The Twenty Dollar Rule

We had a bit of trouble the other day over at the Human Organ take-and-leave area. We are very strict about checking dump stickers to ensure that only town residents are allowed to wander the bins containing various body parts - amputated limbs, kidneys, meniscus, and internal organs (which Clooney refers to as the "sweetmeats.")

Anyhow, as I've noted in past entries, we get a lot of non-residents trying to gain access to this area looking for the "right" tissue for an experiment or other recycling project. The drug companies are always looking for healthy organs that they can use to substitute for the ones that were actually exposed to the new drug being tested. And I hate to think about what the chef from the Cannibal Club does with his "treasures."

So we were just being vigilant the other day when I had to kick out some guy who had no resident sticker on his white Jeep. It turned out He lived in a bordering town and had snuck into the area looking for a liver for his 8 year old daughter, who was dying.

"Hey, I'm sorry," I lied. "But, if I let you in I have to let in every parent of every dying kid... Rules are rules, and I just have to draw the line."
"I have money."
"Its not a question of money," I lied.
(This is usually the point in the discussion when the supplicant shows me a crisp twenty or fifty dollar bill, which I reluctantly stash in my shirt pocket and then look the other way for a few minutes.) But this guy just turns his jeep around and drives off, growling, "I'll be baack!"

The next day, to my surprise, the guy drives up to the trailer, honking the horn and hollering for me.

"Ok, I'm a resident now. See!" He thrusts a deed of ownership paper for me to see. I looked it over carefully. It seemed in order. Something about the address of the property was familiar. But now he was a legal resident, so I let him have access to the organ area. He found a fairly decent pig liver and went around high fiving the other residents before placing the organ in a cooler full of ice on the passengers seat. Then he drove off - giving me a middle-finger salute as he passed the FEMA Trailer.

I went inside. Lardass was sitting in the break area smoking a cigar and counting a wad of cash.

"Where'd you get the money?" I asked.
"Some guy. He said he needed a house."
"You sold your house?"
"Yah. He offered to buy it for twice what it was worth."

I went to my desk to work, but it bothered me that the guy had made it personal. I was just doing my job, enforcing the rules. They guy could have slipped me a $20 and he would have been in like Flynn. But no. In his rage and passion over a dying child, he had decided that he would show me who was in charge. The f*cker. The more I thought about it, the more aggravated I became. If this guy could go around buying up employee houses just to gain access to resident areas, where would it stop? Maybe he would start cheating on his taxes, or start posing as a senior in order to get the 5% discount on coffee at Mickee Dees... Where it would end is anyone's guess.

I got into my unmarked RDF Escalade and drove around, looking for the white Jeep. There is a pub not too far down the road, and sure enough, the white Jeep was parked there. I parked my SUV around back and entered the pub through the rear door. No one noticed me.

I could see the guy at the bar; he had an empty glass in front of him and was ordering another double scotch. One of the hookers was just coming out of the ladies room. I gave her a tenspot to "keep the guy at the bar busy" for 15 minutes. She did not ask why. She took the proffered ten with two fingers and stuffed it into her cleavage and nodded to me with a slight smile that said see you later.

I went outside and found the white Jeep with the cooler sitting on the passenger side in the hot sun. A slight odor of putrefaction was coming from the cooler. I am not sure what mischief I had in mind, my sullen rage had dulled my thought process and I was operating on unconscious reflexes as I opened the cooler.

"Hey you! Get away from there!" I turned around. It was the Jeep guy coming toward me looking bigger than I had remembered. He grabbed me roughly by the arm like a cop would and pinned me face down over the hood of the jeep, just long enough to show me that he was a lot stronger than I was. I could see the hooker standing in the doorway of the pub, watching.

"Um. I was just..." I had no idea what to say next.

"Yeah, I think you were up to no good." Then he let me up and called me a few unpleasant names. Then he looked at his watch, and said, "You're lucky. I"m in a hurry right now. We can finish this later." Then he looked toward the hooker who was still standing in the pub doorway.

"Thanks Doris," He said. "Let me know if this creep gives you any trouble."

After the white Jeep roared away, I turned to Doris with a quizzical look. She gave me that slight mysterious smile and said, "He gave me twenty to watch the Jeep."