The Giveaway

4

The way Bruce Grossman figured it, robbing safe-deposit boxes was a victimless crime. If people kept large sums of money in safe-deposit boxes-and there were always large sums of money to be found-that meant those people were probably crooks. If you’re a normal person, there’s no good reason to keep your money in a place hidden from use. Oh, sure, maybe you harbor fears that the Nazis are coming or the Commies are coming or the end of the Mayan calendar is nigh and the world is coming to an end, but even still, what would having money hidden away do for you? People who hide their money do it because they are doing something wrong.

That’s not to say he robbed safe-deposit boxes to get back at the bad guys, because that wasn’t the case in the least. Starting out, he just wanted to have things. A nice house. A nice car. A place for his mother in a safe neighborhood in Miami. Maybe some flash cash, just so the ladies knew he was more than a receding hairline and an odd personality, because, shit, he knew he wasn’t all that. No, starting out, that money got him places. Opened doors. Got return phone calls from smart girls.

And if he got in deep with somebody, say at the bookie’s joint, he just had to pop a score in some no-name town and come back with whatever money he needed to pay off his debts. Used to be, before a night out in Detroit-back in the 1980s, that was his place to go, right in the middle of the country, easy in, easy out-he’d find a credit union near Wayne State, get what he needed and go.

But later, it was just about cost of living. He moved his mother to Miami after his father died-this was in 1992-and her bills just started piling up. At this point in his life, Bruce considered himself excellent at what he did, to the point that, in an irony even he was aware of, he had to start keeping his money in safe-deposit boxes. He even robbed a bank he had an account and safe-deposit box in, just to deflect interest, not that he thought any was coming his way. His mom, though, was in her seventies and the ailments kept compounding. So he did what any enterprising businessperson, or good son, would do: He made as much as he could and then quietly retired to Florida.

And it was a good life, at first. Bruce spent the next few years in a condo across the street from the house he bought his mother, so that way he could come over and look in on her, replace a lightbulb or two, even take her out to dinner once a week. Most nights, he drove his red Corvette convertible down to South Beach and threw money around, met a couple nice girls, even a couple guys he considered friends, guys he’d fish with, that sort of thing. And, of course, his friend Barry, whom he helped with a few start-up business ventures initially. Importing stolen items. Understanding weak points in the ceiling mortar of old buildings. Hosting pyramid schemes.

But there was something about retired life that just wasn’t as exciting as robbing banks. So he’d periodically case places, you know, just to stay in shape.

And then just in case happened. His mom got her first bout of cancer, in her lungs. Doctors took out most of her left lung, a bunch of lymph nodes under her arm, stuck her in chemo for six months, radiation for another three. Thing was, she had crap for health insurance, just like everyone Bruce knew, apart from Bruce. She had Medicare, but Bruce wanted her to have good doctors, not the hacks who got government money. So out of his own pocket he flew her up to Johns Hopkins, out to LA to Cedars, even to some quack in Montreal who thought she should eat only pork and drink only lime juice.

Then, one afternoon, sitting in the waiting room at the transfusion center over in Coconut Grove, a place his mom liked to go just because it had better magazines than the chemo spot in Aventura, he got an idea while hearing two nurses bitch about their husbands.

“You know,” one said-she was Cuban, so he always thought of her as Fidel-“my idiot husband, if he loses a toe, his insurance policy gives him five hundred thousand bucks. A whole foot, a million. Some nights, I think about just chopping off his big toe and getting out of town, you know?”

The other nurse, who was pretty, so Bruce just thought of her, and thought of her, and thought of her, said, “Dismemberment insurance is what keeps me sane. Bad day here, I think, cut off my pinkie, retire to the Caymans, get away from Peter forever!”

The nurses laughed and high-fived each other, but Bruce started thinking about the future, about taking care of his mom, about maybe doing something good after doing so much bad all these years.

When he got home that night, he called his insurance agent and upped his coverage, added dismemberment to the buffet, said he was doing so much fishing he was afraid he might lose something important. His agent laughed. He laughed. Even told his buddies on the boat one day. They all laughed.

And then he started plotting a way to lose a finger, maybe two, just to keep his mother in the station she’d grown accustomed to. He also thought one more good job would seal the deal.

Now, sitting in the car next to this whack job Fiona, he wasn’t sure any of it was worth it. She was pretty, for sure, but he was supposed to be in business with Michael Westen, who according to Barry, was like a Jedi. He liked the idea of hiring a Jedi to help him out. Figured he could tell a few lies, leave out some key points, what would Obi-Wan know? But then this Fiona girl… she frankly scared the crap out of him, so he just figured he’d tell the straight truth, see where that got him. Worse came to worst, he was in the same position as he was ten minutes ago. But she was cute, so there was that.

