The Getaway Man
Andrew Vachss
Trade

OEB
2003-2-24

English

THE
GETAWAY
MAN

ANDREW VACHSS

VINTAGE CRIME / BLACK
LIZARD

Vintage Books  A Division of Random
House, Inc.  New York

It was just after
two in the afternoon when we pulled up. Tim said that’s the time it was
always slow in the bank, specially on Thursdays.

Virgil had a
double-barreled sawed-off. Those are good for scaring people, Tim said. Much
better than a pistol. Virgil carried the shotgun under his coat, against his
chest, held there by a loop of rawhide around his neck. Tim had a pair of
pistols, like he always used to carry.

“Five minutes,
Eddie,” Tim said to me. Then him and Virgil went into the bank.

The clock on the dashboard was one of those digital ones. It said
2:09.

The clock said 2:12 when I heard the crack of a pistol. Then
the boom of Virgil’s shotgun.

People started
screaming.

Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Frontispiece

Dedication

Acknowlegments

THE GETAWAY MAN

About the
Author

Also by Andrew Vachss

Copyright
Page

for
…

Cammi, Jessie Lee, Johnny the Gambler,
Detroit B., Bust-Out Victor, Iberus, J.R., Everett, Water Street, the East Gary
Express, the Uptown Community Organization, a whole lot of back roads, and some
wrong turns.

and for …

Jim
Procter, who drove the car.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Joe R. Lansdale

It’s true, bro. We would have been kings.

THE

GETAWAY MAN

Every
outfit needs a getaway man. It doesn’t matter how smooth the job goes; if
you don’t get away with the money, it was all for nothing.

I
learned that when I was just a kid, when I first started getting locked up.
Once that happens the first time, it’s like that’s your destiny.
They let you out, but they know you’re coming back, and you do, too.

Inside, some guys get tattoos, so that when they get out, other guys will
know where they’ve been. I never wanted one. I figured people can always
tell, anyway.

Every time they sent me to the kiddie camps, it was for
stealing cars. I never stole cars to keep; I just wanted to drive them. I
wanted to learn how to do that more than anything. The only reason I took the
cars was so I could practice.

When you’re in one of those places
for kids, guys always ask you what you’re in for. The first time I went
in, before I learned, I told them the truth.

I found out quick how dumb
that was. When I told other guys, that first time, why I took the cars, they
said that wasn’t even stealing, it was just joyriding. That’s what
a kid does with a car, joyriding. A man wouldn’t do that.

It
sounds weird, but the worst thing you can be in the kiddie camps is what they
call a “kid.” The word means something different in there.
Something very bad.

Right after I told the truth that first time, I had
to fight a lot. So I wouldn’t get taken for a kid.

By the next
time I went in, I was smarter. I knew nobody would understand if I told them I
took the cars so I could practice my driving. So, after that, when they asked
me, I always said, “Grand Theft Auto.” I wasn’t some little
joyrider; I was a thief.

A thief steals cars to keep. To sell, I mean.
The really good thieves, they get a reputation, and people hire them to steal
certain cars. Like ordering food in a restaurant, and the parking lot is the
menu.

It’s good to be known as a thief when you go Inside.
It’s even better to be known as a killer, but only a certain kind. Like
if you killed someone in a fight, that would be good. Or if someone paid you to
do it.

It’s pretty unusual, to be in one of the kiddie places for
a killing like that, but I know one guy, Tyree, who was. A drug dealer paid
Tyree to shoot someone, and he did it. Everyone respected him for doing that.
It was something a big-time criminal would do.

But not every killing
got you respect. The sick-in-the-head kids, they were nothings. Nobody was
afraid of them. Like the one who chopped up his mother with an ax. Or the one
who went to school with a rifle, and shot a bunch of other kids who were
bullying him.

After that kid got locked up, he still got bullied, only
much worse. The kind of bullying they do in here.

Sometimes, a killing
happens right where they have us locked up. The one I most remember, it was a
little kid who did it. Devon, his name was. A bigger kid, Rock, had done
something to him.

After Rock did what he did, he told everyone that
Devon was his kid.

Everybody knew what had happened, but
nobody said anything, even the ones who weren’t scared of Rock.

After Devon got out of the infirmary, he got a shank—that’s a
piece of metal you sharpen into a knife. One day, he came up behind Rock in the
cafeteria and stabbed him in the neck. Everybody saw it.

We knew Devon
had stuck him good, because they didn’t send Rock to the
infirmary—they called for an ambulance.

The guards charged in and
locked us all down, so we couldn’t see what happened after that. But,
later, we heard that Rock died before the ambulance came.

If they had
let Devon stay in there with us, he would have been all right after that.
Nobody would have tried to do anything to him anymore, even with him being so
little. But they took him away, to the prison for grownups.

I
didn’t actually know Devon. Just his name. But I hoped, wherever they
sent him, he found another shank real quick.

I always wanted to be a
driver. It was just something that called to me. Even when I was practicing to
be good at it, I wasn’t sure where it would end. But I knew I had to do
it.

Where I come from, lots of guys dream about racing stock cars.
But that was never my dream.

Dreams are for kids. And I never wanted to
be a kid. There’s nothing good about being a kid.

I had faith. I
knew if I kept practicing, if I got good enough, I could be the driver.

The very first time the cops caught me, I was so little they thought
someone else had took the car, then ran away and left me holding the bag. They
kept trying to get me to tell who had done it.

I told them the
truth; it was just me. One cop slapped me. It wasn’t that hard, but it
hurt. I didn’t cry; I was used to stuff like that.

Another cop
said I was being a chump, taking the weight for the older boys. He said they
would all be laughing at me while I was in jail. But they didn’t even
send me to jail at all, that first time.

All cops lie. All thieves lie,
too, when they talk to cops. That’s the way it is.

I knew that
good thieves didn’t lie to their partners. I wondered if cops did.

I don’t remember much about the first time they locked me up, but
I know it was only for a few weeks.

After that, they locked me up
every time they caught me.

The first few times, it was because I
didn’t know how to drive. I know that sounds stupid, and I guess it
was.

What I mean is, I didn’t know how to drive like a regular
person, so I kept bringing attention on myself. One time, I got pulled over for
going through a stop sign. The cop didn’t even know the car was stolen
until he saw how old I was. Then he knew the car couldn’t be mine.

Another time, I was just speeding, and they got me. That time, it
wouldn’t have mattered even if I had looked old enough to drive, because
I didn’t have any of the papers the cop wanted.

After a while, I
figured out: If I was going to take cars, I had to drive them like I was a
regular person, going somewhere.

But if I drove like that, I
couldn’t practice the way I needed to.

The longest they ever
locked me up for was six months. Until the time I ran from the cops.

On
that crazy night, I was driving past this roadhouse at the edge of town. I
usually went out that way because there’s a lot of places to practice.
It’s pretty much all two-lane blacktop with no streetlights, and even a
lot of dirt roads off on the sides.

I saw a bright orange Camaro with
white stripes slam on the brakes and slide on the dirt in the parking lot. I
stopped the car I was driving to see what was going on; I thought maybe the
Camaro was challenging someone to race, and I wanted to watch. But all the
other cars around there were parked.

All of a sudden, the
Camaro’s door opened and a girl jumped out. She walked away, fast. The
driver got out and yelled something at her, but she kept on walking. He started
after her, and she turned around and ran. He chased her all the way around the
side of the building.

He had left his door standing open. I could see
smoke coming from the exhausts. I didn’t really think about it—the
next thing I knew, I was behind the wheel of the Camaro, peeling out of the
parking lot.

The Camaro was a terrific car, the first truly fast one
I’d ever driven. I was a little disappointed that it had an automatic
transmission. By then, I knew how to drive a stick real good.

I knew
I wouldn’t have any couple of hours that time. But it seemed like only a
couple of minutes had gone by when I heard the siren and saw the flashing
lights in the mirror.

That’s when I made them chase me. I
don’t remember much about it except that I couldn’t hear
anything—it was like I had gone deaf or something. But it didn’t
scare me. Nothing scared me that night. I was driving. They were chasing me,
and it felt like that was how it was supposed to be.

I was running, but
I had no place to run to. And I was doing all right, until the spike strip they
laid down blew out my tires.

By the time I got the Camaro stopped, it
seemed like there was a dozen cop cars surrounding me. They kept coming, more
and more of them. They shined big lights, so bright I couldn’t look at
them. They were screaming things at me, but I couldn’t understand what
they were saying.

I got out of the car, and put my hands up, like
I’d seen people do on TV. I saw a lot of guns pointed at me. I walked
toward them. They kept screaming at me.

I never saw the cop who tackled
me from behind. Then there was a lot of them. Some were yanking my arms behind
my back for the handcuffs. The other ones were punching me, or kicking me, or
hitting me with sticks … after a little while, I couldn’t
tell.

That time, nobody said anything about joyriding. They put a
whole bunch of charges on me. The heaviest one was resisting arrest. The lawyer
who came to see me in the hospital told me that.

I never had a
lawyer before. Not a real one. The lawyers I had before, they were like people
who worked for the court. They would be standing behind tables when I was
brought out, with big stacks of paper in front of them. All they ever asked me
was my name, so they could check it on their papers.

This lawyer was a
little fat guy with a mustache. I told him what happened. He shook his head.
Like I was stupid, and he couldn’t understand what I did.

I
wasn’t stupid enough to try and explain it to him.

The lawyer
told me I had to plead guilty to everything. If I did that, they wouldn’t
be too hard on me.

When I got out of the hospital, we went to
court.

A couple of the cops were there. They told some lies and some
truth. I did what the lawyer said. The judge asked me some questions, and I
said either yes or no, depending on what he asked.

I answered the
questions about how my face got all banged up and my ribs broke by saying it
was from when the car crashed, even though I never hit anything.

The
lawyer had told me to say it that way. When I was answering that question, I
saw one of the cops looking at me. I could tell by his face that the lawyer had
been right.

The judge said a lot of things about me. By the time he let
the lady probation officer talk, there wasn’t much point in her saying
anything.

There wasn’t anything good to say about me, anyway.
Except that I was just a kid, and my lawyer said that a lot.

The lawyer
said I had panicked when I heard the siren. That made me real mad, but I
didn’t say anything. He was the lawyer.

Then the judge really
hauled off on me. He said I hadn’t panicked at all—I was a
cold-blooded felon and he didn’t want to hear any excuses for my
behavior. I really liked when he said that. It was like he canceled out what
the fat lawyer said. I was glad I had kept quiet.

The judge said he was
putting it in my record that I couldn’t have a license even when I got
old enough, because I was dangerous behind the wheel. I wished guys from the
last place I was locked up could have been in the courtroom when he said that:
“Dangerous behind the wheel.”

The place they put me in
after the Camaro was for the older kids. It was like a farm. We all slept in
dormitories, and we had to work in the daytime.

Every dorm has a
boss. A kid boss, I mean. The boss is either the toughest or the smartest, or
even both. Sometimes, there’s two different bosses in the same
dorm—like when there’s enough white guys in there to have their own
gang, they would have a white boss.

There was a kid named Hector who
was with us. He wasn’t white, but he wasn’t black either. A
Mexican, is what one of the other guys said about him, but I never heard him
speak Spanish. Hector said, where he was from, they called a gang a
“car.” So if a kid was going to join a gang, they would say he got
in the car.

That sounded cool to me, except that the boss got called
the driver. I didn’t want to be anybody’s boss, but I had to be the
driver.

It was on the farm that I first met guys who did jobs. Jobs
where they would need a driver, I mean. Stickup men. Those guys were in the
other places I got put before, but they never mixed with amateurs like me.
Joyriders. But, when I came in after the Camaro, I came in as a real thief. A
thief who made the cops chase him.

Everybody wanted to know about
that chase. By the time I got done telling the story, it got changed a bit. I
had it lasting a hour, with them shooting at me the whole time.

I
wasn’t worried about anyone checking on me. I had heard that some of the
kid bosses could get one of the guards to look at your records, but I knew mine
was good. When I first came in, the lady who asked me a lot of questions about
school and stuff also asked me about getting banged up.

“It says
you received all those injuries when the car you stole crashed, Eddie. Is that
true?”

The way she looked at me, I could tell she was ready to
believe me if I told her different. But I said, “No, ma’am, not
exactly.”

She leaned toward me a little, said, “Well, what
did happen?”

“I was okay when I got out of the
car,” I told her. “But then, when the cops tried to put the cuffs
on me, I fought them.”

“You assaulted police
officers?” she said, leaning back from me, then.

“Yes,
ma’am,” I said.

I watched her write something on my
records. I was glad. She was a nice lady, but it didn’t matter what she
thought of me. It didn’t matter what the judge thought of me, or the
cops, or anyone. Just the guys I was locked up with.

Fighting is
part of doing time when you’re a kid. It’s not so bad, but you have
to be sure to jump up when your name gets called, or they’ll end up
calling you “kid,” in the bad way.

It’s the same
word, “kid,” but you can always tell what it means by how people
say it. Sometimes, when people say, “He’s a kid,” it just
means he’s green—he doesn’t know the score. That isn’t
a good thing to be, but it’s not such a big deal. You can always get
schooled, and then you won’t be green, no matter how young you are.

But if they call you some other guy’s kid, that means you do things
for him. It would be better to be dead. Once in a while, that happens in there.
A kid makes that choice.

There’s other choices. If you’re
that kind of kid, I mean, if someone is trying to make you that kind
of kid, you can go for a fence parole—that’s what they call it when
a kid runs.

If you try that, all kinds of bad things happen. It
isn’t just the beating you get when they catch you. Or even when they put
you in a solitary cell and just leave you there. It’s that the guys who
chase you, they’re the same as you.

There’s a special squad
of kids like that. They don’t stay with us. They have their own dorm.
They don’t eat with us, either.

You have to be very tough to do
that job, being a kid guard. Because if the real guards drop you down,
make you go back to sleeping in the dorm with the rest of us, you’re
going to get hurt one night. That’s a guarantee.

If the place
scares you, but you’re too scared to run, you can ask the bosses to lock
you up in one of the solitary cells. It’s safe back there. But everybody
knows why you went, so you can never come out.

That’s just one of
the things that was so confusing when I first came in, being in solitary. If
they threw you in there, like for fighting, it made you bigger. But if you went
there because you wanted to, it made you smaller.

It was like driving,
I thought. Just knowing the car isn’t enough; you have to know the roads,
too.

Even if you come in with a real good charge on you, if you
don’t have friends Inside, you’ll probably have to fight a couple
of times. The charge doesn’t always tell the story, so people test
you.

You don’t have to win when you fight, but you have to
keep fighting until somebody stops it.

And if you come in without any
friends, everybody watches you. They want to see what kind of a person you are.
After they find out, different things happen, depending.

With me, one
of the crews saw I was okay, so I got to join up. Get in the car, like Hector
said. After that, the only time I had to fight was when my crew got into a beef
with a different one.

By the time they let me out,
I knew a lot of guys who did jobs that needed a driver.

I will
always remember the first one. It was one of those all-night stores that sell
everything. The guy who found me, Rodney was his name, he said he used to work
there, so he knew where everything was, even how to get into the safe in the
back. He said they kept a lot of money in there, because they had to pay the
delivery guys in cash when they came first thing in the morning, once a
week.

Rodney had it all planned out, he said. A three-man job. One guy
to hold the clerk, one guy to get the money, and one guy to drive.

But
the night we were supposed to do it, when I went over to where Rodney was
staying, him and Luther, the other guy, they were all pumped up on crystal;
buzzing around like wasps in a jar, talking so fast I couldn’t hardly
understand a word.

They both had pistols. Rodney was waving his around,
saying if the white trash motherfucker didn’t hand it over, there was
going to be hair all over the walls, stuff like that.

They didn’t
want me to steal a car. They wanted to use Rodney’s. “You can pull
around the back, bro,” he told me. “Out where the Dumpster is.
It’s as dark as a toothless nigger in a coal bin back there.
Nobody’ll see nothing. Besides, I put other plates on it.”

I wanted to tell them I wouldn’t do it, but I couldn’t say the
words. It wasn’t that I was scared. I mean, I was scared, but
not about the robbery. I was scared, if I didn’t do it, word would get
around, and nobody would want me for a driver.

Rodney’s car
had something wrong with the mufflers. It was way too loud. You could hear the
sound bounce off the sides of parked cars as we went past them.

I
knew this wasn’t the way to do things.

We parked off to the side,
just past where the lights from the store reached.

“Let me wait
here,” I said. “This is better than going around back.”

“Not if we have to come out the back, asshole,” Rodney
said. “Just do it like we planned.”

I wanted to tell him
there wasn’t any plan, but it was too late for that.

“This
is the slowest time,” Rodney said. “Three-thirty in the morning,
you never see anybody in there.”

“Let’s go,”
Luther said.

I didn’t say anything. I knew who the boss was.

When Rodney told me, I pulled around the side of the store. Real slow, just
letting the car creep, so the muffler noise wouldn’t be so loud. They
both got out. I had to hold the seatback down for Luther—a Mustang
doesn’t have much room in the rear.

“I’ll be right
over there,” I told them, pointing to a big pool of shadow out past the
Dumpster. Rodney was right about how dark it was.

They pulled the
stockings down over their faces and looked at each other. Then they high-fived
and walked away.

I turned off the lights, then I let the Mustang idle
over to the spot. I backed in careful, made sure I had plenty of room. I opened
the passenger door, so they could get in quicker. The little light on the
ceiling went on. I popped off the cover and pulled out the bulb. Then I moved
the mirror so I could see behind me.

It was hard to see good, because
it was raining that night. I remember it because I was worried about the roads.
I wished I’d had more time to practice driving when it was wet.

It seemed like a long time, but I guess it wasn’t. I heard gravel
crunching, like people were running, then they came around the corner,
fast.

They both tried to jump in the car at the same time, then Luther
went in first and Rodney got in the seat next to me.

“Go!”
Rodney yelled.

I pulled out slow, because I didn’t know if anyone
inside even knew we were back there, and I didn’t want to give away what
direction we went off in.

We were only a short distance away when
Rodney started yelling. “Fuck fuck fuck!” He hit the
dashboard with the butt of his pistol. “God damn it.”

I was afraid they had killed someone, but I hadn’t heard any
shots.

Nobody chased us.

When we got back, I found out why
Rodney was so mad. “Not even two hundred lousy fucking dollars,” he
said, looking at the bills spread out on the kitchen table. “They changed
the deal with the safe. Dirty motherfuckers!”

Luther just kept
shaking his head. He was grinning, but a lot of guys do that when they’re
hyped up and nervous.

Rodney divided the money three ways. I got
sixty-something.

The next morning, the TV said two men had robbed the
store. And got away with a little more than thirty-five hundred dollars.

I learned from that job. The more I thought about it, the better I
understood what really had happened. All the time I was thinking that Rodney
and Luther weren’t really pros, they were thinking the same thing about
me. If I was a professional driver, I never would have even gone along on that
job. I would have used another car. I would have practiced with it, to make
sure it was okay if the roads got slick. And I would have gotten it straight in
front how much my share was.

At first, what I thought was that they
didn’t have a plan. Using Rodney’s own car, with the bad mufflers
and all, was really stupid. And getting high before they went out, that was the
scariest part. I was afraid they might get so amped they would shoot someone.
But it turned out they did have a plan, all along.

I didn’t know
about the rest of the plan for quite a while. And I only found out by accident.
I was looking in the papers for an old car I could fix up, when I saw this
story.

ARREST IN McMARTIN STORE ROBBERY
Two More Men
Sought

The second I saw that big black type, it felt like my heart
was an engine going redline. I was sure either Rodney or Luther had got
themselves arrested, and whichever one it was, he had talked about the whole
thing.

I’m not a great reader, but I can do it pretty good, if I
go slow. Only thing, I couldn’t make myself go slow that time, and I had
to read the story a couple of times before I understood it.

The guy
they arrested wasn’t Rodney or Luther. It was the guy who worked
in the store. The “inside man” is what the police said he was. The
story said it wasn’t a robbery at all. The guy who worked there, he just
opened everything up and handed it over to Rodney and Luther.

I had
been a stupid kid from the beginning. Rodney’s kid, is what I felt like.
It wasn’t so much that they cheated me. It was that they never needed a
driver at all.

I hoped they never found Rodney or Luther. Not because I
cared about what happened to them; I was afraid they’d tell.

Not
tell the cops—I was afraid, when they went back Inside, they would tell
the other guys that I was just a stupid kid. Not a real driver at all.

Far as I know, they never caught Rodney or Luther. I figured the inside
man had told on them, but the paper had said the cops were looking for two men,
not three. So probably Rodney and Luther never told the inside man they even
had a driver.

After that time, I was a lot more careful. I
found a guy who wanted cars stolen. He ran a big junkyard, where he could take
the cars apart and piece them out to body shops and other places that needed
different parts of certain cars.

That’s what I had always told
the other guys I was doing. When I was locked up, I mean. So it seemed right
that it would come true. Maybe that was part of my destiny, too.

I
worked for Mr. Clanton for almost a year, doing that. He paid me depending on
what the car I had to steal was worth to him, but it was never less than five
hundred dollars, so I didn’t have to work very often.

I got
chased a couple of times, but it was different from when I was just driving
with no place to go. I knew I couldn’t go back to the junkyard if the
cops were close on me, but Mr. Clanton told me about a whole bunch of spots
where I could stash a car and just walk away … all I had to do was get
some distance between me and the cops and bail, he said.

After a while,
I got pretty good at getting into cars. I was never behind the wheel long. Mr.
Clanton’s place was way out of town. The last bit of road was nothing but
a dirt track between the trees. I got so I could run without lights. That way,
nobody could follow without me knowing.

There was a place I could pull
over and wait. That was hard, sitting there with the engine off, listening for
the sirens. But I had to do it. The worst thing that could happen would be for
me to lead the cops back to Mr. Clanton’s. He said, if I did that, they
could get a search warrant, and a whole lot of people would go to jail.

When Mr. Clanton told me that, I was in his office. There was some other
men there. I guessed they was the other people he was talking about.

I was driving a beautiful blue Mercedes the night I got caught. Mr.
Clanton always liked them. He said a Mercedes was like a good fat pig—you
could make money out of every last little piece of it.

I spotted the
cop before he saw me, I think. County sheriff. Around there, the troopers
worked the Interstate, the city cops had downtown, but the sheriffs’ cars
got to go anywhere they wanted. There’s a lot of law where I come
from.

It wasn’t like that time with the Camaro. I wasn’t
speeding or anything. And I had a driver’s license with my picture on it.
The license was a fake. I got it from a guy Mr. Clanton sent me to. It looked
real good, but I never used it, except to buy cigarettes, if I was in one of
those places that asked you.

When I took a car, I always looked in the
glove compartment. Sometimes people left money in there, but that wasn’t
what I was looking for. I wanted the registration and the insurance papers.
That time I’d gotten lucky. Or, anyway, I thought I had.

So when
the sheriff’s car showed up behind me with its roof lights flashing, I
didn’t try to run.

On TV, when the cops stop someone in a car,
they always call the driver “sir.” The cop didn’t do that
with me.

I showed him the papers from the glove compartment. He told me
to wait where I was, and he went back to his cruiser. I could have rabbited out
of there, but I knew I couldn’t outrun his radio. So I just sat there.
Like that time next to the Dumpster, waiting for someone else to decide what
was going to come next in my life.

The cop walked back to the Mercedes
real slow. His right hand was down at his side, next to his pistol.

“Are you related to Jayne Howard?” he asked me.

“No, sir,” I said. “I don’t know her.”

“Those papers you gave me, they say this car is owned by one Jayne
Howard.”

“I don’t know anything about that,
sir.”

“Where’d you get this car, then?”

“Well, a guy came by this bar. He said he needed someone to drive his
car over to Atlanta. He offered me two hundred bucks to do it.”

“Is that right? Where in Atlanta?”

“The Classy
Club, on Peachtree,” I said. I remembered one of the guys I did time with
was always talking about that place. Like it was famous or something.

The cop nodded his head like he was thinking it over. He asked me a couple
more questions. I thought I was handling them pretty good, too. Until I saw the
two other cruisers pull up.

The cop who arrested me told the man at
the front desk that there hadn’t been any trouble; I was a real
gentleman. And, while they were taking my picture, I heard him tell another
cop, “Ten to one, this kid never says a word. He’s a real
pro.”

I wanted to thank him for saying that, but I
couldn’t figure out how to do it without sounding stupid.

After
they locked me up, they asked me if I wanted to make a phone call. I knew
better than to call Mr. Clanton, and I didn’t know anyone else.

After a couple of days, they took me to court. There was a Public Defender
there. A black guy. Young. Real clean-looking, wearing a nice suit.

He
had them take me into a room where he could talk to me private. I told him what
I told the cop. He gave me a sad smile.

