Текст книги "Finders Keepers"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

Only one way to find out.

Pete took a deep breath, locked it down in his chest, and pulled. The trunk stayed put, and the old handle creaked warningly, but Pete was encouraged. He found he could now shift the trunk from side to side a little. This made him think of Dad tying a thread around one of Tina’s baby teeth and giving a brisk yank when it wouldn’t come out on its own.

He dropped to his knees (reminding himself he would do well to either wash these jeans later on or bury them deep in his closet) and peered into the hole. He saw a root had closed around the rear of the trunk like a grasping arm. He grabbed the spade, choked up on the handle, and chopped at it. The root was thick and he had to rest several times, but finally he cut all the way through. He laid the spade aside and grabbed the handle again. The trunk was looser now, almost ready to come out. He glanced at his watch. Quarter past ten. He thought of Mom calling home on her break to see how he was doing. Not a big problem, when he didn’t answer she’d just think he was sleeping, but he reminded himself to check the answering machine when he got back. He grabbed the spade and began to dig around the trunk, loosening the dirt and cutting a few smaller roots. Then he took hold of the handle again.

‘This time, you mother,’ he told it. ‘This time for sure.’

He pulled. The trunk slid forward so suddenly and easily that he would have fallen over if his feet hadn’t been braced far apart. Now it was leaning out of the hole, its top covered with sprays and clods of dirt. He could see the latches on the front, old-fashioned ones, like the latches on a workman’s lunchbox. Also a big lock. He grabbed the handle again and this time it snapped. ‘Fuck a duck,’ Pete said, looking at his hands. They were red and throbbing.

Well, in for a penny, in for a pound (another of Mom’s favorite sayings). He gripped the sides of the trunk in a clumsy bearhug and rocked back on his heels. This time it came all the way out of its hidey-hole and into the sunlight for the first time in what had to be years, a damp and dirty relic with rusty fittings. It looked to be two and a half feet long and at least a foot and a half deep. Maybe more. Pete hefted the end and guessed it might weigh as much as sixty pounds, half his own weight, but it was impossible to tell how much of that was the contents and how much the trunk itself. In any case, it wasn’t doubloons; if the trunk had been filled with gold, he wouldn’t have been able to pull it out at all, let alone lift it.

He snapped the latches up, creating little showers of dirt, and then bent close to the lock, prepared to bust it off with the hammer and chisel. Then, if it still wouldn’t open – and it probably wouldn’t – he’d use the crowbar. But first … you never knew until you tried …

He grasped the lid and it came up in a squall of dirty hinges. Later he would surmise that someone had bought this trunk secondhand, probably getting a good deal because the key was lost, but for now he only stared. He was unaware of the blister on one palm, or the ache in his back and thighs, or the sweat trickling down his dirt-streaked face. He wasn’t thinking of his mother, his father, or his sister. He wasn’t thinking of the arkie-barkies, either, at least not then.

The trunk had been lined with clear plastic to protect against moisture. Beneath it he could see piles of what looked like notebooks. He used the side of his palm as a windshield wiper and cleared a crescent of fine droplets from the plastic. They were notebooks, all right, nice ones with what almost had to be real leather covers. It looked like a hundred at least. But that wasn’t all. There were also envelopes like the ones his mom brought home when she cashed a check. Pete pulled away the plastic and stared into the half-filled trunk. The envelopes had GRANITE STATE BANK and ‘Your Hometown Friend!’ printed on them. Later he would notice certain differences between these envelopes and the ones his mom got at Corn Bank and Trust – no email address, and nothing about using your ATM card for withdrawals – but for now he only stared. His heart was beating so hard he saw black dots pulsing in front of his eyes, and he wondered if he was going to faint.

Bullshit you are, only girls do that.

Maybe, but he felt decidedly woozy, and realized part of the problem was that since opening the trunk he had forgotten to breathe. He inhaled deeply, whooshed it out, and inhaled again. All the way down to his toes, it felt like. His head cleared, but his heart was whamming harder than ever and his hands were shaking.

Those bank envelopes will be empty. You know that, don’t you? People find buried money in books and movies, but not in real life.

Only they didn’t look empty. They looked stuffed.

Pete started to reach for one, then gasped when he heard rustling on the other side of the stream. He whirled around and saw two squirrels there, probably thinking the weeklong thaw meant spring had arrived, making merry in the dead leaves. They raced up a tree, tails twitching.

