Burning

He’d been on the run for three days.

At first there had been the actual running. It was tough, though, carrying the satchel. Cash was heavy, even paper money, when added to the weight of the tools he’d used. There hadn’t been as much in the safe as he’d hoped, but by the time he broke through the lock and cranked open the door, it was too late to back out. Then there’d been the problem of the alarm system. That damned thing had a battery in it! Who knew? After he’d cut the power wire he’d been a little too ambitious. Crap! So the time was short and he loaded only twenty thousand dollars into the bag, then he had to get back out of the building and over the back fence.

Inexperience meant that he left traces of himself inside the store. Fingerprints when he fumbled the alarm system. What with his two prior arrests on more minor accounts, he had a file in the system. Within a day – within a few hours – the police knew who had robbed the furniture store.

Captain Burns quickly took charge of the case. He’s the one who sent the all points bulletin across the radio and phoned the states bordering New York. He also tried to phone the RCMP in Toronto and in Montreal, but they felt like this problem would be stopped at the border crossings. “Call us back if you need help,” they’d said. They did agree to write down the details of the incident. The suspect’s full name was Roger Andrew Campbell. He was from Rochester, but had no prior convictions.

Burns and the other officers could not at first figure out why this guy – this nobody – would have attempted to rob the store. But it did not take long for the detectives to follow up his life and determine that he’d lost his job, lost his wife and lost his apartment all within a month’s time. Desperation was noted as a possible primary motive. They knew that while this might lead Campbell to be dangerous, it might lead him to do something stupid.

Running was hard. Campbell quickly decided he needed a better means of movement. He ran into the next overnight parking structure and tried one door handle after another, looking for an unlocked vehicle. Sedans, sports cars, SUVs. Then, finally, a pickup truck. It was old. But the door opened quietly. Campbell slipped inside and laid down on the bench seat. He tried to lie still to catch his breath without making a noise.

He was lucky that it hadn’t rained nor snowed and that the parking area had been swept recently. There was not a trace of him from the street to the truck. It was still the middle of the night. Dawn was probably five or six hours away.

Campbell debated with himself. Should he wait until daylight when he could leave in the truck and merge with the daytime traffic? Or should he get as far away as possible as soon as he could? He was exhausted. Most of this exhaustion came as a surprise. He was in pretty good shape, but the anxieties of the events had conspired to steal away his strength. He needed to sleep. He hoped he could.

***

Four hours later Campbell woke. It was still dark, but as he listened to the street he could not hear any sirens. He’d run maybe five or six blocks from the store’s back alley. The cordon was hopefully tighter than that so that he’d be outside it.

Campbell crouched down, feeling under the dashboard. Yes, this was an old pickup. No electronics. He could twist wires together until he got the engine to come to life. One attempt followed another and before his forearms were exhausted with pain and his fingers painful with exhaustion, he heard the engine start. Thankfully, too, he hadn’t pressed on the accelerator. Even as old as it was, the engine fairly purred.

Campbell raised his eyes to the window’s frame. He scanned left and right. Nothing moved. He was on the ground floor. It was getting a little bit light from the approaching dawn. He scanned again and could not see any surveillance cameras. Judging from the models of vehicles around him, this was not prime real estate. He remembered that that was one reason he’d chosen the store he’d robbed. Money yes. Traffic and police presence no.

Campbell sat up in the seat. He reached behind the back rest and felt fabric. He pulled out a coat, an overcoat, probably stuffed there for bad weather. Looking to where it had been he saw a baseball cap. He grabbed that, too, and put them both on over his own clothes. The coat didn’t quite fit, but it would help.

The motor had warmed. The gas gauge was not at empty. Things were looking good.

***

Captain Burns listened to one call after another. It had been a long night. They had other incidents to investigate. The shop owner had been wakened and brought down to the store in a squad car. He’d pointed out the opened safe, and complained loudly about the damage. When told to please quickly assess the thievery, the owner had counted and counted and then announced “Twenty thousand dollars! Twenty thousand dollars! How the hell am I gonna cover twenty thousand dollars of loss! You better catch this damned thief.”

The two officers there in the shop shook their heads. Burns could almost hear the shaking coming through the cell phone call from them. Twenty thousand dollars was a lot of money, but this was not a bank robbery or a robbery at the horse track or the lottery office. After three or four hours some of the urgency had worn off.

