Текст книги "Finders Keepers"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

‘I done plenty, but I didn’t do that,’ he told Morris time and time again. ‘I woulda, I had the fuckin security code, but someone else beat me to the punch. I know who it was, too, because there was only one guy I told those numbers to. He was one of the ones who fuckin testified against me, and if I ever get out of here, that man is gonna die. Trust me.’

Morris neither believed nor disbelieved him – his first two years in the Ville had shown him that it was filled with men claiming to be as innocent as morning dew – but when Charlie asked him to write Barry Scheck, Morris was willing. It was what he did, his real job.

Turned out the robber-bludgeoner-rapist had left semen in the old lady’s underpants, the underpants were still in one of the city’s cavernous evidence rooms, and the lawyer the Innocence Project sent out to investigate Charlie Roberson’s case found them. DNA testing unavailable at the time of Charlie’s conviction showed the jizz wasn’t his. The lawyer hired an investigator to track down several of the prosecution’s witnesses. One of them, dying of liver cancer, not only recanted his testimony but copped to the crime, perhaps in hopes that doing so would earn him a pass through the pearly gates.

‘Hey, Charlie,’ Morris says. ‘Guess who.’

Roberson turns, squints, gets to his feet. ‘Morrie? Is that Morrie Bellamy?’

‘In the flesh.’

‘Well, I’ll be fucked.’

Probably not, Morris thinks, but when Roberson puts the battery down on the seat of the Harley and comes forward with his arms outstretched, Morris submits to the obligatory back-pounding bro-hug. Even gives it back to the best of his ability. The amount of muscle beneath Roberson’s filthy tee-shirt is mildly alarming.

Roberson pulls back, showing his few remaining teeth in a grin. ‘Jesus Christ! Parole?’

‘Parole.’

‘Old lady took her foot off your neck?’

‘She did.’

‘God-dam, that’s great! Come on in the office and have a drink! I got bourbon.’

Morris shakes his head. ‘Thanks, but booze doesn’t agree with my system. Also, the man might come around anytime and ask me to drop a urine. I called in sick at work this morning, that’s risky enough.’

‘Who’s your PO?’

‘McFarland.’

‘Big buck nigger, isn’t he?’

‘He’s black, yes.’

‘Ah, he ain’t the worst, but they watch you close to begin with, no doubt. Come on in the office, anyway, I’ll drink yours. Hey, did you hear Duck died?’

Morris has indeed heard this, got the news shortly before his parole came through. Duck Duckworth, his first protector, the one who stopped the rapes by Morris’s cellie and his cellie’s friends. Morris felt no special grief. People came; people went; shit didn’t mean shit.

Roberson shakes his head as he takes a bottle from the top shelf of a metal cabinet filled with tools and spare parts. ‘It was some kind of brain thing. Well, you know what they say – in the midst of fuckin life we’re in fuckin death.’ He pours bourbon into a cup with WORLD’S BEST HUGGER on the side, and lifts it. ‘Here’s to ole Ducky.’ He drinks, smacks his lips, and raises the cup again. ‘And here’s to you. Morrie Bellamy, out on the street again, rollin and trollin. What they got you doin? Some kind of paperwork’d be my guess.’

Morris tells him about his job at the MAC, and makes chitchat while Roberson helps himself to another knock of bourbon. Morris doesn’t envy Charlie his freedom to drink, he lost too many years of his life thanks to high-tension booze, but he feels Roberson will be more amenable to his request if he’s a little high.

When he judges the time is right, he says, ‘You told me to come to you if I ever got out and needed a favor.’

‘True, true … but I never thought you’d get out. Not with that Jesus-jumper you nailed ridin you like a motherfuckin pony.’ Roberson chortles and pours himself a fresh shot.

‘I need you to loan me a car, Charlie. Short-term. Not even twelve hours.’

‘When?’

‘Tonight. Well … this evening. Tonight’s when I need it. I can return it later on.’

