“I’m thinking when Reggie first arrived, he saw something right away that made him go charging up the stairs.” The cop reached into the pocket of his trench coat and pulled out a crumpled roll of paper. “Something that made him forget about shutting the front door, something that made him race upstairs, to check under that floorboard.”
“But you said nothing looked like a robbery,” Jerzy said. He relaxed his forehead. He was doing fine.
“NOT A REGULAR kind of robbery.” Detective Edrow Fluett tapped the crumpled roll of paper against Jerzy’s chest. “This was in Reggie’s hand. He must have ripped it off the window when he ran in.” He slipped off the rubber band and unrolled the first few inches for Jerzy to see.
“I make banners for the window,” the kid-man said.
“Like this one yesterday? Huge red letters saying fifty bucks back for each pair of returned boots?”
“Reggie didn’t know those boots were junk until he sold most of them. He said we would give fifty bucks back to anyone returning a pair. He said they’d buy from us forever if we did that.”
“That cheap bastard said fifty dollars back on an eight-dollar purchase?”
The kid-man nodded.
“So, all those smelly boots piled on the tables by the front window where someone coming in would see them first thing…?”
“Yesterday I took back just about every pair Reggie sold. Even yours.”
Edrow glanced down at his new fifty-dollar boots. “Fifty bucks back. I couldn’t believe it,” he said, looking up.
“Reggie said it would make you want to shop us again and again and again.”
“Reggie was a real son of a bitch,” Edrow said.
Jerzy shrugged.
Detective Edrow Fluett turned toward the door, but then he stopped.
THE COP HAD a slight smile on his face, and Jerzy was sure he was seeing into the center of his brain, where Jerzy kept the truth.
But the cop just smiled wider. “What about all those signs on the walclass="underline" ‘All Sales Final’?”
Jerzy felt he could afford a little smile of his own.
“Reggie had a change in his heart.”
The Herald by Leslie Glass
The two deaths occurred sometime in the early morning, in the parking lot of the public boat ramp off Fruitville and Route 41, also known as the North Trail. The bodies were discovered by a homeless man who’d spent the night at the Goodwill facility on 10th Street a few blocks from the bay and who was prowling the waterfront in search of some peace and quiet. He saw blood on the driver’s-side window of a Ford truck and wandered over to investigate. He viewed the bodies from both sides of the vehicle and checked the doors before threading back through the traffic on the North Trail to the Chevron station on the other side, where he told the attendant to call the police. Then he took off.
ON WEDNESDAY, THE hump day of the week, Paradise Major Case detective Alfie Rose had not been expecting any excitement beyond his juvie mission, which got him up before he liked seeing the light of day. He’d gotten an early call from Roy Sultan, an officer responding to an attempted break-in who knew Rose was familiar with the would-be perpetrator involved. Bleary-eyed, Alfie hurried out to confront Jeff Burt, a tattooed kid he wanted to save from the system. That’s how he happened to be on Bee Ridge in the parking lot of Persnickety Cat, talking alternatives with a boy who could go either way. Drink and dope his way into a flying leap off the Skyway Bridge, or face up to the human fucking condition and get his ass back in school. It was seven a.m., and there was still time. Sometimes, Alfie saw himself through a camera’s eye and thought, This is my life. Unmarried cop, in a car with a kid who looked like something out of an eighties punk band, hoping to do a tiny bit of good for someone who needed a little extra help.
Alfie pulled into the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot and bought two glazed donuts and some coffee while Jeff remained silent. Then he set out the alternatives for Jeff in a matter-of-fact voice that was far calmer than he felt. No kid in free-fall really thinks he’s going to end up in a body bag, and Alfie wanted to get that across in a measured sort of way while eating something he knew might clog up his arteries and kill him down the road. He’d sung the same old tune to Jeff before to no good effect, so he felt a powerful sneeze of rage coming on at the early hour and at his inability to be truly useful. Just like his dog, Alfie registered his negative feelings through his nose. But it wasn’t just the kid and the morning that were bothering his sinuses.
It was spring in Paradise, and the air was filled with all kinds of shit. There weren’t supposed to be seasons in Florida, but seasonal changes occurred there nonetheless, Alfie had learned in his first year. Before the hurricane phase officially began, a mammoth rebirth of plants big and small started in March and dragged on right through June. Sometimes in the morning Alfie’s car, parked in a carport, would be green or yellow or red with pollen that had blown in during the night and covered everything like sandstorms in the desert. The stuff coming out of the trees could choke a horse.
Come on, speak to me. Alfie started drumming his fingers on his thigh. Jeff had to say something. That was the rule. He wouldn’t let the kid’s silent, guilty, hangdog, shoot-me-in-the-head expression end the discussion. Silence only signaled a postponement of the inevitable – another incident to follow. Shit, Alfie didn’t have all day. He resisted the urge to glance at his watch.
Never mind what Jeff had been planning for his morning, or how the fifteen-year-old had talked himself into the rightness of what he’d been doing – Alfie didn’t want him back in an orange suit, in front of a judge who wouldn’t be as understanding the third time in two months. It was hardly a major case, but he was taking the time. Also Alfie liked the boy’s clueless mom, Sharon.
Alfred Rose had been in the cops up north, then in the military. He’d seen war, and after he came home, he drifted to Florida for the weather and joined the Paradise PD, where until recently he’d been a detective in Vehicular Homicide. Six months ago, he’d pulled Jeff out of the car wreck that killed his dad. The two had been on their way to a father/son golf tournament out at Foxfire Country Club near I-75 when they’d been broadsided by a pool-cleaning truck driven by an illegal alien without a license.
The fatal car wreck was the kind of case Alfie had worked for the last three years, every single one a catastrophe. In the Burt family tragedy, the driver of the truck had been drunk at the time of the accident. Despite evidence to the contrary, the owner of the vehicle claimed it was stolen and he’d never seen the guy before. As for Jeff and his dad, the father/son golfing team had been a good one, and they’d been hoping to win that day. It was a real nasty case, and neither Jeff nor Sharon was doing well.
Still, if Alfie hadn’t had a promotion, his connection to the family would have ended there. A few months later, however, Alfie was promoted to the Major Case Squad, and Jeff started crossing his path as a juvie, breaking into shops, looking for cash to buy dope. He sported Goth tattoos and dyed black hair, and didn’t look as if he had enough to eat. Alcohol and dope were one thing, but Goth didn’t go down well in Paradise. The grieving Sharon didn’t get the role of parenting a kid on a suicide ride, and Alfie knew he was going to have to talk to her about wising up and getting some help. Court-ordered rehab was what he had in mind.
When Jeff refused to say much more than the fact that he was sorry, Alfie broke down again, gave the boy his strongest “Come to Jesus” talk, then drove him to Riverview High School and watched him melt – as much as a Goth at Riverview could melt – into a crowd of pretty preppy-looking kids. Jeff entered what Alfie thought was the right building and didn’t look back, so Alfie hoped he might stay. It didn’t change his mind about the six-month program, though. His box squawked, and he answered.