In The Absence Of Light (17 page)

“Aunt Jenny said you did something illegal.”

Illegal. I called what I did a lot of things but never that. Truthfully, illegal was the only right word and I knew it. But until the moment the word left Morgan’s lips, it had no weight. Now it crushed me.

“I helped people ship stolen goods. Desperate people fleecing rich folks and then selling what they stole to other rich folks. I’m telling you, the rich buy some pretty weird shit.”  After years of seeing people burn millions, the one thing I swore I would never do: I would never buy something just to look at. Whatever I owned would have a purpose. “Mostly it was antiques and cars. Really expensive cars.”

There was the hollow clink of a beer bottle touching the porch on the other side of Morgan. Mine was close to empty. I drained it and put it beside me on the porch.

“I’m not going to try to pretend that what I did wasn’t wrong. I might not have taken things that belonged to me, but I helped people take things that didn’t belong to them. I’ve shipped thousands of items across the country and the ocean.”

“Did you hurt anyone?” Morgan shifted his weight, and his elbow brushed mine.

“Grant?”

“Yes. But not like you think. I did what I did for money. Putting people in a condition where they couldn’t pay me was not conducive to my goal.  I learned if a person owed me money, they would find it when they needed me again. And the people who used my services always needed me again. Clients got the first job on credit. Ship now, pay after. If they stiffed me, they pre-paid plus half just to make it worth my while.” I rubbed the scar on my chest. “But sometimes things happened.”

“Like what?”

I’d hoped he wouldn’t ask, but at the same time, I was glad he did. For the first time in my life, I could purge my soul of the sins I’d committed. They weren’t the deep dark sins of a lot of men, but it doesn’t take a very big splinter to make you worry the skin.

“Sometimes people tried to steal from you or the people you worked for. Sometimes other businessmen took it personal when you were a better job than them. And there were clients who lied about what they wanted to ship and were not very happy with me when I turned down the contract. Those were the most dangerous because by then you’d seen the product, and if you knew what they were moving, it could make you a liability.”

“Did it happen a lot?”

“Eugene taught me to respect my fellow businessmen, to be gracious to clients, but to never let people run over me. You never mixed friendship with business. A person was either an associate, which meant you never took their money or moved in on their people, or they were a client, which meant they paid you for a service, you did not give them a service to be paid.

“But there was always someone who would eventually test you and I never pulled a gun without the intention of using it.

“That’s why I quit. The rules I’d learned to do business by were fading out. If you weren’t leaving a body count, people didn’t take you seriously. And if your competition couldn’t intimidate you, they went after your clients.

“I was a businessman, providing a service. It was bad enough when I had to worry about my own ass, but when the people I worked for were threatened, I took it personal.”

Another vehicle turned onto the road in front of Morgan’s house. This time the engine lacked the smooth hum of a car or truck. The heavy chug of thick tire tread chased the single headlight to the other end of the street. Then the wind shifted and the putrid earthy smell of chicken shit overrode the spicy fall leaves.

Not long after, the tractor was out of earshot and the smell went with it.

“Did you go to jail?”

“First rule in shipping is to make sure you always had your paperwork in order. Second rule, make sure your client does too. And I am damn good at paperwork and balancing a checkbook, and paying all my taxes.”

“Then why did you come to Durstrand?”

“About four to five years ago, I met a guy. He wanted a job. I gave him a job. I liked him, he liked me, so it was no surprise when we wound up in bed together. Then things went from occasional, to casual, then serious.”

“Did something bad happen to him?” Morgan’s exhale warmed my arm. I extended my fingers and found the edge of his elbow.

“At first I thought he was married, or had kids and was running from child support. Then I wondered if he was trying to steal from me, but he never skimmed any money, even when I gave him the chance. He turned out to be FBI.

“He was good at playing the part. I let my guard down, and it almost got people killed.”  No matter how pissed I was at Jeff and his damn blue eyes, the truth was I was solely to blame. “There’s another rule when you do this kind of work. I don’t know if Eugene ever told me or if it was just something I picked up from being in his circle, but you didn’t piss off the authorities. You treated them with respect. You never gave them a reason to have a grudge. But if they crossed you. If they fucked with your people, not the merchandise, shit can be replaced, but the people who were your bread and butter and relied on you for your confidence, you dealt with them.

“Clean, quick, and with no trace it was ever done, you dealt with them. People would know, but there would never be anything left to prove what you'd done or how. And that can be scarier than a body.”

I curled my fingers into a fist. Somehow it felt wrong to touch Morgan now. I was soiled. “I should have. If he’d just gone back to where he belonged, it would have blown over and no one would have known. But his superiors convinced him to set up a shipment or two under the guise of him going into business on his own.

“Fucking idiot. He called a couple of people he knew I had contact with and pushed them into a job by being willing to do it cheap. Stupidity is only outdone by greed when it comes to the number one cause of death.

“One of my competitors got wind Jeff was underselling me, which meant he was underselling them even more, they took it personal, the client got involved, so did their kids. Bullets got thrown around, innocent people died. I got in the middle of it all, trying to fix what he fucked up.”

“Is that how you got shot?” Morgan turned. His chest pressed against my arm, and his touch slid over my shirt. He rubbed the scar under my pec. The hypersensitive nerves tingled with electricity while the surrounding skin went numb.

I caught his hand. Not to push him away but to keep him there. I wanted him to touch me other places, but I hadn’t earned that right back. There was a good chance I never would.

