Thomas Perry - The Butcher's Boy

Maureen said, “What about there? You just passed a parking lot. There’s another one coming up.”

“No,” he said. “Some of the parking lots downtown are owned by people I don’t want to see. I can’t take a chance.”

Just past the next corner a delivery truck was waiting to pull out. He stopped and waved the driver on, then pulled into the empty space. “Stay here,” he said, and got out. He walked back up the sidewalk to Woodward Avenue and looked for a likely store. It took only a block before he found the side entrance to Hudson’s Department Store. He had no trouble finding the right kind of briefcase. It was the kind that the men in this district carried—hard sides and a combination lock.

In ten minutes he was crossing the street in front of the Midwestern Bank. “There is a magic elixir to make you disappear,” Eddie had said. “It’s money. If you have enough of it you can go anywhere and do anything and nobody will ask you where you got it. But that’s only if you’ve got enough of it so you don’t ever have to do anything to get more.”

At the teller’s cage he said, “I’d like to get into my safe deposit box, please.” He made sure she saw the briefcase. A man with a briefcase might be bringing something to put in the box, or might be making an exchange. You never knew. But he was probably taking a minute off from work, and might be pressed for time.

The teller said, “Your name, please.”

“David R. Fortner.”

She made a move with her left hand and a man appeared beside her. He said, “Please come with me.” The man conducted him to a tiny cubicle with one chair and a table in it, then took his key and reappeared with the box. He asked the man to wait outside; he’d only be a second.

When he was alone again he opened the box. Inside were the bills, exactly as he’d last seen them five years ago. There was no point in counting them; it took time to count a hundred thousand in hundreds. They fit neatly into the briefcase. He watched the man lock the box into its place in a wall of identical boxes, then took the key.

As he walked back to the car he looked at his watch. One thirty-five. It had been less than a half hour, and now he could move on, leaving Detroit behind.

Maureen sat in silence as he drove back toward the freeway. Every third block she glanced behind them at the traffic, but after they were on the highway she settled back and lit a cigarette.

He had planned to drive for an hour and then stop, but when the hour was up he kept driving, putting the monotonous miles between him and Detroit. It had gone beautifully, he knew. It had been in and out with little chance anyone could have seen him. But he still didn’t feel what he wanted to feel, so he drove on, checking the mirror every few seconds to see if there could be a car that had been behind them for too many miles. It was just his nervous energy, he knew, and not the sure and reliable sense of caution he’d acquired over the years. But he drove on into the afternoon sun, building up the count of miles between him and the days he’d spent accumulating the stack of money in that box.

He drove past South Bend and Gary and was on the broad eight-lane expressway that poured the westbound cars into Chicago when Maureen said, “I think we’d better find a place to stop for the night.”

He said, “Not for a while yet. We can move faster at night.”

Maureen said, “I’m tired and I’m hungry, and I think we should. A vacationing real-estate man from Syracuse doesn’t drive all night, and his wife doesn’t have to look as though she slept in her clothes. Why don’t we stop at a motel in the right price range and eat supper in the right kind of restaurant? We mustn’t look as though we’re running from something. Use your head.”

Of course she was right. Besides, he thought, they probably wouldn’t want to try for us where it’d cause an uproar. They’d rather have us on a dark highway. If they spotted me. And they couldn’t have. It might be a week before the word reached places like Detroit that a sight of him was worth money. And nobody had ever known about the safe deposit box.

He saw a Holiday Inn sign drifting toward them beside the highway. It was as good as anyplace: the right location for a couple who had been on the road all day and didn’t want to get enmeshed in the city traffic, the right price. And there would be food nearby. He suddenly realized that he’d been hungry for a long time.

In the parking lot Maureen put her hand on his forearm and held him back. “Here’s where I start to earn my keep,” she said. “Do what I say, and you’ll be all right. I’ve been doing this for a long time, most of it with people who weren’t much more than dead weight.”

“What do you want me to do?” he said.

“The cover is my responsibility. It’s part of what you’re paying for and I know it’s good. We’re Mr. and Mrs. William Prentiss of Syracuse until we’re alone again. From now until we’re on the road tomorrow the curtain is always up and you’re always on stage.”

He smiled. “That’s a little extreme, isn’t it?”

She shrugged. “You’re paying for it, you can decide. If the troubles you’ve got involve Carl Bala, it probably isn’t. But you know more than I do about that, too. All I can say is I haven’t lost a patient yet.”

He sat still for a moment and thought. Then he said, “How thick is the cover?”

She said, “It’s about as thick as anything I’ve ever used. The car is registered to William Prentiss, the license is good, the address exists. If we use the credit cards the bills will get paid on time.”

“All right,” he said. He took out his wallet and examined the driver’s license, the car registration, and the credit cards again. They were either very good forgeries or genuine. He got out and started walking toward the motel office.

“Wait for me,” she said, and caught up with him. “From here on we stay together.”

In the office, he went to the registration desk while Maureen wandered to the other side of the room and pretended to look at a rack of postcards. When the desk clerk asked what kind of room they wanted, he hesitated for an instant, and Maureen said, “A double bed will be fine.”

Once inside the motel room, Maureen walked all around, looking under the bed and behind the mirrors and in the bathroom until she appeared to have satisfied herself of something. Then she turned on the television, came close, and whispered in a voice he could barely hear, “You haven’t worked with a woman before, have you?”

He shook his head.

“You’ve got to think differently now. Look at me. If you were my husband, a young real estate man from Syracuse, would you want twin beds? You might take them, sure. But you wouldn’t ask for them. That’s just the kind of thing that creep would snicker about, and maybe mention to a friend or two.”

Then she brightened and said, “Give me a minute to make myself look human and we can go eat. Check the phone book and see if you can find a restaurant.” She leaned forward and brushed his cheek with her lips, and then disappeared into the bathroom.

The kiss startled him, but he did as he was told. He found a restaurant that appeared to be just the thing; the address was on the same street as the motel. The ad in the Yellow Pages was only mildly pretentious. There was no mention of entertainment, and that was the main thing they’d have to avoid. In some clubs in the Midwest, it was hard for singers and comedians to work unless they were sponsored by the Italians. There was always a quiet man in the audience studying the act, judging the applause, watching for the moment when the performer was ready to be booked into the big clubs in Los Angeles or Las Vegas or New York.