Remember the Future (10 page)

6

City employee Marvin Sanders had just raised the American flag and opened the gates to the Greenwood Cemetery when he saw the casually-dressed lady and gentleman approaching from inside.

From inside?

He’d seen a lot of homeless folks over the last six weeks he’d been employed by the city of New Orleans, but none of them had worn clothes in as good a condition as these two.  Maybe he was missing something here.

“Hey, uh..,” he started as they trotted toward where he stood at the entrance.

“Okay, you must be the new guy,” the man said to him as he whisked by him, pulling the woman behind and out through the gate.

“Well… yeah,” Marvin replied, feeling like he was missing something very important.

“You realize that we've had a bunch of homeless folks in here all night?”

Marvin turned his attention away from them a moment and looked into the cemetery with interest.  “Again?” he murmured under his breath, unclipping the radio from his belt and turning it on for the first time that morning. 
Guess, I’m going to have to call Mr. Bernard
, he thought. 
Man, he hated dealing with that idiot.  Always picking his nose right in front of God and the world.

Suddenly, he glanced around, wondering if he would be asked about these two, but they were already headed for City Park Avenue. 
But they work for the city, right
, he figured as he stared emptily after him. 
Sounded like they did
.

The lady pointed out toward Canal Street, and the man glanced furtively back one last time at Marvin.

“Don't just stand there! You might still be able to catch them if you hurry up!” the man called back to him as he trotted after the lady.

Marvin nodded and headed into the cemetery, calling for Mr. Bernard on his radio and hoping he’d at least remember to blow his nose this morning, so Marvin wouldn’t have the watch the spectacle of his nasal excavation.

7

“Are you sure taking the streetcar is such a good idea?” Grant asked, rushing along behind Maddy and resisting the urge to look back again at the park employee at the cemetery gate.

“We have to keep moving and stick to crowds,” Maddy said, grabbing Grant by his arm and drawing him closer to her.  “They know we went through the cemetery.”

“How do you know that they know?”

Maddy pointed to her stomach.  “You can feel it in here.  Can’t you?”

Grant gave her a look of confusion.  “No, you’re the one with the… system.”

A streetcar pulled up across the street. Maddy raced toward it and Grant followed.

They rushed into line behind a small group standing at the door of the car headed southeast toward the Mississippi.

“You usually disregard it, but everyone has it to a certain extent, Grant,” she said, giving him a patronizing pat on his own belly.  “Even big strong, logic-minded men like you.  I mean, you just did it a few minutes ago.”

When their turn arrived, Grant followed Maddy up the steps.  “What are you talking about?”

Cutting him off, the uniformed driver announced: “Two-fifty.  Exact change, please.”

Maddy turned to Grant with an alarmed look.  “You have two-fifty in exact change?”

“You're the one with all the money,” Grant replied. “Where's your bag?”

“You saw me leave it in the car with Chuckles the clown and the recently departed Pepe.”

“C’mon.  C’mon,” the driver grumbled, glancing at the line slowly forming behind them.  “We’re on a schedule here.”

Grant cursed under his breath and rummaged through his pockets.  Finding the crumpled hundred dollar bill, he handed the bill to the driver and pointed to Maddy.  “Two tickets please.”

The driver glowered at the bill and without looking up at the face of the hand holding it said, “Now what exactly am I supposed to do with that?  Roll it up and snort a line.”

“Wow,” Grant exclaimed, giving Maddy a look of disbelief.  “Look, I love your sense of humor, but seriously, it's the smallest I got.”

“Must be nice to be you,” the driver said indifferently.  “Go get some change.  Another car will be round at fifteen after.”  He pointed to the door.

“No, we've got to take this one,” Grant replied.

“Or we're going to be late,” Maddy added from beside him.  “Very late.”

“Look, you can keep the change,” Grant continued to argue.  “Please accept it as a donation to the Courteous Bus-Driver’s Association.  I don’t care.  We just need to get on this particular streetcar.”

The driver sighed heavily, glancing at the passengers behind Grant growing more and more agitated.  “I got all day passes. Five dollars each.

“Perfect, give me two.”

“Exact change only.”

Grant stared blankly at the driver.  “Give me twenty.  Free all day passes to the next eighteen passengers,” he proclaimed, turning to the grumbling line of humanity crowding into the tiny stairwell behind him.  “Just my way of welcoming all of you to the city of brotherly love.”