“Like I said, number one cause of death.” Morgan sat back. I cleared my throat. “Jeff got between one of the shooters and the client’s little girl. He knew he would die, but he did it anyhow, and if he was dead, I couldn’t get the pound of flesh he owed me.”

I’d like to think the deal wouldn’t have gone bad if Jeff hadn’t agreed to pick up the goods at the client’s house. It would have. Jeff might not have been in the middle of it and neither would I, but Marx was already there with a gun to the man’s head.

I would have never agreed to meet a client in their home, and my customers knew that, so they would have never asked.

“Who shot you?”

“A very angry guy with a really ugly mug.”

Morgan laughed, and in spite of the tangled knot growing ever larger in my gut, I laughed too. Then we fell quiet and there was only the night, the frogs, and that one lone dog off in the distance.

“After he disappeared from the community, rumors spread about his demise. I never told anyone who he was. It was safer for people to think he’d paid for disloyalty with a bullet to the head.”

“Who were the men in the Bronco?”

“If I had to guess, FBI.”

“Are they following you?”

“Apparently.”

“But you made it sound like they couldn’t arrest you.”

“Which is exactly why they’re only following me.”

“What do they want?”

“Information. Names. Dates. Locations. The measurements of my dick.”

“Nine and three quarters.”

“Excuse me?”

“Nine and three quarters.”

“My dick is not ten inches long.”

“No, I said nine and three quarters.”

“Even I’m not that self-inflated.”

“Have you ever measured it?”

For fear of setting off Morgan’s bullshit o-meter, I had to fess up. “Just under eight and a half.”

“When?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Well, if you did it before the age of twenty, you probably gained an inch.”

“My dick is not… okay, even if it was, when did you measure it?”

“I had it in my ass. I think I would know.”

“Is this where you tell me everyone has a built in ruler and all I need to do is bend over so you can show me how to use mine?”

Morgan snorted. “No, but we can test that theory if you want.”

If I said anything but hell yeah, it would have been a five-alarm bullshit fire. “My dick is not that big.” And as soon as I got the chance, I was whipping out the tape measure to prove it.

“Okay, you got me, it has nothing to do with it being in my ass and everything to do with the length of your hand, minus the width of your face, plus the length of your nose.”

In high school art class, we’d been taught how to know the proportions of the human body. Fingertip to fingertip, height. Ears from the corner of the eye to the nose. Corners of the mouth to the center of each eye and so on.

It sounded plausible.

I put my thumb on the heel of my hand and measured to my fingertips. Then I
guestimated
the width of my face, then my nose which was right at the same size as my thumb.

“Done measuring?”

I’d made sure to move quietly, but I think if I’d been on the other side of a wall he would have heard me. “Yeah.”

“Well?”

I measured again.

“Statistically if you have to measure more than once, it means you need to cut your first answer in half.”

“In half?”

“Defensiveness suggests you’re trying to make up what you lost, which means you need to take off at least another quarter.”

“If that’s the case, I just went from ten inches to one and a half.”

“You probably measured your head wrong.”

“I would have had to measure it wrong three times over. Hell, by your calculations, my head would have to be so big that I couldn’t fit through the front…” I had the insane urge to put my goddamned hand in the air and point to the sky. “You’re doing it again, aren’t you?”

“Only a little.”

“How come I fall for your shit? You’re not even a good liar and you get me every fucking time.”

“You underestimate me.”

Morgan was right. “I’d apologize, but I think I’ve run out of my quota for the year.”

He chuckled. “It’s okay. Everyone does. I’m used to it.”

And that was wrong because of why it happened. “I don’t want to be everyone else.”

Morgan’s arm jerked, and his elbow grazed my bicep. He snapped his fingers, and in the dark, his fingers were a fluttering blur next to his head.

“Mor—”

“How come you picked Durstrand?” He jerked again. “I’m assuming you made a lot of money and you can probably go anywhere you want, but you came here. No one with money wants to live here unless there’s a reason.” A small sound was pulled from him with another tic. “And how long were you going to stay? Since you don’t have a reason to stay, it can’t be too long. But it has to be more than a year since you bought the Anderson house. As long as it’s going to take you to fix it up, two years would be pointless.  So is it three or four years?”

I struggled to swallow. “I don’t know for sure.”

His breath shuddered. “My guess would be three years. So why would you come somewhere you don’t want to be and commit yourself to staying for three years when you could live anywhere you wanted? And where is it you want to live, Grant? Where do you dream of being for the rest of your life? What do you dream of waking up to every morning? Mountains, valleys, desert?”

“The ocean.” The confession left a pain in my heart.

“But not just any beach. Someone who ships expensive stolen cars, pisses off the FBI, and gets shot would want a special beach. Somewhere far away and out of jurisdiction of the people who could cause him a problem. I’d say Tahiti, but that just seems cliché. So where were you thinking?”

“Maldives or Seychelles.”

Morgan sighed. “I think I’ve seen pictures of Seychelles. Very pretty.” He shifted, and it left a gap where we’d been touching. It was only an inch at the most, but it might as well have been miles. “You should be really happy there.”

I used to be sure I would. But that was before I had any real idea about what happiness was. Granted, it was only a taste. Just a few precious drops. But what I’d been given in my time with Morgan amounted to more than I’d ever drank from the first thirty-odd years of my life.

Morgan stood, and the wooden slats squeaked. “Grant?”

“Yeah.”

“Would you mind staying the night?”