Hot Plastic

by Peter Craig

Genres: Suspense

Synopsis

Peter Craig reworks the genre in this fast-paced and intelligent thriller about a father and son team of grifters and the female con artist who comes between them. Kevin's dad Jerry, a master of identity theft with a specialty in stolen credit card statements, teaches his son everything he knows. Always on the look out for the big score, the two move from one seedy motel to another. When they meet the teenage Colette, she's already a street-smart and able grifter whose goal is to con her way into the high society. Soon enough she becomes Jerry's girlfriend, but no sooner than he is arrested, she's got her eye on Kevin. When Jerry finally gets out of jail, the three plan one last scam-the big one. The only question is can they trust each other?

Release date: March 3, 2004

Publisher: Hachette Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

Because he couldn’t take the punishment, riding in the front seat past sirens and searchlights, Kevin Swift rocked in and out of consciousness to the motion of traffic. He bled from his rib cage into a stolen coat. Time skipped blocks ahead. The last residue of sunlight glowed on a smudging vapor trail, a bright slash across the sky, and then it was gone behind helicopters and sharpened taillights. Another jolt ahead, shirt soaking and coat drenched, he gauged the missing time in sweat and shadows. The pain was relentless. No matter how he tried to wrestle free, the bullet was scorching against his bottom rib. He rested his head and kissed the glass. Rolling past ragged palm trees, squat motels, billboards between the frets of power lines, he wondered if blood loss could trigger a déjà vu—for either he had traced this route years ago, or he’d dreamed that he would die like this: in a commandeered sports car penned in slow traffic, with a useless gun, a phony badge, and his partner riding the clutch. While she tilted her head over the dashboard to find the helicopters, she told him to sit up straight as they passed another police blockade.

They were silent for each ring of the car phone.

“And by the way, I’m going to murder your father. I’m going to make it my life’s purpose.” Her hair was drenched with rancid water, her fingers covered with rust and grime. On her neck and forearms were the burn marks of sprayed gunpowder. Yet to Kevin she had always seemed most beautiful when placed before a backdrop of disaster. The garbage clinging to her seemed like the remaining viscera of some spectacular rebirth.

She whispered, “Don’t give up on me, baby.”

There was a dusty, sleepy quality of twilight that Kevin remembered from his childhood. Moving under a freeway overpass, through recoiling wind and into another neighborhood of stucco houses with caged windows, he recognized everything, as if his life had been a series of tightening revolutions around this single point.

“Look where we are,” he said, and his voice sounded crushed and airless. “We were kids—”

“Shhh, honey. Try not to talk.”

“And you still can’t drive worth a shit.”

“Don’t criticize me. I’ve got enough pressure on me right now. I don’t know if those helicopters are following us or not. It’s a zoo up there. Are they news or police?”

“They’re still circling the building.”

“We’re both going to keep our heads, and I’m going to get you to a hospital. Shit, I can’t turn left here. Hold on a second. I know, I know—Jesus, people are such assholes in this town.”

“I’m going to die because you drive like an old lady.”

“You’re not going to die,” she said, with a tone half angry, half pleading. “Is he letting me in? Thank you.” She gave a twinkling wave to the back window.

“This is the worst getaway in history.”

She accelerated abruptly back into the flow of traffic, prompting horns from every direction. For a moment Kevin felt his heart throbbing in his side, then a sweep of pain rose so viciously up his spine that he began to retch against the closed window. She touched his shoulder, and said, “Oh, Kevin. Hang on. You’re just sick from the shock. You’re going to be fine.”

“Elizabeth,” he said, tasting blood on his teeth. “I don’t want to die in traffic—just tell me how bad I am. And don’t lie to me. For once in your life—”

“Okay,” she said, reaching across and running her fingers along his face. “You’re a train wreck, honey—you’re bleeding all over the seat and you’re as white as a ghost. But you’re going to make it. I swear, on every dollar, as God is my witness, you and I are going to be sitting on an island somewhere under a fucking coconut tree.”

