Shoot the Moon (5 page)

He will remember imagining being told to wait interminably, being shuttled from one department to another, being required to repeat his story over and over again, being compelled to sign affidavits, being told he couldn’t leave the state while they investigated the situation, maybe even being accused of knowing more than he was letting on.

And the next thing he will remember is having moved his right hand slowly but deliberately toward the key that still sat nestled in the ignition. Giving that key a ninety-degree turn to the right. Hearing the engine catch. Moving the gear-selector lever gently from P, past R, past N, until it reached and settled into D. Feeling the car begin to move him forward. Allowing it to take him back to the entrance sign of the parking lot - which from the inside of the lot read THIS WAY OUT - over the cut in the curb, out onto the street beyond, and back in the direction from which he had come.

Raul Cuervas looks at his watch for the hundredth time in the past two hours and sees he’s finally made it to nine o’clock. He’s been told the pink Camry isn’t due back until noon, but he knows he doesn’t dare assume that the renter won’t bring it back early. He’s fucked up once already, he knows, and he can’t afford to do it again. In the business he’s in, there don’t tend to be a lot of second chances.

* * *

Goodman drives directly back to the motel. Almost involuntarily, he pats the outside of his left pants pocket, feels the room key attached to its plastic tag. One of the things he’ll think about in the next several days is whether he’d really held on to that key for no better reason than just to be able to use the bathroom in privacy. He will wonder if even then he was beginning to set some plan in motion, some plan for which that key might come in handy.

He turns into the parking lot, sees that the spot in front of his room is still vacant. Instead of pulling directly into it, he swings the Toyota around, then backs into the spot so that the trunk of the car ends up closest to the door of his room.

He gets out, walks around to the trunk, opens it up. He removes the two duffel bags and, unlocking the door to the room, carries them inside. As he does so, he looks around, satisfies himself that no one is watching him.

Returning to the trunk, he raises the lid that covers the spare. Bracing his back carefully, he frees the tire from its well, rights it, and rolls it up and out of the trunk and into the room. He returns to the car and retrieves the jack handle before closing the lid and slamming the trunk.

Back in his room, he closes the door and fastens the chain, which suddenly strikes him as foolishly flimsy, but will have to do. He studies the tire; it looks brand-new, as though it’s never been driven on. He decides it’s clean enough to lift onto the bed.

With the jack handle, he separates the tire from the rim, pulling it almost completely free. He sees now that the tire is packed to its capacity with blue plastic packages, each pressed tightly against the ones to either side of it. He removes the first one carefully, with some difficulty; the remainder will come free more easily.

Each package is roughly the size of a brick, and, Goodman figures, each was originally shaped much like one. Wedged into the tire, however, the packages have conformed to the interior of the tire, and as a result, they are rounded on one side. As he handles them, he tries to judge their weight. He uses sugar as a reference: They’re somewhat heavier than a one-pound box, but considerably lighter than a five-pound bag. He ends up guessing they go about two pounds each, maybe a little more.

As he continues to remove them from the tire, he lines them up in a neat row on the bed. When he’s finished, he counts an even twenty bags. If he’s right about what they’re worth, he’s looking at $40,000.

Forty thousand dollars.

He refits the tire around the rim. He empties his two duffel bags of their few items. In the smaller bag, he finds the two remaining unused cans of Jiffy-Spare. He shakes the first one, then threads it onto the valve of the tire until it hisses. He feels the tire begin to harden in his hands. The second can completes the job. A small amount of white adhesive remains on the valve; he wipes it off with a towel from the bathroom.

He lifts the tire from the bed. It’s fully inflated and, for the first time, weighs what a tire ought to. He lowers it to the floor, notices that it bounces now, the way a tire’s supposed to. He feels immensely pleased with himself.

He removes the pillowcases from three of the four pillows in the room and divides the packages among them. Then he tightly knots closed the opening of each pillowcase. Two of them he places in the larger duffel bag, the third in the smaller one. He covers them with his JCPenney possessions.

He takes what’s left of his money out, peels off a $10 bill, and leaves it on the desk. Wonders for a moment what pillowcases cost, can’t remember ever having bought one. Adds a five.

He tosses the room key onto the desk and lifts the two duffel bags onto the floor. They’re heavy but manageable. He steps out into the parking lot and looks around, sees nobody. He opens the trunk of the Camry and raises the lid to the spare-tire well. He rolls the tire from the room to the car and stows it in its well. He bolts it down tightly with the wing nut, and replaces the jack handle. Closes the lid over it. Retrieves the two duffel bags from the room, carries them to the trunk, and places them in it. Slams the trunk closed.

As he pulls out of the parking lot, Michael Goodman tries to think of the most reckless thing he’s ever done in his life up to this moment. The best that he can come up with is the day he and Herbie Schwartz stole two six-packs of Pepsi from the A&P on Eighty-Sixth Street. He’d saved his six bottles without opening them for a month, so sure he’d been that the Pepsi Police were going to come to his home in the middle of the night to arrest him and demand their return. He’d been ten at the time, maybe eleven, but he can still remember his fear as though it had all happened yesterday.

