37

Thirty-two thousand dollars in crumpled bills cast shadows against the lavender-and-purple flower print of the motel bedspread. Flip drew his hands away from them. Thirty-two thousand and change. He rocked on his feet, the crusty carpet crumpling against his heels through holes in his socks.

The smell of the bills drifted up to him, a green fragrance that always reminded him of his brother. How long ago was it? Twenty years? No, twenty-five probably since they’d shared a paper route as kids, alternating days flinging the folded and banded newspapers, going door to door collecting, splitting the profits down the middle. Flip and Jason were friends then. They shared everything—a room, a dad, a house, food, drink, the paper route. The smell of the money reminded him of that time, of things they shared, the easy and hard things that bound them together.

For Flip, counting the collections from their paper route was a rote necessity. But Jason reveled in it, his freckled face as concentrated as a fastballer on the mound. He would pinch each bill between his fingers and thumb to make sure he didn’t miss one stuck to another. He would stroke them, dealing them out on the card table in their room in the summertime with their one fan pointed away from the tabletop to make sure the piles weren’t disturbed. Flip would sit in front of the fan, its breeze the only thing cool in Inglewood that summer, but Jason would rather sweat than have his money ruffled. Flip would watch as Jason counted and recounted until his fingers took on a slick coating as gray as lead. After ten minutes, Flip would be ready to go outside and toss a baseball around, but not Jason. Once he was in the money, Jason couldn’t be pulled out.

“Hey, Daffy,” Flip would say to him in the heat of those afternoons in their room with the door closed and the fan pressing air against his face. The cartoon character’s name seemed the perfect fit for his brother when he was in his money.

Over the years that followed, they took their own odd jobs, and their interests divided, Flip into sports and Jason deeper and deeper into money-making schemes he called business. Jason’s love of money overtook all the other loves but one. One girl.

In the end it wasn’t money that separated Jason from his brother and his father and from everything else they used to share. Not Jason’s obsession with getting all the power and toys and trappings as he grew into as a man. It was the girl.

Flip didn’t need a yearbook to picture Danah as she was in high school. He remembered her walking through the quad in her cheerleader uniform on game days, the boys stealing glances at her shape and the bounce of her walk. They must have wondered why a girl like that was with Jason instead of the homecoming king or quarterback. Flip wouldn’t have understood either if he hadn’t seen them together at the house, their fingers entwined on the sofa, their voices low and excited. Talking about their future.

He couldn’t think about Jason without remembering Danah. Their senior year. Their absorption in one another. As a sophomore, Flip’s classes ended later than theirs. He would come home fresh from the showers after football or baseball practice or from the weight room. The house would be suspended in midafternoon stillness, the presence of a girl as distinct as a flower in a locker room. It might have been her fragrance or the distant murmuring of a keener voice or just a sense that the ordinary male doldrums had been breached by something subtler. At some point Jason and Danah would emerge, maneuvering conjoined down the hallway, enthralled with one another.

Flip, the little brother, an interference, an annoyance. He felt this new distance from his older brother and resented Danah, but he said nothing.

Until the night he came home and Jason was gone. Dad that night shouted into the phone, cursing Jason but looking at Flip as if the whole thing were his fault. Dad slamming the phone down and shouting orders at Flip before phoning the police. Flip driving south alone in his truck, driving by himself at seventeen into neighborhoods where Jason and Danah should never have gone.

Now, in the motel room, he tried to will himself not to let his thoughts go further. But they leaped ahead. A dark, crowded barroom, men older than him by decades sitting huddled over beers and shot glasses at the bar and at dimly lit tables. They looked at him, and one of them threw a joke his way, but Flip wasn’t in the mood. He asked about Danah. None of them joked after Flip popped the bartender to the floor and he was afraid to get up to face him. From the floor, the guy nodded toward the back room.

Now, twenty years and two jail stints later, Flip clamped his eyes shut, pushed his palms against the lids as if he could shut down his mind by closing off his sight. A girl like that, in a place like that.

The picture of her as he first glimpsed her in that back room was still enough to make him want to drive his fist through one of these sheer motel room walls. She’d been beaten unconscious. Her clothes were shredded. It sent him into a fury. Afterward, the cops cuffed him while two of the men lay leaking blood into the sawdust-littered floor. One of them dead.

Flip growled through gritted teeth and shook his head. Thoughts of Jason always took him there. Why had Jason left her? And why would she have entered a place like that to begin with?

Eastlake Youth Authority. No bail for juveniles, just line up for your hearing and cool your heels in YA while they figure out the plea bargain. The investigators only got out of Danah what happened with Jason. She couldn’t coax any memory of the attack back into her head. All she could recall was walking into the bar. After that, nothing. But with her injuries and the evidence of the rape, the prosecutor didn’t want to try Flip for murder and might have passed on the charges completely if the dead guy hadn’t been averaging twenty-seven points a game as a starting point guard for CSU. There were plenty of witnesses willing to put Flip at the scene, they had his fingerprints all over the baseball bat, and to cap it off, they had the confession he’d offered up.

The plea bargain for manslaughter was no bargain for Flip. Eleven years. He started off at the Herman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility in Chino and at twenty-five graduated from gladiator school to the mainstream population in Lancaster, where he had no choice but to arm himself. When he got into a fight and used a shiv he’d fashioned out of a bar from an oven rack, he nearly took his second strike, but the DA decided it wasn’t worth prosecuting. His second strike didn’t come until he was released from Lancaster the first time. A little job for Diane, but he got caught.

By then he had someone waiting for him.

He reached down and gathered up the bills. He wrapped them in a shirt and stuffed the bundle in a duffel bag. The zip of the bag ripped through the room. He sat on the bed. He’d set the papers from Mr. B’s desk to one side to concentrate on counting the bills. Now he reached for them.

As he read, daylight faded beyond the thick drapes sealing off his motel room. The hanging lamp provided him with all the light he needed. One page after another, he laid the sheets to one side, their contents drawing him into what Mr. B had kept in his safe.

It turned out that this information might be worth a lot more than thirty-two thousand and change.