The Doorman

  THE DOORMAN

  A CHUCK BRANDT THRILLER

  ROGER WESTON

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, names, incidents, dialogue, and plot are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Weston Publishing Enterprises

  All rights reserved.

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to Charles Rascher, attorney at law (Ret.), who helped with legal details. Also, thanks to Carter Clews. Any mistakes are my own.

  CHAPTER 1

  Mason Crossing Subdivision

  La Plata, Maryland

  Johnny “JJ” Johnson glanced out the window and raised his eyebrows in surprise. The white van was back. He dropped an armful of broken up sheet rock into the trash pile in the middle of the living room, causing a cloud of dust to mushroom upwards and puff outwards. The bare plywood floor creaked under his feet as he stepped closer to the window for a better look.

  What the devil was that van still there for? he wondered, still upset that someone had broken into his rehab house last night.

  He hooked his thumbs under his suspenders and stood dead still. The white van was still parked down the street. JJ hadn’t given it too much thought earlier. Why should he? There was nothing suspicious about a white van in the suburbs. During the day in a neighborhood like this, there were always vans running up and down the street—cable guys, locksmiths, plumbers—you name it. This van had a decal on the side that said ABC Heating and Air Conditioning. Such vans were always coming and going.

  But this van had been there three days—and nights.

  JJ took off his leather gloves and wiped the sweat from his forehead with a rag. He took a sip from his glass of iced tea, which he set back down on his work bench—a sheet of plywood on two sawhorses.

  The only reason he had even given the white van a second thought now was because of the break-in, and it was parked in front of the hippie’s house again. JJ had his eye on that house. It was a perfect fixer—peeling blue paint, foot-long grass, junk in the yard, and gutters dented near the corner due to somebody’s ladder. Most of the repairs that JJ had spotted could be handled quickly and inexpensively. Unfortunately, when he’d approached the owner and offered to buy the place, the hippie had slammed the blue door in his face.

  This sort of treatment was nothing new to JJ. He took no offense to it either. He realized that most people simply didn’t need his help. He faced a ton of rejection, but that didn’t bother him because he knew why he was doing it.

  JJ’s fourteen-year old son Luke crutched in, carrying his book-bag over his shoulder. His leg was in a cast because two weeks ago he’d been hit by a driver under the influence of narcotics. The boy’s leg had been run over by a pickup truck that broke through a fence and crashed into a house. The driver had gone to jail to do his time. Luke was doing his time in a cast—punishment for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was a miracle that he was even alive.

  “I’ll see you later, dad.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to play pool with gramps.”

  “I know that, but I’m driving you.”

  “No, thanks, dad. It’s only a mile away. I can walk.”

  “You’re on crutches.”

  “So what? I crutch home every day. This isn’t much farther.”

  “Yeah, but I can drive you.”

  “Thanks, dad, but I want to walk.”

  “Alright, but be careful, especially when you cross the street.”

  “I know, dad.”

  “You’ve got your phone, right?”

  “Of course, see ya later.”

  Watching him go, JJ felt anxiety. Having come so close to losing his son, he didn’t like to see him walking anywhere.

  Luke was his motivation. JJ had worked like a madman trying to set up a business for the kid. JJ’s dream was to pass on his home renovation business to his son. Years ago, JJ had made a decent living as a handyman. Then he’d switched to buying and selling fixer-uppers. Thing is he did four deals per year and somehow the expenses were always double what he’d estimated with his sales price was always 10K less than he’d predicted. He was making a Spartan living and not getting ahead even though he’d been flipping houses for five years.

  What the devil was that van doing there three days and nights? he wondered.

  Maybe that workman was the prowler, he thought. Was some creep sitting in the van?

  JJ put away some tools that his son had left out. He laughed and shook his head. He had told Luke to put those away.

  Stepping around the trash pile on the floor, JJ walked over to the fireplace and sat down on the brick hearth. He looked over his current project. He still couldn’t believe his good fortune in getting such a good price on this home. All he had to do was knock out a couple of walls to combine small bedrooms. The rest of the work was just cosmetic. He would soon be looking for another home to renovate. He spent several minutes visualizing himself in successful negotiations with sellers of rundown homes. He had learned the power of visualization at various seminars he’d attended over the years.

  Watching his step, JJ went back down the hallway. The home was a split level. The upstairs had a living room, a kitchen and three bedrooms. The problem was that the bedrooms were too small and lacked adequate closet space. One room had no closet at all, so JJ was tearing down the wall between two of the rooms. He was going to turn the two rooms into one big room with a walk-in closet. He grabbed an armful of broken-up plasterboard from the pile on the floor and carried it to the living room, dropping the broken pieces in the pile. He took another long sip from his glass of iced tea.

  Was the van abandoned? he wondered. What if he called the police to have it towed? After a minute, he put it out of his mind. He had other things to worry about—like stoned drivers and his son walking to his grandparents’ home.

