Play Dead (Part 18)

I’m Fixing To Play Dead (Part 18)

It was Gone! The old Oleg Cassini tweed suitcase with my 600,000 dollars inside of it was gone! I rolled over in my motel room bed and reached further out into the shadowy light and my hand felt nothing but the bare wall. I reached down, touched the floor and felt up underneath the bed and encountered nothing except empty space.

“Leon!” I yelled as I rolled over, sat up and turned on the bedside lamp. His rumpled bed was empty. The entire room was empty. “Maybe he’s in the bathroom or loading up the truck,” I thought. But when I rushed into the bathroom it was empty, and when I threw the motel room door open the parking spot which had held Leon’s old truck was empty.

Frantically, I surveyed the room and the only item that wasn’t a fixture was my duffle bag. “He’s gone to get us some breakfast and will be back directly,” I hopefully thought. “He just partially loaded up the truck and went out to get us a couple of biscuits.” I cringed thinking about the suitcase of money lying unattended in the back of the truck while Leon was in some fast-foot joint.

I decided to take a shower, desperately hoping that by the time I finished Leon would be back with some hot sausage-and-biscuits and continue his story about having two wives while he was in the pen. The sting of the hot water brought me to my full sensibilities and by the time I emerged from the bathroom into the still empty motel room I knew that Leon was gone and that he had stolen my money and wasn’t coming back.

Sitting on the edge of my bed, clad in only a damp towel I considered my situation with the sobering thoughts of what was I going to do next, where was that thieving Leon, and was there any possible way of getting my money back?

Suddenly, another devastating thought struck me, “What if he had also taken the little bit of cash I had left in my pocket?” I quickly snatched up the pair of new pants I had worn and searched the pockets, hoping for the best. Inside of one I found $230, the little bit I had left out of the six hundred I had had on me when I walked away from the plane crash, the amount left after Leon had bought liquor, biscuits, clothes at Walmart, and the gas to get us from Birmingham to Atlanta.

I was beginning to have second thoughts again as I counted the meager amount of money. It was more than enough to pay for a taxi to the airport, get my car out of the parking lot, go home and forget my plan of playing dead.

But then I started getting angry. “No! Heck, no!” I thought. “I’m too far gone to quit now!” Right then and there I made the decision that somehow I was going after Leon, get my money back and beat his sorry old robbing butt when I caught up with him.

“How could I have been so stupid as to trust an old ex-con?” I thought. In retrospect, I knew that I should have slept with that old suitcase instead of leaving it beside my bed. I should have wrapped my arms around it as if it was my lover, but it was too late now.

I checked the time and saw that it was a few minutes past eleven in the morning, and figured Leon could already be back in Birmingham by now. Hunger pangs suddenly hit me, but I pushed the thought of food back and thought about something more important—like how was I going to get back to Birmingham with no ID, no credit card, and with just a small amount of cash.

Leon had been right when he had told me that playing dead wasn’t very easy.

I decided to suck it up. It was a challenge, and, with grim determination, I made a commitment to myself to see it though. The question was, how? “Think,” I told myself. Think like Leon had when he was in prison, “Pretend the money was a woman and use your mind to find a way to win her back.”

I thought and thought but the only thing that came to mind was that what I really needed was more cash. Then it hit me! I knew where there was about $22,000 in cash, and it was only about five miles away!

In my daily transactions at VegX I used a lot of cash to buy vegetables and and fruit from growers at the State Farmer’s Market. Some of them would give you a better price if you paid in cash, consequently, I kept a large amount of cash in the safe in my office, and only I knew the combination to it.

But it was still daylight, and even though it was Sunday, there was a good chance someone who knew me might see me, so I had to wait until darkness set in.

I had burglarized my own home, and now I planned to do the same thing to my business, but no one would possibly know it was me because by tomorrow morning the newspapers and the other forms of media would be fixing to announce that I was dead!