Shoot the Moon Page 4

  He gets up slowly, testing his back. It’s sore, but not as bad as it was yesterday. The night’s sleep on the hard bed has done him some good. He walks to the window, separates two of the Venetian blind slats with his fingers, and looks out.

  He sees the Camry, just as he left it.

  As he showers, Goodman convinces himself that they must’ve stolen the tire out of the trunk after all. Figures whoever came looking for it must have come alone, and since the guy already had a car, he had no real choice - hard to drive two cars at once, after all. Goodman remembers years ago, trying to figure out just how you could manage to do that best - get two cars from point A to point B all by yourself. Would you drive one car a little ways, then walk back for the second one, pull it up to the first one? Maybe even leapfrog ahead a bit? Or were you better off driving the first car all the way to where you were heading, then walking back for the second one? He never could figure out which would work best.

  He lathers his body for what he realizes is a very long time. Suppose, just suppose, the tire’s still in the trunk. What then?

  He rinses the soap off his body. What then, he tells himself, is that he drives to police headquarters, lets his problem become their problem, No other choice, plain and simple.

  He steps out of the shower, dries off, wraps a towel around his waist. He sits on the edge of the bed and dials the information operator. He succeeds in getting the nonemergency number for the Fort Lauderdale Municipal Police Department, and dials it.

  “You have reached the main switchboard of the Fort Lauderdale Police Department. Our telephone hours are 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. If your call is an emergency, dial nine-one-one.”

  He looks at the clock: 6:51. More than two hours to kill. He shaves, taking as much time as he can. He dresses slowly, removing each tag and pulling each pin from his new JCPenney clothes. When he’s done, he stands in front of the mirror in stiffly creased dark blue jeans and a short-sleeved white dress shirt. He feels like a redneck.

  Outside, he looks around before opening the trunk of the Camry, but there’s no one in sight. He unlocks the trunk, lifts the lid over the spare, finds it still nestled in its well. Closes it up.

  He decides to leave the car there while he takes a walk to find some breakfast. He wonders if he’s giving them one last chance to come and make off with the car. No, he decides: It’s just a nice time of day to be out, before the sun heats things up too much.

  Raul Cuervas is back at the Avis counter in the airport by 6:30. His skin is a bit paler than usual, his hair a bit more mussed. His mustache even seems to droop a little more. Raul has had less than two hours’ sleep during the night.

  From the Avis counter, he’d gone back to Fast Eddie’s, but he hadn’t found the chiquita who’d ripped him off the night before. Instead, he’d spent three hours drinking Cuervo Gold and making frequent trips to the men’s room. Not to relieve himself, but to snort the better part of a gram of cocaine to stay awake.

  From Fast Eddie’s, he’d gone to the Miramar Lounge, where he’d hung out to closing time. And from there to Rico’s, an after-hours spot in Miami. There, they’d let him lie down for a couple of hours in one of the upstairs rooms that on busy nights are reserved for the putas and their johns, $20 for thirty minutes, or until you come, whichever happens first. By 5:45, he was back on the road, determined to be the first customer on line at the Avis counter.

  The rental agents show up around a quarter to seven, but they spend the next ten minutes setting things up and giggling like schoolchildren. It’s five of seven when he finally gets one of them to talk to him.

  “My name is Velez,” he says, “Antonio Velez.” To prove his point, he displays the driver’s license Johnnie Delgado has supplied him with, the second one. “I was supposed to pick up a car the day before yesterday. I got delayed.”

  “Let me see,” the woman says. She has reddish hair and big tits. She takes the license, reads from it as she punches his name into her computer.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Velez,” she says after a minute. “We had to cancel your reservation. You were more than twelve hours late.”

  “I had a problem,” he explains.

  “You should have phoned our 800 number,” she says. “Would you like me to see if we can find you another car?”

  “Yes. No, I mean. I want the same car.”

  “No problem. I can give you the same car. A Toyota Camry, right?”

  “It’s gotta be ezzackly the same,” he says. “It’s gotta be the pink one.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The car,” he says. “I need a pink one. I promised my little girl we’d rent a pink car.” He’s pleased with himself for his quick thinking. “See, it’s her birthday,” he adds.

  The redhead plays with her computer some more. “I’ve got a pink Lincoln Town Car,” she says.

  “Gotta be a pink Toyota Camry,” he says.

  More playing with the computer. “I only show one of those,” she says. “And it’s already rented.”

  Cuervas feels a knot in his stomach. “Who’d you rent it to?” he asks. “That was supposed to be my car.”

  “I’m sorry,” she smiles. “We’re not allowed to give out that information.”

  “When’s it due back?” he asks.

  She smiles again.

  “C’mon,” he pleads. “It’s my little girl’s birthday. I promised.”

  She punches some more keys on the computer, then looks around to make sure nobody’s listening. Like this is top-secret information, national security stuff.

  “Noon.”

  “Noon today?”

  She nods.

  “I gotta have it,” he says, feeling the knot in his stomach loosen up a bit.

  “I can reserve it,” she says. “I’ll need a major credit card.”

  He’s already handing her the card Johnnie Delgado gave him.

