William Lashner - Past Due

“As the quantities grew, he started sending up a courier, a motorcycle guy, who would drop off the stuff and remind me, to the dollar, of how much I owed. Thirty-five. Forty. Where was I ever going to find that kind of money outside the business? I was trapped. But still, from Tommy, it was like, whenever. No pressure from him to pay what I owed. Until it was no longer whenever, until it was right fucking now.”

“When was this?”

“Just before he disappeared. He phoned me late one night. He was at a pay phone, that’s what he used for business, and he said he needed the money I owed. By then it was like seventy-five grand and there was no way. ‘Don’t say you can’t,’ he told me, ‘after all I’ve done for you.’ How could I respond to that? He told me to open an account and put all my cash in the bank. Then sell my car, my stereo, whatever I had, and put that in too. Get checks for everything so there won’t be a trail. And then collect all the money I was owed. Hire a thug if I had to and collect it. Give a discount for checks and put everything in the bank. And when you’ve got everything, wire it to an account. He gave me the number. It was something offshore, I think. I thought of just stiffing him, wondered what he could do about it, but then I remembered the motorcycle guy. So I did as he said. I sold my car, moved the merchandise I had, collected what I could. It wasn’t much. I ended up with about twenty-five thousand and I wired twenty of it to that account.”

“You kept five for yourself?” said Kimberly.

“Yeah, I mean, yeah. And I’m glad I did. Because that was the end of the line. No more shipments, no more deals. I was left with the five thousand, sure, but no car, no job, and an addiction I couldn’t afford to feed. I tried to keep the business going, tried to find a supplier, but what the hell did I know, really? I ended up going to Cambridge and working out a shipment from an under-cover cop and that was the end of that. Seven years. A third off for good behavior, a third off for parole, but still.”

“You ever talk to Tommy after that call?”

“No.”

“Ever hear from him?”

“No.” But when he said it his gaze slid down to the empty bottle of beer in his hands, and his knuckles were white.

The fear, where did that come from? I wondered, as I ordered us another round. The one thing I still couldn’t quite figure was why he was so spooked at seeing us. Why had we frightened him so? Why had he thought it necessary to draw a gun? I thought back over it all and I remembered what he had said the first time he saw us. You don’t look like arm breakers, he had said. And how he made sure to tell us there was nothing here for us. And how he said, when he saw us at his house, that he didn’t have what we were looking for. What did he think we were looking for? And then it hit me.

Lawyers are, at heart, archaeologists. Our job is to excavate history, to burrow into the dirt and pull out our shards of evidence. With enough shards you can reconstruct the pot, with enough pots you can reconstruct the past. We send out our document requests like telegrams to the past; what we get back are boxes. And somewhere in those boxes lay the outlines of our most precious tool: the story. Some lawyers see the cardboard cubes being wheeled into their offices and they cringe at the thought of all that paper to review, but not me. For me, each box represents a square plot of land at an ancient site, something to be dug into, sifted, organized, reviewed. And believe me when I tell you this, there is always a box.

“Let’s hear the rest,” I said.

“I didn’t leave anything out.”

“Oh yes, you did. Tell us about the box.”

He startled for a second. “How did you know?”

“It’s my job to know.”

“Fucking lawyers.”

“Yes we are,” I said.

“What did he send you, Sully?” said Kimberly.

He paused for a moment, looked at Kimberly’s wide eyes and small mouth, took a sip of his fresh beer. “A big tool locker,” he said finally. “Red and black. Padlocked shut.”

“When?”

“After I wired the money. He told me to bury it somewhere. That someone would come looking for it someday and until then to just keep it safe.”

“And you thought Kimberly and I were the someones he referred to?”

“Yes.”

“But you were scared. You pulled a gun on us. You were frightened, so you didn’t keep it safe, did you?”

He didn’t answer.

I lowered my voice. “It’s all right. What else could he have expected. You were strung out and broke and you thought there might be some drugs inside, didn’t you?”

“If I was strong enough I wouldn’t have been in that mess in the first place.”

“So you opened it.”

“Snapped the lock.”

“What was inside?”

“Crap. Nothing. Books, pictures, crap.”

“But it’s not the crap that has you so scared, is it, Sully? What else was in the locker? Drugs?”

“No.”

“Money?”

“Yeah.”

“How much?”

“A hundred thou.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“Yeah.”

“And you took it.”

“I was going to put most of it back.”

“But you didn’t.”

“What do you think?”

“I think you pissed it away.”

“Yeah. Maybe I did. Some. Most. And the rest I gave to my new girlfriend to stash. For when I got out.”

“And did she.”

“I don’t know. That was the last I ever saw of her.”

“Good choice.”

“Well, you know, she seemed pretty reliable with money. She was a stripper.”

“It’s amazing how that works. And since then every stranger who stepped your way made you jumpy. Every stranger might be the stranger who would ask for the box, and open it up, and see what was missing, and look to get it back.”

He drained his beer, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he drank.

“In all those years, anyone ever come asking for it?” I said.

“No. Not until now.”

“You mean us.”

“Not just you.”

Kimberly and leaned forward and stared at him. “Go ahead, Sully,” she said.

“I got a call, not too long ago. Just a call. A voice I didn’t recognize. It asked about the package I was keeping safe. I said I don’t know what he was talking about. It asked again, told me to think back twenty years. I said I didn’t know what he was talking about. The voice told me to expect a visitor. That’s all I heard, and then you guys showed up.”

I looked at Kimberly, whose wide eyes were now wide with the big questions. Who had known? Who had called?

“The voice,” I asked, all the while watching Kimberly’s expression, “was it British?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It was.”

And Kimberly’s pretty wide eyes widened even farther. “Colfax?” she said.

“Who?” said Jimmy.

“That’s right,” I said.

“How’d he know about it?” she said.

“Who?” said Jimmy.

“What did you do with the other crap in the toolbox?” I said.

“Left it there,” said Jimmy.

“In the box?”

“Yeah.”

“Where is it now?”

“Buried. I moved it to the basement of the place I live at now.”

“Let’s dig it up.”

“No. They might come for it.”

“Tell you what, Sully. I’ll take it off your hands, which will be a relief for you. And I can work it so you never get that visitor you’ve been fearing.”

“You’re full of shit. You can’t do that.”

“I’m a lawyer,” I said. “I can walk through walls.”

“Now I know you’re full of shit.”

“Trust me.”

He laughed a sad, rueful laugh. “Do I got any choice?”

“Let’s go dig it up,” I said.

And we did.