Pete turned back to the trunk and grabbed one of the bank envelopes. The flap wasn’t sealed. He flipped it up with a finger that felt numb, even though the temperature now had to be riding right around forty. He squeezed the envelope open and looked inside.

Money.

Twenties and fifties.

‘Holy Jesus God Christ in heaven,’ Pete Saubers whispered.

He pulled out the sheaf of bills and tried to count, but at first his hands were shaking too badly and he dropped some. They fluttered in the grass, and before he scrambled them up, his overheated brain assured him that Ulysses Grant had actually winked at him from one of the bills.

He counted. Four hundred dollars. Four hundred in this one envelope, and there were dozens of them.

He stuffed the bills back into the envelope – not an easy job, because now his hands were shaking worse than Grampa Fred’s in the last year or two of his life. He flipped the envelope into the trunk and looked around, eyes wide and bulging. Traffic sounds that had always seemed faint and far and unimportant in this overgrown stretch of ground now sounded close and threatening. This was not Treasure Island; this was a city of over a million people, many now out of work, and they would love to have what was in this trunk.

Think, Pete Saubers told himself. Think, for God’s sake. This is the most important thing that’s ever happened to you, maybe the most important thing that ever will happen to you, so think hard and think right.

What came to mind first was Tina, snuggled up next to the wall in his bed. What would you do if you found a treasure? he had asked.

Give it to Daddy and Mommy, she had replied.

But suppose Mom wanted to give it back?

It was an important question. Dad never would – Pete knew that – but Mom was different. She had strong ideas about what was right and what wasn’t. If he showed them this trunk and what was inside it, it might lead to the worst arkie-barkie about money ever.

‘Besides, give it back to who?’ Pete whispered. ‘The bank?’

That was ridiculous.

Or was it? Suppose the money really was pirate treasure, only from bank robbers instead of buccaneers? But then why was it in envelopes, like for withdrawals? And what about all those black notebooks?

He could consider such things later, but not now; what he had to do now was act. He looked at his watch and saw it was already quarter to eleven. He still had time, but he had to use it.

‘Use it or lose it,’ he whispered, and began tossing the Granite State Bank cash envelopes into the cloth grocery bag that held the hammer and chisel. He placed the bag on top of the embankment and covered it with his jacket. He crammed the plastic wrap back into the trunk, closed the lid, and muscled the trunk back into the hole. He paused to wipe his forehead, which was greasy with dirt and sweat, then seized the spade and began to shovel like a maniac. He got the trunk covered – mostly – then seized the bag and his jacket and ran back along the path toward home. He would hide the bag in the back of his closet, that would do to start with, and see if there was a message from his mother on the answering machine. If everything was okay on the Mom front (and if Dad hadn’t come home early from therapy – that would be horrible), he could whip back to the stream and do a better job of concealing the trunk. Later he might check out the notebooks, but as he made his way home on that sunny February morning, his only thought about them was that there might be more money envelopes mixed in with them. Or lying beneath them.

He thought, I’ll have to take a shower. And clean the dirt out of the bathtub after, so she doesn’t ask what I was doing outside when I was supposed to be sick. I have to be really careful, and I can’t tell anyone. No one at all.

In the shower, he had an idea.

1978

Home is the place that when you go there, they have to take you in, but when Morris arrived at the house on Sycamore Street, there were no lights to brighten the evening gloom and no one to welcome him at the door. Why would there be? His mother was in New Jersey, lecturing about how a bunch of nineteenth century businessmen had tried to steal America. Lecturing to grad students who would probably go on to steal everything they could lay their hands on as they chased the Golden Buck. Some people would undoubtedly say that Morris had chased a few Golden Bucks of his own in New Hampshire, but that wasn’t so. He hadn’t gone there for money.

He wanted the Biscayne in the garage and out of sight. Hell, he wanted the Biscayne gone, but that would have to wait. His first priority was Pauline Muller. Most of the people on Sycamore Street were so wedded to their televisions once prime time started that they wouldn’t have noticed a UFO if one landed on their lawn, but that wasn’t true of Mrs Muller; the Bellamys’ next-door neighbor had raised snooping to a fine art. So he went there first.

‘Why, look who it is!’ she cried when she opened the door … just as if she hadn’t been peering out her kitchen window when Morris pulled into the driveway. ‘Morrie Bellamy! Big as life and twice as handsome!’

Morris produced his best aw-shucks smile. ‘How you doin, Mrs Muller?’

