Fiction Short Story

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Fiction Short Story

by Robin Flinchum

The Story of my Life

OK, I ask you, is it my fault? Is it my fault the guy leaves his briefcase in the back seat of my cab? It's not my fault. He's back there with some Betty making out and I'm keeping my eyes on the traffic. People think cabbies get a thrill out of watching them get nasty in the back of a cab but the truth is we're generally sick of other people and their bad manners, poor taste, and total insensitivity. It's gross, and I'm not that kind of girl. I don't watch. I just drive. So when we get to the Dentmoor building on Broadway and the two of them slime out and drop me a skimpy tip, I'm not looking to see if he left any personal items behind. I leave the lost underwear for the cleaning crew.

I get a cheap hot dog at a stand down the block –– my usual lunch, and I'm still tasting it when the next fare, a business type, taps on the glass and tells me there's a briefcase on the floor and says he's not riding in the back with an unidentified briefcase. New York is the city of paranoia these days –– like terrorists spent months plotting to blow up my cab, who would care? But maybe he thinks he's important enough to make a good target cause he sure is making a lot of noise about it. So I get out and grab the case and haul it up front. He settles back in his seat. I open the case, snap it shut again as fast as I can, and hit the gas.

"The case is all right?" asks Mr. Paranoid.

"Yeah, it's fine," I answer. "Just a bunch of business crap."

I let the fare out about ten blocks down, near the subway and don't even check to see if he dropped me a tip. My heart is pounding so hard in my chest I'm thinking the whole time he must be able to hear it, but I guess he didn't. I drive the cab to my apartment building. It's all the way across town and normally I'd never do something like that since I have to pay for every click on the meter. But I want to get that briefcase inside where no one else can see it.

With the door shut and bolted on my little studio, I sit down on the saggy bed and pop open that case. It's chock full of money. Money, money, and more money. The sleazy fare with the Betty was so busy getting busy he left behind a suitcase full of it. I didn't spend a whole lot of time wondering what it would be like to be so rich you could let a case full of money slip your mind, but I did try to picture it for a second. Unimaginable. So instead I concentrated on deciding what to do now that it was all in my hands. The guy might forget about it momentarily, but he'd come looking for it soon enough.

Was I going to give it back, or was I going to keep it?

Sure, right about now you're thinking I'd have been stupid to keep it. The guy probably had it marked, they'd find me in a heartbeat, the money didn't belong to me and it was just wrong. You're thinking all that now, but if you were sitting in a shit apartment in a shit neighborhood in New York City with enough currency in your hands to wallpaper the whole tenement, you wouldn't be so quick to think like that.

I'm not the kind of girl who's ever done much worth talking about: haven't taken many risks, been driving a cab since I got out of high school, and never been any farther out of New York than New Jersey. I'm not the kind of girl people remember. I'm plain, in the way I look, the way I talk, the way I live. You couldn't write a book about my life because there would be no plot, no story. If I disappeared this minute, no one would miss me. Hank would miss his cab until he got the cops to track it down. The fare would miss his money until he figured he wasn't getting it back. But no one would miss me.

So I do it. I don't even pack my clothes, just grab a few things out of my important papers drawer, put the money in a less conspicuous duffle bag, and walk out of my apartment. Just like that, it's the end of my life as I'd lived it up until that moment. I take a bus downtown and find a beauty salon and have one of those makeovers done. I'm not much for all that primpy stuff, but I figure I should look different if I'm going to get away with this. And if I'm going to be slapping down a lot of money, I should look like I have a right to it. So after the salon I go into Saks Fifth Avenue and have the sales girls fit me up with the right clothes. I buy some matching luggage to put the clothes in, catch a cab for the airport, and I'm on my way.

I feel ridiculous in the linen skirt suit and heels from Saks but no one questions me.

They call me ma'am and smile politely.

