The Best American Mystery Stories 2019

Robb T. White Inside Man

from Down & Out

He told his cellie and other cons in his pod he believed in the redistribution of wealth and that was why he’d always stolen for a living. Though it was a medium-security institution, he had earned some respect because of his stories of the many scores in his past. His age gave him an air and a gravitas the younger men couldn’t touch. He’d taken his lawyer’s advice and accepted the Alford plea they offered for the jewelry store heist in Sheboygan, the legal thing that let him plead guilty without admitting he’d done the crime. Shit like that drove him crazy but it added to the stories he could tell, just like the one about how he should have gotten away, but his partner on the job traded him in for less time. His partner’s treachery didn’t bother him anymore. He would have done the same thing. Most criminals would shove their own grandmother off a dime if she was standing on it.

He had always thought of himself as special, not an ordinary criminal, until a young black guy confronted him in the chow line. All the mean-mugging he’d seen in his jail life, he knew there were better actors in prisons than in Hollywood. But this guy wasn’t buying into his status and he chest-bumped and cursed him before turning back to the serving line. A small thing but he’d backed down and it was seen and word in any Graybar Hotel got around fast. A few weeks later, his own cellie took over some space on the table they used to share.

At forty-one, he thought, I’ve become the toothless wolf in the pack. That night he woke with a nightmare: he had stolen a Ryder van full of gold and silver bars. A laughing circle of young gangbangers tore the metal door loose and stole every bar inside while he pleaded with them to leave him a few. Pathetic. His scars and stories meant nothing now.

Tommy called from Minneapolis when he got out. A huge score lined up at MoA, he said, the Mall of America. He told Tommy he was out of his fucking mind. They had security up the ass what with all this crazy terrorist shit and brainless gangbangers gunpointing shoppers.

“So what?” Tom said. “I’ve got Bob.”

Who the fuck was Bob?

“Give me a disgruntled employee over the best cutting torch on the market.” Tom laughed.

He used to steal in the summer, play in the winter — another of his prison mottos the young cons used to lap up. His last lawyer had taken the cash a sister in Coeur d’Alene was holding for him. Minneapolis in October might not be Duluth, but it’s cold enough to coat the lawns and cars with frost most mornings. Tommy’s score, if it panned out, meant Key West — maybe even retirement. It had to come sometime. Back before ATM machines, when banks kept real cash on the premises, he would have booked for the Maldives by now. It’s easier than ever to get the cash in the drawers from the tellers — they’re ordered to give it up — but banks in small towns don’t keep much around. He hadn’t seen a major haul in years. The FBI had a long memory too, and that was another reason to go for it now.

He had developed ulcerated colitis three years ago, and he was told he had to be careful what he ate. He once spent three days holed up in a Motel 6 in Casper, Wyoming, instead of casing a bank because of his goddamned irritated bowels. On the road, he was forced to watch how much coffee and junk food he consumed. Sometimes he had no choice. All of it was adding up to one word in blinking, neon green: Retirement.

He had met Tom in a bar.

“Ain’t you drinking, bro?” Tom asked.

“I got a fuckin’ beer in front of me, don’t I?”

“Have a real drink, chickenshit.”

“I’ll stick with the beer.”

Hard liquor on his stomach was the same as gulping from a can of Drano. He turned to Tommy, who looked no different from the last time he’d seen him, maybe more bulked, leaner in the belly.

“Tell me about your guy,” he said.

It always seemed to start in a bar, the way a lot of good and bad things did in his life. His parents were alcoholics and he learned early on what booze could do. Still, they tried to instill the values of their faith in their kids even if they didn’t have much luck. His sister in Idaho was the only one of his siblings who escaped unscathed. One brother was a suicide, another doing life in Walla Walla. Two other sisters were alcohol and opioid addicts. Their parents had died young, the father of bleeding ulcers. He still remembered the grim trail of rust-brown feces that leaked from him down the carpet stairs as the paramedics came for him the very last time.