Roberson has stopped laughing. ‘That’s a bigger risk than takin a drink, Morrie.’

‘Not for you; you’re out, free and clear.’

‘No, not for me, I’d just get a slap on the wrist. But drivin without a license is a big parole violation. You might go back inside. Don’t get me wrong, I’m willin to help you out, just want to be sure you understand the stakes.’

‘I understand them.’

Roberson tops up his glass and sips it as he considers. Morris wouldn’t want to be the owner of the bike Charlie is going to be putting back together once their little palaver is done.

At last Roberson says, ‘You be okay with a truck instead of a car? One I’m thinking of is a small panel job. And it’s an automatic. Says “Jones Flowers” on the side, but you can hardly read it anymore. It’s out back. I’ll show it to you, if you want.’

Morris wants, and one look makes him decide the little black panel truck is a gift from God … assuming it runs all right. Roberson assures him that it does, even though it’s on its second trip around the clock.

‘I shut up shop early on Fridays. Around three. I could put in some gas and leave the keys under the right front tire.’

‘That’s perfect,’ Morris says. He can go in to the MAC, tell his fat fuck of a boss that he had a stomach bug but it passed, work until four like a good little office drone, then come back out here. ‘Listen, the Groundhogs play tonight, don’t they?’

‘Yeah, they got the Dayton Dragons. Why? You hankerin to take in a game? Because I could be up for that.’

‘Another time, maybe. What I’m thinking is I could return the truck around ten, park it in the same place, then take a stadium bus back into town.’

‘Same old Morrie,’ Roberson says, and taps his temple. His eyes have become noticeably bloodshot. ‘You are one thinking cat.’

‘Remember to put the keys under the tire.’ The last thing Morris needs is for Roberson to get shitfaced on cheap bourbon and forget.

‘I will. Owe you a lot, buddy. Owe you the motherfuckin world.’

This sentiment necessitates another bro-hug, redolent of sweat, bourbon, and cheap aftershave. Roberson squeezes so tightly that Morris finds it hard to breathe, but at last he’s released. He accompanies Charlie back into the garage, thinking that tonight – in twelve hours, maybe less – the Rothstein notebooks will once more be in his possession. With such an intoxicating prospect as that, who needs bourbon?

‘You mind me asking why you’re working here, Charlie? I thought you were going to get a boatload of cash from the state for false imprisonment.’

‘Aw, man, they threatened to bring up a bunch of old charges.’ Roberson resumes his seat in front of the Harley he’s been working on. He picks up a wrench and taps it against the grease-smeared leg of his pants. ‘Including a bad one in Missouri, could have put me away down there for the rest of my life. Three-strikes rule or some shit. So we kinda worked out a trade.’

He regards Morris with his bloodshot eyes, and in spite of his meaty biceps (it’s clear he never lost the prison workout habit), Morris can see he’s really old, and will soon be unhealthy, as well. If he isn’t already.

‘They fuck you in the end, buddy. Right up the ass. Rock the boat and they fuck you even harder. So you take what you can get. This is what I got, and it’s enough for me.’

‘Shit don’t mean shit,’ Morris says.

Roberson bellows laughter. ‘What you always said! And it’s the fuckin truth!’

‘Just don’t forget to leave the keys.’

‘I’ll leave em.’ Roberson levels a grease-blackened finger at Morris. ‘And don’t get caught. Listen to your daddy.’

I won’t get caught, Morris thinks. I’ve waited too long.

‘One other thing?’

Roberson waits for it.

‘I don’t suppose I could get a gun.’ Morris sees the look on Charlie’s face and adds hastily, ‘Not to use, just as insurance.’

Roberson shakes his head. ‘No gun. I’d get a lot more than a slap on the wrist for that.’

‘I’d never say it came from you.’

The bloodshot eyes regard Morris shrewdly. ‘Can I be honest? You’re too jail-bit for guns. Probably shoot yourself in the nutsack. The truck, okay. I owe you that. But if you want a gun, find it somewhere else.’

