Talk is cheap.
“You pluck your eyebrows, man?”
Talk doesn’t cost you anything. You can make all the promises in the world.
“Because it looks like you pluck your eyebrows.”
Tom stares into the barrel of the gun, then focuses on the face behind it. A strung out, desperate junkie.
The guy behind him looks even worse. “All right, all right. Let’s go.”
The first guy, holding the gun, steels himself by swiping his runny nose with the back of his hand and then widening his eyes, like he’s trying to look crazier. He’s in a dirty tank top that says “Saints” on it. Both of them in tank tops, actually; shorts, beat-up sneakers.
“Give it to me,” the guy with gun says.
Tom asks, “What?” He’s sitting in his truck, window down. It’s the damn air conditioning, man. He needs to get it fixed. Otherwise he wouldn’t be in this neighborhood at this time of day in a nice shiny truck with the windows down, practically begging to be jacked. Welcome to Fort Myers.
“Your wallet, man – what do you think? Come on, man. Give it to me. Now.”
The guy is definitely twitchy – but it’s not crystal meth. It’s opioids, for sure. By now it’s probably beyond Oxy or hydrocodone. These guys have the heroin look. Like a fentanyl overdose chased by a shot of Narcan is just around the corner for them. After this one last score.
Because there’s always one last score.
“Okay,” Tom says. He’s had his hands up where they can see him. The light has just turned from red to green but no one is behind him, not back here, not on these streets at two a.m. on a Tuesday. If these two boys weren’t so strung out, they might be asking themselves why a guy, looking like Tom with a good build, all his teeth, and a fresh haircut from Supercuts, is driving his nice shiny pickup truck through the area at this hour.
With his hands up, he says, “I’m going to reach for it, all right?”
“No funny shit, man.”
Yeah, that first guy is twitchy, but it’s the guy behind him, the one without the gun, Tom is most worried about. The guy back there tugging up his loose shorts to keep them from falling around his ankles – he looks homicidal.
A trickle of sweat rolls down Tom’s spine. Maybe this isn’t funny.
He gets his wallet out, and lifts it into the air like a cheeseburger on a spatula, and slowly hands it over to the guy with the gun who snatches it. Then they run, both of them are running, and around a corner into an alleyway and gone.
Maybe they’ll try to pawn the badge.
Otherwise, Tom calculates, they just got themselves thirteen dollars cash and a debit card they can’t use.
He puts the truck in drive. The light has changed back to red, but he rolls through the intersection anyway. Nothing like getting carjacked to start your heart pumping.
***
Maybe the badge could fetch them something, he thinks a little later. He’s pulled over on the interstate about a mile from where the thugs robbed him. If they find a pawn shop with a brazen broker, they might get thirty dollars. Forty, tops. Picked up eventually by someone looking to impersonate a cop, perhaps.
How the world turns.
It’s been two years since Nick died, and this is where it happened. Right here on the side of I-75. Presently, the vehicles on the Southbound side rush past like they’re all in a hurry to get somewhere. Tom walks to the white cross staked into the ground just past the asphalt. Instead of a flower, like a rose or something, he has a cigar. Corny, maybe, but Nick liked to smoke.
“Here you go, buddy,” Tom says, and sets it down.
The cigar is Nicaraguan. Get it, Nicky? Nic-a-raguan.
Nick would have thought it was funny. He’d had that goofy kind of humor. He’d been a troubled soul, but he was the only big brother Tom ever had. Tom’s only family at all, really, and now he was gone.
Tom walks back to the truck and gets in, his shirt sticking to his back. It’s hot. A northerner at heart, he’s never quite gotten acclimated to the tropics. Maybe it will take another couple years. Maybe not.
He gets behind the wheel and uses his phone to call the ROC. He works for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and the regional operations center where he keeps an office is just a couple of miles away. After he gets through the automated system and talks to the desk cop, he tells his supervisor about the stolen badge, and how it happened.
“Huh,” Turnbull says. “You want to run them through the system?”
Turnbull’s not the most compassionate guy in the world. “I’m fine, thanks,” Tom says.
“I know you’re fine, or you wouldn’t be calling.”
Right.
“No need to get involved,” Tom says. "I just had to report the stolen badge.” He checks his mirrors and starts getting up to speed. He’s got to really floor it to merge with traffic.
Turnbull probably overhears the engine. “You going to go get it back?”
Tom’s already slowing for the next exit. With in a couple of turns and two intersections he’ll be back where two guys rolled him. “Yeah” he says to Turnbull. “I’ll go get it.”
He rings off, tossing his phone onto the seat beside him.
Talk is cheap. Nick was a talker, but he was good on his word. He was a man of action. No, he wasn’t always the best role model. But about some things, Tom followed Nick’s lead.
Like right now, chasing after two guys unfortunate enough to get strung up on heroin. Lost their sanity to the point they’d steal from a state cop. He didn’t care about them, so much. You couldn’t do much more with junkies but give them a mulligan; the drugs had typically fried their common sense, taken them over.
It was the principle of the thing.
It was his badge.
It was what he had left.
Tom hit the gas, took the next right, putting the ocean and the setting sun to his back.
Nick, he thought as he drove, I love you, brother.