The Triangle was Tom’s kind of bar, a shitkicker dive, your basic country-western with way too much steel guitar; whiny notes poured from the speakers, the same raggedy-assed-looking crowd packed tight on the same stools. Some tattooed trailer-trash taking a break from popping out babies with violent boyfriends gyrated in an orange bikini onstage and gave hump-sex to a shiny pole slimed with sweat and even more bacteria. His eyes boxed the room. Tom sat at the bar a distance from two rednecks in greasy ball caps chattering about their trucks and some pussy they’d just made up.

He shared a cell in Brushy Mountain with Tom years ago, and they kept in contact the way cons do. Tom said his inside contact worked for the Mall of America. The guy would get them inside where the money bags were loaded into the armored cars.

Then “Big Tom” Youtsey got himself violated on a domestic abuse charge before he could introduce him to the inside man. Tommy was in county, but he had no way of contacting him what with all calls being recorded. The only thing he remembered was Tom telling him his man drank nights at this shitty rathole.

For three straight nights from six in the evening until midnight, he nursed a beer, scanned the crowd, and kept the bartender happy with a couple drinks on him. But no one jumped out. He had no idea what the guy looked like. Plenty of truckers, some cheating spouses, he guessed, mostly guys; a bunch of working-class yahoos and a few singles, bikers drifting in from the road like windblown tumbleweeds. But nobody showed up wearing a security guard’s uniform or looked to him like a county clerk wanting to take a walk on the wild side. He tipped the bartender a ten on the third night for allowing him space all week on the bar stool.

Heading for his car across the stone parking lot, his thoughts were grim, mainly about spending the coming winter pinching pennies in some squalid trailer park with a bunch of inbred white trash and their squalling brats.

A voice called out from somewhere: “You the guy?”

He was too far from the streetlights or the bar’s neon to see who it was. He swiveled his head around until he spotted the glowing tip of a cigarette trace an arc in the blackness. He followed it to the source.

“You Tom’s man?” he asked.

“I don’t know a Tom,” he said.

“My mistake.”

He took a few slow steps.

“Wait up,” called the voice.

He turned around. He still couldn’t see him well. The man looked average-sized, clean-shaved, wore a windbreaker. Nothing too redneck about him. An ordinary Joe.

“I might be, at that,” he said.

Another step and he’d be close enough to chest-bump, like back in the yard when you wanted to see if a guy had the balls to fight.

“Prove it,” he said.

He did it with three words: “Mall of America.”

Bob turned out to be one of those kinds of men the FBI profilers liked to call “angry loners” on their wanted posters. He hated his job, he hated his ex-wife, he hated his neighbor’s dog for barking when he had to work the swing shift, and he hated anybody who couldn’t see he wasn’t just some nobody like everybody else.

After a couple days of going over the plan, Bob grew to dislike Steve Pine, the name given by the man from the parking lot. Bob thought of him much like he did his ex.

Bob was no criminal, the man calling himself Steve Pine thought, that much was clear. What he had going for him was a grudge against the world the size of Australia. Maybe, he thought, that’ll be good enough this time. Pulling into Bob’s driveway at dawn and there he was, waiting in his car at the curb.

“Fuck me, you. I knew you’d be here early,” Bob complained. “Look, I’m dead tired, man. They had us doing inventory and emergency drills all night long.”

Too much whining as they headed to his front door. Bob walked like an old man with bent shoulders as he pawed at his pants pockets for his house key. There was booze on Bob’s breath.

“I don’t think your neighbors across the street caught all of that,” Pine said to Bob, steadying his arm. “Why don’t you repeat it a little louder?”

“You’re real hilarious, Pine,” Bob said. He was still fumble-fucking with keys on a ring trying to unlock his front door. “That ain’t even your real name, I’ll bet.”

“Don’t bet,” Pine said to him and gripped his upper arm tighter. “You’ll lose.”

