Body Language

Hell, if he’d picked up a Bible that afternoon in the library, the whole thing might be different. Today, he might be studying theology or some shit. Be one of those door-to-door idiots who wanted to talk about Jesus, some weird gobbledygook name for their church.

Stan Rafferty had never even shoplifted a wooden pencil at the dime store, but he knew the mind-set of a big-time robber, a guy with twenty banks under his belt. Some mornings after a night of dreaming about robberies or other mayhem he’d committed, he’d wake up glowing with excitement.

When he finally decided to play around with a plan of his own, first thing he did was make up a list of the natural laws of the criminal universe. He came up with three. Easy to remember, not necessary to write down.

The first law was: The crime itself is less dangerous than what you do with the money later. Most crooks got caught from doing something dumb after the fact. Spending their money in lavish ways. Drawing attention to themselves.

The second one said: Don’t give your wife the littlest hint about what you are up to. He couldn’t count the number of famous crooks who’d been turned in by their wives after they got jealous or pissed off about some little thing the guy had done entirely unrelated to the crime itself. And with Alex working at Miami PD, it was even more important he didn’t let the smallest thing slip. Somehow, it made it all the more exciting, Stan pulling off a major crime while married to a cop.

And yeah, he guessed Benito was right. If it wasn’t for Alex, all his plans would’ve just stayed right there in his head. Alex and her goddamn job. Coming home night after night with the stink of death on her. That sour metallic reek of blood and vomit and gunpowder that didn’t wash off. She couldn’t hide it with soaps or perfumes. Over and over, Stan had tried to put the smell out of his mind, reach out, touch her skin, stroke her breasts, try to get himself hard and horny, but the best he could do was half-mast. A limber-dicked lover. Getting little flashes of corpses as he touched her, as they kissed, his dick wilting.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, then her old man came to live with them. Overnight, the house got crowded. The old man always underfoot. Like having a kid in diapers, only he’s 150 pounds and won’t shut up. That’s why Stan started fooling around, sneaking out, leaving the old man locked in the house while he hung out at a couple of neighborhood bars till he’d met the girl. Cute, young Jennifer, who smelled like flowers and cinnamon, with flesh as soft as fresh-baked rolls. Innocent and clean. Jennifer thought Stan was strong and complicated. That’s what she said to him once. Strong and complicated. A father figure, she’d said. Fucking-A.

So that’s where he was. Ready to chuck nine years of marriage – make his score; then a month or two from now, when things had cooled down, he’d walk out on Alexandra and just flat disappear.

Rule number three, that was Stan’s favorite, his triumph, the one with his own personal stamp on it. It said: When it comes to crime, chaos is a thousand times better than order.

Like the others, it was an idea he’d distilled down from a book. At a bookstore a month ago, totally random, he’d flipped it open and started reading. Though it wasn’t about crime, he got hooked immediately.

It was part quantum physics, part philosophy, with some psychology and religious bullshit thrown in. Mainly, it was about chaos. How everything, even the most orderly systems in nature, even the man-made machines that ran the world – computers, internal combustion engines, turbines, generators, radar, all the things we think are operating neatly and efficiently – is actually full of all kinds of chaos.

Fat, expensive book. He started on it that night while Alexandra was off at work. He didn’t understand it for shit. You needed a college degree to read the flap copy. But he forged on anyway, feeling himself absorb some of the material, bit by bit, though later on when Alex asked him what it was about, all he could think to say was, ‘It’s about chaos. How everything’s chaotic.’

‘That’s it?’ she said. ‘A whole book about that?’

‘Yeah, a whole book.’

‘Seems to me,’ she said, ‘you could get that on the first page, then go off to other things.’

‘It’s more complicated than that,’ he told her. ‘Stuff you wouldn’t understand. I barely understand it myself.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That complicated?’ Giving him her smartass college smile. Stan with only a year at Dade Junior College, and Alex lording it over him all the time. Very subtle about it, so someone standing right there wouldn’t even notice what she was doing, but Stan saw it. Yes sir.

Even though Stan didn’t understand but maybe a tenth of what was in that book, the idea he got from it was that chaos was the answer to the perfect crime. You had to throw everything into the blender. Your goal was total disarray, complete and utter confusion. You even took the chance that the whole goddamn thing would get so cockeyed crazy that you couldn’t even steal the money at all. There was an excellent chance of that.

But that was the beauty of the plan. If it failed, he could just walk away. Because no one would ever believe there was a plan to steal money in the first place. Nobody would be able to see a plan through all the craziness.

