Finders Keepers (16 page)

He got off the bus on Garner Street, near the library where he had spent so many hours as a kid. The libe had been his safe haven, because big kids who might want to beat you up avoided it like Superman avoids kryptonite. He walked nine blocks to Sycamore, then actually did idle past his old house. It still looked pretty rundown, all the houses in this part of town did, but the lawn had been mowed and the paint looked fairly new. He looked at the garage where he had stowed the Biscayne thirty-six years ago, away from Mrs. Muller's prying eyes. He remembered lining the secondhand trunk with plastic so the notebooks wouldn't get damp. A very good idea, considering how long they'd had to stay in there.

Lights were on inside Number 23; the people who lived here—their name was Saubers, according to computer research he'd done in the prison library—were home. He looked at the upstairs window on the right, the one overlooking the driveway, and wondered who was in his old room. A kid, most likely, and in degenerate times like these, one probably a lot more interested in playing games on his phone than reading books.

Morris moved on, turning the corner onto Elm Street, then walking up to Birch. When he got to the Birch Street Rec (closed for two years now due to budget cuts, a thing he also knew from his computer research), he glanced around, saw the sidewalks were deserted on both sides, and hurried up the Rec's brick flank. Once behind it, he broke into a shambling jog, crossing the outside basketball courts—rundown but still used, by the look—and the weedy, overgrown baseball field.

The moon was out, almost full and bright enough to cast his shadow beside him. Ahead of him now was an untidy tangle of bushes and runty trees, their branches entwined and fighting for space. Where was the path? He thought he was in the right location, but he wasn't seeing it. He began to course back and forth where the baseball field's right field had been, like a dog trying to catch an elusive scent. His heart was up to full speed again, his mouth dry and coppery. Revisiting the old neighborhood was one thing, but being here, behind the abandoned Rec, was another. This was Doubtful Behavior for sure.

He was about to give up when he saw a potato chip bag fluttering from a bush. He swept the bush aside and bingo, there was the path, although it was just a ghost of its former self. Morris supposed that made sense. Some kids probably still used it, but the number would have dropped after the Rec closed. That was a good thing. Although, he reminded himself, for most of the years he'd been in Waynesville, the Rec would have been open. Plenty of foot traffic passing near his buried trunk.

He made his way up the path, moving slowly, stopping completely each time the moon dove behind a cloud and moving on again when it came back out. After five minutes, he heard the soft chuckle of the stream. So that was still there, too.

Morris stepped out on the bank. The stream was open to the
sky, and with the moon now directly overhead, the water shone like black silk. He had no problem picking out the tree on the other bank, the one he had buried the trunk under. The tree had both grown and tilted toward the stream. He could see a couple of gnarled roots poking out below it and then diving back into the earth, but otherwise it all looked the same.

Morris crossed the stream in the old way, going from stone to stone and hardly getting his shoes wet. He looked around once—he knew he was alone, if there had been anyone else in the area he would have heard them, but the old Prison Peek was second nature—and then knelt beneath the tree. He could hear his breath rasping harshly in his throat as he tore at weeds with one hand and held on to a root for balance with the other.

He cleared a small circular patch and then began digging, tossing aside pebbles and small stones. He was in almost halfway to the elbow when his fingertips touched something hard and smooth. He rested his burning forehead against a gnarled elbow of protruding root and closed his eyes.

Still here.

His trunk was still here.

Thank you, God.

It was enough, at least for the time being. The best he could manage, and ah God, such a relief. He scooped the dirt back into the hole and scattered it with last fall's dead leaves from the bank of the stream. Soon the weeds would be back—weeds grew fast, especially in warm weather—and that would complete the job.

Once upon a freer time, he would have continued up the path to Sycamore Street, because the bus stop was closer when you went that way, but not now, because the backyard where the path came out belonged to the Saubers family. If any of them saw him there and called 911, he'd likely be back in Waynesville tomor
row, probably with another five years tacked on to his original sentence, just for good luck.