As soon as they were inside, Pine punched him — once, very hard, in the gut. Bob dropped to the floor as if somebody had handed him a basketball-sized lump of uranium. He gagged and started bucking sideways. The solar plexus was a quick way to get someone’s attention. Pack wolves held a misbehaving pup’s snout into the dirt; cons used their fists in their cells to settle friendly differences.

He waited for Bob to recover. A foul reek filled the tiny foyer where he stood looking down. A ropy string of yellow bile had come up last.

“Stupid motherfucker,” he said quietly. “We’re two days from something that’s either going to make us wealthy men or put us in prison for twenty years and you’re dicking around.”

Bob said nothing, didn’t even try to stand up. He lay on the floor and whimpered. He was tempted to double him up again with a kick to the same place.

A jolt for aggravated first-degree armed robbery in Minnesota was twenty years. That was what Bob faced. He faced LWOP, life without parole. He surprised himself when he realized his fist was still balled and cocked.

He brought Bob a glass of water and helped him drink; then he raised him to his feet, gently, like a mother with a just-walking child.

“Let’s go over it again, Bob.”

Bob slapped the glass out of his hand. It flew across the room and landed unbroken in his La-Z-Boy, the one article of furniture in Bob’s living room besides the hi-def TV.

“Feeling better?”

“Fuck you, Pine.”

He watched him stomp off to his room and slam the door. Robbing was like playing poker, Tom used to say. You don’t play the cards as much as the people sitting across from you. But with partners, it was more like pinochle, and he wasn’t sure Bob could go through with it. Bob swiped copies of paperwork from the place, loading schedules, and staff shifts. He xeroxed them when he was alone. He said the supervisor left them lying around on her desk.

“Lazy bitch leaves her door wide open,” Bob bragged, sounding like a TV bad guy.

He didn’t mention to Bob the copier was counting every duplicate while he was on closed-circuit TV no matter where he was in that vast complex of stores. Tom had called Bob Captain Obvious when he first mentioned his inside man to him.

Bob was a gold-star employee of five years, ten years, and then fifteen years. His “dedicated service” certificates were computer-signed by the company’s CEO, who had probably never heard of his dedicated employee. They were lined up on the wall encased in glass photo frames. He found the letter denying Bob’s application for promotion shoved in a drawer, ripped in two, and then taped together. Bob heaped abuse on the female supervisor every chance he got, calling her “a stupid hatchet wound,” and accusing her of “sucking her way to the top.” The whole thing nearly came crashing down during a final rehearsal when Bob decided to surprise him with a dozen photos he’d taken with his cell phone. “So you’ll know your way around better,” he said.

“I didn’t... tell you... to do that,” he said. The words were fishbones in his throat; he could barely suppress the rage pounding in his veins. You stupid, stupid fuck, he thought.

“Relax, Pine. Nobody saw me take them,” Bob said.

He had to go into the bathroom, shut the door, and douse himself with water before he felt it safe to come out again.

It was too late to back out, though. The following night would either be payday or doomsday. He let Bob drink himself shit-faced that night. He’d kept him away from the Triangle for fear he’d say something stupid. Prisons were jammed with braggarts from bars. It was always in the back of his mind that he’d already talked in that bar anyway. How many guys had he drunkenly approached before he met the real deal in Tom? In the joint, they loved those crime shows where one spouse murders the other and the narrator reveals how many barflies and snitches they’d buttonholed looking for a hit man. The killer never had a chance.

It didn’t surprise him that Bob never once tumbled to his final role as the tethered goat. The tiger would spring once he was gone with the swag and all the arrows of guilt were pointing straight at dumbfuck Bob. Without a second man, there wouldn’t be four hands stuffing cash into garbage bags, only his two. Half the take, but if Bob’s numbers were accurate, there would still be plenty to retire on even after allowing for Tom’s cut. That was understood, too, once Tom had got himself jammed up. Don’t trust anybody not to sell you down the river. Better to keep everyone happy. Except for the dumbasses, the clueless assholes that couldn’t hurt you.

