THERE WERE A FEW QUERIES ABOUT THE CONDOS WHEN PETTY woke early Saturday morning. He responded with the burner number, and the first call came at 8:00 a.m. He pulled on his sweats and stepped out onto the walkway to take it. The woman on the line was suspicious. She asked why there were no reviews for the unit she was interested in on Airbnb. Petty told her it was because this was the first time he’d listed it. And why, she asked, did he want her to wire the money to him instead of paying through the site? “I don’t want to pay taxes,” Petty said. “The less I have to deal with the IRS, the better.” The woman said she’d think about it and call back. Petty doubted that, writing her off as a stroke, a waste of time.
He spent the rest of the morning replying to e-mails and answering the phone. Tinafey went out and came back with coffee and a bagel for him from the chintzy breakfast buffet the motel provided. He was so busy that he managed only two sips of the coffee before it got cold. By the time he was ready to turn off the burner and leave for the hospital, he thought he might have a couple of fish on the line, but he wouldn’t know for sure until they sent their MoneyGram transaction numbers.
He asked Tinafey if she wanted to come with him again to check on Sam.
“You need to learn to talk to her on your own,” she said.
“Fine,” Petty said, “but she’ll be disappointed not to see you. She likes you a lot more than she likes me.”
“Maybe so,” Tinafey said, “but she loves you.”
He walked to Good Samaritan, down the street of tenements. It was the weekend, so the neighborhood was much livelier. More people hanging out, more music. The same women and kids were on the same stoop as last time. They passed around a plastic bag of pineapple chunks and a fork. A little girl skipped down the steps to block Petty’s way. She stared up at him with a defiant pout until one of the women hissed her back to the group. A wreath strung with lights blinked in the window of an apartment; a cardboard Santa hung in another. Petty hadn’t noticed them before. Christmas kept creeping up on him.
His phone rang. He took it out of his pocket and looked at it. Someone calling from Miami, but not Avi. This unnerved him. He let the call go to voice mail. Whoever it was didn’t leave a message. Petty wondered who it could be but didn’t press Call Back. If it was nothing, it was nothing; if it was trouble, no sense running toward it.
He heard a commotion in Sam’s room as soon as he stepped off the elevator. Mrs. Kong’s family was visiting. Old people, kids, babies. They’d lined up all the chairs in the room next to the woman’s bed. She was asleep, but they carried on anyway, eating cookies from a pink bakery box and passing around a photo album. The conversation was in Chinese, which sounded like stones clattering down a shallow stream. A Mexican woman lay in the middle bed now, a bandage wrapped around her throat. She ignored the party and stared at her TV, listening to it through headphones.
Sam was reading an astronomy textbook. She raised her hand and told Petty to hold on while she finished a paragraph. Her tone irked him, but he let it go.
After a minute or so she closed the book. She had big news to share: her friend Jessica had managed to get the two of them tickets to a concert that had been sold out for months.
“Have you heard of him?” she asked Petty about the guy who was playing.
“I don’t follow music,” he said.
She pulled up a song on her phone and insisted that Petty put in her earbuds, enthusiastic about hipping him to something she liked. It was electronic stuff, dance stuff, the shit they played in all the clubs in Vegas, the shit that made him feel old and out of it. He didn’t tell Sam that. He kept his mouth shut and listened to the music while watching a cartoon on the TV, an orange elephant eating ice cream. When he felt enough time had passed, he handed the phone back.
“Sick, right?” Sam said.
“Sick,” Petty said.
An argument broke out among Mrs. Kong’s family about how to arrange all the flowers people had sent her on her single shelf. Granny had a boy set them up one way, but then a young woman jumped up and repositioned the baskets and vases.
“I really liked Tinafey,” Sam said.
“She liked you, too,” Petty said.
“How long have you guys been together?”
“Not long.”
“Is she bad like you? Or good?”
“She’s good,” Petty said.
Sam’s phone dinged. She picked it up, checked the screen, and started texting. Petty’s first instinct was to be angry at how quickly her attention had shifted, but again he kept his cool. Nothing would change between them if he blew up every time she irritated him. He went back to watching the elephant.
“Sorry about that,” Sam said when she finished. “I had to tell Jessica where to buy Sherman’s food.”
“Do you remember that cat in Cancun?” Petty said.
During one of their summer trips she’d made friends with a stray cat that hung around their hotel in Mexico. By the time they left, the mangy thing was eating out of her hand, and it tried to jump into the cab taking them to the airport. Petty knew he was treading on dangerous ground by bringing up the past, but some of the best times they’d had with each other had come during those trips. He was hoping she’d recall them as fondly as he did.