He doubled back to Birch Street instead, confirmed the sidewalks were still empty, and walked to the bus stop on Garner Street. His legs were tired and the hand he'd been digging with was scraped and sore, but he felt a hundred pounds lighter. Still there! He had been sure it would be, but confirmation was
so
sweet.

Back at Bugshit Manor, he washed the dirt from his hands, undressed, and lay down. The place was noisier than ever, but not as noisy as D Wing at Waynesville, especially on nights like tonight, with the moon big in the sky. Morris drifted toward sleep almost at once.

Now that the trunk was confirmed, he had to be careful: that was his final thought.

More careful than ever.

4

For almost a month he
has
been careful; has turned up for his day job on the dot every morning and gotten in early at Bugshit Manor every night. The only person from Waynesville he'll see is Charlie Roberson, who got out on DNA with Morris's help, and Charlie doesn't rate as a known associate, because Charlie was innocent all along. At least of the crime he was sent up for.

Morris's boss at the MAC is a fat, self-important asshole, barely computer literate but probably making sixty grand a year. Sixty at least. And Morris? Eleven bucks an hour. He's on food stamps and living in a ninth-floor room not much bigger than the cell where he spent the so-called “best years of his life.” Morris isn't positive
his office carrel is bugged, but he wouldn't be surprised. It seems to him that
everything
in America is bugged these days.

It's a crappy life, and whose fault is that? He told the Parole Board time after time, and with no hesitation, that it was his; he had learned how to play the blame game from his sessions with Curd the Turd. Copping to bad choices was a necessity. If you didn't give them the old
mea culpa
you'd never get out, no matter what some cancer-ridden bitch hoping to curry favor with Jesus might put in a letter. Morris didn't need Duck to tell him that. He might have been born at night, as the saying went, but it wasn't last night.

But had it
really
been his fault?

Or the fault of that asshole right over yonder?

Across the street and about four doors down from the bench where Morris is sitting with the remains of his unwanted bagel, an obese baldy comes sailing out of Andrew Halliday Rare Editions, where he has just flipped the sign on the door from OPEN to CLOSED. It's the third time Morris has observed this lunchtime ritual, because Tuesdays are his afternoon days at the MAC. He'll go in at one and busy himself until four, working to bring the ancient filing system up-to-date. (Morris is sure the people who run the place know a lot about art and music and drama, but they know fuckall about Mac Office Manager.) At four, he'll take the crosstown bus back to his crappy ninth-floor room.

In the meantime, he's here.

Watching his old pal.

Assuming this is like the other two midday Tuesdays—Morris has no reason to think it won't be, his old pal always was a creature of habit—Andy Halliday will walk (well,
waddle
) down Lacemaker Lane to a café called Jamais Toujours. Stupid fucking name, means absolutely nothing, but sounds pretentious. Oh, but that was Andy all over, wasn't it?

Morris's old pal, the one with whom he had discussed Camus and Ginsberg and John Rothstein during many coffee breaks and pickup lunches, has put on at least a hundred pounds, the hornrims have been replaced by pricey designer spectacles, his shoes look like they cost more than all the money Morris made in his thirty-five years of prison toil, but Morris feels quite sure his old pal hasn't changed inside. As the twig is bent the bough is shaped, that was another old saying, and once a pretentious asshole, always a pretentious asshole.

The owner of Andrew Halliday Rare Editions is walking away from Morris rather than toward him, but Morris wouldn't have been concerned if Andy had crossed the street and approached. After all, what would he see? An elderly gent with narrow shoulders and bags under his eyes and thinning gray hair, wearing an el cheapo sport jacket and even cheaper gray pants, both purchased at Chapter Eleven. His old pal would accompany his growing stomach past him without a first look, let alone a second.

I told the Parole Board what they wanted to hear, Morris thinks. I had to do that, but the loss of all those years is really your fault, you conceited homo cocksucker. If it had been Rothstein and my partners I'd been arrested for, that would be different. But it wasn't. I was never even questioned about Mssrs. Rothstein, Dow, and Rogers. I lost those years because of a forced and unpleasant act of sexual congress I can't even remember. And why did that happen? Well, it's sort of like the house that Jack built. I was in the alley instead of the tavern when the Hooper bitch came by. I got booted out of the tavern because I kicked the jukebox. I kicked the jukebox for the same reason I was in the tavern in the first place: because I was pissed at
you
.

