A Simple Plan (40 page)

“That’s what it amounts to,” he said. “Marked money.”

“Crime doesn’t pay,” Renkins said.

Tan,
I thought,
oatmeal.
With a strain I managed
amber.
But the knowledge slipped in around the words, waterlike, seeping through the cracks. The money was marked.

Fremont offered me his hand. I forced myself to take it, struggled to match its firmness. Then I repeated the ritual with Renkins.

“Our knowing about the serial numbers,” he said, “that’s confidential, of course. It’s the only way we’ll be able to catch whoever else is involved in this.”

Fremont nodded. “So if you talk to the press…”

“Yes,” I said, “I understand.”

“If we need you, you’ll be around?” Renkins asked.

“Of course,” I said. I gestured across the street toward Raikley’s. “I work over there.”

They both glanced at the feedstore. “We probably won’t have to bother you,” Renkins said. “It seems pretty cut-and-dried.”

“Yes,” I said weakly.

Sepia,
I thought.
Terra-cotta. Adobe.

“I’m just sorry you had to get mixed up in all this. It’s a tragedy, the whole fucking thing.”

He gave my shoulder a parting pat, and then they turned, one after the other, walked up the town hall steps, and disappeared through the double doors.

I watched my feet make their way toward the curb. They shuffled out into the street, then moved across it to the other side. My car was there, a little ways down the block, and my boots guided me around its rear end, stopping when they reached the door. Magically, my hand emerged from my jacket pocket, holding the keys. It unlocked the door, pulled it open, and my body bent at the waist, my head ducking forward, as I dropped into the seat.

And it was only then, safe in my car with the door shut firmly behind me, that I let my mind slip free, allowed it to settle on Fremont’s words, absorb them like a sponge, swelling with their import.

The money was worthless.

My first reaction, one that had even begun to trickle out while I was standing there with Fremont and Renkins on the sidewalk, was an overwhelming wave of despair. The bloodied corpses of Pederson and Nancy and Sonny and Jacob all rushed forward to confront me—four lives I’d ended with my own hands to protect my hold on the bag of money, money that was nothing now, simply stacks of colored paper.

Fatigue followed directly behind despair, like rain from a cloud. It was my body’s reaction to the horror of what I’d done—a bonenumbing tiredness, a feeling of surrender and acceptance. I sank in the seat, my head falling forward on my chest. I’d been living for almost three months beneath a tangled knot of strain, a knot that had just been loosened, severed even, in one sharp stroke. There was some relief in that at least—for now it was truly over. I could go home and burn the money, the final fragment of damning evidence, the last loose end.

Move.

The thought flickered through my despair and fatigue, a warning from some deep corner of my mind, some frontier outpost that was still planning, still cautious, still carrying on the fight, unaware that the war was over.

If Fremont or Renkins were to glance out Carl’s window,
it whispered,
they’d see you sitting here in a daze. It might set them thinking. Start the car. Drive away.

The voice had strength to it, the strength of caution. It was a voice I’d been listening to with care for nearly three months, and, automatically, as if conditioned, I listened to it now, too. My hand rose, inserting the key in the ignition.

But then I stopped.

On the street corner behind me, perhaps fifty feet away, was a phone booth, the sinking sun glinting off its Plexiglas sides.

Drive away,
the voice said.
Now.

I scanned the street. Across the intersection, in front of the church, a woman moved down the sidewalk with a little girl in a stroller. She was talking, and the child was twisting around in her seat to watch her. They were dressed brightly, in matching yellow parkas. I recognized them—they were Carla and Lucy Drake, the daughter and granddaughter of Alex Freedman, the owner of Freedman’s Dry Cleaning. I’d gone to high school with Carla; she’d been in Jacob’s class, three years ahead of me. I watched her now as she and her daughter made their way up the walk to St. Jude’s and disappeared inside.

The voice persisted, a tone of urgency creeping in:
Drive away.

I ignored it. I had a view of Carl’s office window, but the sun was glinting off it like a mirror. Fremont and Renkins were invisible behind it.

