Something Missing_ A Novel - Matthew Dicks [53]
The more he thought about it, the more his idea seemed foolproof.
Once cleaned and dressed, Martin went to the front porch to collect his mail. In addition to the usual bills, magazines, and circulars, he found a total of three cardboard boxes and one large, cushioned mailing envelope. Placing the rest of the mail on the kitchen counter for later processing, Martin brought the boxes and envelope to his upstairs office, unlocking the door with a key from a ring that he kept in his pocket at all times while within the house. On this ring were the keys to Martin’s home, his car, his storage unit in Groton, and assorted bike locks, padlocks, etc. No matter where he was or what he was doing, Martin kept his keys with him at all times in case of emergency. If he needed to exit his home quickly, the last thing he wanted to hold him up was searching for keys that he had flung into some conspicuous location in a home full of conspicuous locations.
Though Martin’s business was highly profitable, this hadn’t always been the case. Before venturing into the realm of large-scale acquisitions, the business had for a long time provided him with groceries and common household necessities, but not with the cash required to pay rent, make car payments, and pay utility bills. So for the first ten years that Martin had been on his own, he had held down a variety of jobs in order to generate the funds needed to survive. Working as a part-time barista at Starbucks had been and remained his primary job (its early morning hours fitting in well with his afternoon client visits), with stints as a pizza deliveryman, a McDonald’s cashier, a telemarketer, and an ice-cream vendor filling in the gaps. He hated all these jobs; particularly Starbucks with its corporate brainwashing, pretentiously named coffee sizes, and tattooed-pierced-vegetarian coworkers. But despite the noticeable loathing that he exuded behind the counter each day, Martin’s excessively logical and methodical mind, and his affinity for sequence and order, had allowed him to produce the overpriced lattes and espressos for which Starbucks was famous more quickly and efficiently than anyone else in town. Though his manager, Nadia, was clearly an idiot and did not like Martin, she was at least smart enough to recognize his skills, and was willing to put up with his sour face in exchange for quick service for her customers, all of whom she presumed to know intimately each time they came in. As a result of his business’s profitability, he had been able to reduce the number of hours that he worked at Starbucks considerably, keeping the job only to maintain the excellent health insurance that the company provided its employees.
Martin had his mother to thank for eventually ridding him of the other low-paying jobs that plagued his existence. Though the possibility of large-scale acquisitions had always been in the forefront of Martin’s mind, it was the converting of these items to cash that had always posed the biggest challenge. He had heard the term “fence” before, and understood that in the larger cities thieves could find someone who would exchange cash for stolen goods, but he doubted that Hartford, Connecticut, was teeming with these individuals, nor did he have any desire to associate with such a criminal element. Years went by while Martin missed many, many opportunities for large paydays, until an afternoon in his dead mother’s closet changed everything.
Having inherited everything that his mother owned, Martin had begun packing her clothes in order to send them over to the Salvation Army shortly after moving back home. One afternoon Jim was visiting