Later that day, they had some
kind of little trial. To see what they were going to charge me with, I think.
Only the cop got to testify. My lawyer asked him a lot of questions about what
he did after they arrested me. It sounded like he was saying the cop never
checked out my story.

After that was over, I went back to jail.

The lawyer came to see me again a few days later.

“You never
told me you had a record,” he said.

“I’m
sorry.”

“A record for stealing cars.”

“I guess I should have,” I said.

“Never mind.
Just tell me the truth. That’s the only way I can help you.”

“I already told you.”

He showed me his sad smile again.
He looked older when he did that. “Which is it, Eddie? You think
I’m dumb enough to believe that fairy tale? Or you’re dumb
enough to think a jury will?”

“It’s all I can
say,” I told him.

“No, it’s not. Listen. The ADA says
he’ll give you a suspended sentence in exchange for
cooperation.”

I didn’t know what an ADA was, but I knew
what “cooperation” meant. “No,” I said.

He
nodded, like that was what he’d been expecting.

It was another
couple of weeks before he came back again. He had papers in his hand, white
papers, with a blue back holding them together.

“You know
what’s wrong with your story?” he said. “The ignition was
popped. If it wasn’t for that, for that and your track record, I mean,
you might have a fifty-fifty shot with a jury.”

“The car
was running when that guy pulled up,” I said. “I never looked at
the ignition.”

“Uh-huh. Well, Eddie, here’s the deal.
Here’s a deal, anyway. You’re not going to beat this case,
but they don’t want to go all the way through a trial for a minor league
GTA bust. And the car wasn’t banged up, so there’s no insurance
company to raise hell about making an example of you. Bottom line,
they’ll give you a misdemeanor plea, if you cop.”

“Cop to what?”

“Use without
authority?”

“What’s that?”

“Just
what it sounds like,” he said. “Driving the car without permission
of the owner. They’ll drop the Grand Theft Auto, so no more felony.
How’s that?”

He looked real pleased, like he’d done
extra good.

“How much time would I get?”

“First offense … as an adult, anyway. Misdemeanor, on a plea,
we can probably seal it for six months county time.”

“You
mean, stay right here?”

“Yep. And with the time
you’ve already got in, plus the time they’ll take off if you stay
out of trouble, maybe four months.”

“I … don’t
know.”

“It would be just you, Eddie,” the lawyer
said. “You admit to driving the car without permission, that’s all.
You wouldn’t have to say anything else.”

When I got out,
I went over to Mr. Clanton’s. He said I was a good, standup kid. He said
he knew people who were looking for a driver like me.

That’s how I ended up in the state pen. Mr. Clanton introduced me
to Tim and Virgil. They were brothers. Tim was the older one, and Virgil pretty
much followed his lead. I don’t mean Tim was like his boss or anything;
he just knew more things.

Tim was only a few years older than
Virgil, but Tim always called him “kid.” The way he said it, you
could tell it didn’t mean what it meant Inside.

The first job we
did was a liquor store. I just pulled up out front and waited while they went
in. Virgil stayed by the door; Tim went all the way inside.

It seemed
like only a minute when they came flying back out. I drove away fast and
smooth. Never even heard a siren.

When we got to the long sweeper curve
just before you could take the dirt road up to Mr. Clanton’s, Tim told me
to pull over. Him and Virgil got out of the car. Tim came over to my window. He
said to take the getaway car to the junkyard and leave it with Mr.
Clanton—only he called him Seth—and there was another car there I
could use to get back.

The money was in a yellow-and-black gym bag on
the front seat. Tim said to wait two days, then call him at the number I had
for him. If everything was okay, I should bring him and Virgil the money
then.

I wasn’t exactly sure what Tim had meant by two days, so
I waited until the night after the second day to call.

Tim answered
the phone. He recognized my voice. Said everything was okay; told me to come
over to his house.

Tim and Virgil lived in an old double-wide trailer,
in a heavy patch of woods a few miles outside of town, right at the base of
some little hills. They had built it out nice, with wood framing and aluminum
siding. It was pretty damn big, but set so far back you couldn’t see it
from the road.

I knocked on the door. Virgil opened it. He moved his
head to show me to come on in. Tim was sitting at the kitchen table.

“You bring the money, Eddie?” he said.

“It’s right here,” I told him, holding up the gym
bag.

“Sit down,” Tim told me. He took the gym bag from me.
Held it up with one hand, like he was trying to guess the weight. “How
much was in there?” he asked me.

“I don’t
know,” I said.

“You can’t count?” Virgil
said.

“I never looked,” I told him.

Virgil made a
little noise in his throat. Tim looked at him until he was quiet. Then he
unzipped the gym bag. “Let’s see,” he said.

He took
out the money. It came in little bundles, with rubber bands around them.

“Count it,” he told Virgil.

Tim lit a cigarette. He
asked me if I wanted one. I said yes.

Virgil counted for a few minutes.
Then he said, “One thousand, six hundred, and forty-four
dollars.”

Tim didn’t say anything. He just stared at Virgil
for a few seconds. “What did I tell you?” he finally said.

Virgil stuck out his hand for me to shake. I didn’t understand why he
did that, but I shook with him.

Tim counted out some money, handed
it to me. “That’s six hundred,” he said. “Virgil and I
will split the rest. Okay?”

“Sure.”

“Those package stores don’t keep much cash around.”

“That isn’t my part,” I said. “I’m the
driver.”

“Right. The liquor store, that was kind of like a
little test run, you know what I mean?”

“I … I think
I do. I think I do, now, anyway.”

“You drive like a
pro,” Tim said. It made me feel a lot better than the money did.

Tim went over to the wall, where the phone was. He dialed a number.
“Your friend Rochelle doing anything tonight?” he said.

I couldn’t hear what the other person said back. Then Tim said,
“Oh, she’ll like this boy, I promise you.”

I don’t know how much Rochelle liked me, but I liked her, all
right. In the morning, I drove her to work. She was a waitress, and she had the
early shift.

I saw her for a few weeks straight after that. I used
some of the money from the job to buy her a bracelet she saw in a store window.
Rochelle said she really liked that bracelet, so I knew I couldn’t go
wrong getting it for her.

One night, Rochelle told me her man would be
back sometime the next day. The County was cutting him loose, and he would be
moving back in with her. She said he was crazy jealous, and she couldn’t
be seeing me anymore.

I wasn’t upset—I had never figured on
a girl like Rochelle staying with me for long.

“Thank you for
telling me,” I said. “Otherwise, I might have come by your house
one day, and it could have been bad.”

Rochelle gave me one of
those looks I never understand. “Do you want your bracelet back,
Eddie?” she asked me.

“It’s your bracelet,” I
told her. “I bought it for you. I guess you could tell your man you got
it from—”

“I wasn’t asking you because I was
worried about … Ah, never mind, sugar. You take care of
yourself.”

She gave me a kiss with no promise in it, and then she
went away.

Later that same night, Virgil walked over to where I was
working on one of the cars in the shed.

“Rochelle was doing
you a favor, Eddie,” he said. “That man of hers, Leon, he is one
stone insane peckerwood. You’d have to kill him.”

“I
guess.”

Virgil was quiet for a few minutes. Then he said,
“You want her bad enough to do something like that?”

“No,” I told him.

“Okay, then,” he
said.

We smoked a cigarette apiece, just looking at the crescent moon.
Then Virgil went back into the house.

After that
first time, we didn’t do any more test runs. Everything was for
real.

One job was a post office. We went at night. Virgil was
dressed in one of those padded suits people who work in meat lockers wear. Tim
swung the sledgehammer against the glass. Virgil put his arms over his head and
jumped right on through where it was smashed in. The alarm went off, loud.

Virgil ran around and opened the door from the inside, so Tim could help
him.

The alarm kept ringing. Tim said we had to keep everything under
three minutes. He told me to keep watch, but not to make any noise unless the
cops showed up.

Tim and Virgil came out. They were hauling a big gray
post office bag. They heaved it into the trunk and jumped in with me.

“Drive like the Devil’s behind you, Eddie,” Tim
said.

The bag was full of all kinds of stuff. Mostly stamps. There
was a little cash, not much. The big score was all the blank money orders. Tim
said he knew a guy who would give us a good deal on them, but we had to turn
them over fast, before the feds got the list out.

One thing I
learned from Tim: It was better to take a long time planning a big job than to
do a lot of little ones in a hurry. After a while, I got to be in on the
planning. Just the driving part, but that was very important, Tim said. Mostly
the route for the getaway, but also what car to use, too.

Mr.
Clanton’s junkyard was so big, you could make a new car out of the parts
of old ones. He showed me how to cut license plates in half and make new ones
out of the pieces. Ones that wouldn’t come up stolen if a cop looked at
them.

“Can you get us something really fast?” Tim
asked me one night.

“Fast top end? Or off the line?” I
said. There’s a big difference, but most people never think about
that.

“We’re gonna be chased, Eddie,” he
said. “Count on it.”

“How could the
cops—?”

“Not the cops,” he said.
“It’s going to be a race. If we win, we get a lot of
money. And nobody’s going to call the cops.”

“What
happens if we—?”

“We get dead,” Virgil said. He
had a big grin on his face.

Mr. Clanton had an old Chevy stock car
at his place. It used to run in Sportsman Modified over at the Speedway a few
years ago. “The owner got sick of throwing away money,” Mr. Clanton
told us. “The fool he had for a driver spent more time on the wall than
he did on the track. They never could get themselves a decent sponsor, so I
took it in trade for some motors. It’s just been sitting around here,
ever since.”

I spent a lot of time with that car. Putting in a
new engine was easy—the whole front end tilted up and there was plenty of
room to work. The suspension was the problem.

“This one was set
up to go roundy-round,” Mr. Clanton said. “Spent its whole sad life
making left turns. It’s geared real short, too.”

I told him
I was sure I could fix it, and he let me use his shop to try. Every time I made
a change, I took it out and tried it, to make sure it worked.

One
night, Virgil asked me what the hell was taking me so long. Before I could say
anything, Tim said, “Eddie knows what he’s doing.”

That made me even more determined to do it perfect.

When I was
done, the car looked like it was normal, if you didn’t get too close. I
even got the lights hooked up. There was only the one seat in the front, but we
weren’t going any long distance. The bad thing about it for a getaway car
was that it only had two doors. If you’ve got more than one man coming,
it takes longer to jump into that kind of car. But Tim said he had a plan for
that, too.

The building was against the side of a hill, so you had
to climb a long flight of outside stairs to get to the door on the second
floor. That was around the side; the front was the same level as the
ground—that’s where they had the strip club.

“The
game’s upstairs,” Tim said, “but the chase is going to come
from around the front. They’ll have to call down for help.”

“What about doing their tires?” I asked him. “So they
can’t chase us.”

“You see how many cars there are in
the lot, Eddie? We don’t know which ones the bouncers drive. We’d
have to do them all. Anyway, there’s way too much traffic in the lot,
people coming in and out all the time. Anybody spots us doing the tires,
we’re done. You’ve got to drive, kid. All
right?”

“I got it,” I said. My chest felt big with
what Tim had called me. Same as Virgil.

I started the engine. We rolled
over to a spot right next to the bottom of the stairs. Tim and Virgil got
out.

They climbed up the stairs. I lost sight of them when they went in
the door.

I closed my eyes for a second, to fix the road I’d have
to drive in my mind. Then I waited.

Somebody came charging down the
stairs. Virgil. He grabbed the widemouth can he had stashed at the bottom, ran
about halfway back up, and started splashing gas all over the steps as he
backed down again.

Three shots blasted. Tim came flying down the
stairs, a laundry sack in one hand. When he got to where the gas was, he threw
down the sack and vaulted off. Soon as he was in the air, Virgil lit the whole
thing up.

I revved the engine, put the car in first, held the clutch
down.

Virgil threw the laundry sack in the side window. It landed right
next to me. He crawled in behind; Tim jumped in the front. They pulled their
masks off.

The flames were swallowing the stairs. I dropped the clutch.
We came out of that lot like a shotgun blast. The stock car got a little
sideways on the dirt, but I was ready for it to do that, and I never had to let
off the gas.

The road went straight as a string for about five miles
before there was any chance to turn off. I couldn’t see any lights behind
us.

“We’re gone!” Tim said, looking over his
shoulder.

We were almost to the first turnoff when I saw a pair of
pickups coming toward us. Suddenly, they slammed on their brakes, blocking the
road.

“Well, look at that. Hillbillies got themselves a CB radio,
huh?” Virgil said. I couldn’t see his face behind me, but I knew he
was grinning.

I stabbed the brakes as I gunned the engine and
downshifted all the way to second. As we started to skid, I cranked the wheel
hard over, and floored it. The stock car got sideways, powersliding right at
the two pickups. I whipped the wheel back to the left and we slipped around
them with about a yard to spare.

A big chunk of the windshield
disappeared just before I heard the shots.

“Come on,
cocksuckers!” Virgil yelled right in my ear, blasting his pistol out the
window.

Tim was somewhere under all that glass, but I could see him
moving.

Everything slowed down then. I could see it all happening, like
we were underwater. I felt a couple of shots go into the rear of the car, like
they were going into me. Tim’s face was all bloody. He was trying to get
his gun up. One of the pickups wheeled around behind us. It had a row of bright
lights in a bar across the top of its roof, blazing.

“Drive us,
Eddie!” Tim said. Real soft, but it was like a shout to me.

I
bent the stock car into that first corner, and put my right foot through the
floorboard. I’d been over those roads dozens of times, practicing. It
felt like there was a wire running from my hands direct into the front wheels,
like I was bending my own body around those curves. Once in a while I could
catch a flash of the pickup’s lights on an angle, but they never got
close enough to fire any more shots. At least, none I could hear.

When
I spotted the big tree with the giant white “X” I had spray-painted
on it, I knew we were nearly home. Just up the road a piece from the
“X” was a tight hairpin curve around a mass of rocks. I could hear
the pickup coming on. I braked deep, sliding just a little bit. Then I slowed
down even more, so we were just barely moving. I could hear Virgil slam another
clip in his pistol.

I looked over at Tim. He finally had his gun up,
but he couldn’t turn enough to aim back out his window.

The
pickup came closer. I goosed the throttle with the clutch in, making sure the
carburetor was clean. The second I saw the wash of the pickup’s lights,
we took off again. The stock car slipped around that hairpin like water through
a pipe.

The pickup thought we were going much faster than we really
were. By then, it was too late for them to slow down. I couldn’t see the
crash, but I heard it.

“They ain’t got no more!”
Virgil yelled.

When we got back, we found out that Tim was all cut
up, but none of it was too bad. I didn’t even know I’d been nicked
until Tim’s girl Merleen finished cleaning him up and came over to
me.

“Your ear’s bleeding, Eddie,” she said.

“Probably some glass, like Tim got,” I told her.

“Let me see … Damn! The whole lobe is about gone. You must
have had a bullet go right by your face.”

“I don’t
remember anything like that.”

“It’s all …
burned, too. Like you got shot up close,” Merleen said.

She
poured some alcohol on my ear, then covered it with some white ointment from a
tube. She wrapped a lot of tape all around my ear, real tight. It looked
stupid, but it didn’t hurt.

By then, I figured out what had
happened, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want Virgil to feel
bad.

“You feel bad about it?” Mr. Clanton asked
me.

He meant that we had to cut up the stock car and get rid of all
the pieces.

“No, sir,” I told him.

“That car
was a horse for you boys,” Mr. Clanton said.

I wanted to
explain to him. How I didn’t care about cars, just about driving. But I
thought that would sound dumb, so I just shook my head like I was sad. That was
what Mr. Clanton expected of me, I think.

Virgil showed me how to
bury money in mason jars, like they use for canning. Money’s only paper.
If you don’t seal it up real tight, it could rot on you, especially if
you left it a long time.

We couldn’t spend most of the money
right away, Tim said. The men who were in that poker game had people all over
the place. If we started throwing money around, word could get back to
them.

I asked Tim if he would hide my share for me.

“I’ll hide half of it for you, Eddie,” he said.
“The other half, you have to hide for yourself.”

“How
come?”

“You can never have all your money in one
place,” he said. “What if I had to come back for my own money? In a
hurry, you understand. I might not have time to cover my tracks. Anyone coming
hot on my heels would find your share, too.”

“If that
happened, you could take my share with you.”

“Eddie
… you can’t always get away. Not every time. If I got
caught, all the money would be gone. Yours, too,
understand?”

“I guess I do. But I could
always—”

“Half,” Tim said. “No
more.”

Virgil was a real good cook. Specially his barbeque. He
made his own pit on the side of the house, out of some special bricks that came
from a famous barbeque oven in Kansas City. Virgil said, after a lot of years,
the bricks get to hold a flavor, and whatever you cook in them gets some of
that flavor, too.

I was never sure when Virgil was having fun with
me, when he told me things, but his barbeque was good enough he could have
opened a restaurant. Tim was always after him to do that. He said we all had to
have regular, legitimate businesses to be in, because stickup men never die of
old age, and we couldn’t just keep on the way we were forever.

Virgil said we were going to all do it, someday. We’d have a big
barbeque joint. Virgil would be the cook, and Tim would be the manager.

“And we’ll have a beautiful little garage right next to
it,” Tim said. “Maybe a body shop, or a place for motors. Right,
Eddie?”

“Sure,” I said. But I was really wishing they
had asked me to work in the restaurant.

We were all out by the
barbeque pit one afternoon. Virgil had been doing something with the meat all
day—he had all different kinds, not just pork, like you see in some
places—and he was just starting to put it on the fire. A car pulled up.
An old one, is all I remember about it.

A woman got out of the front
seat. She was kind of heavy, with long straight brown hair.

“Brenda,” Tim said to Virgil.

The woman walked over to
where we were standing.

“I got to talk to you,” she said to
Tim.

Tim looked over at Virgil. Then he moved his head to the side a
little bit, so you could see he was listening.

“Wallace.…” the woman said.

“I’m not
doing this again, Brenda,” Tim said. “That’s your man. And
that’s your choice. You think I forgot what happened before?”

“This is—”

“What, Brenda? This is
different? How many times you come around here, looking for money because
Wallace beat your ass and took your check? But that wasn’t enough for
you, right? You wait until I’m off somewhere and sneak yourself up here.
Virgil, he takes one look at your face all bashed up, and what does he
do?”

“I didn’t mean for him to—”

“You’re a no-good, lying bitch, Brenda,” Tim said. His
voice was as calm as if he was asking you if you wanted a beer. “You
think, because we’re kin, you get to play us over and over, don’t
you?”

“Tim, I swear—”

“Don’t fucking swear,” Tim said. “It
wasn’t the judge who sent my brother over that time, Brenda. It was
you.”

“I’m sorry. You know I never
would—”

“You never would what?” Virgil said.
His voice was soft and quiet, like Tim’s. “Get me some County time
for whipping that piece of shit Wallace? Yeah, you’d do that. You
did that. But you know what, Brenda? That’s not why I’m
done with you, even if you are Mom’s baby sister. I didn’t mind
doing the time. I thought it was worth it. I figured that was it for Wallace;
he’d be afraid to show his mangy face around you. And then what
happens?”

“Virgil.…”

“You take
up with him again,” Virgil said, still quiet. “I’m on a
fucking road gang, and Wallace is back with his favorite piece of
ass.”

“There’s nothing for you here, Brenda,”
Tim said. “We never thought we’d see you again, and that’s
the way we wanted it. You may be a stupid slut, but you’re not that
stupid, you didn’t know how we felt about you. If Mom was alive,
she’d spit on you for what you did to Virgil, so don’t come around
using her name like you did before.”

“It’s not for
me,” the woman said. Her face was all twisted up, like she was going to
cry, but she didn’t. “It’s about Janine.”

“I don’t know any Janine,” Tim said.

“She’s Wanda and Roy’s girl,” Brenda said.
“You know Wanda was killed by that drunk driver year before last. And
then Roy took with the cancer. He’s been in the hospital, just waiting to
die. So I took Janine to live with me. Since I’m a blood relative and
all.”

“Yeah, you’re a good-hearted woman, all
right,” Tim said. “How big a check’s the government giving
you for her?”

“That isn’t why I did it,” Brenda
said. “If I didn’t come through, Janine would have gone to a foster
home. And you know what they’re like.”

“Get to it,
Brenda,” Virgil told her. “I got meat waiting that’s more
important to me than you are.”

“Who’s this?”
Brenda said, looking at me.

“None of your business,” Tim
said. “Nothing around here is any of your business. This is a
man we trust. You don’t want to talk in front of him, tell your
story walking.”

“She’s in the car,” Brenda
said.

“Who?”

“Janine. I had to bring her
with me. She’s only twelve. I couldn’t leave her in the house
alone.”

“Brenda.…” Tim didn’t sound so
patient anymore.

“Wallace has been messing with her!” she
said. “I just found out, I swear. I don’t know what to do.
She’s scared of him. I can’t go to the police,
because—”

“You stay here,” Tim said, cutting
her off. “Stay here, and don’t say a fucking word. Nobody’s
listening to you, anyway.”

Tim walked down to where
Brenda’s car was sitting. I saw him tap on the window. In a minute or so,
the window came down. I could see someone was in there, but I couldn’t
make out anything about them.

“I’m sorry,” Brenda
said to Virgil.

He acted like she wasn’t there.

Tim
opened the car door. A little girl got out. All I could see was that she was
real skinny, with light brown hair, wearing a big yellow T-shirt that covered
her all the way down to her knees. She walked down the path with Tim until I
couldn’t see them anymore.

They were gone a good while. Brenda
kept trying to say something to Virgil, but he never spoke to her.

“Eddie, would you do me a favor?” he asked me.

“Sure.”

“Go in the house and get my
pistol.”

“Which one?” I said.

“Any of
them’ll do,” Virgil told me.

“Virgil.…”
Brenda said.

By the time I got back with Virgil’s pistol, Tim and
the little girl were coming back up the path. Tim opened the door to the car,
and the little girl got in. Tim held out his hand, and she grabbed it for a
second. Then Tim came back up the rise toward us.

“You filthy
whore,” Tim said to Brenda. His voice was so soft and quiet I almost
couldn’t hear it. “You didn’t just find out about Wallace
fucking that little girl. You also found out she was pregnant, huh? So now
you’re worried about your own ass. Like always.”

“She’s lying, Tim!”

“Lying about what?
Lying about when she came to you and told you Wallace was grabbing her, and you
slapped her face and told her Wallace was the man of the house? Lying about
when Wallace whipped her with his belt until she was bloody, and you
didn’t do nothing? Lying about the time you woke up in the night and
found Wallace in her bed?”

Tim moved closer to Brenda. She took a
step back.

“Tell me, Brenda,” he said. “I really want
to know.”

“I swear I—”

“I told
you about swearing, Brenda. Remember before, when I said if Mom was alive
she’d spit on you? Well, if Mom knew what you did to that little girl,
she’d fucking kill you, sister or no.”

“What
am I going to do?”

“You, huh? What
you’re going to do, you’re going to drive Janine down to
the Welfare and tell them the truth. The truth, you dirty bitch. If I
find out you protected Wallace, I’ll come looking for you,
understand?”

“But if Janine tells,
Wallace’ll—”

“Here,” Tim said, handing
her some bills. “You don’t go back home, understand? You go to a
motel. There’s enough there for a couple of weeks, food and everything.
It may take a few days for the law to pick Wallace up, but he’s not
making bail once they do, and you’ll be able to go back home.”

“A motel’s no place for a—”

“Janine’s not going to be with you, Brenda. You leave her with
the Welfare.”

“But she’ll end up
in—”

“Wherever she ends up, it’ll be better
than being with you.”

Brenda started crying. “You
don’t understand, Tim,” she said. “You’re not a
woman.”

“Neither are you,” Tim said.

We
were at the kitchen table later that night, when Tim said, “We’ve
got a job, Eddie.”

“Okay.”

“Thing
is, there’s no shares this time. There won’t be any money. So
we’ll just pay you cash, like we hired you, fair enough?”

“Sure,” I said. I got up and walked outside. Quick, before
anything showed on my face.

I was out there a long time. I never
felt so sad in my whole life.

I heard them come up behind me. I
didn’t turn around.

“You want some sausage?” Virgil
said. He knows it’s my favorite.

“No thanks,” I
said.

“I don’t blame him,” Tim said.
“Who’d want to eat a meal with a pair of stupid assholes like
us?”

I didn’t say anything. I knew my voice would shake if
I did.

Both of them came around so they were facing me.

“We apologize, Eddie,” Virgil said. “We never meant to
insult you.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“No, it isn’t,” Virgil said. “We never should have
offered you money. We should have just asked if you’d drive
us.”

I didn’t want to talk. I felt like crying, only I was
too sad.

“No, that’s not right,” Tim said.
“Eddie, we shouldn’t have asked you at all.”

I looked right in his eyes.