Now, thirty years later, Goodman drives toward the Fort Lauderdale Airport with two duffel bags containing twenty packages of white powder. He’s not sure precisely what the white powder is, but he’s certain it’s worth more than all the Pepsis in all the A&Ps he’s ever been in. He’s equally certain that if the police catch him, it won’t be a matter of returning a six-pack of Pepsis; he’ll spend the rest of his life in prison. He turns on the radio and tries not to think about that. The local weatherman tells him it’s going to be clear skies, with temperatures in the lower eighties.

Raul Cuervas is so busy opening a new pack of Marlboros that he doesn’t notice the pink Toyota Camry until it’s almost alongside him. He follows it on foot, which is easy, since the car return area is crowded. He sees a uniformed attendant signal the driver to pull into a spot. Cuervas walks closer, but not too close. He wants to get a look at the driver, but he’d rather not be noticed. So he walks behind a minivan and melts into the family that’s just climbed out of it.

When Cuervas sees the driver step from the Camry, he can’t help smiling. The guy is short, maybe five six. He’s not fat, but soft-looking. Got this curly Jew hair with a little bald spot just starting to show. He’s maybe forty. Looks like he never did a real day’s work in his life. A pencil pusher. But the thing that really gets Cuervas is the way the guy’s dressed. Got on this girlie shirt and a pair of jeans that look like they just came off a rack, real dark and still perfectly creased. Best of all, they’re turned up about four inches at the cuffs. This guy is a
bufón,
Cuervas says to himself, a real clown.

Goodman unloads the two duffel bags from the trunk. He tries to act casual about it, telling himself to treat them as though they contain nothing but personal belongings. An Avis attendant wearing a WE TRY HARDER button checks him out, then directs him to a shuttle bus that will take him to the terminal. He pays no attention to a family returning a minivan nearby.

He boards the bus. When the driver goes to help him with his duffel bags, Goodman politely declines the offer. He rides the bus with the bags on his lap. He realizes he’s only drawing attention to himself, tells himself he’s going to have to try loosen up a little bit.

“Hey, that’s my baby,” Cuervas tells the Avis attendant who’s about to get into the pink Camry. When the attendant, a large black man, looks at him quizzically, Cuervas explains. “I got her next, special for my daughter’s birthday. She likes pink.”

“That’s nice,” the man says, as if he couldn’t care less.

“I ‘preciate it if you could turn her around real fass for me,” Cuervas says, and to show just how much he would appreciate it, he extends a $50 bill in the man’s direction. The man takes it, never taking his eyes off Cuervas’s.

“
Real
fass,” Cuervas repeats. “An’ let ‘em know at the counter as soon as it’s ready I’m in a
big
hurry.”

“No problem,” the man says.

At the main terminal, Goodman finds the Avis counter and gets on line. When he makes it to the front of the line, he asks the rate for a oneway rental to New York City. After punching up some numbers on the computer, the attendant, a young man with blond hair, gives him the news.

“For a midsize car, I can give you a rate of $46 a day, unlimited mileage-”

Goodman is pleasantly surprised, and is in the process of multiplying forty-six by two, then three, when he hears the bad news.

“And there’s a one-way drop-off charge of $250.”

Goodman knows his credit card can’t take a hit like that. “Thanks,” he says. “Let me think about it a bit.” He turns, lifts his bags, and walks away from the counter.

Goodman is gone less than a minute when a Hispanic man with a droopy mustache ignores the line and walks directly to the Avis attendant with the red hair and the big breasts.

Cuervas pays no attention to the complaints muttered by the people waiting on line. “My pink Camry,” he tells the woman. “She’s back.”

“Oh, Mr.-”

“Velez. Antonio Velez.”

“Mr. Velez,” she repeats. She checks her computer. The people on line mutter some more, but she ignores them, too. “I’m sorry,” she says, “they’re still servicing it.”

“I don’t need it serviced,” Cuervas tells her. “I need it
now.”

“Let me see what I can do,” she says, and picks up the phone.

Goodman stops at the Delta counter, asks about a one-way ticket to New York.

“I can put you on our flight five-sixty-two to Kennedy,” he’s told. “It leaves at twelve-oh-one.”

Goodman has a theory about the number 562. He’s convinced it comes up more often than any other three-digit number. Were he a gambler, he’d play the number. But he doesn’t even know how you go about betting on a number. Nonetheless, he figures flight 562 is a good omen.

“How much would that be?” he asks. He’s down to $47.47, plus a $100 in traveler’s checks.

“That would come to $229.”

“Okay,” he says, and fishes out his Visa card. Again he holds his breath, but it seems that Delta isn’t checking credit cards too closely this day. A machine spits out his ticket and boarding pass.

“How many bags will you be checking?”

Goodman freezes for a moment. Do they search bags? Run them through an X-ray machine?

“I don’t know yet,” he says. “I’m going to buy a few things before I check them in. Is that okay?”

“Sure.”

After a few minutes on the phone, the redhead tells Raul Cuervas that his car is ready. She gives him a big smile, like maybe she expects another fifty. But Cuervas is finished with her.

