Moving Day: A Thriller (20 page)

A rich, bald old man drives past Freedom Café in a vintage Mercedes with the top down.

The three skinheads sitting in the cafe look out and notice.

Out here at the crossroads of Freedom Café, it rates as an unusual event. You don’t see that kind of thing. It is only a moment. A dream.

There is something loosely disconcerting, something annoying, about it.

One of the skinheads thinks vaguely of an old man who wandered into the cafe a few days ago. But that guy had a cowboy hat.

T
he big white Mid-South Partners truck pulls past the gate, past the pickups and trailers, past the farmhouse, across the mud fields, and around to the overhead doors at the far end of the barn. Home. Transitory, dust-crusted, roughly kept, but home. Forty-two hours after the fact, Nick is still stewing about the poor Miami Beach taste of the widow. Eccentric modern furniture, too distinctive, too difficult to move. But there were some paintings.
Christ—all that money, all that leisure time, and no taste
, thinks Nick.
No taste.

Nick hears the dogs barking but doesn’t see them. They usually come greet the truck, scrabble and dance excitedly around its tires as it pulls in. Maybe they’re around the other side of the barn, chasing something in the woods.

LaFarge hops out of the truck and trots over to the overhead doors to unlock them while Nick maneuvers the truck around, backing it into position. It was a tiring, all-night drive. He’s thinking they can unload later in the day, leave it all in the truck for now, break open the beers, pop on the stereo. Although it’s hard to gather everyone back to the job after a few hours of drinking, after they’ve been off the clock.

He hasn’t yet moved out the previous goods. Still too early. He’ll have them put this load in next to them. Once dealers are found, it’ll be more efficient anyway to deliver the marketable parts of the loads together.

“Hey, Nick?”

“Hey what?”

LaFarge stands looking up at the cab with a stricken expression on his face. Like he’s done something horrible. Fucked up big.

“Some of our stuff . . .”

“What about it?” says Nick irritably.

LaFarge can barely believe it even as he says it. “It ain’t here.”

Nick stands looking at the empty space just inside the huge barn’s garage bays.

He paces the dirt-pack floor. Looks down, stares, as if waiting for the goods to reappear.

Someone’s found him. He’s deep in these goddamn woods, where he lives with no one and nothing, exists like some grumpy fairy-tale character, like some miserly ogre or banished warlock, yet he’s been found.

He feels the invasion. He feels the violation. He is aware of the irony, that this is precisely how his victims must feel, but his thinking for the moment is occupied by more practical concerns than irony. Data; information; implications; revenge. Irony is shoved far to the side.

He thinks first of the locals, of the crazy neo-Nazis he’s coexisted uneasily with, the nuts in the woods, seeing him go in and out with his truck, unable to resist anymore, sneaking in to share the spoils. His fury rises. They’re fools. He’ll find them.

He soon sees, though—his overorderly, overclerical mind almost immediately notices—that the only items taken are items from the last job. Nothing else touched. In another couple of weeks, depending on buyers, the items would have been intermingled. But they weren’t yet.

The neo-Nazis would have cherry-picked, grabbed only what intrigued them. Or ransacked it, leaving a trail of mess. One or the other. But this is neither.

He looks again more closely, considers. Other quick theories and visions—of petty pilferers and local teenage adventurers and reckless hayseeds—drop away.

It’s only the items from the last job.

Including, he now sees—feeling its absence like a physical emptiness inside him—the silver Mercedes.

It’s as if—carefully, considerately—the owner has come and retrieved his things. That old man with the accent.

Nick feels his stomach clenching. He’s aware of a throb at his temples. He feels his brain winding tight, seizing like a broken machine.

That old man.

It would explain things, except for the fact that it seems impossible. From two thousand miles away? How would the old man have found them? Could the truck have been followed? Nick would have noticed. He was looking. He is always looking out for being followed. He could not have been followed day and night across two thousand miles by an old man.

Did it happen when he went back to the safe-deposit box? That seems more likely. But he hired locals, was so cautious. He can’t imagine that he was even seen. He was never in the bank himself, and if seen, then—again—certainly not followed. Not—again—across two thousand miles. He would have noticed—careful
Nick. Alert, aware, spending his professional life looking in the rearview mirror.

He is instantly and sickly aware that if he has been found like this, then very possibly the police have been informed, have maybe taken a look already, and have been patiently, watchfully waiting for his return.