23

At three o’clock that Friday afternoon, Morris comes within a whisker of trashing twelve million dollars’ worth of modern art.

Well, no, not really, but he does come close to erasing the records of that art, which include the provenance and the background info on a dozen rich MAC donors. He’s spent weeks creating a new search protocol that covers all of the Arts Center’s acquisitions since the beginning of the twenty-first century. That protocol is a work of art in itself, and this afternoon, instead of sliding the biggest of the subfiles into the master file, he has moused it into the trash along with a lot of other dreck he needs to get rid of. The MAC’s lumbering, outdated computer system is overloaded with useless shit, including a ton of stuff that’s no longer even in the building. Said ton got moved to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York back in ’05. Morris is on the verge of emptying the trash to make room for more dreck, his finger is actually on the trigger, when he realizes he’s about to send a very valuable live file to data heaven.

For a moment he’s back in Waynesville, trying to hide contraband before a rumored cell inspection, maybe nothing more dangerous than a snack-pack of Keebler cookies but enough to get him marked down if the screw is in a pissy mood. He looks at his finger, hovering less than an eighth of an inch over that damned delete button, and pulls his hand back to his chest, where he can feel his heart thumping fast and hard. What in God’s name was he thinking?

His fat fuck of a boss chooses that moment to poke his head into Morris’s closet-sized workspace. The cubicles where the other office drones spend their days are papered with pictures of boyfriends, girlfriends, families, even the fucking family dog, but Morris has put up nothing but a postcard of Paris, which he has always wanted to visit. Like that’s ever going to happen.

‘Everything all right, Morris?’ the fat fuck asks.

‘Fine,’ Morris says, praying that his boss won’t come in and look at his screen. Although he probably wouldn’t know what he was looking at. The obese bastard can send emails, he even seems to have a vague grasp of what Google is for, but beyond that he’s lost. Yet he’s living out in the suburbs with the wife and kiddies instead of in Bugshit Manor, where the crazies yell at invisible enemies in the middle of the night.

‘Good to hear. Carry on.’

Morris thinks, Carry your fat ass on out of here.

The fat fuck does, probably headed down to the canteen to feed his fat fuck face. When he’s gone, Morris clicks on the trash icon, grabs what he almost deleted, and moves it back into the master file. This isn’t much of an operation, but when it’s finished he blows out his breath like a man who has just defused a bomb.

Where was your head? he scolds himself. What were you thinking?

Rhetorical questions. He was thinking about the Rothstein notebooks, now so close. Also about the little panel truck, and how scary it’s going to feel, driving again after all those years inside. All he needs is one fender-bender … one cop who thinks he looks suspicious …

I have to keep it together a little longer, Morris thinks. I have to.

But his brain feels overloaded, running in the red zone. He thinks he’ll be all right once the notebooks are actually in his possession (also the money, although that’s far less important). Get those puppies hidden away at the back of the closet in his room on the ninth floor of Bugshit Manor and he can relax, but right now the stress is killing him. It’s also being in a changed world and working an actual job and having a boss who doesn’t wear a gray uniform but still has to be kowtowed to. On top of all that, there’s the stress of having to drive an unregistered vehicle without a license tonight.

He thinks, By ten P.M. things will be better. In the meantime, strap down and tighten up. Shit don’t mean shit.

‘Right,’ Morris whispers, and wipes a prickle of sweat from the skin between his mouth and nose.

24

At four o’clock he saves his work, closes out the apps he’s been running, and shuts down. He walks into the MAC’s plush lobby and standing there like a bad dream made real, feet apart and hands clasped behind his back, is Ellis McFarland. His PO is studying an Edward Hopper painting like the art aficionado he surely isn’t.

Without turning (Morris realizes the man must have seen his reflection in the glass covering the painting, but it’s still eerie), McFarland says, ‘Yo, Morrie. How you doin, homie?’

He knows, Morris thinks. Not just about the panel truck, either. About everything.