“In retrospect,” Bruce told Fiona, as they rounded yet another street filled with old ladies out on their porches talking on their portable phones or playing solitaire, “I should have just chopped my finger off and been done with it.”

“You’re enthralling me with your tale of woe,” Fiona said. “And most of it even seems plausible, except for the part about smart girls thinking you were cute, but what happened with the stash house?”

It was stupid, Bruce had to admit. After getting released from jail, minus a finger, minus the $500 he had to pay to lose the finger, but plus the $750,000 his insurance paid out that he was able to give to his mom for her bills while he was inside, he moved in with his mom, determined to just be a good son, which he felt he was. Good citizen, which meant he wouldn’t help his friend Barry do anything cash-based, just give him some occasional advice, maybe even get a job working at the Starbucks across the street, or the one next door, or even the one half a block away.

And for two months it worked. Well, apart from the Starbucks thing. He got a job instead working at Kinko’s, just to pass the time. But then his mom got sick again-this time the cancer was in her liver-and he started thinking about giving her some comfort. She was eighty-eight now and even if it all worked out with the cancer, how much longer did she have?

The thing was, he couldn’t go back to prison. And the last time he’d robbed a bank he found out the hard way that banks in Miami in the late nineties weren’t like crap-ass savings and loans in small towns in Oregon: You could break into the safe-deposit boxes, you just couldn’t get your ass back out, at least not with a broken leg. And that was twelve years ago. So Bruce went looking for a stash house, something run by drug dealers, so they’d be working from straight cash, and preferably crystal meth or coke dealers, since they frequently got high off of their own supply and couldn’t stand to be locked up at home.

It only took him a couple of weeks of scouting, first by going to the colleges at night and watching the dealers pull up to the fraternity houses to make drops, and then later tinkering around the hot spots in South Beach, looking for actors and actresses and models with runny noses and then seeing where they went. A couple of times he thought he’d found a good spot to rob, as they were in nice neighborhoods lined with expensive homes, but then he got to looking and realized that those nice places had security systems and Neighborhood Watch and talkative kids on bicycles who might notice something.

So when he finally found the ideal spot-a piece-of-crap house on the edge of the Everglades-and an ideal pair of marks-two stupid longhairs with modified motorcycles that roared like injured lions, which made them about as inconspicuous as Siegfried and Roy used to be, and who just let people walk in all day and buy drugs-he went to work. If he’d been younger, that would have meant getting city plans of the house, taking pictures of all the angles, maybe even enlisting a getaway car, but at sixty- five, and with these morons, it seemed easier to wait for them to leave for the night, break in through the ceiling-his go-to route, since these guys weren’t gonna call the cops anyway, and because there’s less absorbent surface to leave fingerprints and such-and rob the place.

Which is exactly what he did.

Two in the morning on a Saturday-your basic come-down time-both morons hopped on their bikes and headed out, messenger bags over their shoulders to make their drops in Miami, and Bruce headed in. Popped through roof tiles into the attic, out through the attic door with a rope ladder and into a bedroom closet, which was good because it was right where he needed to be. File cabinets of paperwork, boxes, bags-actual bags! — of cash. And drugs. Ziplocs filled with crystal meth, crack, pills. It was pitch-dark in the closet and the door was locked from the outside and, smartly, made of steel. On that measure, these boys were wise. Everything else, not so much.

Bruce took all the money, of course. Filled his car up. And then thought, you know, what drug dealer keeps paperwork? And so he broke back in and took the files, too, thinking he’d have a few more arrows in his quiver. Maybe some car information, house deed… who knew? He didn’t try to read anything in the dark, just took everything he could and got the hell out, thinking that if his mom got really sick, whatever he found would be worth something to someone. Plus, he really couldn’t lose another finger.

“How much money?” Fiona asked.

He hated to tell her, since he had the sense that maybe she’d robbed a few places in the past, too. “Three hundred,” he said.

“All of that for three hundred dollars?”

“Thousand,” he said. “Three hundred thousand.”

“Oh, my,” she said. Weird. Maybe she liked him, since her voice took on a much huskier tone. “And when did you find out it was a Ghouls’ house?”

“That night when I started going through the paperwork. I didn’t even think twice about it then, though,” Bruce said, though actually he’d been quite happy. “But then word got back to me that they were looking to find out who would be stupid enough to do the crime, lots of money being thrown around to find out, which meant that soon enough they’d find me. That’s why I just want to give what I have back, before they put it all together.”

Fiona reached into her bag and pulled out her cell phone. “Anything else you care to add?” she asked.

“Are you single?” he asked. Worth a try.

“I’m free any night for the right price,” she said, smiling, “and my price right now includes men with all of their fingers, so you just missed out.”

She dialed a number on her phone, still smiling, still giving off one vibe, but clearly not meaning it. She must have robbed banks, Bruce thought.

“Michael,” Fiona said, “he’s an idiot and he’s in trouble, but he’s not a liar.”