Figures

Malcolm watched the man across from him with a detached sense of amusement. He was bored; any entertainment was welcome. This guy had raised enough ruckus to pull his attention away from his phone, basically sprinting into the subway car and using his momentum to make a hard left by grasping the bar at the door and swinging/sliding into the bench seat next to it. Whereupon he proceeded to strike up a cigarette while sitting directly beneath the very obvious no smoking sign.

This guy had all the hallmarks of being stressed out. He had the five o'clock shadow, the tousled hair, the loosened tie, the sweat-stained shirt, the bouncing leg, the fervent glances at his watch, and the religious dedication of sucking down his cigarette every couple of seconds. Malcolm was feeling anxious just looking at him.

He never looked around or made eye contact with anyone, just stared off into space whenever he wasn't consulting his watch or, strangely, reaching back to pat at his backside like he was checking to make sure he still had his wallet. He did that a few times, his face alternating between concern and relief as he reassured himself he was still in possession of whatever it was that was back there.

Malcolm found it ironic then, when the train came to a halt a few stops later, and the man fairly bolted for the door, not realizing that something had fallen out of his pocket onto the floor of the car. The "good Samaritan" in Malcolm suddenly snapped to the fore as he stooped to pick it up and called after the man.

Too late. The subway doors shut in his face, and he futilely knocked on the glass while waving around what he assumed was a wallet. On the other side of the door, the man turned around, having apparently heard him, with a look of impatient annoyance on his face that quickly transitioned to disbelief as his hand shot around to pat himself down in a vain attempt to assuage his rising panic.

Malcolm gave the man a helpless shrug as the car lurched and began to pull away from the landing. The man just stood there, dumbfounded, watching him go until Malcolm lost sight of him. He returned to his seat, feeling sorry for the guy, and started looking for a driver's license to get a name, but it turned out he had been mistaken.

It wasn't a wallet.

It was a notebook….

It was finely made, roughly palm-sized, covered with black leather, featuring a bookmark and a logo that he didn't recognize embossed on the spine. Malcolm opened it up hoping to find a "property of" line, a phone number, any kind of identifying information; instead, he was greeted by a plethora of numbers and letters in odd combinations. He flipped through the pages, confused by page after page filled only with nonsensical figures. Towards the back, though, the figures became quite a bit less garbled, enough for him to start making sense of some of it.

Mr. Ball-of-Stress was apparently a bookie of some kind; one that was lackadaisical when it came to maintaining the cipher he was supposed to be using. Malcolm was no code breaker, but after flipping back and forth between several pages for a while he worked out that this guy had apparently created a much simpler, bastardized version of the original cipher for his personal use. Probably not the smartest idea, considering that a random Joe Blow had quickly figured it out. And, once he knew what he was looking at, the reading became quite interesting indeed.

Apparently this was a record of very large sums of money changing hands. The first few lines of any given entry were times, dates, and locations. Under those were what he believed to be confirmation times, showing the transaction had been successful; a deal closed. Some very big deals had gone down too: one hundred thousand...five hundred thousand...

Not every entry was as large though. The majority were under fifty thousand, but that was still enough to make his mouth water. He flipped to the latest entry. After a few moments of deciphering, he saw that the payoff was twenty thousand dollars, and that there was no confirmation date as of yet.

The “good Samaritan” in him took an abrupt back seat as he began feverishly trying to decode the entire entry. Twenty thousand wasn't an insane amount of money, but it wasn't anything to shake a stick at either. He could use twenty thousand…. He was only on this subway because the fuel pump on his car had gone out. He could fix his car, pay rent for the foreseeable future, take Sarah out on a legitimate date--hell, take her on an actual vacation! That was the trick: Get out of town, use the money fast, leave as little a trail as possible. Maybe save a bit...but ultimately keep it from being traced back to him. There was no way that these transactions were legal, which meant if a shipment were to disappear mysteriously, maybe no one would look too hard for it if they thought it would draw too much attention. All of this assuming he could get his hands on it of course.

He was nearly done right as his stop came up. He, too, found himself checking his pocket repeatedly as he exited the subway and made the short trek back to his apartment. Once inside, he sat down to finish. He ran through the notebook's entry, deciphering, and--yes--there was supposedly a duffel bag with twenty thousand dollars in it, just sitting in a locker at an airport not ten miles from him at this very moment.

