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Finished, he’d looked around one last time, then pulled up the door.
Then I’d watched as he moved into the crowded unit, full of crap I was reasonably sure he’d never owned. He’d found an old chest piled high with chairs, then covered in blankets.
Then he’d removed each item before opening the chest.
Finally, he’d reached into his jacket, producing something in a brown bag, and buried it in the chest before carefully reassembling the blankets and furniture, pulling down the door, and locking it.
“Did you still think he was just being crazy?” Silvano asked.
“I didn’t know what to think,” I admitted. “So, I planned.”
“To do what?”
“To get into the unit. There really seemed to be no other choice, given how strange he was acting.”
“How’d you manage that?”
“I stole his keys when he was asleep, went to one of those key machines, made copies, then returned the originals where I found them.”
“Look at you. A little criminal yourself,” he said, giving me a smirk as his fingers started to trace distracting little circles across my thigh. “Then?”
“Then I went to the unit.”
I don’t think I’d ever been as anxious as I’d been as I made my way to that garage, my gaze moving around, as paranoid as my father had seemed.
Once inside, I’d pulled the door closed again, just in case. Then I’d gotten to work, moving everything the same way my father had, but paying close attention to the order and placement, wanting to get it right when I put it all back.
I’d hesitated for a long time once I got to the chest. Some part of me was afraid to confirm the things I’d been suspecting.
That he was into something.
Something bad.
But I’d beaten those worries back, wrenched open the chest lid, and got confronted with piles and piles of the same brown bags I’d seen the night I’d followed him.
“Drugs?” Silvano asked, voice devoid of judgment, and I appreciated that he was likely the only person in the world I could tell this story to without being judged.
“Money,” I corrected. “Bags and bags and bags of money.”
It was too much for me to count, even if I’d been so inclined. I had fanned one of the stacks, estimating ten grand or more.
And if there were almost a hundred bags…
Silvano took a slow, deep breath. Like he knew where this was heading.
“He stole that money,” I told him. “I mean, I didn’t have any proof of that right away. For all I knew, he was too paranoid to use a bank. Or he didn’t want the IRS on his back. Something like that.”
“You didn’t really believe that, did you?”
“No,” I admitted.
I’d had the overwhelming urge to be sick right there in that cluttered garage.
I’d known it wasn’t legit money.
There was no way.
My father had always been reasonably comfortable financially. There’d been lean times once in a blue moon, but he’d never gotten evicted, or needed to go without power or water. Our pantry never went bare.