Kevin turned his eyes back to the blur of passing shadows, and he thought he would rather curl up and sleep somewhere out there, in a stack of tires, an abandoned refrigerator, or the briar patch of a junkyard. He had learned everything he knew in those dark recesses, growing up like a weed through cracked pavement. “We never got away,” he mumbled. “All that time, we were going in circles. Remember? We were right—not here, not here …” He made a gun’s shape with his hand, poked his finger onto the glass, and pulled the trigger. “Here.”

An hour past sundown on a long summer drive, coming from the high desert in a Mercury Monarch, his father raced through a blind speed trap at the first decline toward a valley of blurred lights. The brakes burned; the roadside gravel sounded like popcorn under the tires. Quickly he shifted the mess of clothes in the backseat, and told Kevin to lie down and play possum until the cop was gone. “Those two bags, Kevin—have a nap on those. If you’re getting sick, let’s get some mileage out of it. We don’t want this guy poking around in here.”

Kevin climbed onto the bags and watched the siren flash through the back window. A few months shy of his fifteenth birthday, with something too wise in his narrow face and too alert in his wide gray eyes, he had outgrown this conceit of the helpless child. But when his father switched on the interior light, casting Kevin’s reflection onto the glass and over the patrol car, he looked like a sick little boy—black curly hair sprawling and unkempt, cheeks flushed, nose reddened at the tip. Up until now Kevin had believed himself only to be intensely carsick. His appearance startled him and he lay down against the lumpy bags. When his father stretched back and pressed his knuckles onto his forehead, they felt like coarse stones. “Hey, you do have a fever.”

“I think I’m really going to throw up, Dad.”

“Well, if that cop tries to search the car—puke on him. Play it up. Act like you’re losing a kidney. Shut up, he’s coming.”

Kevin closed his eyes and listened to the crisp steps of boot heels approaching. “Evening, Officer. I know, I admit it—I was going too fast. To tell you the truth, I’m glad you stopped me.” A flashlight shined through the open window, across his father’s legs and onto a backpack overflowing with ripe laundry. “I got a sick kid in the car, and I got to be honest with you, I just panicked. He’s hot as a firecracker, and I thought, holy smokes, we got to get this kid to a doctor before he starts hallucinating.” The officer shined his light down through the glass to where Kevin lay marooned in shirts and socks. “How hot does he have to be to damage his brain? I’m just asking because I figure you guys get some kind of medical training.”

Sternly the officer replied, “I think you have to be pretty sick for that.”

“That’s a relief. He’s never like this, Officer. He’s got my constitution. I mean, the kid can drink a gallon of Tijuana tap water and ride three hours on a bus. Not that he’s ever had to. So, you know, once he started moaning about stomach pains, I just couldn’t help stepping on the gas a little. You got kids, right?”

The officer checked his license and registration. As he returned to his patrol car for paperwork, Jerry stayed still, clutching the wheel and whispering, “Come on, come on, let’s go …”

When the officer returned to give only a warning, “from one father to another,” Jerry nodded his head in stilted agreement and said—as if reciting the motto for a secret society—“toughest job I ever had.” Back on the highway he was superstitiously quiet for miles, until suddenly, speeding to merge with thickening city traffic, he began to cheer and thump on the empty passenger seat. “Beautiful work, kid. Fantastic. You’re a natural—I ought to rent you out for telethons!”

Jerry kept yelling, so Kevin muffled his ears with a shirt that smelled like sweat and cigarettes. Feeling the car’s lullaby drift, he fell asleep for a few dreamless beats, waking up with a jolt, his hair damp with sweat. He was now alone in the parking lot of a pink slab motel, somewhere near the airport and the nocturnes of idling jet engines. Diesel fumes hovered on damp air. Past the shadows of palmetto blades his father stood in a lobby window, talking to the receptionist, vigorously laughing at his own jokes, raising his chin to show a quivering throat.

