The Dry Cleaner Thieves

A short story

“It’s not worth the trouble, Jayhawk.”

Twenty-year-old Jason Hawke—Jayhawk to his friends—rocked on his Nikes, heel to toe, heel to toe, as he rubbed his hands together and eyed the storefront from top to bottom and side to side.

Clayton knew that look. His best friend and co-conspirator was in an impetuous trance, his blood a cauldron of larceny. Chances were ninety-nine percent that Clay wouldn’t get Jayhawk to change his mind, but he’d try because Clay didn’t want to rip off the dry cleaner.

The two broken street lights consumed the moonlight, which caused the remaining light to work three times as hard, amping their shadows into sentience. While the street had plentiful parking, only one car dared park, a rusty Volkswagen beetle that was at most a year away from becoming a planter. 

“There’s nothing worth stealing at a cleaner’s,” Clay said.

“Sure there is.”

“Nothing. We’re better off saving our energy for a watch or jewelry shop.”

“They’re all heavily alarmed. This cleaner’s got goodies, I’m sure of it. Plus, it has a lock I can pick in ten seconds or break open with ‘ole trusty without dripping a drop of sweat.” The black crowbar Jayhawk held by his side darkened the stygian night even more. 

“What makes you so sure the cleaner’s got no alarm?”

“I know things,” Jayhawk said. “And as for the spoils, there’s a register—”

“That the owner empties every night.”

“And people leave valuables in their pockets, even sometimes a wallet. We’ll score fine, a good risk-to-profit ratio tonight.”

Jayhawk always used the term risk-to-profit ratio, which made Clay roll his eyes because any job could be justified that way: stealing expensive cosmetics from a drug store, an apartment break-in, testing car doors in an underground parking lot to discover the one that’s unlocked, grabbing a luncher’s unattended bag at the mall, or even a bank job.

“I don’t know, Jayhawk. I kind of wanna get home. I’m beat. I’m not at the top of my game, if you know what I mean, so let’s save it for another time unless you really need the bread.” He could taste the alcohol on his own breath. 

They’d been drinking beer and shooting pool for the past three hours at a bar fifteen minutes away. While not the most vigorous evening, they had been on their feet the entire time. 

“Ten minutes, we’re in and out.” Ten minutes was their rule, unshakable no matter how great the spoils they discovered. Even if they tripped a silent alarm, ten minutes gave them time to get out before the police arrived. “You can do ten minutes.”

“I really don’t—”

Jayhawk’s glare iced the air on this hot summer night in Baltimore. 

“Fine,” he hissed. 

Clay stood with his back to the dry cleaner’s glass window, watching the street for cars and passersby while Jayhawk did his thing on the lock.

“Whoa, baby!” Jayhawk said, a little too loud for Clay’s comfort. “Place isn’t even locked. We’re going to be lucky tonight; I can feel it.”

Scant light passed through the shop’s dirty windows, yet a neon glow hung as if the walls were covered with phosphorescent paint. A dozen or more green-glowing fireflies emerged from the walls, humming as they wafted around the store.

The two thieves clicked on their flashlights and stepped deeper inside. 

Jayhawk pressed the cash register’s largest button. The drawer sprung open, and the two thieves instantly bathed it with their flashlight beams. 

“Nothing. I said he’d empty the register,” Clay said with a told-you-so tone. 

A twisty rack with plastic-covered clothes packed tight together abutted the counter. Clay vaguely recalled seeing racetrack-shaped racks at other cleaners angling up to the ceiling to give more space for clothing; sometimes, a dry cleaner had two or even three of them. But this rack spiraled like a rollercoaster turned on its side, looping around itself. He could not trace the conveyer’s entire length with his flashlight’s beam, as the loops and twists seemed endless. 

“Best use of space ever,” Clay thought.

Movement caught Clay’s eye. 

Jayhawk!

He grabbed Jayhawk’s arm as his fingers reached the round red start button. “Are you insane? Do you know how loud these things are? Start the conveyor rack, and we don’t have to worry about an alarm.”

Jayhawk glared at Clay again, making him slink back a step. He clicked open his switchblade, spun toward the rack, and sliced through the plastic. Slice, rifle through the pockets, slice, pockets, slice, pockets.

After a dozen slices, Jayhawk stopped. He cocked his head. “Shine your light on this one,” he said. 

Their beams illuminated a pair of fringed, wide bell bottom pants with a half dozen flower patches sewn into them and an olive and long, brown v-neck madras shirt.

Jayhawk removed the plastic completely, letting it fall to the floor. He took the pants and shirt off the rack and held them against his body. 

“What are you doing?”

“This is great! Hippie clothing from the sixties.”

“But what are you doing? We’re supposed to be stealing, not shopping.” Clay glanced at his watch. “We’ve got six minutes left.”

Jayhawk’s pupils filled his eyes.

“Plenty of time,” Jayhawk replied as he unbuckled his belt, kicked off his shoes and socks, and slipped off his pants. He hesitated momentarily, trying to figure out if he should remove his t-shirt or pull the madras over it, but decided to completely immerse himself, tearing his shirt down the middle with his bare hands and slipping on the madras.

Jayhawk vanished. 

Three hours later

The face staring back through the peephole was familiar to Clay, but he couldn’t place it through his teary eyes. “Go away; I don’t want any.” 

“Is this Clay Singer?”

“I’m not buying.” Clay glanced at the wall clock in his studio apartment: 1:25 a.m. “Are you fucking insane? It’s the middle of the night. I’m definitely not buying whatever you’re selling.”

