The Big Get-Even Read online

  Inside were some two hundred gold Panda coins, thirty grams each, issued by the Chinese government. At current market value, each coin was worth about thirteen hundred dollars, although the guy I regularly sold them to, a shady coin dealer named Bert Deluca, would give me only a thousand apiece. The discount was consideration for his keeping the transactions unrecorded. So the total contents of the chest were worth somewhere between two hundred thousand and a quarter of a million dollars.

  Not too many lawyers had an actual golden parachute—especially a lawyer deemed bankrupt by every court in the land.

  2

  Returning home in the repaired Impala, I had occasion to think about my future. Converting the latest gold Panda had turned my thoughts in that direction. Minus the garage guy’s share, the remaining cash from the thousand that Deluca had given me weighed heavily in my pocket. Once, that sum would have represented a not particularly extravagant night on the town, a few bottles of good champagne, and some C-notes tucked into the waistband of a stripper’s thong. Now it felt like one more bloody slice out of a dwindling legacy. I would piss the money away on boring necessities, maybe springing for something as wild as a movie ticket and a few happy-hour drinks at Danny’s Cavern. This was a train of thought that always left me feeling numb, angry, confused, and helpless.

  After being permanently disbarred, I could do nothing with all my expensive legal education and years of experience at GG&S. To all my old contacts, the back-slapping guys I had schmoozed and boozed with, I was radioactive waste. I had given up junk, and confronting myself in the mirror each morning, I felt anew, with genuine surprise, that the craving had truly and completely left my bones. So I couldn’t even dream my time away in an opiate haze. No other pursuit really appealed to me. Since my teenage years, I had never had a predilection for anything but making as much easy money as fast as I could, and had chosen law school as the quickest route to that goal. And then I had chosen larceny as an even faster path. I supposed I could force myself to adapt to some new and decent-paying career. Pick up some fresh skills. Job training, sure. A new degree in bleeding-heart social work, maybe. Tractor-trailer driving school. Although, with my criminal record, the prospect of someone hiring me was no sure thing. Maybe I could buy into a glamorous and lucrative Dairy Queen franchise. But no likely alternative career was going to get me back into the stratosphere of one-percenter wealth and luxury that I had formerly inhabited.

  A quarter-million dollars in gold. It sure sounded like a lot, even for someone who had boosted five million—until you realized that the stash was all there was or would ever be. That sum worked out to twenty-five K a year for ten years—a decade at chump wages.

  My trapped mind ran down familiar channels, like a rat trying to earn some science cheese. Maybe I should think about relocating to a different country after my parole ended. Some stable, peaceful tropical place where life was easy and expenses were a fraction of what they were here. Beautiful half-naked native girls serving exotic drinks while I lolled in a hammock, shaded by palm trees. But did any such place actually exist anymore in this crazy, dangerous world? And what would such a backwater offer in the way of sophisticated pleasures that wouldn’t get stale after the hundredth go-round?

  I put the Impala in park and shut off the engine. Walking to the front door of Ralph’s house—I refused to think of it as mine; that would be just too depressing—down the cracked pavement whose summer-strengthened weeds I kept meaning to grub up, I continued uselessly going over my limited options. It was like riding a carousel past the same unreachable brass ring that gleamed just beyond my too-short child’s arms.

  Still distracted, I had my key in the lock when a big, heavy hand dropped onto my shoulder from behind, even though I had heard no one approaching.

  My first thought was Anton Paget. He’d been spying on me in his sneaky parole-officer way and saw me cash in that Panda, and now I was royally fucked.

  My second thought was that a pizza-delivery guy got shot a block away from here only a week ago.

  My third thought was that I should slowly turn around in a nonthreatening manner and find out who this was.

  Who it was, was the mook. The guy whose life I had saved back in December, over half a year ago.

  But today he didn’t look so mookish, and I began to form a new, more respectful opinion of him that would deepen with time.