  Kneeling down, JJ looked around at the plywood floor of the living room. His next project would be to lay new carpet, but that was for another day. He shot a quick glance back at the van. Two days ago, he hadn’t cared about the van. What he’d cared about was the potential profit that vanished when he saw it. If the hippie was sinking money into his house, he wasn’t going to be motivated to sell it to JJ at a wholesale price. Now the van interested him for another reason. When did it ever take three days to replace an air conditioner? The dude was spending serious money, which meant JJ could forget about buying that place. Then again, maybe if he made an offer, but also offered to reimburse the seller for the entire c
ost of his new AC unit, then he could work out acceptable terms. Maybe.

  But JJ hadn’t seen any workmen, which was odd.

  Whoever broke into his house last night had also broken a window.

  Shaking his head, JJ went back down the hall, figuring he needed to work more and worry less. In the bedroom, he picked his crowbar from the floor and began tearing away the second half of the wall. He ripped and tore away plasterboard. Plaster dust began to plume out and fill the room, so he stopped and put on his doctor’s mask, the white mask that covered his face and nose. In his business, he was always breathing too much dust.

  Coughing, he snagged the crow bar and tore at the wallboard with vigor. He needed to get this job done. When he pried away a large section of plasterboard, something happened that shocked him like he’d hit an electrical wire. When the plasterboard fell to the floor, it exposed something in the wall that wasn’t supposed to be there. JJ couldn’t believe his eyes. Three of the spaces between the 2x4s were filled with something wrapped in black trash bags.

  JJ tore off his face mask and breathed the dusty air. He didn’t know what to do. Should he touch the bags? What if there was something horrible inside—or something deadly? He didn’t want to touch them. Maybe he should call the Hasmat people and have them open the bags? No, he thought. That was a ridiculous idea. Those people charged a fortune. Using the crowbar, he touched one of the bags. Something inside was solid. As he pulled the crowbar away, several bags fell out of the wall and hit the floor. He gasped and jumped backwards, but then shook his head. What could anybody possibly hide in a wall that was dangerous? It was a ridiculous idea, but then again, normal people didn’t hide things in walls.

  He drew his box cutter knife from his construction belt, kneeled down and slowly, carefully, cut open one of the bags. Leaving his leather gloves on, he pulled the flaps back where he’d cut. He pulled the bag open and feasted his eyes on what he saw.

  CHAPTER 2

  The bag was full of stacks of hundred dollar bills that had been sealed in clear plastic wrap. Each bundle was sealed with a sash that read $10,000. For half a minute, JJ could barely move. Each bundle was nearly half an inch thick. He could not believe this was happening. Finally, he tore open the bag and grabbed a bundle of hundred dollar bills. He tore away the plastic wrap and flipped through it to verify that this was real money and not some joke. It was as real as any cash he’d ever seen. He smelled it. It even smelled like real cash. It had that inner wallet smell.

  There were two more bags!

  Suddenly, he thought about the last owner. Who was it? He had no idea. After all, he’d bought the house at auction from an estate sale. All the seller’s agent had said is that the owner was retired military, which made no sense at all now. When did any retired military man have bags of cash stashed in his wall? Then again, when did anyone?

  He handled several more bundles of cash, flipping through each one and smelling them. He’d never known just how good money smelled until now. He’d never seen so much, so the smell was never so potent. He thought it smelled just a little bit like ink—green ink.

  Then fear stabbed his heart.

  What was the right thing to do? Should he call the police? Sure, he thought, and watch his money evaporate or disappear as some corrupt politician appropriated it into a personal slush fund. No way.

  He certainly couldn’t call the owner. The man was dead. The real estate had said that the man had no family. The lawyer was just liquidating the estate to pay off creditors. If JJ alerted the real estate agent, lawyers would get involved and that was not a path he wanted to take.

  Of course, his first thought was that the money was dirty, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was just somebody’s life savings—someone who didn’t trust the banks after the savings and loan debacle back in the 1980s. Who could blame them? It was probably some miser who just died and no longer had any use for a fortune.

  JJ certainly had use for cash. He could think of no good reason to alert anyone of his discovery. He had heard of people who found buried gold on their property. They reported it to government officials—and immediately had their gold seized and lawsuits filed for ownership and process. Who needed that?

  Methodically, he counted the bundles. He stacked them in eleven stacks of ten bundles. He sat there and stared at his stacks. It was $1,100,000.

  JJ took a closer look at the cash. One hundred dollar bills, series 2017. Picture of Ben Franklin. The artwork looked amazing to JJ. Signed by Steven Mnuchin, secretary of the treasury. Federal Reserve note. The numbers were sequential. Evidently, the cash had never been in circulation.