Several of the passengers grumble their indifferent thanks.

The driver began to count out pairs of passes, then stopped to search the ticket compartment in vain.  “I've only got the five pair.”

Grant seized Maddy by the shoulder and leaned in to whisper conspiratorially.  “Please take control of this situation before I throw myself through the windshield,” he pleaded.

Maddy nodded and stepped past Grant to address the driver.  “Please, sir. We really need to catch this car.  It may very well be a matter of life and death.”

Finally making eye contact, the driver quietly assessed the woman standing before him.

“You have the money and you asked for twenty all day passes, I just didn't have the proper number of passes available. Driver error. You ride for free. Please take your seats,” the driver concluded, turning to the next passenger in line.

As Maddy led Grant down the aisle, he leaned down to her and said, “There’s a man who genuinely seemed to take pride in his job.”

Grabbing the first available seats, Maddy plopped down and beamed brightly as Grant joined her.

“What?” he asked.

“See, you can be positive when you want to be,” she stated, leaning casually against him.

Grant cleared his throat and looked somewhat uncomfortable.  Finally, he separated himself and angled his body to face her.  “Now, explain what you meant when you said that I did it a few minutes ago.  What exactly did I do?”

“You knew that guy watching the gate of the cemetery was new.  How did you know that?”

Grant considered. 
How had he known?

“In whatever brief amount of time we had, I must have just assessed him and something spoke inexperience to me.”

Maddy tagged him playfully on the arm.  “That’s in small measure what I do,” she told him.  “It’s not so crazy actually.”

“Did you see the knife?” Grant asked fixing his eyes on her with a laser-like focus.

Maddy shrugged.

“That’s not an answer,” he challenged her.

“In a way, I
did
see it,” she answered.

He continued to stare at her, giving a subtle shake of her head.  “Was that an example of what you were talking about before at the truck stop?  Remembering the future?”

Maddy lowered her eyes almost with shame.

“What?  Now you don’t want to talk about it?”

“Yeah, I didn’t exactly have a choice.  You were going to leave me there,” she replied, an edge to her voice.

“What’s stopping you now?”

“I find it’s not a wise thing to… y’know.”  She looked away.  “Let’s just say, bad things happen to the people I open up to, Grant.”

Grant gave up and gazed intently down at the hundred in his hands.  “What you do is very special, kid.  It’s not a system.  It’s not something you can teach.  What you do is a full-fletched phenomenon.”

“Now do you understand why I’m being hunted like an animal?”

Grant gave her a slow nod then turned back to the bill in his hands as the streetcar finally started to move down the track.  “So you really gave Rudy all your money?”

“Yes,” she replied, staring wide-eyed out the window as the driver rang the bell of the streetcar.  She sat forward on the edge of her seat and brought her hands together like an excited child.  “Don't worry about money,” she told him without looking up.  “As long as you’re with me, you never have to worry about it.”

“You want to explain to me why you had a bagful of loose cash to begin with?”

“Right place at the right time, Grant,” Maddy responded enigmatically, tipping him a wink.  “Just like finding the knife in the waistband of that punk in the cemetery.  If I need it, I'll find it.  I knew I would need a satchel full of money at some point and for some good reason, but I didn’t know the reason until I met you.”

Grant gave a heavy sigh and looked over his shoulder.  “Giving him that money won’t change anything.”

“It’ll change something,” Maddy said, looking back out the window and catching a sudden breeze that blew her hair back from her face.  She closed her eyes for a moment and basked in the sensual feeling of the air against her skin.  “The only constant in all our lives is change Grant.”

While her eyes were still closed, Grant took the opportunity to study her face.  She held a pleasant smile there, almost as if she were on vacation instead of being pursued by maniacs intent on killing her.  In the moment, he envied her that ability--to compartmentalize the danger and tragedies of the past and live only in the moment.

She opened her eyes and stared openly and without shame into his eyes as if glimpsing a corner of his soul.

He quickly diverted his stare, feeling the sudden intimacy of the moment too much.

“By the way, in case you’re wondering.  I can’t read minds,” she explained.  “When I was younger, I thought I could if I tried hard enough—y’know, practiced and meditated.  But no.”  She shook her head. “I thank the Lord that he never handed me that cup.  Some things are meant to be kept private, y’know.”

Grant nodded, his mind turning to his own past and the demons that made their home there.