Not true, and he knows it isn’t, but the part that’s still in jail and always will be assures him it is true. To McFarland, Morris Bellamy’s forehead is a pane of glass. Everything inside, every turning wheel and overheated whirling cog, is visible to him.

‘I’m all right, Mr McFarland.’

Today McFarland is wearing a plaid sportcoat approximately the size of a living room rug. He looks Morris up and down, and when his eyes return to Morris’s face, it’s all Morris can do to hold them.

‘You don’t look all right. You’re pale, and you got those dark whack-off circles under your eyes. Been using something you hadn’t oughtta been using, Morrie?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Doing something you hadn’t oughtta be doing?’

‘No.’ Thinking of the panel truck with JONES FLOWERS still visible on the side, waiting for him on the South Side. The keys probably already under the tire.

‘No what?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Uh-huh. Maybe it’s the flu. Because, frankly speaking, you look like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag.’

‘I almost made a mistake,’ Morris says. ‘It could have been rectified – probably – but it would have meant bringing in an outside I-T guy, maybe even shutting down the main server. I would have been in trouble.’

‘Welcome to the workaday world,’ McFarland says, with zero sympathy.

‘Well, it’s different for me!’ Morris bursts out, and oh God, it’s such a relief to burst out, and to do it about something safe. ‘If anyone should know that, it’s you! Someone else who did that would just get a reprimand, but not me. And if they fired me – for a lapse in attention, not anything I did on purpose – I’d end up back inside.’

‘Maybe,’ McFarland says, turning back to the picture. It shows a man and a woman sitting in a room and apparently working hard not to look at each other. ‘Maybe not.’

‘My boss doesn’t like me,’ Morris says. He knows he sounds like he’s whining, probably he is whining. ‘I know four times as much as he does about how the computer system in this place works, and it pisses him off. He’d love to see me gone.’

‘You sound a weensy bit paranoid,’ McFarland says. His hands are again clasped above his truly awesome buttocks, and all at once Morris understands why McFarland is here. McFarland followed him to the motorcycle shop where Charlie Roberson works and has decided he’s up to something. Morris knows this isn’t so. He knows it is.

‘What are they doing, anyway, letting a guy like me screw with their files? A parolee? If I do the wrong thing, and I almost did, I could cost them a lot of money.’

‘What did you think you’d be doing on the outside?’ McFarland says, still examining the Hopper painting, which is called Apartment 16-A. He seems fascinated by it, but Morris isn’t fooled. McFarland is watching his reflection again. Judging him. ‘You’re too old and too soft to shift cartons in a warehouse or work on a gardening crew.’

He turns around.

‘It’s called mainstreaming, Morris, and I didn’t make the policy. If you want to wah-wah-wah about it, find somebody who gives a shit.’

‘Sorry,’ Morris says.

‘Sorry what?’

‘Sorry, Mr McFarland.’

‘Thank you, Morris, that’s better. Now let’s step into the men’s room, where you will pee in the little cup and prove to me that your paranoia isn’t drug-induced.’

The last stragglers of the office staff are leaving. Several glance at Morris and the big black man in the loud sportcoat, then quickly glance away. Morris feels an urge to shout That’s right, he’s my parole officer, get a good look!

He follows McFarland into the men’s, which is empty, thank God. McFarland leans against the wall, arms crossed on his chest, watching as Morris unlimbers his elderly thingamajig and produces a urine sample. When it doesn’t turn blue after thirty seconds, McFarland hands the little plastic cup back to Morris. ‘Congratulations. Dump that, homie.’

Morris does. McFarland is washing his hands methodically, lathering all the way to his wrists.

‘I don’t have AIDS, you know. If that’s what you’re worried about. I had to take the test before they let me out.’

McFarland carefully dries his big hands. He studies himself in the mirror for a moment (maybe wishing he had some hair to comb), then turns to Morris. ‘You may be substance-free, but I really don’t like the way you look, Morrie.’

Morris keeps silent.