The next day was another fall day with leaves in bright colors, gold and red all over town, not the soggy, all-day drizzle Bloomington of the past week. Bob’s sour mood was abetted by the hangover.

“Just be yourself,” he had told Bob all day long. “Act your part. Everybody will be on the floor with you when I come into the room. Look scared.”

“I am scared,” Bob said.

Bob never understood that it was too risky to meet up right away to split the cash. He grudgingly accepted his explanation, but Pine didn’t want to shine too bright a light into Bob’s dim-bulb of a brain. He needed some time before the company figured with certainty the robbery had been an inside job. Bob had to be prepared for an FBI interrogation, he reminded him.

“I don’t know If I can go in tonight,” Bob moaned. “My stomach is all messed up. Maybe tomorrow is better—”

“Just pre-fight jitters, Bob,” Pine told him soothingly.

They were dressed in matching security guard uniforms sitting at the Formica kitchen table. Bob’s one foot was rabbit-thumping the floor, beating a nonstop tattoo of fear.

“Those patches you made,” Bob erupted suddenly, “they look like shit. They look like fuckin’ Frankenstein stitches.”

“Nobody’s going to study them up close, Bob,” he replied. “My jacket will cover the shirt.”

Bob nodded his head; his eyes were bugged, and his face was greasy with perspiration.

“Remember, I might need you to vouch for me as a new-hire in case your district supervisor makes a surprise appearance—”

“Oh fuck you, Pine! I told you a dozen times by now he ain’t coming. We always get a tip ahead of time when that prick’s about to show up.”

“Bob, take a drink. Just one. Then rinse your mouth out.”

Bob looked at him as if Pine had just asked him to tango.

“You want me to drink?”

“It’ll calm you,” he said.

“I’ve got to go to the bathroom... right now!”

Bob bolted from the table. A few seconds later he heard Bob’s bowels evacuating in a noisy torrent. A few minutes later, it was followed by the sound of vomiting.

Bob returned, his face ashen.

“Calling the Irishman?”

“Huh? What Irishman? What the fuck—”

Pine imitated a vomiting sound as he pronounced the name O’Rourke.

“You’re so fucking funny, you ought to do one of those comedy acts,” Bob said. But he was calmer, his color better.

“Sit down, Bob.” The smell of the bathroom had followed Bob back to the tiny kitchen. He’d done so much jail time, with its shit smells and body odor of unwashed men, that it was nothing. Bob had talked all day long as the hours got closer. Just nerve-shot chattering before a job by a rookie. “Monkey mouth,” they called it in the joint. He finally quieted down.

“Time to go, Bob,” he said.

“I just can’t...”

He hoisted Bob to his feet and shoved him ahead out the door. He tucked black garbage bags and the fish billy under one armpit. It alarmed Bob when he first noticed it. “What’s that for?”

“Oh, you know,” Pine told him, “for those everyday occasions when you need to tap someone to sleep.”

The sawed-off Remington twelve-gauge was secured in a sling sewn into the jacket under the other armpit. Bob didn’t know about the Glock in Pine’s ankle holster.

“What’s that?” Bob asked before getting inside his car.

“It’s my lucky saint’s medal,” Pine said. He stopped to put it around his neck. He had worn it since his fourth-grade confirmation ceremony back in Providence. He thought that when he spoke the words “renouncing the devil” he would be entering a new, better life and that the sordid catastrophe of his home would be cleansed when he returned. He kept the medal anyway.

“Drive the speed limit,” he told him. Bob’s eyes through the window were moist. He guessed Bob had been sneaking in a few nips.

Pine took his own car and stayed on Bob’s tail from the 77 turnoff to East Broadway all the way to the turn at the 28th Street lot where the armored company’s depot was located. The MoA was the busiest hub station in Minnesota and was linked to Minneapolis by both bus and rail. The lower level of the eastern parking lot was patrolled by security to keep commuters from parking there and connecting to the St. Paul International Airport or Target Field where the Twins played.

