The Book of Lies - Brad Meltzer [6]
“Listen, thanks for calling us instead of the cops,” I tell the restaurant manager, a middle-aged guy who looks like a ferret.
“I’m no schmuck,” he laughs, dropping his French accent. “Cops would take two hours. You take the trash out fast.”
He offers a handshake, and as I reach to take it, I spot a hundred-dollar bill in his palm. I pull back as if he’s offering a coiled snake.
“Just our way of saying thanks,” he adds, reaching out again for the handshake.
I don’t shake back. “Listen,” I insist, stepping toward him. It’s clear I’m not the most imposing figure—I slouch and have a shambling walk that’s all arms and legs and big hands—but I do have most of my dad’s height. Nearly six feet when I stand up straight. And the only time I do that is when I’m pissed. Like now. “Do you understand what I do?” I ask, my thick Adam’s apple pumping with each syllable.
“Aw, jeez, you’re gonna give me some self-important speech now, aren’t ya?”
“No speech. We take the homeless back to shelters—”
“And what? If you accept a tip it’ll make it less of a good deed? I respect that. I do. But c’mon, be fair to yourself,” he says, motioning to my faded black T-shirt, which is barely tucked in. “What’re ya, thirty years old with that baby face? You’re wearing secondhand sneakers and sweatpants. To work. When was the last time you got a haircut? And c’mon . . . your van . . .”
I glance back at the van’s peeling tinted windows and the swarm of rust along the back fender, then down at my decade-old sweatpants and my checkerboard Vans sneakers.
“Take the money, kid. If you don’t use it for yourself, at least help your organization.”
I shake my head. “You called my client trash.”
To my surprise, he doesn’t get defensive. Or mad. “You’re right—I’m sorry,” he says, still holding out the money. “Let this be my apology. Please. Don’t make it the end of the world.”
I stare at my sweatpants, calculating all of the underwear and socks I could buy for our clients with an extra hundred dollars.
“C’mon, bro . . . even Bob Dylan did an iPod commercial.”
“And once again, making the world safe for people who eat croque-monsieurs,” I say, yanking open the door of the van and climbing back behind the wheel.
“What the fudge, Cal? You didn’t take the money, did you?” Roosevelt asks with a sigh as he reaches into the brown bag on his lap and cracks open a pistachio shell. “Why you so stubborn?”
“Same reason you say dumb crap like ‘What the fudge.’ ”
“That’s different.”
“It’s not different,” I shoot back, looking down at the van’s closed ashtray. With a tug, I pull it open, spot the dozens of discarded pistachio shells he’s stuffed inside, and dump them in the empty Burger King bag between us. Roosevelt cracks another shell and leans for the ashtray. I shake the Burger King bag in front of him instead. “You were a minister, so you don’t like to curse—I get it, Roosevelt. But it’s a choice you make on principle.”
“You were a minister?” Alberto blurts from the backseat, barely picking his head up from the RC soda can with the plastic wrap on top. It took nearly six different pickups before Alberto told me that’s where he keeps his father’s ashes. I used to think he was nuts. I still do. But I appreciate the logic. I’m what my parents left behind. I understand not wanting to do the same to someone else. “I thought you were some special agent who got arrested . . .”
Twisting the ignition and hitting the gas, I don’t say a word.
“That was Cal,” Roosevelt points out as we take off down A1A, and his ponytail flaps behind him. “And we’ve talked about my ministry, Alberto.”
Alberto pauses a moment. “You’re a minister?”
“He was,” I offer. “Ask him why he left.”
“Ask Cal why he got fired,” Roosevelt says in that calm, folksy drawl that filled the church pews every Sunday and immediately has Alberto looking my way. “Losing his badge . . . y’know that’s what turned his hair white?” Roosevelt adds, pointing at my full head of thick silver hair, which is such