‘Let me tell you something eighteen years in this job has taught me. There are two types of parolees, and two only: wolves and lambs. You’re too old to be a wolf, but I’m not entirely sure you’re hip to that. You may not have internalized it, as the shrinks say. I don’t know what wolfish shit you might have on your mind, maybe it’s nothing more than stealing paper clips from the supply room, but whatever it is, you need to forget about it. You’re too old to howl and much too old to run.’

Having imparted this bit of wisdom, he leaves. Morris heads for the door himself, but his legs turn to rubber before he can get there. He wheels around, grasps a washbasin to keep from falling, and blunders into one of the stalls. There he sits down and lowers his head until it almost touches his knees. He closes his eyes and takes long deep breaths. When the roaring in his head subsides, he gets up and leaves.

He’ll still be here, Morris thinks. Staring at that damned picture with his hands clasped behind his back.

But this time the lobby is empty save for the security guard, who gives Morris a suspicious look as he passes.

25

The Hogs-Dragons game doesn’t start until seven, but the buses with BASEBALL GAME 2NITE in their destination windows start running at five. Morris takes one to the park, then walks back to Statewide Motorcycle, aware of each car that passes and cursing himself for losing his shit in the men’s room after McFarland departed. If he’d gotten out sooner, maybe he could have seen what the sonofabitch was driving. But he didn’t, and now any one of these cars might be McFarland’s. The PO would be easy enough to spot, given the size of him, but Morris doesn’t dare look at any of the passing cars too closely. There are two reasons for this. First, he’d look guilty, wouldn’t he? Yes indeed, like a man who’s got wolfish shit on his mind and has to keep checking his perimeter. Second, he might see McFarland even if McFarland isn’t there, because he’s edging ever closer to a nervous breakdown. It isn’t surprising, either. A man could only stand so much stress.

What are you, twenty-two? Rothstein had asked him. Twenty-three?

That was a good guess by an observant man. Morris had been twenty-three. Now he’s on the cusp of sixty, and the years between have disappeared like smoke in a breeze. He has heard people say sixty is the new forty, but that’s bullshit. When you’ve spent most of your life in prison, sixty is the new seventy-five. Or eighty. Too old to be a wolf, according to McFarland.

Well, we’ll see about that, won’t we?

He turns in to the yard of Statewide Motorcycle – the shades pulled, the bikes that were out front this morning locked away – and expects to hear a car door slam behind him the moment he transgresses private property. Expects to hear McFarland saying Yo, homie, what you doing in there?

But the only sound is the traffic passing on the way to the stadium, and when he gets around to the back lot, the invisible band that’s been constricting his chest eases a little. There’s a high wall of corrugated metal cutting off this patch of yard from the rest of the world, and walls comfort Morris. He doesn’t like that, knows it isn’t natural, but there it is. A man is the sum of his experiences.

He goes to the panel truck – small, dusty, blessedly nondescript – and feels beneath the right front tire. The keys are there. He gets in, and is gratified when the engine starts on the first crank. The radio comes on in a blare of rock. Morris snaps it off.

‘I can do this,’ he says, first adjusting the seat and then gripping the wheel. ‘I can do this.’

And, it turns out, he can. It’s like riding a bike. The only hard part is turning against the stream of traffic headed for the stadium, and even that isn’t too bad; after a minute’s wait, one of the BASEBALL GAME 2NITE buses stops, and the driver waves for Morris to go. The northbound lanes are nearly empty, and he’s able to avoid downtown by using the new city bypass. He almost enjoys driving again. Would enjoy it, if not for the nagging suspicion that McFarland is tailing him. Not busting him yet, though; he won’t do that until he sees what his old pal – his homie – is up to.

Morris stops at the Bellows Avenue Mall and goes into Home Depot. He strolls around beneath the glaring fluorescents, taking his time; he can’t do his business until after dark, and in June the evening light lasts until eight thirty or nine. In the gardening section he buys a spade and also a hatchet, in case he has to chop some roots – that tree overhanging the bank looks like it might have his trunk in a pretty tight grip. In the aisle marked CLEARANCE, he grabs a pair of Tuff Tote duffels, on sale for twenty bucks each. He stows his purchases in the back of the truck and heads around to the driver’s door.

