Finders Keepers (27 page)

He grasps the sides, and the trunk slides out of its hole so easily that Morris overbalances and flops on his back. He lies there, staring up at the bright bowl of the moon, and tries to tell himself nothing is wrong. Only he knows better. He might be able to talk himself out of the broken handle, but not out of this new thing.

The trunk is too light.

Morris scrambles back to a sitting position with smears of dirt now sticking to his damp skin. He brushes his hair off his forehead with a shaking hand, leaving a fresh streak.

The trunk is too light.

He reaches for it, then draws back.

I can't, he thinks. I can't. If I open it and the notebooks aren't there, I'll just . . .
snap
.

But why would anyone take a bunch of notebooks? The money, yes, but the notebooks? There wasn't even any space left to write in most of them; in most, Rothstein had used it all.

What if someone took the money and then
burned
the notebooks? Not understanding their incalculable value, just wanting to get rid of something a thief might see as evidence?

“No,” Morris whispers. “No one would do that. They're still in there. They have to be.”

But the trunk is too light.

He stares at it, a small exhumed coffin tilted on the bank in the moonlight. Behind it is the hole, gaping like a mouth that has just vomited something up. Morris reaches for the trunk again, hesitates, then lunges forward and snaps the latches up, praying to a God he knows cares nothing for the likes of him.

He looks in.

The trunk is not quite empty. The plastic he lined it with is still there. He pulls it out in a crackling cloud, hoping that a few of the notebooks are left underneath—two or three, or oh please God even just one—but there are just a few small trickles of dirt caught in the corners.

Morris puts his filthy hands to his face—once young, now deeply lined—and begins to cry in the moonlight.

28

He promised to return the truck by ten, but it's after midnight when he parks it behind Statewide Motorcycle and puts the keys
back under the right front tire. He doesn't bother with the tools or the empty Tuff Totes that were supposed to be full; let Charlie Roberson have them if he wants them.

The lights of the minor league field four blocks over have been turned off an hour ago. The stadium buses have stopped running, but the bars—in this neighborhood there are a lot of them—are roaring away with live bands and jukebox music, their doors open, men and women in Groundhogs tee-shirts and caps standing out on the sidewalks, smoking cigarettes and drinking from plastic cups. Morris plods past them without looking, ignoring a couple of friendly yells from inebriated baseball fans, high on beer and a home team win, asking him if he wants a drink. Soon the bars are behind him.

He has stopped obsessing about McFarland, and the thought of the three mile walk back to Bugshit Manor never crosses his mind. He doesn't care about his aching legs, either. It's as if they belong to someone else. He feels as empty as that old trunk in the moonlight. Everything he's lived for during the last thirty-six years has been swept away like a shack in a flood.

He comes to Government Square, and that's where his legs finally give out. He doesn't so much sit on one of the benches as collapse there. He glances around dully at the empty expanse of concrete, realizing that he'd probably look mighty suspicious to any cops passing in a squad car. He's not supposed to be out this late anyway (like a teenager, he has a
curfew
), but what does that matter? Shit don't mean shit. Let them send him back to Waynesville. Why not? At least there he won't have to deal with his fat fuck boss anymore. Or pee while Ellis McFarland watches.

Across the street is the Happy Cup, where he had so many pleasant conversations about books with Andrew Halliday. Not to mention their
last
conversation, which was far from pleasant.
Stay
clear of me,
Andy had said. That was how the last conversation had ended.

Morris's brains, which have been idling in neutral, suddenly engage again and the dazed look in his eyes begins to clear.
Stay clear of me or I'll call the police myself,
Andy had said . . . but that wasn't
all
he said that day. His old pal had also given him some advice.

Hide them somewhere. Bury them
.

Had Andy Halliday really said that, or was it only his imagination?

“He said it,” Morris whispers. He looks at his hands and sees they have rolled themselves into grimy fists. “He said it, all right. Hide them, he said.
Bury
them.” Which leads to certain questions.

Like who was the only person who knew he had the Rothstein notebooks?

Like who was the only person who had actually
seen
one of the Rothstein notebooks?

Like who knew where he had lived in the old days?

And—here was a big one—who knew about that stretch of undeveloped land, an overgrown couple of acres caught in an endless lawsuit and used only by kids cutting across to the Birch Street Rec?

The answer to all these questions is the same.

Maybe we can revisit this in ten years,
his old pal had said.
Maybe in twenty
.

Well, it had been a fuck of a lot longer than ten or twenty, hadn't it? Time had gone slip-sliding away. Enough for his old pal to meditate on those valuable notebooks, which had never turned up—not when Morris was arrested for rape and not later on, when the house was sold.

