Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [160]
He ended by saying he hoped I didn't mind, and that he'd been careful not to light a fire anywhere.
“I guess not,” I told him, and asked what he'd done to his face. He touched it gingerly and said he'd done it on Friday night when the fire he was working on hit a stash of kerosene and blew up in his face. “Knocked me top over teakettle,” he said with a laugh. “I woke up in the hospital tent twenty-four hours later, and since I could walk and remember my name and that Teddy Roosevelt was President, they kicked me out, since they had a dozen others who needed the bed worse than me. My boarding-house is gone, so I thought you wouldn't mind.”
“Of course not,” I told him.
“There's one other thing,” he said, and the way he said it made my sympathy for his plight fade.
You see, when we were young, we'd gotten into a number of scrapes. Just through high spirits, but it would begin with a dare and a look, and even beneath the white grease and the bandages he wore, the look he gave me now was the same he'd give me when he had something really outrageous in mind. And I remembered the “stuff” he'd needed help with, and I immediately stepped away from him.
“GF,” I said, “I have a family. I can't do that kind of thing anymore. You're on your own.”
“It's nothing at all,” he told me. “Hey, my face really hurts. You got anything to drink in this mess?”
That was the moment I should have ended it. I should have told him no and showed him the door, taking his key as he left. I should have, but I did not. He was burned and I'd seen far too much in the last few days to put my old friend out on the street. Before I knew it we were sitting in the library with a candle and a bottle of good whiskey, talking about old times.
It turned out his “stuff” was a tin cookie box that he'd tripped across right in the middle of Geary Street the first morning. Because it was heavy enough to trip him, he'd taken a closer look and found it packed to the gills with cash—bills, coins, even gold. No names on it, no identifying marks, no body lying nearby. “So I kept it.”
“It's not yours,” I told him in disgust. “You'll have to put up a notice and ask somebody to identify it. If they tell you what kind of money was in it and how much, it'll be theirs.”
“Well, there's a little problem.”
“What's that?”
“I kind of added to it. It'd be hard to know what was there originally and what went in as time went along.”
“Jesus wept!” I shouted at him. “You're a damn thief.”
“I guess,” he said, “but I've got to tell you, it all came from people who won't miss a hundred dollars here or there. All of it. And I can't give it back, there's money there from maybe ten places.”
I dropped my head in my hands, feeling sick.
“Charlie, I really need a new start.” He was pleading. “You know about my wife and that mess, and I can't get any money, and without money you can't make money. You've got to help me.”
“You disgust me,” I told him.
“I know.”
“Where is the box now?”
“Well, that's the thing. It's buried in your garden.”
I nearly hit him, bandages and all. If I'd had the gun, I'd have shot him dead, I was so angry. He saw it, and put up his hands as if to say “Whoa.”
“Now look, Charlie, I couldn't very well just leave it sitting on your kitchen table while I went up to sleep, could I? I just buried it under a bush to keep it safe for a while.”
“You buried your looted cash in my garden.” I couldn't believe I'd once been close to this idiot.
“Just until I can get it and go. I'm off to France. My half-sister lives there now, she said I could go stay with her and help manage the business—she's got a nice little bar and cabaret in Paris. Anyway, I was thinking about it even before all this happened. This town has been a curse for me, Charlie, you know that.”
I did know that, as it happened. He'd had a