8

Leaning out onto the balcony, Rudy looked down on the mass of humanity already starting to fill St. Peter Street below. He took a long drag on his cigarette and closed his eyes in satisfaction.  His nose was swollen and every inhalation caused him pain but it was worth it.

The hell with the doctor!

If he was going to live a few less years because of this habit, then so be it.  Better he should spend his life happy than to die old with a mouthful of that foul-tasting nicotine gum.  Besides he held no illusions as to his life expectancy in this profession.

Mack, one of Torres’ bodyguards, called out to Rudy from inside.  As much as he hated to, Rudy crushed the cigarette out under his foot.

He found the big man sitting alone surrounded by at least ten empty dishes at a center table in the empty restaurant.  He was reading a newspaper and smoking one of those foul-smelling Dominicans he liked--being too cheap to spring for the real Cubans he could easily afford.

Arturo Torres owned the Restaurant DeBois as a cover.  Still, it was a damn good restaurant.  The chef was some hot shot French douche-bag from Paris and could knock out anything from pasta to gumbo.

Laden with mental exhaustion, Rudy dropped heavily into a chair across from his boss.

“Well, let's hear it,” Torres said around the edges of the cigar in his mouth, without looking up.

Rudy sighed and touched his nose experimentally.  “Had an accident on the way to the airport, boss.”

“Hear you lost Frederickson,” Torres stated, folding the newspaper in half with a snap and slapping it loudly down on the tabletop.  He turned the full intensity of his glare on the other man, an expression that made lesser men weak to their knees.  But Rudy had seen it before.  More and more often lately, it seemed to him.

“I've been on this thing since, what, midnight last night and...”

“I don't want to hear how fucked up your day's been,” Torres growled angrily.  “I lost my shop, about a million and a half of inventory and to top it all off, in all the confusion, my Pepe went missing.”

Rudy opened and quickly closed his mouth again.

Torres fixed him with a look that said, “Tell me something.”

Rudy quickly switched gears and narrowly avoided striking the pothole in the center of the road.  “The good news is Frederickson came through with the money,” he said, taking a seat at the table. “The boys inventoried it downstairs. Twenty thousand eight hundred seventy.”

Giving him a look of suspicion, Torres returned to his paper.  “I already explained to you that it doesn’t matter. His grace period expired.”

Rudy studied Torres for a moment before leaning forward and taking a careful measure of the approach he was about to make. “Arturo, you have the money and Frederickson is gone now. Why don't we just wash our hands of this guy and move on to this Houston situation? Do we know what the story is there?”

“No, we don't,” Torres snapped, an edge to his voice.  “Do you have something to tell me about the garage in Houston?”  Looking up from his paper, the large man breathed heavily and stared steadily at Rudy.

“I wasn't there, because I was busy handling this Frederickson thing just like you asked me to do. You can guarantee if I'd have been there, it wouldn't have happened.”

Torres grunted ironically and polished off his cup of coffee.  Wiping his mouth on his sleeve, he said, “Questions have been asked. Like maybe Frederickson led those fuckers out to the Lakeshore site.  There’ve been a lot of fingers pointed in your direction.”

Rudy stared blankly at Torres, his eyes slowly growing more and more confused.  “I was told personally by Charlie B, when he showed up that morning to let him into the shop.”

Torres grunted and turned back to his newspaper.

“No, wait!  This is important,” Rudy said sharply, resting his hand on Torres’ arm.  “Remember when I asked you how he had found the location and you told me that Tran had left him a message in his apartment?  Do you remember that conversation?”

Torres stared down at the hand on his sleeve.

Behind him, Rudy could sense movement toward the table.  He didn’t have to look back to know it was Mack.  The shaggy-faced Cajun never even went to the can without a loaded gun on him, and he knew better than to make him nervous.

Rudy slowly removed his hand from his boss’s sleeve and settled back into his chair.

“Listen carefully,” Torres told him, removing the cigar from his mouth and gesturing at his chest with it. “You are going to find this man.  If you need reasons, then here's a couple; because I want him and you work for me. Do you see any flaw in my fucking logic?”

Rudy took a moment before answering, turning his head slightly and finding Mack standing just a few yards away from them--clearly an active listener in the conversation now.

“Is there something else you want to tell me about Frederickson? Something personal maybe that might help me find him?” he asked.

Torres’ face hardened then finally he smirked.  “Yeah, the asshole will always do exactly the opposite of what me or you would do in any given situation.”