Finders Keepers (33 page)

He's never felt saner in his life.

When he doesn't show up for work this morning, his fat fuck boss will probably call McFarland. That, at least, is what he's supposed to do in the event of an unexplained absence. So Morris has to disappear. Duck under the radar. Go dark.

Fine.

Terrific, in fact.

At eight this morning, he takes the Main Street bus, rides all the way to its turnaround point where Lower Main ends, and then strolls down to Lacemaker Lane. Morris has put on his only sportcoat and his only tie, and they're good enough for him to not look out of place here, even though it's too early for any of the fancy-schmancy stores to have opened. He turns down the alley between
Andrew Halliday Rare Editions and the shop next door, La Bella Flora Children's Boutique. There are three parking spaces in the small courtyard behind the buildings, two for the clothing shop and one for the bookshop. There's a Volvo in one of the La Bella Flora spots. The other one is empty. So is the space reserved for Andrew Halliday.

Also fine.

Morris leaves the courtyard as briskly as he came, pauses for a comforting look at the CLOSED sign hanging inside the bookshop door, and then strolls back to Lower Main, where he catches an uptown bus. Two changes later, he's stepping off in front of the Valley Plaza Shopping Center, just two blocks from the late Andrew Halliday's home.

He walks briskly again, no strolling now. As if he knows where he is, where he's going, and has every right to be here. Coleridge Street is nearly deserted, which doesn't surprise him. It's quarter past nine (his fat fuck of a boss will by now be looking at Morris's unoccupied desk and fuming). The kids are in school; the workadaddies and workamommies are off busting heavies to keep up with their credit card debt; most delivery and service people won't start cruising the neighborhood until ten. The only better time would be the dozy hours of mid-afternoon, and he can't afford to wait that long. Too many places to go, too many things to do. This is Morris Bellamy's big day. His life has taken a long, long detour, but he's almost back on the mainline.

15

Tina starts feeling sick around the time Morris is strolling up the late Drew Halliday's driveway and seeing his old pal's car parked
inside his garage. Tina hardly slept at all last night because she's so worried about how Pete will take the news that she ratted him out. Her breakfast is sitting in her belly like a lump, and all at once, while Mrs. Sloan is performing “Annabel Lee” (Mrs. Sloan
never
just reads), that lump of undigested food starts to crawl up her throat and toward the exit.

She raises her hand. It seems to weigh at least ten pounds, but she holds it up until Mrs. Sloan raises her eyes. “Yes, Tina, what is it?”

She sounds annoyed, but Tina doesn't care. She's beyond caring. “I feel sick. I need to go to the girls'.”

“Then go, by all means, but hurry back.”

Tina scuttles from the room. Some of the girls are giggling—at thirteen, unscheduled bathroom visits are always amusing—but Tina is too concerned with that rising lump to feel embarrassed. Once in the hall she breaks into a run, heading for the bathroom halfway down the hall as fast as she can, but the lump is faster and she doubles over before she can get there and vomits her breakfast all over her sneakers.

Mr. Haggerty, the school's head janitor, is just coming up the stairs. He sees her stagger backward from the steaming puddle of whoopsie and trots toward her, his toolbelt jingling.

“Hey, girl, you okay?”

Tina gropes for the wall with an arm that feels made of plastic. The world is swimming. Part of that is because she has vomited hard enough to bring tears to her eyes, but not all. She wishes with all her heart that she hadn't let Barbara persuade her into talking to Mr. Hodges, that she had left Pete alone to work out whatever was wrong. What if he never speaks to her again?

“I'm fine,” she says. “I'm sorry I made a m—”

But the swimming gets worse before she can finish. She doesn't
exactly faint, but the world pulls away from her, becomes something she's looking at through a smudged window rather than something she's actually
in
. She slides down the wall, amazed by the sight of her own knees, clad in green tights, coming up to meet her. That is when Mr. Haggerty scoops her up and carries her downstairs to the school nurse's office.

16

Andy's little green Subaru is perfect, as far as Morris is concerned—not apt to attract a first glance, let alone a second. There are only thousands just like it. He backs down the driveway and sets off for the North Side, keeping an eye out for cops and obeying every speed limit.