“You’re with us,” Tim
said. “We’re with you. Blood is bullshit. Brenda’s not our
kin, Eddie. You are.”

Right then was the best moment I ever spent
on earth.

I stayed the next few days at the house. We all worked on
our piece of what we had to do.

“Janine’s with the
Welfare,” Tim said, when he got off the phone. “Nobody knows where
Brenda is.”

“They pick up Wallace?” Virgil asked.

“No. And they’re not going to.”

“How
come?” I said. “Once that little girl tells who—”

“Janine’s not going to tell,” Tim said.

“Why not?”

“We made a pact,” Tim said.
“A blood pact, between kin. If she told, you know what would
happen?”

“Wallace would go to prison?”

“Maybe. And even if he did, it’d be only for a couple of years.
What’s that?”

“He has to be worried, though,”
Virgil said. “Wondering if the hammer is going to drop.”

“He’s not worried about the law,” Tim said.
“He’s worried about us.”

“He doesn’t
know—”

“Sure, he knows, little brother. You think
that whore Brenda wasn’t on the phone to him first thing? Hell,
she’s probably with him right now. It’s for damn sure Wallace
hasn’t been sleeping at their place. He’s not going to give us a
chance to catch him alone. Specially not after dark.”

Tim had
a plan. We gave it a couple of weeks, then we went out to do the job.

“That’s him,” Tim said. “The fat fuck in the brown
jacket. But there’s a lot of traffic.…”

“It’s all right,” I told him, as we drove past the
poolroom on the other side of the street.

The poolroom was one of those
places where you could make a bet, or shoot dice, or buy different kinds of
things. Out front, they had some benches, and a bunch of little tables and
chairs. People played dominos and cribbage out there, or they could eat one of
the sandwiches they sold inside the place. They did a lot of business.

I made another pass, then I double-backed and came at it from
downwind.

Wallace was out front, at one of the tables, having a beer
with a couple of other guys. It wasn’t luck that we found him. Tim said
he was there regular—he spent most of his days at the poolroom, either
inside or out.

Virgil was in the backseat, with the window down. He had
a canvas sack filled with sand draped over the sill, to make a rest for his
rifle. Tim was up front, next to me. He had a pistol in each hand.

We
were all dressed in the same white jackets. Tim and Virgil pulled the black
stockings over their faces. We all had on black gloves. I was wearing a white
cowboy hat and sunglasses.

Cars were parked in front of the poolroom,
but there was space between them. I came to a stop.

Wallace never
looked our way.

“Back us up just a little,” Virgil said.
“I need a better angle … yeah!”

I pulled the lever
into low, held the brake down with my left foot and fed the car a little gas. I
watched the left mirror to make sure we weren’t going to get blocked when
we pulled out. Then I said, “Okay.”

A bomb went off just
behind my head. Then Tim opened up with both pistols, like he was spraying with
a pair of garden hoses. I moved my left foot off the brake as I stomped down on
the gas.

I slipped through traffic as smooth as I could, trying to
balance speed with not calling attention to us. I had to bust a red light at
one corner, but that wasn’t so unusual, the way people around there
drove.

A few blocks later, a squad car came right at us, siren
blasting. But he went on by, probably heading to the poolroom.

Once I
was sure nobody was chasing us, I pulled in behind the bus depot and Virgil
jumped out. He had a duffel bag over his shoulder. Inside was all three guns,
the stocking masks, my cowboy hat, and two pair of gloves—I kept mine,
because I was still handling the wheel.

After that, we were okay. I
drove Tim all the way across town, to where he was parked. He was going to pick
Virgil up from the bus depot, like he just came in from out of town.

That left me alone. I wasn’t worried about an APB on the car. It was
a grayish Toyota Camry; looked like a million other cars on the road. I just
drove it through the alleys until I found a nice quiet spot. Then I climbed
out, leaving the door open and the engine running, just like that guy in the
Camaro, a long time ago.

It came out just the way
Tim said it would. They had the chief of police on TV. He was a square-faced
guy, wearing a regular suit. The woman asking him questions had a lot of makeup
on. Her hair was blonde, stiff, like a helmet.

“The shooting
appears to have been gang-related,” the chief told her.
“We’ve been charting a significant increase in drug trafficking in
our area recently. We attribute this to an influx of gangs from major
metropolitan areas. This is typical of their pattern; they’re like
salesmen trying to establish new territories.”

“Is it true
that you already have suspects?” the woman said.

“I
don’t want to comment at this time,” he said. “We don’t
want to say anything that might compromise an ongoing
investigation.”

I thought maybe they were just trying to trick
us, make us think they didn’t know what really had happened. But then
they showed the TV woman talking to a couple of the people who had been there,
outside the poolroom. They both said it was black guys who had done the
shooting, a whole carful of them.

We probably would
have gone on forever, except for that little bank. Tim was the one who found
it. He studied up on things like that, and he was a real good planner.

The bank was about an hour’s drive away from where we were. It was an
old one, sitting on some high ground outside the town. Tim told us the bank was
there even before the town got built up, when the only thing around was the
mill.

“It was a company town,” Tim said.

“What’s that?” I asked him.

“That’s
when the only work is for this one company, Eddie,” he said. “Like
when there’s a mine, and nothing else. So the mining company owns the
houses the workers live in, and it owns the stores they buy their goods in,
too.

“It’s like being in prison. If you have money on the
books, you can get stuff from the commissary, right? Candy bars, cigarettes
… even vitamins in some joints. And things for your cell, like a radio.
But the deal is, there’s only the one commissary, so you don’t have
a choice. If they want to sell Milky Way bars for five dollars, and you want a
Milky Way bar, you pay that five dollars.”

“But it’s
not like real prison,” I said. “So how come the people in those
towns, why don’t they just get in their cars and drive someplace else to
shop?”

“Things were different back then,” Tim said.
“Back when they had those company towns, if you lived there, you probably
didn’t have a car. Besides, you didn’t have any cash money. They
just paid you in scrip.”

“What’s scrip?”

“Like a piece of paper that you could use for money. But it was only
good in the stores the company owned.”

“Isn’t that
crooked?” I asked him.

“Our granny thought it was,”
Tim said. “She was the one who told me and Virgil about company
towns.”

“Because she lived in one?”

“Sure did. She and my granddad, a long time ago. She was a real old
lady when she told us about it.”

“Your granddad was a
miner?”

“Not for long, he wasn’t,” Virgil
said.

“What happened?” I asked.

“He went into
business for himself,” Tim said. He was smiling, like he does when
he’s happy.

“What business?”

“Same one
we’re in, Eddie,” he said.

“What happened to
him?”

“The law got him,” Virgil said.

“He went to prison?”

“Never once,” Tim
said. “My granddad got shot down by the law. They came to take him, and
he wouldn’t go.”

Tim said the bank would be swole up
with money by noon every Thursday. That’s because Thursday was payday at
the mill, and everyone came to the bank to cash their check. The armored car
made the delivery early in the morning. The first shift at the mill ended at
three, so we had what Tim called a window—we had to get in and out while
it was still open.

“I’ve been looking at that little
bank for over a year now,” he told me and Virgil. “There’s
only one guard, and he’s about a hundred years old. Spends all his time
jawing with the customers, like it was a general store, or something.
There’s only one camera, and we can take that out with spray paint. I
guess there’s silent alarms and stuff, but all we need is about five
minutes in there, then Eddie gets us all gone.”

Tim leaned way
back in his chair, puffing on his cigarette like it was a big cigar.

“Boys,” he said, “that little bank, it’s like a
cherry on top of a chocolate cupcake. All we got to do is pluck it
off.”

I never found out what happened inside that little bank,
not until the trial.

It was just after two in the afternoon when we
pulled up. Tim said that’s the time it was always slow in the bank,
specially on Thursdays.

Virgil had a double-barreled sawed-off. Those
are good for scaring people, Tim said. Much better than a pistol. Virgil
carried the shotgun under his coat, against his chest, held there by a loop of
rawhide around his neck. Tim had a pair of pistols, like he always used to
carry.

“Five minutes, Eddie,” Tim said to me. Then him and
Virgil went into the bank.

The clock on the dashboard was one of those
digital ones. It said 2:09.

The clock said 2:12 when I heard the crack
of a pistol. Then the boom of Virgil’s shotgun.

People started
screaming.

I started the engine and backed the car up to the front door
of the bank.

There was more gunfire. Then it got real quiet.

I
got out and opened both back doors. I jumped back in the driver’s seat
and watched the mirror to see when Tim and Virgil came out.

I heard the
sirens, off in the distance.

I put the getaway car in gear, holding it
in place with the brake.

The dashboard clock said 2:17 when the first
trooper’s car roared up. There was another right behind it. And then a
whole bunch more.

The cops piled out. They hid behind their cars,
aiming their guns at the door of the bank. One of them had a loudspeaker in his
hand. He yelled at me to get out of the car and get on the ground.

I
waited for Tim and Virgil.

Then the cops started shooting.

I
woke up in the hospital. There were tubes running out of me. I don’t know
how much longer it was before I could feel the shackles around my
ankles.

The cops came. And men in suits. They asked me a lot of
questions. I was so dizzy that it was easy not to answer them.

The
nurse had red fingernails. She was kind of chunky, but she looked pretty in her
white uniform.

“Did you really rob that bank?” she asked
me, real soft, when nobody was around.

“Huh?” I said.

She got a nasty look on her face. Then she picked up a big needle and gave
me a shot.

One day, a lawyer came. An old guy, with
a lot of heavy black hair he combed straight back. “Can you tell me what
happened?” he asked me.

“Huh?” I said.

They tried us all together. All of us that was left. The lawyer showed
me the papers that said they were charging Tim and me, for two counts of
capital murder and four pages of other stuff. They didn’t charge Virgil,
because Virgil was dead.

“That second count is felony
murder,” the lawyer said to me. “If a person dies during the
commission of a felony, everybody involved in the crime can be held
responsible.”

“I don’t understand,” I told him.
It was the truth.

“The prosecution’s theory is that, after
the robbers had lined everyone up, one of them went into the cages. It was then
that the assistant manager pulled a gun. He shot the one with the shotgun. The
other robber then shot him, killing him instantly.

“The robber
with the shotgun fired a blast, but it didn’t hit anyone. Apparently, he
was mortally wounded, and the other one wouldn’t leave him. They were
brothers, maybe that explains it.”

I didn’t say
anything.

“The reason you’re charged with the homicides is
that you were part of the robbery attempt. The wheelman, obviously. It’s
not clear to me why you didn’t take off before the police
arrived.…”

He let his words trail off, the way people do
when they want you to finish what they’re saying. But I
didn’t.

I was still bandaged up by the time we started the
trial, but they kept me ankle-cuffed anyway. Tim had a bunch of chains around
his waist.

All the time they were putting on one witness after
another, Tim never looked at me. Not once.

His lawyer never asked one
single question. But when they started to bring me into it, my lawyer got up,
like he had business to take care of.

“Officer,” he asked
the cop on the stand, “how many shots would you estimate were fired at
the car in which my client was sitting?”

“I couldn’t
say. If he’d gotten out of the car when we—”

“More than five shots, officer?”

“I think
so.”

“More than ten?”

“I don’t
know.”

“Well, officer, isn’t it a fact that every
single shot fired by the State Police has to be logged in and accounted for?
Every single bullet?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Can
you tell us where we would find out that information, please? Where is it all
collected?”

“That would be with the shooting team,”
the cop said. He was watching my lawyer like a bird on the ground watches a
cat.

“That team reviews all police shootings, to determine if
they were justified, is that correct?” my lawyer asked him.

“Yes, sir. And this one was perfectly—”

“I’m sure,” my lawyer said. “Now if I were to tell
you that the report of the shooting team was that seven different officers
fired a total of thirty-one rounds at the car in which my client was sitting,
would that surprise you?”

“No.”

“Thank
you. Now, after my client was wounded and taken into custody, you examined the
interior of the car, did you not?”

“Yes.”

“How many guns did you find in the car, officer?”

“There were no weapons in the car.”

“By
‘weapons,’ do you mean firearms, officer? Or are you referring to
weapons of any kind, such as a knife or a club?”

“Weapons
of any kind.”

“I see. And did you search the trunk of the
car as well?”

“Yes.”

“With the same
result?”

“No weapons were found in the trunk of the
vehicle,” the cop said. His jaw was clenched so tight you could see a
knot in his cheek.

“Were any weapons found on the person of the
defendant?” my lawyer asked him.

“On … ?”

“On my client, officer. The young man sitting right over
there, at the counsel table. You see him, the one with all the
bandages?”

“No.”

“No, you don’t
see my client? Or, no, you didn’t find any weapons on my client after you
shot him?”

“Your honor!” the DA said.

The judge stared hard at my lawyer, but anyone could see he didn’t
scare him any.

There was a lot of stuff like that, but I didn’t
see what the point of it was. I saw a couple of people on the jury looking at
me, but I couldn’t tell what they were thinking.

When they
called Tim’s name, it was like a shock wave hit the place. I guess nobody
expected him to get on the witness stand and talk for himself. I know my lawyer
told me he wouldn’t let me do it.

But Tim
didn’t act like himself up there. Tim was a man with a lot of charm.
That’s what Merleen, Tim’s girl, told me once. I wasn’t sure
exactly what it meant, although I knew it was true.

On the stand that
day, you would never know Tim had any charm at all. It was like he was sneering
at everyone. Like they were all nothing but bugs.

He said him and
Virgil were professional robbers. They’d robbed dozens of places and
nobody ever got hurt. “And if that punk manager hadn’t tried to be
a hero, nobody would have gotten hurt this time, either,” Tim said.
“The little asskisser was trying to show what a good boy he was, save the
boss’s money. He shot my brother in the back, like the weasel coward he
was. I wish I could kill him again.”

A woman started crying, real
loud. I guessed maybe she was the wife of the man Tim had shot. The judge had
to bang his hammer hard a few times to get people to quiet down.

Tim
told them that, after Virgil got shot, he wasn’t able to move, and Tim
couldn’t carry him and keep his gun on everyone at the same time, so he
just dug in and waited for the cops, so they could get Virgil an
ambulance.

“My brother was still alive when they took him out of
there,” Tim said. “I figure the cops took their time getting him to
the hospital.”

His lawyer tried to clean that one up.
“You’re not saying the police are responsible for your
co-defendant’s death?” he said.

“Between them and
that little weasel in the bank, they got it done,” Tim said.

“Look at his eyes!” someone whispered behind me.
“He’s a psycho.”

The judge slammed his hammer again,
until people stopped making noise.

Tim and his lawyer were staring at
each other like a pair of pit bulls on the scratch line. Finally, the lawyer
shrugged his shoulders, like there was nothing he could do about things. He
stepped back, away from Tim, and said, “You know a man was arrested
outside the bank, don’t you?”

“You mean Eddie?”
Tim answered him. “Yeah, I knew that.”

“Was he your
accomplice?”

“Accomplice? Eddie? Be serious.
Virgil and I always do things the same way. We plan out a job, then we find
some dummy to drive us. They usually never know what’s going on, unless
someone starts chasing us.

“Eddie, he’s not real swift in
the head. All we told him was, if he’d drive us to the bank, wait for us,
and then drive us back home, we’d pay him a couple hundred bucks. Hell,
we didn’t even tell him the car was stolen.”

“He went
too far with that one,” my lawyer whispered. “Now he’s opened
the door.”

When it was the DA’s turn at Tim, he
practically jumped out of his chair.

“Are you claiming your
acts were justified?” he yelled.

“Which acts?” Tim
said, grinning at him.

“Murder!”

Tim lifted his
shackled wrists so he could point his finger at the DA. “That
wasn’t murder,” he said. “That was justice.”
Tim’s voice was like stone. “That coward killed my brother, and I
killed him.”

The DA stuck his chest out, talking real loud.
“If you and your brother hadn’t robbed that bank, this never would
have—”

“Me and Virgil robbed plenty of
places,” Tim cut him off. “And all that time, we never shot nobody.
Never beat anyone up. Never raped any of the women. If that punk had just kept
his hand in his pocket, he’d still be alive. And me and Virgil would be
down on the beach in Biloxi, spending that bank’s money.”

“You and Virgil and your co-defendant, you mean?”

“What co-defendant? You mean Eddie?”

“That’s right. Your poor, innocent friend Eddie. You testified
earlier that he didn’t even know the car he was found in had been stolen,
is that correct?”

“That’s right.”

“Would it surprise you to know that your friend Eddie has been to
jail for stealing cars?” the DA said. He stepped off a little, like he
had just landed a good one.

“Hell, no,” Tim laughed at him.
“Eddie’s a natural-born sucker. Fifty to one, somebody else stole
those cars, and left Eddie to take the weight.

“That boy’s
not all there in his head. He couldn’t plan to take a shower. Look at
what he did, for Christ’s sake. We tell him to wait for us, and so he
just sits there. And when the cops start blasting, he still sits
there, like a lump of clay.”

I could feel people looking at me. I
didn’t want to look at them, and I didn’t want to look down, like I
was afraid. For the first time, I looked at Tim.

“Eddie’s
not like other guys,” he told the jury. “He’s a retard.
Slow.” Tim’s eyes were like chips of blue ice.

“It’s like Eddie’s just a kid,” he said, shaking
his head. “A simple, dumb kid.”

The jury found me guilty
of something, some charge I never heard of. I wasn’t guilty of the
killing, or even of the robbery. I guess it probably had something to do with
the car I was in.

My lawyer was really happy. He said the most the
judge could give me would be five years, and I probably wouldn’t get even
that much.

“I guess you heard how Tim made out,” he
said.

I just shook my head.

“Capital murder,” the
lawyer said. “And the jury found special circumstances. Do you know what
that means?”

I shook my head again.

“It means the
death penalty,” the lawyer said. “If he hadn’t come across
like such an outlaw when he testified, they might have cut him some slack, I
think. It wasn’t an intentional murder. I would have thought a life
sentence would be more appropriate, myself.”

“Yeah,”
I said.

The lawyer looked at me hard, like he could stare through to
the truth. I think he was mad because he knew I would never trust him.

When you first come into prison, they keep you separate from everyone
for a few weeks. They have to make sure you don’t have a disease, I
guess. Once in a while, they bring you out of your cell to see a doctor or to
talk to different people. Everybody asks you a lot of questions.

One
man, I guess he wasn’t a guard, because he didn’t have a uniform,
it was his job to tell new guys what prison is like. I know that because he
started to tell me stuff like don’t borrow money from anyone. He was
reading through a bunch of papers while he was talking to me, moving his finger
down the pages.

“Oh, you’ve been in the system for a long
time,” he said.

“I guess,” I told him.

“Well, then you already know the score,” he said.

It
was in prison that I first learned what I was. I mean, what to call myself: a
getaway man.

I learned that from J.C. He was an older guy, maybe
forty or something. He was a heist man. You don’t get called that if you
just stuck up a bunch of 7-Elevens, or even if you broke into places. You had
to be doing big jobs, like banks. The way Tim wanted.

J.C. had so much
respect in there that the blacks left him alone, even though he wasn’t
with any of the gangs. That’s really hard, to do time by yourself, no
matter how much you might want to. Even the guards treated him good.

I
never thought a man like him would ever talk to me.

One day, a guard came around to my cell. He told me I
was being discharged into population. I went with him into the main part of the
prison.

They gave me a cell. I could see right away it wasn’t
a good one. Too close to where they have to rack the bars to let you off the
block, so it would be noisy all the time. But at least I was the only one in
it.

The first thing I did when I got to go out into the yard was to
look around for guys I’d been with in the kiddie camps. We all knew
we’d go to prison someday, and some of us made promises, to stick
together and everything, when we met up again. But I didn’t see any of
the guys I knew from before.

Except for one—Toby. When I first
spotted him, he was walking with the boss of one of the white power gangs. I
watched until he went off by himself. I figured Toby could talk me up with the
gang; get me in, too.

But when I came up to him on the yard, Toby
wouldn’t talk to me. He acted like he didn’t know me at all. His
eyes had colored stuff on the lids, like a girl’s. And when he walked
away, I could see someone had cut the back pockets off his jeans.

Where
we were before, Toby had never been anybody’s kid. I could see the state
prison was different. That made me nervous, but I knew I could never show that
to anyone.

That was the same day I met J.C. I was standing by
myself, watching Toby walk away, wondering what I was going to do. I
didn’t know that much about prison, but I knew I couldn’t make it
in there all by myself.

J.C. just walked up to me, and asked me how
I got there.

You’re not supposed to do that, I know. Not when
you’re in a real prison, for grownups. But J.C. was bigger than the
rules. I had to answer him. His voice was like the stuff they put in air
conditioners. That stuff is so cold you can’t touch it or you’ll
get burned. J.C. had a couple of guys with him. Older guys. Their eyes
didn’t have anything in them at all.

“I was the
driver,” I told him.

“Yeah, I know that,” J.C. said.
I wondered how he could know, but I didn’t say anything.

I guess
a couple of minutes went by before J.C. realized I wasn’t going to say
anything else, not unless he asked me to.

“How come you
didn’t get in the wind when you first heard the shots inside the
bank?” he asked me.

“Tim and Virgil were still
there,” I said.

“You heard the sirens, right? You knew the
cops were rolling?”

“They were still inside,” I told
him.

He looked at one of the guys with him. I’d seen that look
before.

“That was solid,” J.C. said. “That’s
the first thing a real getaway man has to have. Balls. No nerves, and balls of
steel. Am I right?”

One of the other guys said he was. I
didn’t think he was asking me.

A few nights later, I went off
the block. I knew I couldn’t just stay in my cell all the time, or people
would get ideas about me.

I didn’t know when the test would
come, but I wanted it to be where there would be guards close by.

I
went over to the rec room, to watch the TV. There were plenty of empty
chairs.

In just a minute, a black guy came over and sat down next to
me. He was my height, but much wider. He had huge muscles all over him, like
armor. He was smiling, friendly. His teeth were very white. I didn’t look
in his eyes. He smelled clean and bitter, like laundry soap.

This was
the test. I knew what would come next. If I talked to him, he’d see if my
voice was under control. If I sounded scared, then he’d be nice. Tell me
what a bad place the prison was if you didn’t have a friend. Maybe offer
to protect me from certain people in there, pat my arm to make me feel better.
Then he’d ask me to go someplace with him. Someplace where we could
talk.

But if I didn’t answer him, he’d pretend to get mad.
He’d say I had disrespected him, or something like that.

It
didn’t matter how he was going to get it started, it was always going to
end the same way.

I knew I’d have to try and hurt him bad, if I
ever wanted to be left alone. My best bet was to jump him first, but I was,
like, paralyzed, trying to make myself move.

There was only one guard
in the rec room. He was watching the TV.

I was looking at the floor,
trying to see if there was anything I could use on the black guy. I wished I
had a knife. I didn’t know how to use one—I mean, sure I knew how
to use one, but I’m not a pro at it, like some guys you hear about when
you’re locked up—but I know, some people, if you just show them a
blade, they’ll back off.

I didn’t think that black guy
would back off, even if I had a knife. I could tell he’d done this
before.

I wished Toby hadn’t done what he did.

The black
guy was talking to me. I couldn’t make out any words—just the
sound, like my ears were full of water.

I knew it had to happen
soon.

And then another black guy came up to us. He was older than the
one who was trying to bulldog me; he even had gray in his hair.

I snuck
a peek around the room, but everybody was looking away from us.

The
older guy didn’t say anything. He just shook his head at the one sitting
next to me—side to side, like he was saying no.

The guy with all
the muscles got up, like he just remembered something he forgot to do.

The two black guys walked off together. Nobody else came over. I sat by
myself for the whole rest of TV time.

A couple of
days later, J.C. and his men found me again. They stood around me, but I
didn’t feel all hemmed in; I felt safe.

“At the trial,
Tim took all the weight, didn’t he?” J.C. said. “Told the
jury you didn’t even know what was going on. Just a dumb kid he and his
brother talked into driving them to the bank. That’s why you’re
only doing a nickel, not sitting up in the death house with Tim.”

“I never said anything,” I told him.

“At the
trial? Why should you? Tim was putting it all on him and his brother. And his
brother, he didn’t make it. All you had to do was sit there.”

“I didn’t say anything even before that. When the cops had
me.”

“Why not? They must have wanted you to roll over,
testify against the others. Offered you a deal.”

“I would
never do that,” I said.

He looked at the guys with him again. But
it was a different look, that time.

After that, I was with J.C.
Everybody knew it.

J.C. was short—near the end of his
sentence—when I met him. He got out almost two years before me. But, by
that time, it was okay—I could live there by myself. It was like J.C. had
left his protection on me.

One night, before he left, J.C. told me I
didn’t want a parole.

I nodded okay.

“That
doesn’t sound crazy to you, Eddie? What I just said?”

“Not if you say it,” I told him.