I glanced back at the phone booth, then scanned the street one last time. It was empty.

I climbed quickly from the car.

S
ARAH
answered on the third ring.

“Hello?” she said.

I paused, a long, weighty moment. Sitting in the car, I’d thought that telling her immediately would help somehow, would diffuse the grief I felt pressing down on my heart, allow me to shift some of it onto hers. I’d wanted her to know, so that I could soothe her, could tell her that it would be all right, because by doing so, I knew that I would soothe myself, too. But as soon as I heard her voice, I realized that I couldn’t do this over the phone; I had to be there; I had to be able to touch her while I talked.

“Hi,” I said.

“Are you still at the police station?” she asked.

“No. I’m out on the street. On a pay phone.”

“We can talk then?”

“We can talk.”

“I saw all about it on the news.”

I could hear the excitement in her voice, the relief. She thought it was over, she thought we were free. It was how I wanted to feel.

“Yes,” I said.

“It’s done now, isn’t it? We’re the only ones that know.” She sounded elated. I was half-expecting her to laugh.

“Yes,” I said again.

“Come home, Hank. I want to start our celebration. I’ve planned it out.”

Her voice was rich with joy. It stabbed at me like a knife.

“We’re millionaires now,” she said. “Starting from this very moment.”

“Sarah—”

She cut me off. “I don’t think you’ll care, Hank, but I did something stupid.”

“Stupid?”

“I went out and bought a bottle of champagne.”

I shut my eyes, pressed the receiver against the side of my face. I knew what she was going to tell me; I could see it coming.

“I used some of the money,” she said. “One of the hundred-dollar bills.”

I felt no surprise, no rush of panic. It was as if I’d known from the very beginning, from the very moment I’d pushed the duffel bag out of the plane, that this would happen. It seemed just; it seemed deserved. I rested my forehead against the side of the phone booth, the Plexiglas cold and smooth along my skin.

“Hank?” she said. “Hon? Are you mad?”

I tried to speak, but my throat was clogged, and I had to clear it first. I felt drugged, half asleep, dead.

“Why?” I said. My voice came out very small.

“Why what?”

“Why did you use the money?”

She was immediately defensive. “It just seemed like the right way to start things off.”

“You promised not to touch it.”

“But I wanted to be the first one to spend it.”

I was silent, struggling to find a way through this. “Where?” I asked finally.

“Where?”

“Where did you buy the champagne?”

“That’s how I was smart. I didn’t buy it around here. I went all the way out by the airport and bought it there.”

“Where by the airport?”

“Oh, Hank. Don’t be mad.”

“I’m not mad. I just want to know where.”

“A place called Alexander’s. It’s a little package store on the highway, right before you get to the airport’s access road.”

I didn’t say anything. I was thinking, my mind moving slowly, painfully around the situation, searching for an escape.

“I was good, Hank. You would’ve been proud of me. I said the bill was a birthday present, that I hadn’t wanted to break it, but the banks were closed and my sister had just been proposed to, so it was worth it.”

“You brought Amanda with you?”

Sarah hesitated. “Yes. Why?”

I didn’t answer her.

“It’s no big deal,” she said. “The cashier hardly even seemed to notice. He just took the bill and gave me my change.”

“Was there anyone else besides the cashier in the store?”

“What do you mean?”

“Customers? Employees?”

She thought for a second. “No, just the cashier.”

“What did he look like?”

There was a pause on the other end.

“Hank,” she said. “He didn’t even notice.”

“What did he look like?” I asked again, raising my voice.

“Come on. He doesn’t know me. It’s no big deal.”

“I’m not saying it’s a big deal. I just want to know what he looked like.”

She sighed, as if exasperated. “He was big,” she said. “Black hair, a beard. He had wide shoulders and a thick neck, like a football player.”

“How old?”

“I don’t know. Young. Probably midtwenties. Why?”

“Don’t spend any more of it before I get back,” I said, forcing a little laugh, trying to make it sound like a joke.

She didn’t laugh. “Are you coming home now?”

“In a bit.”