She gave him a hug which Morris could have done without but dutifully returned. Then she turned her head, setting her wattles in motion, and yelled, ‘Bert! Bertie! It’s Morrie Bellamy!’

From the living room came a triple grunt that might have been how ya doin.

‘Come in, Morrie! Come in! I’ll put on coffee! And guess what?’ She gave her unnaturally black eyebrows a horrifyingly flirtatious wiggle. ‘There’s Sara Lee poundcake!’

‘Sounds delicious, but I just got back from Boston. Drove straight through. I’m pretty beat. Just didn’t want you to see lights next door and call the police.’

She gave a monkey-shriek of laughter. ‘You’re so thoughtful! But you always were. How’s your mom, Morrie?’

‘Fine.’

He had no idea. Since his stint in reform school at seventeen and his failure to make a go of City College at twenty-one, relations between Morris and Anita Bellamy amounted to the occasional telephone call. These were frosty but civil. After one final argument the night of his arrest for breaking and entering and assorted other goodies, they had basically given up on each other.

‘You’ve really put on some muscle,’ Mrs Muller said. ‘The girls must love that. You used to be such a scrawny thing.’

‘Been building houses—’

‘Building houses! You! Holy gosh! Bertie! Morris has been building houses!’

This produced a few more grunts from the living room.

‘But then the work dried up, so I came back here. Mom said I was welcome to use the place unless she managed to rent it, but I probably won’t stay long.’

How right that turned out to be.

‘Come in the living room, Morrie, and say hello to Bert.’

‘I better take a rain check.’ To forestall further importuning, he called, ‘Yo, Bert!’

Another grunt, unintelligible over the laugh track accompanying Welcome Back, Kotter.

‘Tomorrow, then,’ Mrs Muller said, her eyebrows once more waggling. She looked like she was doing a Groucho imitation. ‘I’ll save the poundcake. I might even whip some cream.’

‘Great,’ Morris said. It wasn’t likely Mrs Muller would die of a heart attack before tomorrow, but it was possible; as another great poet said, hope springs eternal in the human breast.

The keys to house and garage were where they’d always been, hanging under the eave to the right of the stoop. Morris garaged the Biscayne and set the trunk from the antiques barn on the concrete. He itched to get at that fourth Jimmy Gold novel right away, but the notebooks were all jumbled up, and besides, his eyes would cross before he read a single page of Rothstein’s tiny handwriting; he really was bushed.

Tomorrow, he promised himself. After I talk to Andy, get some idea of how he wants to handle this, I’ll put them in order and start reading.

He pushed the trunk under his father’s old worktable and covered it with a swatch of plastic he found in the corner. Then he went inside and toured the old homestead. It looked pretty much the same, which was lousy. There was nothing in the fridge except a jar of pickles and a box of baking soda, but there were a few Hungry Man dinners in the freezer. He stuck one in the oven, turned the dial to 350, then climbed the stairs to his old bedroom.

I did it, he thought. I made it. I’m sitting on eighteen years’ worth of unpublished John Rothstein manuscripts.

He was too tired to feel exultation, or even much pleasure. He almost fell asleep in the shower, and again over some really crappy meatloaf and instant potatoes. He shoveled it in, though, then trudged back up the stairs. He was asleep forty seconds after his head hit the pillow, and didn’t wake up until nine twenty the following morning.

Well rested and with a bar of sunlight pouring across his childhood bed, Morris did feel exultation, and he couldn’t wait to share it. Which meant Andy Halliday.

He found khakis and a nice madras shirt in his closet, slicked back his hair, and peeked briefly into the garage to make sure all was well there. He gave Mrs Muller (once more looking out through the curtains) what he hoped was a jaunty wave as he headed down the street to the bus stop. He arrived downtown just before ten, walked a block, and peered down Ellis Avenue to the Happy Cup, where the outside tables sat under pink umbrellas. Sure enough, Andy was on his coffee break. Better yet, his back was turned, so Morris could approach undetected.

‘Booga-booga!’ he cried, grabbing the shoulder of Andy’s old corduroy sportcoat.

His old friend – really his only friend in this benighted joke of a city – jumped and wheeled around. His coffee overturned and spilled. Morris stepped back. He had meant to startle Andy, but not that much.

‘Hey, sor—’

‘What did you do?’ Andy asked in a low, grinding whisper. His eyes were blazing behind his glasses – hornrims Morris had always thought of as sort of an affectation. ‘What the fuck did you do?’

