Cardboard Castles

By Harriet Rogers

Honey Walker, cabbie extraordinaire, is back with the Cool Rides crew behind her and in front of her. A homeless boy stows away in her cab for a trip out of town, but all Honey sees is a big black SUV in her rear view.
Suddenly Honey finds herself in the middle of a human trafficking ring that stretches from Massachusetts to Miami.
Toss in a homeless teenager having a baby in the back of one of their cabs, and the whole Cool Rides Cab Company gets sucked into helping Jon—hunky police lieutenant and Honey’s boyfriend—bust the illegal sale of humans by humans to humans.
Lucille, retired FBI agent, and Anton Scarpelli, retired Mafia Don, pull strings and ferret out information to find the bad guys, all the while baking the best cookies ever made.
Belle, retired lady of the evening, plans the wedding of the century for Riggs and Henry.
Oz, the Wonder Dog, provides backup and therapy for all with soft ears and a wagging tail.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harriet Rogers
• Release date: Jan 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463097342

Harriet Rogers

When Harriet Rogers was fourteen, she picked tobacco and didn’t learn to smoke for three years. When she was seventeen, she picked oranges in Israel, where she finally learned to smoke, and got Ben-Gurion’s revenge for a month. When she was nineteen, she worked the night shift at the Oxford pickle factory and couldn’t have relish on her hot dogs for five years.She spent ten years getting through three years of college and, while she still doesn’t have any letters after her name, she can swear effectively in five languages.She has some second and third place ribbons from a childhood of horseback riding, and a bad back, knee, and elbow from the same.When she was driving a taxi, she started to write about her experiences. Her mission is to make people laugh. Laughter is the soul of the human machine.

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Cardboard Castles

by

Harriet Rogers

at Smashwords

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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or to actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Cardboard Castles

Copyright ©2019 Harriet Rogers

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from

Harriet Rogers

Chapter One

I pulled my taxi up to the house as Denise ran a paint brush down the edge of the day-glow orange front door.

She straightened, yanked dark curls off her neck and pushed them up under her over-sized floppy hat. With hands fisted on her waist, loosely trousered legs spread, she looked like Wonder Woman doing Annie Hall. Leaning back to inspect the structure, she nodded with satisfaction.

Given the lush meadow stretching down to a broad flowing river, dotted with mature oak and maple trees, sun glinting off the water, it would be easy to consider this piece of land one of God’s better creations. Of course, one might want to focus on the open bucolic scene in the background rather than the structure that Denise was proudly displaying with a sweep of her arm.

You gotta take a tour. We just finished the build, she yelled at me.

I stared at the entrance. Above the door, bold red letters declared this a Westinghouse kitchen. Her home was the height of two full sized refrigerator boxes which meant we could stand upright once inside. For a Denise build, which frequently was more womb-like, it looked almost spacious as I viewed it from my protected position inside the car. This one was a double wide, which meant it was four boxes across. It had two windows in front with similar slices and punched out holes gracing the side walls.

I got out cautiously, stepped gingerly over the threshold, and followed Denise into the kitchen. A huge stump supported a two-burner hot plate. A piece of plywood extended to another stump, forming a breakfast nook. A dented metal sink rested in a hole in the plywood. The pipe from the sink dropped into a used plaster bucket.

As we moved to the formal dining room, the wall motif changed to Sears, although the table and chairs said Goodwill. The width narrowed to two boxes, forming a hallway. I squeezed by the table and held my arms against my sides to walk down the narrow passage.

A lot of duct tape was involved in Denise builds. The traditionally gray tape now came in different colors and patterns. Some of the house walls were held together with tape the color of cheese—the orange processed American kind printed with macaroni while others had pink strips covered with dancing unicorns or flamingoes. There were a few lines of bright red where the roof was attached.

I gotta show you the bedroom. You should see the stuff I found for the mattress, which, by the way, I rescued from the river. But don’t worry, I got it dried out real good. She started humming and I realized the song was Old Man River.

Grabbing my arm, she was off, running barefoot, humming to herself as she dragged me behind her.

Uh, I muttered.

I wanted to get Denise into my cab and uptown where she could work the streets for a few hours to allow her to pay for my services.

Denise and I met two years ago when she called for a ride to a motel out on the strip. Sometimes things went well in our relationship, sometimes not so much. Even considering the times things didn’t go well, in the last two years I had developed a fondness for Denise. Despite her short attention span, a wild imagination, and a few psychological challenges, she was basically an honest person with a good heart. I stopped trying to keep up with her rapid and strange mood changes and thought patterns. Occasionally I wondered what it must be like to be as afraid of walls closing in as Denise was. Many of the homeless in my town suffer from some form of mental illness. Denise had severe claustrophobia.