“What?”

“In a bit,” I said more clearly. “I’ve got a few things to take care of here. Then I’ll be home.”

“Are you mad, Hank?”

“No.”

“Promise me you aren’t.”

I lifted my head and stared off across the intersection. Carla and Lucy Drake had reemerged from the church. They were moving down the opposite side of the street now, their faces hidden beneath their yellow hoods. The little girl seemed asleep. Neither of them sensed me watching them.

“Hank?” Sarah asked.

I sighed, a tired sound. “I promise you I’m not mad,” I said.

Then we said good-bye.

T
HERE
was a directory hanging from a wire beneath the phone. I looked up Alexander’s in it and called the number. A young man’s voice answered.

“Alexander’s.”

“Yes,” I said. “What time do you close tonight?”

“Six o’clock.”

I checked my watch. It was 4:52.

“Thank you,” I said.

I
WAS
halfway back to my car when I thought of something else, the first vestige of a plan. I stopped in midstride and returned to the phone booth.

I looked up the state police in the directory.

A woman answered. “State Police.”

“Hello,” I said, deepening my voice to disguise it, in case they taped their calls. “I’d like to report a suspicious person.”

“A suspicious person?”

“A hitchhiker. I picked him up outside of Ann Arbor, and while we were driving south he pulled out a machete, started sharpening it right there in my front seat.”

“Pulled out what?”

“A machete, a big knife. I told him to get out after that, and he did, no problem, but then I started thinking, maybe the kid’s dangerous, so I decided I ought to call you, just to be safe.”

“Did he threaten you with the machete?”

“No, nothing like that. I asked him to leave, and he left. I just thought maybe you might want to check him out.”

“Where did you drop him off?”

“Outside of Toledo, right near the airport. He made a joke about hijacking a plane with the machete.”

“On Airport Highway?”

“Yes. Outside a convenience store.”

“Can you describe him, please?”

“He was young, maybe eighteen or so. Thin. Kind of weird looking, like he was sleepy or drugged out…”

“Caucasian?”

“Yes. Red hair, pale skin, freckles. He was wearing a gray sweatshirt, the kind with a hood on it.”

“Height?”

“Average. Maybe six feet, a little less.”

“And may I have your name?”

“I’d rather not,” I said. “I live in Florida. I’m on my way back there now. I’d prefer not to get involved in anything up here.”

“I understand,” the woman said, her voice clipped, officially precise. “Thank you for calling. I’ll have the dispatcher alert our patrolmen.”

I
SPENT
the next twenty minutes sitting in my car, right there on Main Street. St. Jude’s rang the hour, a little melody of bells, then five heavy strokes. The sun closed in on the western horizon, the sky around it taking on a pinkish tint. It had turned into a stunning afternoon, the air so crystalline it seemed like it wasn’t there. Objects—the cars lining the street, the storefronts, the parking meters, the church steeple—seemed more clearly defined than usual, as if they had thin, black lines drawn around their edges.

The town was quiet, abandoned looking.

I knew there was a 90 percent chance that the bill Sarah had used was untraceable. Perhaps this should’ve been enough for me, but it wasn’t. I thought about it, debated it in my head. If only one of the bills had been marked, or ten of them, or even a hundred, I think I might’ve acted differently, I might’ve just let it go. There were five thousand of them, though, one out of ten, and that was too much. I couldn’t take the risk.

Fremont and Renkins came down the town hall steps shortly after five. They didn’t notice me; they walked off to the right, up the sidewalk, Fremont talking in an animated manner, Renkins nodding emphatically to everything he said. They climbed into their car and pulled out, heading east, toward Toledo. Renkins drove.

I waited until my watch said five-ten. Then I started my own car, eased it away from the curb, and, also heading east, the setting sun large and red in my rearview mirror, made my way carefully out of town.

It was a thirty-minute drive to the airport.