He takes the stupid little red bus to the pickup area and spots his Camry. He opens the trunk and lifts the lid covering the spare tire. It’s there, good as new, nicely bolted down. He gives it a push with his thumb; it feels nice and hard. He closes the lid, slams the trunk.

He gets in behind the wheel, starts the engine, and pulls out of the spot. He knows a little turnoff about ten minutes away, where he can make sure that everything’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Goodman looks at his watch, sees he’s got an hour to kill before his flight. He decides he’s going to have to take a chance and check his luggage, at least the larger duffel bag. They’d only take it away from him at the gate: It’s much too big to carry on.

While he knows they don’t make you open checked-in luggage on a domestic flight, he has no idea what they do to the bags before putting them on the plane. But he figures he has no choice.

He buys a newspaper, wanders into a souvenir shop. They’ve got all this Miami Dolphin and Florida Marlin stuff, picture frames covered with shells, and plastic dolphins and killer whales that can spout water. He buys Kelly a dolphin. Then, as an afterthought, he buys his mother-in-law a bottle of toilet water called Florida Breeze. He figures a little peace offering can’t hurt.

His purchases come to $19.85, leaving him $27.62.

He finds a quiet corner to unzip the big duffel bag. He rearranges the contents until they look like nothing but clothes and dirty laundry. He puts the dolphin and the toilet water on top, then zips the bag closed again. He finds a piece of string in a trash can and uses it to tie the zipper pull closed. Then he goes back to the Delta counter and checks the big duffel bag with them.

Cuervas pulls the Camry off the highway and into a little turnoff between the north and south lanes. It’s a heavily wooded portion of the divider, where he can back his car between the trees in such a way as to make it invisible to passing traffic. He knows the spot because a friend of his who used to be with the Highway Patrol pointed it out to him. The cops use to use it to “coop” - to catch some sleep on the job - or even to conduct a quick out-of-court settlement of a speeding infraction committed by some pretty young thing who’s afraid of losing her license.

He opens the trunk and lifts the lid, revealing the spare tire. He unscrews the dust cap from the valve. Using the blade of a silver pocketknife, he presses against the valve stem to let air out of the tire. He knows there’s supposed to be twenty kilos inside, so he figures there can’t be much air, maybe only five or ten seconds’ worth.

To his surprise, air keeps hissing out. Fifteen seconds, twenty, thirty. As the tire empties, Cuervas fills with panic. By the time the hissing noise stops, the sidewall of the tire is soft enough to push away from the rim.

Though he could easily pry the tire from its rim by hand to inspect the inside, Cuervas instead stabs at the rubber with the blade of his knife, cutting into it and ripping it.

“Fuckin’ gringo!” he shouts. “Fuckin’ gringo
maricón!”
He continues to slash away at the empty tire until the knife blade closes across his fingers, drawing blood. He slams the lid and the trunk, gets back into the car, pulls out onto the highway in a violent spray of cinders and dirt, and heads back to the airport.

He covers the seven miles in just over six minutes, weaving in and out in the midday traffic. He remembers making the same drive, more or less, last night, only to arrive at the Avis counter after closing time. This time, it’s not the Avis counter he’s racing to; it’s the guy in the rolled-up jeans who’s stolen the twenty kilos from the spare tire.

Cuervas has no idea how the guy knew the stuff would be there. He figures
somebody
has to have tipped him off; he just doesn’t know who or why yet. The thought that the guy might have stumbled onto the drugs by pure accident never once occurs to him. In Raul Cuervas’s business, there is no such thing as coincidence; there
are
no pure accidents.

He pulls the Camry right up to the terminal and leaves it there. They can tow it back to fuckin’
Japan
, for all he cares. He strides into the terminal, starts with the United ticketing area, then heads to American. . . .

Goodman hears the first announcement for his flight at twenty minutes to twelve. From the fact that there are passengers waiting to get on as standbys, he figures he was lucky to get a ticket when he did.

He listens for the announcement that they’re boarding his row before getting on line. When he was married and traveling with Shirley, she always said it didn’t matter, and insisted that they line up as soon as the very first announcement was made, the one for travelers with small children, or those requiring special assistance. But, without his wife’s bravery, Goodman’s afraid they might catch him boarding before his row’s been called, so he waits his turn.

Finally, at quarter of twelve, they announce that everyone can board, and Goodman takes his place at the rear of the line, the smaller of his two duffel bags tucked under his arm like a football.

It’s ten minutes to twelve by the time Cuervas works his way to the Delta gates, just in time to see Mr. Rolled-Up Jeans handing his boarding pass to a ticket taker at gate 22 and disappearing from view. Immediately, Cuervas runs to the counter, pushes past several people waiting for standby seats, and gets the attention of a man behind the counter.

“I gotta get on that flight!” he shouts.

“Sorry, sir,” the man tells him. “That flight’s actually
over
sold.”

“You’re actually an asshole!” is all Cuervas can think to say.

People turn to stare at him. After a moment, he walks off, but not before taking a look at the sign above the door through which the guy disappeared: GATE 22 FLIGHT 562 NEW YORK-JFK.