Then J.C. explained:
If I was going to be a getaway man, I couldn’t have some parole officer
checking on me all the time. A good getaway man is responsible for everyone who
goes out on the job. He has to get them home safe.

“What if your
P.O. just dropped in the same day you were working?” J.C. said.
“You’re not home, that isn’t going to stop him. Those
motherfuckers don’t need a warrant to search your house if you’re
on parole. You see what that could do?”

“Yeah,” I
said.

“For you, parole is a chump play,” J.C. said.
“With good time and all, you’ll max out only a few months later,
anyway. If you were doing thirty years, and they offered you a parole after
ten, well, you’d have to take that. But with the time
you’ve got, it doesn’t make any sense to expose
yourself.”

The parole board was easier than I thought. J.C.
had told me a few tricks I could use to mess things up, but I didn’t need
any of them.

The parole people asked me if I felt any remorse for
the man who was killed inside the bank. I knew they didn’t mean Virgil. I
told them I had nothing to do with what happened, like J.C. told me to. One
lady on the board said I had to learn to take responsibility. She said that a
lot. I told her I didn’t do anything.

They all started yelling at
me, then. I didn’t answer them back. And I didn’t get the
parole.

When I’d paid everything they said I owed, they let me
out. J.C. was right—it wasn’t much longer than if I’d gotten
that parole.

Prison’s full of guys who have gotten out before,
and come back. They always complain that your clothes get old while
you’re locked up. So when you make it out, the first thing you need to do
is get some clothes that are in style.

I guess the good thing about the
kind of clothes I wear is that they don’t get old. I was glad of that,
because I only had the fifty dollars gate money they give you, plus sixteen
dollars on the books from my job on the cleaning crew in Four Block.

They pay your bus fare back to your hometown. If you don’t have a
hometown, you can go anyplace in the state you want, one-way.

I took
the bus west, just like J.C. said. At the end of the line, I walked over to the
highway and thumbed a ride. It didn’t matter to me where the guy was
going, but I remembered not to say that. All I really needed was to get to
another town, so I could get on another bus, and go back east, away from the
flatlands.

I did everything in order. First, I got a room. J.C. told me
how to find the place. It was in a part of town where everybody writes on the
walls. A four-story house, all busted up into tiny little rooms, not much
bigger than my cell.

The walls were gray, and the shade over the window
was the yellow things get from cigarettes after a long time. The shade was
taped in a lot of places. The bed had a big drop in the middle. The sheet was
the same color as the walls. There was a wire strung across the room on one
side, so you could hang your clothes. A little lightbulb swung down from the
ceiling—you had to reach up to turn it on or off.

I
couldn’t see a place in the wall to plug in a radio, if I had a radio.
The toilet was down the hall. Some of the people who used it must have been
drunk.

I asked the man downstairs if there was a phone. He said no. I
just walked around until I found one, outside a store. I called the number J.C.
gave me. It rang three times, then a girl’s voice came on.

“Hi. We’re out having fun. If you know how we can have some
more, leave us a message. Bye!”

I wasn’t surprised by this.
J.C. had told me it would be a machine.

“This is Eddie,” I
said. “I just got—”

“Are you staying where
you’re supposed to be?” a voice cut in. A man’s voice, but
not J.C.’s.

“Yes. I went right to—”

“Stay there,” the voice said. Then it hung up.

That
was almost four years ago. I’m a getaway man now. Seven jobs, every one
correct. We never got caught. Only got really chased once. And that was by a
city cop’s car—it didn’t have a chance. All I had to do was
to put a couple of corners between us, and we were gone.

We
don’t stay together, except just before a job and for a little while
after. The cops always expect us to run far, but we never do. That’s what
I mean about a couple of corners. We have other cars—switch cars,
they’re called—stashed.

Whatever car I drive, we drop that
one off quick, and jump into one of the switch cars. And even then, we only go
a little ways. There’s plenty of places to stash cars in this part of the
state, now that the plants have all pretty much closed down. Lots of empty
buildings, all the windows broke out.

Nobody on the job ever goes right
back to where he lives, either. J.C. rents places where we all stay for a
while. That way, no neighbor sees you leave just before a job, or come back
right after one. Those are the kinds of things cops look for.

Everybody
wears gloves, so we can just walk away from the getaway car when we switch. But
they can find out stuff from blood, too. One time, J.C. got hit. It
wasn’t bad, but he was bleeding a lot. So, that time, we couldn’t
just dump the getaway car. I dropped J.C. and the other guys off; they took the
switch car, and I went back out.

I drove the getaway car until I got it
way back on a dirt road I knew about. I siphoned a five-gallon can of gas out
of the tank, and I poured it all over the backseat, where J.C. had been
bleeding. Then I wadded up a rag into an empty soda bottle and poured a few
drops of the gas over the top. I lit the rag. As soon as it got going a little
bit, I tossed the bottle underhand through the back window. Flames shot right
up, and I knew there wouldn’t be a trace of J.C.’s blood left.

I walked back through the woods to a main road, where I knew there would be
phones. I figured it would take a few hours, and it would be dark by then.

I’d only gone a little distance when I heard a big air-sucking noise.
I looked back, but the woods were thick, and I couldn’t see
anything.

All the jobs I did with J.C., I was
always the driver. But I wasn’t a getaway man all the time. Sometimes, I
would take the bus to a big city up north. When I got there, I would go to
wherever J.C. said. I could never take a cab to those places; J.C. says that
cabdrivers have to keep records, and we never wanted to be on anybody’s
records.

“The perfect driver would be an invisible man,”
J.C. told me. “Driving an invisible car.”

When I would get
to the places I was supposed to, I would ask for a particular person. Most of
the time, it was a man, but once it was a woman. They would give me a car to
drive.

That was all I had to do, then. Drive the car. A long distance,
it always was. When I got to where the car was supposed to be, I would just
drop it off. The people I dropped it off with would make me wait while they
checked to see if everything was all right. It was always all right.

Then they would take me to a bus station, and I would go back to wherever I
was living.

I asked J.C. once, if I got stopped by the police, should I
try to get away from them.

“No, Eddie,” he said.
“Remember, you were hired to transport a car from one place to another,
that’s all. You’re getting paid by the mile. Lots of guys do that
kind of work. If you ever get busted, you make sure they give you a
polygraph.”

“A lie detector?”

“Right.
Because the only question they’re going to care about is whether you knew
what was in the trunk. And you’re going to pass, understand?”

J.C. knows how to plan things out. He told me, on those drives, I should
always carry a decent amount of cash, but never a gun.

All the times I
drove those cars, there was always a spare tire—one of those little ones
that will take you far enough to buy a new tire—and a jack, on the floor
of the backseat. Never once did I ever have to open the trunk.

None of
these people paid me. They paid J.C., and he would give me my share whenever I
got back.

Sometimes, I had to lay over a day or two after I dropped
a car off, in case they had another one for me to take out.

One
time, the place where I was staying was near a mall. A huge one, with a lot of
real classy stores in it. Usually, whenever I had time on my hands, I would go
to the movies. But that day, I remembered something I had been wanting to do,
so I walked over to the mall.

I wanted to get something for Bonnie. She
wasn’t my girlfriend, exactly—I had just met her a few weeks
before—but I had hopes.

I’d met Bonnie in Wal-Mart. I went
to get a pair of boots, and she worked there. Not over where you get shoes, but
where they had jackets and stuff.

Bonnie had red hair and real white
skin. She had freckles, too, like cinnamon dusted over milk.

“You
could use a new coat to go with those new boots,” she said, as I was
walking by with the box the boots had come in.

She had a beautiful
smile. It was so wide, it made her eyes kind of scrunch up.

“This
one’s still pretty good,” I told her.

“Good for
what?” she said. “It’s kind of tired. I’ll bet your
girlfriend has been after you to get rid of it.”

“No.”

“No, she hasn’t. Or, no, you
don’t.…”

“I don’t have a
girlfriend,” I told her.

“Good!” Bonnie said. She was
kind of bold, but she was so nice about it that you’d never think she was
slutty.

I didn’t really know how to ask a girl for a date. Most
of the girls I ever knew, I just met them in places I was. Like when
they’d come over to Tim and Virgil’s. Or in a bar. But I never
liked to talk to girls in bars—it seemed, half the time, that ends up
with you getting in a fight.

The girls who came over to Tim and
Virgil’s always talked good about men who took them to nice places. I
wasn’t sure what that meant, exactly, but I knew they didn’t mean
the movies. I stood there like a damn stump, trying to remember what it was
they said they liked. And, then, I remembered. So I asked Bonnie if she would
like to have dinner with me.

I could see in her eyes that it was the
right thing to say. She gave me her address, and told me to come around eight.
It was a Friday, but she didn’t have to work late, she said, because she
started at seven in the morning.

Eight o’clock seemed pretty late
to be eating dinner to me, specially if you got started so early in the day,
but I didn’t say anything.

All that afternoon, I tried to
puzzle it out. I didn’t know what Bonnie meant by “around
eight,” for starters, but I figured I’d come there at eight
exactly, so I could handle that one. It was the going out to dinner part that
confused me. I had asked her easy enough, but I didn’t have a plan, so I
was a little nervous.

One thing I knew—I couldn’t take
her to Denny’s or McDonald’s or anyplace like that. I looked in the
paper. There were so many places I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t
know how to choose.

So I just started calling them. But when I would
ask how much a meal cost—I figured that was a good way to tell if it was
a classy place—they treated me like I was stupid, and I got all
embarrassed.

Finally, I just went out looking for myself. I drove past
a lot of restaurants until I saw one that looked pretty nice. I parked and
walked up to it. And, sure enough, there was a menu right in the window.

It was real expensive, that place, so I knew it had to be a good
one. Enrico’s, the name was.

I got back to where I was staying,
and I took a shower and shaved extra careful. When I went to get dressed, I was
all embarrassed again—I could see what Bonnie meant by me needing to get
a new coat.

I had money. Ever since I got out of prison and started
working, I always had money. J.C. and the others spent their money on all kinds
of things, but I never spent most of mine. When they would ask me if I wanted
to go to one of the gambling clubs, I never much did.

J.C. knew how to
dress. His clothes didn’t look real fancy, but, somehow, you knew they
cost a lot of money.

Tim and Virgil spent money on clothes, too, but
you never had to look close to see that. One time, we were all supposed to go
over to this roadhouse where a band Tim liked was playing. Virgil said there
would be a lot of girls there, and I couldn’t go looking like I was. He
went and got one of his shirts—a beautiful red silky one, with gold
stitching and pearl buttons—and he told me I had to wear it. I was
worried about getting it torn—I had been to that same roadhouse with them
before—but Virgil said there was no point in having nice clothes if they
were going to stay in the closet.

I didn’t give Virgil his shirt
back right away. I wanted to get it all cleaned and ironed first. But when I
brought it over to him, he told me I needed to keep it, because it didn’t
fit him anymore. Besides, he said, he knew the shirt had brought me luck.

That made me embarrassed, but it felt good, too.

I never knew what
happened to that shirt. I wasn’t wearing it when I got shot and arrested
and all, and there was no one I could ask to go over to where I was staying and
get my stuff. Maybe the cops got it.

But J.C. didn’t live near
me, the way Tim and Virgil had, so I couldn’t go over and ask for advice.
J.C. wasn’t the kind of man you could just show up at wherever he was
staying, anyway, even if you knew where that was.

I went out to the
stores. It took me quite a little while, but I found a real nice shirt. Not a
red one, a dark blue one.

Bonnie lived with her
mother. She introduced me, and her mother asked me what I did for a living. I
told her I was a mechanic—J.C. said to never tell people I was a driver;
they wouldn’t understand it.

Bonnie’s mother asked me
where I worked, and I said I worked for myself.

“You’re
pretty young to have your own shop,” she said.

“Well,
it’s not really a shop, ma’am,” I said. “It’s
just a garage behind the house I rent, but it’s got a lift, and
industrial wiring for my tools.”

“You work off the books,
then?”

“Mama!” Bonnie said. “That’s not
your business.”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “I
got a bank account for my business. And I pay my taxes regular, too.” I
felt proud saying that. And I was thinking how smart J.C. was. It was him who
told me I had to have a legitimate business.

“It doesn’t
matter if you make any money, Eddie. Just so you deposit some
money. In the bank. You have to account for the money you spend, so the
government doesn’t get suspicious. We all have little businesses,”
he said. “Cash businesses. Like a parking lot or a cigarette store. You
see what I’m telling you?”

“I … think
so.”

“You have to pay taxes,” J.C. said. “You
don’t pay taxes, they know you’re doing crime. A smart thief always
has a good civilian front.”

“Hah!” Bonnie said.
“Not the answer you expected, huh, Mom?”

Bonnie’s
mother laughed. “Fair enough,” she said. “I apologize, young
man. But Bonnie’s my only child, and you know how that is, don’t
you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

It was almost nine when we got to Enrico’s, the
restaurant I had picked out. When we got inside, there was a man standing
behind a little desk.

“May I help you?” he said to me.
He didn’t sound like he wanted to help me.

“We want to eat
dinner,” I told him.

“You, uh, have reservations, I
trust?”

“I didn’t … I mean, I thought we
could.…”

Bonnie grabbed my arm and pulled a little, so I
had to lean down toward her.

“I don’t want to eat here,
Eddie,” she said. “I heard bad things about this place. About the
food, I mean. Can’t we go somewhere else?”

“Sure,” I said. “But I don’t know
any—”

“Oh, I know a wonderful place. Do you
like Chinese food?”

The restaurant we went to was just like I
would have picked out, if I had known what I was doing. We had a whole big
booth to ourselves. There was all kinds of different food, and I liked every
bit of it.

I was really glad that Bonnie had known Enrico’s
had such a bad reputation. The Golden Dragon was a million times better, even
though it didn’t cost anywhere near as much.

After that, we
went out three more times. To the Golden Dragon twice, and to a club, once. But
Bonnie didn’t favor the club. I was glad—I don’t like it when
it’s very loud, either, but I thought she might have gotten tired of just
going out to eat.

She always looked so pretty. Not just when we were
going out, but all the time. Once, she came by my garage on a Sunday, just to
have a soda with me. She was wearing a pair of overalls and a white T-shirt
with short sleeves. I remember how her arms looked in that shirt, all nice and
round.

I hadn’t said anything to Bonnie about going away for a
few days. I didn’t want to act like it was a big deal; I mean, that it
would be a big deal to her if I was going to be out of town for a while.

I planned on asking her to the movies when I got back. And I thought, if I
got her a nice present, she would know that I hadn’t forgot about her
just because I was away. I thought her mother would like that, too. Not a
present for herself, but that I got Bonnie one. Her mother was that kind of
person, I could tell.

I was thinking about maybe a little bottle of
real good perfume. The girls I knew from Tim and Virgil were always saying how
much they loved perfume. Clothes and jewelry and perfume. It would make me too
embarrassed to be buying girl’s clothes, and I didn’t know anything
about jewelry—Rochelle had picked out that bracelet her ownself. So I
figured on the perfume.

In the mall, I couldn’t find a place with
bottles of perfume in the window. But I did find one with store dummies all
dressed in clothes you knew had to cost a lot of money, so I went in
there.

The place was really big. Not as big as a Wal-Mart or a
Sam’s Club, maybe, but it was three stories, and it sold all different
kinds of stuff.

I wasn’t sure where to go, so I just walked
around. I was feeling good inside. I had money in my pocket and I was dressed
all neat. Nobody knew me in that city. If anyone saw me, they would think I was
a regular man. Maybe one who had a job in a place where I made a good salary. A
man who had a wife and kids, and a nice little house.

That’s when
I first saw Daphne. And if I’d been a regular man, I would never have
known what she was doing.

She was a tall girl, kind of skinny, with
short yellow-blonde hair. She was wearing a shiny black dress and high heels.
She looked very classy, like one of those window dummies come to life.

When I first saw her, she had her pocketbook—a black, shiny one, just
like her dress and her shoes—open at the top. It was on a strap over her
shoulder, dangling down by her waist. She picked up a wristwatch from one of
the counter displays with her left hand. Then, quick as a flash, she cut
something off it with a little pair of scissors in her right hand, and dropped
the watch into her pocketbook.

She moved away from the counter, just
taking her time and looking around, like she couldn’t decide what to
buy.

By the time she was close to the escalator, she had put a few more
things in her bag. A lipstick, I saw for sure. And a little white jar of
something.

That’s when I saw the man watching her. He had on a
dark green sport coat, and a white shirt with no tie. He went everywhere the
girl did, but never all that close. A young guy, kind of pudgy, with a
bully’s look on his face.

At first I thought he was working up
his nerve to talk to her. But then he turned to look over his shoulder, and I
saw the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt.

I knew there wasn’t
much time. And I knew I was being stupid, but I still went over to the shelves
where the girl was looking at those little tiny computers you can put in your
pocket.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” I said.

She
looked up real quick. There were two dots of red on her face, one on each
cheek. Her eyes were very big. Her mouth was open a little bit.

“There’s a man been watching you. He’s been watching you
put stuff in your purse. I think he works for the store.”

She
turned her back on me and walked away, moving smart, like she was about
business. She marched right over to one of the registers, and started taking
stuff out of her pocketbook. A woman came over from behind the counter. I
couldn’t hear what they said to each other but, finally, the woman behind
the counter rang up all the stuff the girl had. The girl took out a credit
card.

The pudgy guy in the suit coat walked past me. He gave me one of
those “I’ll know you next time” looks, but he didn’t
say anything.

I finally found where they sold the perfume. A nice
older lady with a pearl necklace sold me a tiny little bottle for more than
fifty bucks, so I knew it was really good stuff.

She asked me if it
was for Valentine’s Day. I could tell by the look on her face I should
say yes, so I did.

“Then you’ll want it wrapped,” she
said.

She put it in a little box that was just the right size. Then she
wrapped it in shiny silver paper, and put a thin red ribbon all around it, tied
in a bow.

By the time I left, it was the middle of
the afternoon. I was a little hungry, so I thought I’d look for a place
where they sold food. I never knew a mall that didn’t have them.

“Hey,” a woman’s voice said.

I turned around. It
was the girl from the store, the one in the black dress.

“That
was very chivalrous of you,” she said.

I didn’t know what
she meant, but I could tell from the way she said it that it was something
good.

“That’s all right,” I said.

“I’ve been waiting for you. The least I could do is buy my
rescuer a drink.”

She took hold of my arm and steered me down the
corridor. I thought we were going to a bar, but she kept going until we were in
the parking lot.

“Where’s your car?” she said.

“It’s in the shop,” I told her. Which was kind of the
truth.

“How did you get here, cab?”

“That’s right,” I said. Which wasn’t true, but I
didn’t want her to know I was staying so close by. Or the kind of place I
was staying in, either.

“Then we’ll take mine,” she
said, and started steering my arm again.

After we walked a little bit,
she reached in that pocketbook of hers and took out some keys. She had one of
those things that unlocks your car from a distance. When she pressed on it, I
heard a chirping sound. I looked in that direction. There was a big Lexus
sedan, plum-colored, with its lights blinking.

“That’s
mine,” she said. “Do you like it?”

“I never
drove one,” I told her.

“Then you should drive this
one,” she said, and handed me the keys.

I wanted to explain to
her that I didn’t mean I wanted to drive that car; I just couldn’t
say if I liked a car if I’d never driven that kind. But I didn’t
say anything.

“You drive very … carefully,” she
said, after we’d gone a few blocks.

“I’m getting
the feel of it,” I told her. “You have to do that a little bit at a
time.”

“Oh. Are you a professional driver?”

I
liked the way that sounded in her mouth. “That’s right,” I
said. “Driving is what I do.”

“Do you race
cars?”

I liked her for saying that. I was afraid she was going to
think I drove a cab, or something like that.

“No, not that kind
of driving,” I said.

“Well, do you like the car
now?” she asked me.

“I still don’t know yet.
You really can’t tell about a car unless you put it through its
paces.”

“Like a horse?”

“I …
guess so. I don’t know anything about horses.”

“Like
a test drive,” she said. “Only a hard one, yes?”

“Yeah. That’s it.”

“All right,” she
said. “I know where you can do that. Turn left at the next
light.”

We ended up on a farm. Not a farm where people grow
things, just a place with a lot of land. I know it belonged to someone rich,
because there was a gate to get in. She pushed a button on a box she had
clamped to the sun visor, like one of those garage door lifters, and the gate
opened right up.

“Is this yours?” I asked her.

“My father’s.”

“It’s a big
place.”

“Not so big,” she said. “If you know
what I mean.”

I didn’t know what she meant, so I just
nodded. That satisfies most people.

“Is this a good spot?”
she said, after a little while.

It was a single strip of blacktop, laid
down like a runway for an airplane. Grass on one side of it, dirt on the
other.

“Does it curve at all?”

“Up ahead it
does.”

“Okay,” I said, and stomped the gas.

The car was faster than I would have thought, big as it was. Got around
turns pretty decent, too, although it heeled over a bit. At the end of the
stretch, I slammed on the brakes. The car didn’t skid at all, just
scrubbed off speed in a straight line. Just as I got it stopped, I flipped the
lever into reverse and floored the pedal. We went flying backwards. I spun the
wheel all the way to the right and slammed it down into drive as I gave it the
gun and cranked over to the left. We went steaming on back the way we
came.

“Wow!” she said. “What was that?”

“It’s called a bootlegger’s turn,” I said.
“In case you have to reverse yourself real quick.”

“Do it again!”

I thought she wanted to see how I did
it, so she could do it herself, but no matter how many times I showed her, she
never asked to try.

It worked even better on the dirt road.

“Pull over there,” she said, after a while. “I never smoke in
the car.”

I could tell somebody smoked in that car,
but I didn’t say anything.

She got out and sat on the front
fender, crossing her legs like she was on a couch. I stood next to her and gave
her a cigarette.

“So that’s the kind of driving
you do,” she said. “Executive protection.”

“I
guess you could say that,” I said, although I wasn’t real sure what
she meant.

“What kind of gun do you carry?” she asked
me.

“I don’t carry a gun,” I said. “I’m a
driver.”

“Oh. What’s your name?”

I told
her. That’s when she said her name was Daphne. I never knew a girl with
that name before.

We drove off the farm. I followed her directions
to a big apartment house.

The garage was in the basement. She had a
different box to open the door.

“That’s my space,”
she said. It had little walls on each side, I guess so other cars
wouldn’t bang into it when they opened their doors.

I backed the
car in.

“You did that in case you had to get out quickly?”
she asked me.

“Sure,” I said. “I always park like
that.”

“Come on,” she told me.

There was a
little elevator in the basement. It only went to the lobby. We got out there. A
guy in a uniform and a hat said “Good afternoon” to her, and called
her by her name, with a “Miz” in front of it, like she was his
boss.

We got in the elevator. She touched PH on the pad. I watched the
numbers as we went up—PH was the top floor.

The room we walked
into was bigger than a lot of houses I’d been in. It was all black and
white, except for slashes of red in different spots—across the back of
one of the chairs, on the seat of the couch, cutting across a lampshade. Even
the floor was black and white, in squares. It kind of looked like a fancy
bathroom, with a red rug.

“Would you like a drink?” she
said.

I didn’t know the names of the kind of drinks she probably
was thinking of, and I didn’t want to ask her for a beer, so I just said,
“No thanks.”

She went over to the bar to mix herself
something. I looked out the window. It was easy—one whole wall was glass.
I could see there was some kind of a terrace out there, but I couldn’t
see how you could get to it.

She came back with two glasses. “Ice
water,” she said, handing one to me.

“Thanks.”

“You’re a wonderful driver, Eddie. Did you have to go to a
special school to learn all those tricks?”

“No,” I
said. “I just pick things up on my own.” I wanted to tell her that
what I showed her wasn’t tricks, but I couldn’t really do that
without telling her what it was used for.

She asked me a lot of
questions. And she talked a lot, too. I guess I got lost in the sound of her
voice. The sky outside got dull, then it turned dark. I didn’t
care—there was nothing for me to do until at least the next day. Nobody
was waiting for me.

“Is this all yours?” I asked her.

“This apartment?”

“Yeah.”

“All mine. Would you like to see the rest of it?”

“No, I was just … wondering.”

“If I was
married?”

“No. How come you … ?”

“What, Eddie?”

“You have this place. And that
car. And you dress so good. You’ve got a great job, right?”

“I don’t have any job,” she said. “What I have is a
trust fund.”

“A trust fund?”

“Money
that was left to me. I can’t spend it all, but I can spend a
lot.”

“You don’t have to work?”

“No,” she laughed. “I never have to work. What difference
does that make?”

“It doesn’t, I guess. Only, with all
this, how come you … ?”

“What?” she said
again. Only she sounded annoyed that time.

“How come you boost
stuff?”

“Boost? Oh, you mean … in the department
store.”

