Free Feelers by Brian M Wiprud Page B

Jonathon got to his feet and dug into his pocket. “Need money?”
    “I could use a little, yeah.”
    His brother-in-law passed him a wad of twenties. “It’s all I got on me.”
    They left the kids with their SpaghettiOs and went out to the driveway. A monstrous white SUV was parked there, and they got in.
    On the way to the station, Danny reflected on his visit to the house on Vanderhoosen Drive. Even as Mary had said, the lock was stuck, and Danny more or less forced his way in, knocking out a piece of the doorjamb.
    Utterly empty, except for the dust shadows on the wallpaper of where pictures used to be on the walls of long-dead relatives. You could not tell where the furniture had been, but Danny remembered where the couch once was—at a right angle to the front windows. There was a dust shadow opposite where you could trace where the huge old TV had been.
    On his hands and knees, he slid an ice pick between the floor-boards, working to loosen one of them. There was so much accumulated dirt and dust that he had to work at it a while until he lifted one edge. Danny stabbed the pick into the wood and lifted.
    He remembered the night he and Joey paid off the Atlas armored car driver and put the remaining money under the floor. It was the night before the horrible day when the others were all shot up on the boardwalk, while Danny was trying to nurse Jimmy’s oozing skin back at the safe house. Danny thought Joey meant to kill him the night they hid the money. In fact, he was sure Joey was at least considering it—then only Joey would know where the treasure was—but Danny never showed Joey his back as they slipped into Uncle Cuddy’s house with the tools. Uncle Cuddy was in Florida at the time. Danny knew there was a space under the floor because he had helped his father fix the place after the boiler exploded, and remembered thinking at the time how much space there was between the floor and the ceiling of the finished basement, that you could put things there. But there almost was not enough room for those millions of dollars. That much money takes up a lot of space, and they really had to pack it in. Most of the night was required to get the floor back together. They even waxed it to make it look completely uniform, to fill in the cracks between the boards.
    Fifteen years later, Danny stared into the same cavity in the floor.
    His eyes now had a fine lace of wrinkles around them, and the crescent under each eye was now dark. A little gray had come into his hair at the temples, and there was a slight scar on his upper lip from a fight in the Sing Sing laundry—he’d been sliced by a razor blade.
    His breath came hard, eyes blinking. He loosed a little moan of frustration, like that of a dog wanting to go outside.
    The floor was empty.
    “You OK?” Jonathon had stopped the SUV in front of the station.
    “What?” Danny realized that he might have made that dog sound, that groaning whimper.
    “Again, Danny, I’m sorry. But you understand.”
    Danny felt around the door looking for the handle. Could they at least have kept door handles in cars in the same place? “Thank you for the money, Jonathon. I’ll pay you back.”
    “No, you won’t. You won’t be back.”
    They locked eyes.
    “Maybe once I get settled . . .”
    Jonathon was shaking his head. “Have you looked in a mirror?”
    “A mirror?”
    “I remember Danny Kessel as a good kid who was going to Yale. Who are you now? And what happens to those people?”
    Danny absently felt the scar on his lip. “I think it all depends.”
    “There’s a chance, but a small one. You know it, I know it. I’ve hired my share of ex-cons, and it almost never goes well for them. It’s just the way it is. You’ll have to turn it around, Danny. And the five million won’t make that happen. It’ll only get you killed.”
    The ice picks on Danny’s forearms felt cold. He guessed under the circumstances stabbing him in the eye with one of them would only