My name is Honey Walker and I drive a cab for Cool Rides Cab Company in Northampton, Massachusetts, a small city with a mystifying array of philosophic outlooks and socio-economic realities. Lots of the citizens use mind altering and sometimes addictive substances from now-legal marijuana to cigarettes to heroin; others frown vociferously on such practices but couldn’t start the day without a hit from Starbucks. It’s a small, picturesque college town with a very high and visible squawk quotient.

For a fee, my company provides transportation for anyone in any of these varied groups. We’re an equal opportunity transporter. I’m on the shy side of thirty which means I can live on pizza and donuts and still button my jeans. I like what I do, and I love the people, so much so that I am gradually buying into the cab company business.

Despite occasional problems, Denise is one of my favorite customers. Her case of claustrophobia can get intense which makes it difficult for her to live inside real walls inside real houses. When she wants to replace the river with a hot shower, she might rent a motel room. But she only lasts, at best, twenty-four hours. Then she moves back outdoors to the sweeping vistas of the Meadows.

The Meadows is a sparsely inhabited section of the city, spreading across the area near the Connecticut River and the interstate and bordered on one side by the City of Northampton. It houses a small airport, a fairground, a few businesses, even fewer residences and, when the shelter in town closes for the summer, lots of homeless people. Most of it is categorized as flood plain and isn’t usable for anything commercial or residential so the homeless villages that spring up are tolerated. That would probably change if any economic profit could be found for the more or less 3,000 acres. Occasionally there is a complaint and the police sweep the area. People and tents fade away, wait, and return when the locals lose interest.

We proceeded through the dining/living room toward the back of Denise’s house.

Please note the fine china, said Denise, her hand swinging in the direction of an old electrical spool covered with another piece of plywood. Slightly stained Styrofoam take-out containers served as plates on top of painted paper bag place mats. Fast food plastic utensils and paper napkins completed each place setting. We got to the bedroom which was still two boxes high but back to four boxes wide. More than one household in the city had upgraded their washer/dryer set and Denise had made off with the boxes. The mattress looked like a king size and it was evident from the indentations that more than one body was using it.

Someone was throwing these away! Can you imagine?

I stared at the iridescent black and purple sheets. The quilt folded on top had once been cream colored and now had suspicious rust brown stains wandering across it as well as tufts of stuffing sticking out where a family cat had sharpened its claws, causing the bedding to be useless to anyone less prone to recycling than Denise.

Uh, I said again.

Yeah, it’s a bi-i-i-i-g mattress. But Pud is pretty large. I needed extra space to avoid ending up on the floor whenever he has a thrashing night.

Thrash? Pud? I responded, thinking that maybe Denise had adopted a large dog.

My sweetie. He’s a real gem. She swept her arm around the room. I’m planning on some paint but I gotta find a few more half-full cans.

Everything in Denise’s life was at least half-full, frequently completely full, possibly overflowing. Empty was a foreign concept to her. My BFF and fellow taxi driver, Belle, told me that somebody named Anais Nin said, Don’t let one cloud obliterate the whole sky. Denise would have personalized it and simplified it to No clouds in my sky.

She pointed out the window.

I got enough to do the bathroom, which is gonna be over by that tree.

I looked out a hole that had been sliced neatly from the cardboard wall. The view took in the river, the open meadow and a large maple tree. Two boxes, previously used to protect some Lazy-Boy recliners, were stacked on the far side of an oversized metal pot and an ancient blue porcelain toilet that sat under the tree. One of the boxes was painted with a rainbow consisting of more than the usual number of colors. Shit here was written in large, sunny, yellow letters. A lot of half cans of paint had been combined to form the mud colored background.

I’m still working on that section. My sweetie promised to dig the hole. It might be the first time we’ve actually had a bathroom. I mean with a door and all. Excellent privacy.

A shovel leaned precariously against the rounded edge of the toilet bowl.

I can’t decide about the toilet or the pot. The pot thing is kind of traditional, like a pot to piss in, which none of us have. But the toilet’s a lot comfier. Either way, I gotta get a hole under it. Shit flows downhill but it doesn’t empty itself. Plus, we gotta make that part of the house mobile ‘cause we gotta move it pretty often. Depends on how many people use it. It’s sorta open to the general population, if you get my drift. That toilet is fuckin’ heavy.

I imagined the digging of holes in the river bottom land was easy but the possible overflow if the big dig got put off too long might be problematic.

Uh. When I was around Denise, my vocabulary was severely limited. We worked our way back to the front of the building with Denise sweeping ahead, pointing out special features and me mumbling Uh at appropriate times.

I’m thinking of putting an addition on the back, maybe rent out a room. My sweetie wants a man cave or maybe it’ll be my she-shack. So I’m looking for another mattress. One should float down the river soon enough. Water’s been pretty high, she mumbled, mostly to herself, as we headed back to the front of the house.

