My Favorite Suspects: Part 13
Nothing seemed unusual in there, unless by unusual Luna meant a small wedding album with an ice pick driven through it.
Thanks, everyone, for the support, while I’ve put MFS on the back burner. Getting words on the page has been much tougher than it’s been in years. And yet again, while reviewing previous chapters for continuity checks, I saw the likes and comments you’d put there, and it inspired me to continue.
Deep breath. We’re close to the end, now. Here we go.
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Later, after sundown, I stood at a bus stop a few blocks from my place. I wasn't waiting for a bus. A pair of age-yellowed headlights separated from the stream of headlights moving down East Ave in the darkness, and the lights became a gray Hyundai SUV, which rolled to a stop at the curb, right in front of me, the brakes chirping.
The passenger window whirred down.
Luna said, "Get in."
I didn't recognize her, again. This time she’d tucked her hair under a filthy baseball cap and dirt streaked her face.
I'd been going along with my plan— her plan, whatever—so far. It’s not that I was cool with all of it, with the getting bossed around, the not knowing the bigger picture. I'll admit that Luna had physical attractiveness, had the whole "woman of mystery" vibe, so I’d never deny she was one of my reasons for sticking around. The real reason, I reminded myself, was Miller.
I still had to take him down.
Luna snapped her fingers. “Helloooo?”
However, after running the gauntlet in the supermarket, and racing back to the church in the borrowed-stolen van, I'd reached a limit with her charisma.
I decided to push back.
"Why are you wearing a Waste Management vest?" I said.
"Look. Get in. Or walk away and forget everything. You've got until the light changes." She pointed at the traffic signal.
The light facing us was red. Against the night sky, the cross-street's light went from green to yellow.
As our light went green, I got in the passenger side of the SUV. I swear we were rolling before I brought my trailing foot up.
"What's going on?" I said, struggling with a recalcitrant seat belt.
"I'll get to that in a minute. You're wearing old clothes, right?"
"Sure," I said, appreciating that she thought I would own new clothes. I checked out the interior of the SUV and guessed it was another vehicle she’d borrowed or stolen. "Why does it smell like hot garbage in here?"
"Because it's hot and there are bags of trash in the back."
I twisted around. Behind the back seat, in the glare of oncoming headlights, I made out the crumpled shapes of black plastic bags.
She drove to a 24-hour self-storage facility, the kind with rows of storage units like garages, surrounded by chain link fence and gates that opened with the wave of an RFID badge at a reader.
"I thought we'd do this from your apartment."
"I'm not here to socialize. I'm here to work."
“Fine. How are we going to watch the video feed?"
"It’s handled." She crawled the SUV down the rows of storage units, her eyes in constant motion. So far, we had the place to ourselves. “I do this for a living, Price Check.”
We stopped at a storage unit on the end of a row. Luna shut off the SUV and got out. I followed. She tossed me a key on a leather lanyard and pointed to the storage unit. While I unlocked the unit and hauled the big metal door upward, she opened the back of the SUV and began pulling out plastic bags that sagged and sloshed.
She handed me a bag and pointed inside the storage unit.
Inside, Luna set two battery-powered camp lights on the floor, throwing ominous shadows on the bare walls behind us. The unit was otherwise empty. She tossed a greasy tarp onto the concrete floor. We spread it out.
"What're we doing?" I said.
"Multitasking." She set up an iPad to one side. The screen showed the view from the surveillance camera I'd set up earlier that day.
"What’re we looking for?"
"Anything unusual." She sliced open a bag with a box cutter and the contents oozed onto the tarp.
We each had three bags.
I dragged one to a corner of the tarp. The plastic parted with a swipe of my box cutter. Nothing came out. Grimacing, I pushed on the bag. It slowly defecated a wad of linguine, blobs of rancid meat, and wilted romaine, all held together, like ligaments, by dental floss, lengths of fabric or window sash, and what looked like blood-soaked Ace bandages. I fought back my gag reflex and dug into the gaping wound with rubber-gloved hands. Sticky black liquid dribbled and formed a pool around the opening. Nothing seemed unusual in there, unless by unusual Luna meant a small wedding album with an ice pick driven through it. (She did not.)
"Think about it," I said. "Who buys an ice pick these days?"
"Move on, Price Check."
I dropped the album and picked up the second bag. It contained mostly dry stuff, or stuff that had once included liquid that had dried and crusted over. I pulled out handfuls of thin strips of paper. They looked like office documents that had been run through a shredder. Each strip had letters and numbers.