They joined a cluster of uniformed guards chatting to one another as they headed for the single entrance. Several of them greeted Bob and gave him a curt once-over. His jacket covered the wad of nylon zip cuffs tucked into the back of his belt.

They took the long walk down the drug tunnel, their name for the single unfinished corridor lit in patches by overhead fluorescent lighting. This led to the first security door. Management’s heightened concerns over acts of lone-wolf terrorism had relaxed security at the main depot because new policy dictated more staff had to be shifted from collection points.

An older, white-haired guard was checking badges ahead. Pine and Bob were last in line and waited until the others were out of sight when they approached. Bob held his badge up just as he reached the turnstile and accidentally brushed the guard’s arm in passing. When the old man turned back to check Pine’s badge — a fake like everything else — he hit him on the top of the head with the fish billy. The old guard sank to the floor like he’d stepped into a pit full of quicksand.

“What the fuck,” Bob hissed. “You weren’t s’posed to hit him!”

“Keep watch,” Pine ordered.

He had the old man hoisted up under the arms and was dragging him to the utility closet. He opened it with one hand and put the old man face-first on the floor. He had the nylon cuffs on him and a strip of duct tape across his mouth in seconds.

“Pine, what are you doing?”

“Shut up. Just a tiny variation in the plan.”

He couldn’t take a chance on Bob’s terrified, shining face giving everything away right up front. He’d decided earlier that he was going to put the old man on the floor rather than try to fool him with his half-assed ID.

He knew exactly where they were going thanks to the cartoon-like sketches Bob had scratched out with his box of Crayolas. There would be four people to deal with, including the supervisor. Shift change should allow for a window of opportunity large enough for Pine to remain undisturbed in the deposit room before the real guards came trooping in with their collection bags.

The canvas sacks were stored in rows on metal shelves inside a big steel cage. Bob preceded Pine through the door again. The motion of his shotgun and the shouted command to “Hit the floor!” worked the first time. No heroes here. Nylon zip ties secured hands behind backs; he left feet untied. Pine had practiced on a prone and squirming Bob in his living room so many times by then he could have done it in his sleep. He let the cold metal barrel of the shotgun rest against the nape of each one’s neck to make his point about not resisting. The sole woman guard lay between the two men. Bob, acting his part, was the first one to hit the floor, already cuffed en route; he twisted his head to look up at him. He took the woman’s key ring and let himself inside the locked metal cage. Once inside he began shoveling the canvas money bags into the garbage bags.

He was thinking how much more there was still on the shelves but weight considerations — and Pine’s own age — made leaving it necessary. Sprinting a couple hundred yards across a parking lot with fifty pounds of money in each hand was all he reckoned he could accomplish in the time allotted.

A sixth sense, the kind most cons develop if they do enough time, alerted him to something out of the corner of his eye. He was reaching down for a better grip on the second garbage bag when he saw a gun barrel coming around the corner of the supervisor’s office.

In one even movement, Pine scooped the shotgun off the shelf and fired from the open cage door just as she squeezed off a round at him. Her slug made a ferocious ricocheting sound off the metal walls, missing him, but his blast blew her head into a red mist. That was how his mind recorded it. He went practically deaf from the boom.

She must have been behind the door when he passed leading Bob as his hostage. The woman on the floor was not the supervisor; he had failed to read the desperate look in Bob’s eyes on the floor.

His hearing came back. The men on the floor were thrashing around like fish on a deck and begging for mercy or help. He drew his Glock and stepped behind the first guard and put a slug into his head. The second guard, the same, the woman last. He wasn’t sure why he did the men first. She raised herself up, like a supplicant before a throne, made a hunching movement like a caterpillar crawling, when the round tore through the top of her head and gouged a chunk of concrete from the floor. Bob’s neck craned to follow him as he stepped calmly behind him. A string of popping noises, loud farts, and then a hideous banshee wail from Bob as the strip of tape across his mouth came loose. The bullet churned through the back of his head, pulped his brain, and bounced around in his skull. No exit.

