Sid’s facial muscles tightened as he clung to composure. Underage girls were such great lays, he thought, but the immature crap he had to put up with-it just didn’t seem right.
“You’re messin’ up my gig!” said Sid. “Go wait outside!”
“You’ve got the money, right?” said Patty. “What’s the big deal? Just take it and let’s go!”
“What’s going on?” said Deloris. She looked inside her envelope and saw the stack of plain pieces of paper. She looked up. “You’re not a cop! Gimme my money back!”
“Let’s go!” yelled Patty, tugging on his right arm.
“I want my money!” yelled Deloris, grabbing his left arm.
Sid was dumbstruck by the turn of events.
Before he knew it, Sid had turned and decked Deloris with a right cross to the nose delivered as hard as he could. She dropped at his feet like a fifty-pound sack of russet potatoes. Her delicate vascular network had ruptured and begun to fill out the area under her eyes and across both cheeks with a deep purple just under the skin.
“Ooooo, gross!” said Sid. He leaned over and studied Deloris as she moaned.
“What are you waiting for?!” asked Patty.
“Think we should call an ambulance?”
“Don’t tell me you care what happens to her!”
“No, I care what happens to me!” said Sid. “If she dies, this is a murder rap.”
“Fuck her!” said Patty. She reached on top of the TV and grabbed a brass statue of the gentle Saint Francis holding a songbird on his finger, and she bashed Deloris in the head. That stopped all but the slightest movement in the old woman, so Patty did it again. This time Deloris fell completely still.
“There! She’s dead,” said Patty. “Now there’s no decision to make. Can we finally go!”
“Jesus Christ!” Sid yelled, stumbling backward in shock. “You’re one cold cunt!”
“You hit her first.”
“But that was self-defense!”
M rs. Hastings never felt a thing. She didn’t die right away like Patty thought. First she went into a coma. Six hours later, about the time that brain swelling put a coda on Mrs. Hastings’s ninety years, Sid was on his fourth Corona at a table in the back of a beach dive called The Wharf Rat. Patty had made a whining pain in the ass of herself wanting to go to the beach, but Sid said he needed some beer first to settle his nerves from what he had just witnessed. He placated her with two of Deloris’s hundred-dollar bills, and Patty smiled for the first time all day.
“This calls for a suck!”
Sid looked around the dim bar. “Okay,” he said and pulled out the chair next to him, and she crawled under the table.
The Wharf Rat was the kind of place where the waitresses worked in wet T-shirts and sold five-dollar joints on the side, which was overlooked by the bartender, who sold forty-five-dollar half-grams in the men’s room. The music was too loud, the room too dark, and the only pool table was warped.
An hour later, Sid’s nerves were sanded down smooth and he was feeling pretty good about himself. He had even gotten over his anger at Mrs. Hastings. The five thousand meant he wouldn’t have to work again for weeks.
A drink arrived, and the waitress in the wet T-shirt told him it was compliments of the men at the next table. Sid looked over. He saw three sloppy-drunk losers in T-shirts. He reluctantly raised the drink in a gesture of thanks, but they were too far gone. They had an entire bottle of scotch on their table, half pouring, half spilling their own drinks. He recognized them. They were regulars, just like him. But he had never liked their looks, and they didn’t socialize.
Sid soon noticed he was having trouble getting served. At first, the waitresses merely hovered around the three drunks. Then they dropped all pretenses; service to the rest of the bar ground to a halt as every waitress stopped and joined the circle around the three men, waiting to jump at their command. Sid saw they were tipping with hundreds. The bartender came over and led the trio to the bathroom, and they all came back out smiling.
“Arriba! Arriba!” they yelled.
Sid slid his chair over to their table. “What’s the celebration, fellas?”
“We’re richer than King Tut,” said the closest one, his pupils dilated different sizes and his mouth and tongue out of synch. “We just found five million big ones!”
“Shhhh! Shhhh! Shhhh! Shhhh!” said the second, his head rolling around in its neck socket. “That’s a seeeeecret! We can’t let anybody know it’s out in the car!…Ooops!” And he covered his mouth with his hands as if they were faster than the speed of sound.
“But I’m your friend,” said Sid.
“Yesh, he’sh our friend!” slurred the third one.
L ate the next morning, the first of the car thieves awoke in bright sunlight on the wooden floor of their Ybor City warehouse apartment, where they’d passed out just before daybreak.
He looked around, groggy. What happened? Snatches of memory filtered back. He remembered some guy back at The Wharf Rat helping them into a cab and paying the driver, then the ride back to the warehouse and the inebriated struggle up the steps, the three of them leaning against each other, an unstable tripod holding itself up. They must have made it into the apartment and lost consciousness on the floor because that’s all he could remember. He couldn’t remember anything at all about…the money! Where was the money? That bastard in the bar must have stolen it!
The car thief tried to spring up from the floor but couldn’t move. He looked down and saw his entire body spooled tightly head to toe with hundred-pound-test fishing line, his arms pinned by his sides and his legs bound together. He looked over at his two comrades on the floor next to him wrapped in the nylon line.
“Hey, you guys! Wake up! There’s trouble!”
The other two came around slowly at first, but then awoke all at once when they realized their situation. They thrashed around in panic.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said an unfamiliar voice. “That line will slice you to ribbons.”
A stranger walked into the room from the kitchen and sat on the couch. He was wiry and casual, sitting there with a leg crossed, reading a Tampa Tribune. On the front of the newspaper the thieves saw a big headline, “Keys Killer Sought,” and a large photo that matched the man holding the paper.
“Who are you?” said the first thief. Then he stopped and studied the stranger. Something familiar. “Hey-you’re that guy we jumped last night coming out of the warehouse.”
Serge set the paper down. He leaned forward on the edge of the sofa cushion and spoke softly. “Where’s my money?”
“What money?”
Serge reached around the side of the couch and slid a toolbox into view. He opened it and removed a pneumatic staple gun.
“Oh, that money. We don’t have it anymore. Some guy took it.”
Serge’s voice was understated: “Where’s my money?”
“I told you, we don’t know where it is.”
Serge didn’t say a word. He got down on the floor and sat cross-legged next to the men.
“What are you going to do to us?”
Serge raised a single finger to his lips for them to be quiet. Slowly and with deliberate theatrics, he removed items from the toolbox and set them on the floor. The men lifted their heads the best they could to get a better look. A roll of metal wire, tubes of commercial solvents and epoxies, arsenical soap, gauze, highly elastic putty, steel wool and quick-dissolve surgical suture. The three faces went white. One of the thieves fainted, and his head hit the wooden floor with the clack of a billiard break.
Serge went into the kitchen and came back with two buckets and a large plastic mat, which he unrolled on the floor. He turned on a small electric air compressor.
Serge went to work with diligence, industry and master craftsmanship. Before the hour had passed, Serge had been told every single detail the thieves could remember about the money, and a few more they made up. Serge knew they weren’t holding back. But it was too late; nothing could stop him once he was into one of his hobbies.