Highway 61 by David Housewright

for a moment I wondered if it was off course like the Northwest flight that flew 150 miles past the Twin Cities before the pilots realized they were heading in the wrong direction. Finally Truhler’s cell phone rang. He answered. I could hear only his end of the conversation.
    “Yes … Just leave it on the bench?… Okay, okay.”
    He turned off his cell.
    “They said to leave the bag on the bench, walk to my car, and drive away.” This time he actually looked straight ahead when he spoke. “They said they were watching.”
    “Do exactly what you were told,” I said. “I’ll take it from here.”
    Truhler set the bag down, rose from the bench, and walked in the direction of his car. He didn’t speak. He didn’t press his fingers against his ear. He didn’t look for me.
    Good for him, my inner voice said.
    I stopped watching Truhler and instead concentrated on the brown paper bag. Sitting alone on the bench, it looked like it could have contained someone’s forgotten lunch. I heard Truhler open his car door, slam it shut, and start his engine. “Good luck,” he said. A few moments later, he was out of range. I turned off the transmitter and removed the receiver from my ear. No one approached the bag. Still, I thought, the blackmailers were taking a helluva risk, leaving the money in plain sight like that. What was to stop a bus rider from stumbling over it and either reporting it to the cops or taking it to the nearest Indian casino, depending on how closely they adhered to the maxim “Finders keepers, losers weepers.”
    Again minutes seemed like hours.
    Finally a little girl crossed the street at the light. She was wearing a sweatshirt that suggested she was a student at Farnsworth Elementary School just down the block and carrying a backpack emblazoned with a Disney character. She sat on the bench, which I found odd. Didn’t elementary school kids have their own school buses? Wasn’t there a phalanx of teachers to make sure they got on them? Certainly there had been enough of the yellow behemoths cruising Arcade in the past half hour.
    It wasn’t long before the girl opened the brown paper bag. It took just a moment before she fully realized what was inside. She looked carefully around her, then stashed the bag inside her backpack. I waited for someone to rush up to her and demand the bag’s return. No one did. I thought for a moment that I should retrieve the cash, then thought better of it.
    The girl was meant to find the money, my inner voice said.
    Nice, I thought. Very nice. The blackmailers had probably anticipated that someone—the cops, let’s say—might be conducting a stakeout. If the cops rushed the girl now, what would they get? A tearful child claiming she found the money and was taking it to her parents, brother, sister, cousin, friend, teacher, or coach to ask what to do with it. If they followed the girl, like I was about to do, until she actually gave the money to her parents, brother, sister, cousin, friend, teacher, or coach and then moved in, what would they get? More tearful people, all saying the same thing. The girl found the money and brought it to us. We were going to turn it over to the police, honestly we were. Or: The girl found the money and brought it to us and we decided to keep it —finders keepers, losers weepers. In any case, no crime was committed. Nice. My estimation of the blackmailers had increased immensely.
    ’Course, I wasn’t a cop anymore. I wasn’t interested in building a case. My job was merely to identify the blackmailers and ask them, politely, to take what they’d gotten from Truhler so far and move on. Or something like that. I wasn’t even carrying. My weapons were locked in the safe embedded in the floor of my basement. The Colt I took off the gunman the evening before was resting at the bottom of the Mississippi River where I tossed it on my way home—it’s never wise to keep a gun if you don’t know where it came from or what it was used