Burn Scars, Eddie Generous [read full novel txt] 📗

on his shelf—until one of the familial kids winged a hockey puck through it. The steadiness and constant, unwavering speed. Rusty was in awe, it was like six Carys.

Truck emptied, Cary joined Charles inside the warehouse while the laborers stood outside near Rusty and the trucks. Rusty accepted a refill to his paper Tim Horton’s cup from a huge, stainless steel Fast Charlie’s branded thermos.

“Man, y’all are pretty good,” he said. “You do these night deals all the times?”

A man, maybe fifty with a salt and pepper beard, smiled at this. “No, not often.”

“You sure do boogie.” Rusty slurped his coffee—bold as a punch to the temple.

“Mr. Ranger is the kind of employer you work hard for or you get gone,” the bearded one said.

Another man, maybe thirty, said, “We earn every penny we get and Mr. Ranger respects our effort and the skill by which we carry out our tasks.”

Rusty sipped the straight black coffee and grimaced some at the words. “Our boss wa—is a shithead. We got one guy who takes a dump every shift and another who’ll park his truck on a back road for a nap whenever he wants. We had a guy quit this week, he was tweaking…” Rusty trailed, didn’t want to talk about Jim McManus, and sometimes his mouth did run like a river over a waterfall. “Cary’s the only one of us worth a shit at the job.”

The men looked at each other and then to salt and pepper beard. “That’s not really our concern,” he said.

These guys might as well have been wearing thousand dollar suits and riding in BMWs, selling futures and bonds or whatever those smart assholes on TV did. They didn’t fit as a delivery crew. They were almost like cyborgs, so efficient and speaking so sternly.

Rusty, thinking of their ill fit as deliverymen despite their skill, said, “You’re not cops or something, suckering us in.”

Salt and pepper beard grinned. “Sure, you’re under arrest.”

Rusty smiled, but didn’t feel it. There was a pause in the action and the air became very thin. The seconds ticked by like a cooling engine. Rusty made sure to hold his smile, hold, hold, hold.

The other guys laughed and eased the tension. Right then Rusty wished he were at home in bed and everything was finally over, or he’d wake up and the last week had all been a dream. Even with the promise of money just around the corner.

Sunrise was a few hours away but that particular industrial section of a particularly industrious city was already starting its day. The streets got louder by the minute. Trucks and rough sedans passed the warehouse and kept on going toward the other huge buildings on the waterfront. A van dropped off six men at a stop sign and they started off in different directions, feathers sprouting all over their dirty pants and sweaters like Rusty had just missed a werechicken transformation. A few crows sat on the hydro lines crossing the neighborhood looking down upon the world with obsidian eyes and great patience. A few dozen seagulls slept on the damp planks with black sandpaper stripping on a waterfront loading dock next to the parking lot.

Rusty was going to ask about how much bird shit they had to clean off their cars at the end of the week when Cary emerged from the warehouse with a black and gold Time Magazine duffle bag. He was grinning ear to ear despite the obvious weight of the bag’s contents, or more likely because of it.

“Heya,” he said and kept walking.

Rusty lifted his coffee cup to give a second thanks to the eerie crew and then stepped in line and followed to the pickup truck. The bag sat in the slim middle seat of the truck’s bench—most of the broken glass had settled into the crack at the back or on the floor.

Rusty climbed in and felt the undeniable draw of the bag. “Can I look?” he asked.

“Sure, but have it zipped before we hit the highway.”

Rusty pulled the zipper and eyeballed the stacks of tens, twenties, and fifties. Nothing brand new, a few of the bills were from older issuances, as if perhaps Fast Charlie was the kind of guy who had barrels of money buried in his yard. None of this was cop money, none of it traceable—he knew all about that from cable TV. Once Cary pulled onto the street, Rusty swung his belt over him. He continued thumbing the contents of the bag until he had to stop. It wouldn’t do to have a single one of those bills shoot out the window.

“Get pulled over with that much, we’re going to jail and they don’t even need to know what we’ve actually done.” Cary hit the button on stereo and turned it up loud enough that it drowned out some of the whipping winds as he pulled up the ramp, back to the highway.

Rusty reached around the floor and gathered arrant trash and paper. He stuffed it into the Timbits box. He sat still for a handful of seconds when exhaustion hit him like tsunami wave. Sometimes coffee worked opposite to what he wanted when he was totally exhausted and there was a ten-minute window where it was virtually impossible to keep awake. He looked at Cary and thought, doesn’t need me for a while. Cary was driving and bobbing along to something Rusty couldn’t name, though had heard it plenty enough times before. Rusty fought, but lost, and yawned, and then blink, blink, blinked.

—

“Morning, sunshine,” Cary said, they were pulling into a McDonald’s well north of the last of the cities and the heavy-traffic highways, about twenty-minutes from Andover. The town of Artville was dead aside from the slim activity beneath the all-night golden arches that loomed, a lighthouse in a storm beneath the canopy of pre-dawn darkness.