Now, Luna showed more enthusiasm, grabbing the papers from my hands as fast as I could pull them out. She took the strips to a cleaner corner of the tarp and laid them flat. She picked up a lamp and held it close to the strips. She hummed a familiar movie theme while arranging the strips beside each other in different patterns.
"Good?" I said.
"Hell yeah. Money shot.”
I noticed motion on the iPad.
In the video feed, the view swiveled slowly around until figures appeared. The grainy quality of the video reminded me of all the nights spent watching the surveillance feeds in Miller’s office. I’d never had a view of the loading dock, however. One of the people wore a white button-down shirt and a red tie thrown over one shoulder: Miller.
"Here we go," I said.
The camera view stabilized. Miller and the night crew were unloading the trucks. It felt like I hadn’t seen him in a month. It had been a week.
The video buffered. The screen went black. When the image returned, Miller stood alone on the dock. He appeared to be talking with someone out of view of the camera. He faced the inside of the supermarket, so he must have been talking to someone on the night crew. After a brief exchange, Miller looked down at his own iPad and flicked at the screen.
Behind Miller was the open trailer, the doors swung fully around the sides, harsh shadows cast from the overhead lighting obscuring the depth of it. Four large boxes remained on the trailer, stacked neatly against one wall.
A man approached from off-camera. He came from the opposite direction of the supermarket, which meant he’d climbed up the steps of the loading dock. At first, I thought it was the driver. Drivers sat out the process because union regulations prevented them from unloading. Then three other guys appeared behind the first guy, and I knew the driver wasn’t involved. For one thing, those four beefy guys wouldn’t fit in the cab, even if they clown-car’d the operation.
Miller turned toward them and put his back to the camera.
The four men were all business. Three split off to the left, right, and back of Miller. One stayed in front: A big guy, shaped like a brick, no neck, muscles stretching out his black tee shirt, a round belly hanging over the belt of his cargo pants. Obviously in charge.
When I pointed at the big guy, Luna said, “I know him. He's Soft.”
“He doesn’t look soft.”
“It’s his street name,” she said. “Because he never raises his voice.”
“Why’s that?”
“Doesn’t have to.”
Soft loomed over Miller. Miller pointed back and forth between Soft and the last four boxes on the truck. I wished there had been audio. I didn’t need it, though, to recognize Miller bluffing. Miller was not on his game. Soft seemed unimpressed, too, and slowly shook his head.
Soft grabbed Miller’s hand in mid-gesture and cranked it around like it was a pool noodle. Miller fell to his knees. He dropped the iPad and tried to support the trapped wrist with his other hand but Soft cranked harder.
Miller writhed from the pain.
“What the hell?” I said. I’d been bullied throughout school—four-eyes this, fatso that—but that usually involved shoving and a haymaker or two. I’d never seen a wrist lock, much less one done so quickly and effortlessly.
“Actually not the worst I’ve seen from Soft,” Luna said. “My guess is Miller’s short on his quota.”
“Wait. Thieves have quotas?”
“It’s like any job, Price Check. Except the highs are higher and the lows are lower than you can imagine right now.”
I waited for more. She stayed focused on the screen and ignored me. What she’d said didn’t bother me as much as what the phrase “right now” meant.
I watched Soft’s lips move on the video and tried to read them. Miller nodded his head repeatedly and enthusiastically. Then Soft let go. He pointed to the cigarettes and the other three guys hustled the boxes from the truck. When they lifted the boxes, the logos of cigarette manufacturers were visible on the sides.
"There," Luna said. "Now you have Miller making a deal for the cigarettes from the truck. It’s everything you need to take him down. I’ll put this on a private YouTube channel for—”
"Everything? What about the paper strips? What about all this trash? What’s this for?"
Luna laughed. "You crack me up, Price Check. It's got nothing to do with Miller. It's for another job."
"Another what?”
“Job. I told you I was multitasking.”
“Then… you owe me for helping you.”
"Not at all. This is training. You need training." She gathered the paper strips and carefully sandwiched them inside a large plastic binder. “And the next part of your training is taking Miller down."
Luna glanced at me and she didn’t like the look on my face.
“Oh, Price Check. You’re not having second thoughts, are you?”
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Use the Previous and Next buttons at the end of each post to navigate through all posts on My Favorite Suspects, or use the Story Guide for an overview of this book and list of all chapters.
Stay tuned for the next chapter!