LITMIR.BIZ

       5

      By three o’clock, they were carrying somewhere near $4 million. Five sacks of cash, two smaller satchels of coins. A bag of food stamps. Typical day. Savings and Loan, Publix supermarket, NationsBank, a check-cashing joint, another supermarket. Stan driving, Benito riding shotgun. The Winchester in the rack beside him. Following procedure, same shuffle at every stop.

      Benito, the courier, wearing his Kevlar vest, carrying a .38, hauled the empty canvas bags from the truck at every stop, brought them back full, while Stan stayed in the truck with the doors locked. Benito got seventy-five cents more an hour for taking that risk. Which brought him up to eight bucks per. Stan could’ve had the job if he’d wanted it, and, God knows, he needed the money. But he passed. He had something better in mind. Something that required him to stay behind the wheel.

      Usually, they made a little chitchat between stops, though today Stan wasn’t feeling conversational. His Kevlar vest was tight, lungs unable to expand. Felt like a hot wire was wriggling in his left armpit.

      ‘Your father-in-law driving you crazy again? Talking his bullshit?’

      Stan said no, the old man was fine.

      ‘Then it’s your wife,’ Benito said. ‘What happened, she find out about your little sugar on the side? Jennifer what’s-her-name?’

      ‘Shut up about that.’

      ‘Hey, I got no problem with adultery. Just because I’m faithful to my wife, it don’t mean I can’t appreciate a man chasing pussy. Wife like yours, I understand completely. Pretty, but no interest in sex. Hey, I’ll take an ugly one any day. Ugly and horny, those are the best. That’s the mistake you made, Stan – you married a pretty one. She looked hot, but she’s dry where it counts. Ham and cheese without mayo. Those are the worst. I don’t blame you for screwing around, man. Makes perfect sense to me.’

      ‘Shut the fuck up, Benito.’

      ‘Oh, I got it. I know what it is. This is the fucking day you’re leaving, running off with her, your little sugar tit. It is, isn’t it? I guessed it.’

      ‘Wrong again, asshole. Just another day in paradise. Nothing special whatsoever.’

      ‘Don’t lie to me, man. I can see it in your face, like something crawled up your ass and died. Looks like maybe it was a porcupine or something. That what it is, man, a porcupine up your ass?’

      ‘Yeah, that’s it,’ Stan said. ‘A porcupine.’

      ‘Hey, you don’t want to confide in your partner, okay. We ride together five years, tell each other every sad story, expose ourselves down to the bottoms of our hearts, sure, that’s okay. You’re hurting about something; your mouth is all twisted up, bones sticking out from your flesh where I can see them. Then you just turn your back on me, shut me out, slam the frigging door in my face. Hey, I can deal with it. I got my own thoughts. I know how to amuse myself.’

      ‘So do it.’

      ‘Yeah, yeah. I’ll just sit here and play back all the women I slept with this past year. Picture their naked bodies. Put them up on the big screen in my head. Remember how they smelled, what they tasted like, all the details. I don’t need to talk to you, man. You just drive and be quiet and let me picture my women.’

      ‘Fine,’ Stan said. ‘Let’s see how long you can keep your mouth shut. Maybe you can beat your personal best of eleven seconds.’

      Benito was quiet for a moment, then said, ‘You’re not thinking of doing something stupid, are you?’

      Stan kept his eyes on the back of a red Cadillac in his lane.

      ‘’Cause if you are, you should tell me, so I can get out right here.’

      ‘What the hell’re you talking about, you nimrod?’

      ‘That look you got, it’s the same way my old man looked the night he stuck his freaking pistol in his mouth. I don’t want to be riding with no guy has suicide on his mind.’

      Stan looked over at the little man. Curly black Cuban hair, dark complexion. Might be a mulatto, for all Stan knew. Long eyelashes. Kind of guy you’d see on the street, you’d say he was queer, only Stan knew Benito was married, with four bambinos. Big roly-poly wife, twice Benito’s size. There couldn’t be any naked women in his head because his wife took up the whole damn movie screen.

      ‘I’m fine,’ Stan said. ‘I just got things on my mind is all. Just drop it.’

      Benito snapped his fingers, then thumped the side of his skull several times.

      ‘Shit, of course. Now I remember. It’s the Bloody Rapist. He killed another girl and now your old lady’s all wound up, gonna start working all her freaking overtime again. Stomping around, pissed off. And old Stan’s gotta catch a bunch of shit for what some other guy did, gotta stay home every night with the shit-for-brains father-in-law, can’t get away to suck on his sugar tit. Am I right? Huh? Do I know you through and through, or what?’

      Stan shot him another look.

      ‘Eleven seconds, remember? Why don’t you see if you can set an all-time record, Benny. Maybe the rest of the fucking day, for instance. That would truly impress me.’

      Benito pouted for a moment, then pressed his lips together, made a zipper sign across them, then twisted a key for good measure and tossed it away, and sat back in his padded seat.

      Stan steered them out onto Biscayne Boulevard. They were way the hell up in Aventura. All the condo commandos out in their Cadillacs and Mercedes, prowling for bargains. He got into the right lane, laid in behind a slow-moving Buick stuffed with blue-haired discount hunters, and worked through the gears from stoplight to stoplight, traveling south toward 151st Street, where they’d pick up Dixie, then 135th, and head west over to 1-95. Twenty minutes, fifteen if the traffic was light, and they’d be at the spot. Ground zero. And it would all go down. He was crossing over the line from a normal law-abiding citizen to a major-league felon. That is, if Stan’s goddamn nerves held.

      You tried to set up a perfect crime, you were doomed to fail. That’s how Stan saw it. Crimes got fouled up by little things that came zooming in unexpectedly – some microscopic dust particle that got in the gears and caused them to grind to a halt just at the exact moment you needed to go forward. Or a stray electron misfires and fries the circuitry at the crucial second. No such thing as a perfect crime. Never was, never would be.

      Stan knew what he was talking about. He’d read crime books all his life, ever since one afternoon when he was a little kid dumped at the library by his mother while she went off to the bar with one of her soldier boyfriends. Stan snooped around for a while and, what do you know, first book he pulls off the shelf, flips it open, on page one there’s a naked woman’s body found in a field. Who was she? How’d she get there? Why would anybody kill her? Eight years old, he takes the book over to a corner, sits down, and starts reading, ears getting hot, heart quivering. Trying to picture himself walking through a field, coming upon a naked woman’s body. The whole thing grabbing him, not letting him go till his mother showed up an hour or two later and hauled him off. Soon as he could get back, he was in the library, hunting that book down. He found it, read the rest and was still hungry. Finally, working up his nerve, he asked the librarian if she might have anything else like the book he’d just read. ‘So, you like the crime field, young man?’ she said. It felt like a trick question, but finally he said, yeah, he guessed so. ‘Oh, so do I,’ she said. ‘I just adore a good murder mystery.’ Old woman, could be his grandmother. She wore the same dress every day, dark blue with white flowers, and she’s taking him under her wing, steering him around the room, raving about this murder book and that one.

      From then on, he was hooked. True crime, crime magazines, crime stories

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