‘Hey!’ From behind him.

Morris freezes, listening to the approaching footsteps and waiting for McFarland to grab his shoulder.

‘Do you know if there’s a supermarket in this mall?’

The voice is young. And white. Morris discovers he can breathe again. ‘Safeway,’ he says, without turning. He has no idea if there’s a supermarket in the mall or not.

‘Oh. Okay. Thanks.’

Morris gets into the truck and starts the engine. I can do this, he thinks.

I can and I will.

26

Morris cruises slowly through the Northfield Tree Streets that were his old stomping grounds – not that he ever did much stomping; usually he had his nose in a book. It’s still too early, so he parks on Elm for awhile. There’s a dusty old map in the glove compartment, and he pretends to read it. After twenty minutes or so, he drives over to Maple and does the same thing. Then down to the local Zoney’s Go-Mart, where he bought snacks as a kid. Also cigarettes for his father. That was back in the day when a pack cost forty cents and kids buying smokes for their parents was taken for granted. He gets a Slushie and makes it last. Then he moves onto Palm Street and goes back to pretend map reading. The shadows are lengthening, but oh so slowly.

Should have brought a book, he thinks, then thinks No – a man with a map looks okay, somehow, but a man reading a book in an old truck would probably look like a potential child molester.

Is that paranoid or smart? He can no longer tell. All he knows for sure is that the notebooks are close now. They’re pinging like a sonar blip.

Little by little, the long light of this June evening mellows to dusk. The kids who’ve been playing on sidewalks and front lawns go inside to watch TV or play video games or spend an educational evening texting various misspelled messages and dumbass emoticons to their friends.

Confident that McFarland is nowhere near (although not completely confident), Morris keys the panel truck’s engine and drives slowly to his final destination: the Birch Street Rec, where he used to go when the Garner Street branch of the library was closed. Skinny, bookish, with a regrettable tendency to run his mouth, he rarely got picked for the outdoor games, and almost always got yelled at on the few occasions when he did: hey butterfingers, hey dumbo, hey fumblebutt. Because of his red lips, he earned the nickname Revlon. When he went to the Rec, he mostly stayed indoors, reading or maybe putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Now the city has shut the old brick building down and put it up for sale in the wake of municipal budget cuts.

A few boys toss up a few final baskets on the weedy courts out back, but there are no longer outside lights and they beat feet when it’s too dark to see, yelling and dribbling and shooting passes back and forth. When they’re gone, Morris starts the truck and pulls into the driveway running alongside the building. He does it without turning on his headlights, and the little black truck is exactly the right color for this kind of work. He snuggles it up to the rear of the building, where a faded sign still reads RESERVED FOR REC DEPT. VEHICLES. He kills the engine, gets out, and smells the June air, redolent of grass and clover. He can hear crickets, and the drone of traffic on the city bypass, but otherwise the newly fallen night is his.

Fuck you, Mr McFarland, he thinks. Fuck you very much.

He gets his tools and Tuff Totes from the back of the truck and starts toward the tangle of unimproved ground beyond the baseball field where he dropped so many easy pop flies. Then an idea strikes him and he turns back. He braces a palm on the old brick, still warm from the heat of the day, slides down to a crouch, and pulls some weeds so he can peer through one of the basement windows. These haven’t been boarded up. The moon has just risen, orange and full. It lends enough light for him to see folding chairs, card tables, and heaps of boxes.

