Almost Anything for Money: Mystery of the Missing Sister
Here’s a button you can push:
The missing sister. A corporate VP. A mook. A recent high school grad. A rust-belt border-city detective. And a cynical 20th-century boatman who travels the waterways of the USA, earning his keep and paying his way by doing Almost Anything for Money.
Here are the first couple of chapters from my book. Hope you like it!
May, 1996.
The cassette deck made a slight whirring sound as I poured a tumbler of passion fruit juice and sat back to wait for the tape to finish rewinding. Many other mornings, vodka would have joined juice in the tumbler. Perhaps the juice would have been V8 with dashes of Worcestershire and ground pepper.
But not after last night.
Too much alcohol, a dockside party, bright stars on a clear late-spring night, loud music, and one single lovely lady had combined to lead up to the way I now felt. Good and bad being relative, I make it a point to wake up feeling this way every once in a while for purposes of comparison. Each time I swear I’ll remember next time.
But I don’t.
I sipped the juice. The rattling ice was loud. I sucked breath and held my head as my taste buds, unable to decide between the bitterness of the passion fruit and the sweetness of the added corn syrup, exploded. It hurt to swallow quickly. It hurt to do anything quickly.
The cassette deck stopped. I moved in slow-motion to place the tumbler on the table, pick up my pen and legal pad, and hit the cassette deck’s play button.
The loud obnoxious beep at the beginning of the answering machine tape bored a quarter-inch hole two-thirds of the way into my skull. It hurt when I moved (quickly) to lower the volume.
(beep) “Yeah, listen, Almost Anything for Money. I saw your ad in the Chronicle. My neighbor’s cat’s got up a tree, and it’s screamin’ it’s lousy head off. If you don’t get over here quick and stop it from howling, I’m gonna shoot it. Y’better call me soon.” (click)
Same joke on every tape. Same joker, too. Nothing better to do but leave stupid messages on my machine. Get a life.
The messages were in response to the classified ads I regularly placed in several newspapers across the country: “Need Help? Almost Anything for Money. (800) 555-1217.”
I made a note to stop placing classified ads in the Chronicle.
(beep) “You’re sick! If I ever find out who you are, I’ll fix you good!” (click)
Another one of those people who ignore the Almost and automatically assume that Anything for Money means illegal or immoral or both. Fortunately, I’ve taken steps to protect myself from them.
There isn’t much chance of a caller finding out who or where I am. My system makes it very hard for the average Joe to find me. I place and pay for the ads by mail with money orders. The 800 number is forwarded through a third-party service to my unlisted telephone line and an answering machine at my friend Twill’s house in Winter Park, Florida. Once a week, Twill loads the message tape into a mailer and ships it off to me general delivery wherever I happen to be.
(beep) “Yeah. How much do you charge to fix car engines? Uh, do you know anything about car engines? I think my mechanic’s giving me the run-around. My number’s four oh seven five five five two three three eight.” (click)
I didn’t write the poor guy’s number on my legal pad.
I am able to change the oil and tweak things as necessary on the engines in my boat, but the truth is, I know very little about fixing internal combustion engines in cars, boats, or any other vehicles.
That’s why this particular caller was out of luck, and why for the better part of the past week my boat was moored at the public docks in Waterford, New York while a local marine mechanic ran up my own repair bill.
The Town of Waterford is at the eastern terminus of New York State’s Erie Canal, the waterway that connects the Hudson River in the east to the twin cities called The Tonawandas on the Niagara River in the west.
I was slowly making my way to the Great Lakes in my thirty-eight-foot Chris Craft, the “Ship for Brains,” named after a drunken sense of humor.
Ship for Brains was actually my second choice. The name I had originally chosen for the boat was the “John D.,” named for the author of the Travis McGee series of novels, John D. MacDonald. But if something went wrong in any of my “Almost” gigs, I didn’t want my actions to be formally associated with his good name.
As I read MacDonald’s novels, a rough idea formed that I, too, could be a boat bum who travels around helping people out of jams. America’s Great Escape fantasy was calling me.
No, not the fantasy that finds me freshly retired at age sixty-six-and-a-half, selling off everything I had accumulated over a lifetime, and moving to an island in the Bahamas with two palm trees and a hammock on the beach. Nope. By then there would be fifty thousand of my fellow Baby Boomers on that island. Besides, the ad I saw for the Bahamas had artwork of that iconic Beach Guy In A Hammock with the headline, “Life Is Complete in the Bahamas!”
I took that to mean I’d be pushing up daisies – or weeds. I didn’t want my life to be complete.
Instead, I decided to make my move early, at about half of my retirement age. After all, at the time, my life was a jumble of hierarchical office politics, whiny advertising clients, hand-to-mouth living on bi-monthly pay, rush-hour traffic, mortgage, car, boat, and credit card payments, clock and calendar watching, and wallowing in despair over the I-just-don’t-love-you-anymore line spoken by the woman to whom I was married for nearly ten years.
The plan for my new life and lifestyle was carved in stone six years ago when Twill and I visited friends who lived on a boat at a marina in Fort Lauderdale. As it happened, the marina was Bahia Mar, where slip F18 was the fictional home of Travis McGee’s boat, the Busted Flush. Our friends had invited us to a dockside weekend party, and by the end of the weekend I had made up my mind.
It was actually carved in stone when one of the people at the party – an ancient gentleman who had spent his life criss-crossing the Atlantic in his forty-five-foot sailboat – shook my hand and told me, “If you’re really serious about doing it, than let me leave you with something that can be both a blessing and a curse: May all of your days be challenges.” He was absolutely spot-on.
I quit my fairly successful career as an advertising creative director. I sold everything the woman let me keep after the divorce, and gave away nearly everything I didn’t sell.