Why don't you try me on those notebooks around the turn of the twenty-first century, if you still have them?

Morris watches Andy waddle away from him and clenches his fists and thinks, You were like a girl that day. The hot little virgin you get in the backseat of your car and she's all
yes, honey, oh yes, oh yes, I love you so much
. Until you get her skirt up to her waist, that is. Then she clamps her knees together almost hard enough to break your wrist and it's all
no, oh no, unhand me, what kind of girl do you think I am?

You could have been a little more diplomatic, at least, Morris thinks. A little diplomacy could have saved all those wasted years. But you couldn't spare me any, could you? Not so much as an attaboy, that must have taken guts. All I got was
don't try to lay this off on me
.

His old pal walks his expensive shoes into Jamais Toujours, where he will no doubt have his expanding ass kissed by the maître d'. Morris looks at his bagel and thinks he should finish it—or at least use his teeth to scrape the cream cheese into his mouth—but his stomach is too knotted up to accept it. He will go to the MAC instead, and spend the afternoon trying to impose some order on their tits-up, bass-ackwards digital filing system. He knows he shouldn't come back here to Lacemaker Lane—no longer even a street but a kind of pricey, open-air mall from which vehicles are banned—and knows he'll probably be on the same bench next Tuesday. And the Tuesday after that. Unless he's got the notebooks. That would break the spell. No need to bother with his old pal then.

He gets up and tosses the bagel into a nearby trash barrel. He looks down toward Jamais Toujours and whispers, “You suck, old pal. You really suck. And for two cents—”

But no.

No.

Only the notebooks matter, and if Charlie Roberson will help
him out, he's going after them tomorrow night. And Charlie
will
help him. He owes Morris a large favor, and Morris means to call it in. He knows he should wait longer, until Ellis McFarland is absolutely sure Morris is one of the good ones and turns his attention elsewhere, but the pull of the trunk and what's inside it is just too strong. He'd love to get some payback from the fat sonof­a­bitch now feeding his face with fancy food, but revenge isn't as important as that fourth Jimmy Gold novel. There might even be a fifth! Morris knows that isn't likely, but it's possible. There was a lot of writing in those books, a mighty lot. He walks toward the bus stop, sparing one baleful glance back at Jamais Toujours and thinking, You'll never know how lucky you were.

Old pal.

5

Around the time Morris Bellamy is chucking his bagel and heading for the bus stop, Hodges is finishing his salad and thinking he could eat two more just like it. He puts the Styrofoam box and plastic spork back in the carryout bag and tosses it in the passenger footwell, reminding himself to dispose of his litter later. He likes his new car, a Prius that has yet to turn ten thousand miles, and does his best to keep it clean and neat. The car was Holly's pick. “You'll burn less gas and be kind to the environment,” she told him. The woman who once hardly dared to step out of her house now runs many aspects of his life. She might let up on him a little if she had a boyfriend, but Hodges knows that's not likely. He's as close to a boyfriend as she's apt to get.

It's a good thing I love you, Holly, he thinks, or I'd have to kill you.

He hears the buzz of an approaching plane, checks his watch, and sees it's eleven thirty-four. It appears that Oliver Madden is going to be johnny-on-the-spot, and that's lovely. Hodges is an on-time man himself. He grabs his sportcoat from the backseat and gets out. It doesn't hang just right because there's heavy stuff in the front pockets.

A triangular overhang juts out above the entrance doors, and it's at least ten degrees cooler in its shade. Hodges takes his new glasses from the jacket's inner pocket and scans the sky to the west. The plane, now on its final approach, swells from a speck to a blotch to an identifiable shape that matches the pictures Holly has printed out: a 2008 Beechcraft KingAir 350, red with black piping. Only twelve hundred hours on the clock, and exactly eight hundred and five landings. The one he's about to observe will be number eight-oh-six. Rated selling price, four million and change.