“Yeah. What you took, it couldn’t have cost
that much.”

“What did I take?” she said.
“Let’s see.”

She got up and went over to where she
had tossed her pocketbook. She brought it back, opened the top, and spilled it
all out on the couch.

“Hmmm.…” she said.
“You’re right. This is all very tacky.”

“Daphne.…”

She came over and sat real close to
me. “Want to hear a secret,” she said, very soft.

“If
you want to—”

“Ssshhh,” she said. She slid into
me. I put my arm around her. “Don’t look at me,” she
said.

It was real dark in there by then, but I still closed my
eyes.

Her voice was soft, but I could hear every word. “When
I’m in a store … not all the time, but only sometimes …
when I’m in a store, sometimes, I get … excited. It’s like
there’s this pressure inside me. Stronger and stronger. I get very
anxious. Tense. I don’t think about anything else. I know, as soon as I
take something, it will be like a … release. All the tension will be
gone.

“But, after I leave the store, I never want what I take.
Just looking at it makes me feel bad. Guilty.

“I wish I could pay
for what I take,” she said. “Not with money. I could just buy
things, if I wanted them. Before, when you told me I was being watched, I felt
like I wanted to die. I don’t know what I would do if I was ever
caught.

“I mean, I have been caught, but not
caught-caught. Once, a detective stopped me, but I was still inside the store,
and I told him I was going to pay on my way out. They couldn’t do
anything. And once a store girl was watching me in the changing room. They had
a little camera in there, can you imagine that? She saw me cutting the security
tag off a dress and putting it in my bag. She knocked on the door of the
changing room. I let her in, and she told me what she saw me do. All in
whispers.

“But she let me go. All she wanted was a kiss. That
kiss, kissing her, it felt like a punishment to me. And that made me feel
… good. Because I deserved it.

“I had this dream, once. I
was in a store, and a man caught me. He took me back in his office, called me a
spoiled brat, and gave me a spanking. I was crying. He made me promise to never
do it again. But I knew I would. I knew I would come back to that very same
store.”

She was quiet for a minute, like she was waiting for me
to say something. I do what I always do when I can’t figure out the right
thing to say.

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
she said. “Taking chances? I always do that. Look at you. I don’t
know you. I don’t even know if your name is a real one. You seem like
some kind of a criminal to me. A dangerous man. Are you a dangerous man,
Eddie?”

“Only behind the wheel,” I said, thinking of
that judge, from when I was a kid.

“Oh, you’re
precious,” she said. She was laughing or crying; it was hard to tell with
her face buried.

Late that night, she woke me up. I
was on my back, looking up at her. She was holding the silver box with the red
ribbon.

“What’s this?” she said. “A present
for someone.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s for
me, now,” she said.

She tore off the paper like she was
in a hurry. When she saw the perfume, she made a little noise in her
throat.

“Is this your favorite?” she said.

“I
don’t know. I never smelled it.”

Daphne opened the top of
the bottle. She put her finger on the top and turned it upside down. Then she
patted herself all over. Behind her ears, between her boobs, on the front of
her legs. She kept going back to the bottle for refills. When she was done, she
turned her back to me, so I could see where else she was putting the
perfume.

“Where are you going?” she asked me the next
morning.

“I have to see someone about work,” I
said.

“Take the Lexus,” she said. “I’ve got
another car. Bring it back when you come tonight.”

It took me a
couple of hours to find my way to where I’d been staying. I had to
backtrack over and over again, but I didn’t want to ask anybody for
directions.

I guess it all started when Daphne said I had to tell
her a secret.

I felt myself go cold in my spine when she said that.
In my life, only one kind of person wants to know such things.

“What secret?” I asked her.

“Not any
particular secret, you dope,” she said. “A
secret, that’s all. It doesn’t matter which one. Everybody has
secrets. When people share their spirits, that’s part of the
deal.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. I say that
a lot, to buy time. But, when I think about it later, I always see that I
hadn’t been lying.

“Didn’t I tell you secrets?”
she said.

“About stealing?”

“Yes!”

“I already knew that,” I said. “I mean, I saw you when
you were—”

“Secrets aren’t about
what,” she said, whispering. “Secrets are about
why. Remember what I told you, Eddie? About feeling guilty? And being
punished … ?”

“I.…”

“That
was a special secret. You’re the only one who knows. I never
told anybody. Do you know why?”

“Because they
wouldn’t understand?”

“That’s right, Eddie!
Don’t you have feelings like that? Feelings you know other people
wouldn’t understand?”

“I … guess.”

“You know you do. Everybody does. Everybody in the whole
world.”

It made me feel good, to know that. It made me more like
a regular person.

That was the night I told her about driving.

I could never explain exactly what driving was. I guess I
shouldn’t say it like that. Before Daphne, I had never really tried. She
worked real hard at understanding what I was telling her, but I guess I
wasn’t making much sense.

“Remember I told you, about a
dream I once had?” she said.

“About getting
caught?”

“Yes. The truth is, I have that dream all the
time, Eddie. Not just that once. And even when I’m awake. Do you have any
dreams like that?”

“About getting caught?”

“No! Any dream that you have over and over.”

I
didn’t say anything. I wanted to tell her. There was no reason I
couldn’t. I mean, it wasn’t like I would be ratting anyone out. My
dream wasn’t about stealing, it was about driving. But something was
making me not say it out loud.

In my dream, I’m standing in the
dark, by the side of a road. Yellow beams cut through the night; a car, coming.
I can’t tell what kind, but it’s low to the ground. The car is
black. Not pitch black—the same black as ravens, with a glisten to
it.

The car stops. I can’t see inside, but I know there’s
no one in the driver’s seat.

The car sits there, waiting. I know
if I get in, I’ll be driving for all eternity.

I never get in.
But I know one night I will.

“I dream about girls,” I
finally told her. That was the truth, too.

Daphne smiled at me, like
I’d done something good.

I was on a blue leather couch, in the
room next to the black and white one, waiting for Daphne to get dressed. She
had the biggest TV I ever saw in there. I was pushing the button to change
channels. Daphne has a setup where there’s so many stations you could
never really get through them all. She said there’s a way to do it fast,
depending on what kind of shows you like to watch, but I didn’t
care—I was just passing time.

On the screen, a car came along
the road. A black car, with black windows. I watched. It was a killer car. Not
the driver, the car. That was the name of the movie, The Car.
I’d seen it before. It was pretty stupid, a car with no driver.

Not like my dream. In my dream, the car was waiting for a driver.
Waiting for me.

I didn’t hear Daphne come in. “What kind of
car is that?” she said, right next to me.

“A crazy
one,” I told her. Then I explained what the movie was about, as best I
could.

“Oh, that’s like Christine,” she
said.

“Who’s Christine?”

“Christine is the name of a book,” she told me.
“It’s about a car that’s possessed by an evil
spirit.”

“What kind of car?” I asked her, just like
she’d asked me. I wanted to see what she said, so I could say it myself,
if anyone ever asked me about that movie again.

“Oh, I
don’t know,” she said. “An old one. It was in the book. By
Stephen King, did you ever hear of him?”

“I think
so,” I said.

“He’s the biggest horror writer in the
world.”

“Oh.”

“It was a movie!”
she said, clapping her hands.

“What was?”

“Christine, Eddie. It was a movie. Would you like to see
it?”

“I … guess I would. But if it’s like this
one.…”

“No, it’s a lot better,
I’m sure. Come on, let’s go get it.”

We went to a
video store. They must have had thousands of movies there. You could buy them
or rent them.

Daphne said the movies were all in sections, so you
could find what you were looking for pretty quick. I looked for a section about
driving, but there wasn’t any.

“Just ask the clerk,”
Daphne told me. “Here,” she said, putting bills in my hand,
“buy whatever you want, okay?”

“I’ve got my own
money,” I said. “Plenty of money.”

She took the bills
back from me. Put her hands behind her back and looked down.

“I’m sorry, Eddie,” she said. “I didn’t mean
anything. I just wanted to buy you a present, like you bought me.”

I started to say I hadn’t bought that perfume for her, but I stopped
… she looked so sad.

“It’s okay,” I said.
“I’ll just look around by myself.” I took her by the
shoulders and turned her around. “You see if you can find that
Christine one,” I told her, and gave her a little smack on the
bottom so she’d get moving. I saw Tim do that once with Merleen, when
they were in a store, and Merleen had liked it fine.

From the way she
walked off, I guessed Daphne did, too.

I found four different movies
that looked like they might be good from the stuff on the package. When I
walked over to the register, Daphne was there. She held up a box for me to see.
It said Christine on the cover.

“I got it!” she
said.

When we got out on the highway, Daphne wanted me to go fast. She
opened her purse and took out a videotape. I couldn’t make out the
writing on the cover, but the picture was of two girls, without any clothes
on.

“I couldn’t bring this one to the register,”
Daphne said. “It would be so embarrassing, I’d just
die.”

When we got back to her apartment, Daphne showed me how
to work her VCR, then she went off to change her clothes.

I was
watching one of the movies I found—I didn’t think it would be right
to watch Christine until Daphne got back—when I heard her come
up behind me.

“Let’s watch this one, first,” she said
in my ear.

It was the one with the naked girls on the cover. When I
turned around from putting the cassette in, Daphne was naked, too.

Christine turned out to be a pretty scary movie. The car was a
demon. A kid owns the car, but the car gets jealous of him and kills him. And
even when his friends figure out what the car is, nothing they could do would
kill it.

“Did you like it?” Daphne asked me, when it was
over.

“I guess not.”

“Why is
that?”

I thought about it for a minute. Then I told her, “I
like movies about driving, not about cars.”

“Well,
let’s look at the ones you picked out,” she said.

After
a few days, I could see that the place where I had delivered the car
wasn’t going to come up with anything for me to drive out.

Daphne found me a room in a motel. A really nice one, but it cost a lot. I
didn’t say anything about the price, because I’d already told
Daphne I had money, and I didn’t want to look like I had just been making
myself big.

It was when I was staying in the motel that Daphne got me
my portable unit. I always carry it with me now, whenever I’m going to be
away. It’s a TV and VCR all in one. The screen isn’t all that big,
but I only watch by myself, so it doesn’t matter if I have to sit
close.

I usually went over to Daphne’s in the afternoon. Then
I’d come back to the motel real early in the morning, before it got
light.

After a while, I got used to sleeping in the daytime.

Daphne’s place was perfect for watching movies, but she didn’t
like them all that much. What I would do was read in the TV guide about a movie
that looked like it could be good, and then I’d watch it for a little
bit. To see if I wanted to tape it, like she showed me. Even with all the
channels Daphne got, it was pretty slow work.

Back in my room, I had
that VCR that Daphne bought me, so I could watch the stuff I had taped at her
place.

There were a lot of video stores in that city. I spent time in
some of them, just looking. Other kinds of stores get all annoyed if you spend
a long time doing that, but the video places didn’t care.

One
store had a guy working there that knew a lot. I could tell, because people
were always asking him questions. I didn’t understand a lot of what he
said, but I could tell he knew what he was talking about from the way everybody
listened to him.

Even though it wasn’t all that bright inside the
store, he always wore sunglasses. And a red T-shirt with a black vest. His head
was shaved, but I knew he wasn’t a skinhead—his tattoos were all
wrong.

I waited until he was alone, and I went up to him.

“Do you have any movies about driving?” I asked him.

“Car chases? We’ve got them all, my man. From the classics to
the contemporaries. Bullitt to Ronin. Are you looking for any
particular director?”

“Not chases,” I said.
“Movies about driving.”

“There’s all kinds of
driving,” he said. “Grand Prix was amazing. The original,
I mean, not Driven. That was a Stallone remake. Bor-ring! If you want
to stay with the classics, there’s always Duel. That was a
made-for-TV, but we have it in stock. Did you know Spielberg helmed that one?
Brilliant. You know the Bandit series? As in Smokey and the
… ? Burt Reynolds is a comic genius. It wasn’t recognized at the
time, but you look at Striptease or Boogie Nights, and you
can see that somebody on the Holy Coast knew it all along. And
there’s a lot of cult stuff, too, like Death Race 2000.
Everybody thinks Carradine, but Stallone was in that one, too, before he caught
fire. Then you’ve got truck driving, crime—”

“Crime,” I said. “You have any of those?”

Some of the movies he sold me were pretty good ones. But none of them
were what I wanted.

One night, Daphne said she wanted to go
shopping. I didn’t say anything—I didn’t think she was asking
me.

“You have to come, too, Eddie,” she said. “Only
you can’t go in the store with me, okay?”

“I
guess.”

“Eddie, don’t you understand what I’m
telling you? I need you to be outside. With the motor running, so I can jump in
and you can take off, fast.”

“What are you going to
do?”

“You know.”

“That won’t
work,” I said. “If anyone follows you out to the sidewalk,
they’ll get the license number. And they’d have a real good
description of you. The way you’re dressed up and all, people will notice
you. And remember you, too.”

I thought she’d be glad I
warned her. I even thought she’d be a little impressed. But her face
closed up and her mouth made a straight line. “Never mind,” she
said. “It’ll be fine.”

I was in the room with the
TV when Daphne walked in. At first, I thought she wasn’t wearing
anything.

“You know what this is?” she asked me, coming
into the light where I could see her better.

“Yeah. Like
strippers wear.”

“You mean a G-string? No, those are
hidden. In the back, so it looks like they’re completely naked. This is a
thong. You’re supposed to see a little bit of color around the
waist.”

Daphne walked past me, real slow.

“See?” she said.

“It’s black.”

“How very observant you are, Eddie. Anyway, I thought it would be
perfect to wear tonight.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m going to be bad,” she said.

“I can’t just wait at the curb,” I told her.
“There’s no parking there. If I hang around, some security
guy’s going to come over and ask me to move.”

“Just tell him to—”

“Daphne, if you do
something like this, the last thing you want to do is make a fuss, get people
to notice you. Just tell me what time you’re going to come out, and
I’ll be right there, guaranteed.”

“Oh! Yes,
that’s even better. You act like you’ve done this before,
Eddie,” she giggled.

I wanted to tell her that I was a pro. And
that what she was doing was just a stupid crazy game. But I didn’t say
anything except, “Not me.”

Daphne said
nine-fifteen. At ten after, I crawled the Lexus along the sidewalk, like I was
looking for a place to turn into one of the rows. The parking lot was crowded
with cars and clogged with people. When it finally got clear behind me, I
stopped and opened the trunk, like I was going to load it up.

I was
behind the car, watching the store, when Daphne came busting out, walking fast,
swinging her purse, heels going click-click on the sidewalk. I slammed
down the trunk, got behind the wheel, and pulled up right across from her.

She jumped in the front seat, said “Get going!” through her
teeth, like she was afraid somebody would hear her.

I whipped through
the lot, keeping it smooth. “Come on!” Daphne said to me.

People who don’t know think a car’s not going fast if the
engine doesn’t roar and the tires don’t squeal. When we got out to
the street, I gave her what she wanted.

“Look!” she said, when we got inside the gate to
her father’s land. She reached in her purse, held up a little
scarf.

“Okay,” I said.

“Eddie, this is a
Hermes. Very expensive.”

“Ah,” I said, like
I understood.

“We made a clean getaway,” she said.

It made me blue to hear her say it like that.

Daphne opened her mouth. She held still while I tied
the scarf behind her head, like a gag. Then she pulled up her skirt and put one
leg over me.

I didn’t even have to pull that thong thing down.
Just moved it over to the side.

“None of them worked out for
you, huh?” the guy in the video store said, when he saw me walk
in.

“They weren’t bad, but—”

“Oh, I’m hip. The fit is everything. Try me on it
again.”

“Try … ?”

“Tell me what
you want,” he said. “Think about it, then tell
me.”

“I … it has to be about driving. Not about the
cars. Not a chase, either. I mean, it’s okay if it has a chase,
but.…”

The guy just looked at me, waiting. He was very
patient. I guess because he was an expert, and he was used to people like me
not knowing how to say exactly what they wanted.

“It has to be,
maybe, the man’s job,” I told him. “But not like a
truck driver. Or a racer. More … special. Like not everyone could do
it.”

“Thunder Road,” he said.

“What?”

“Thunder Road. The
greatest moonshine movie ever made. Robert Mitchum wants to.… Never
mind, you take it, try it out for yourself, then let me know.”

“Were you in prison?” Daphne asked me one night.

I had always been afraid Bonnie would ask me a question like that. Or
Bonnie’s mother, more likely. But I could tell from Daphne’s face
that she wouldn’t think being in prison was a bad thing.

“Yes,” I said.

“But you’re so young. Was it
a long time ago?”

“Long enough.”

“Did
you have to be in handcuffs a lot?”

“No. Just when they
arrest you. Or when they transport you, like to court for your trial, or to a
different lockup.”

“Did you hate it?”

“Prison?”

“Being in handcuffs.”

“I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t so bad. And it never
lasted long.”

“I wonder what that feels like.”

“Prison? It doesn’t feel like—”

“Handcuffs. I have a pair. Very nice ones. They’re lined in
velvet. But I was always afraid of them.”

“I—”

“Come on, Eddie,” she said.

It was about six weeks after I first met her that I went over to
Daphne’s for the last time.

“I need the keys,” she
said.

“What?”

“To my car. I need the keys
back.”

“Okay,” I said. I took them out and handed
them to her.

“Please don’t be mad, Eddie,” she said.
That’s when I knew what she was talking about.

“I’m
not,” I told her.

“You’re not going to stalk me, are
you?” she said.

I just shook my head. It had been bad enough
being a fake getaway man; I wasn’t going to be a fake stalker, too.

Before I left that city, I went by the video store one more time.

“Well?” the guy said, as soon as I walked in the
door.

“It was a fine one,” I said.

He nodded like I
was making good sense. I was glad he didn’t ask me to explain. I had
tried to work it out in my head, what I was going to say, before I went there,
but I kept getting stuck. The guys who ran moonshine, they were real drivers.
It was like … I don’t know, a contest, maybe. If they got through,
they got paid. If they didn’t make it, they went to jail. But they
weren’t bad men, and they always had people pulling for them. Not because
they wanted the money, but because it was their own people.

For those
men, driving the moonshine, that was their job. Even the cops who chased them
respected them, if they were good at it.

“I knew it!” he
said. “I’m on your wavelength, now. I’ve been holding this
one for you. Moonshine Highway. The perfect vehicle for Kyle
MacLachlan—remember him from Twin Peaks? This one’s a
minor classic. Underrated and understated. Very noir.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”

I held
out my hand for him to shake. I could see from his face he wasn’t used to
that, but he nodded like he always did, and gave me a good grip.

When I got back to where I was living, it was like the time with Daphne
had just gone past without me realizing it. Like it never happened.

I had the portable TV and VCR to remind me that I’d been with her.
But when I tried to think about that time, it was like trying to read a book
through a Coke bottle.

I called Bonnie. Her mother said she was
married.

“That was … quick,” I said.

“It was to Kenny, her old boyfriend,” Bonnie’s mother
said. “They’d been engaged once, but Bonnie had broken it off.
Kenny’s in the military. He came home on leave, so they had to act fast
if she was going to go back to the base with him.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sorry, Eddie,” she said.
“Bonnie tried to call you, but you were out of town on that job. She
thought you would have been back a long time ago.”

“I got
held over.”

“Well, it wouldn’t have mattered, Eddie.
I wouldn’t want you to think that.”

“I don’t
think that,” I told her.

Sometimes, we have to wait around for
a few days before we do a job. So we can be close when the time comes. Laying
in the cut, J.C. calls it.

Once, when we were alone, J.C. told me
there was another reason. Nobody gets told the whole plan until we’re all
together. After that, nobody leaves, so there’s no chance of anybody
talking.

This one time, there were four of us in on it. Gus always
works with J.C. He’s an old guy; older than J.C. “Gus was in the
war. Not that desert vacation,” he told me. “The real one. In the
fucking jungle.”

Gus looks all soft, flabby even, on his face.
His hair is rust-colored, thin on top, but he combs it over from the side and
you can’t really tell unless he turns a certain way. Most of the time, he
wears a cap.

“Gus can make things go boom,” J.C. said, the
first time he introduced us.

“Virgil was studying on how to do
that,” I said. “So we could blow this safe we were going
to—”

“Virgil was an amateur,” J.C. said.
“Just like that dumb cowboy brother of his. Gus is an artist.”

I didn’t say anything. I don’t like it when J.C. says things
about Tim or Virgil, but I never let him see how I feel. I’m trying to be
a professional.

“Guys like that, they never think about anything
longer than tomorrow,” J.C. said. He was watching my face. I wondered if
J.C. could read my mind, like Gus is always saying he can. “Their idea of
planning a job is figuring out which way to turn at the first corner. Cowboys,
they never last.”

“It wasn’t Tim’s
fault,” I said. I wished I could have stayed quiet, but I felt like a
chicken was pecking at my nerves.

“He didn’t plan it
out,” J.C. said, like a preacher from the Bible. Not like you
couldn’t argue with him; like you couldn’t argue with the
truth.

I wondered how J.C. ended up in prison himself, being that he
could plan so perfect and all, but I never asked him.

I know Virgil
would have.

Besides Gus, on this job we had another
guy. Kaiser. His work was muscle. This was the first job I had ever been on
with him.

He was a biker, or something like that. It was hard to
tell from his tattoos; he had so many they got all smudged together, especially
on his arms.

Kaiser was always looking at his own arms, like he wanted
to make sure they were still there.

J.C. was going over everything with
us again. He always says, you can’t stick to the plan if you don’t
know the plan.

“Speaking of plans, what do we need a
wheelman for?” Kaiser said. “This isn’t no bank we’re
doing.”

“You never know,” J.C. said. “You never
know when you’re going to need a getaway man. And a driver like Eddie,
that’s the best insurance you can buy.”

“Driving’s driving,” Kaiser said. “I got a dozen
brothers who can haul ass.”

“Driving’s not the same
as sticking,” J.C. told him. “No matter what happens, Eddie will
always be there when we come out.”

“Fuck, he’ll be
the only one there, way out in the boonies in the middle of the
night.”

“I know what this is all about,” J.C. laughed
at him. “For a Nazi, you’re a real little Jew, huh? Forget it, pal.
It’s equal shares all around, like I said it was going to be.”

“Equal? You’re taking half off the top before we split
anything.”

“That’s for the planning,” J.C.
said. “The other half’s for the execution. You know how it’s
done. Your work, it takes a couple-few hours. But the setup, my piece,
I’ve been working on it for months, already.”

“What
do you have to say, Gus?” Kaiser asked him.

“Me?” G us told him. “I don’t have anything to say.
You didn’t want to come in on this with us, the time to say so was before
you got told all about it.”

“I’m not saying anything
like that,” Kaiser said. “I just don’t see why this kid
should get a full cut just for being a limo service.”

“You
don’t have to see,” Gus said.

“No hard feelings,
right?” Kaiser said to me, later.

“About
what?”

“About your share.”

“I’m
getting my share,” I told him.

“Yeah, I know. I mean
… you’re not slow, are you?”

“If
nobody’s chasing us, I always—”

“I don’t
mean slow driving. Christ, what are you, some kind of
relative?”

“Huh?”

“Of J.C.’s. You
any kin to him?”

“No.”

“Well, he sure
looks out for you.”

“I know.”

“What’s the point of having a getaway man if
we’re going to be in this fucking tank?” Kaiser said from the
backseat.

“The point,” J.C. said, turning around to look
at Kaiser, “is that, where we’re going, we have to blend in. The
law sees this big old Jeep, they figure we’re a hunting party. Deer
season’s open. We got licenses and everything. That explains why we got
the rifles. And that’s why we’re dressed for the part. Understand,
now?”

“Yeah,” Kaiser said.

“It’s
all part of the plan,” J.C. told him. “My job is to think ahead.
That’s what I get paid for.”

The house was mostly glass,
shaped like a triangle, with the point on top. It was set in a stand of trees.
If you weren’t looking for it, you would probably never see it.

“Some ‘hunting lodge,’ huh?” J.C. said. “Only
thing that doctor hunts up here is pussy.”

“You sure the
cash’ll be there?” Kaiser asked.

“Cash and gold
coins,” J.C. said. “This guy’s been doing outlaw abortions
for years. He won’t do regular ones. Even comes out against them; says
it’s ‘killing the unborn.’ Pretty slick, huh? Who’d
ever think he was the man to see if your daughter was six months gone?

“He’s got a little place where the girls can stay, before and
after. Full-service. I heard he gets fifty large for each one. And not a dime
of that gets reported, so it can’t go into the banks. He’s
all-the-way dirty. When he comes back and finds his stash looted, he’s
not even going to call the cops. This one is perfect.”

“It’s a decent-sized place,” Gus said. “I wish we
had an idea where he kept it.”

“We’ve got all the
time we need,” J.C. told him. “And nobody’s around to hear
the noise.”

