“And that’s not all,” said Carter. “When I got in this afternoon, the lights were already on. I found an empty pint glass, still wet with foam, right where Grizz sits. Along with this.”
He pulled out a nondescript cardboard box. Someone had scrawled ‘Do not open until Xmas’ on it, but it was clearly unsealed.
“You already opened it?” asked Bodie.
“Hell yeah I opened it,” replied Carter. “Could’ve been a bomb, or a claymore mine, or a pile of used kitty litter. You know Grizz’s sense of humor. He holds nothing back.”
Sawyer blinked. “And?”
Carter shoved the box our way. It seemed to take a little effort.
The three of us huddled around the flimsy cardboard container. Bodie pulled the top open, and our heads came together as we peered inside.
What we saw struck us utterly and completely speechless.
“That can’t be real,” gasped Sawyer.
“Oh it’s real.”
“But… I don’t…”
“I spent almost an hour counting it,” Carter went on. “Twenties, fifties, hundreds. Mostly older bills, too. The ones with the little Presidents on them.” He added a shrug. “Who knows how long he had this thing shoved in the back of his closet? But I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that Grizz hated banks.”
Bodie slid the box closer and picked it up, trying to gauge its weight.
“There has to be over a hundred thousand dollars here,” he swore.
“Two hundred eighty six thousand, nine-hundred and twenty,” Carter corrected him. “No note, no sign, no anything. Just what he wrote on the box.”
“But this is Grizz’s money,” Sawyer lamented. “We can’t take this.”
“I thought the same thing at first,” said Carter. He pointed back to the name in the photo. “But then I did some research on Jonathan Grizzlock. Turns out he’s loaded. He took an Agent Orange payout, decades ago, parlayed it into a not-so-small fortune. He’s been a raging philanthropist ever since. He even started two of his own charities; one for veterans, and one for the children of soldiers who’ve been lost.”
“Grizz?” I pointed at his empty spot in disbelief. “That guy, right there? The one who drinks your beer for free every night?”
Carter chuckled. “Yeah. I guess so.”
“How thehelldid we not know this?” asked Sawyer.
Carter’s broad shoulders moved up and down. “He tries to stay off the grid, I guess. But by now he’s given too much. There are tons of articles about him, if we’d only known his name.”
We stared at the spot together, in silence, each lost on our own thoughts. In half a month, Grizz hadn’t been back, not even once. And the box on the bar seemed final. He wasn’t coming back.
“He wanted us to have this,” Carter said solemnly. “We took care of him, now he’s taking care of us.”
Sawyer stepped forward. Reaching out, he laid a hand on the box.
“So, we take it,” he reasoned. “We use it to save The Refuge.”
“No.”
All eyes fell on Carter. His expression was oddly peaceful.
“This place has run its course,” he said. “It served its purpose, providing a gathering place for men who really needed it. Grizz was the last of his kind. With him gone, it’s just another bar.”
Bodie scratched at his chin. “So then… what do we do?”
“That’s obvious,” Carter smiled. “We take the money and start over. We go somewhere and we do something else. We get a fresh start.”
