Moving Day: A Thriller (3 page)

He’s been at it a couple of years. It’s pretty good. Some of the moving companies now send stern warnings in red lettering along with their shiny sales packets, but these are old people—they don’t understand. If they read the warnings at all, they obviously forget them by the time Nick rolls up. Or else they’re overwhelmed by the crisp green uniforms, blinded by the sparkling white truck.

The big white truck. Like an earthbound cloud. A little bit of white rolling heaven. Crisscrossing the black ribbon highways of the greatest land on Earth like it’s Nick’s backyard. America!

Of course, he knows that stealing the worldly goods, the memories, the lifetime of an elderly couple in a single deceitful morning and afternoon isn’t exactly the American dream. But the sunny salesmanship of it, the bright-eyed, cheery hucksterism—well, that’s American, isn’t
it? Pulling up in a shiny eighteen-wheeler now, instead of that rickety wooden cart with snake oils on the back. It’s the American grifter tradition. A long-established, if not quite honorable, piece of Americana.

The American grifter tradition—he smiles at the notion. The criminal’s need to glorify his craft, to make it more than it is—he recognizes and suppresses that impulse in himself. He doesn’t deceive himself. He’s smarter than that.

Oh, he’s no highbrow, and no evil genius, but he’s no idiot either. He’s a species that he’s quickly come to see is exceedingly rare—an intelligent criminal. Intelligent enough, anyway, to stay out of jail long enough to get good at it. Intelligence is the exception in his world. But there are a few who possess it, and he’s one.

Growing up in deprivation (a deprivation that, in truth, was not so much a daily trial of living as a suffocating flatness of life), he was always fascinated by finer things. A sculpture—inexplicably unscarred by graffiti—in the park where he’d meet his dropout friends. An ornate stained-glass window in the sorry church he was dragged to, before he refused to go anymore. The elaborate pewter chalices on the altar. Who possessed the time, and patience, and talent—who knew the safety and serenity in life—to create such intricacy? To craft these subtle pleasures?

Such objects were like missives from some other, greater, twinkling civilization he was drawn toward across a noisy, seething universe. And this—this cargo, this dark highway, this ingenious little system of his—was the way he’d found in adult life to deal in that civilization’s glittering currency.

Growing up in deprivation, he saw that he frightened people with his intelligence. It was unwelcome, out of place, belonged in that paint-peeling foster home and that faded neighborhood even less than he did. It made his sour, dull foster parents nervous (hell, as a kid it made him nervous—this
difference
), and they said no good would come of it. And were they right? Hard to say.

It’s his intelligence and his yearning, he knows, that have landed him in this truck and in this life, though he can’t sort out whether it’s his intelligence or his yearning that has the upper hand. Though there is a third trait that is a by-product of both and may override them both: his essential aloneness.

Which probably accounts for his success at this as much as anything, he thinks. As one who is adjusted to his own aloneness, he feels no impulse to boast, or confide, or share—all fatal flaws in the life of crime.

By now he’s accepted his aloneness, his predilection for self-distance and isolation. And this is just right for a loner. The long, silent hours. The wide-open spaces. The continual movement. Rather than, for instance, standing on the same street corner day after day, peddling drugs, in broad view on an urban stage, expected to entertain and impress the locals. Or sealed up in some apartment, waiting for untrustworthy buyers where they can always find you, like a sitting duck.

It’s low-tech, too. In these freewheeling days of cybercrime, of stealing information off the Internet, of complicated telecom scams, of digital identity theft, it’s about the last low-tech scam he knows of. That’s admirable, he thinks. It’s simple. It relies on the American highways. The glittering black ribbons of interstate. Like black ribbons wrapping the gifts America is offering.

And it’s safe. Old people, for Christ’s sake. It’s self-selecting: these people are selling and moving in general because they can’t manage their current lives anymore. Nobody gets hurt. Not physically. Not even financially. Except the insurance companies, of course. People like this are all insured, but the insurance companies are so big, one operator like Nick hitting randomly, irregularly, isn’t enough to get them to mobilize. As far as the police go, well, nobody’s gotten killed, after all. Not so far, anyway. The only injuries are psychological. The stolen memories—that’s the part the old
people want back most—and cops don’t have the manpower to go after memories.

And there are so many rich old people in America. Every single town in America has its little establishment of them. Go into any stinky little American town anywhere, and it’s got its fancy section, its local wealth. Pockets of money, whatever pocket of America you’re in. The amazing thing isn’t that there are wealthy people—it’s how many. The sheer number! Literally thousands upon thousands.

America! What a stupendously successful experiment it’s turned out to be. So many rich. Scattered so vastly. That’s why Nick is never caught.

Like sheep spread across an immense meadow—and a wolf emerges periodically from the woods to pluck them at will, Nick thinks.

Driving west, into the setting sun.

It’s highway robbery, redefined.

In mid-Pennsylvania, just before Harrisburg, they pull off the interstate. Now, near midnight, they make their way along service roads, past a line of industrial buildings whose exact function is unclear in daylight and utterly oblique at night. But it is a path on which an eighteen-wheeler at midnight is not the least bit suspicious. It is a corner of industrial America where an eighteen-wheeler is merely part of the landscape, even at this late hour. Particularly at this late hour.

The night. It’s one of the things Nick likes best about the scam. One of its simplicities. You load up all day, then take off and drive all night with the advantages of darkness. The advantages of speed, and relative invisibility, and law enforcement at low ebb. It’s a time when truckers dominate the interstates anyway.

They make a right turn and head toward a row of warehouses. Nick takes his cell phone out of his uniform pocket, dials, waits patiently until it is answered.

“It’s Nick,” he says. Which is sufficient, he knows.

