Once he pulled up at his grandmother's apartment down the street and shut off the car, he took the package off the passenger's seat and stuffed it back into his pants leg. When he sat up again, he looked all around to see if anyone was looking, maybe watching him come up, but the street was empty. He stepped out of the Impala, locked it up, and walked as normally as he could to the steps leading to his place. The stairs were concrete, chipped away by long use and misuse, with a couple of bullet marks like moon craters from about a year ago, the last time there was real trouble here. Since then, there had been a stabbing and several drug raids, but nothing so serious. Mike wondered how his grandmother felt about these steps, and whether they were the reason she stayed inside so much these days. She said it was the neighborhood, too many thugs and drug dealers. She said that even in her day, the bad men weren't so bad that an old lady had to worry about being robbed or raped, but that these days, anything was possible. Ever since that woman and her son got beaten and raped by ten teenagers in West Palm Beach in 2007, Grandma Bev had stayed home more and more, the lights low and the doors locked. When that story first broke the news four years ago, she would even try to barricade the door, but the heaviest thing she could move by herself was her rocking chair, and that did almost nothing. She was only sixty-five years old, but looked much older, having been sick with so many things, including liver cancer, which she had survived going on five years. She always smiled and tried to say encouraging things, quoting scripture and other platitudes, but Mike new she was scared, tired, and worried. When she stopped going to church and started staying in to watch service on the television instead, he knew she was over the edge.
He also knew she would want to die if she found out some of the things he was into, that she would think he had become just like those boys in West Palm Beach. How could he explain to her that he was just trying to make a way for himself? To get ahead and be able to have the things that none of his family had ever had? He was doing all of is as much for her as for himself anyway. He had decided early on to to be like some of these other guys, flashy and show-off, buying expensive cars that stuck out in this neighborhood like neon signs saying 'criminal.' No wonder they always got caught. No, he would do it right, keep his head low, avoid suspicion, and the one day just disappear. He already had almost forty-thousand under the floorboards under his bed, and this night's take would make it almost forty-five. Sometimes he felt the need to look at it, take it out, feel it, count it, touch as much of it at once as he could. It was almost the same feeling he had when he wanted a woman, maybe even stronger. He smiled slyly as he turned on he second floor landing and start up to the third floor, wondering if that was the real reason he refused to put it in the bank, even in a safe deposit box, because he wanted it close by, to get his fingers on it.
He reached the last stair to the third floor, turned towards apartment 302, and stopped for a moment. He checked the window to see if any lights were on, if his grandmother was sleeping or not. He knelt down one more time to reposition the package. Unable to resist the urge to peek one more time, he slipped his fingers in between the folds of the bag and looked across the single-file stack of strapped hundreds wrapped in plastic. The was $50,000 there, and five grand of it was his. All he had to do was take the rest to Corleone in the morning and he was done with this business. First he had to get past his grandmother and her questions.
He opened the door as quietly as he could, even though the door always scraped against the jamb as it opened. To minimize the sound, he pulled hard on the doorknob, up and to the right, as he opened it, and still there was a slight scratching sound and a tiny pop when the door swung free of its frame. He stuck his head through the opening, because the light over the doorway would spill into the room, and wake his grandmother if she were sleeping on the couch. There was a hoodie hanging on a hook by the door, so he gently took it down and put it on outside, to cover his bloody arm.
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