We gathered her working tools for the day—a backpack, a series of handwritten signs requesting money for a variety of problems, a change of clothing in case she got into a territorial dispute with another panhandler that got messy, and a large coffee can for contributions to whatever ailment she was collecting for today. We stepped out the door and headed down the path to the taxi.

I flinched and turned as a deep-throated roar came from the near-by woods. A huge, possibly human, male, mostly naked except for some cutoff jeans that were just long enough, stepped into the clearing. He was hairy from his long, full beard to his shoeless feet. His bare chest was fuzzy with tight black curls.

What the fuck, Denise? You were supposed to call me.

Oh, yeah, I need to head uptown to recharge my phone at the library.

Oh. The gorilla in a human costume hung his head. I didn’t know you had a visitor. He looked like an endangered great ape, or, possibly, the extinct bigfoot, and acted like a hobbit. His voice sounded the way I imagined a male grizzly bear would if it had a human voice—deep and growly.

Come on over, Pud. Meet Honey, my chauffeur. Denise winked at me. I just love a full beard; it feels so good on the inside of my legs.

I thought about too much information as Northampton’s version of the wooly mammoth ambled over and stuck out one massive paw.

My name’s Pud. What’s yours? he rumbled.

I reassessed him to Where the Wild Things Are meets Winnie the Pooh. Up close, a pair of deep brown eyes conveyed kindness, empathy, all the good and none of the hostility of the world. Despite his size, I felt like I was being pulled into a fuzzy friendly place in his domain.

This is Honey, sweetie, Denise repeated the introduction.

Wow, what a great name, he said as my hand disappeared in his, up past my wrist. But the grip was gentle, as if he might have practiced not crushing the hands of new acquaintances. I wondered if Pud’s size added to Denise’s feeling of being closed in or if he was a safety valve.

Denise deals with her claustrophobia by building houses. Cardboard houses, sometimes cardboard castles. They can be amazing creations but when the walls close in around her, she simply flattens them, recycles them and builds another structure out of new boxes. The average life span of a Denise structure is one or two months. Some of them only last a few days or, when Denise is feeling especially judgmental, a few hours. One particularly spectacular castle, complete with turrets and a drawbridge, stayed up all summer. But Denise didn’t live in it. She gave it to a young artist and built herself something more becoming of my philosophy of minimalism, she said. I’m waiting for her to be discovered by HGTV and start her own home show, The Recycled Residence.

When I get back from uptown, we need to put the roof and siding on. Denise pointed to a pile of blue tarps and clear, slightly stained shower curtains. Her homes didn’t melt in the rain. A little bit of indoor weather didn’t bother her, but no meteorological event was going to destroy her home. If one of her houses came down, it was her own doing. I had seen her play wrecking ball once. It wasn’t pretty.

I popped the hatch to load up Denise’s gear when I heard a loud bang. Pud’s head swiveled suddenly in the direction of the sound.

Shit, that was a gunshot! he muttered.

I slammed the hatch, scrambled to the driver’s seat, and rammed the key into the ignition. I heard another crack and my side mirror shattered. Denise was in the back seat. Pud jumped in front.

Drive, drive, drive! he bellowed. I didn’t know what the shooter’s immediate agenda was, but mine was self-preservation. In the fight or flight question, I always choose flight.

I slammed out of park, hit drive, and spit gravel. A figure charged out of the woods right in front of my taxi. He wore unlaced, oversized boots with a full-length coat that flapped like a demented bat. There was nothing under it. More importantly, his pasty body was between my taxi and escape. I slammed the brakes and stopped inches from his bare legs. Another shot rang out and the figure staggered, throwing itself across the hood of my cab. His hand grabbed for the wrecked side-view mirror and got wedged in tight. Pud reached out his open window and grabbed the guy’s foot. It was hanging off the other side.

Go, I got him! Go, go, Pud screamed again.

I floored it and left a shower of gravel and mud on Denise’s front lawn. White knuckled on the steering wheel, I chanted something like shit, shit, shit, under my breath.

You asshole, Gork, Denise screeched, pointing a finger at the figure flopped across my hood. We were bouncing over the rutted dirt, but he was heavy and stuck to the mirror and Pud’s hand.

I swerved around a tight bend in the dirt road, sending up a plume of sand and dust. Who the hell is Gork? I yelled.

I felt like a hunter returning from the North Woods with his trophy ten-point buck strapped across the hood. This ten-point buck looked dead. His bald and tattooed head had bounced to face me, the eyes unfocused and blank. A trickle of blood dripped out of his mouth onto the hood of my car. His coat slapped the hood like a category five hurricane-driven sail, leaving the rest of him to flop loosely in front of us. His bare bottom was round and tattooed with a snake that wiggled and writhed with the jiggling butt.

Punching my phone where it sat in its handy dash holder, I pushed number one for my favorite cop, Lieutenant Jon Stevens.

Honey, everything okay? He sounded distracted. Even under the circumstances my