Becoming suddenly more nauseous, Kevin scrambled outside just in time to throw up onto a sidewalk garden of white rocks and oleander shrubs. By the time his father returned, boots clopping, car keys rattling in his fist, Kevin was lying in an empty parking space. “Kev, you can’t really be this sick, man. What is it, food poisoning? You don’t hardly eat anything but pancakes.” He knelt down onto the concrete and his aviator glasses flared briefly with passing headlights. “Look—help me out. If you’re really falling apart on me, you got to speak up, man.”

Kevin sat back against the car door and brushed the grit from his cheek. “I’m sorry I didn’t throw up on the cop.”

“I didn’t want you to throw up on the cop, dummy. I just wanted you to distract him. Forget it. Now come on. We got a nice room—we’re moving up in the world.”

“Dad? What are we hiding in the car?”

“We’re not hiding anything,” he said sternly. “Whatever your crazy old man does, it’s not your problem.”

The room was a narrow stall of polyester curtains and beige wallpaper, carpet freshener and dust circulating through the air conditioner. Kevin complained that his joints hurt, and this new information seemed to alarm his father, who wondered if it was from sleeping in the car or some tropical disease. Even as Kevin lay down on the queen-sized bed, he was distressed by the way his father paced the room, ranting and cursing. In dangerous situations, Jerry usually became more self-assured. Kevin had once seen him cross the border in a stolen car, carrying five hundred film cartridges stuffed with rolled-up bills. In San Diego he had pimped a nonexistent prostitute to a group of drunken sailors, collecting their money and sending them to an abandoned room. He could smile through any lie, and hold court on cars, women, boxing, cockfights, cops, and dirty jokes with any combination of armed and angry men. But he was terrified of illness and betrayal, those surprise attacks from within the ranks, and all that night he alternated between grumbling and pleading at his son’s bedside. “You’ve got to tell me, big guy, you got to tell me exactly how serious this is. Because if we got to hit the emergency room, it’s going to take some planning. I can’t just waltz in there with a puking kid—they ask questions, you know. All those doctors in their scrubs, they’re just cops in blue pajamas.”

The planes roared overhead as steadily as shore breaks. Kevin was awake for hours, a greasy sweat dampening his clothes and hair, while he listened to volleys of slamming doors along the hallway, toilets and hissing pipes. He finally slept a feverish hour; and then his father was standing over him in the glare through parted curtains, dressed for the day in a striped shirt with drooping collar flaps, clutching a paper bag. “I got you some primo medicine, big guy. Top of the line. And I want you to try to eat something.” He held up an orange, peeled it with his thick, square fingertips, and tossed the rind onto the comforter. Kevin could smell pulp on his hands as he checked for fever.

“I want you to take some of this swill. It’s going to taste like death—but—okay, so this shit is for the fever, and this one here is for the puking. This one is for the runs. How you doin’ in that department?”

Kevin gave him a thumbs-up.

“Better just take all three.” He started wandering around the room looking through drawers and opening cabinets. “Damn it. You need a spoon. You can’t drink out of the bottle, that’s just too uncivilized. Hold on—I got to go steal a spoon.”

When he returned he was slapping the spoon on his thigh and mumbling to himself. The light had changed angles, deepening the dirty color of the walls. “You didn’t eat your lucky orange.”

He poured the pink ooze onto the spoon with such frowning concentration that Kevin laughed. “You look like a big monkey, Dad.”

“I am a big monkey.” Balancing the spoonful, he paused for a moment. “Hey, man? Can I ask you something?”

Kevin blinked a bead of sweat off his eyelashes, then grunted his permission.

“What kind of shit did your mother used to do?”

Kevin glanced past the unmade bed, to where, in a dusty path of sunlight, the smooth black handle of a revolver poked up through the tangled sleeves of his father’s open suitcase. “The same exact thing, Dad.”

“Okay. I was just asking. Point of reference. Now open up: here comes the fucking choo-choo.”

