Any Day Now Page 4

  Rodriguez sat triumphantly on one side of the booth while the writers watched the file from the other side.

  Sure enough, the video was as advertised.

  It showed a man in a colorful sombrero, white tee-shirt and blue jeans dancing on the roof of a single-story house.

  He was perilously close to the edge, obviously intoxicated and waving a bottle of tequila.

  A bottle which was almost empty, which almost surely explained his behavior.

  As Rocki and Darrell watched, he removed an old-fashioned revolver from his belt and fired several shots into the air.

  He shouted “Viva Mexico” and laughed like a banshee.

  Rocki said, “He looks rather familiar, doesn’t he?”

  Darrell agreed.

  He looked directly at John Rodriguez and said, “He looks exactly like you.”

  “Hey, I told you we were distant cousins. That’s just family resemblance.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Rocki asked, “Has anyone else seen him besides you? I mean in person. Not somebody who’s seen the video.”

  “No. Like I said, he only appears to me. I’m the only one who can see him or hear him.”

  Darrell changed the subject on purpose.

  They talked about the weather.

  Roadrunners and coyotes, both real and in the cartoons.

  They talked of the Cowboys, and whether they’d win more than a couple of games in the upcoming season.

  They talked about anything and everything other than Pancho Villa standing on a rooftop drinking tequila and shooting a pistola.

  Rodriguez finished his lunch and stood up to leave.

  Darrell handed him back his thumb drive, the three shook hands and parted ways.

  As Rodriguez walked out of the restaurant Rocki said to her husband, “What do you think? Think old Pancho has earned a place in our ghost book?”

  “No way. But this whole thing, the wild story, the bogus video, the free lunch for John… maybe it’s more suitable for our book on Americana.

  “I mean, we’ve got to record it somewhere. It’s just too crazy not to.”

  Chapter 10

  Marilyn Petty really wasn’t very good at budgeting her money.

  She counted the money in her purse and found she had two hundred seven dollars and fourteen cents.

  She found a scratch-off lottery ticket in her glove box worth another four bucks.

  Two hundred eleven dollars.

  Once she made up her mind to head back to Toledo, there was absolutely no reason she couldn’t have made it.

  But she passed up the budget motel in Valdosta because she’d once seen a cockroach run across the floor there.

  The place she stayed at instead cost twice as much.

  She wasted money on gas because somebody told her cars got better mileage on premium gas.

  Maybe.

  But certainly not enough to justify the fifteen additional cents she paid for each and every gallon.

  She also couldn’t pass up the convenience store snacks every time she topped off her tank, and the exorbitant prices which of course came with them.

  She’d have made it if only she’d been more careful.

  But money management was never her strong suit, even when it was critically important.

  By the time she got to Akron the baby was out of formula and diapers, the car was running on fumes and she was down to her last twelve dollars.

  She wasn’t gonna make it.

  Once the realization struck her the regrets came.

  She should have made friends with the roaches at the motel.

  Or at least tolerated them.

  She should have foregone those big bags of potato chips and extra large diet sodas.

  She should have gone with the cheaper gas.

  And the four packs of cigarettes she’d gone through at eight bucks a pack.

  She was frustrated and upset, but had only herself to blame.

  The baby was hungry and was starting to wail.

  Formula was expensive.

  If she bought some she wouldn’t be able to buy enough gas to get her the rest of the way.

  If she used her last few bucks for gas instead she could hit up some of her street friends for formula money.

  Street people are notorious for not sharing their money.

  However, many of them make an exception for small children and babies.

  Especially babies who are hungry. For they all remember times from their childhoods when their own stomachs were empty and growling.

  But it wasn’t fair for her little “Jacob” to have to go hungry for another two hours.

  If he’d just go to sleep there was a chance he’d wake up in Toledo, after she’d scrounged a few bucks to take care of his hunger.

  But that was unlikely.

  He’d awakened from a nap not long before.

  He was probably up for awhile.

  She tried cooing to him, then singing a silly lullaby.

  None of it worked. A baby who’s hungry won’t be happy until that hunger is satisfied.

  She was growing more and more desperate by the minute.

  And she made a huge mistake.

  She pulled into the parking lot of a familiar supermarket chain.

  A chain she knew from past experience which didn’t lock up their baby formula like other stores did.

  Now, she could have stood outside the supermarket’s doors and begged for change.

  Mothers, especially, hate to see a hungry baby.

  In no time at all she’d have been blessed with change and one-dollar bills from mothers on their way in and out of the store.

  And many fathers too.

  But Marilyn, by this time, was growing ever more frustrated by the minute.

  And her frustration level clouded her judgment.

  Chapter 11

  Marilyn walked into the Food King store, already having her plan in mind.

  She’d been in Food Kings all over Ohio.