A smile spread across her face.
“I loved that cat,” she said.
“What was its name?”
“Letty,” Sam said. “They called it Letty.”
“That was the same trip I got stung by a scorpion.”
“On the beach. I remember.”
“You couldn’t stop laughing.”
“Come on! You hopping around on one foot, yelling ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’ It was hilarious.”
“My lips went numb. I thought I was a goner.”
“You wanted somebody to pee on the bite. The guys from the hotel were cracking up.”
“Hey, though,” Petty said. “One hour later I was back on the beach.”
“Because you saw me talking to a boy there,” Sam said.
“That was the dad in me coming out,” Petty said.
“What, for the first time?” Sam said.
Petty tried not to let her see that her jab had connected, but some flicker, some pulse, gave him away. Her mean grin softened.
“I’m kidding,” she said.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I get it.”
The silence that followed stretched into something awkward. They both focused on Mrs. Kong’s family, watched them straighten her blanket and wipe her face with a damp cloth.
“I don’t know anything about you,” Sam finally said. “I mean the big things, yeah, but not much else.”
“What do you want to know?” Petty said.
“Did you ever have any pets?”
“My mom had a dog, but it didn’t like me, went crazy every time I got near it. After that I was always moving around too much to keep an animal.”
“What’s your favorite food?”
“I don’t have one.”
“What’s your favorite color?”
“Don’t have one of those, either.”
“That’s weird,” Sam said.
“Why?” Petty said.
“Why wouldn’t you have a favorite color?”
“I’m not picky. It makes things easier.”
“It makes things weird,” Sam said.
“What’s your favorite color?” Petty said.
“Green.”
“And your favorite food?”
“Cheese enchiladas.”
They went on like that for a while, Petty asking what she liked and she answering. He’d never remember all her preferences, wasn’t even listening, really. What was important to him was that they were talking and she seemed to be enjoying herself. That was a step forward, an accomplishment, and he felt pretty good about it, like he’d pulled off something slick.
He went back to the motel and spent the afternoon replying to queries about the condos and answering calls. When he wasn’t on the phone, he watched TV with Tinafey. She did a good job of hiding her boredom, but Petty noticed how quickly she said yes when he asked if she’d run out and get him something for lunch.
“Did you like your sandwich yesterday?” she asked as she changed out of the Hard Rock T-shirt she’d taken to lounging in and into a red tank top.
“A sandwich’ll be fine,” Petty said.
“Or they have salads,” she said. “Like Caesar and spinach.”
“You know what? A salad sounds better—spinach,” he said and handed her forty dollars. “Get whatever you want, too.”
As the door closed behind her, the thought flashed in his head that she wasn’t coming back. She’d found a cockroach in the sink that morning, and the noise from the bus stop in front of the motel had kept her awake all night. He wouldn’t blame her for rethinking sticking around. Her current situation was a step up from working the street, but a pretty girl like her could do better.
When she returned forty-five minutes later, saying the spinach salads looked nasty so she’d gotten him a Cobb instead, the intensity of his relief shocked him. He was more stuck on her than he’d thought. And while that wasn’t a bad thing, it also wasn’t entirely good, because he wasn’t at his best right now, not by a long shot, and he wanted to be at his best for her.
He e-mailed and talked to twenty-three people over the course of the day. Five said they’d send money, and two actually e-mailed confirmation numbers: a woman from Toronto paid five hundred dollars for three nights on Napili Bay, and a man from Seattle transferred twelve hundred dollars for a week at a place in Lahaina. Petty sent them both bogus receipts. There was also another call from Miami, from the same number as before. Again Petty let it go to voice mail. Again no message.
Toward dusk Bernard and Patricia returned from a day of sightseeing. Tinafey was sitting out on the walkway, texting. Petty heard her greet the Frenchies and ask where they’d been. He had a grinder on the phone. The dude had spent twenty minutes trying to chisel down the price of a two-bedroom unit at the Eldorado in Kaanapali. Petty had offered it to him for two hundred dollars a night, and the guy had immediately countered with nine hundred for a week. After too much back-and-forth, Petty finally said he’d let him have it for eleven hundred.
“No deal,” the dude said and ended the call.
Petty kicked himself for not accepting the first offer. What did it matter if he took the guy for nine hundred or eleven hundred? Every haggle didn’t have to be life or death.
Tinafey came in and said the Frenchies were going to a jazz club in Little Tokyo and had invited them along.
“You go ahead,” Petty said. “I’m gonna stay here until the calls die down, then run over and see Sam.”
