Money, Get Away!

Chapter 5 Insider Trading

It was almost three-thirty in the morning when they eased up in front of the abandoned warehouse in the old taxi cab after circling the block in the misty rain. They could hear the high-pitched squeals of a slow-moving freight train somewhere nearby after they turned the engine off.

It took a hell of a lot of persuasion, but Tony relented and decided it might actually be best to see if they were in the warehouse Mavis had recently owned. He did not say how he was going to do this and Mel had not asked out of fear he might change his mind, though already she was beginning to change her own mind.

As they parked, he said, "Okay. A long time ago Mavis was using this dump to store and run cigarettes from and to other states with less tax or more tax than Oklahoma. It wasn't much with a single carton, just a buck or two saved by buyers here and there. But with tens of thousands of cartons it added up."

The neighborhood seemed to leer at her from all corners after she knew this information. It's such an odd neighborhood to begin with, strange enough to be in The Lost Boys movie, but it's hard to put your finger on exactly why. The feeling begins with the out of place little dinky houses. They're all small one story affairs. As with the hotel's neighborhood, many windows have wood covering them probably from tornado damage, and possibly to avoid theft.

Many houses are isolated, shoe horned between warehouses or on lonely corners. There doesn't appear to have been a solid delineation for the zoning department to crack the enforcement whip, beat back the little houses from sneaking in to the industrial zones, or vice versa, keep the gorilla warehouses from invading near the rails.

It's a "mixed" neighborhood in that sense. Warehouses and factories are peppered by the small houses; and struck through it all, like a violin's strings, railroad tracks run at an odd angle northwest which makes all the blocks pie shaped, or obtuse triangles of gathered grubby little domiciles with giant factories and dilapidated warehouses leering over them.

"Let's just sit tight and watch for a minute." Tony said, "Sometimes watching, it reveals more than just being foolish, just rushing in." The rain pitter-patterned on the taxi roof as the sky decided to quit crying and soon push the cloud cover out.

An alley cat with black spots crossed to the middle of the pot holed street and paused to lick his right flank with business like motions before looking around and moving on. They were both struck silent at the wet industrial look of this creepy neighborhood.

The entrance to this particular block, Easton Street, had yet another tiny house on the corner with boarded up windows, and the paint on the house was a sick color of dead grass in winter. What really baked your noodle, so aged it appeared just looking upon it, was to wonder what came first, the little house or the warehouse. Judging by the exterior of the small home, built as shabby as the barn behind the house in Andrew Wyeth's painting, "Christina's World," this little house may have actually been built before the warehouse behind it. Maybe a few centuries ago some lady in a pink dress laid downhill and stunned in a dead field of grass at the sight of it. None of these streets existed yet as she looking at this stump of a home from afar in the distance.

Immediately behind this house, which had no yard to speak of, was the front yard of the warehouse. This was the warehouse they were to watch. It had walls that were pockmarked and almost the same color as the little house too, if it were not streamlined by rust down its mottled sides from the metal roof. In the dead grass out front were thrown broken pieces of pallets lost long ago and were now in various states of decomposition.

Right in the middle of a blank wall on the warehouse some wayward youth had tagged "Hound," on the wall, but that had faded with time to merely a whisper of "Hound" on a dirty old wall. There was a single rolled down garage door, the color of a dirty polar bear with a concrete ramp rising at its flank toward an aged door. The ramp was littered with debris and garnished with ugly rusted handrails. It all looked as if it hadn't been used since President Coolidge was in office. At the end of this ramp the metal door was so orange with rusted age that the color of it could be discerned at night, and there was no visible doorknob on it.