That afternoon, as the shadow of the balcony railing slanted farther into the room, his father perched on a lounge chair outside and made phone calls. Every few minutes a plane rose, folding up its wheels, and Kevin found it amusing how his father tried to duck away from the sound with his finger in his ear.

“No, it’s just that I got an unforeseen problem here. I got a sick kid on my hands. Let’s meet where we said earlier and I’ll figure it out—if we wait, we lose the window.”

He lifted his glasses to scratch the bridge of his nose. While he talked to the next person in a more familiar voice, he wrote numbers onto the rubber flap of the lounge chair. He dialed again and spoke loudly over a descending jet. “Mr. Rubashov? My name is Jerry Swift—I’m a friend of Lenny’s—Lenny Hutsinger? Can you hear me okay? Listen, I’m going to need one of your girls for something a little out of the ordinary, preferably somebody with some medical experience. No, no, Jesus—nothing weird like that. Here’s the situation: I got some business I can’t delay. I’m about to lose a year’s worth of work here; but my kid has got typhoid or something. I just need somebody to sit with him, dial 911 if he chokes or turns blue. Somebody who’s clean, okay—no drugs—somebody you can vouch for. That’s right. Yes, sir, but you understand my predicament. I understand that, but those baby-sitting services are just narcs; I don’t need DCFS crawling up my ass.” With his hand against his forehead like a visor, he peered through the closed portion of the glass door into the room.

“No, sir—in fact she would be under strict orders not to do anything of that type. He’s only fourteen.”

Seeing Kevin awake, Jerry shook his head and slid the door shut all the way. Kevin watched the rest of the conversation without any sound except the murmuring air conditioner: his father crouched down, the phone buried under a tuft of wind-shaken, wheat-colored hair. Kevin held a slice of orange in his mouth. He was so sleepy in the stirring air that he closed his eyes and fell asleep chewing.

He woke to the sound of a straw slurping, the orange now a thin husk against his back teeth. By the far table, a girl was sunk into an armchair with a crossword puzzle propped against her bare legs. She maneuvered an ice chip in her mouth and twirled a pen around her fingers like a small baton. Kevin was disoriented by the dark windows and the changed rhythm of evening traffic. His fever had broken and the sheets were soaked. She had pulled back the comforters and placed towels around him, leaving a damp washcloth on the pillow beside his face. “So?” she said with her cheek bulging, spitting the ice back into the glass. “Did you see an irresistible white light?”

She didn’t glance up from the puzzle. Wearing a short miniskirt and an oversized sweater with a collar wide enough to droop off one tanned shoulder, she looked like a teenage girl trying to trick her way into a nightclub. She had traces of kohl around her eyes, and glistening lipstick, but no matter how orchestrated her looks, she couldn’t conceal a tomboyish quality to her face. Her cheeks and nose were scattered with freckles, the color of nutmeg, and her hair appeared bleached from lemon and saltwater and long summer afternoons, lightening into loose, feathery strands at the edges. “You were, like—legally dead all afternoon,” she said. “Legally, medically. You know what I mean. Clinically. How do you spell ‘Eurythmics’?”

“Where’s my dad?”

“Don’t worry. I have detailed instructions in case I have to take you to the hospital. Apparently I’m supposed to wheel you over in a shopping cart and leave a note stuck to your forehead. Your father is adorable, by the way. He was actually shaking. I didn’t know there were still guys that lost—you know, domestically.”

As he sat up to arrange the blankets, the blood drained from his ears and the room spun and settled like a stopping carousel. “How long have you been sitting there?”

“Years,” she said. “Every few months I gave you a haircut and trimmed your nails.”

He didn’t want her to see him shirtless or in his silly pajama bottoms, so he draped a humid sheet entirely around himself and dragged his duffel bag past her to the bathroom. He went through his daily rituals. For almost a half hour he arranged the towels and toiletries into a symmetrical pattern around the sink, combed down his bushy hair, and repacked his duffel so that the shirts didn’t touch the socks.