At first it's almost a replay of Friday night. He stops once more at the Bellows Avenue Mall and once more visits Home Depot. He goes to the tools section, where he picks out a screwdriver with a long blade and a chisel. Then he drives on to the square brick hulk that used to be the Birch Street Recreation Center and once more parks in the space marked RESERVED FOR REC DEPT. VEHICLES.

It's a good spot in which to do dirty business. There's a loading dock on one side and a high hedge on the other. He's visible only from behind—the baseball field and crumbling basketball courts—but with school in session, those areas are deserted. Morris goes to the basement window he noticed before, squats, and rams the blade of his screwdriver into the crack at the top. It goes in easily, because the wood is rotten. He uses the chisel to widen the crack. The glass rattles in its frame but doesn't break, because the putty is old and there's plenty of give. The possibility that this
hulk of a building has alarm protection is looking slimmer all the time.

Morris swaps the chisel for the screwdriver again. He chivvies it through the gap he's made, catches the thumb-lock, and pushes. He looks around to make sure he's still unobserved—it's a good spot, yes, but breaking and entering in broad daylight is still a scary proposition—and sees nothing but a crow perched on a telephone pole. He inserts the chisel at the bottom of the window, beating it in as deep as it will go with the heel of his hand, then bears down on it. For a moment there's nothing. Then the window slides up with a squall of wood and a shower of dirt. Bingo. He wipes sweat from his face as he peers in at the stored chairs, card tables, and boxes of junk, verifying that it will be easy to slide in and drop to the floor.

But not quite yet. Not while there's the slightest possibility that a silent alarm is lighting up somewhere.

Morris takes his tools back to the little green Subaru, and drives away.

17

Linda Saubers is monitoring the mid-morning activity period at Northfield Elementary School when Peggy Moran comes in and tells her that her daughter has been taken sick at Dorton Middle, some three miles away.

“She's in the nurse's office,” Peggy says, keeping her voice low. “I understand she vomited and then sort of passed out for a few minutes.”

“Oh my God,” Linda says. “She looked pale at breakfast, but when I asked her if she was okay, she said she was.”

“That's the way they are,” Peggy says, rolling her eyes. “It's either melodrama or
I'm fine, Mom, get a life
. Go get her and take her home. I'll cover this, and Mr. Jablonski has already called a sub.”

“You're a saint.” Linda is gathering up her books and putting them into her briefcase.

“It's probably a stomach thing,” Peggy says, sliding into the seat Linda has just vacated. “I guess you could take her to the nearest Doc in the Box, but why bother spending thirty bucks? That stuff's going around.”

“I know,” Linda says . . . but she wonders.

She and Tom have been slowly but surely digging themselves out of two pits: a money pit and a marriage pit. The year after Tom's accident, they came perilously close to breaking up. Then the mystery cash started coming, a kind of miracle, and things started to turn around. They aren't all the way out of either hole even yet, but Linda has come to believe they
will
get out.

With their parents focused on brute survival (and Tom, of course, had the additional challenge of recovering from his injuries), the kids have spent far too much time flying on autopilot. It's only now, when she feels she finally has room to breathe and time to look around her, that Linda clearly senses something not right with Pete and Tina. They're good kids,
smart
kids, and she doesn't think either of them has gotten caught in the usual teenage traps—drink, drugs, shoplifting, sex—but there's
something
, and she supposes she knows what it is. She has an idea Tom does, too.

God sent manna from heaven when the Israelites were starving, but cash drops from more prosaic sources: banks, friends, an inheritance, relatives who are in a position to help out. The mystery money didn't come from any of those sources. Certainly not from relatives. Back in 2010, all their kinfolk were just as strapped as Tom and Linda themselves. Only kids are relatives, too, aren't they?
It's easy to overlook that because they're so close, but they are. It's absurd to think the cash came from Tina, who'd only been nine years old when the envelopes started arriving, and who couldn't have kept a secret like that, anyway.

Pete, though . . . he's the closemouthed one. Linda remembers her mother saying when Pete was only five, “That one's got a lock on his lips.”