  It was one of her favorite places to shop. They were clean, cheap and had a good variety of brand name foods.

  They were also laid out exactly the same.

  She knew before ever setting foot in the store that the powdered baby formula would be knee-high on the second shelf of the left side of Aisle 4.

  Just like it was in every other Food King in the state.

  The corporation mandated similar stocking plans for the convenience of their customers. So they could go from store to store without having to search for what they needed.

  It also made it easier for their employees to move from store to store to augment staff when one store might be short-handed due to a flu virus or other employee shortage.

  Marilyn knew the unmarked door at the front of the store was the loss prevention office, where a single store employee would be sitting in front of an array of seven monitors.

  She knew the employee would be minimum wage, typically a kid just out of high school, with no real zest for stopping petty shoplifters.

  She also knew the kid would be in the room alone, for hours at a time, pretty much unsupervised.

  And that more than likely he was playing video games on his tablet or texting his girlfriend instead of paying close attention to the monitors.

  She’d done this kind of thing too many times not to have a solid plan.

  She knew the drill.

  If the snotty-nosed kid saw her shoplifting something on his monitors he’d notify the store security guard by radio.

  The guard would nonchalantly walk toward the registers, and as soon as she paid and headed for the exit he’d apprehend her.

  It would be up to the store manager to decide whether to have her arrested for shoplifting or to cut her a break.

  It was her one and only chance to talk her way out.

  Once a decision was made to call the cops the deal was done. The cops, once called to the scene, wouldn’t leave without their pound of flesh.

  The po
und of flesh, in this case, being Marilyn in handcuffs in the back of their patrol car.

  She placed little Samson; the baby she called Jacob, into a folding stroller she kept in the trunk.

  The stroller had a wire rack directly beneath the baby’s bottom.

  She took a wadded up baby blanket from the trunk and placed it upon the rack.

  It was wadded into a ball on purpose. A folded blanket wouldn’t hide the baby formula quite as well.

  Luckily the store wasn’t very crowded at all.

  It was mid-afternoon. Still two hours before the crush of customers who’d hit it in the five o’clock hour, grabbing this-or-that on their way home from work.

  Shoplifters all had their own preference.

  Some said it was easier to get away with a “lick” in a busy store, because the employees were all too harried to pay close attention to any one person.

  Whenever Marilyn was at a Food King, she found just the opposite was true.

  When it was slow, the young punk in the loss prevention room was more likely to slack off.

  More likely to pull out his phone.

  Or more likely to doze off.

  She rolled the baby into the store’s west side door, knowing full well that there would be only two checkers working at this time of day.

  Likely older white women, because those were the type of checkers who preferred to work first shift.

  They’d be on lanes one and two, unless one of those registers wasn’t working. In that case they’d open register three instead.

  She walked right past the clearance bin, where the guy in charge of the night stockers would have placed any dented cans they came across.

  She actually walked past Aisle 4, the one with the baby formula.

  It was essential she do her other shopping first.

  She’d have to actually pay for everything other than the formula, so she had to be careful it was both cheap and bulky.

  Both were essential elements to her plan.

  She went first to the canned pasta section and picked up a can of spaghetti and meatballs.

  The store brand. It was a few cents cheaper than the one she preferred, but good enough in a pinch.

  Next she went to the paper goods, where she grabbed a roll of paper towels.

  The baby had thrown up in the car from crying too much, so she needed something to clean it up with.

  And the store brand was on sale for thirty nine cents a roll.

  She tucked the paper towels under her arm, held the spaghetti and meatballs in one hand, and pushed the stroller to the produce section.

  She selected three bananas and broke them apart.

  A rack of plastic produce bags stood adjacent to the bananas but she passed them by.

  Her goal was to appear to be a damsel in distress. A single mother struggling to carry all her groceries and pushing a baby stroller at the same time.

  Three loose bananas would project that image much better than a plastic bag full of them.

  That was enough.

  She went to Aisle 4 and stopped the stroller right in front of the powdered formula.

  She looked down, pretended to just now notice her shoe was untied, and went down to one knee to tie it.

  She placed her paper towels, bananas and spaghetti on the floor in front of her, and looked up/

  Just as she’d planned, the baby stroller blocked the view of the camera at the head of the aisle.

  She knew instinctively her own body blocked the view from a similar camera at the back of the aisle.

  She slipped two cans of formula from the shelf and tucked them under the blanket.

  The baby had calmed down and was no longer crying. That was a good thing, because it drew less attention to her.

  She approached the register, nonchalantly looking around for the security guy.

  He was near the exit, making nice with a pretty girl in a low-cut blouse.

  He didn’t reach for his radio.

  That was a good sign.

  She listened intently for a specific set of words coming over the store intercom.

  “Priority cleanup, Aisle 20.”