When he returned, the young woman had made the bed, and was now running her fingertip along the windowsills in a facetious search for dust. With fading reception, the television played a sitcom full of emphatic laughter, and Kevin dodged around the rabbit ears to pass her. In a phony British accent, she said, “Ah good, now that you’re clean and presentable, I’m going to give you the rules.” She raised her chin as she spoke. “I will not tolerate untidiness or mischief. Breakfast will be served at seven o’clock, no excuse for being tardy; I deplore laziness of any kind. And one more thing, you look very nice, a perfect gentleman—but do please use the cologne a bit more sparingly.”

“Who the hell are you supposed to be?”

Lapsing back into her hoarse, tomboyish voice, she said, “Shit. I thought it was obvious. I guess I need a flying umbrella.” She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Hey—do they have room service in this hole?”

“Just a vending machine.”

“You’ve got to hit your father up for a nicer place,” she said. “What does he do anyway? Sell encyclopedias?”

“I don’t think so.”

She walked to the glass door and looked melodramatically at the darkness. “I daresay he’s not a very good provider.” Whatever character she was imitating, Kevin had never seen the movie; but he worried that if he admitted this, he would reveal something deprived about his childhood. In her normal voice she said, “You should find out what he does exactly. Maybe he sells coke to washed-up movie stars. And you know, Santa is very generous to kids who can rat out their parents.”

“I’m not exactly a kid.”

“Right, of course not. You’re a grown man with footballs on his pajamas.”

“I didn’t buy those.”

“No, no. I know. The tooth fairy brought them.”

“You know what—don’t even try to mess with me. You may think you’re some kind of street girl, but I’m a green belt and I’ll kick your ass.”

“A green belt. Oh my goodness. Karate and pajamas. How thrilling.”

“Just forget it.”

“You should come over here and feel how my heart is pounding.”

“You’re crazy, aren’t you? You’re deranged. Are you on something right now?”

“Maybe I’m just in the early stages of your bubonic plague. Poor me. Tomorrow I’ll drop dead under a bridge somewhere. You’ll be a murderer and never even know it.” She dove onto the bed, rocking them both on cheap springs. “Actually I’m delirious from hunger. Do you think we can break up this little quarantine and go for a market run?”

So they crossed the street to the gas station, and each moment Kevin had a more difficult time deciding if she was a child or an adult. She bought beer and cigarettes from a man at the counter who rolled his eyes at her ID; then she shoplifted a dozen candy bars.

Back at the motel, they sat on the balcony with their legs draped through the railing, eating packets of powdered doughnuts. Sitting in a pleasant breeze, tinged with the flowery smell of her hair, he clutched the balusters and knocked against her shoulder. She laughed and said, “It’s really touching that you’re already so in love with me. I’m flattered. But before you get your hopes up, you should know I’m completely out of your league.”

“Why? You don’t think I could scrape together twenty bucks?”

“Oh my God. You are so dead. That is just so wrong.”

She hit him in the shoulder with a lopsided fist, and Kevin jumped up, snickering, to flee from her across the room. As she chased him in narrow circles over the bed and around the carpet, she told him that she was going to strangle him and string him up by his green belt. He was an evil little man. The game quickly expanded into the hallway, and for the next hour they staged an elaborate barefoot chase around the motel, playing hide-and-seek in the alcoves of ice makers and vending machines, running up and down the stairwell with echoing squeals of laughter.

Up and down three floors and in a wide circle around windowless corridors, she chased him back into the room again, where he dashed onto the balcony. Quickly she locked the door. She stuck her tongue out at him and he pressed his crotch against the glass. “Oh, that’s very attractive. You just cool off out there.”

He put his lips onto the glass, at first kissing it tenderly; then he exhaled so that his cheeks inflated and his mouth spread wide.