  No longer slumped dead in the driver’s seat, and standing much too close inside my personal space, he proved to be a few inches taller than I. He had a lot of muscle on him, and some comfortable fat around the gut. Wherever he had been for the eight months since his overdose, it probably hadn’t included the Fashion Institute of Technology. The electric-blue silk shirt, featuring various images of cavorting African wildlife, showed off even more chest foliage than his winter sweater had. He had dialed back the jewelry to a single silver Italian horn on a silver chain around his neck, but the decorative cornicello was as big as my middle finger. His sleek brown pants were of some form-hugging synthetic that displayed his topography in more lurid detail than if he had worn one of those Speedo marble bags. Brown tasseled loafers, sans socks, completed the ensemble.

  Only after I had taken all this in, with the stranger’s hairy paw still draped familiarly on my shoulder, did I notice that he was smiling, putting me vaguely in mind of a snarling grizzly. Okay, that was supposed to make me feel a tad more reassured about his innocent intentions.

  “I’m Stan Hasso,” he said, pushing a shaggy brown lock off his forehead as if to reveal a confirmatory trademark. “You’re Glen McClinton, and you saved my fucking life.”

  “Um, yes, that would appear to be correct. No big deal.”

  The ursine face darkened. “Whatta you mean, ‘no big deal’? It was a huge fucking deal! For me, anyhow, it sure was!”

  I tried to back straight through the closed door. “Yes, of course,” I stammered. “Saving someone’s life is a very big deal! I just meant, it was, uh, no particular burden on me. No obligations. Happy to do it. Any old time.”

  Stan Hasso grew friendly again. “Okay, so we agree. You saved my life, and I owe you big-time. So listen, I’m gonna do something good for you. To repay you, like.”

  In a fleeting moment of baseless absurdity, I pictured Stan Hasso introducing me to some woman, a friend of his own hypothetical girlfriend, and the four of us going on a double date.

  In the months to come, I would recall that visionary flash and marvel at its off-kilter accuracy.

  Stan Hasso leaned in close to me, his thick, spicy cologne swamping my senses and even causing my eyes to blur. “How’d you like to get rich, Glen? Five million dollars rich. Sound good to you?”

  At first, I couldn’t think. This whole freaky scene was playing out as if he had been reading my mind for the past few hours.

  But when my brain got revolving again, I said, “Stan, my friend, let’s go inside, where you can tell me more.”

  3

  Inside the stuffy house, I opened some windows and got two beers out of the fridge. The cheap stuff I could afford. I didn’t bother with glasses. Such delicate hostess touches had vanished with my old life. I didn’t think Stan Hasso would mind a cold, sweaty bottle on a hot August day, and he didn’t.

  Uncle Ralph’s house had no air-conditioning, so I set a grimy plastic box fan wobbling in one window to push the heat around.

  Hasso had gravitated inevitably to the most comfortable chair in the room, one suitable for his bulk. The parlor featured Aunt Gillian’s best furniture, ground down by the unforgiving years into a suite of flophouse castoffs. Uncle Ralph’s slovenly lifestyle had not been kind to Aunt Gillian’s pride and joy. Unfortunately, she had favored for her set white fabric dotted with small blue flowers, and it showed every stain of the subsequent decade. Sprawled with his legs stretching almost to the center of the small space, Hasso resembled some Long Island disco-era prince u
nwinding after a funky time on the dance floor.

  I took the seat farthest from him and closest to the front door. He seemed harmless, even a potential new best friend, especially if he was somehow going to put five million dollars in my hands. But as with all dealings involving money, tempers could flare, and Hasso’s earlier lapse into anger had shown me he might easily find a reason to do me harm. It did not escape me that I sat here, incommunicado with anyone else who might care about my welfare, sharing a beer with an unknown ex-con and holding seven hundred and fifty dollars in my pocket. In these situations, having saved a guy’s life bought only so much goodwill.

