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We’d been working on the place for four days, having ten times more garbage and donation boxes than we did shit that was coming back to the city with us, when she suddenly called me, her voice tense enough to make me rush toward the living room, where she’d been going through her dad’s action movie DVD collection.
“What’s all that?” I asked, seeing her sitting there with several open, empty DVD cases scattered around her.
It was then that she lifted her hands.
Where a fucking pile of keys were located.
“Keys,” she said, voice strange.
“To what?” I asked.
“Well,” she said, putting them down on the coffee table, and reaching for one. “This one belongs to the garage where I know Neeley’s money is stashed,” she said, holding it out to me.
And, sure enough, on the back of the tag were the words April Ave.
“Do they… all have addresses?” I asked, looking at them.
“Yes,” she said, her wide eyes looking up at me.
“Fuck,” I said, looking down at the key, trying to calculate just how much money that might be, if he had it stashed in a ll of those locations.
“We have to go and look in all of them, right?”
Her father had been murdered for this.
A dozen other men were dead for it too.
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “If you don’t want to do it, I could do it by myself,” I offered.
“No. No, I want to. He died for this. I owe it to him to collect it, right?”
“Where do you want to start?” I asked.
“The one I know about, I guess. We probably have to clear them out too.”
I didn’t expect them each to be as full of crap as they were. But I guess it made sense. If he wanted to throw people off the scent of all of the cash hidden in there, the best way to do it was to make it seem like the garages and storage facilities were full of shit that no one would even want.
For the most part, it seemed like he’d possibly driven around on trash day and collected all the junk at the curb. Broken chairs. Old mattresses covered in stains. Those cube organizer things full of old kid toys.
But, inevitably, hidden somewhere in each of those storage spaces, there was cash.
In the first unit, it was in brown bags in a chest. In the second one, stashed in cheap, straight-to-DVD movie cases. In the third, he’d put the cash in the bottom of old plastic containers of coffee.
By the time we were done, I was actually fucking anxious driving back to her father’s apartment.
Because while we didn’t count it, I had a pretty good idea we were talking millions.
Millions.
No wonder Neeley had been after her.
Her father must have put a big dent in his income.
“I don’t understand why he did this,” Millie said as she stood staring at the kitchen counter where we had piled all of it. “He lived so simply. I mean… look,” she said, waving to the apartment as a whole.
As a whole, she was right.
The place wasn’t fancy. There were high points. His TV was expensive as fuck. So was his laptop and some of the clothes in his closet. As a whole, though, it seemed like the man’s only vice was buying physical media. Mostly movies.