Gus went in first, around the
back. When his flashlight blinked from inside the house, Kaiser took hold of a
sledgehammer in one hand and a big pry bar in the other and walked over to the
front door. J.C. was right behind him, carrying a toolbox.

I knew
they must be smashing the place to pieces inside, but I only heard a couple of
thumps every so often.

I couldn’t leave the engine running; it
isn’t good for a motor to be idling for hours. I got out some cotton rags
and sprayed cleanser on them. Then I did the windshield, the headlights, and
the wipers, just in case. I’d already hooked up a toggle switch, so we
could run without taillights if we had to.

I never looked at my watch
once, but I knew it was hours passing just by how I felt inside.

They came out in a line. Gus was first, then Kaiser, then J.C. Gus and
Kaiser were carrying tools; all J.C. had was a little suitcase.

When
I saw them coming, I got out to open the doors for them. Gus turned around, so
he was facing Kaiser. He put his tools on the ground.

“Don’t get in the car, Eddie,” J.C. said.

Gus
took out a pistol. He pointed it at Kaiser’s stomach.

“There’s one behind you, too,” J.C. told him.

“Hey! What the fuck is—?”

“Open your
hands,” J.C. said. “Let everything drop.”

Kaiser did
what they told him. J.C. took out some plastic loops and tied Kaiser’s
hands behind his back.

“Walk,” J.C. said. He made a
movement with his head for me to come, too.

They marched him back into
the house. Inside, it was all wrecked. Holes in the walls, chunks of the wooden
floor pulled up, furniture all slashed, guts leaking out. There was a railroad
spike driven into the floor, deep.

They made Kaiser go over by the
spike. They told me to go get a kitchen chair. When I came back with it, they
made him sit down. Gus pulled Kaiser’s arms up, then dropped them over
the back of the chair.

“We don’t have a lot of time,”
J.C. said to Kaiser. “Where are they?”

“What are
you—?”

“Your partners,” J.C. said. “Where
are they? At the bottom of the private road? Back at our hideout?
Where?”

“You are stone motherfucking crazy,” Kaiser
said. He didn’t act scared at all.

“I am,” J.C. said,
like he was agreeing with him. “But this is just business. We need to
know how to get away from your partners. We need you to tell us.”

“This is all bullshit,” Kaiser said. “You just
don’t want to pay me my share. I fucking knew it.”

J.C. put
one hand under Kaiser’s chin, and lifted it up. He brought up his pistol,
and moved it slow in front of Kaiser’s eyes. Then he pushed the barrel
into the side of Kaiser’s neck.

J.C. held it there while Gus
wrapped more of the plastic cuffs around Kaiser’s ankles, doing it so
quickly I could hardly see his hands move. Then he made a loop out of the
plastic, so Kaiser’s ankles were chained to the spike.

Gus
stepped back a couple of feet. J.C. stepped away, too. Kaiser was staked out
solid; no way he could move from there.

“Show him,” J.C.
said to Gus.

Gus reached in his jacket and took out a fat sausage, like
you’d have for barbeque. He held it up for Kaiser to see, like he was
trying to sell it. Then he took out a coil of copper wire and cut off a piece
with a pair of pliers.

“You wrap it around like this,” Gus
said. “Couple of times, nice and tight, so it cuts off the blood
flow.” He showed Kaiser what he meant. The sausage bulged around where
the wire cut in. Three ugly little blisters, ready to pop.

“Depending on how tight you wrap it, takes as little as fifteen
minutes, to over an hour. But, eventually, the tip turns black. No blood
getting there, that’s what happens. Like the reverse of a hard-on. Or a
blowjob from a vampire.”

Gus smiled. His face stayed flabby, but
his little eyes were like shiny, hard black buttons.

“And then it
just falls off. But that’s okay—the wire’s so tight, you
don’t bleed to death. Like a tourniquet on a wound. After a while, the
next piece falls off. One piece at a time. When it’s all done, you look
just like a pussy. A pussy having her period.”

Kaiser’s
face got all wet and suety colored. He smelled ugly.

Gus took out a
pair of thin rubber gloves, like you see nurses wear in the clinic. He put them
on.

“When we’re done, we’re leaving you here for the
cops,” J.C. said to Kaiser. “It’s up to you. If you
don’t want to go back Inside without a cock, you’ll talk before it
falls off.”

Gus unbuckled Kaiser’s belt. I turned my face
away. I knew I was going to be sick. I wanted to be outside, behind the
wheel.

“At the first turnoff!” Kaiser said. His voice was
high and thin, like a sliver of glass. “Just past that stand of white
birch. They’re going to block the road with some big rocks.”

Gus stepped away, slipped around behind Kaiser’s chair. That seemed
to calm him down.

“How many?” J.C. asked him.

“Five. There wasn’t going to be any shooting. When the retard
gets out to see what’s wrong, they’re going to swarm the car. I
told them, you’re a professional. When you see all that hardware,
you’ll just give up the money.”

“So
Eddie’s the retard, huh?” J.C. said. “You think it
was a high-IQ move to smuggle that little cell phone in with you?”

“I … I didn’t have no choice, I swear. They’ve got
my sister. They said, if I didn’t—”

“If you
have a sister, you’ve been fucking her since she was ten. After your
father got done with her,” J.C. said. “Just thank fucking Odin or
whoever that I can’t stand a murder rap. When the cops get here, you tell
them any story you want. But if you mention any of our names, you’re a
dead man, no matter where they hide you. Understand?”

“Yes.
You don’t need to do anything to me. I wouldn’t—”

Gus stepped out from behind the chair and clamped his left hand on the side
of Kaiser’s face. His right hand flashed. There was a little thudding
sound. When Gus took his right hand away, an ice pick was sticking out of
Kaiser’s ear.

I didn’t take us back the way we came. I
drove the car through the woods. The Jeep was perfect for that. I went real
slow and careful, until I found a dirt track and I could make some speed. We
stayed with the track until it dead-ended.

After that, we walked.
Gus had a compass. We came out of the woods before first light, and I found a
car for us in a few minutes.

In the morning, J.C. divided the cash
three ways. “I’ll have to put the coins out on the wire,” he
said. “Could take a while, cost us a few points, but it’s the only
way to play it safe.”

Gus didn’t say anything to that.
Neither did I. J.C. wasn’t the kind of man to cheat his partners.

J.C. went to get himself another bottle of Coke. He drinks dozens of them
every day. Ice cold, right out of the bottle.

Gus was sharpening one of
his knives. He’s got a lot of them. Keeps them like razors.

When
J.C. got back, I asked him, “How did you know?”

“About the doctor? He’s a big man. With a big mouth. A pussy
hound, like I said. Man thinks with his cock, he’s not thinking straight,
Eddie. You never want to forget that.”

“Not about the
money,” I said. “About Kaiser. How did you know he was setting us
up?”

Gus laughed out his nose, the way he does when he thinks
somebody’s being stupid.

“I didn’t
know,” J.C. said. “It was just a bluff.”

“You
mean, you weren’t really going to let Gus … do that to
him?”

“Nah. What for?”

“To make him
tell—”

“That stuff never works,” Gus said.
“Not to get information, anyway. It’s a crapshoot. I’ve seen
guys take stuff make you toss your cookies just to hear about, and
never say a word. And I’ve seen them die from fear, too, before you even
get started. They go into shock, like—their hearts just stop.”

“There was always that chance,” J.C. said. “We knew he
had the phone, but we didn’t know if he ever used it. Anyway, you
can’t trust any of those fucking Nazis. A mutt like him, soon as he got
squeezed, he would have given us all up, anyway.”

J.C. took
another hit off his bottle of Coke. “Some tools, they’re only good
for one job. When you’re done, you throw them away, am I
right?”

“Sure, J.C.,” I said.

That was
about a year and a half ago. The last job we did before this one. And this one,
it will be the last job we do, ever.

“This one is our
retirement score,” J.C. said. “It all comes down to the odds.
Percentages. No matter how perfect you plan, there’s always the chance of
a wild card being dealt. The wheels can always come off. You do enough jobs,
sooner or later, you’re going to get popped.”

“You
ready to go legit, Eddie?” Gus asked me.

“Sure,” I
said.

Later, I wondered about it. Wondered about what I would be if I
wasn’t a getaway man anymore.

“Nobody’s going
home after this one,” J.C. had told us. “Nobody’s going back
to tie up any loose ends. Nobody’s going back to say goodbye. Everything
you want to take, you bring with you, all right?”

That was why
Vonda was with us. Vonda is J.C.’s woman. She’s been with him a
long time, I think.

Gus didn’t bring anybody with him. Me,
neither.

When I moved out, I didn’t just sneak away in the middle
of the night. That wouldn’t be good at all—it’s the kind of
thing people talk about. I told some of the guys who hung around the garage
that I was pulling up stakes, heading for California. Guys who like cars are
always talking about doing that. I’ll bet folks who spend a few winters
out here talk about it, too.

I didn’t have a phone in the house
where I lived, but there was one in the garage. A pay phone.

I figured
I didn’t have to do anything about that phone, but I did use it to cancel
my electricity. The propane man would just see I had moved when he came out
next.

One of the reasons J.C. picked this cabin is because of the barn.
It’s in sorry shape. Probably hasn’t been painted in fifty years.
There’s even big holes in the roof. But it’s got good electricity
running out to it, and there’s enough space for all the cars.

J.C. has a brand new Ford Explorer. A blue one, with a trailer hitch for
towing his boat.

“After this, I’m a retired businessman,
Eddie,” he said when he showed the whole rig to me. “This setup,
it’s perfect camouflage. Cops expect outlaws to move fast—only a
civilian would be driving a rig like this.”

Gus had a white
Cadillac.

My car wasn’t a new one like theirs. Mine was a 1955
Thunderbird. I hadn’t been planning to put it on the road so soon, but
when J.C. said this was the last job, and we couldn’t go home after it, I
hurried up and got my car ready to travel. The interior’s not finished,
and I haven’t painted it yet, but it runs beautiful.

The
Thunderbird was the only thing I wouldn’t have been able to leave behind.
I’ve had it for a long time. I still think about the way I got it,
sometimes, because nothing like that had ever happened to me before.

The old lady who had the car for sale told me it was out in her garage, and
I should go look at it for myself. It was jammed tight against the back wall,
covered with a dusty tarp. There wasn’t any overhead light in the garage,
but the sun came in the open door enough for me to see what I was doing.

I only got the tarp a little way up before I saw what it was. When I peeled
it off completely, I could see the Thunderbird had been sitting there a long
time. The tires were all flat, the rubber on the windshield wipers was so dry
it crumbled in my fingers, and there was orange peel on the rocker panels and
around the headlights. The chrome was all pitted, and the floor of the trunk
was rusted right through.

It wasn’t locked. The interior
wasn’t so bad; but the seats had some ripped seams, and the dashboard had
cracks in it.

The key was in the ignition, but I didn’t try to
start it up. It looked like nobody had in a real long time.

I put the
tarp back on and closed up the garage. When I got back to the front door, it
opened, like the lady had been waiting for me.

“Well, young
man?” she said.

“It’s a real nice car,
ma’am,” I told her. “But I couldn’t afford to buy
it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you know
what that car is, ma’am?”

“I most certainly do. It
was my husband’s car, Lord rest his soul, and it was his pride and joy.
He was a minister, my husband. He used to call that car his little sin, because
he loved it so. Kept it polished like a gemstone.

“When
we’d go for a ride in that car, we knew people would be talking. A
minister in a car like that, and a bright red one to boot! Certain as winter,
some old nasty-mouths would be saying that’s Satan’s own color. But
Hiram always said, his judge was the Lord, and he wouldn’t answer to
anybody else.”

“Yes, ma’am. But, I mean, do you know
what it’s worth?”

“Well, there was another man come
here a week or so ago, he allowed he could let me have a thousand dollars for
it.”

“That’s a Thunderbird, ma’am. A ’55.
I could tell by the taillights. And I’ll bet it’s all original,
too, just like it came from the factory.”

“Oh, it is
certainly not,” she said. “It is in terrible condition, I’m
sure. My husband’s been gone, it’ll be ten years this spring, and I
haven’t so much as washed it.”

“No, ma’am, I
mean, it’s not changed from when it was new. It has the same motor and
the same transmission and—”

“Well, that it surely
must have. Many’s the time the mechanic told Hiram he should get new
parts for it instead of fixing up the old ones. It would be much cheaper to put
a modern engine in, over the long run. But Hiram couldn’t bear to have
that. He just spent the money to keep her … he called that car
‘she,’ can you imagine? … running. Pride. Like I said,
pride.”

“Yes, ma’am. But what I’m saying
is—”

“If you’re going to be explaining things,
you better come on in and have a cup of coffee with me,” she said.

Her house smelled a little bit like lemons. She took me through the
living room. All of it was wood, dark and light, and it all shined like new.
There was a big Bible, lying open on one of those things a preacher stands
behind when he preaches.

The old lady told me to sit down in the
kitchen. She brought me a cup of chicory coffee, and took one herself.

“Now,” she said, “what is all this about my
husband’s car?”

“It’s worth a lot of
money,” I told her. “I don’t know how much, exactly, but more
than I could pay, that’s for sure.”

“More than the
thousand dollars that other young man offered me?” Her eyes were brown.
Bright and sharp, not filmy, the way some old people’s eyes get.

“A lot more, I think,” I told her. “There’s places
you could find out from.”

“What places?”

“Well, I don’t know, exactly, myself. There’s magazines
about old cars, for people that collect them, that would be one place. I
don’t sell cars; I only work on them.”

“But
you’re sure it’s worth more than a thousand dollars?”

“Ma’am, I absolutely know it is. There was this one guy, he had
a car like yours—not exactly like it, his was a ’57—and he
paid twenty-five thousand dollars for it. Of course, his was all in perfect
condition, but, still.…”

“Are you a Christian, young
man?”

“I … I guess so.”

“What do
you mean, you ‘guess so’?”

“Well, I’m not
nothing else. You know, like a Jew or a Arab or anything.”

“Are you a churchgoer?”

“No,
ma’am.”

“You mean you don’t go regular, or you
don’t go at all?”

“I don’t go at all,” I
said.

“Hmpf!” she said, kind of to herself. “I was
sure you’d turn out to be born-again.”

“I’m
sorry, ma’am,” I said. “Thank you for the coffee.”

I got up to go.

“Hold on a minute,” she said.
“Would you pay a thousand dollars for my husband’s car?”

“Ma’am, I already told you—”

“And
would you want it to be driving it yourself, or to sell it?”

“If I had a car like that, I wouldn’t ever sell it,” I
said.

“All right. Let me go and get the papers.”

I was still trying to figure out what was going on, when the old lady
came back.

“Here’s everything,” she said, handing
me a shoebox. “My husband kept it all in the same place.”

“Ma’am, I don’t understand.”

“My
husband was taken by cancer, young man. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds.
His spirit was strong right to the end, and he died right here, in his own
home.

“We had a lot of time to talk, then. A long twilight before
the night came. I got to understand my husband better in that time than in the
fifty-four years we were man and wife.

“And do you know what he
said about that car of his? He said, ‘Ruth Ann, I want you to sell my
little jewel,’ … that’s what he called it, sometimes
… ‘I want you to sell my little jewel to someone who is going to
love her. Someone who will drive her around and show her off. Have pride in
her. Not some merchant, now. And not somebody who is going to make a hot rod
out of her, either. That’s what she deserves.’

“Well,
I said to him, ‘Hiram, how in the world am I going to read a man’s
mind? You know how people will dissemble when they want something.’

“And he said, ‘I’ve been praying over that one for some
time. And the Lord sent me the answer. Ruth Ann, that little car is worth a lot
of money. And that shall be the test. I want you to put my little jewel up for
sale, but don’t you put a price on her. And I want you to sell her to the
first person who doesn’t try and cheat you.’

“Well, I
did solemnly promise Hiram, young man. But I couldn’t bring myself to
sell his car for a long time. I was frightened that I wouldn’t be able to
tell when someone was trying to cheat me—I’m not sharp in those
ways.

“So I did what my husband did. I prayed on it. I
didn’t get a direct answer, but I was told that, when the right person
came along, I could count on the Lord to alert me.

“And
that’s what happened. Every single man who has come to my house and taken
a look in that garage has tried to buy my husband’s car. Some of them
asked me what I wanted for it, but I always said I wasn’t sure. Not one
single person ever so much as hinted to me that my husband’s car was
worth a lot of money.

“Then you come along and you say the truth.
So I know you’re saying the truth when you tell me you will drive my
husband’s car and keep it like it should be. Now, do you have a thousand
dollars?”

“Not with me, ma’am. But I do have it. In
fact, I have almost seven thousand dollars put aside.”

“Never you mind that,” she said. “You come back with the
thousand dollars, and you take Hiram’s car away with you.”

Her bright brown eyes were a little damp, but she didn’t cry.

I was jealous of Hiram, then.

The Thunderbird’s still in
primer, waiting. After I stripped the old, dull paint, I had figured on doing
it in the original color—“Torch Red,” it said in the papers
that came with it—but, when I thought about my dream, the one about the
car coming for me, I decided to make it all black.

It’s the
perfect car for my dream. It only has room for two people. They would even
share the same seat; it’s just a bench, not buckets.

Whenever I
drive this car, I think about what it means to be a getaway man. Not just for a
job, for always.

When this job is done, I guess I’ll find
out.

For this last job, we’ve got a secret weapon.
That’s what J.C. calls him.

His name is Monty. I never seen
him, myself. Everything I know about him, I know from J.C. and Gus.

The
job is an armored car. It makes the run from the Indian casino every Saturday
night. At four o’clock, so, Sunday morning, really. I never heard of an
armored car that picks up at night, but that’s the way the Indians wanted
it, is what Monty told J.C.

J.C. said the Indians have all the power
around here. The casino Indians, he means, not the ones who live on the
reservation. Those ones don’t have anything.

They keep the money
in a vault with big thick walls. In between the vault and the outside is
bullet-proof glass. Behind the glass, they have men with machine guns.

Nobody could ever get in there, J.C. says. But, sooner or later, the
money’s got to come out.

The way they do it is very slick. Every
afternoon, an armored car pulls up to the casino. It goes around back where
nobody can see, inside a special fence with doors in it, and another set of
doors behind that one. Like the sally port the bus that brings you into prison
goes through. After a while, the fence opens, and it comes back out. If you
follow it, you see it go right to the bank.

The only thing is,
there’s nothing in those cars. They’re empty. A decoy. The only
time the money actually comes out of there is that night run, once a week.

J.C. knows this from Monty. And Monty knows because he’s the man who
drives the armored car. An inside man, like Rodney and Luther had a long time
ago. Only this time, it was different—everybody was a professional.

Monty doesn’t drive the special night run every week. He told J.C.
you never know when it’s going to be your turn. There’s a list of
guys who they let make that run, and Monty’s on it. He has to be by his
phone every Saturday at midnight. They always call him, even if he’s not
picked to go that night.

The armored car company is real strict,
Monty says. If you don’t answer your phone even one time when they call,
you get taken off that special list. There better not be a busy signal when
they call, either. You’re not allowed to give them a cell phone number;
it has to be your home phone. And if they catch you forwarding the calls, you
get fired.

Monty says you get paid for Saturdays whether you work or
not, just for being ready. Real good money. And if they do pick you, you get a
nice bonus. Monty’s been there a long time, to get that high up on the
list.

J.C. told me I couldn’t steal a car for this job. What
we’re going to use, it has to be fixed up special. If you steal a car,
you have to use it right away. The longer you keep it, the better the chance of
getting spotted, even if you switch plates. Anyway, the car we need for this
job, you wouldn’t find one like it just lying around.

J.C.
bought the car a few months ago. He always fronts the money for things we need
on a job. That’s part of the planner’s piece, he says, the
financing.

I’ve been working on the car J.C. bought for a few
weeks now. “There’s no hurry,” he told me. “It’s
like a roulette wheel. If you wait long enough, every number’s going to
come up. And, if you keep waiting, that same number’s going to
come up again. The trick is not to go bust while you’re waiting,
see?”

“I think so.”

“That armored
car’s like the wheel, Eddie. And every time they give the job to Monty,
that’s our lucky number coming up, okay? We don’t want to jump the
gun. If they call Monty out one week, and we’re not ready, we just wait.
They’ll call him again.”

It’s
nice up here. Peaceful. Sometimes J.C.’s around, sometimes he’s
not. When he goes away, Gus goes with him, mostly.

I never leave.
Neither does Vonda.

She’s … I don’t know the right
word for it. Not pretty like Bonnie was. I mean, she is pretty, but
not the same way. Vonda has long black hair and eyes the same color as
turquoise. She’s real well built, and she’s got long legs even
though she’s not tall. Her skin looks like she just took a shower, and
her mouth looks like it was just slapped.

I don’t think
Vonda’s much older than me, but she knows a lot more. About all kinds of
things. Vonda’s smart. The only thing I know more about than her is
cars.

So I like it when she comes out to where I’m working.
Because she always asks me questions, and I know the answers for her.

Vonda found out about my movies by accident. Sometimes, when J.C. and
Gus are watching TV at night—they like sports, mostly—I go out to
the barn and plug in my VCR, and watch one of my movies. I guess I could just
go in my room, but the cabin is kind of small, and the noise would come
in.

I’ve got part of the barn all fixed up for when I watch my
movies. I found this huge old armchair behind the cabin. It was all rotten from
being left out in the weather, but I tore everything off, right down to the
frame, and then I laid some pieces of carpet I found all over it. After I put
enough layers on and wrapped it down tight with duct tape, it was real
comfortable. You could even turn sideways in it, and put your feet over one of
the arms, like a little couch. I made a footrest and a table out of some wooden
crates, and I was all set.

We had plenty of long extension cords, but I
didn’t need any light in that part of the barn. I always watch my movies
in the dark.

The way I have it set up, the VCR is in a far corner of
the barn, and my couch and stuff are set up to the side. So there’s a
wall to my right, and I can still see if anybody comes in out of my left
eye.

At least I thought I could. But, that night, first thing I
realized was Vonda, whispering in my ear.

“What are you watching,
Eddie?” she said.

I guess I jumped a little—I never saw her
come into the barn. “Nothing,” I said.

I pushed the button,
and the movie stopped running.

Vonda came around the side of my couch.
She was looking down at me. It was dark, but I could see her shape pretty
good.

“I’ll bet I know what you’re watching,”
she said.

I didn’t say anything.

“Don’t be
embarrassed, Eddie. All men like to watch those movies. It’s no big deal.
Some of them can be pretty hot, too.”

It took a second, but then
I understood what she was talking about. “No,” I told her. “I
wasn’t watching one of those.…”

“Well, what
were you watching, then?”

“Just a
movie.”

Vonda sat down. On the arm of the couch, with only half
her bottom. She kept one foot on the floor.

“You wouldn’t
tell me a story, would you, Eddie?”

“I wouldn’t
… oh, you mean a lie, right? No, I’m not lying. It’s just a
regular movie.”

“Where I come from, if somebody challenges
you, you’ve got to show them your stuff. Do you know what I
mean?”

“I guess I do. Like in a race, right?”

“Well, that wasn’t what I was thinking of, but it’ll do.
So. Are you ready to show me?”

“Show you?”

“Show me the movie, Eddie. So I can see if it’s what I
think it is.”

It was Moonshine Highway, one of my
most special favorites. It takes place a long time ago, when people were
better, I think. The guy in the video store had been right.

When
Vonda had come in, the movie was near the end, where the guy in the Chevy goes
after the guy in the Lincoln and they have their final duel.

I thought,
as soon as she saw it wasn’t porno I was watching, Vonda would go away.
But she stayed perched right on the arm of the couch, watching until it was
over.

“I’m sorry, Eddie,” she said. “I never
should have doubted you. I know you’re not the kind of man who would lie
to a woman.”

“That’s okay,” I said.

“Well, it’s not okay. I make that mistake, sometimes.
Thinking all men are alike. But that’s my mistake, and I
shouldn’t put it on you.”

“It’s all right,
Vonda. I don’t mind.”

She looked over at where my carton of
tapes was next to the VCR. “Are these all just regular movies,
too?” she asked me.

After that, Vonda came
out to the garage at night a lot. Not real late, and never for very long. First
I thought she was trying to catch me watching one of those movies she thought I
was watching that first time, but that wasn’t it.

“I’m just trying to figure out what you like, Eddie,” she
said.

“Well.…”

“Don’t tell me! I
think I know. It’s cars, right? I mean, that would make sense, you being
an expert and all.”

Nobody had ever called me that exact word
before. I felt the back of my neck burn, and I was glad it was dark in the
barn. But I had to tell her the truth.

“It’s not …
the movies aren’t about cars,” I told her. “They’re
about driving.”