  That would have been the backup signal, in case the security guy didn’t answer his radio.

  Marilyn knew there was no Aisle 20. Not in this Food King or any of the others.

  Also, there was no such thing as a priority cleanup. When a customer dropped and broke a jar of pickles or jelly, it was announced as a cleanup. But none had priority over any others.

  “Priority cleanup, Aisle 20” would have been a discrete signal to the security guy there was a theft in progress.

  But it never came over the public address system.

  She’d done it.

  She was going to get away with it.

  She wouldn’t have to cry and plead and swear on her son’s very life that she didn’t mean to steal the formula. She’d claim her hands were full. She couldn’t carry everything. She merely placed the formula there, at the bottom of her stroller, until she got to the register.

  And she merely forgot it was down there, honest she did.

  She never had to do that.

  She breezed through the checkout and was on her way out the door when suddenly an extremely loud buzzer sounded.

  Loud enough to wake the dead, it seemed.

  Then she felt the grip of the security man’s hand on her upper arm as he left the girl with the cleavage and decided to do his job.

  She was busted.

  The gig was up.

  In street slang, she’d gotten “got.”

  Chapter 12

  She’d gotten too cocky.

  She thought she’d known everything there was to know about how they handled security at Food King.

  But she didn’t know everything.

  She didn’t know that of the one hundred seventy six Food King stores in Ohio, this was one of three they were using to try out new security procedures.

  She didn’t notice the magnetic scanners on each side of the doorway as she walked in.

  Walmart had been using them for years, as had many of the other supermarkets she frequented.

  She was so used to seeing them everywhere else they didn’t register when she walked between them.

  She’d been too focused on her task at hand. She had tunnel vision and concentrated only upon accomplishing her mission.

  She screwed up.

  She also didn’t know that the store manager identified the top thirty items which were shoplifted from the store during the previous six months.

  The items were easy to identify.

  The computerized inventory control system flagged the thirty items as most pilferable, or the thirty items most likely to be written off as “presumed stolen” during monthly inventories.

  The thirty items included flashlight batteries, phone cords, bottles of fancy wines… and cans of powdered baby formula.

  Apparently Marilyn wasn’t the only new mother out there who’d rather steal the stuff instead of paying twenty eight dollars a can for it.

  Each of the target items was affixed with a tiny magnetic strip which set off the scanners as they left the store, unless the cashiers demagnetized the strip at the checkout counter.

  The formula came with a pull-top lid. It also had a blue snap-on plastic lid to keep it fresh and dry after it was opened.

  Had Marilyn lifted up the snap-on plastic lid and peered beneath it she’d have clearly seen the magnetic strip and modified her plans.

  But she didn’t think to look.

  Why would she? They’d never pulled such a stunt before.

  She felt somehow like the store had cheated. Like they weren’t playing fair.

  She resolved she’d never bring this particular Food King her “business” again.

  She didn’t tell the management that, but they probably would have readily agreed it was a good idea.

  Marilyn was dragged to the manager’s office.

  It was there she brought
forth phony tears and started to bawl.

  “I swear to you, sir, it was an accident. I didn’t get a shopping cart because I couldn’t push it and the stroller at the same time.

  “I only had a few items and thought I could carry them all. But I couldn’t.

  “I put the formula on the rack below my baby, fully intending to pay for it.

  “Honest I did.

  “I just forgot. It was an innocent mistake.”

  “Have you ever been arrested for shoplifting before?”

  “No sir, I promise I haven’t.”

  “Ever been trespassed from a Food King outlet before?”

  “I don’t understand. What do you mean by trespassed?”

  She understood perfectly. But she wanted to appear innocent and naïve to the ways of the world.

  She knew that Food King, like many other retailers, didn’t press charges against a first offender for shoplifting.

  What they did instead was have the local police issue a “no trespassing order.” It was an order to stay away from the store for the rest of her life. Basically a ban from the store. If she ever showed her face on the property again, she’d be arrested for trespassing whether she was stealing or not.

  She said she’d never been trespassed from a Food King outlet.

  She lied.

  She was well aware that Food King stores were typically franchised by city, and that the franchisees didn’t communicate much.

  The Dayton franchisee didn’t share his list of trespassed shoplifters with the Cleveland stores, for example.

  Or the Akron stores either, for that matter.

  At least that was the way it used to be.

  It was another of the enhanced security procedures being tried out by this particular store.

  The manager requested and received lists of all shoplifters banned from every Food King throughout the state.

  “You said your name was Marilyn Jamison?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Marilyn’s last name wasn’t really Jamison.

  But she’d been married to a jerk named Paul Jamison for three years.

  He got drunk and beat her almost every night during those three years.

  They were the longest three years of her life.

  She finally divorced him two years before and took back her maiden name of Petty.