The smoke, blood, and smell of shit was overpowering. He gripped the bags and hustled in a fast scissor-walk back the way he had come. The long corridor seemed to stretch out in front of him like in that nightmare he’d had with the wolves. He made it outside. He was sweating, his knuckles turned white gripping the heavy garbage bags. He heaved one, then the other into the trunk, tore off his jacket and shirt, and replaced his outerwear with a Vikings jersey and ball cap. A chorus of sirens erupted from the nearby interstate. His timing was nearly perfect.

He didn’t count the money until he had put three states between himself and Minnesota. It was less than he had hoped — $184,000 — but a good haul nonetheless.

Lying on a bed in a Valdosta motel that night, he wondered about himself and the distance he had come since childhood. Why had he never used his spatial gift to make something of himself — say, as an architect or a designer? Why crime? He had never killed anyone on a job before this. Murder was unforgivable, it provoked God’s wrath. An act of contrition on his deathbed could still save him from damnation. He just wanted out, to be safe now from SWAT crashing through his door at dawn. The money would give him that. He felt calmer than he had since he’d left Minnesota. His only worry was Tom expecting too big a share now that he was national news.

His reverie broke just as a movie came on. The screen flashed a warning for parents: “Intense Sequences of Violence, Gore, a Scene of Sexuality, and Cigarette Smoking.” Sounded like his house when he was a boy.

His fate was linked to his saint’s medal in some serpentine way he did not fully understand. They had cheated him too. St. Christopher had been booted out of the community of sainthood. It wasn’t for his early years of dissipation, drinking and brawling in taverns, it was because church investigators had recently deemed his miracles had not been true ones — at least, they said they could not be verified by modern methods. The Vatican had revoked his canonization and knocked him down a peg to the “blessed” category where he would remain for the rest of eternity.

He felt tired and his skin itched. Just nerves, Pine thought. His stomach roiled with acid. He knew he would be on the six o’clock news and he wanted to wait for the update. He needed to see how close they were.

Maybe I can still turn it around, he thought. Maybe I don’t have to stay a criminal.

I never wanted to be this way.

I never chose it.

This whole life... it just... happened to me.

They say the devil knows his own.

The man whose real name was Christopher but who had recently called himself Steve Pine lay on his bed and meditated, his mind doing its own riff through his past — those early failures followed by the successful robberies where the money was good but never lasted. Those bodies on the floor back in Minnesota intruded. It would have been unthinkable when he started down this path — to take a life so easily. Bob was an easy one, a pragmatic decision. That wasn’t even Pine’s doing because Bob wrote that part for himself. He felt nothing inside for him or any of them. Suicide, they told him, was the only irredeemable sin. He took off his St. Christopher medal and laid it gently on the pillow beside him. He took the Glock out of his ankle holster, brought the barrel to his mouth, and applied a pound of pressure just to see what it felt like to pull the trigger. Except for the taste of bluing in the metal, he had no other sensation, no fear of ending his life in an abject squalor of brain and blood on a headboard in a highway motel. The money in the trunk of his car had all the meaning that mattered now.

He trusted his instincts. Key West was too risky — too many snowbirds from up North came down and he’d stand out to local cops and bar owners. He’d save it for later like a good middle-class citizen deferring pleasure until circumstances were more in hand. First things first: a place to stay, nothing flashy like those deluxe resorts at the tip of Little Torch Key. A small trailer park on the leeward side of Dolphin Marina fit the bill; a decrepit sign stuck between a couple of palm trees declared lots, trailers, and rentals available, inquire with the manager. He introduced himself as “Keith Reynolds,” financial-services consultant, out of Chicago.