A couple of days later,
Vonda asked me if I knew if there was any more of that old carpet I put on the
couch. I said there was rolls and rolls of it up in the loft, but that ladder
was pretty rotten and you had to be careful going up there.

“Can you go up and throw down a roll for me?” she said.
“And is it okay if I set up in that corner way over there? I won’t
be in your way.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about,
but I went up in the loft and pushed a couple of rolls of carpet over the
edge.

Vonda worked hard for the next few days. She cut pieces off the
carpet, then she hung them over a line and beat them half to death with an
aluminum baseball bat Gus always keeps in his car. She washed down a section of
the barn floor, then she scrubbed it with a brush. When she was done, it
smelled like pine over there.

After the carpet was laid down over the
section she cleaned, it looked pretty good. Vonda came out with one of those
big radios, the kind that also plays tapes, or CDs, and has speakers on the
sides. She was wearing stretchy black pants and a white sweatshirt. She had
white sneakers on her feet, a white band around her head, and a thick pair of
purple socks that went up real high over the outside of her pants.

She
turned on the radio. A lady’s voice said they were going to work on
quads. Then the lady’s voice said to do things, and Vonda did them.
Different exercises. For each one, the lady’s voice would count while
Vonda did them.

It went on for about an hour. Every time I looked up
from what I was doing, it seemed like Vonda was doing some other exercise.

“Now we’re going to step,” the lady’s voice
said.

Vonda went over and pushed a button and the voice stopped. She
came over to where I was working.

“Eddie, I need a step
platform,” she said. “Do you think you could make me
one?”

“I don’t know what one is,” I told
her.

Once Vonda showed me what she meant, it only took a few minutes to
make one. She carried it back over to where her carpet was, pushed a button,
and the lady’s voice started up again.

Vonda stepped up, then she
stepped down. Over and over. Then she switched legs. After a while, she started
doing things with her arms, too.

I went back under the car.

When the lady’s voice stopped, Vonda walked over to where I was
working. She had a big pink towel wrapped around her shoulders. Her face was
all dewy from the exercise, but she didn’t smell stale, the way guys in
prison did when they finished lifting weights or playing basketball.

“That is hard work,” she said.

“I
guess.”

“Men are always like that,” she said.
“It doesn’t look hard, does it? Just stretching and
jumping around. But it is. And it gets the job done.” She turned
sideways, stood on the toes of one leg, and pointed at the back of her thigh.
“Feel that,” she said.

I touched it, real light.

“It’s real strong,” I told her.

“Squeeze it,” she said. “Come on.”

I did what she said. I hadn’t been lying before—her thigh was
as hard as a piece of wood.

“See what I mean?” she
said.

“Yeah.”

“I do aerobics every other day,
religiously. And I do my stretches every day. I drink eight big
glasses of water every day, too.”

“How come?”

“How come I … ? Oh, the water? It flushes your system. Keeps
it clean. It’s very important for good skin.”

“Oh.”

“Eddie,” she said, with her hands on
her hips, “why do you keep a car tuned?”

“So it runs
good.”

“It’s the same thing with a person’s
body. You have to keep it tuned.”

“I guess that’s
so.”

“You wouldn’t want your car to let you down,
would you?”

“No. Of course not.”

“That’s because you rely on it, Eddie. It’s something you
need to get what you want. That’s the way I am about my body,
see?”

“Like a boxer?”

“Yes!
That’s exactly it, Eddie. Just like a fighter.”

Sometimes, when Vonda was exercising, J.C. would come out and talk to
her. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Not that I would ever try and
listen.

Sometimes, she’d stop and go off with him. Sometimes
she wouldn’t.

J.C. came out to talk to me, too. About what we
needed for the car, mostly. But he’d talk about the job, too, a little
bit.

When J.C. would ask me questions, it was easy. When he stopped
talking, like he expected me to ask him a question, it was hard.
I’m never sure about things like that.

One time, Gus came out to
the barn. He had some work to do, on the stuff he makes.

There was
plenty of room out there. Gus put together a workbench out of sawhorses and
some planks, but, when he tried it, he said it wasn’t bright enough for
what he had to do. So I took a couple of the trouble lights you use for working
under the hood and hung them over a beam with extension cords. They dropped
right down over what he was doing, and he said they worked fine.

When
Gus was done, he walked past where Vonda was working out. I couldn’t hear
what he said to her, but I heard her say, “Get the fuck away from
me.”

When Vonda was done with her workout, she always drank a
big bottle of water. Sometimes, she would come over and ask me if I wanted a
drink. I never did.

Vonda was always asking me about my movies.
After that first time I had told her, I thought maybe she’d think it was,
I don’t know, immature of me, or something. But she was real interested.
And it was nice to have someone to talk to while I was doing things to the
car.

She asked me when it started. With my movies.

I told her,
when I was a kid. I saw this one movie. Not at the movies; it was a
real movie, but it was on the television.

I had always wanted to see it
again, but I never did—until Daphne told me all about video stores.

The Driver, it was called. I didn’t know who was in it, but
the star, the guy they called “The Driver,” he was real handsome.
Always very calm and cool, no matter what was going on.

When I told her
about it, Vonda asked me if I had it on videotape. When I said I did, nothing
would do but that she had to see it for herself. But I was … I
don’t know, kind of edgy about it.

So Vonda begged me. Not like
real begging, just playing around. “Please, please,
please!” she said, leaning down to where I was working. I
thought maybe she was making fun of me, but I said okay. Only I didn’t
want to watch my movies in front of J.C. and Gus. I never did that. I
didn’t know what they would think.

She said that was all right.
“We’ll get our chance, Eddie,” is what she said.
“There’s no rush.”

Finally, J.C. and Gus had to go
somewhere for a few days, to make sure about stuff for the job. They were
always doing that.

The first night they were gone, Vonda watched the
movie with me. I’ve been to movies with girls enough times, but Vonda was
the first one who never said a word all the while it was on. Not one word; like
the movie was important to her, and she didn’t want to miss any of
it.

And the minute it was over, she started asking me all kinds of
questions about it.

Nobody ever did that before, either.

So I
told her, the driver in the movie, he was supposed to be a getaway man, but he
really didn’t do it right. Vonda asked me, what did I mean? Asked me
serious. So I explained. The man in the movie, when he had to do a job,
he’d steal a car for it. That part was okay. But he never checked the car
out.

You have to do that. You have to make sure the tires are good.
Even the tire pressures are real important. The brakes, the shocks.
You can be the best driver in the world, but if the suspension’s no good,
you can’t make the car do what it’s supposed to. You can’t
just grab something off the street and use it on a job right away.

Vonda never knew any of that. Her eyes got real big when I explained it to
her. They had little black glints in the turquoise, like metalflake chips in
paint.

It made me feel good, that she could see there was a lot more to
my job than just driving for a few minutes each time.

So I told her
other stuff, too. The chases, they went on too long. In the movie, I mean. It
was like the driver had a plan that all the cop cars behind him were going to
crash, and then they’d just leave him alone while he rode off.
That’s plain silly. It never happens like that.

The driver in the
movie looked cool behind the wheel, but you could see he didn’t really
know how to do it—he was just acting.

Vonda told me the man who
played the driver was famous. He was once married to some girl who was so
beautiful she was in magazines. Vonda had a lot of those magazines. I thought
they were J.C.’s, when I first saw them around the cabin. Maybe they
were, even. But Vonda was always reading them.

The next morning,
Vonda cooked me breakfast. She always cooks, but she never eats anything in the
morning. I thought, with J.C. and Gus gone, she wouldn’t bother. But she
made me a real nice omelette, with all kinds of stuff in it.

I went
out to work on the cars we were going to use for the job. But I got distracted
by the way the sun came in through a crack in the beams.

The sunlight
fell right across my Thunderbird, and I felt bad, like I was not taking care of
it. I had a set of headers for it that I was pretty sure would fit, but
I’d never gotten around to trying them. I figured this was a good day to
do it.

“Did you miss me?”

It was Vonda, standing behind me. Real close.

I looked at my watch.
It was after three o’clock. I guess Vonda hadn’t come out to
exercise that day, like she usually did.

“I was working on the
headers,” I said. “I almost got it done. They’re going to
work perfect.”

“Is this your car, Eddie?”

“Sure,” I said.

“For real?”

“What do you mean, Vonda?”

“I mean, do you
own it? Or did you just steal it?”

“It’s
mine,” I said. Just for a second, I thought about the preacher and the
sin of pride. I thought I knew how he felt. “I bought it, and I’m
fixing it up myself.”

“It’s so cool!” Vonda
said. “I think I saw one like it, once. In the movies.”

“It’s an original Thunderbird,” I told her. “A
nineteen fifty-five.”

“That’s as old as J.C.,”
she laughed. “Does it still run good?”

“It runs
great,” I said. “And when I get these headers all tightened down,
it’s going to run even better.”

“Let’s take it
for a ride!”

“You know I can’t do that, Vonda,”
I told her. “Nobody’s supposed to see any of the cars we’ve
got back here.”

“This cabin’s on thirty acres, Eddie.
We wouldn’t have to go off the property. Just a little ride, so I can see
what it’s like. Come on.”

“Somebody might still
see.”

“From where? The road’s got to be a mile away.
And the woods are so thick around us. Just around the back, on the dirt path.
We wouldn’t have to go fast or anything. Please!”

We went so slow a fast runner could have caught us. I was a little
worried about the undercarriage, but the ground was almost as smooth as a
road.

“It’s such a beautiful afternoon,” she said.
“Too bad your car’s not a convertible.”

“It
is,” I said. “I mean, I don’t have the convertible part of
it, but the top, this one, it comes off.”

“Oh, do it! Come
on.”

“It doesn’t just go back, the way a convertible
does. You have to lift it off. Like with a hoist.”

“But you
could do it, if you wanted?”

“It’s nothing
special I’d be doing,” I said, so she wouldn’t think I was
blowing myself up. “It’s supposed to do that. It’s
called a removable hardtop. All of them had it.”

“So we
could do it, someday, right?”

“I guess,” I said. But
I didn’t really see how.

When J.C. and Gus got back, Vonda
said, “You boys have a good time?”

“We
weren’t there to have a good time,” J.C. said. “After this
job, we’ve got the rest of our lives to do that.”

“Did you bring me anything?” Vonda asked.

“We’ve got to go again on Friday,” J.C. said. “Tell
me what you want, I’ll bring it back for you.”

Vonda turned
her back on him and walked off.

J.C. looked at me and shrugged his
shoulders.

“Do you like her?” Vonda
asked me, the day after J.C. and Gus took off.

“It’s
just a picture in a magazine,” I said. “I don’t know
her.”

“I don’t mean her personality, Eddie.
Isn’t she pretty?”

“She’s not as pretty as you,
Vonda,” I said. As soon as I said that, my face got hot, and I felt
stupid.

“How can you say that?” Vonda asked me.

“I … don’t know.”

“Look at the
picture, Eddie. Now look at me. What’s the difference?”

“She’s a blonde, and—”

“And she
doesn’t have any clothes on. So how could you say I’d be as pretty
as her?”

“I could just tell,” I said.

Vonda’s eyes got smaller for a second. Then she just reached down to
her waist and hauled her sweater up over her head.

“Watch!”
she said.

She took a deep, deep breath, and made her back curve.
Standing just like the girl in the picture. Her boobs stuck way out, like they
were going to pop loose from her bra.

“Now you can
tell,” she said.

For this job, there’s two cars I have
to get ready. One isn’t a car, really; it’s a truck. Not a
pickup—this one has the back all closed up, like those yellow ones you
can rent if you want to move your stuff. But I didn’t have to do much of
anything to it, really. Just check it over, make sure everything’s
working right.

The other car, the one J.C. bought, that’s
special. It’s a big black Cadillac. Kind of an old one, but that’s
right for what its job is. It’s a hearse. Not the open kind that carries
the flowers in the back; this is the one for the coffins.

I put a lot
of time in on that big hearse. We need it for the way it looks and all. But if
things go wrong, it will have to be our getaway car, too.

Every time J.C. and Gus went away, Vonda would watch
movies with me.

One night, she didn’t come.

The next
morning, she didn’t make me breakfast, either.

I went out to the
barn to work on the hearse.

She came out to do her workout. When she
was finished, she came over to where I was.

“Did you miss
me?” she said.

“I figured you wanted to watch the TV. I
mean, in the cabin, not the movies.”

“You didn’t
figure, maybe I was sick?”

“No, Vonda. I
mean.…”

“You know I love to watch your movies with
you, Eddie. If I don’t come to be with you, there’s a good reason.
There’s always a good reason. Okay?”

It made me feel
all different ways when she said that. Like I was driving real fast, right at a
fork in the road, and I didn’t have a plan. But I just said
“Okay” back, like she wanted me to.

J.C. came back from his trip alone. I didn’t know
where Gus was. J.C. asked me, could I have everything ready three weeks from
Saturday? I told him I guessed so, but I would rather have more time, if I
could.

I didn’t look at him when I said that. I was afraid he
would see it on my face. That once we did the job, we’d split up, and
I’d never see Vonda again.

I think that’s when he started
hitting her. I heard him late that night. Right through the wall. “You
stupid bitch,” then the slap. I didn’t know what to do.

I
closed my eyes and tried to think about something else.

He was gone the
next morning. I was working on the hearse when Vonda came out.

“You heard?” she said.

“Huh?” I said.
That’s what I always say when I don’t know what to say.

“I know you heard, Eddie. It’s okay. J.C.’s got a bad
temper, you know. It doesn’t mean anything.”

I kept my head
down. In prison, one of the things J.C. was famous for was never losing his
temper. Guys called him an iceman—it was high respect.

“It
was my fault, Eddie,” Vonda said. “J.C. told me I shouldn’t
spend all day sitting around on my fat ass, and I mouthed off to
him.”

“You don’t.…”

“Don’t what, Eddie?”

“You don’t sit
around all day. You always make breakfast, and you keep the house all nice and
you—”

She bit her lower lip and looked sad. “Oh, now
I’m disappointed.”

“Why, Vonda? What did I
say?”

“It’s what you didn’t say,
dopey. What you were supposed to say is, ‘You don’t have a
fat ass, Vonda. Yours is just perfect.’ You think I do all those workouts
to be fat?”

“I didn’t mean to—”

“Come on, Eddie. Tell me the truth. You do think I have a
fat ass, don’t you?” she said.

“I
never—”

“Tell me the truth!” she said, like she
was mad. She bent all the way over, so she was touching her toes. She was
wearing little white shorts, and they rode up on her. She looked at me from
upside down, her long black hair trailing down to the ground.
“Well?”

“No, you’re not fat, Vonda.
You’re … perfect, is what you are. I swear.”

She
straightened up, came over to where I was working on the axle. She kissed me.
On the cheek. “You’re so sweet, Eddie. I feel much better
now,” she said.

I knew things had gone wrong, then. But I
couldn’t stop myself from watching her as she walked away.

We
watched some of my movies that night. I showed Vonda where they went off the
track. Where they stopped being real.

J.C. came back the next
morning. Vonda was real nice to him, fetching him his ice-cold Cokes, and
rubbing the back of his neck.

J.C. had a big map spread out all over
the kitchen table. He was sitting there, smoking. You could see he was thinking
deep. Making plans. Every once in a while, he’d draw something on the
map.

Vonda came over and tried to sit on his lap. “I’m
working,” he said.

“Oh come on,” Vonda said.

He pushed her away and said something mean to her.

I went out to
the barn that night. I was going to fix up the little drapes that cover the
back window of the hearse so they stayed closed, but I ended up watching one of
my movies instead.

Vonda never came, not even for a minute.

Late that night, J.C.’s voice came right through the wall.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I heard him
say.

I couldn’t hear what Vonda said back, but I could hear the
hitting.

In the morning, he was gone again. Gus still hadn’t come
back.

We were watching one of the movies, when Vonda started to cry.
I asked her what was the matter—it wasn’t a sad movie.

She wouldn’t tell me. I kept after her. Finally, she said that J.C.
was really hurting her. She was terrified of him.

I didn’t know
what to say. I wasn’t thinking it was okay to slap her around or anything
like that, but I couldn’t see why she would be so scared, all of a
sudden. She’d been with J.C. a long time, I knew. And, in the daytime, it
always seemed like they had made up.

That’s when she showed me.
The little round scar. She took off her shorts to show me, like it was the only
way I would have believed her. I would have believed her, no matter what she
said.

Way high up on the inside of her leg, right next to her …
where it was so soft and tender.

I got sick thinking of the vicious red
tip of J.C.’s cigarette, making her hurt.

I kissed where the scar
was. She put her hands in my hair and pulled my head up. Then she kissed me,
hard.

The next night, she told me the scar was old. J.C. had done it
a long time ago. But he always told her he’d do it again if she ever
crossed him. The next time, it would be one of her nipples, he told
her.

“Right here,” she said.

I closed my eyes. I
looked down, so she wouldn’t see what I was doing. But she must have
figured it out.

“Look!” she said. “J.C. says it
wouldn’t be so bad, since they’re nothing but fakes.”

“Fakes?”

“My boobs,” she said, so soft I
almost didn’t hear her. “You know what implants are, don’t
you, Eddie?”

“I guess I do.”

“I
didn’t do that just to make them bigger,” she said. “When I
was a kid, the people who raised me never gave me enough food. Some days, all I
got was laundry starch and water. It makes your belly swell up, like
you’re pregnant, so you don’t get hungry. But it’s not real
food. That’s no nutrition.

“That’s what I had.
Malnutrition. It’s like when you almost starve to death. It sucks all the
fat out of your body. Didn’t you ever see pictures of kids like that on
TV?”

“Like in Africa?”

“Just like that.
Only, people here get it, too. Some people, anyway.”

“Why
didn’t they—?”

“I got taken away from those
people. And they put me in a different place. It wasn’t so great, but
there was plenty of food.

“And when I got bigger … older,
I mean, my boobs never grew. They were just these sad little droopy lumps on my
chest. As soon as I could save the money, I went and got the implants.

“You know what the doctor told me, Eddie? He said, now I look just
like I should have looked, if I hadn’t had that malnutrition
when I was a kid. I could have gone a lot bigger, like some of the girls do,
but I wanted to look natural.”

“They look perfect,
Vonda,” I said. “Nobody could tell in a million years.” It
was the truth.

“They don’t look perfect to J.C.,” she
said. “He’s always saying I’m a freak.”

“But you look—”

“There’s a little
packet in there,” she said. “They put it right over the muscle.
J.C. says it feels like a sac of water. He doesn’t like to touch me
there.”

“I don’t.…”

“Eddie, tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Do they feel like that to you? Like sacs of water?”

“Vonda.…”

“Just tell me,”
she said. She was crying.

I reached over to her. Even with my eyes
closed, my hand went right to where she wanted.

“They feel
perfect,” I told her.

“You swear?”

“No
one could ever tell,” I said.

That wasn’t true, but I guess
I fooled her, because she stopped crying.

“I hate him,”
she told me, the next morning.

It felt strange to talk about J.C. in
the cabin. The cabin was like J.C.’s place. The barn, that was my
place.

“Why don’t you leave?” I asked her. “Go
someplace else. Plenty of guys would be—”

“I’d
be too afraid,” she said. “You know J.C. How … dedicated he
gets to things. He’d find me, no matter where I went. I don’t have
any money. I’d have to go back to dancing. And you can’t do that
with a bag over your head. He has pictures of me. Somebody would spot me for
him.”

“This job … the one we’re going to do
… there’ll be a lot of money, Vonda,” I told her.
“With your share, you could—”

“My
share?” she laughed at me. Only it wasn’t funny, the way
she did it. “I never get a share, Eddie. I only get what J.C.
gives me. When he wants to. You understand? It’s like he’s
got a chain around my ankle.”

“We don’t have to
t.c.b. on the spot,” J.C. said to Gus. “He’s got no moves. He
doesn’t know where we’re going when it’s done, and he
doesn’t know about this place at all. He’s got to lay up at
wherever he runs to, and wait for us to contact him at the number so he can
pick up his share.”

“It’s fucking amazing amateurs
live as long as they do,” Gus said, shaking his head.

“Are you going to take all your tapes along when you go,
Eddie?” Vonda asked me a couple of nights later, when J.C. and Gus were
gone again.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ve got a lot
of them, maybe, but they don’t take up much room.”

“But your car’s so little.”

“The
trunk’s bigger than it looks. And I can put a lot of stuff next to me in
front, too.”

“That’s not such a good idea,”
Vonda said.

“Why not?”

“Sometimes, you
can’t have everything you want. You have to pick and choose. Let’s
play a game.”

“What game?”

“If you
could only take one movie, just one, which one would it be?”

I
didn’t even have to think about it. I went and got my copy of
Vanishing Point, and plugged it into the VCR.

Vonda watched
the whole thing with me. Without saying a word, like always. Only this time,
she held my hand.

When it was over, she said, “Why that one,
Eddie? Why is that one your favorite of all?”

I tried to tell
her, but I think I got all confused. Vanishing Point is about a
driver. A great driver, driving against people trying to catch him. All over
the country. He’s not a robber or anything. Just a driver. And everybody
knows he’s running, because there’s a guy on the radio who’s
on his side. So the driver can listen to the radio himself, and the guy who
likes him can tell him what’s going on. The cops are trying to get him,
but a lot of other people are pulling for him, even regular ones.

“It’s a perfect movie,” I said to Vonda. What I meant
was, it’s not complicated, like Moonshine Highway. It’s
just the driver, driving forever.

“But he kills himself,
Eddie,” Vonda said, all upset. “At the end, he sees that roadblock,
and he’s speeding right for it. And he’s smiling. He knows
what’s going to happen, and he’s glad.”

“No!” I said. As soon as I heard how my voice sounded, I
apologized to Vonda. “I didn’t mean to yell,” I told her.
“But you don’t understand. He’s not smiling because
he’s going to die. He’s smiling because he thinks he’s going
to make it.”

“But there was no room,” she said.
“How could he possibly—?”

“He was a great
driver,” I said. “He had a chance.”

Vonda was real
quiet for a minute. Like she was thinking over what I said.

“That’s what I want,” she said. “A chance. A real
chance.”

“You know what’s wrong with that
movie?” Vonda said to me in the morning. “He was all alone. He
should have had a girl with him; then it would be
perfect.”

I’d never thought about that.

“He might have made it, then,” Vonda said.

She reached
over and held my hand.

Every time J.C. came back with Gus, they
would go over the job again. J.C. is real careful. That’s why we never
got caught, I know.

“You want to hear the whole plan,
Eddie?” J.C. asked me one day.

“Sure,” I said.

When J.C. and Gus explained it to me, I was real impressed. It was so good
a plan, the cops would never even figure out what happened.

The reason
they told me the whole plan was, this time, I had to do more than drive. I had
another job. Scouting, J.C. called it.

“You want a woman to
fall in love with you, you have to know what to do,” Vonda told me.
“You have to have some techniques.”

“What do you
mean?”

“You have girlfriends, right, Eddie?”

“Well, I’ve had girlfriends. I mean, you know, girls
who.…”

“Sure. Did any of them really love
you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I
don’t guess they did.”

“You’re the nicest guy I
ever met, Eddie,” she said. “But if you want a girl to fall deep in
love with you, that’s not enough.”

“What do you
mean?”

“There’s little … tricks. Ways to act.
I’ll tell you one,” she said, in that secret voice she has,
sometimes. “You want to get a girl to treat you special, take her
shopping for shoes.”

“Huh?”

“Take her
to the fanciest shoe store in town; tell her to pick out whatever she wants. I
promise you, she’ll wet her panties right there in the store.”

“Did anyone ever—?”

“J.C. did, once,”
she said, like she knew what I was going to ask her. “But he hasn’t
in a long time. He’s not what I need, now.”

I wondered what
would have happened if I had taken Bonnie shopping for shoes. If I hadn’t
gotten lost with Daphne.

“What do you need,
Vonda?” I asked her.

Her eyes held me. I watched them turn a
darker green. “I need a getaway man, Eddie,” she said.

“Take her with you,” J.C. told me.

“Vonda?”

“You see any other broads around here? A
cop spots you driving around, doing nothing, he could decide he wants to stick
his nose in. But he sees you with a woman, he’ll think you’re
looking for a good spot to pull over and get some.”

“If
it’s okay with Vonda.…”

“It’ll be okay
with her,” J.C. said.

“It’s the only place I can
get what I need,” Gus said to J.C. “Ordnance like that, it
doesn’t fall off a truck. And I’m not dealing with some fucking
clerk off the base. These are people I did business with before.”

“We’ll be back in a few days,” J.C. said to Vonda.
“Keep your eye on Eddie.”

He gave her a hard smack on the
bottom. I could see Vonda’s face over his shoulder; she didn’t like
it.

The days got filled, then. When I wasn’t doing my
scouting, I was working on the cars. The truck and the hearse, I mean. Once in
a while, on my Thunderbird.