“Wonderful,” she said. “You know, I’m going to throw you off that balcony. Then I’ll come in here and forge a suicide note.”

With his breath he made a circle of fog on the glass, then drew a sad face into it.

“ ‘Dear world,’ ” she said. “ ‘I’m just too big a loser to go on any longer. I’ve been killed by unrequited love, and I leave my green belt to my criminal father.’ ”

When she unlocked the door, Kevin climbed over onto the outside of the balcony railing, glancing down at a three-story drop through palm fronds and into an empty section of the parking lot. She gasped and hovered in the doorway, as he crabbed sideways onto the neighboring balcony. He rolled over the railing and tried to open the sliding glass door. It was locked, so he continued to the next balcony, eventually climbing across the entire length of the third floor until he found an open passage through an occupied room. He tiptoed into the darkness, across the blue night light of the television, past a snoring old man and the lit outline of a closed bathroom door, to emerge in the bright hallway, where the girl ambushed him by leaping forward and grabbing his ear. She twisted it and dragged him ahead, whispering, “That was way out of line. Oh my God, you’re psychotic.”

Back in the room, with belts and sheets and the drawstring from a robe, she tied him to the bedpost while he tried not to laugh. “You’re going to stay here until I can get an exorcist, Damian.”

Throughout the ten o’clock news, she sulked on the bed, watching a report on a Korean airliner downed by the Soviets, until the game once again evolved and Kevin played the wounded prisoner of a brutal dominatrix.

“If you ask me politely,” she said, “you may have another doughnut.”

“Please, mistress, may I have a fucking doughnut?”

“Is that what you think is polite?”

She leaned down and smudged powdered sugar all over his face.

Just then, Jerry returned, nonchalantly dropping his bag and keys onto the cabinet. He cleaned his glasses with his shirttail, then pointed the frames at Kevin and said, “I’m not paying extra for that.”

“He just got a little bit excited, sir. He’s feeling a lot better.”

“What the hell is that powder all over his face?”

“It’s from a doughnut,” said Kevin.

“You fucking kids are going to give me a heart attack. All right, all right—party’s over. Let’s untie the boy and you can get back to business.” Kevin groaned and rose, easily extricating himself, and the girl dropped into the armchair hugging a throw pillow to her chest.

Massaging his temples, Jerry said, “So we’re all fine, right? Nobody was injured; no hemorrhaging. Right? Fantastic. Thank what’s-his-name for me—um—Mr. Ruba-somebody.”

“Elia? Yeah, sure. I’ll thank him.” She gave him an awkward smile of tucked-in lips, which made a popping sound as she opened her mouth again. Kevin noticed a somber tension come suddenly over the room.

Without looking at the girl, Jerry fished a roll of cash from his pocket and wiggled off a thick rubber band. “So what are we talking about?”

“Listen, I’m not comfortable discussing business in front of your son.”

“What does he care? He’s seen money before.”

“Could we handle the financial situation someplace else? Please?”

He gave a hiccup of air. “The financial situation. Everybody in this town talks like a pissed-off bookie.”

“If we could go someplace more private.”

“Well, maybe we should cram into the closet? That’s private.”

She grunted and rose, grabbing his elbow to lead him from the room. At first he seemed amused by her frustration, allowing her to escort him out to the hallway as if he were blindfolded and awaiting a surprise.

As soon as they were gone, Kevin unzipped his father’s bag to find hundreds of credit cards held together in stacks with fat rubber bands. They were obvious fakes, with only names and account numbers embossed onto gray or white plastic.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Jerry, just outside. “What do I look like—some kind of tourist?”

Kevin hunkered down and spied on them through the partly opened door, but the girl’s voice was drowned by a stammering change in the air conditioner’s cycle.

“I don’t care if that’s what you think your time is worth,” said Jerry, “that’s not the service you provided here. At least I hope it isn’t.”

She moved a few steps closer and her voice was audible in fragments: “… because I have to make a living, okay? We’re not talking . . .