James Grippando - Found money

“Bartender!” he said urgently. “Have you seen my bag? It was right beside the stool.”

“No. Sorry.”

“Did somebody pick it up, maybe by accident?”

“I don’t see nobody.”

He wheeled around for a look at the woman. Her table was empty. She was gone.

“Damn it!” He ran from the bar to the lobby, weaving through the crowd, skidding on the marble floors. He nearly knocked over a bellboy laden with baggage. “Have you seen a woman in a tan suit? Black hair?”

The man just shrugged. “Many peoples, senor. ”

Ryan was about to try in Spanish, but his mind was racing too fast to translate. He sprinted across the lobby and pushed through the revolving doors at the main entrance. Outside it was dusk. City lights were flickering, a neon welcome for the night life. Cars and taxis clogged the motor entrance to the hotel. Pedestrians filled the sidewalks on both sides of Avenida Balboa. Ryan ran to the curb and looked up the busy street, then down. For blocks in either direction, throngs of shoppers flowed in and out of stores that would remain open well into the evening. Ryan picked out several tan suits in the crowd, but no one stood out. In Panama, that woman’s jet-black hair was hardly a distinguishing feature.

He clenched his fists in anger, mostly at himself. She was clearly a designed distraction. He’d been robbed. Scammed was more like it. Undoubtedly, the woman had gone in one direction. Her partner had run off in another — with Ryan’s bag.

He rolled his head back, looking up toward the darkening sky. “You idiot.”

It took longer than Amy had expected to fix her truck. She didn’t get on the road until the late morning. It wasn’t just a leaky water hose. The radiator had holes in it. Not rust holes. They were small and perfectly round, evenly spaced apart, as if the metal had been punctured by something. Or someone. The mechanic suggested it might have been kids, possibly a prank — rowdy teenagers with nothing better to do on the plains in the summertime.

Amy wasn’t so sure.

She drove straight to Boulder from Kit Carson, stopping only once for gas and to make phone calls. Nothing urgent at work. No answer at home. That didn’t surprise her. Gram took Taylor to the youth center three afternoons a week, always on Monday. She would play cards with the other seniors. Taylor would jump rope or play kickball, though most of her time was spent running from the boys who felt compelled to pull the hair of the prettiest girl on the playground.

At 5:20 Amy reached the outskirts of Boulder. She would have liked to go directly to the youth center to pick up Taylor, but during the peak of rush hour she couldn’t have gotten there before the place closed at six o’clock. She went home to the Clover Leaf Apartments, where she’d wait for Gram and her little girl.

Amy inserted her key in the lock, but the deadbolt was already open. That was surprising. Gram never left the door unlocked. She turned the knob. It felt different, the way it turned. The door creaked open by itself, just a few inches. She realized what was wrong.

The lock had been picked. Someone had been there.

Logic told her to run, but maternal instinct wouldn’t let her. She was worried about her daughter. “Gram, Taylor!” she called out.

There was no reply. She nudged the door, swinging it open slowly. Her eyes widened with horror as the scene unfolded.

The apartment had been ransacked — completely torn apart. The sofa had been butchered, the cushions sliced open. The television was smashed. Shelves had been emptied, books and mementos strewn across the carpet. They had been searching for something.

“Taylor!” she called, but all was quiet. Amy knew they were supposed to be at the youth center, but something told her differently. The smell. The whole apartment had that smell.

She ran to the bedroom. Broken glass from picture frames crackled beneath her feet. It was an obstacle course of broken furniture, shattered memories. “Taylor, where are you!”

Amy shrieked at the sight. Taylor’s bedroom was destroyed, her mattress shredded. The dresser was overturned, her little clothes thrown everywhere. But no sign of her daughter.

“Taylor, Gram!” She ran to the other bedroom. It was the same scene — completely destroyed. The cordless phone lay on the floor beside the shattered lamp. She snatched it up to dial 911, then stopped. They couldn’t tell her what she needed to know. She tried the youth center first, speaking as fast as she possibly could.

“This is Amy Parkens. I’m looking for my daughter, Taylor. And my grandmother, Elaine. It’s an emergency. My grandmother should be in the senior recreation room.”

“I’ll check,” said the woman on the line.

“Hurry, please.” Amy’s eyes scanned the wreckage as she waited, but the wait wasn’t long. Gram was on the line.

“What is it, darling?”

“Gram, are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m up five bucks.”

“Someone broke into our apartment. The place is destroyed.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Yes, I’m here right now. Where’s Taylor? Is she with you?”

“She’s — I left her with the counselor. Outside. Let me see.” Gram went to the window and scanned the playground. Kids were tumbling and running in every direction. She searched the swing set, the monkey bars. Finally she saw her. “Yes, she’s right outside playing on the teeter-totter.”

“Oh, thank God.”

“What about the money?” asked Gram.

Panic struck. “I didn’t even think to look. Let me check.” She hurried to the refrigerator, cordless phone in hand, stepping like a hurdler over toppled furniture. She stopped in the kitchen doorway. The cabinets had been emptied. Appliances had been yanked from the walls. Gram’s favorite dishes were broken, the pieces scattered everywhere. The doors to the freezer and refrigerator were wide open. Their food covered the floor. The odor was pungent — meat or something was rotting in the heat. That was what she had smelled earlier.

Amy checked the bottom shelf of the freezer, where Gram had stashed their nest egg.

Her hand shook as she spoke into the phone. “It’s gone. The box, the money. Everything is gone.”

Gram could barely speak. “What do we do now?”

“What we should have done in the first place. We call the police.”

Ryan didn’t call the police. Sure, he’d been robbed — robbed of the paper trail that could prove his father was an extortionist. He needed help, but not from law enforcement. He needed a lawyer. A good one.

From a phone booth in the hotel lobby, he called his friend Norm back in Denver. With the two-hour time difference, he was still in his office at the end of the business day, feet up on the desk, leaning back in his leather chair.

“Norm, I need your help.”

“What’d you do, steal the locks off the canal?”

“This is no joke. I’ve been ripped off.”

He straightened in his chair. “What happened?”

In a matter of minutes, he told Norman everything. The extortion. The rape conviction. The scam at the hotel. Saying it all on the phone was less agonizing than in person. Knowing his father had committed rape made it almost easy; he seemed less deserving of protection.

Silence lingered after Ryan had finished, as if the pensive lawyer was still absorbing it. Finally, he spoke: “It’s curious.”

“Curious?” he said, chuckling with frustration.

“It’s a nightmare, Norm.”

“I’m sorry. I know it’s awful. What I meant was, the extortion is curious. Your father commits a rape, and then twenty-five years later he blackmails somebody for five million dollars. It doesn’t make sense. You would think someone would have been blackmailing him, threatening to expose the sealed juvenile records or something along those lines.”