P AULIE’S HAS THIS GREAT CRUST that’s crisp and thin and has enough flavor to make you wish they’d just forget about the toppings. Seriously. Sometimes we just get a twelve-inch without anything and eat the crust.
Em ordered a fourteen-inch mushroom and Italian sausage with a pitcher of beer to wash it down, and we sat out on the faded wooden deck under a cheap umbrella, the sun cooking everything that wasn’t covered.
“So what is this big venture?”
“Promise me you won’t laugh?”
“No.”
“No, you won’t laugh?”
“No, I won’t promise you. Skip, that’s one reason I keep seeing you. You make me laugh.”
She laughed.
I read one time that if you can get a girl to laugh, you can get her into bed. I’m always afraid that they’ll laugh while we’re in bed.
“I’ll tell you anyway. James wants to go into the hauling business.”
“The what?”
“Hauling business.”
She was silent for a moment while she rolled that idea around in her head. “Well, he’s had to haul his ass out of a lot jams and he’s always been pretty successful.”
“He bought this box truck, and-”
“A box truck?”
“A box truck.”
“Like a U-Haul?”
“Yeah. Sort of. It’s this fourteen-foot aluminum box on the back of a cab. And you can haul just about anything.”
A smile played on her face.
“You’re gonna laugh.”
“No. Actually, it’s not a bad idea. For a sideline. And you could use the extra income.”
“That’s what I’m thinking. But James is thinking more than a sideline. He wants to have an entire fleet. He says people have too much stuff and they always want to move it.”
“Or store it.”
“Huh?”
“Skip, there’s this lady, Jackie Fuentes, and she’s got a ton of stuff she needs to store. You could haul it for her.”
There it was. We hadn’t handed out the first business card, and we already had a customer. This was going to be easier than I thought.
She sipped her beer and crossed those awesome tanned legs of hers. Her shorts rode up another couple of inches. I started to wonder if we were going to get comfortable tonight.
“She lives near the causeway off Indian Creek Village. Dad built her house about five years ago. God, Skip, it’s this huge mansion.”
Em’s dad lives in a 10,000-square-foot home in a gated community called Silver Bay, so when Em’s impressed with the size of a house, it must be awesome. And Daddy’s little princess lives in a condo that looks out over Biscayne Bay and South Beach from twenty stories up, so she’s not doing so bad herself.
“Her husband is involved in financing. I think he’s like a venture capitalist. He arranges high-interest loans to fund new businesses. And apparently he arranges extramarital affairs, because Jackie caught him with a little blond and threw him out of the house.”
In my relatively short life, I have always found it hard to fathom people who live that kind of life. And even with Emily, my own little rich bitch, I have to bite everything off in very small chunks. Christ, the apartment James and I live in isn’t 600 square feet, and our combined income is about $30,000 a year. Ten thousand square foot homes on fancy islands and high-finance engineers just don’t register.
“Eugene?”
She caught my mind wandering. Whenever she was serious she’d call me by my given name. I wish my mother had given it to someone else. And Skip? When I was younger, people would ask my name and when I said Eugene they’d invariably say “What?” I got to a point where I’d just say, “Skip it.” Over the years the name Skip took hold and I am so thankful for that. Of course, people I’ve known for years sometimes revert to Eugene. Sometimes when they’re serious and sometimes when they just want to piss me off.
“Yeah. Go on.”
“As I was saying, Jackie Fuentes threw her husband out.”
“And?”
“And she’s throwing all of his stuff out.”
“Stuff. That’s what James was talking about. People needing to move stuff.”
“She’s been going through his closets, the storage rooms, and she’s got a huge pile of stuff that she wants to move out. You could call and offer your services.”
Em gave me a big smile. I love that mouth. “Em, how do you know all this?”
“She confides in me. I see her at the club, and-”
The club. Em’s friends belong to the club, and how can someone like me identify with the “club”?
“She told me.”
The waitress brought the pizza, the steam still rising from the hot, melted cheese. I took a whiff. I believe that God created pizza for the regular people. Em can be regular when she wants to. It’s cheap, it’s filling, and there isn’t a bad pizza out there. There are great pizzas. There are pizzas that aren’t as great as the great, but there are no bad pizzas. That’s what I believe.
“She said that Rick-”
“Rick?”
“Ricardo, her husband. She said Rick had moved the little blond into a condo and she wanted his stuff out. And then she told me something that I probably shouldn’t say to you. Hell, I shouldn’t say it to anyone.”
I loved this about Em. She fought with herself. Usually she was conflicted about her financial and social status. She wanted to be a pizza person, but she was this little rich bitch who could afford filet mignon. She had a lot of battles over that. But this time, it was something totally different. And again, I should have heard it and walked away. Away from her, away from the truck idea, and away from James. But no, I actually encouraged my cute little Emily. Partly because it was fun to torment her a little, and partially because I really was trying to understand how the other half lives.
“Come on, Em. Tell me. Please?”
She picked up a corner piece of pizza and took a tentative bite. Not too hot.
“I shouldn’t.”
“Em, you’re asking me to do a job for this lady. Tell me.”
“All right, but you can’t go to James with this.”
“Maybe. After all, he is my partner.”
“Eugene!”
“No James.”
“She thinks that Rick might be working for some subversive group.”
“Subversive?”
“I think she’s paranoid.”
“Subversive?”
“Things that he’s said. Spanish-speaking guys who call at all hours of the night.”
“So what’s he doing for these foreign guys?”
“I told you. He raises money for risky business ventures and charges a hefty percentage.”
I scraped the cheese off a square piece with my teeth, chewed and swallowed it, then took a bite of crust. I’ve asked some of the people at Paulie’s what was in the crust, and they act like it’s a secret. Actually, most of them are Puerto Rican and they don’t speak much English. They might have told me the ingredients, but I wouldn’t have understood.
“So he’s raising money for a Spanish business.”
“It’s probably just that. But she says they call or show up at all hours of the night. I think she just got freaked out. She thinks they are”-she paused dramatically-“terrorists-part of a subversive plot.”
I bit off another piece of pizza and this time savored the sauce.
“Anyway,” she asked, “should I call her?”
“Yeah. I think so. I mean, what’s to think about. The terrorist thing sounds like a lady who’s paranoid.”
“She thought about going to the FBI or CIA, Skip. She was that scared.”
“She was really going to turn her husband into the CIA? Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”
“I shouldn’t have said anything.”
Terrorists? God, it seems that everything that happens any more is terrorist related. “Well, hell, we could use the money, we’ve got the truck, we can load it. Where does she want it hauled?”
“Probably a storage unit. Maybe to the condo where the Mr. is keeping the mistress.”
“How much do we charge?”
Em shook her head and drained her glass of beer. “Skip, Skip. You’re a business major. Did you learn anything at all at Sam and Dave?”
“To be honest?”
“Call a couple of companies and ask what they would charge.”
And there it was. Our first hauling job. Hauling away the remains of some philandering guy’s marriage. Hauling away the possessions of some rich bastard, Rick Fuentes, who might be an international terrorist. And I wondered if U-Haul and Ryder started out like that. I bet they didn’t.