Had his old pal at some point decided to visit Morris's old neigh
borhood? Perhaps to stroll any number of times along the path between Sycamore Street and Birch? Had he perhaps made those strolls with a metal detector, hoping it would sense the trunk's metal fittings and start to beep?

Did Morris even
mention
the trunk that day?

Maybe not, but what else could it be? What else made sense? Even a large strongbox would be too small. Paper or canvas bags would have rotted. Morris wonders how many holes Andy had to dig before he finally hit paydirt. A dozen? Four dozen? Four dozen was a lot, but back in the seventies, Andy had been fairly trim, not a waddling fat fuck like he was now. And the motivation would have been there. Or maybe he didn't have to dig any holes at all. Maybe there had been a spring flood or something, and the bank had eroded enough to reveal the trunk in its cradle of roots. Wasn't that possible?

Morris gets up and walks on, now thinking about McFarland again and occasionally glancing around to make sure he isn't there. It matters again now, because now he has something to live for again. A goal. It's possible that his old pal has sold the notebooks, selling is his business as sure as it was Jimmy Gold's in
The Runner Slows Down
, but it's just as possible that he's still sitting on some or all of them. There's only one sure way to find out, and only one way to find out if the old wolf still has some teeth. He has to pay his
homie
a visit.

His old pal.

PART 3: PETER AND THE WOLF

1

It's Saturday afternoon in the city, and Hodges is at the movies with Holly. They engage in a lively negotiation while looking at the showtimes in the lobby of the AMC City Center 7. His suggestion of
The Purge: Anarchy
is rejected as too scary. Holly enjoys scary movies, she says, but only on her computer, where she can pause the film and walk around for a few minutes to release the tension. Her counter-suggestion of
The Fault in Our Stars
is rejected by Hodges, who says it will be too sentimental. What he actually means is too emotional. A story about someone dying young will make him think of Janey Patterson, who left the world in an explosion meant to kill him. They settle on
22 Jump Street
, a comedy with Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum. It's pretty good. They laugh a lot and share a big tub of popcorn, but Hodges's mind keeps returning to Tina's story about the money that helped her parents through the bad years. Where in God's name could Peter Saubers have gotten his hands on over twenty thousand dollars?

As the credits are rolling, Holly puts her hand over Hodges's, and he is a little alarmed to see tears standing in her eyes. He asks her what's wrong.

“Nothing. It's just nice to have someone to go to the movies with. I'm glad you're my friend, Bill.”

Hodges is more than touched. “And I'm glad you're mine. What are you going to do with the rest of your Saturday?”

“Tonight I'm going to order in Chinese and binge on
Orange Is the New Black
,” she says. “But this afternoon I'm going online to look at more robberies. I've already got quite a list.”

“Do any of them look likely to you?”

She shakes her head. “I'm going to keep looking, but I think it's something else, although I don't have any idea what it could be. Do you think Tina's brother will tell you?”

At first he doesn't answer. They're making their way up the aisle, and soon they'll be away from this oasis of make-believe and back in the real world.

“Bill? Earth to Bill?”

“I certainly hope so,” he says at last. “For his own sake. Because money from nowhere almost always spells trouble.”

2

Tina and Barbara and Barbara's mother spend that Saturday afternoon in the Robinson kitchen, making popcorn balls, an operation both messy and hilarious. They are having a blast, and for the first time since she came to visit, Tina doesn't seem troubled. Tanya Robinson thinks that's good. She doesn't know what the deal is with Tina, but a dozen little things—like the way the girl jumps when a draft slams an upstairs door shut, or the suspicious I've-been-crying redness of her eyes—tells Tanya that something is wrong. She doesn't know if that something is big or little, but one thing she's sure of: Tina Saubers can use a little hilarity in her life just about now.

They are finishing up—and threatening each other with syrup-
sticky hands—when an amused voice says, “Look at all these womenfolk dashing around the kitchen. I do declare.”

Barbara whirls, sees her brother leaning in the kitchen doorway, and screams “
Jerome!
” She runs to him and leaps. He catches her, whirls her around twice, and sets her down.

“I thought you were going to a
cotillion
!”

Jerome smiles. “Alas, my tux went back to the rental place unworn. After a full and fair exchange of views, Priscilla and I have agreed to break up. It's a long story, and not very interesting. Anyway, I decided to drive home and get some of my ma's cooking.”

“Don't call me Ma,” Tanya says. “It's vulgar.” But she also looks mightily pleased to see Jerome.