12

I
T STAYED
farm country until right before I hit the airport. Then the highway broadened to four lanes, and buildings started to pop up—convenience stores, video arcades, taverns, cheap hotels, pool halls, fast-food restaurants—growing denser and taller and brighter the farther east I went. Traffic thickened, cars exiting and entering, blinkers flashing. This was the edge of Toledo, a long boulevard of neon and fluorescent light reaching out like a tentacle from the city’s core.

Alexander’s was a dingy-looking store, bunkerlike, with low, concrete walls and a flat roof. Iron bars crisscrossed its windows, and a sign flashed
BEER
on and off in pink and blue letters above its door. There was only one car in its tiny lot, a black, mud-spattered Jeep, sitting out near the road.

I drove past, then circled back.

There was a greenhouse a hundred feet beyond Alexander’s. It was closed for the weekend, dark. I pulled into its gravel lot and parked facing the street, to facilitate my getaway.

Across the highway, running parallel to the road, was a chain-link fence topped with a double coil of razor wire. Beyond it lay the airport. I could just make out the control tower in the distance, could see the slow spiral of its spotlight through the night sky, and, below it, the vague red-and-green glow of the runways.

I climbed out, walked around to the rear of my station wagon, and swung open the tailgate. Jacob’s trunk was there; it’d been the last thing I loaded when I cleaned out his apartment. Quickly, I lifted its lid and reached inside, my hand moving over the stack of bath towels, the tackle box, and the fielder’s mitt, groping for the cool, metallic edge of the machete’s blade.

It was off to the right, exactly where I’d left it. I took it out and set it on the bumper. Then I began searching through the other boxes. I found Jacob’s ski mask in the first one I opened, his hooded sweatshirt in the second.

I exchanged my jacket for the sweatshirt. It was much too big for me—the sleeves hung down to my fingertips and the hood draped itself across my face like a monk’s cowl—but that was exactly what I wanted: it would cover my hair and forehead, disguising my features long enough for me to enter the store and make sure that it was empty. Then I could put on the ski mask.

I slid the machete up my right-hand sleeve, handle first. Its point rested in the center of my palm, a sharp pinprick of pain. I jammed the ski mask into my pants pocket, swung the tailgate shut with my hip. Then I headed off toward the store.

It was quarter till six, and the sun had just disappeared. Drivers were switching on their headlights.

As I entered the parking lot in front of Alexander’s, a plane thundered overhead, shaking the air, a huge mass of steel less than a hundred feet above me. Its landing lights threw a moment’s glare onto the asphalt, like a flashbulb popping, then it was gone, shooting across the highway, its engines whining as they decelerated, its flaps coming down, its wheels stretching toward the ground. I watched it until it landed.

When I pushed open the store’s front door, a bell rang above my head, alerting the cashier to my presence. He was sitting behind a counter off to the left, reading a newspaper. There was a radio playing beside him, tuned to an evangelical station, its volume turned up high.

“You got to be careful what you listen to,” a man’s voice said from the radio. “Just like there’s the word of God, there’s also the word of Satan. And it sounds the same. It sounds exactly the same.”

The cashier glanced up at me, nodded, then returned to his paper. He was exactly as Sarah had described him: large, muscular, bearded. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, and he had a tattoo on his arm, black and green, of a bird in flight.

I moved past him and into the store’s center aisle. I kept my right arm clamped against my side as I walked, holding the machete in place. The store was longer than it was wide, and by the time I reached its rear, I was safely out of sight.

I pulled off the hood and looked around.

The back wall was lined with sliding glass doors, behind which sat cans of soda and beer, tubs of ice cream, boxes of frozen food.

I walked quickly to the left, then back to the right, scanning the other two aisles. They were empty; there was no one else in the store.

The radio continued to preach, reading now from the Bible: “‘There is great gain in godliness with contentment; for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world; but if we have food and clothing, with these we shall be content.’”

Beyond the refrigerated display case, in the far-right-hand corner of the building, was a door. It was cracked partway open, its interior lost in darkness. I assumed that it led to a storeroom.

“‘But as for you, man of God, shun all this; aim at righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness….’”