Burns was happy to send out the APB, and to call the other states and even to call Canada. He could then in good conscience set this one aside and move on. They and the detectives would have to hope for evidence to track down Campbell, or whoever had done the job.

***

Campbell drove south through the city. He kept to the speed limit, or a bit over, to look like anyone else. He obeyed the traffic signals and signaled his turns. Inside the city there was no longer any snow, so the roads were clear and there was little chance of an accident.

Eventually he passed out of the city and took to the highway. It was tough choice. He still did not know if the cordon was behind him or ahead, and he didn’t know if his chances were better on the four-lane or on the two-lane roads. Considering that it was the start of a work day, he decided to stay in the middle of the traffic opposite the rush hour inward bound cars. For twenty miles there were no roadblocks. He actually passed two speed traps, with state police cruisers hiding behind billboard or shrubbery. They took no notice of him. If it wasn’t the unremarkable truck or the unremarkable clothes, then he was at a loss to explain his good fortune.

The land rose as the miles passed away. Snow covered the fields. Then there was a berm of snow on each side of the highway. The plows might not have passed through last night, but they had been here within a week. The land rose as the temperature fell. Before he reached the fifty mile mark it had gone down to below freezing. And the trends continued.

He skipped lunch: too nervous. He skipped dinner: still nervous, not knowing who might be in the diner and see him. He just needed to find a place to hide and wait a few days. Finally, he relented and stopped at a small grocery, one poor enough to have no surveillance cameras. He bought ordinary foods, including a six pack of beer – all the kinds of things a guy would buy for his wife on an errand coming home from the night shift. That’s the story he went with when the clerk looked up. He strove to appear as ordinary as possible, with ordinary needs, ordinary cash and an ordinary “goodbye” going out the door.

By nightfall he was in the woods. He had to leave the highway to search. The roads narrowed. There was still a lot of snow here. It would be cold unless he found a cabin. The headlights revealed very little. No mailboxes appeared along the road. Then the driveways and dirt roads disappeared, too. He’d passed a sign ten miles back that a town was thirty miles further on. But the truck would be out of fuel by then. Yes, it was an old truck and did not get thirty or twenty or maybe even ten miles per gallon.

He pulled off at a side road. It wouldn’t do to leave the truck on a siding or at a rest area. Someone would likely report it stolen from the garage. So he drove as far up the lane as he could before the snow became too deep. It hadn’t been plowed and there was no sign of a dwelling.

Campbell grabbed whatever seemed useful from the truck. He walked off the lane into a grove of birch trees and began breaking off branches and peeling away bark. He carried these under the limbs of a tall pine and began assembling some kind of lean-to. With the wind blocked and the snow trod down, he knelt to make a fire. It was not too hard. In ten minutes he had a blaze going, but kept it small enough to be hidden from the road back down the lane. At night no one would see the light nor the smoke.

He warmed his hands, then his feet, then his torso. He rearranged the pine boughs and sat on the largest of the broken limbs. Then he stared at the satchel. “It’ll stay warm for a bit longer, I figure,” he said to himself, there being no one there to talk to. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

Campbell reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pencil. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a little black book. He turned past the pages where he’d made notes in the months passed by – notes to do with the job he’d since lost. He turned past the list of phone numbers for his wife and her relations, and turned past the list of their addresses. Finally, he came to a blank page.

Pulling one bundle of bills from the satchel he saw the paper wrapper which spelled out how many dollars were bound. He made a note “$20” and one hash mark. “Twenties will go here. I can do the multiplication later.” He pulled bundle after bundle, adding hash marks in the twenties column, or the tens column, or the fives column, or the fifties column. A smile crept onto his lips even as he took a break to stretch his legs and feed the fire. Two reasons brought up the smile. There was a lot of money here, and he remembered how to do the junior high school math to figure out the sum.

Before he reached the end of the satchel’s contents, he had to forage for more dead limbs, from both pine and birch trees. It didn’t take long, but he could feel the cutting cold right away. More than fifty feet from the fire there was really no warmth to be found. He scurried back to the flames and coals.

At the end he did his sum of products and stared down at the answer. It was just over twenty thousand dollars! Pretty much what he had guessed, but now it was a real number not an imaginary one. He put his book back in his back pocket and his pencil in his front pocket. “Put your tools away,” he could hear his father say.

He tried to sleep. But even with the tarp he’d carried from the truck, he had to choose between warming his face and hands versus warming his feet. He had worn the right shoes for a robbery, but not for slogging through the snow.

