We both know that. That was the scene of someone else's crime.”

“
Do
we both know that?”

“Are you accusing me of stealing my own machine?”

“I don't know what to accuse you of,” I said. “I don't know what the fuck is happening. You have to tell me. I'm here. I'm in the goddamn car, too.”

“You're fine. I took you against your will.”

I wondered if that would be enough. I said, “But are we talking about—what are we talking about here?”

“It's only ever money,” he said. “Nobody ever gets hurt. That's why I hated what went on at Island. You don't want actual police showing up around actual kids. Those jackasses, selling dope out of the back of the kitchen. What idiots. They can't have been clearing more than a couple grand a week.”

“Is it drugs?” I said. “Is that what all this is?”

“Look. Between you and me and anybody else who can count to four, Hurley's got to have a field or two out in the swamp somewhere. The crocus shit can't be the only thing paying him. But it doesn't matter. It's all just money. Just numbers. Move little packets from one thing to the next. Do it enough times and finally not everybody knows where all the little packets are anymore, and you can put a few away. That's all. It's pretty simple laundry. You know how this works.”

“I don't know how it works,” I said.

“You did it for a living!”

“I sold loans.”

“Call it what you want. That's the same thing.”

“It's hardly the same thing.”

“I thought you had expertise in this field,” he said. “I thought you guys knew all about this.”

“Is that why I'm down here?” I said. “Is that why you brought me on? So I could mop up after whatever the fuck this all is?”

“I brought you down here because you needed a job and place to live, and we had those things. There is nothing else. Like I said before, this is an unfortunate sideshow. I did not mean for this to happen. I am truly sorry. I humbly repent.”

“How much of it is bullshit?” I said.

“What?”

“Me Kayak. The Twice-the-Ice. How much is bullshit?”

He eased off the gas some. “None of it is. All that is real.”

“A sea kayak rental doesn't make a hundred thousand off the books,” I said.

“They do fine over there.” He slowed at a yellow sign with a silhouette of an alligator on it, turned onto a gravel road. After a hundred yards he stopped the car at a wire cable strung between two sawed-off phone poles. He got out, unhooked it, got back in. It was clear he knew exactly where we were. “I'm not walking you through it,” he said. “I'm just not. We want for you not to understand. That way, later on, you can explain, in full, your complete lack of understanding to the authorities.” He got us going again, fought the wheel against the ruts in the road. “All you need to know is what you know right now. That Me Kayak, for instance, rents and occasionally sells some generally beat-up sea kayaks for a fair price.” He looked over at me. “And I need you to keep those kids on the payroll. Make sure they don't fuck off too much on the job. Make sure they're getting everybody to sign the insurance waiver before they go out.”

I said, “Are you committing suicide?”

“Jesus,” he said. “No. Not this time. No guardian angels needed, OK? I'm fine.”

“You don't seem fine.”

“And yet I am,” he said, turning again, off the road and onto something that wasn't much bigger than a deer trail.

“What's going to happen to you?” I said.

“I'm optimistic I can still make a trade,” he said. “Just need to row up a few more ducks.”

“What kind of trade?”

“Couple of guys on the commission might be persons of interest in another investigation. A larger investigation. And I might have some useful information for somebody who wanted it.”

I held the money in my lap. I was back in the kitchen, our old kitchen, and Alice was coming around the corner with the test kit, asking if I was sure. There was nothing I could do to stop what was happening. The inside of my head was completely lit up, every circuit flashing full. “Pete Brett?” I said.

“That was actually separate. That was when I thought I could take care of everything on my own.”

“You were going behind Friendly and Helpful—”

“And now I'm not.”

“Except they're who we're running away from.”

“This isn't running away,” he said. “This is buying time.”

I said, “Persons of interest in what way?”

“You really don't want to know.”

“Try me.”

“Short version is they siphon off airline-grade diesel from a few regional airports and then resell it at some gas stations they've got between here and the Georgia line. They don't see most of the taxes that way. Pretty sweet deal, really. Friendly and Helpful think they're hooked into some Baltic crime syndicate, but I'm almost positive they're just assholes stealing gas.”

I wanted to say: Let's go find Carolyn. We can figure something else out. What I said instead was: “Are you hooked into all that, too?”

“Hell no, man. What do you take me for, a thief?”

We broke out of the woods and into a clearing. There was a metal barn, and behind it a long flat field of mown grass, a windsock out at the far end. The door on the barn slid back and then there was Hank, the parachutist, standing in the open door. The back wall was open, too, and light flooded through around him. “No,” I said. “You don't know him. You can't.”

“Of course I do. Why not?”

“He flies up the beach—”

“Everybody knows him. We had a gig lined up to sell his ultralight things, but it didn't work out.”

“What's he doing here?”

“I asked him to be here today in case things became complex.”

“So you knew all this was coming?”

“I got the money out after they took me in the first time, if that's what you're asking. I wanted to be ready.”

“For this?”

“Among other possibilities.”

I said, “Where are you going?”

He got out, tilted his seat forward, rummaged around in the back until he came out with that same pink duffel. Delton's. “Nowhere,” he said. “I'm going nowhere. Tell the cops I'm all theirs as soon as I'm done.”

“When will I talk to the police?”

“You said it yourself. You can see this thing from space. You'll probably get pulled over on the way back home.”

“Fuck you,” I said.

“You don't mean that,” he said. The car was still running. “Tell Carolyn this was not my original plan. Tell Alice I'm sorry. Tell her I knew what she wanted, and I ran you over anyway. And tell the kids at Island the state has a goddamn camera back there. No sense in me holding up my end anymore.” He leaned in, took hold of my shoulder. “I'll see you in a couple days. This won't even make the papers. I'll be back to help you get everything straightened out. No worries, alright? You know how to get back home?” The question seemed made from some other language. He pointed behind the car. “Turn right at the end of the driveway. Turn right at the end of the road. Go straight until you hit the ocean. Turn right again.” I held where I was. I pushed my feet against the floorboard to make sure it was still there. “I'm sorry, Walter,” he said. “I really am. But sometimes this is how it goes.” He opened the duffel, moved things around in there, and then zipped it back closed. He said, “That kid'll break Olivia's heart, by the way. You know that's what's coming.”