The park manager was a Vietnam vet with tobacco-stained teeth and shoulder-length gray hair. He said a retiree named Jefferson had just brought his double-wide down from South Dakota and “then, by God, dropped deader than Julius Caesar from a massive coronary” after only a week down here. He looked inside, nodded, asked the manager about the price and was told it could be his at a huge discount because “the old boy’s family, they don’t want to pay a big-ass fee to have it hauled back home.”

He agreed to the price, asked to pay cash — he planned to open up an account at a bank in the Lower Keys tomorrow.

“I’m sure the family will let you have all his stuff at a good price,” he said.

“No thanks,” he replied.

The manager said, “No problem, man,” and then said he’d arrange with some moving people to have the furniture carted away to a storage facility.

He thought of his St. Christopher medal back in Valdosta, now most likely the property of a motel maid. He wasn’t free of all superstition, but he didn’t want anything a dead man had touched hanging over his new life.

He thought he felt his luck changing. He began to breathe more easily and stopped looking over his shoulder so often. The sunshine, the ocean breezes, the postcard sunsets were everything he dreamed of back when he was languishing in his prison bunk. He drove his car close to the back of his trailer and threw a blue plastic tarp over it in case somebody glimpsed the out-of-state plate and got curious. One night was spent counting and sorting his money. He decided it was safe inside the trunk for a couple more days until he could dispose of the car. Just to be sure, he let the air out of the tires.

His first goal was to find a bank to begin depositing small amounts of money. Banks were required to report deposits of $10,000 or more; he suspected they reported amounts much lower, so he planned to stagger his deposits in odd amounts. The park manager suggested the bank on Islamorada Key, and he made plans to go there the following day. He’d box up $50,000 for his sister in Iowa and ask her to mail Tom a few bucks, have her get the message to him he’d catch up on old times with him soon.

He wore the suit and new shoes he’d picked up at a mall in Homestead on his way down to the Keys. He practiced the story he intended to roll out of an eccentric aunt who died suddenly and left him cash. He practiced it in the rearview mirror until it sounded natural.

The assistant manager told him he himself had been called by an elderly woman just the other day who wanted to know if she could cash “a gold bar” at the bank. He laughed along with the man, playing an amiable nitwit, joking like a squarejohn with a man he’d have snarled at and put a gun in his face not so long ago.

“She was a dear soul but very much belonged to a different time,” he told him, assuming the role of an amiable nephew.

When he returned that afternoon, his bone-white shirt was damp behind the collar and his silk was folded up in his pocket, its job completed.

The manager was raking lava rocks around the palm trees out front.

He stopped raking when he saw him exit the Uber car.

“The two moving men was here while you was gone. They got your place cleaned out,” he said. “Refrigerator and everything.”

“That’s fine.”

He had no further interest in the man or the topic and headed down to his trailer.

Inside, he found a carton of lukewarm beer that had been removed from the fridge before the moving men took it. The place was empty, all blond wood, polished. No dead man smell anywhere. He popped the tab on one can and took a long swallow. He thought of engaging a charter for some deep-sea fishing off Islamorada the next morning. He’d take his time filling up the trailer with his own furniture. No rush, no rush at all...

He was raising the can to his lips for another sip of beer when a thought struck him like ice in the belly. No, not that. He rushed to the back window and flipped the curtain aside. The blue tarp was gone, as well as the car beneath it.

He unscrewed the vent in the bedroom and removed his gun. He slipped it into his belt and raced to the park manager’s trailer. He banged on the door.

A smell of marijuana drifted out when it opened. The manager’s pale chest and pot belly clashed with the skinny, sunburned arms; his nipples peeked from behind an unbuttoned shirt like a pair of mismatched rosettes.

He drew an imaginary line bisecting them and imagined the bullet going in there punching everything to mush before it exited his spine.

“My car...” he choked out, “my car is... gone.”

“Them boys asked me if they should take everything, like you told me, and I said, yeah, it’s all got to go. I let’em use the phone to call for a tow truck.”

