6

Five miles away from the car thieves’ warehouse, an unrestored white Rambler sat in a small south Tampa parking lot.

It was just another day in paradise for Sidney Spittle.

Sid sat behind the wheel with his arm resting in the open window. The upholstery was red and split. It was a Wednesday.

The parking lot was half empty and there was light traffic on the minor artery through Tampa ’s Palma Ceia neighborhood. Two teenage girls cutting school walked by on the sidewalk. Sid smiled at them; they called him a schmuck. Sid laughed. Nothing could ruin his day. He had a cold beer in a Styrofoam koozie between his legs and a newspaper propped on the steering wheel. The late-morning Florida sunshine warmed his arm in the window. The AM radio was tuned to Jamaican music, “ Electric Avenue.” Tropical flowers bloomed on the landscaped islands in the parking lot, and egrets perched on trash cans. What an existence. He turned the paper over to the weather page to check the temperatures in Sheboygan, Bangor and Duluth (14, 1, -8). There was a tracking chart and a small article about a new hurricane with a fifteen percent chance of striking Florida. Sid stuck his face out the window into the sunlight and smiled. “Ain’t gonna be no hurricane.” He folded the paper over to the races at Tampa Downs and creased it sharply. He took another swig of cold beer, clicked open a ballpoint pen and went to work picking losers.

Sidney Spittle was the Twenty-First-Century American. He completed the nation’s transition from a culture molded by sacrifice and hard work to a bunch of cranky, unobliged brats. The Roosevelt Americans of the Depression and World War II were gone. So was rugged individualism, self-determination, Ellis Island, manifest destiny and the American Dream.

Now there was Sid the Fuckhead.

Sid was living off the national inheritance, of which he was unaware and ungrateful.

Sid was a twenty-eight-year-old doughboy. Not fat, just soft in the gut, face and work ethic. He grew a dark mustache so he wouldn’t look like a complete dick, and it made him look like an insecure complete dick. Exercise never crossed the man’s mind. Sid had gotten up that morning at a leisurely nine o’clock, a little earlier than usual because he was working today, which he did three days a month tops, and then only for a couple of hours. At other times, Sid dressed like a slob, but this morning he wore a natty charcoal suit, and his hair was organized.

Sid looked over the top of the newspaper. The glass front door of the local branch of Florida National Bank opened, and Mrs. Deloris Hastings, a venerable and bent-over ninety year old, walked out in slow motion without the aid of a cane. Sid put down the paper and started the Rambler. He waited patiently for Deloris to get to her car, but her pace was so excruciatingly slow that Sid began to give her body English.

Once in traffic, Mrs. Hastings drove a precise and unvarying sixteen miles per hour for twenty blocks, having signaled for her eventual left turn immediately after leaving the bank parking lot. A steady stream of traffic flowed around Mrs. Hastings to pass. Except Sidney Spittle.

When Mrs. Hastings pulled into the driveway of her 1923 bungalow, a Rambler pulled in behind her.

“Who are you?” Deloris asked as she got out of her car.

Sid flashed a gold badge as he walked up the driveway. His tie was thin and pinned to the bright-white button-down shirt with a bald eagle tack.

“Norman Kauffman, Federal Investigation Department Agency.”

“What do you want?”

“I’m here to protect you,” said Sid. “Let me give you a hand.” He took her by the arm and helped her into the house.

“You’re such a nice young man,” she said. “Could I get you some tea?”

“Maybe some other time, ma’am, but right now I’m on business. My department is investigating a suspect who preys on the elderly. We could use your help.”

“My help? What can I do? I’m ninety years old.”

“There’s a teller at the bank who is stealing from seniors. We want you to go to the bank and make a withdrawal. He’s the last one on the right. We’ll have people watching.”

“You want me to be a decoy?” she asked. “Like on Hunter?”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t think I can. What if there’s shooting?”

“There won’t be any shooting. This guy is strictly nonviolent. Besides, we’ll have people all around for your safety. The person in front and behind you in the bank line will be our undercover agents. But of course they’re such pros that they’ll look ordinary. They’ll never acknowledge you, and you can’t talk to them. How much can you withdraw?”

“I only have three thousand left in savings until my next Social Security check…”

“You better get all of it because this guy won’t make a move unless the stakes are right. He rarely goes for less than five grand. You have any CDs?”

“Two, but I was saving them for an emergency.”

“This is the emergency,” said Spittle. “Mrs. Hastings, your people need you.”

D eloris Hastings was two feet shorter than everyone else in the bank line. She turned and smiled at the construction worker behind her. She leaned and whispered, “You people do such fine work.”

The carpenter leaned down to her and whispered back: “Thank you.”

When Deloris got to the last teller, she handed over her paperwork, and the teller smiled warmly. Then he stopped and looked puzzled at Mrs. Hastings’s face. It appeared an angry sneer was curling up at the corner of her mouth. Either that or she’d gotten some bad cottage cheese.

“Are you okay, Mrs. Hastings?” he asked.

“I’m fine!” she groused. “I’ll bet you sleep just fine at night!”

Sidney Spittle waited around the corner in his Rambler and followed Deloris back home once he had determined everything was jake.

“I got it! I got it!” Mrs. Hastings said in her living room. She dumped the money from her purse onto an old desk. “I hope you put him in jail and throw away the key!”

“With the help of citizens like you, we just might,” said Sid. He took a midsize office envelope from his jacket pocket and stuffed the money inside.

“What I’m doing is putting this money in a special envelope and I’m going to mark it, and then I want you to take it back to the bank.”

Sid bent over the desk and wrote “Mrs. Hastings” on the envelope with a thick black Magic Marker. As he straightened up, he had his back to Hastings. During the brief moment, Sid switched the envelope of money with an identical envelope stuffed with blank pieces of paper that was premarked “Mrs. Hastings” with the same felt pen. God, this was too easy, he thought. It was one of the oldest scams, but it never stopped working. There was an endless supply of old people who were trusting, eager to follow rules and ready to assist authority. When would they wise up?

He held the packet out to her. “Okay, now go back to the bank.”

As Deloris took the packet, someone honked a horn outside. Spittle walked to the front window and peeked out the curtain, and he saw a green Geo parked in the driveway behind his Rambler, half hanging out in the street.

“Shit!”

The honking resumed-beep, beep, beeeeeeeeeep.

“Something’s come up,” said Spittle. “I gotta run.”

“What about catching the bad guys?” asked Deloris.

“That’ll have to wait.”

The horn outside went silent.

“What am I supposed to do now?” Deloris asked.

Sid kept glancing at the front door, starting to show the first tremors of panic. “Look, I really gotta go.”

Deloris asked, “But what-”

The front door opened without a knock, and Sid cringed.

There she stood. Patty Bodine. The seventeen-year-old runaway that Spittle started diddling last week on Indian Rocks Beach. She was a thin waif of a thing with long, straight dirty-blond hair and lots of freckles that made her look even younger. She was sorta cute, but her lower face had a nagging ursine quality that Sid couldn’t quite get around. Her loose jeans rode low on her hips and the tight tangerine junior miss top exposed her midriff and pierced belly button. She tapped one of her dirty bare feet impatiently and smoked a Marlboro red. “What’s taking so long? Come on!”