Morning came. He opened the bag of groceries again to see what was left after his dinner the night before. Bread, peanut butter, jelly, slightly frozen orange juice (the irony was not lost on him). He could get by. The problem was, where to go now?

The truck was useless, except perhaps as shelter. (Why hadn’t he thought of that last night?) The lane seemed to head nowhere. The road would have passing cars but he wouldn’t want them to pick him up. With these poor choices, the best one seemed to be to hike along the road and hope to find a house. Ideally he night find an abandoned house.

Back down the lane, carrying the satchel, the axe and the tarp. The fire starters he’d used up the night before, except for a book of matches. It was a heavy load. He stopped at the shoulder and stuffed the tarp and the axe into the satchel. He was glad, in a plaintive, mournful, desperate kind of way, that everything fit inside and he didn’t have to throw out any money.

The road was not busy. Maybe one car each ten minutes went by. He tried to make it look to each one like he had a destination to reach and with firm stride was prepared to do so without assistance. The weather was better than at midnight, but not by much. The wind had died down before breakfast and the sun had come out, but it conveyed little warmth. He counted on the strides themselves to do the warming.

Maybe three miles down the road he reached another lane. He stopped and looked up it through the trees. There seemed to be a cabin there. Would it be occupied? He watched for smoke. He listened for dogs or engines. Nothing. But it was better than being stuck out here in the snow, risking the next car or the one after that from calling in the sighting of a vagrant out on a country road in the winter.

He turned up the lane and walked to the edge of the clearing around the cabin. He stopped to listen again. Nothing. He went to the front door and pulled on it. It was locked. He left the satchel there and plowed through the now all the way around the building’s single room. No other doors. There were windows on two sides. He put his hands up to the glass and peered in. Yes, one room, but with a chimney and some fuel. He leaned against the door and pushed. It did not budge. He considered using the axe, but thought better of it. He’d need a good, tight door to keep out the cold. He walked to the end and broke one window, then reached through and pried the catch loose. He managed to climb onto the sill, then tumble inside. He went immediately to the front door and twisted the deadbolt. Opening it, he pulled the satchel inside and slammed the door. Back to the broken window, he opened the satchel and pulled out the tarp. Yes, he’d find something to fix it to the wall to keep out the wind from that spot.

In the dim light he found another book of matches but no other fire starter. There was wood in the bin, but no kindling. He needed something to start with.

Maybe it was the lack of nourishment. Maybe it was the cold. Maybe the desperation or the unfamiliarity with being stuck in the country without the benefits of city living. He thought, “If I had some paper, I could light it with a match…”

Campbell reached into his back pocket. He pulled out the little black book. The pages with the hash marks had consumed the remaining blank pages. But for what purpose would he need those figures?

He tore each of the marked pages from the book and crumpled it up beside its siblings. It made a meager pile.

He looked at the other, earlier pages in the little black book. For what purpose would he need those figures, those addresses, those names? Those people were as nothing to him.

He tore each of those marked pages from the book and added their crumpled bodies to the pile. Less meager he began to have hope.

He was getting cold. Colder than he’d been the night before. Looking over at the firewood rack there were only large, split pieces of log there. He considered going back outside, but he’d have to have trudged back across the clearing, into the woods, find the right trees, chop and split and wrench wood free, and carry it back on the same route. Maybe it would work with just this.

Two split pieces were placed into the fireplace. Between them he put the crumpled paper – half of it. Across the top he put a third piece of firewood. Then he scratches a match. It burst into flame, startling him in the gloom. It went out before he could shield it with his hand and reach toward the paper.

He scratched a second match, and it lit, too. He covered it with two hands, wincing at the pain unti lhe got his fingers the right distance away. He placed it against the pages and they lit gratifyingly beneath the log. They burned, but they burned away in only fifteen seconds. Nothing else lit.

Campbell pulled his coat tighter around him. He put the second half, the remaining half of the crumpled pages into the skeletal remains of the first half. Would it work? If not, what could he do?

Just before lighting the match and touching the papers, Campbell had a moment of clarity. The money! The paper bills. He could sacrifice some of them. He burrowed into the satchel and found a bound pile of fives. He placed it above the crumpled papers and below the log. He actually had no idea if money would burn.

He lit another match.

Then he heard a heavy car coming up the lane. Through the window he could see flashing red lights.

Copyright 2021 by William Altmann, all rights reserved.