Pulphouse Fiction Magazine, Issue 1 by Dean Wesley Smith

Author:Dean Wesley Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WMG Publishing

Took a long time to get the six hundred thousand in cash. Not the full six hundred and fifty thousand. The bastard, his voice coarse and distorted over the phone, had laughed and said he assumed I’d spent fifty grand already, a fool like me always does that, and if I hadn’t, wasn’t he a nice guy leaving me all that dough?

So I bought me a briefcase, a cheap one, dark brown with no lock—never had reason to own a briefcase before that—and I packed all that money in it. Had Gerty drive me to the train station. We didn’t say nothing. Didn’t look at each other.

Didn’t have to.

Couldn’t.

Just sat in the darkness of the car down below the station, parked along the curbside, and waited, looking up at it every few seconds, our hearts pounding even while they were breaking. Sweat formed on our foreheads, the air heavy and warm. My fists clenched and unclenched. Beside me, Gerty softly sobbed.

The 9:58 p.m. train arrived in a whoosh of air, noisy and screeching. What felt like several lifetimes later, it left. Several lifetimes after that, a couple emerged from the concrete stairwell and walked the couple hundred yards down the street to the commuter parking lot.

Several lifetimes after that, I walked up the twenty-one stairs alone, the briefcase in one hand and the plastic bag of trash I’d brought, following the bastard’s directions, in the other. They felt like they weighed a couple hundred tons, but that was nothing compared to how heavy my heart felt.

Not because I cared about the money.

Oh, I cared about the money, all right. There was six hundred thousand dollars inside that briefcase, after all. That money had let me breathe, given me hope for our family’s future.

Angie’s future. She could get her crooked teeth fixed. She could go to college. Be something more than her father, just a poor, dumb laborer at the plant who got lucky with a couple numbers on a ticket.

She could be anything.

But it was turning out that money wasn’t going to let me breathe. Wasn’t going to let my little girl get her teeth fixed or go to college and make something out of herself. This drowning man had gotten his couple gulps of air, but now a hateful, cruel hand was thrusting me down beneath the waves one last time, this one for good.

So much for luck.

All I wanted now was to get my little girl back. To hell with the goddamned money, just so long as I got Angie back. So I’d said nothing to the police. Didn’t trust them to protect my little girl. I’d seen too many things in my lifetime to trust them at all.

So I was on my own. Nobody but me up here and Gerty down in the car.

I was alone here on the platform, but the bastard had to be here or nearby somewhere. Had to be watching me somehow, perhaps from a window in the old, red brick, three-story factory building on the other side of the tracks set back a few hundred feet.

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