Planning for the Future

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

Planning for the Future

By Plot Roach

I’ve had just about enough of this homeless crap as I can take, Mother Brown thought to herself as she surveyed the abandoned building. This is it, this is going to be my home. It was a two story structure, build merely ten years earlier, yet left empty when the business owner fell on hard times and could not afford to keep the place open. Mother Brown had done her research and found out that the building was currently in limbo. The owner failed to keep up with the taxes, so the city took it in order to tear it down and build something else in its place. But then the city ran out of funding and left the space to crumble under the sun.

A man named Markos had worked there back when the place was in its heyday. There had been small shops on both levels, with a cafeteria style restaurant in the basement. Now Markos himself was just as bad off as the abandoned building. He traded her a bottle of Jack Daniels and fifty dollars for the key to the front entrance. He would have squatted in the building himself, but was afraid that the place was still under guard.

Mother Brown held her breath, hoping that the key still worked after all these years. That no one had thought to changed the lock, or that its innards had not frozen with age. She slipped the key into the rusted lock and slowly turned and pulled. To her relief, the lock was not as old as its exterior promised, much like Mother Brown herself.

She snatched the key back, letting the door fall back into its closed position and locking itself once again. She took a seat under an awning across the street, keeping an eye on the door. If the building was under surveillance, then surely the front door would have tipped them off to a possible break in. She ordered a drink from the local coffee place, and sat where she could keep an eye on the building. With a drink in front of her, she could sit unmolested by the local security officers as a ‘customer’. Without this costly prop, she was just another homeless that needed chasing off. She had done her research on this city, before deciding to settle here for a while. Now her education would pay off.

Security carts skimmed by on the sidewalk. Whenever she received an odd glance, she merely lifted her glass and took a sip, proving to them that she was sitting here legally. She sat there for three hours, but no police ever came. The security guards never once tested the door or did anything more than shoot her a wary glance now and again.

That night she returned with a flashlight and the key. She timed her entrance after the last of the restaurant workers had headed home for the night, and when security was busy chasing sleeping homeless off on another city block. She opened the door and slipped inside, turning on the flashlight only when she could no longer guide her way by the handrail of the staircase.

She examined the basement first. The floor was mostly dirt with a few concrete slabs here and there. It might have sported a wood floor at one point, but it had been pulled up in haste, leaving splinters behind in the dirt. She walked to each room, shining her light in and nodding her approval. It seemed that the prior owner had planned on cementing the entire floor since several bags of concrete and other building materials sat in one corner. There were tools, hardhats and reflective workers vests, almost as if they had been abandoned in mid construction. There were slabs of thick marble stacked in one room, and a working bathroom in the next. It would have to be cleaned, since it looked like a jungle from years of neglect. But all the faucets delivered water and the toilets flushed. The kitchen Markos had told her about lay at the back of the building. She was surprised to find that everything was still intact from the large oven to the dishwasher and the deep sinks. A refrigerator sat in the corner, empty but for a box of baking soda.

She walked up the back stairs onto the next floor. Ply board was nailed over each window, yet she remembered from viewing the building the day before that none of the windows had appeared to be broken from the outside. There were abandoned display cases, a few clothing racks and even a few old cash registers. Moving onto the last floor, she found the main office along with a few more empty shops. To her relief there were windows on the ceiling as well as the walls, which would let the natural light through during the day. She shifted through some of the old papers and found a journal left by the previous owner, as well as blueprints for the building.

This is it, she told herself. This is going to be home. She took the papers and shoved them into her bag, making a mental note to come back with a few friends the next evening. On her way out, she passed by a metal staircase that lead to the roof. Why not? She asked herself. It would be nice to see what my new home has for an evening view.

She dropped her bag at the foot of the stairs and made her way up, finding that the door to the roof had already been left open. I wonder if I’m not the first to call this place home, she thought. She opened the door and wedged it open with a brick she found almost immediately, proof someone had been here before her. I guess I’m not the only one who likes the view, she thought.

She stumbled around in the dark until she found a nice spot next to the door. She let her eyes adjust before walking the roof, looking for any sunken spots that might reveal a place where the roof would need to be patched before the next rainstorm. She kicked decaying lumps of leaves, old pigeon nests and plastic garbage bags out of her way. She stopped when she kicked a lump that refused to move. It looked like a bundle of old clothes, but proved to be something more when she turned on her flashlight to investigate it.

It was a corpse, and not a fresh one. Dressed in a hooded style sweatshirt, black slack and running shoes, it clutched a canvas bag. If its clothes, faded by the sunlight, did not provide proof that it had been here long, the corpse’s face, ruined by the meals of many pests, surely told her that it had been here a while. There were holes in the corpse’s clothes with dark stains around them. Bullets?

She turned the flashlight off and made her way back to the door, dragging the canvas bag behind her. Once there, she opened the bag and peered inside with her flashlight. Inside of it she founds stacks of bills, rubber banded together to make green paper bricks. Easier to carry that way, she told herself. Was it from a bank? Or a drug deal gone bad? Who was this person to have died for the contents of the bag she now held? She emptied the bag, finding a gun at the bottom. She left the gun in the old canvas bag and tossed each stack of bills to the floor below before returning through the door, locking it behind her. Not that the corpse can come after me, she thought. But she felt safer with a locked door between her and the gun. She put the money into her backpack next to the blueprints and the journal and headed out into the night.

She met up with two of her most responsible and trusted friends, Max and Riley, the following morning. She showed them the blueprints as well as the journal and a stack of money. “How about breakfast on me?” she asked them, grinning.

“Do you think that it’s safe to spend the money, it could have come from a bank robbery. And don’t they track the bills by their serial numbers or something?” asked Max.

“Yes and no.” Riley said. “I don’t think they bother will bills smaller than a twenty, and these aren’t banded with paper-which would tell you which bank that they came from, but are rubber banded in mixed bills that all equal about ten thousand each. Banks are too anal. They would only use the same type of bill in each stack and they would all face the same way, these don’t. So they must have come from somewhere else.”

“So it’s okay to have a hot meal?” Max asked.

“Looks like the dead guy is buying.” Mother Brown said.

They made their plans over steaming cups of coffee and breakfast specials, eating until they thought they would burst from the food. “This beats the hell out of cold oatmeal and burned bread you’d get at the shelter any day of the week!” Riley said, pushing his empty plate away from him and draining another cup of coffee.

“I agree” Max said. “But now what do we do?”

“We buy the building.” Mother Brown said, closing the journal she had been reading while they were too busy eating to talk.

“But we could do anything with this money, go anywhere. why stay here?” Max asked.

“No matter where we go, eventually it will run out. If we buy the building, we’ll have something to own.”

“How much?”

“That’s the best part. You see, if we pay at least five years of the building’s back taxes and bring it up to code, it belongs to us.”

“Who owns it now?”

“The city. Which, of course, will charge itself the least amount of taxes possible and won’t foreclose if the taxes haven’t been paid.”

“And we’ll own it just like that?”

“There’s a few more legal holes to jump through, but I’m certain we can do it.” Mother Brown said.

“And how do you know all this?” asked Max.

“Remember last winter when it rained for three months and I spent most of my days in the Reference section?” Mother Brown asked. “I was busy planning for the future.”

The three laughed heartily until their waitress shot them an evil look. They left her a generous tip anyway and headed out onto the street, a plan to secure their future tucked in between a journal, a set of blueprints and a dead man’s treasure.