  “Lissen,” he says while she punches numbers. “I’m gonna wait for it, okay? Case the guy brings it back early. You don’t see me, you page me, okay?” He extends his hand over the counter, showing just the corner of a $50 bill. She sees it, looks around again. Then she covers his hand with some papers while she takes the fifty from him.

  “Don’t give my car away again,” he tells her.

  “Don’t worry,” she says with a smile.

  As soon as he gets his license and credit card back, Cuervas walks away from the counter. Too dangerous to wait there, he knows.

  He steps outside and wanders around for a while until he finds the sign he’s looking for: AVIS RETURN RENTAL CARS HERE.

  Goodman dawdles over breakfast at an imitation Dunkin’ Donuts place called The Duke of Donuts. Several times he looks at his watch, imagining that even as he’s eating his pancakes, thieves are breaking into the Camry back at the motel. It’s 7:50 by the time he finishes his second cup of coffee and pays his check - $6.50, with the tip.

  He walks back slowly, pretending to enjoy the sights, hoping that by the time he gets to the motel, the car - and his problem - will be gone.

  Finds it parked, exactly as before.

  Inside his room, he packs his few new possessions into the two JCPenney duffel bags. His plan is to get to police headquarters as soon as they open up, tell them his story, let them take the spare tire and give him a receipt for it, drive to the airport to drop off the car, and rent another one if he can, one-way to New York.

  He checks the rate schedule posted on the inside of the motel door, notes that checkout time is 11:00 a.m. Decides to hang on to the room key for a while, just in case he needs to stop back in the room later, like maybe to use the bathroom. He doesn’t mind using a public restroom for urinating, but when it comes to sitting down, he likes his privacy. And he figures even if he doesn’t come back, he can always drop the key in any mailbox, just like the writing on the green plastic tag tells him.

  Even though he’s unsure of the way and drives extra slowly, Goodman arrives at police headquarters a
full twenty-five minutes before nine. Finds a parking lot, but it’s reserved for municipal vehicles. A block and a half away, there’s another one, for visitors. He guesses he qualifies as a visitor. Pulls in at the sign marked entrance, finds a spot, shuts off the motor, and waits.

  At the airport, Raul Cuervas waits, too. He’s positioned himself right outside the Avis drop-off area. He wants to be there when the clown who took his pink Toyota Camry brings it back. He wants to see the car at the earliest possible opportunity, make sure there’s nothing wrong with it. Maybe follow it through the drop-off process, slip a coupla bucks to the guy’s supposed to check it out, see that he’s good and quick about it.

  He also wants to get a look at the driver. Just in case it turns out there’s a problem.

  As he begins his wait, he lights a cigarette. He’ll go through a pack and a half before the morning’s over.

  In his South Bronx apartment, Russell Bradford finally falls asleep. He’s been out most of the night, copping and smoking, copping and sniffing, hanging out on corners, on rooftops, in alleyways. It was already getting light when he sneaked back into the apartment. He thought he heard somebody saying something in one of the bedrooms. Probably his grandmother, Nana. She never seems to sleep. But she didn’t come out to the living room.

  Spaced-out from the dope but still jumpy from the crack, Russell had lain on the couch for what seemed like a couple of hours. Then, just as he began to hear people waking up and moving about, he finally crashed. . . .

  In the days that follow, Michael Goodman will try to reconstruct just what it was that went through his mind as he sat behind the wheel of the pink Camry in the visitors’ parking lot, waiting for the beginning of normal business hours to begin at the Fort Lauderdale Police Department headquarters. He will remember thinking about how hopelessly in debt he was, and how little money he had to his name. He will remember worrying about his daughter, shuddering to think what headaches could mean in a six-year-old, not daring to imagine how expensive the tests would be and how he would possibly figure out a way to pay for them.

  He will recall that there had been no one thing in particular that he could put his finger on. It had just seemed at the time, as he had added things up, that everything seemed to be in the debit column and nothing in the asset column, with no prospects anywhere on the horizon. And he had suddenly felt terribly tired; and the old, seductive fantasy of falling asleep and never waking up again had entered his thoughts as he sat there. And the only thing that had finally brought him out of that was the realization that while that might be fine for him, it wasn’t going to do much for Kelly.

  And he will remember that it was somewhere right about then that it had come to him: that he did have an asset after all; that there was indeed a prospect on the horizon. Not floating vaguely way out there somewhere, but sitting right under him, not five feet behind his butt!

  He will recall looking at the clock on the dashboard, seeing that it was still ten minutes before nine, becoming acutely aware of the annoyance he felt at having had to call the police repeatedly, listen to their stupid recordings, drive to them (when by rights they should have dropped everything and come rushing over to him), and then wait on their bankers’ hours. He will remember sitting there behind the wheel of the Camry, feeling his annoyance begin to steam and simmer, until it reached the full boil of anger. Anger at the mechanical voices of the operators he’d had to listen to. Anger at the bureaucracy that forced him to respond to its stupid rules and adjust to its rigid schedule. Anger at the officials he’d be sure to encounter as soon as he walked inside and tried to explain his discovery of the contents of the spare tire.

  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.
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br />   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.