This was not the welcome Morris had anticipated. He sat down. ‘What we talked about.’ He studied Andy’s face and saw none of the amused intellectual superiority his friend usually affected. Andy looked scared. Of Morris? Maybe. For himself? Almost certainly.

‘I shouldn’t be seen with y—’

Morris was carrying a brown paper bag he’d grabbed from the kitchen. From it he took one of Rothstein’s notebooks and put it on the table, being careful to avoid the puddle of spilled coffee. ‘A sample. One of a great many. At least a hundred and fifty. I haven’t had a chance to do a count yet, but it’s the total jackpot.’

‘Put that away!’ Andy was still whispering like a character in a bad spy movie. His eyes shifted from side to side, always returning to the notebook. ‘Rothstein’s murder is on the front page of the New York Times and all over the TV, you idiot!’

This news came as a shock. It was supposed to be at least three days before anyone found the writer’s body, maybe as long as six. Andy’s reaction was even more of a shock. He looked like a cornered rat.

Morris flashed what he hoped was a fair approximation of Andy’s I’m-so-smart-I-bore-myself smile. ‘Calm down. In this part of town there are kids carrying notebooks everywhere.’ He pointed across the street toward Government Square. ‘There goes one now.’

‘Not Moleskines, though! Jesus! The housekeeper knew the kind Rothstein used to write in, and the paper says the safe in his bedroom was open and empty! Put … it … away!’

Morrie pushed it toward Andy instead, still being careful to avoid the coffee stain. He was growing increasingly irritated with Andy – PO’d, as Jimmy Gold would have said – but he also felt a perverse sort of pleasure at watching the man cringe in his seat, as if the notebook were a vial filled with plague germs.

‘Go on, have a look. This one’s mostly poetry. I was paging through it on the bus—’

‘On the bus? Are you insane?’

‘—and it’s not very good,’ Morris went on as if he hadn’t heard, ‘but it’s his, all right. A holograph manuscript. Extremely valuable. We talked about that. Several times. We talked about how—’

‘Put it away!’

Morris didn’t like to admit that Andy’s paranoia was catching, but it sort of was. He returned the notebook to the bag and looked at his old friend (his one friend) sulkily. ‘It’s not like I was suggesting we have a sidewalk sale, or anything.’

‘Where are the rest?’ And before Morris could answer: ‘Never mind. I don’t want to know. Don’t you understand how hot those things are? How hot you are?’

‘I’m not hot,’ Morris said, but he was, at least in the physical sense; all at once his cheeks and the nape of his neck were burning. Andy was acting as if he’d shit his pants instead of pulling off the crime of the century. ‘No one can connect me to Rothstein, and I know it’ll be awhile before we can sell them to a private collector. I’m not stupid.’

‘Sell them to a col– Morrie, do you hear yourself?’

Morris crossed his arms and stared at his friend. The man who used to be his friend, at least. ‘You act as if we never talked about this. As if we never planned it.’

‘We didn’t plan anything! It was a story we were telling ourselves, I thought you understood that!’

What Morris understood was Andy Halliday would tell the police exactly that if he, Morris, were caught. And Andy expected him to be caught. For the first time Morris realized consciously that Andy was no intellectual giant eager to join him in an existential act of outlawry but just another nebbish. A bookstore clerk only a few years older than Morris himself.

Don’t give me your dumbass literary criticism, Rothstein had said to Morris in the last two minutes of his life. You’re a common thief, my friend.

His temples began to throb.

‘I should have known better. All your big talk about private collectors, movie stars and Saudi princes and I don’t know who-all. Just a lot of big talk. You’re nothing but a blowhard.’

That was a hit, a palpable hit. Morris saw it and was glad, just as he had been when he had managed to stick it to his mother once or twice in their final argument.

Andy leaned forward, cheeks flushed, but before he could speak, a waitress appeared with a wad of napkins. ‘Let me get that spill,’ she said, and wiped it up. She was young, a natural ash-blonde, pretty in a pale way, maybe even beautiful. She smiled at Andy. He returned a pained grimace, at the same time drawing away from her as he had from the Moleskine notebook.

He’s a homo, Morris thought wonderingly. He’s a goddam homo. How come I didn’t know that? How come I never saw? He might as well be wearing a sign.

Well, there were a lot of things about Andy he’d never seen, weren’t there? Morris thought of something one of the guys on the housing job liked to say: All pistol and no bullets.