But on the other side of the seesaw from that low-risk potential was the high fuckup possibility. One goes up, the other goes down. If he went ahead with his plan, it was conceivable he could do absolutely everything right and things would get so incredibly fucked up that the money wouldn’t wind up where he wanted it to.

That was the trade-off. Low risk, high fuckup potential.

Most bank robbers and heist guys were basically nineteenth-century types. Still back in the Newtonian universe. Gravity, mechanized thinking, gears clanking against gears, all that. Wanting their capers to run with greased efficiency, all the clock-work meshing, all the balls dropping in the right holes, bing, bing, bing.

But Stan Rafferty was going to be the first of his kind, a post-Einstein robber. A totally brand-new thing coming down the pike. So innovative in his thinking, he could even have a chapter dedicated to him in the next set of the Encyclopedia of Crime. Except no one was ever going to know his name, since Stan wasn’t going to get caught.

Because even though Stan Rafferty could easily walk off with somewhere near $2 million, there was an excellent chance no one was even going to know a crime had been committed.

‘Man,’ Benito said, ‘you’re thinking so hard, it’s getting noisy in here.’

Stan glanced at his watch.

‘You made it exactly three minutes and fourteen seconds, you dumb shit. Now, let’s try it again, see if you can break five.’

‘I don’t believe you, man. Everything I confided in you, all the shit I opened up and revealed. My wife, all her medical problems, and when something finally comes along, it bothers you a little, you get lockjaw.’

‘I got the stopwatch on you, Benito. Tell me when you’re ready to start.’

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘And I thought you and me were close. I thought we were friends.’

‘We are, partner. And this is what friends do. They respect each other’s privacy. Get it?’

Benito clamped his mouth and stared straight ahead at the ramp up to 95.

Ten minutes and they’d be there. Ten minutes for Stan to decide if he wanted to start his life over or continue being the gutless loser he’d spent the last twenty-nine years turning into.

6 (#ulink_d212d6a4-39ae-5deb-99f4-77f88adcff08)

Mrs Scarlett Rogers, the tour guide for Sunny Pines Assisted Living Facility, was a fifty-year-old woman with a swirl of bright orange hair and a smile that was so rigid, it had to be the result of multiple failed plastic surgeries. Gritting her teeth, the woman looked like someone who’d just stepped off the ledge of a twenty-story building and was still trying to keep her composure. Lawton was crooning to himself while Scarlett Rogers described the excellent amenities package at Sunny Pines. A gym, a sauna, five coed hot tubs, a walking course on their two-acre lawn.

‘I want to see these hot tubs,’ Alexandra said. She had no idea why she said it. As far as she knew, her father had never climbed into a hot tub in his life, and had expressed no interest in doing so. But she didn’t like this woman, didn’t like the place, and it was the meanest thing she could think of saying.

The woman turned her inflexible smile on Alex, lifted an eyebrow, and scrutinized her for a moment, as if Alexandra might be concealing a miniature video camera. One of those sneaky reporters the TV stations were always sending around.

‘Certainly,’ Mrs Rogers said. ‘This way, please.’

She led them down the freshly waxed linoleum hallway, past a large recreation room with pool and Ping-Pong tables. Alex noticed the net was down on the Ping-Pong table, no paddles or balls in sight. The corridor was lined with women in housecoats and smocks. They sat on benches or in wheelchairs and several of the women were speaking, but there didn’t seem to be any actual conversations going on. An elderly black man was slumped over in his wheelchair near the door at the end of the hall where Mrs Rogers halted.

She motioned at a heavy gray door.

‘The tubs are inside there. I would show them to you, but they might be in use, and we certainly don’t want to disturb anyone.’

Before the woman could protest, Alexandra pushed the door ajar and peeked inside. There were four large plastic whirlpools arranged in the middle of the room. All were empty. The gray wall-to-wall carpet was soggy and reeked of mildew and chlorine. Except for the tubs, the room was bare.

‘This place sucks,’ her father said. ‘Like a waiting room at the morgue.’

‘We have a very well-trained staff,’ Mrs Rogers said, shutting the door firmly. ‘Four full-time RNs and eight state-certified orderlies.’

‘You’re not thinking of locking me up in this hellhole, are you?’

‘We’re just investigating, Dad. That’s all we’re doing.’

‘We have a registered dietician on staff. Our meals are nutritious and low-fat and we offer salt-free and vegetarian specialties.’

‘Am I here because I shot that gun?’

‘Dad, please.’

‘Send me to Raiford,’ Lawton said. ‘Christ, lock me up with the child molesters and rapists. Anyplace but here.’