“You’re a good daddy, stepping up like you are,” Tinafey said.
“No, I’m not,” Petty said. “I’m an asshole. I’m showing off to impress you.”
“That was my other idea,” Tinafey said.
Petty was back on the phone when she got into the shower and still on when she got out. The bathroom was so small she had to step into the room to dry off. Petty lost track of what he was saying to the mark he was trying to reel in as he watched her put on her panties and choose a bra. She noticed he was watching and started teasing him. She arched her back and swayed her ass as she applied her mascara and turned to him and smiled as she slowly buttoned her blouse. The room heated up, the air turned swampy. Petty finally tossed the phone aside and charged her.
“No, no, no,” she said, batting him away. “Uh-uh.”
“What do you mean, ‘Uh-uh’?” Petty said.
“You’re gonna mess me all up.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“I got them people waiting for me.”
“I’ll be quick, too.”
“Get back,” Tinafey said.
She sashayed out the door after letting him kiss her on the cheek. Some trick getting him all worked up like that and leaving him wanting more. She was as good at her hustle as he was at his.
He took a few more calls. The news came on the TV. Russia and China. Israel and North Korea. He couldn’t have found China on a map if you’d held a gun to his head, much less Korea. He put on ESPN and dozed off watching college basketball.
The nap didn’t last long. He fell right into another bad dream about the cowboy, bullets and blood and dirt, and came awake again feeling like he was going to be sick. He knew a guy who’d never gotten over the shit he saw in the army in Iraq, would start crying out of nowhere, punch brick walls. He hoped he didn’t end up like that. He found a music channel on the TV and played it loud while he got ready to go out, singing along to the Rolling Stones, trying to clear his head.
The MoneyGram outlet was in a mini-mall on 6th Street. It shared a parking lot with a Laundromat, a pupuseria, and a water store. All the poor neighborhoods had stores that sold “filtered” water. The immigrants who crowded into the creaking boardinghouses and roachy apartments couldn’t trust the tap water back in Honduras or wherever, and they didn’t trust it here, either. This particular store also sold scratch-off lottery tickets, running two scams at once.
The pupuseria and Laundromat were hopping, everybody smiling, happy to be throwing around a little money on a Saturday night. Petty walked into the MoneyGram place and stood in line behind a kid in paint-spattered boots who was sending money to Guatemala and a skeevy white couple clearly strung out on something. They fidgeted repetitively, cycling through a sequence of tics: arm scratch, nose wipe, eye bulge, cough—two scarecrows in dumpster-dived jeans and T-shirts.
“You got the number?” the guy asked the girl.
“Shut the fuck up,” the girl said.
“This even the right place?”
“Shut the fuck up.”
The guy turned to Petty. “Bro, sir,” he said. “Do you have five bucks to help us get to Oxnard?” His mouth moved twice as much as it needed to in order to form the words. He looked like someone in an old kung fu movie. Petty blamed him for the girl’s being messed up. He couldn’t help it; he had a daughter.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Leave him alone,” the girl said, grabbing the dude’s sleeve and yanking him back to her side.
When it was their turn at the window, the girl didn’t have the number. Luckily for Petty, they were too messed up to argue much. The clerk explained the problem, the girl said, “But we need the money,” the clerk explained the problem again, and the girl said, “Fuck you,” and she and the guy staggered out.
Petty stepped to the window and gave the clerk the confirmation numbers from Toronto and Seattle. The clerk gave him seventeen hundred dollars. He peeled off two hundreds and rolled the rest up and stuck it in his sock before leaving the office.
The woman at the pupuseria didn’t understand when he asked if they had enchiladas—or pretended not to, anyway. There was a Mexican joint across the street, ENCHILADAS painted right on the sign. He ordered two cheese to go and sat down to wait. Three old men in cowboy hats were eating tacos and drinking beer at a table in front of the window. The music coming from the jukebox was so loud that the glass rattled whenever the tuba honked.
Petty reached down to check the money in his sock. His phone rang. The Miami number. Enough, he decided. A punch meant for you wasn’t gonna miss because you closed your eyes. He walked outside to answer.
“Who’s this?” he said.
It was a recording.
“The FBI estimates that there are three break-ins every minute and urges you to take steps to prevent this from happening to you. If you allow us to put a small sign in front of your house, we’ll install an advanced security system at no cost to you.”
Petty smiled, relieved. Steve Roberts used to run this scam out of Dallas. And Corey Brown, out of Atlanta. Both did pretty well with it. And now someone else was giving it a go. That’s the way things went: a good con never died.