He turns to Tina and gives a small bow. “Pleased to meet you, little ma'am. Any friend of Barbara's, and so forth.”

“I'm Tina.”

She manages to say this in a tone of voice that's almost normal, but doing so isn't easy. Jerome is tall, Jerome is broad-shouldered, Jerome is extremely handsome, and Tina Saubers falls in love with him immediately. Soon she will be calculating how old she'll need to be before he might look upon her as something more than a little ma'am in an oversized apron, her hands all sticky from making popcorn balls. For the time being, however, she's too stunned by his beauty to run the numbers. And later that evening, it doesn't take much urging from Barbara for Tina to tell him everything. Although it's not always easy for her to keep her place in the story, with his dark eyes on her.

3

Pete's Saturday afternoon isn't nearly as good. In fact, it's fairly shitty.

At two o'clock, class officers and officers-elect from three high schools crowd into the River Bend Resort's largest conference room to listen as one of the state's two U.S. senators gives a long and boring talk titled “High School Governance: Your Introduction to Politics and Service.” This fellow, who's wearing a three-piece suit and sporting a luxuriant, swept-back head of white hair (what Pete thinks of as “soap opera villain hair”), seems ready to go on until dinnertime. Possibly longer. His thesis seems to be something about how they are the NEXT GENERATION, and being class officers will prepare them to deal with pollution, global warming, diminishing resources, and, perhaps, first contact with aliens from Proxima Centauri. Each minute of this endless Saturday afternoon dies a slow and miserable death as he drones on.

Pete couldn't care less about assuming the mantle of student vice president at Northfield High this coming September. As far as he's concerned, September might as well be out there on Proxima Centauri with the aliens. The only future that matters is this coming Monday afternoon, when he will confront Andrew Halliday, a man he now wishes most heartily that he had never met.

But I can work my way out of this, he thinks. If I can hold my nerve, that is. And keep in mind what Jimmy Gold's elderly aunt says in
The Runner Raises the Flag
.

Pete has decided he'll begin his conversation with Halliday by quoting that line:
They say half a loaf is better than none, Jimmy, but in a world of want, even a single slice is better than none
.

Pete knows what
Halliday
wants, and will offer more than a
single slice, but not half a loaf, and certainly not the whole thing. That is simply not going to happen. With the notebooks safely hidden away in the basement of the Birch Street Rec, he can afford to negotiate, and if Halliday wants anything at all out of this, he'll have to negotiate, too.

No more ultimatums.

I'll give you three dozen notebooks,
Pete imagines saying.
They contain poems, essays, and nine complete short stories. I'm even going to split fifty-fifty, just to be done with you.

He
has
to insist on getting money, although with no way of verifying how much Halliday actually receives from his buyer or buyers, Pete supposes he'll be cheated out of his fair share, and cheated badly. But that's okay. The important thing is making sure Halliday knows he's serious. That he's not going to be, in Jimmy Gold's pungent phrase, anyone's birthday fuck. Even more important is not letting Halliday see how scared he is.

How terrified.

The senator winds up with a few ringing phrases about how the VITAL WORK of the NEXT GENERATION begins in AMERICA'S HIGH SCHOOLS, and how they, the chosen few, must carry forward THE TORCH OF DEMOCRACY. The applause is enthusiastic, possibly because the lecture is finally over and they get to leave. Pete wants desperately to get out of here, go for a long walk, and check his plan a few more times, looking for loopholes and stumbling blocks.

Only they don't get to leave. The high school principal who has arranged this afternoon's endless chat with greatness steps forward to announce that the senator has agreed to stay another hour and answer their questions. “I'm sure you have lots,” she says, and the hands of the butt-lickers and grade-grubbers—there seem to be plenty of both in attendance—shoot up immediately.

Pete thinks, This shit don't mean shit.

He looks at the door, calculates his chances of slipping through it without being noticed, and settles back into his seat. A week from now, all this will be over, he tells himself.

The thought brings him some comfort.

4

A certain recent parolee wakes up as Hodges and Holly are leaving their movie and Tina is falling in love with Barbara's brother. Morris has slept all morning and part of the afternoon following a wakeful, fretful night, only dropping off as the first light of that Saturday morning began to creep into his room. His dreams have been worse than bad. In the one that woke him, he opened the trunk to find it full of black widow spiders, thousands of them, all entwined and gorged with poison and pulsing in the moonlight. They came streaming out, pouring over his hands and clittering up his arms.

Morris gasps and chokes his way back into the real world, hugging his chest so tightly he can barely breathe.