At the end of the center aisle, there was a gigantic display of red wine. There were six green-glass gallon jugs lined up along the floor, in two rows of three. On top of these bottles was a sheet of cardboard, and on top of the cardboard another six jugs of wine. There were five levels in all, a total of thirty jugs. They rose up to just below my chin.

“‘I charge you to keep the commandment unstained…’”

I took out the ski mask and pulled it over my head. It smelled of my brother, of his sweat, and at first it made me gag, so that I had to breathe through my mouth.

“That’s the Bible. The Word of God. Once I had a listener call in…”

I slid the machete out of my sleeve.

“‘Who wrote the Bible?’ she asked me…”

When I turned to head back down the aisle to the front of the store, I was remarkably calm, and this calmness seemed to feed on itself, growing stronger and stronger with each passing moment, like panic might in a similar situation.

The cashier was reading his paper. He was sitting on a stool, with his arms resting on the counter. He was a good six inches taller than I and probably outweighed me by ninety pounds. It made me wish that I’d brought Carl’s pistol. I had to stand in front of him for several seconds before he looked up. Then he just stared. He seemed neither frightened nor surprised. Very slowly, he closed his newspaper.

I gestured threateningly at him with the machete, nodded toward the cash register.

He reached across the counter and turned down the radio. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he asked.

“Open the register,” I said. The words came out sounding hoarse, nervous. It was how his voice should’ve sounded.

He smiled. He wasn’t as young as I’d thought at first; close up, he looked like he might even be older than I was.

“Get out of my store,” he said calmly.

I stared at him, bewildered. The stench of Jacob’s sweat in the ski mask was making me dizzy. I realized that things weren’t going to happen like I’d planned, and it gave me a sinking feeling, a hard little pip of nausea in my stomach.

“You gonna chop me up?” he asked. “You gonna kill me with that thing?” His voice began to rise in anger.

“All I want is the money.”

He scratched at the tattoo on his arm, then took his beard in his hand and lifted it toward his nose, thinking. “I’ll give you this one chance,” he said. He waved toward the door. “You run now, and I’ll let you go.”

I didn’t move. I just stood there, speechless.

“Either run or stay,” he said. “That’s your choice.”

I lifted the machete, held it up over my head like I was going to hit him. I felt foolish doing it: I could tell that it didn’t look real. I waved it in the air. “I don’t want to hurt you,” I said, meaning it as a threat, but it came out sounding like I was begging. “I’ve killed people. I’m a murderer.”

He smiled at me. “You’re staying?”

“Just give me the money.”

He climbed off his stool and, almost casually, made his way around the counter. I retreated into the center of the store, the machete held out in front of my chest. He walked toward the door, so that for a moment I thought he was going to leave, but then he pulled a set of keys from his pocket and twisted shut the lock. He turned his back on me to do it, as if to emphasize how little he feared me.

“Come on,” I said. “Quit screwing around.”

He slid the keys back into his pocket and took a step toward me. I retreated into the center aisle. I held the machete in both hands, straight out in front of me. I was trying to look threatening, trying to regain control of the situation, but I knew that it wasn’t working.

“Anything I do to you now,” he said, his voice laced with a sudden malice, “will be in self-defense. That’s how the police’ll see it. You came in here with that knife, threatened me, tried to steal what’s mine. You’ve put yourself outside the protection of the law.”

He came toward me slowly, grinning. He seemed to be enjoying himself. I continued to back away.

“I gave you a chance to run because I knew it was the Christian thing to do. But you wouldn’t leave. So now I’m going to make sure, no matter what happens to you once the police arrive, that you’ll never do this again. I’m going to teach you some respect for other people’s property.”

He was in the aisle now, stalking me. I was about ten feet away from him. I held the machete in my right hand and waved it again, but he didn’t seem to notice. He was staring at the shelf to his right, as if searching for something. I watched as he reached up and pulled down a can of peas. He hefted it in his hand, and then, very calmly, without any hurry to the motion whatsoever, reared back and threw it at me. It hit me in the chest, hard, with a loud cracking sound, just below my left nipple. I stumbled backward, gasping. It felt like he’d broken one of my ribs.