In which case they will be swooping in, noisy and overstaffed and overarmed and overarrogant, any moment now.

But all is quiet. They do not.

And if the old man were going to contact the police, he would not have taken his things back like this. If the police were involved, this is not how it would go—one person’s possessions retrieved, others left. The police require evidence. Procedure. Equal treatment of the victimized.

No, he realizes, at least for now, there seems to be no police involvement. The police have not been called.
Did not call the cops.
He tucks that away.

As he begins to accept that it might actually be that old man, he gets angrier. Angrier that the old man has somehow pulled this off. The clenching in his stomach spreads, becomes a heat surging through his body like a chemical, like a medicine gone bad, sitting hot in the bottle too long.

He’s alone in the barn. The others huddle outside—they know to move away when Nick is angry.

Nick moves slowly out of the barn, still stunned, confused—the anger still spiraling upward.

He notices only now that the dogs are in the pen. The pen is closed. How did he do that? How did the old man get them in there?

As Nick opens the door of the dog pen, his dogs come bounding out, released, freed, jumping around him, exultant.

He kicks the first one in the jaw. It yelps and recoils.

He kicks the second in the side, before it can move away in confusion, in instinctive defense.

“What the fuck good are you?” He goes to kick them again, but they are faster than he is; they steer clear, scurrying away across the field.

He runs at them, tries to land a few more kicks, but they manage to stay a few steps ahead of him, adeptly avoiding him until he stalks the other way.

If he has to be with them to give the attack command, what the fuck is the point?

Nick inspects the garage-door mechanisms. The side-door lock. The career thief reconstructing how he was robbed. Bringing an expert’s perspective.

Nothing damaged.

He sees car tracks in the dirt. The Mercedes tracks.

He stalks up the farmhouse’s back steps, sees the broken pane.

He toes the broken glass off the wooden landing.

Entering, looks at the key ring on the nail by the door. It’s there, where he always leaves it. But returned there, he is sure, by the old man. The old man who saw the key ring and knew. Keys to the kingdom. Maybe even thinking,
You found my brass key. Now I’ve found yours
.

Sullenly, wordlessly, Nick heads for his office.

Sits down at his desk.

Opens the second drawer.

Of course.

The jewelry is gone.

Nick feels it. The old man sitting here. The fury rises in Nick, a fresh wave of it, washing over him.

He pounds his fist on the desk. Spins in his chair and yanks open a file drawer behind him. Riffles through it frantically, until he stops at a folder. He stares at the folder a moment, before pulling it out and opening it.

The old man’s signature has been ripped off the top sheet. Nick took it to make copies, sending the copies of the signature to the safe-deposit box actors, for them to practice from.

But the rest of the fake pink form is still there, with the address: 3901 Pacific View, Santa Barbara.

Is the old man really taking his things there? Is he that arrogant? But he is arrogant enough, after all, to come collect his things deep in the Montana woods.

Will he now try to hide from Nick? No—he will go on with his life, certain, probably, that Nick wouldn’t risk an escalation of events. Wouldn’t tangle with someone so clearly and completely onto Nick. Someone crazy and determined enough to cross the country, to somehow find his way here, in order to retrieve his things. Or maybe the old man figures Nick has already tossed the original delivery address. But even if Nick didn’t have it, he could probably still get the destination address from Dolly, his moving-company contact, to confirm it—that’s where the Pekes’ name came from. It’s probably still in Dolly’s computer. The old man must have guessed at Nick’s having some mechanism, some system, like that. Or maybe the old man simply figures Nick would never jeopardize his whole enterprise by coming after one old man, one particularly stubborn mark.

In which case, the old man—pretty good at figuring, apparently—has finally figured wrong. Smart old man. Stupid old man.

You can’t just come in here and steal my things
, thinks Nick.

I’m gonna get my things back.

N
ick sits inside Freedom Café. The three skinheads are seated around him.

He’s asked if he can join them, speaking to them directly for the first time, and they sense that this has significance, that this is an occasion. Nick senses they’ve been itching to know what it is he’s doing with that big white truck on that property out there. Maybe they’ve even come by, aimlessly curious, but have seen the gate, heard the dogs, and thought better of it, though it’s probably only fed their curiosity.

Nick’s been thinking about the old man, and that gracious, tasteful house, and that accent that Nick heard in the few sentences he exchanged with the old man.