“Just open the damn door.” The voice belonged to an aged man, the words wispy and weak, cracked like mud baked under a hot summer sun, not a salesman for sure, unless people in their eighties worked in door-to-door sales, which might be the case given the economy and all that. But something about the voice compelled him to at least examine the stranger more closely. 

Clay attached the chain to the doorframe, cautiously opened the door, and gasped. Somehow, some way, it was Jayhawk. 

An ancient, wrinkled Jayhawk stooped, wobbling on a cane like a powerful windstorm was trying to topple him. Jayhawk grabbed the door, his grip desperate. “I need to sit, Clay.”

“Jayhawk?”

“Yes.” 

While Jayhawk hobbled to the couch, Clay filled two glasses of water and handed one to his friend, who took a long drink, finishing the water in a single swallow.

“If you haven’t guessed already, Clay, that wasn’t an ordinary dry cleaner. Yeah, the rack twisted all weird, huh? And the clothes, all sorts of different styles, well guess what, when you put on clothes from a particular time, you travel back in time. It took me a while to figure that out even when I got there, but those clothes were hippies’ clothes—they sent me back to 1963, sixty-one years in the past. Sixty-one years! I arrived six months before Kennedy was shot, though there was nothing I could do about that. Did you know that zip codes didn’t exist before 1963 and the Dodgers beat the Yankees in the Series, which is what finally convinced me that I had traveled in time, ‘cause I remember reading about that game.”

“You’re old, Jayhawk.” Clay couldn’t think of what else to say.

“Course I’m old. I’m eighty-one. We were just twenty when we hit the dry cleaners—”

“That was tonight.”

“For you. For me, it was a lifetime ago.”

“I need a drink, Jayhawk. You want a drink?”

“I’m not supposed to. My liver’s shot, and my heart’s not so good either. Prison life is no picnic—”

“Prison?” Clay emptied Jayhawk’s water glass, filled it with Jim Beam a quarter of the way, and then poured a glass for himself. 

They clinked glasses, and Jayhawk continued, “Yeah. What else was I supposed to do in 1963, get a job as an accountant? Go to school and become a lawyer? I did the only thing I knew how to do: I stole stuff. Unfortunately for me, I stole some rich lady’s diamond necklace while she was wearing it—she tripped and broke some ribs—and I got sentenced to a long time in prison because her husband was a Congressman. Can you believe that? Anyway, it wasn’t all bad because at least I had a place to live.”

Clay listened as Jayhawk recounted the past six decades, mouth agape, registering all his friend said and believing it, too, because what choice did he have? Jayhawk was as frail as anyone he’d ever seen. And the crude tattoos on his neck and arms—prison gang tattoos he didn’t have earlier today. 

Jayhawk downed the rest of his drink, which caused a minute-long coughing fit. “Emphysema, too. Don’t know how I caught that. Maybe it’s TB cause those prison doctors don’t know shit. Either way, all my systems are failing and I don’t have much time left. I’m glad I could find you, Clay, to say goodbye and explain why I disappeared.”

Clay poured himself another drink. “Another?”

“I can feel my liver already disintegrating from just one bourbon. Do you know this is my first drink in sixty-one years?”

“Yeah,” was all Clay could say. Not profound or sympathetic. But who thinks straight when they discover that their best friend, their only friend and business partner, has traveled in time and is now an old man while they’re still twenty? This is the most extraordinary thing that’s ever happened.

Clay snapped his fingers. “I have an idea, Jayhawk. Can you wait an hour? I’ll be back.”

“You mean, will I die in the next hour?” Jayhawk glanced at his watch, a Rolex. The police had taken it from him the day they arrested Jayhawk, but because nobody knew if he’d stolen it (though they suspected he had), they returned it when he left prison. He supposed it was even more valuable now. Maybe he’d pawn it and live off the money for the rest of his life. “I think I’ll still be here, but probably napping.”

“That’s fine. Nap away. Be right back.”

No police tape. No police. Nobody around. Nothing had disturbed the dry cleaner, meaning Clay had a good chance of saving Jayhawk. As far as plans went, this one was much easier than setting up a jewelry store heist. 

He’d find more 1960s clothes, travel back to when Jayhawk went, and they’d team up like old times. Like earlier today. Jayhawk could be annoying and rough around the edges, but he was Clay’s buddy, and they needed each other. 

Nineteen-sixty-three would be all right. Clayton quickly thought about what he might miss. Cellphone, yeah, but he could do without that. The internet—that was just a place where thieves left clues for the cops. 

There were flush toilets in 1963 and air conditioning, too, so he’d be fine. 

Most of all, with their 2023 burglary skills, they’d be unstoppable thieves, becoming richer than possible in their time. 

Clay ripped through thirty or so plastic wraps before he found another set of clothes from the 1960s: a shirt and pants made from tightly-connected, silvery metal interlocking rings. Some metal rings reflected his flashlight’s beam, but most had dulled over the decades. It was heavy, but what did he know about 60s fashion? It must be some kind of disco clothes.

Clay wondered if time travel was painful. He wondered if he’d see flashes or sparkling light or anything like that or if he was here and then there without any sensation of traveling. 

I should have asked Jayhawk, but I’ll know in a minute.

Clay stripped to his underwear and quickly slipped into the pants and then pulled the metal-ringed shirt over his arms. 

Then he was there. 

Searing sunshine stung his eyes. 

Shielding his eyes with his hand, Clay tilted his head up toward one of the castle’s four turrets. He cast his gaze back down as the drawbridge lowered over the moat that bordered the massive stone structure, and then spun toward the rumbling parade of dozens of knights on horseback. Knights carrying black and red flags with griffins sewn on. Knights in armor, knights wearing chainmail under their armor.

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If you enjoyed this story, I think you’ll also like my story, Hopscotching.