Nick pulls the white truck in behind the row of warehouses, turns in toward one warehouse among them. He stops at the shut chain-link gate. Atop the gate and along the entire chain-link fence, razor wire perches thickly coiled, glistening like a snake of menace in the moonlit night.

A small metal shack stands inside the gate. A stocky Hispanic man pokes his black-capped head out from inside it.

The chain-link gate opens electronically, with an initial jolt. Nick cajoles the truck carefully into the huge lot. There is a handful of other sixteen-wheeled-trailer bodies, cabless, in the lot already. Slumbering allosaurs of the American road.

Nick pulls in slowly, brings the big truck to a halt behind one of the trailers.

His crew piles out. LaFarge. Chiv. Al. All three take out cigarettes. No smoking in the cab with Nick.

The black-capped Hispanic—Jesus
(Hay-sus)
is his name—hustles out from the guard shack, carrying a large, deep carton awkwardly in front of him and struggling with a stepladder hooked over one shoulder. He is pockmarked, sorry-eyed, indigent-looking. And with his graying hair, he is older than one might expect for this kind of rendezvous.

For greeting, Nick merely nods.

Jesus bends down to the carton. Lifts out an industrial paint-sprayer, wriggles the apparatus onto his back.

Whereupon LaFarge stubs out his cigarette, comes over and bends down to the carton, and hitches on a second paint-sprayer. Besides Jesus—an auto-body-shop spray-painter by day—LaFarge
is the only one allowed to do this work. Any of the others, including Nick, would make a mess of it.

First, three strips of guide tape are placed, quickly and expertly, down one entire flank of the truck, demarcating two white strips between them.

And then the paint sprayers—smoothly, wordlessly, hissing mildly—are walked by Jesus and LaFarge down the flank to make two thin red stripes.

Now, above the double stripe on one side, using the stepladder, Jesus tapes up the stencil he’s already cut, to carefully spray the big, simple red letters in a glossy metallic quick-dry lacquer that will do its final drying on the road.

It’s a nice, dry, beautiful night.

In rain, they would have pulled the truck into the warehouse. Would have had to wait a couple of hours for the lacquer to dry. A little riskier. A little longer. Lights on. But tonight is dry.

Chiv scurries up into the cab of the truck. Emerges with a flattened paper bag, from which he pulls two
STATE OF OHIO
truck license plates. He hunches down at the rear of the truck to switch the license plates.

They’ve never had any trouble. Not an ounce. But better safe than sorry, to keep it that way, is Nick’s philosophy.

Now Jesus and LaFarge stretch the guide tape along the other side.

They spray smoothly. LaFarge—a former tagger in the Bronx—is the only guy Nick can think of for whom that offbeat skill has translated into actual, if not legal, employment.

Now Jesus tapes up the stencil on this side. In tiny, graceful arcs begins to spray.

“You fuck!”

The word from Nick is like a rifle shot in the previously still night.

“How the fuck do you spell ‘Ohio’!?”

The spray-painter jumps back from the truck, turns to Nick, stricken. His eyes wide, as if swollen, a broad cartoon of utter fear.

Nick smiles wide. Shakes his head. “Naw, it’s right. Just messin’ with your wetback brain. You got it right.”

LaFarge, Chiv, Al, laughing, choke and wheeze out cigarette smoke.

Nick looks up at the side of the truck and finds himself actually feeling a note of pride. Ohio Produce. A fine concern. Tonight, they are Ohio Produce.

Previously, Western Auto Supply. Before that, Iowa Growers Transport. Metro Distributors. Bailey Industries.

Sometimes the red stripe, sometimes two green ones, other times blue. That and the logo did the job. You didn’t have to paint the whole goddamn truck.

Though they did that, too, once a year. One time, yellow. Another time, sky blue. For promise. For clear sailing.

Ohio Produce. Western Auto Supply. The made-up corporate entity, the manufactured manufacturers, existing only for hours. Then, on safe arrival, scraped off.

Iowa Growers Transport. Metro Distributors. The corporate names like a bland song of the American road. Nick and his crew had been employed at each of them for only a day or two.
Can’t keep a job. Unreliable fuck-ups, aren’t we?
Nick smiles.

In twenty minutes, Jesus stands back, unshoulders the spray-painter.

The paint is tacky to the touch. It will air-dry, final-seal, over the next hour, air-assisted on the road. That’s the new technology.

Nick stands up. He likes this quick stop in industrial America. An industrial America his privileged victims generally never see, or understand, or even think about. That’s part of why he likes it, he knows. Because this is his, and not theirs.

Now, for payment. Nick opens the right-side back gate of the truck. It swings out and clangs against the truck side, echoing against the night as he rolls the interior horizontal gate open. Jesus, suddenly less sullen, suddenly shedding years, climbs up. He and Nick disappear inside the dark truck as if into a narrow shop at a Middle Eastern bazaar. Merchant and buyer.

With the low assistance of Nick’s flashlight, Jesus browses the truck. When he looks toward items that are covered, Nick describes them to him.

The auto-body spray-painter settles quickly on the Nakamichi stereo sitting between two Louis XIV chairs. Nick can see it: the glum spray-painter arriving back at his ghetto walk-up with the brushed-aluminum Nakamichi, listening to salsa on it, the bland, unquestioning look of his worn-out wife. A stereo like this is arguably a lot for painting a name and some stripes on a truck. It’s worth a lot and easy to move. But in this case, Nick knows, it’s easy to be generous. The Louis chairs are probably worth ten times as much. But of course the paint-sprayer doesn’t even consider a chair. Chairs are just to sit in.

No cash changes hands. A deal that’s cleaner than cash. Nick likes that, too.