  Systematically, he moved each stack, bundle by bundle as he checked the dates. All bills were dated 2017. He got an idea.

  ***

  JJ’s truck backfired as he turned into Atlantic Ford dealership. Two salesmen smoking cigarettes by the front door looked startled and turned their sunglasses toward the old Chevy. One of them made some fast hand movements, and then JJ realized they were flipping a coin.

  Parking his rig off to the side, JJ drifted among the shiny new Fords. He went with the current until he saw a beautiful new Ford F250 4x4 with a lift kit, gritty tires, and a winch mounted on the front bumper. He circled the Ford F250 several times. He stopped in his tracks. He hooked his thumbs under his suspenders and stood there. It was a surreal moment. For years he’d seen trucks like this on the road, but he’d never had the dough to even considering owning one. Instead he always used his handyman skills to fix his old half-ton Chevy which showed over a hundred thousand miles on the odometer.

  Of course, JJ had no intention of actually buying a truck. Still, it would be fun to dream a little bit. The fact that he could drive in here and pay cash for anything on the lot if he wanted to gave him a feeling of power and importance that he had not felt before. That’s all he wanted. He just wanted to bask in the moment and soak in the realization that he actually had a million dollars in cash.

  He kicked the tires. The treads were so big that he could actually put his fingers in gaps. He could smell the fresh new rubber.

  Of course, he couldn’t buy a truck. He couldn’t just fork out forty grand in cash. That would raise too many eyebrows. On the way over here, he’d thought about whether the right thing to do was to turn the cash over to the police. He’d decided against it. If he did that, the money would disappear and ultimately be used to line the pockets of some local bureaucrats and politicians who always had their greasy hands in the trough and who were always skimming the fat off the milk. Every year the cops hauled a dozen more government officials off to court where they would tell lies and twist their stories so as to introduce reasonable doubt. JJ decided that since he found the money and it was obviously abandoned, that he had more right to it than corrupt politicians who were constantly raising everyone’s taxes to give themselves more power and line their own pockets.

  There was no question about it. JJ was keeping the cash. He found it, fair and square. But he would not be handing out piles Ben Franklins and driving out of here in a dream rig.

  “She’s a beauty, ain’t she?”

  JJ turned to face a smiling salesman in a green tie decorated with vines. Because the man was dressed in expensive clothes, JJ’s first emotion was shame. He’d pulled in here in a beat up Chevy. Now he stood here in boots he should have replaced five years ago. His jeans had holes, stains, and were frayed around the seams. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days because he always worked alone anyways. Then images of piles of cash flashed into his brain. He felt a rush of adrenaline, but he was not going to pay cash for a truck. He would probably be reported to the F.B.I. as a suspected drug dealer.

  “She’s alright, but I’m just looking.” JJ noticed the salesman’s new and shiny shoes.

  “She’s open. You want to look inside?”

  “No, that’s alright. I ain’t planning to buy anything.”

  The salesman shrugged. “That don’t matter. Let’s take a look.”
>
  “I don’t want to waste your time.”

  “You’ll be helping me out. My manager’s watching. If you don’t at least look inside, he’ll think I’m not doing my job.” He opened the door. “Go ahead. I know you’re not planning to buy anything today.”

  “Alright, why not?” JJ climbed up into the driver’s seat. He could hear the sound of the seat as he slid into place. He could smell the fresh smell of a brand new truck. He could see shine everywhere he looked. The steering wheel felt rich in his hands.

  The salesman handed him the keys. “Start her up. Wait till you hear this thing. You won’t believe it.”

  The key felt smooth in his calloused fingers. It slid into the ignition as if it was covered with butter. When he turned it, the engine began to purr like a sleeping lion. JJ could feel the power. The contrast with his old junker was dramatic. There was no shaking and shuttering. No hesitation. No squeaks. The gas gauge was not on empty. The windows were not dirty. There was no fear that driving it would do further damage. There was no embarrassment. For just a flicker of a moment, JJ actually felt desire.

  “You want to take her for a test drive?” the salesman said. “I know you’re not buying anything. Let’s take her out just for fun.”

  “I don’t know,” JJ said.

  An hour later, Johnny “JJ” Johnson drove out of Atlantic Ford in a brand new Ford F250, ¾ ton 4X4. He was the proud new owner of the most beautiful truck in all of Maryland. He was riding high, both physically and psychologically. He hadn’t paid cash, of course. That would have been too ostentatious for his style. Plus, it would have raised too many eyebrows. People would wonder how some dude in frayed jeans could show up with so much cash. He may have been just a handyman, but he had more discretion than that. He got $600 trade-in value for his Chevy. Plus, when nobody was looking, he peeled twenty Ben Franklins of his tight stack of bills. Two grand he laid on the table—cold, hard cash. Those bills caused his salesman’s eyes to open wide when he brought JJ a cold root beer.