  And yet, I could not regard Hasso as a menace or a scammer. Sure, such a guy would always be looking out for himself. But some oddly ingenuous, even faintly naive vibe underneath the bluster convinced me he might also do me some good along his selfish path.

  I didn’t open the conversation. After draining a third of his drink in the first pull, he said, “Let me tell you a few things about Stan Hasso, so you can get an idea of where I’m coming from.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But you have to promise me one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You will never refer to yourself in the third person again.”

  Hasso’s face flashed confusion, irritation, and amusement in quick succession. “You got it.” He squirmed his butt around as if to reconfigure the ridge formed over the years by Uncle Ralph’s bony ass groove, and began.

  “That night in December when I almost cashed my ticket, I had just got out of the can. Released that morning. Served three years for felony arson. When I went in, I had a habit. And the first thing I did when I got out was score. I’d been dreaming of a fix for three years, you know, even though I was clean after the first few months in the stir. Kept telling myself I needed and deserved it. It had gotten to the point where the dream had a life of its own. Looking back, I can see I didn’t even really have any desire to shoot up. At least, not like when I was truly hooked. It was just like the dream was some old debt that had to be paid, or sort of a fuck-you to them for putting me away. Like my mind was an old video replaying itself. I was gonna get even with everyone, even if I had to cut off my own dick to do it. Any of this making any sense to you?”

  I tried to figure out if Hasso’s question implied anything about my own junkie past. How much did he know about me? He had tracked me down here, after all. Well, maybe the depth of his knowledge about me would come out later.

  I thought about my own detox, how I had harbored similar fantasies and compulsions and anger that, luckily for me, had died out before I got released. Somehow, I had seen through the deceptions of my own addiction before I got into a place where I could resurrect old bad habits.

  “Yeah,” I said, “I hear you.”

  Hasso killed another third of his beer. “But Jesus, I hadn’t realized how much the frigging scene had changed since I went in! Dealers these days, they don’t think twice about cutting their stuff with enough fentanyl to croak a bull. People are offing themselves left and right, when all they want is a nice high!”

  Hasso sounded genuinely indignant at the injustice of it all, revealing again that hidden and faintly ridiculous nobility of soul and sense of injured justice.

  “So to cut to the chase, I got a hot shot like nothing I ever had before. And maybe, too, being clean, my body couldn’t take what it used to. Whatever. You saw what happened. I OD’d right there at the stoplight where I put the spike in. If it wasn’t for you, I’d be rotting today in one of those number-only plots with the other nameless street trash.”

  “Like I said, I was happy to be of help. So, no family, then?”

  “Not one lousy second cousin or ex-sister-in-law to claim my unholy carcass. It’s just me against the world. I don’t even have a kindly old uncle, like some folks I could name.”

  He smiled big at the undeniable and purposeful hit. It seemed Mr. Hasso had done some homework.

  “When I got out of the hospital, I expected to end up back in the can. But I lucked out. The judge was a goody-goody. She stuck me in this new kind of diversion program. That’s where I been for the past seven months. Learning all about how to be a decent member of society by avoiding all my codependent triggering shit and how to reprogram all my failure modes, like. Then, when I finally got some free time, it still took me a couple of weeks to track you down and scope you out. The cops weren’t too liberal with information. I had to pull in a few favors.”

  “This is your town, then?”

  “Yeah, that’s why I came straight back to the city after they turned me loose from the calaboose. Figured I knew the territory.”

  “You planned on, uh, resuming your old line of work?”

  “Torching stuff? Nah, that’s out. Not that I couldn’t pick right up again. I didn’t lose my touch. Best firebug this side of the Mississippi. No, they only caught me because of a tip. A bastard of a snitch turned me in—the very guy who hired me for that last job, in fact.”

  As swiftly as a tropical storm, a cloud of pure hatred passed over the face of Stan Hasso. I felt relieved to be sitting at some distance from him, and also not to have a place on his shit list.

  “So that part of my career relates directly to how you and me and a couple of essential helpers I got in mind are gonna get rich. You’ll hear all about it at the proper time. But the only way you’re gonna understand how this’ll pay off for us is to take a little tour.”

