The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [98]
“What’s going on here?” he asked the bartender.
“Northwest State Police Conference. Washington, Idaho, Montana . . . they have a huge meet here every year.”
Art got his beer to go.
He ran right back to the room, where he found his father smoking weed from a pipe next to an open window—a move so stupid and arrogant that, had it been anyone else, Art would have dumped him off at a Greyhound station and ended the trip right then.
“Put that out! We have to get the fuck out of here,” he told his dad, and explained the situation. Senior casually finished inhaling from the pipe.
“They don’t know what we’ve done,” he finally said. “You look good, I look good, and we’re driving a car that looks just like what they drive. Do you really think they’ll think we’re anything else but cops? We’re safer here than anywhere.”
Against all instinct, Art surrendered to his old man’s assurances and calmed down. Senior’s control impressed him. Art took a hit from the pipe himself, drank his beer, and they went to bed watching TV. “The truth was, I was having the best time in my life,” Art says. “My old man was cool. I can’t explain it. Yeah, he was a piece of shit, but he was cool. Maybe that’s easy to say because that’s really all I had, but I’d never give that trip up.”
They slipped out of Coeur D’Alene the next morning while the hungover cops slept. Continuing down I-90, they hit the gas stations in and around Missoula and Billings hard, changing up almost as much money as the day before. They were having so much fun, in fact, that on the third night they almost died. Hoping to make up for all the time lost at gas stations, they drove late into the night as they entered North Dakota—and straight into a supercell storm system that was causing massive damage along the I-94 corridor. As lightning and rain raked the highway, the pair smoked a joint and cranked up the Led Zeppelin, oblivious to the fact that tornadoes were touching down all around them. “I thought it was a little weird because for a long time we were the only car on the road,” remembers Art. “We didn’t realize what had happened until we checked into a motel early the next morning. It took a long time for the desk clerk to show up, and when he did he said, ‘What the hell are you people doing? Haven’t you been listening to the news?’ He’d been hiding in a shelter behind the motel.”
After that little laugh at God’s expense, they kept moving across the North Dakota plains. For hundreds of miles the land was empty and bright and mostly free of civilization. At that point they couldn’t be criminals anymore; just father and son, stuck inside a speeding shell that could have doubled as a time capsule. Art couldn’t help remembering that the last time he had been on the road with his dad, the trip had ended with his father dumping him off on a Chicago curbside, then abandoning him for good.
BY THE END OF THE FOURTH DAY they had made it into Minnesota. Senior wanted to hit Minneapolis, so they spent the next day milking the gas stations there before bearing south for Chicago. Two hours from the city, Art called his sister from a gas station pay phone.
“I’ll be arriving tonight, and I have a surprise for you,” he told her.
In keeping with his practice of never allowing anyone to know his plans or his location, Art hadn’t told Wensdae that he and his father were coming to the city. As far she’d known, they were still in Alaska. Her boyfriend at the time, a man who was, ironically enough, a successful Chicago printer, had a fifty-foot yacht that they lived on during the summers, and she was relaxing on deck when Art came aboard alone.
“Ready for your surprise?” he asked her, then shouted, “Okay!”
Senior, who had been waiting on the dock, ambled onto the deck and toward his daughter. “I was freaked out and happy,” Wensdae remembers, “also relieved. Suddenly I had a parent that