“This is a rare opportunity,” he said. “There aren’t many situations where you can hurt someone as bad as I’m going to hurt you and get away with it.”

I had no idea how to handle this. He was supposed to have just given me the money. Then I was going to make him lie down on the floor and count to a hundred while I ran off to my car.

“I’ll even be congratulated for this,” he said. “Taking a bite out of crime. They’ll call me a hero.”

I continued backing down the aisle. I assumed that the building had an exit in the rear, probably through the storeroom I’d noticed earlier. I thought that if I could just hold him off till I got there, I could make a break for it, could get outside and sprint for my car.

He reached up again, pulled down a jar of olives from one of the shelves, and threw it at me. It hit me in the shoulder this time, then fell to the floor, shattering at my feet. A dull, tingling ache spread down my arm, and my fingers, as if of their own accord, opened, dropping the machete. It landed in the olives. I had to pick it up with my left hand.

“That’s enough,” I said. “I’ll go now. You can keep the money.”

He laughed, shaking his head. “You missed your chance. The door was open, and now it’s shut.”

At the end of the aisle, something caught my arm. Without taking my eyes off the cashier, I tried to jerk it free. I looked back, quickly, and saw the display of red wine, the huge column of jugs. There was a large staple in the sheet of cardboard that divided the third tier of bottles from the fourth, and it was on this that my sweatshirt had become hooked.

I glanced toward the cashier. He was six feet away. Another step and he would’ve been able to reach out and grab me. In a panic, I yanked my arm away from the staple, but instead of freeing myself, I simply pulled the sheet of cardboard out of the display. The bottles it had supported balanced there for an instant, like in a magic trick, trembling, and then began to fall. The whole display came apart before my eyes, the jugs hitting the floor one after the other in a loud, prolonged crash.

There was a brief silence in the store, a pause through which the preacher’s voice found its way toward us down the aisle. “And is there a difference,” he asked, “between a sin of
o
mission and a sin of
co
mmission? Is one punished with more vengeance in the fires of Hell than the other?”

The tiles at my feet were red-black with wine. Shards of glass lay scattered about, like jagged islands. I stepped back from the mess, retreating all the way to the rear wall, watching as the puddle spread out across the floor.

The cashier made a whistling sound, shaking his head. “Now who do you think’s going to pay for that?” he asked.

We both stared down at the shattered bottles. The sheet of cardboard hung from my arm, swaying. I tore it free and dropped it to the floor. My fingers were still tingling, and my chest ached each time I took a breath. I wanted to begin working my way toward the storeroom, but my legs wouldn’t move. They held me there, pressed up against the icy door of the cooler, paralyzed.

The cashier stepped forward, moving around the edge of the puddle. He paused at the far side, no more than three feet away, turned his back to me, and stooped down to retrieve a funnel-shaped hunk of glass from the wreckage. It was in the center of the puddle, and he had to lean forward on his toes to reach it.

He was getting it to use as a weapon, I knew. When he stood up, he was going to cut me.

I glanced toward the storeroom. I was fairly confident that I could make it there if I sprinted. The cashier was off balance, in a crouch; I’d catch him by surprise. And when I pushed away from the cooler, that’s what I thought I was going to do—I thought I was going to run. But I didn’t. Instead, without planning to, I found myself stepping toward him. My hands grasped the machete like a baseball bat. I lifted it over my head, my eyes locked on the back of his neck. Then I brought it down with all my strength.

It was only as I did it, only as I heard the blade hiss through the air above me, that I realized it was what I’d yearned to do all along.

He seemed to sense the blow coming. He started to rise, twisting his body to the right. This was the side I hit him on, the machete coming down at an angle, striking him just below the chin, its blade burying itself into his throat. It cut deep, but not nearly as deep as I’d hoped. Brutal as it sounds, I’d wanted to chop off his head in a single stroke, ending it in an instant. I didn’t have the strength, though, or the blade wasn’t sharp enough, because it sank about two inches in, then stopped. I had to jerk it free as he collapsed to the floor.