He bent low, sick to his stomach, and punched himself in the forehead with his fist. No act of self-abasement; he had to dispel the tsunami of rage and panic. Killing this idiot standing in front of him was not going to get his money back.

Calmer now, his hands shaking, he asked him where the stuff had been taken.

The manager handed him a card.

“I forgot to give you this when we was talking out front just now.”

It had the name of a storage facility: Bonefish Self-Storage. Marathon, FL. Someone had written in block letters the word UNITS and two numbers: 149, 150.

“Nothing closer?” he asked, some of his spit flecking the manager’s bony chest.

“All’s I know is they say they got a contract from the owner.”

His hand swung around to his belt and stopped.

No, not him. It might not be too late. Think, think—

“Give me your car keys,” he said.

“Hunh?”

“Give me your fucking car keys, asshole, and a bolt cutter. Right now!”

He drove and wept, big sobs erupting unbidden from his throat. Mile markers on the Overseas Highway were a blur, the sunlight dazzled him, but he stared dully through the windshield. The glint off the windshields of opposing traffic heading north created a mirage of dazzling light and flashing chrome, a snake unwinding beside him, its belly full of happy tourists whose faces appeared in his peripheral vision. He blanked out all thought as if he were on a caper. No thought but one now: find the car, get the money, ignore the world.

He took in at a glance that the facility in Marathon was surrounded by a cyclone fence and closed-circuit cameras mounted on poles.

The lock snapped. The metal folding door rattled on its castors. The car was backed into unit 149. The first thing he noticed was that both doors were left wide open and the trunk lid was up, like a giant metallic insect unable to take flight. He forced himself to look inside.

He snapped the lock of the next unit and saw the dead man’s items neatly arranged. They’d done the unloading first; the trunk was popped merely to see if there was anything of value that could be taken and not be missed, such as a tire lever, maybe the whole jack set, asserting the scavenging rights of the unskilled laboring class.

He had only the money in his wallet he’d taken with him that morning. Not enough to track the thieves, certainly, and more pressing, not enough to sustain him for more than a few days in his empty trailer.

He expected to find the police waiting for him back at the trailer park. Instead, the manager — shirt undone as before, but high on weed from the odor wafting toward him — snatched his keys back, grumbled something derisive and obscene, and then slammed the door in his face.

He couldn’t bear walking back to the trailer. He headed mindlessly in the direction of the marina and soon found himself on a sandy path that cut through saw grass down to the shoreline. Sand fleas hovered around his shoes with every step; dust took away the mirror polish as he trudged along.

He waded into the water up to his knees, uncertain. He should make the Grand Gesture: curse God and die.

He took out the Glock, thinking This is as good a place as any—

He placed the barrel at his temple. He looked down at the refracted image of his legs, his dress shoes submerged in muck. The warm air and salt-scented tang of the open sea was a balm, a belated gift after the torment of those last several hours. The gun seemed to lower itself of its own weight. He stuck it back inside his belt and stared again over the flat sheen of the gray-green waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Sandwiched between two oceans — the Atlantic just on the other side of the key — he felt small and insignificant. God wouldn’t care. His suicide might make the paper in Key West, but not in Miami. That is, if his body didn’t go out with the tide and get nibbled to a skeleton by fish.

He heard a noise behind him and turned around. A small white-tailed deer stood there calmly staring back at him.

He laughed. Bob, sending me a fuck-you message...

“If you came to see me off, you’re in for a disappointment,” he told the deer.

The tiny creature bolted as soon as he began plowing back to shore and disappeared into the thicket. His heart was a lump of ice despite the heat. He could survive. The country had other disgruntled employees, plenty of inside men. Meanwhile, he was going to have a long talk with the park manager. He may know more about that tow truck operation than he had volunteered.

The island wasn’t all that big, and they had to expect someone would come looking before too long. He wondered if they’d expect it would be someone like him.