Morris has planned on bringing the notebooks back to his room in Bugshit Manor, but that’s risky; Mr McFarland can search his room anytime he pleases, it’s part of the deal. The Rec is a lot closer to where the notebooks are buried, and the basement, where all sorts of useless bric-à-brac has already been stored, would be the perfect hiding place. It might be possible to rathole most of them here, only taking a few at a time back to his room, where he could read them. Morris is skinny enough to fit through this window, although he might have to wriggle a bit, and how hard could it be to bust the thumb-lock he sees on the inside of the window and pry it up? A screwdriver would probably do the trick. He doesn’t have one, but there are plenty at Home Depot. He even saw a small display of tools when he was in Zoney’s.

He leans closer to the dirty window, studying it. He knows to look for alarm tapes (the state penitentiary is a very educational place when it comes to breaking and entering), but he doesn’t see any. Only suppose the alarm uses contact points, instead? He wouldn’t see those, and he might not hear the alarm, either. Some of them are silent.

Morris looks a little longer, then reluctantly gets to his feet. It doesn’t seem likely to him that an old building like this one is alarmed – the valuable stuff has no doubt been moved elsewhere long ago – but he doesn’t dare take the chance.

Better to stick with the original plan.

He grabs his tools and his duffel bags and once more starts for the overgrown waste ground, careful to skirt the ballfield. He’s not going there, uh-uh, no way. The moon will help him once he’s in the undergrowth, but out in the open, the world looks like a brightly lighted stage.

The potato chip bag that helped him last time is gone, and it takes awhile to find the path again. Morris beats back and forth through the undergrowth beyond right field (the site of several childhood humiliations), finally rediscovers it, and sets off. When he hears the faint chuckle of the stream, he has to restrain himself from breaking into a run.

Times have been hard, he thinks. There could be people sleeping in here, homeless people. If one of them sees me—

If one of them sees him, he’ll use the hatchet. No hesitation. Mr McFarland may think he’s too old to be a wolf, but what his parole officer doesn’t know is that Morris has already killed three people, and driving a car isn’t the only thing that’s like riding a bike.

27

The trees are runty, choking each other in their struggle for space and sun, but they are tall enough to filter the moonlight. Two or three times Morris loses the path and blunders around, trying to find it again. This actually pleases him. He has the sound of the stream to guide him if he really does lose his way, and the path’s faintness confirms that fewer kids use it now than back in his day. Morris just hopes he’s not walking through poison ivy.

The sound of the stream is very close when he finds the path for the last time, and less than five minutes later, he’s standing on the bank opposite the landmark tree. He stops there for a bit in the moon-dappled shade, looking for any sign of human habitation: blankets, a sleeping bag, a shopping cart, a piece of plastic draped over branches to create a makeshift tent. There’s nothing. Just the water purling along in its stony bed, and the tree tilting over the far side of the stream. The tree that has faithfully guarded his treasure all these years.

‘Good old tree,’ Morris whispers, and steps his way across the stream.

He kneels and puts aside the tools and the duffel bags for a moment of meditation. ‘Here I am,’ he whispers, and places his palms on the ground, as if feeling for a heartbeat.

And it seems that he does feel one. It’s the heartbeat of John Rothstein’s genius. The old man turned Jimmy Gold into a sellout joke, but who can say Rothstein didn’t redeem Jimmy during his years of solitary composition? If he did that … if … then everything Morris has gone through has been worthwhile.

‘Here I am, Jimmy. Here I finally am.’

He grabs the spade and begins digging. It doesn’t take long to get to the trunk again, but the roots have embraced it, all right, and it’s almost an hour before Morris can chop through enough of them to pull it out. It’s been years since he did hard manual labor, and he’s exhausted. He thinks of all the cons he knew – Charlie Roberson, for example – who worked out constantly, and how he sneered at them for what he considered obsessive-compulsive behavior (in his mind, at least; never on his face). He’s not sneering now. His thighs ache, his back aches, and worst of all, his head is throbbing like an infected tooth. A little breeze has sprung up, which cools the sweat sliming his skin, but it also causes the branches to sway, creating moving shadows that make him afraid. They make him think of McFarland again. McFarland making his way up the path, moving with the eerie quiet some big men, soldiers and ex-athletes, mostly, are able to manage.