With the waitress gone, taking her toxic atmosphere of girl with her, Andy leaned forward again. ‘Those collectors are out there,’ he said. ‘They pile up paintings, sculpture, first editions … there’s an oilman in Texas who’s got a collection of early wax-cylinder recordings worth a million dollars, and another one who’s got a complete run of every western, science fiction, and shudder-pulp magazine published between 1910 and 1955. Do you think all of that stuff was legitimately bought and sold? The fuck it was. Collectors are insane, the worst of them don’t care if the things they covet were stolen or not, and they most assuredly do not want to share with the rest of the world.’

Morris had heard this screed before, and his face must have shown it, because Andy leaned even farther forward. Now their noses were almost touching. Morris could smell English Leather, and wondered if that was the preferred aftershave of homos. Like a secret sign, or something.

‘But do you think any of those guys would listen to me?’

Morris Bellamy, who was now seeing Andy Halliday with new eyes, said he guessed not.

Andy pooched out his lower lip. ‘They will someday, though. Yeah. Once I get my own shop and build up a clientele. But that’ll take years.’

‘We talked about waiting five.’

‘Five?’ Andy barked a laugh and drew back to his side of the table again. ‘I might be able to open my shop in five years – I’ve got my eye on a little place in Lacemaker Lane, there’s a fabric store there now but it doesn’t do much business – but it takes longer than that to find big-money clients and establish trust.’

Lots of buts, Morris thought, but there were no buts before.

‘How long?’

‘Why don’t you try me on those notebooks around the turn of the twenty-first century, if you still have them? Even if I did have a call list of private collectors right now, today, not even the nuttiest of them would touch anything so hot.’

Morris stared at him, at first unable to speak. At last he said, ‘You never said anything like that when we were planning—’

Andy clapped his hands to the sides of his head and clutched it. ‘We planned nothing! And don’t you try to lay this off on me! Don’t you ever! I know you, Morrie. You didn’t steal them to sell them, at least not until you’ve read them. Then I suppose you might be willing to give some of them to the world, if the price was right. Basically, though, you’re just batshit-crazy on the subject of John Rothstein.’

‘Don’t call me that.’ His temples were throbbing worse than ever.

‘I will if it’s the truth, and it is. You’re batshit-crazy on the subject of Jimmy Gold, too. He’s why you went to jail.’

‘I went to jail because of my mother. She might as well have locked me up herself.’

‘Whatever. It’s water under the bridge. This is now. Unless you’re lucky, the police are going to be paying you a visit very soon, and they’ll probably arrive with a search warrant. If you have those notebooks when they knock on your door, your goose will be cooked.’

‘Why would they come to me? Nobody saw us, and my partners …’ He winked. ‘Let’s just say that dead men tell no tales.’

‘You … what? Killed them? Killed them, too?’ Andy’s face was a picture of dawning horror.

Morris knew he shouldn’t have said that, but – funny how that but kept coming around – Andy was just being such an asshole.

‘What’s the name of the town that Rothstein lived in?’ Andy’s eyes were shifting around again, as if he expected the cops to be closing in even now, guns drawn. ‘Talbot Corners, right?’

‘Yes, but it’s mostly farms. What they call the Corners is nothing but a diner, a grocery store, and a gas station where two state roads cross.’

‘How many times were you there?’

‘Maybe five.’ It had actually been closer to a dozen, between 1976 and 1978. Alone at first, then with either Freddy or Curtis or both.

‘Ever ask questions about the town’s most famous resident while you were there?’

‘Sure, once or twice. So what? Probably everybody who ever stops at that diner asks about—’

‘No, that’s where you’re wrong. Most out-of-towners don’t give a shit about John Rothstein. If they’ve got questions, it’s about when deer season starts or what kind of fish they could catch in the local lake. You don’t think the locals will remember you when the police ask if there have been any strangers curious about the guy who wrote The Runner? Curious strangers who made repeat visits? Plus you have a record, Morrie!’

‘Juvenile. It’s sealed.’

‘Something as big as this, the seal might not hold. And what about your partners? Did either of them have records?’

Morris said nothing.

‘You don’t know who saw you, and you don’t know who your partners might have bragged to about the big robbery they were going to pull off. The police could nail you today, you idiot. If they do and you bring my name up, I’ll deny we ever talked about this. But I’ll give you some advice. Get rid of that.’ He was pointing to the brown paper bag. ‘That and all the rest of the notebooks. Hide them somewhere. Bury them! If you do that, maybe you can talk your way out of it, if push comes to shove. Always supposing you didn’t leave fingerprints, or something.’