Turns out the world looks different when you're wearing money. I catch the first plane out, which happens to be headed for Las Vegas. It seems the perfect place to go. Of course I probably won't have long before I'm tracked. I have to buy the plane tickets in my own name since I wasn't prepared with a set of fake documents just in case someone dropped a million bucks cash in my lap (I hadn't actually counted it yet, but I was pretty sure it had to be at least that much).

Vegas ... wow! What a place. It's warm and sunny but not muggy like in the city. I'm thinking it's the perfect place to turn over my money fast. I could buy stacks of chips at every casino on the strip and play a little bit, then turn them in for different bills. If I worked fast enough, I might launder all that money before anyone even came looking for it.

Of course, trading in a million dollars in currency is a little more time-consuming than you might think. The casinos have limits on how much you can slap down at a time; guess there are a lot of people get the same idea I had. But once I get started I make pretty good progress. I've gone from the Luxor all the way to the Rio and probably have at least twenty thousand clean money on me.

And that's when the sleazy fare shows up. I'm having dinner in the Top of the World restaurant at the Stratosphere, eating lobster and drinking champagne and planning to have the tiramisu for desert, when he kicks out the empty chair across from me and sits down. You'd think it would scare me enough to make me stop eating, but I tell you I never had food that good in my life. He props his elbows on the table and leans forward but I just kept eating. If this is my last meal, I'm going to make the most of it.

"Where's the chick from the cab?" he asks. And for a minute I don't know what he's talking about. Then I realize he doesn't recognize me.

"Her?" I smile big at him and try batting my eyelashes. It's a new one for me so I'm not sure if I'm doing it right. "I left her in an alley in New York. She was on her way to turn the money in. I figured what a waste! So I took her ID and the money and knocked her on the head. That simple. Champagne?" I picked the bottle out of the ice bucket and motioned for the waiter.

The fare is looking me up and down. He's leaning forward and leaning back again, like he's not sure what tack to take. Intimidate me, kill me, have a good laugh, he can't decide.

"So you kept the money from going to the feds?"

"Sure. I didn't know who it belonged to, I couldn't have brought it back to you, but I knew it didn't belong to the cops."

He smiles then and I feel my shoulders relaxing. He's ugly, kind of greasy in an expensive suit that looks cheap on him, but the smile improves him.

"All right," he says. "You did good. You give the money back, I let you keep little for your trouble, and we call it even." You can tell the guy's got a soft spot for the Bettys.

"And if I don't?" I ask.

"And if you do, I also let you live," he answers, while the waiter pours him out a glass of champagne and pretends not to hear.

"All right," I say, giving a sigh. "Let me finish my dinner and we can catch a cab to my hotel."

He nods with a self-satisfied smirk that makes me want to smack him, but I do the eyelash thing again instead. I finish the lobster and I go for that tiramisu.

"I already cleaned twenty thousand," I say hopefully as we're riding the elevator down, looking out over the whole sprawled-out neon glory of Vegas below us.

"All right, then," he makes one of those expansive gestures. "We'll make it an even fifty. How do you like that?"

Me? I have to tell you I like that just fine. It's no million dollars but fifty thousand is more than I'd have saved in a lifetime and in less than 24 hours I've gone from a hot dog on the corner of Broadway and 57th to lobster at the top of the Stratosphere tower. Throw in a little plot and now it's like the story of my life is just waiting to be written. "Yeah, I like that fine."

So it wasn't my fault the guy left his briefcase in the back of my cab, but it would've been my fault if I hadn't taken the chance when it came. Nobody who can't afford to lose it carries a million in cash, nobody who kept their hands clean making it. So I figure it was fair game. I took the risk and it changed my life.

It doesn't seem safe to go home again, not after all that's happened, but I can't think why I would want to. There's a lot of sunshine out here in the west. That and fifty thousand bucks makes the world seem like a whole different place.

© Copyright 2003 Robin Flinchum

About the Author:

Robin Flinchum is a freelance writer living in the Death Valley desert. Her work appears regularly in Las Vegas Life, Las Vegas Weekly and other publications. This is her fiction debut.