He swings his legs out of bed and sits there with his head down, the same way he sat on the toilet after McFarland exited the MAC men's room the previous afternoon. It's the not knowing that's killing him, and that uncertainty cannot be laid to rest too soon.

Andy
must
have taken them, he thinks. Nothing else makes sense. And you better still have them, pal. God help you if you don't.

He puts on a fresh pair of jeans and takes a crosstown bus over to the South Side, because he's decided he wants at least one of his
tools, after all. He'll also take back the Tuff Totes. Because you had to think positive.

Charlie Roberson is once more seated in front of the Harley, now so torn down it hardly looks like a motorcycle at all. He doesn't seem terribly pleased at this reappearance of the man who helped get him out of jail. “How'd it go last night? Did you do what you needed to do?”

“Everything's fine,” Morris says, and offers a smile that feels too wide and loose to be convincing. “Four-oh.”

Roberson doesn't smile back. “As long as
five-
o isn't involved. You don't look so great, Morrie.”

“Well, you know. Things rarely get taken care of all at once. I've got a few more details to iron out.”

“If you need the truck again—”

“No, no. I left a couple of things in it, is all. Okay if I grab them?”

“It's nothing that's going to come back on me later, is it?”

“Absolutely not. Just a couple of bags.”

And the hatchet, but he neglects to mention that. He could buy a knife, but there's something scary about a hatchet. Morris drops it into one of the Tuff Totes, tells Charlie so long, and heads back to the bus stop. The hatchet slides back and forth in the bag with each swing of his arms.

Don't make me use it
,
he will tell Andy.
I don't want to hurt you
.

But of course part of him
does
want to use it. Part of him
does
want to hurt his old pal. Because—notebooks aside—he's owed a payback, and payback's a bitch.

5

Lacemaker Lane and the walking mall of which it is a part is busy on this Saturday afternoon. There are hundreds of shops with cutie-poo names like Deb and Buckle and Forever 21. There's also one called Lids, which sells nothing but hats. Morris stops in there and buys a Groundhogs cap with an extra-long brim. A little closer to Andrew Halliday Rare Editions, he stops again and purchases a pair of shades at a Sunglass Hut kiosk.

Just as he spots the sign of his old pal's business establishment, with its scrolled gold leaf lettering, a dismaying thought occurs to him: what if Andy closes early on Saturday? All the other shops seem to be open, but some rare bookstores keep lazy hours, and wouldn't that be just his luck?

But when he walks past, swinging the totes (
clunk
and
bump
goes the hatchet), secure behind his new shades, he sees the OPEN sign hanging in the door. He sees something else, as well: cameras peeking left and right along the sidewalk. There are probably more inside, too, but that's okay; Morris has done decades of postgraduate work with thieves.

He idles up the street, looking in the window of a bakery and scanning the wares of a souvenir vendor's cart (although Morris can't imagine who'd want a souvenir of this dirty little lakefront city). He even pauses to watch a mime who juggles colored balls and then pretends to climb invisible stairs. Morris tosses a couple of quarters into the mime's hat. For good luck, he tells himself. Pop music pours down from streetcorner loudspeakers. There's a smell of chocolate in the air.

He walks back. He sees a couple of young men come out of Andy's bookshop and head off down the sidewalk. This time
Morris pauses to look in the display window, where three books are open on stands beneath pinspots:
To Kill a Mockingbird
,
The Catcher in the Rye
, and—surely it's an omen—
The Runner Sees Action
. The shop beyond the window is narrow and high-­ceilinged. He sees no other customers, but he
does
see his old pal, the one and only Andy Halliday, sitting at the desk halfway down, reading a paperback.

Morris pretends to tie his shoe and unzips the Tuff Tote with the hatchet inside. Then he stands and, with no hesitation, opens the door of Andrew Halliday Rare Editions.

His old pal looks up from his book and scopes the sunglasses, the long-brimmed cap, the tote bags. He frowns, but only a little, because
everyone
in this area is carrying bags, and the day is warm and bright. Morris sees caution but no signs of real alarm, which is good.

“Would you mind putting your bags under the coatrack?” Andy asks. He smiles. “Store policy.”

“Not at all,” Morris says. He puts the Tuff Totes down, removes his sunglasses, folds the bows, and slides them into his shirt pocket. Then he takes off his new hat and runs a hand through the short scruff of his white hair. He thinks, See? Just an elderly geezer who's come in to get out of the hot sun and do a little browsing. Nothing to worry about here. “Whew! It's hot outside today.” He puts his cap back on.