Only where could a kid of thirteen have come by that kind of money?

As she drives to Dorton Middle to pick up her ailing daughter, Linda thinks, We never asked
any
questions, not really, because we were afraid to. No one who didn't go through those terrible months after Tommy's accident could get that, and I'm not going to apologize for it. We had reasons to be cowardly. Plenty of them. The two biggest were living right under our roof, and counting on us to support them. But it's time to ask who was supporting whom. If it was Pete, if Tina found out and that's what's troubling her, I need to stop being a coward. I need to open my eyes.

I need some answers.

18

Mid-morning.

Hodges is in court, and on best behavior. Holly would be proud. He answers the questions posed by the Bald Beater's attorney with crisp succinctness. The attorney gives him plenty of opportunity to be argumentative, and although this was a trap Hodges sometimes fell into during his detective days, he avoids it now.

Linda Saubers is driving her pale, silent daughter home from
school, where she will give Tina a glass of ginger ale to settle her stomach and then put her to bed. She is finally ready to ask Tina what she knows about the mystery money, but not until the girl feels better. The afternoon will be time enough, and she should make Pete a part of that conversation when he gets home from school. It will be just the three of them, and probably that's best. Tom and a group of his real estate clients are touring an office complex, recently vacated by IBM, fifty miles north of the city, and won't be back until seven. Even later, if they stop for dinner on the return trip.

Pete is in period three Advanced Physics, and although his eyes are trained on Mr. Norton, who is rhapsodizing about the Higgs boson and the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, the mind behind those eyes is much closer to home. He is going over his script for this afternoon's meeting yet again, and reminding himself that just because he
has
a script doesn't mean Halliday will follow it. Halliday has been in this business a long time, and he's probably been skirting the edges of the law for much of it. Pete is just a kid, and it absolutely will not do to forget that. He must be careful, and allow for his inexperience. He must think before he speaks, every time.

Above all, he must be brave.

He tells Halliday: Half a loaf is better than none, but in a world of want, even a single slice is better than none. I'm offering you three dozen slices. You need to think about that.

He tells Halliday: I'm not going to be anyone's birthday fuck, you better think about that, too.

He tells Halliday: If you think I'm bluffing, go on and try me. But if you do, we both wind up with nothing.

He thinks, If I can hold my nerve, I can get out of this. And I will hold it. I will. I have to.

Morris Bellamy parks the stolen Subaru two blocks from Bugshit Manor and walks back. He lingers in the doorway of a secondhand store to make sure Ellis McFarland isn't in the vicinity, then scurries to the miserable building and plods up the nine flights of stairs. Both elevators are busted today, which is par for the course. He scrambles random clothes into one of the Tuff Totes and then leaves his crappy room for the last time. All the way down to the first corner his back feels hot, his neck as stiff as an ironing board. He carries one Tuff Tote in each hand, and they seem to weigh a hundred pounds apiece. He keeps waiting for McFarland to call his name. To step out from beneath a shadowed awning and ask him why he's not at work. To ask him where he thinks he's going. To ask him what he's got in those bags. And then to tell him he's going back to prison: Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Morris doesn't relax until Bugshit Manor is out of sight for good.

Tom Saubers is walking his little pack of real estate agents through the empty IBM facility, pointing out the various features and encouraging them to take pictures. They're all excited by the possibilities. Come the end of the day, his surgically repaired legs and hips will ache like all the devils of hell, but for the time being, he's feeling fine. This abandoned office and manufacturing complex could be a big deal for him. Life is finally turning around.

Jerome has popped into Hodges's office to surprise Holly, who squeals with joy when she sees him, then with apprehension when he seizes her by the waist and swings her around as he likes to do with his little sister. They talk for an hour or more, catching up, and she gives him her views on the Saubers affair. She's happy when Jerome takes her concerns about the Moleskine notebook seriously, and happier still to find out he has seen
22 Jump Street
. They drop the subject of Pete Saubers and discuss the movie at
great length, comparing it to others in Jonah Hill's filmography. Then they move on to a discussion of various computer apps.