It was a two-step scenario: A first locker held the key to a second locker…. The first was rented-out under the name of "Jackson,” locker number thirty-eight. The second key was to locker eighty-eight.

Malcolm ran his hands through his hair. Could it be that simple? A couple of lockers, and he's twenty thousand richer? No way he was that lucky. He was never that lucky; things always blew up on him one way or another. Wasn't it about time something worked out though?

This was something he could do; after all, it was twenty thousand dollars! He could do this. Malcolm strode over to a shelf, grabbed a bottle of bourbon, opened it, and took a deep swig from it. With a satisfied sigh, he placed it back and muttered to himself, "Let's do this...."

Half an hour later, Malcolm stepped out of a taxi at the airport, virtually vibrating with excitement. He knew this airport, he knew where the lockers were. He approached the help-desk nearby and requested the key for locker thirty-eight under the name Jackson. The lady at the desk bade him wait one moment as she searched it up on the computer and then reached beneath the counter to procure the key and handed it over. Malcolm thanked her with an awkward and embarrassing half bow. He quickly about-faced and bee-lined it for the lockers.

As he was approaching the appropriate locker, he had a small heart attack as he noticed the stressed-out man pacing in front of the completely wrong row of lockers muttering strings of numbers, obviously trying to remember the correct locker. Malcolm gritted his teeth and mumbled, “Figures,” under his breath. He nearly called it off right then, but he was so close! Thankfully, the guy’s back was to him. Malcolm swallowed hard and power-walked to locker thirty-eight, put the key in, and opened it as quietly as possible, his heart hammering. Inside was another locker key that had a tag reading eighty-eight. He took it, closed the locker quietly, then glanced around for the next locker, hoping against hope it wasn’t on the side with the man who was legitimately losing it at the moment. Malcolm swore he heard him sob.

Thankfully it wasn't. He realized the key to eighty-eight was for a different set of lockers over on the other side of the airport, the tag was different. He tiptoed, then power-walked, purposely avoiding the help-desk in a roundabout route, in the direction of the other lockers. He passed by a security officer and tried his hardest not to seem suspicious before he found the lockers he was looking for and sidled up at eighty-eight.

The key slid in and turned easily. He nearly passed out as he opened the locker and saw the bulging duffel bag before him. He looped the duffel's straps over his shoulder and closed the locker as stealthily as possible even though it wasn't necessary. He booked it for the exit, throwing both locker keys in a trash can for lack of any better idea, and hailed a new taxi outside.

A half-hour later, he was back at his apartment.

The first thing he did was drop the duffel bag on his coffee table and immediately suck down another two shots of bourbon to calm his nerves. He sank down onto his couch, feeling giddy, with the duffel bag resting on the table before him. He reached over and unzipped it, then bit his knuckle and did a little dance as the stacks of bills revealed themselves.

He spent the next hour counting and recounting the bills in disbelief. They were mostly large bills, but they always added up to exactly twenty thousand dollars. When Malcolm was satisfied that his count was accurate, he sat back and polished off the bourbon. He slept very well that night.

Several days later, Malcolm had a small portion of the money in his bank, his car was repaired and ready to go, and he had a vacation to Paris with Sarah booked. The rest of the money was going to be pocket-change and slowly introduced to his savings account over the next few months. He was sitting back on his couch, feeling proud of himself--when there was a knock at the door.

No one ever knocked at his door….

He got up to look through his peephole...and immediately broke out in a cold sweat due to what he saw.

On the other side of the door stood the stressed-out man, looking significantly worse for wear, as if he'd gone twelve rounds in a boxing match. With him were two bruiser types. One was bald, the other had slicked-back hair and a goatee; both were musclebound and imposing. Baldy knocked on the door as Malcolm watched and said with a chuckle, "We know you're in there, we can hear ya breathin’, Bud.”

Malcolm wasn't just breathing, he was on the verge of hyperventilating. Of course it had been too good to be true. Why did he ever think he could manage to get away with it?

“We know you have the notebook too. It's the twenty-first century bud, those particular notebooks come special with a GPS tracker under the logo. Higgs, here,” he nudged the beaten man, “is on his last legs with the boss and really needs that back. We just need you to hand it over...and, oh yeah...you’ll need to come along quietly with us.”

Malcolm felt his heart sink like a stone down into the pit forming in his stomach. With a wry grimace he simply said, more to himself that anyone else, “Figures….”