We didn’t, Morris thought. I wasn’t stupid. And I’m not a cowardly big-talking homo, either.

‘Maybe we can revisit this,’ Andy said, ‘but it will be much later on, and only if they don’t grab you.’ He got up. ‘In the meantime, stay clear of me, or I’ll call the police myself.’

He walked away fast with his head down, not looking back.

Morris sat there. The pretty waitress returned to ask if she could get him anything. Morris shook his head. When she left, he picked up the bag with the notebook inside it and walked away himself. In the opposite direction.

He knew what the pathetic fallacy was, of course – nature echoing the feelings of human beings – and understood it to be the cheap, mood-creating trick of second-rate writers, but that day it seemed to be true. The morning’s bright sunlight had both mirrored and amplified his feeling of exultation, but by noon the sun was only a dim circle behind a blear of clouds, and by three o’clock that afternoon, as his worries multiplied, the day grew dark and it began to drizzle.

He drove the Biscayne out to the mall near the airport, constantly watching for police cars. When one came roaring up behind him on Airline Boulevard with its blues flashing, his stomach froze and his heart seemed to climb all the way into his mouth. When it sped by without slowing, he felt no relief.

He found a news broadcast on BAM-100. The lead story was about a peace conference between Sadat and Begin at Camp David (Yeah, like that’ll ever happen, Morris thought distractedly), but the second one concerned the murder of noted American writer John Rothstein. Police were saying it was the work of ‘a gang of thieves,’ and that a number of leads were being followed. That was probably just PR bullshit.

Or maybe not.

Morris didn’t think he could be tracked down as a result of interviews with the half-deaf old codgers who hung out at the Yummy Diner in Talbot Corners, no matter what Andy thought, but there was something else that troubled him far more. He, Freddy, and Curtis had all worked for Donahue Construction, which was building homes in both Danvers and North Beverly. There were two different work crews, and for most of Morris’s sixteen months, spent carrying boards and nailing studs, he had been in Danvers while Curtis and Freddy toiled at the other site, five miles away. Yet for awhile they had worked on the same crew, and even after they were split up, they usually managed to eat lunch together.

Plenty of people knew this.

He parked the Biscayne with about a thousand others at the JC Penney end of the mall, wiped down every surface he had touched, and left the keys in the ignition. He walked away fast, turning up his collar and yanking down his Indians cap. At the mall’s main entrance, he waited on a bench until a Northfield bus came, and dropped his fifty cents into the box. The rain grew heavier and the ride back was slow, but he didn’t mind. It gave him time to think.

Andy was cowardly and full of himself, but he had been right about one thing. Morris had to hide the notebooks, and he had to do so immediately, no matter how much he wanted to read them, starting with that undiscovered Jimmy Gold novel. If the cops did come and he didn’t have the notebooks, they could do nothing … right? All they’d have would be suspicion.

Right?

There was no one peeking through the curtains next door, which saved him another conversation with Mrs Muller, and perhaps having to explain that he had sold his car. The rain had become a downpour, and that was good. There would be no one rambling around in the undeveloped land between Sycamore and Birch. Especially after dark.

He pulled everything out of the secondhand trunk, resisting an almost overpowering urge to look into the notebooks. He couldn’t do that, no matter how much he wanted to, because once he started, he wouldn’t be able to stop. Later, he thought. Must postpone your gratifications, Morrie. Good advice, but spoken in his mother’s voice, and that started his head throbbing again. At least he wouldn’t have to postpone his gratifications for long; if three weeks went by with no visits from the police – a month at most – he would be able to relax and begin his researches.

He lined the trunk with plastic to make sure the contents would stay dry, and put the notebooks, including the one he’d taken to show Andy, back inside. He dumped the money envelopes on top. He closed the trunk, considered, and opened it again. He pawed the plastic aside and took a couple of hundred dollars from one of the bank envelopes. Surely no cop would think that an excessive amount, even if he were searched. He could tell them it was his severance pay, or something.

The sound of the rain on the garage roof was not soothing. To Morris it sounded like skeletal tapping fingers, and made his headache worse. He froze every time a car went by, waiting for headlights and pulsing blue strobes to splash up the driveway. Fuck Andy Halliday for putting all these pointless worries in my head, he thought. Fuck him and the homo horse he rode in on.