  My voice cracked a bit. “Um … tour?”

  “C’mon now, Glen, don’t go all taffy-ass on me. I don’t mean anything more than what I’m saying. We just need to drive around town for an hour to scope out a few sites. That sound like a small enough investment for a five-million payback?”

  “Well, when you put it that way …” I had a sobering thought. “Should we be seen together, though? Two ex-cons associating?”

  “Don’t sweat it; no one’s gonna recognize us. It’s not like we’re Dog Day Afternoon here. Just put on your shades and slump down in your seat if you’re worried. And guess what? Your Big Brother Anton Paget is out of town this week. How do I know? He’s my minder, too.”

  Hasso glugged the last of his beer and shot to his feet. He moved fast for a big man sunk down in an old sprung chair.

  “Okay, then, Glen boy! Toss me the keys. I’ll drive so you can focus on the sights. I don’t have any wheels myself right now—had to take a taxi out to this dump.”

  Reluctantly, I handed over the keys to the Impala. At this point, there seemed no reasonable way I could refuse. I wasn’t buying into anything yet, after all. I was just going for a drive. And I would actually feel safer out in public than in the house.

  Still, I had to raise some mild objection to Hasso’s dominance. “It’s my uncle’s car, you know.”

  “Don’t get your panties in a twist. I’ll treat it like the vintage classic it is. Now, let’s roll.”

  4

  The recently rebranded Seven Oaks neighborhood was an up-and-coming residential district on the west side of town. Back in my GG&S days, looking to get in on the ground floor of a solid investment, I had almost bought a place here before getting a better deal on a loft closer to work. Once home to various light industries associated with the garment trade, it used to be called Button Town. I remember my dad taking me there one Saturday morning when I was about nine years old. We trooped past stooped, bandanna-coiffed laboring women and across a noisy factory floor where hot cotton, rubber, and machine oil gave off a fascinating tang. At the other end was a seedy but neat office. There, my dad talked business with a guy sporting a mustache like Lech Walesa’s—an exotic figure much on the nightly news at the time. While they dickered over the installation of a new sprinkler system in the shop, I was left unattended, to leaf with increasingly horrified fascination through an undergarment catalogue. Right around that long-ago year, the first Victoria
’s Secret store had opened in our local mall. I had been riveted by the sexy images and was hoping for something along those lines from this sales brochure. Instead, I found black-and-white photos of women who resembled my grandmother, wearing support garments fashioned after medieval torture devices. I still don’t know how my sexuality ever recovered.

  As Stan Hasso tooled the Impala down Callista Avenue, the memory made me smile.

  I could have sworn Hasso had eyes only for the sparse traffic. His driving was competent and circumspect and surely striving to be unworthy of any police attention. But he must have caught my grin. Imperceptive, he was not. A good thing to remember.

  “What’s so funny?”

  I told him.

  “Now, that’s a coincidence. I knew that building pretty good. Hadn’t been a girdle factory for some time, but there were still a bunch of retail shops inside. That’s one of the places I wanted to show you. We’re coming up on it right now, in fact.”

  Hasso pulled into a curbside slot. I looked out and saw, not the factory from my youth or the arcade that replaced it, but a gleaming new condo building. A modest three stories tall, but it took up the entire square block. Elegant signage proclaimed this to be The Phoenix Arms. Brick and brushed aluminum, blue-greenish thermopane windows and passive solar features. Very tasteful.

  “This is where that underwear factory used to be?”

  “Yeah. It burned down somehow.”

  I pondered that acid-etched observation.

  Hasso grinned. “I think the concierge here makes more a week in tips than any of those women got paid in six months. Your basic unit goes for one-point-five million. Get out of the car.”

  “Huh?”

  “Get out of the car, go up to the front door, and read the plaque they got pasted there. Don’t try no soliciting, though. They got a warning posted, and it’s backed up by security guards.”