I bought the Chris Craft from a pair of octogenarians in the Northern Neck of Virginia who were finished with long-distance cruising. They wanted to downsize to a smaller boat so they could explore and enjoy the waters of the Potomac and the Chesapeake.
Ship for Brains has been my home and base of operations ever since.
But don’t get me wrong. I’m not caught in the fantasy world of mystery novels. The only thing I actually have in common with my mind’s image of a fictional non-conforming south-Florida protagonist is a tan. I’m not a chauvinist. I’m not extremely tall, nor outrageously handsome, nor possessive of inhuman physical or mental strength. I’m still a relative novice when it comes to how things operate on the streets. But I’m learning.
Although I have a few handguns stashed in nooks and crannies on the Ship for Brains, they generally leave me with as bad a taste in my mouth as I had when I woke up this morning. And I will do everything I can to stay out of a fistfight, including running.
Especially running.
But I do enjoy the lifestyle, which is about forty percent leisure, forty percent travel by boat, and twenty percent work – not including sleep.
(beep) “Hi there. I’m lonely. If you’re really looking to help someone, why don’t you help me over my loneliness? We’ll have a few drinks and a good time. Guaranteed. Area code four four four five five five three seven three one.” (click)
An enterprising professional. But I didn’t write her number either.
Fact is, I enjoy being alone. It’s just that, at times, I can’t stand being lonely. I enjoy the pleasure of a woman’s company. Stimulating conversation, the ritual games two people play to discover the interest level of the other, the laughter, the anticipation, and of course, the loving. I’m a romantic at heart, but I’m still a little gun shy about serious relationships.
I shield myself by moving around.
Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your perspective, I also have a fairly healthy sex drive. A classic conflict of id and superego. Last evening, as usual, id was victorious. Id compelled me to saunter over to the dockside party, acquire sufficient beer swagger, and invite Melanie, I think she was called, to have a nightcap on the Ship for Brains.
I don’t do that often. Casual sex is downright dangerous these days. Besides, one-night encounters leave me wanting from all angles. I’d much rather develop a relationship over a period of time. It heightens the enjoyment of the entire man/woman thing. But I can’t. I’m always moving around our nation’s waterways on the Ship.
Keeping my shield intact.
Every now and then I try to enjoy a wholesome personal adventure. Some would call it a vacation, but I think of a vacation as being cooped up in a hot car for days on end with Dad threatening every few miles to stop the car to give his screaming bickering kids a good wallop while Mom juggles the map, damp smelly washcloth, board games with missing pieces, boxed snacks, and other family vacation essentials.
Vacations are also typically limited to a week or two before the participants have to return to their daily grinds. Fortunately I have no such limitations.
This particular personal adventure began three months ago with a float plan that would take me north along the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, up the Chesapeake and down the Delaware bays, quickly past the Port of New York, up the Hudson River to the Erie Canal, through the canal to the Great Lakes, west to Chicago, south on the Illinois/Mississippi/Tenn-Tom to the Gulf of Mexico, around the Florida Keys, and back north to my home port of Titusville, Florida.
It all totaled up to a year or so of chasing the endless summer. But if it took longer, who’s to worry? I learned a long time ago that the boat is the destination. Where it takes me is the adventure.
I had no pressing need to find a project until I got home. The cash I’d accumulated all winter was holding out pretty well. Small withdrawals here and there for food, supplies, fuel, paying the mechanic for repairing a damaged something-or-other in the port engine, and regularly restocking my booze locker had left me with just under seventy thousand in cash hidden away in the hollow under the hinged gauge panel on the flybridge.
Because I was already in the Northeast when the latest answering machine tape arrived, and because I’m not the kind of guy who’ll turn down an easy buck if it’s dangled in front of me, I decided to see who and what were on the tape in the locations I planned to visit.
Besides, I had a day to kill. I needed it to recover from last night’s overindulgence.
I was in no condition to begin the ten-day trek through the canal. Piloting the Ship in that shallow, narrow ditch was active business, requiring constant attention to the wheel. Leave the bridge for a minute and she’d miss the next turn, head straight into the bank and wind up carrying one of those shoreside boulders or tree trunks in her bow.
“Hi, um, I’m having a problem with my, um, computer and the tech people at the store are, um, no help. All they want to do is sell me a new one, but, um, I like mine. I’m used to it and, um, I’m comfortable with it. Please, um, give me a call, um, oh yeah, my number is, um, four four seven, um, five five five, um, three four one one. Thanks, um, bye.”
I wrote his, um, number on my, um, legal pad and put a star next to it to call him soon. Fact is, I’m pretty good with computers. It started with the Radio Shack TRS-80 in the 1970s – which soon to become known as the “Trash Eighty” – then to a Commodore 64, a Kaypro, and an early IBM Personal Computer, which set the standard for everything to follow. That is, until Apple hit the market. I had an Apple IIe for awhile and really liked it, but all my friends and business associates were using the IBM PC, so that decision was made for me.
(beep) “Hello … If this Almost Anything for Money is a really serious thing, I think I could use your services. It’s my sister. She’s disappeared. The police don’t seem to be making any progress. Please call me. My number is seven one six, five five five six six four oh. Please, after six-thirty.” (click)
More suited to a private investigator, which I am not. But Almost Anything for Money is indeed a really serious thing. At least to me. And seven-one-six is a western New York area code, where I planned to be in about a week. I paused the tape and wrote the number and “disappearing sister” on the legal pad. I hit the button and the tape continued.
Now that you’ve fallen in love with it, Rick would like you to buy his book. Here’s a link to Buy It Now. Yay! If you don’t read books, buy it anyway and donate it to a local free library!