Vonda was with me almost all the time.
Telling me about how to be with girls. Or watching movies with me.

One
time, she even cleaned the Thunderbird. Real close cleaning, like it was a pot
she was scrubbing.

It took her a few hours, working hard. “That
was my workout for today,” she said.

I told her the Thunderbird
looked new inside.

“See,” she said, “I’m good
for some things.”

“Vonda,
you’re—”

She put two fingers on my lips to keep me
quiet. Then she ran off, back to the cabin.

That night, she asked me
to bring my VCR into the cabin, so we could watch the movies there.

I liked it better in the barn, but she looked like it would mean a lot to
her, and I didn’t want to disappoint her.

When the movie was
over, she went into the bathroom. When she came out, all she had on were a pair
of her high heels. Red ones.

I couldn’t say anything.

“Eddie,” she said, real soft. “Remember when I showed you
my scar? From the cigarette? Remember when you kissed it? That was a sweet
thing to do. It’s a sweet place to kiss. If I asked you real
nice, would you do it again?”

From then on, Vonda was my girl. My
secret girl.

“You sure it’ll all go up?” J.C.
asked Gus, after they had been back for a couple of days.

“A
drop like that? Guaranteed,” Gus told him. “Be nothing left but
some bone fragments, if that.”

“It’s all got
to burn. Otherwise, they’ll keep looking.”

“It’s a hundred to one, with a full tank of gas, that
it’ll happen just from the impact,” Gus said. “But what we
picked up makes it a sure thing. Even if they find traces, they’ll figure
we brought the stuff with us to blow the box, in case the drivers didn’t
give over when we threw down on them.”

He looked sideways at me
and winked. “Yeah,” he said. “I finally get some use out of
what they taught me.”

Gus meant the army. He talks about that a
lot. He hadn’t liked it there; that’s where something happened to
one side of his face. His right eyebrow is split in half, like he has two of
them over just the one eye.

But even though Gus says he hated the army,
it never sounded so bad to me, when he talked about it.

I wanted to ask
him questions, but I never did. I’m always afraid of sounding stupid, but
that wasn’t it. With a man like Gus, it’s better if he
doesn’t think you’re too interested in anything about him.

It was great riding with Vonda, even if I
couldn’t show her how good a driver I was. J.C. said to be extra careful
not to attract any attention. Mostly, I just went over the different routes,
and Vonda wrote down the mileage and kept time.

One day, Vonda slid
next to me on the seat. She put her left hand on the inside of my right thigh.
Not grabbing me or anything, just holding it there.

Right then, I
thought about us just taking off. Just go from there. Drive.

But I
didn’t have a real plan. And Vonda deserved a better chance than just
trying to run a roadblock.

When they told me how we were going to
make the plan work—“selling the scam,” J.C. called it—I
got a little spooked.

Gus could see it in my face, and he laughed at
me. “They don’t bite, Eddie,” he said.

Getting the
bodies turned out to be easy. It was the first time we used the hearse. I was
the driver. Late one night, we went to this cemetery J.C. knew about. It was a
long drive, because he said we couldn’t do it close to our base.

After we put the dirt and sod back, it still didn’t look that good,
even in the dark, I didn’t think. But J.C. said it was a cemetery for
people who died broke, and nobody would be visiting their graves.

That’s when I figured out why J.C. and Gus had brought back that
giant freezer from one of their trips away. After we put the bodies inside, I
helped chop up the coffins. Then we burned everything.

“How
come I never see you with a gun, Eddie?” Vonda asked me one day.

“I don’t know anything about guns,” I said.
“Anyway, that’s not what I do, guns. I’m the
driver.”

“J.C. and Gus always have guns on them,”
Vonda said.

“Sure.”

“Don’t you ever
worry … ? I mean, if something happened. If you got into trouble and you
needed a gun, what would you do?”

“I’d
drive,” I told her. “I’d drive everyone out of
trouble.”

I didn’t see Vonda for all the rest of that day.
At night, I went out to the barn to watch my movies, but she didn’t
come.

I was polishing the Cadillac the next morning when Vonda came
up to me. She was wearing her exercise clothes, but she hadn’t started
yet.

“What difference does it make if it’s so
shiny?” she asked me.

“It’s supposed to look like
it’s out on business,” I said. “J.C. says, in this part of
the country, folks sometimes have their funerals at dawn, soon as it gets
light. So if anyone sees a hearse driving at four in the morning, they’ll
think it’s on its way to a graveyard, somewhere.”

“J.C. thinks of everything,” Vonda said.

I could tell
from her voice something was wrong. It was just a little tone laid over the top
of what she was saying, but I knew Vonda real well, and I picked up on things
like that.

“What’s the matter?” I asked her.

“J.C. thinks of everything,” she said. “But he
doesn’t think of everyone. Do you understand, Eddie?”

I could tell this wasn’t any time to be saying I did when I
didn’t, the way I do, sometimes. “No,” I said.

Vonda
looked over her shoulder, back at where the cabin was. Then she looked at me,
like she was waiting for me to say something more.

After a little bit,
she reached around me to where my pack of cigarettes was, and took one for
herself.

“Don’t light that here,” I told her.

“Why not? You smoke in here.”

“Not this
close to where I’m working. You see that carburetor over there?
It’s the old one off my T-bird. I’m soaking it in stuff that would
go right up if a spark hit it.”

“I thought you said you put
a new one in it.”

“Well, I did. And it works fine. But that
one there is the original, and I thought I’d like to save it. So
I’m getting all the gunk out before I rebuild it.”

She made
a little noise.

“You can smoke over by where I watch movies,
Vonda. I’ll come over and have one with you, okay?”

“Not now,” she said. “If J.C. wanders on out here, I want
it to look like you were working on the car and I just stopped to say hello. If
he sees us over by your couch, he’s going to get ideas. And when J.C.
gets ideas, I get hurt.”

“All right. I can just go back
to—”

“Eddie, listen to me. What I said before? About
J.C. looking out for everything? I want you to think about that.”

“I don’t have to think about it,” I said. “J.C.
looks out for everyone with his plans. And I look out for everyone when I
drive. That’s the way it is.”

J.C. and Gus took off
again just after supper. Vonda went into the room she shared with J.C., and
closed the door.

I went out to the barn. Not to watch my movies. I
wanted to see if this idea I had for the Cadillac was going to work, and I
needed to weld something up to try it out.

When I saw someone come into
the barn, I took off the goggles I was wearing.

It was Vonda. She had
on a pair of jeans and a pink top, one of those tube things you can just pull
off.

She came over to where I was working. Her hair was in a ponytail,
tied with a pink ribbon. She had a lot of lipstick on. Long silver earrings.
“Let’s go to the movies,” she said.

I stood up.
“Which one would you like to—”

“Not
those movies, Eddie. I know where there’s a better one playing.
Come on.”

Vonda got in the front seat of the hearse. Up there,
it was just like a regular car, a big Cadillac. She slid over, so I could get
behind the wheel.

“This is our own private movie, Eddie.
Special.”

“I don’t—”

“If
you trust me, you’ll get a reward,” she said. “Just trust me,
Eddie. Close your eyes, and you’ll see a movie in your mind. Just like we
were at the drive-in.”

She moved in close to me. I put my arm
around her and looked through the windshield. It was so dark there that I
didn’t have to close my eyes. But I did, because I had promised.

I tried to see one of my movies, but, instead, I saw my dream. The black
car pulling up. I knew there was no driver. I knew it was me who was supposed
to be behind the wheel.

Vonda made a little humming noise. I felt her
pull my zipper down. Felt her hand.

Vonda took me in her mouth. Not a
kiss, like she had done before, but real deep this time. I closed my eyes
tighter. She made that humming noise again, louder. I put my hand in her hair,
but I didn’t hold her head down.

When I let go, Vonda made a
different noise.

She stayed there, with her head in my lap. Licking
me dry, the way a cat does.

Her hair felt like ribbons of silk in my
hand.

I kept my eyes closed.

Vonda pulled her mouth away from
me. “You think I’m dirty, don’t you, Eddie?”

“Nobody would ever think that about you, Vonda,” I told
her.

“J.C. does,” she said. “J.C. thinks I’m a
dirty little whore. He calls me that, plenty of times. And he’s right,
too.”

“Vonda.…”

“He is
right, Eddie. J.C. makes me go with other guys, sometimes. When he wants
something.”

“You mean, like a pimp?”

“No. That’s not J.C. A hooker could never make enough money for
a man like him. J.C.’s not a pimp. He’s a man who plans.
And when he needs information for one of his plans, sometimes, he
makes me be the one who gets it for him.”

“I don’t
under—”

“One time, J.C. and Gus wanted to hijack a
shipment of computers. A whole truckload of them. But they couldn’t be
sure about the routes. Where the driver would stop off for a break, stuff like
that. So he sent me in.”

“Sent you in to the
factory?”

“No, Eddie,” she said, in a sad voice.
“Sent me in to work on one of the drivers for that company. He used to
come into this club where I danced. J.C. made me play up to him, so I could get
him talking.”

I thought about the doctor. The one with the gold
coins. I wondered how long Vonda had been with J.C. If it had been her
who.…

“That’s not being a whore,” I said.
“It’s more like being … a spy, maybe.”

“Spies don’t have to go to bed with the people they’re
spying on.”

“Sometimes they do,” I told her. “I
saw it in a—”

“This wasn’t a movie,” she
said. Her voice had gone from sad to sharp. “This was real life. And this
guy wasn’t a Russian spy; he was a truck driver. That’s something
J.C. always says: a man can’t eat pussy with his mouth closed. And, once
it’s open.…”

“Why do you have to talk like
that?”

“I’m sorry, Eddie,” she said. Her voice
was back to being sad. “It’s not the way I like to talk, not
really. It’s just that being around J.C. and Gus all the time, I started
to sound like them. Now it’s a habit, I think.”

After I was sure the truck was running perfect, I took
it out near the spot where it was going to happen. J.C. says it’s no good
just measuring with your eyes; the only way is to take the thing itself and see
if it will fit.

I drove the truck down into where we would be
leaving it. And I was glad I had listened to J.C., because it didn’t fit
right. When I walked back out onto the road and took a look back, I could still
see the truck pretty good. I couldn’t tell how it would look at night,
but I knew we couldn’t take a chance.

Gus showed me how to make
curtains out of branches and leaves. You cut some branches that have some heft
to them, but they still have to bend, so they hold their tension when you put
them in place. Then you lay smaller branches across, like a lattice. Finally,
you weave even smaller branches—ones with leaves on them—in between
the slots. Unless someone gets real close, it looks just like part of
the forest. At night, it would be impossible to tell.

Gus said to build
the curtains back at the cabin, then, when we’re ready, we could move
them in the back of the truck. It would only take a little while to set them
up.

“Where did you learn to make these things?” I asked
Gus. “In the army?”

“Where else?” he said. He
was squeezing his exercisers in both fists. They’re just a pair of wooden
handles connected by a spring. I tried them once. It takes a lot of power to
make them close all the way. I could barely do it ten times with my right, and
I couldn’t hardly do it at all with my left. Gus can do it for hours, so
fast you can hear the handles click against each other when he closes his
fists. “Just one of the many valuable skills they taught me.”

“Why do you call them curtains? Because you can slide them
open?”

Gus laughed. His laugh is always short and dry. Not like
something’s funny; like he’s making fun of something. “We
called them that because it was curtains for anyone who walked past them,
see?”

I didn’t say anything.

“You missed out
on all the fun,” he said. “How old were you when you first went
down?”

“Nineteen,” I said. I knew he meant real
prison, not the kiddie camps.

“I was a year younger than you when
it was my turn,” Gus said. “Only, back then, as long as your beef
wasn’t too bad, they gave you a choice. You could take the ride, or you
could give Uncle four years.”

“You could go in the army
instead of jail?”

“Sure. Happened all the time. It was just
the same, really. In the army, you know what they called guys who made a career
out of it?”

“What?”

“Lifers,” he
said. “You see what I mean?”

“Yeah. But, being in the
army, it’s something, you tell people you did that, they respect you,
right? Not like being in prison.”

“Maybe they do
now,” Gus said. “When I was in, nobody respected you.
Vietnam wasn’t a real war.”

“But there was fighting,
right? People died.”

“Oh, a whole bunch of
motherfucking people died, kid.”

There were some parts of the
job where the best you could do was look it over real good. When I checked
those things, it wasn’t really scouting. It was the part I was going to
have to do myself, like practicing on the roads.

When I went out to
check everything for the last time, I took Vonda with me. For cover, like J.C.
said.

We parked over near where we were going to leave the truck. After
I made sure everything was going to fit just right, we drove over to the place
Gus had picked out for J.C.’s trick on the cops: an old played-out quarry
that hadn’t been worked in years.

I pulled the car way off to the
side, where you couldn’t see it from the road, then I walked over and
took a closer look.

The ground up to the lip of the quarry was all
rock and hard-packed dirt. I came up on it real careful, just in case it got
loose without any warning.

When I looked over the edge, I could see Gus
was right. It must have been a thousand feet to the bottom, easy. Sometimes, a
quarry will have water at the bottom, but this one was nothing but stone all
the way down.

I paced it off a half-dozen times. There wouldn’t
be any lights around the night we did the job.

When I got back to
the car, Vonda was waiting for me. But she didn’t act impatient, even
though she couldn’t play the radio or smoke while I was gone, in case
someone might take notice.

“That curtain thing for the truck
is amazing, Eddie,” she said. “You really did a great
job.”

“It was Gus’s idea,” I told her.

I reached over for the ignition key. Vonda put her hand on mine.

“They don’t know how long it’s going to take you,
Eddie,” she said. “Let’s go back to where the curtain is.
We’ve got plenty of time.”

It seemed like it didn’t
take long. But when I looked at my watch, it was more than an hour later.

“We’re really kind of late,
already,” I told Vonda.

“Please,” she
said. Real soft, like the first time she play-begged me. “I’ll just
run in and get what I want. It won’t take five minutes.”

Even though it was a video store, I didn’t go in with her. I could
never get out of a place like that in five minutes.

When Vonda came
out, she was swinging a plastic bag in her hand. She looked so happy.

“I got you a present, Eddie,” she said, when she got in the
front seat.

“What is it?”

“It’s a
surprise. I mean, you know it’s a movie, right? But what movie?
That’s the surprise. You have to take it with you, so J.C.
doesn’t see it.

“Put it in the garage with your other
tapes. But you have to promise me not to look at it. I want us to watch it
together, okay?”

“Sure,” I said.

“What the hell are you up to?” J.C. asked
me.

It made me jump a little bit—J.C. almost never comes out
to the barn at night.

“I’m making something. For the
hearse. Just in case.”

“Just in case what?”

“In case we get chased.”

“We’re not going
to—”

“I know that,” I said. “But this
won’t slow us down any. And it could buy us some time. If we
ever needed it. If it works.”

“Show me,” he
said.

So I showed him the tank I had welded up, with the rows of
spigots coming out the bottom. It looked something like the mufflers you see on
those old Volkswagens some guys convert into dune buggies for off-road
racing—that’s where I had got the idea.

The tank was going
to run across the back of the hearse, just over the bumper. I was going to fill
it with ball bearings—I had a whole barrel of them, soaking in
forty-weight. When I pulled the lever, the ball bearings would spill out behind
the hearse. No way anyone chasing us could stay on the road when they ran over
them.

“That’s a sweet piece of engineering,” J.C.
said.

Even with all that had been on my mind, it still felt good when
he said that.

“It’s like you always say,” I said.
“If you plan for things to go wrong, they usually
don’t.”

He gave me a big grin. Then he went back to the
cabin.

Vonda came out to the barn that night. I was on the couch,
but I was just sitting there, thinking.

“You didn’t
watch that movie I bought, did you?” she said.

“I would
never do that. I waited for you. Did you want to watch it now?”

“No, not now. I can’t stay long. And, anyway, I don’t
want us to watch it out here. J.C. and Gus are taking off again in a day or
two, for one last time. We can watch it then.”

“Okay.”

Vonda picked up my pack of cigarettes and lit
one for herself. She didn’t sit down. I couldn’t see her face in
the dark.

“When this is over, he’s not going to take me
with him, Eddie,” she said. “I’m good for some things, sure.
But, after this job, he won’t need me for any of them.”

“But … but you said … you said, if you ever tried to
get away from him, he’d track you down, Vonda. If he doesn’t want
you anymore, why would he care?”

She took a long drag from her
cigarette. I could see her face behind the red glow for a second.

“Think about it,” she said.

“I have been
thinking about it,” I told her. “Only, this makes it different.
Makes it easy. If J.C. is going to leave you, you can go with me. In my car.
I’ll split my share with you, Vonda. There’ll be
plenty—”

“You think it’s that easy?
You’ll be in the hearse; they’ll be in the truck. With the
money.”

“They have to come back here, Vonda.
Everything’s here. Their cars and all their ID and—”

“Oh, they have to come back all right,” she said. She took
another drag. “They have to clean up all the loose ends before they get
gone for good.”

“But if they—”

Vonda
ground out her cigarette in the hubcap I used for an ashtray. “I have to
go in now, Eddie,” she said. “Just think about it,
okay?”

The next day, we were all eating lunch in the cabin.
The television was on, with the sound off. Gus liked it that way. He was
squeezing his hand things. Click-click.

J.C. told Gus about
what I was rigging up with the ball bearings. Gus nodded at me, like he does
when I finally understand something he’s been saying.

J.C. wanted
to know when I’d be finished with the hearse. “A few more
days,” I told him.

Vonda and J.C. argued about something before
they went to bed, but I didn’t hear any sounds of hitting through the
walls all that night. I guessed they had made up.

When I got up the
next morning, nobody was around. I made myself some bacon and eggs. I
don’t cook as good as Vonda, but I do pretty good. Virgil always said he
was going to teach me to barbeque someday, but he never got the chance.

I made plenty extra, in case they came out and wanted something, too. But
nobody did. So I went to work.

I was in the barn when I heard the car
take off. When I went back over to the cabin, J.C. and Gus were both gone.

It was after lunchtime, so I made myself a sandwich.

Vonda
didn’t come out of the bedroom until almost three o’clock. I looked
at her face, but I couldn’t see any marks.

I asked her if she
wanted something to eat.

“Not now, Eddie,” she said.
“I have to take a hot bath.”

Vonda was in there a long
time. I didn’t know what to do. I went over to the door, stood real close
by, but I couldn’t hear anything.

I knocked. Soft, but loud
enough for her to hear.

I still couldn’t hear anything. I opened
the door, slow. In case she was.… I couldn’t even say the rest of
that in my mind.

Vonda was in the tub. She was crying, but quiet, like
she didn’t want anybody to hear.

“What is it?” I
said.

She started crying louder, then.

I went over and held the
back of her head.

It took a long time for her to tell me what happened.
The reason I hadn’t heard anything the night before was because J.C. had
tied her up. He wanted to do something to her she didn’t like. And he
wanted Gus to do it to her, too. He put tape over her mouth, so she
couldn’t yell.

That’s why she needed the bath, because what
he did hurt so much.

She said, sometimes, J.C. and Gus had her at the
same time. She said Gus liked to hurt girls, and J.C. let him do what he
wanted.

I closed my eyes. When I did, I saw little red dots, like the
tips of cigarettes.

“Wash me, Eddie,” she said, crying.
“Get me all clean. I have to get all clean.”

She was so
limp, I had to hold her arms up to wash under them. When I was all done with
her front, I said, “Vonda, do you want me to.…”

“I’m dirty, Eddie,” she said. She turned over in the tub.
She put her hands on the edge so she could keep her face out of the water, and
I did her other side. “Scrub hard,” Vonda said. “Get
it all.”

When I was all finished, I helped her stand up. I got
the towels and patted her dry.

Vonda turned her back, and said
something real low.

“What, girl?” I said.

“Am
I all clean now, Eddie?”

“All clean,” I said.

She turned and kissed me. Not a sex kiss; on the cheek.

“I
can always count on you,” she said. “I’m going to get dressed
now.”

When Vonda came out of the bedroom, she had her hair in
a ponytail, like she did before, and her face was all scrubbed. She was wearing
a big white T-shirt that came down over her knees. For a second, a picture of
Janine popped into my mind. I wondered if they had treated her good in that
foster home.

“I want to tell you a secret,” she
said.

I sat down in the easy chair. Vonda sat on my lap. Not the way a
woman does. All curled up, like a little girl.

“It seems, all my
life, I’ve been looking for a getaway man,” she said. “Even
when I was a kid. Other little girls, they used to dream about Prince Charming.
You know, someone to ride up on a white horse and take them to a castle, where
they’d be a princess and everything would be perfect. Me, I always knew
it would be a man in a car. Honking the horn in front of the house. And
I’d run out, and go away with him.

“I ran to that horn
plenty of times, Eddie. Only it was never a prince behind the wheel.

“All my life, I’ve been waiting. What I told you before,
it’s God’s truth, Eddie. You’re my getaway man. That’s
my half of it, Eddie. The other half, you have to make come true. Promise
me.”

I didn’t tell Vonda about my own dream, because it was
already coming true. But I did promise her.

“I wish I could
sleep with you,” Vonda said, when I came back into the cabin that
night.

“Why couldn’t we?”

“Not that,
Eddie,” she said. “Sleep with you. The way a wife does
with her husband. In the same bed. All night. So when I woke up in the morning,
you’d be the first thing I saw.”

“We can do
that,” I said. “We can—”

“We
will do that,” she said, in a fierce voice. “But we
can’t do it here. Not ever. I don’t know when they’re coming
back. I never do. And if J.C. ever caught us, you know what he’d
do.”

I wasn’t sure what he would do, but I didn’t
want to argue.

“But we could do something like
it,” she said. “If you’re willing.”

“I’ll do whatever you want, Vonda.”

“Go sit
on the couch,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

She was gone a lot more than a little while. I just sat there.

When she came out of the bedroom, she was wearing a black slip. Her hair
was down and she didn’t have on any makeup. Or any shoes. She looked real
little that way.

“This is like a nightgown, isn’t it,
Eddie?”

“I guess it is.”

She had a blanket in
one hand. She gave it to me. Then she laid down on the couch, so her head was
in my lap.

“Put that over me,” she said.

I did
that, and she snuggled into it so it was all wrapped around her.

“I’m going to sleep,” she said. “Right here. Just a
little nap. You can watch television; it won’t bother me at all.
Okay?”

“Sure.”

“And, when I wake up,
you’ll be right there, Eddie. I feel so safe when I’m with you
watching over me, I could sleep like a baby. I’ll bet I have sweet
dreams.”

I stroked her hair, to help her fall asleep.

“Goodnight kiss!” she said, in a bratty kid’s voice.

As soon as I kissed her, she closed her eyes.

I was watching a
TV movie. The Badlands. It was about a young guy who killed a whole
bunch of people. He had his girlfriend with him the whole time he was doing it.
They drove all over the place, across the state lines and everything. But, when
the cops got close, he didn’t try to get away; he just gave up.

The girl was real young, just a baby who didn’t know
anything. The movie tried to make it out like she was as guilty as him. But I
could tell she was innocent. He was a guy who just liked killing, and she
didn’t have any choice but to go along with him.

Vonda stirred in
my lap. “Hi, honey,” she said.

That was the first time she
ever called me that.

“Did you sleep good?” I asked
her.

“Like an angel,” she said. “Eddie, could you do
something for me?”

“Sure.”

“Could you
sleep out in the barn tonight? On your couch? I’m afraid, if I knew you
were sleeping in the next room from me, I couldn’t stop myself from going
to be with you.”

“We could just—”

“Please, Eddie,” she said. “I know I’m being a
pain, but, just this once … ?”

When I got up in the
morning, I went into the cabin to take a shower. The room where Vonda and J.C.
stayed was closed; I guessed she was still asleep.

I was eating
breakfast when Vonda came out. She was wearing her bathrobe. It’s white,
and it looks like it’s made out of towels. She had the belt tied tight,
but I could see she didn’t have anything on under it.

She went
into Gus’s room. I had never seen her do that in all the time we had been
staying there.

She came out with a cigar box in her hands.

“This is Gus,” she said. And she handed the box to me.

I opened it up. Inside were pictures. Girls. They were all tied up. But not
like Daphne wanted to be tied up—these girls, it looked like they were
tied up for real. And the way they were tied, it had to hurt. One girl, from
the look on her face, you could tell the ropes were really cutting into
her.

There was no reason to tie them up like that just to keep them
from getting away, so it had to be like it was with Daphne. But I
could tell it wasn’t.

At the bottom of the pile, a girl was tied
to a long, thick piece of wood, like a pig on a spit. She was facing the
camera. There was a man behind her, but you couldn’t see his face. Her
eyes had a lot of white showing. Her mouth was open, like she was
screaming.

“This is Gus,” Vonda said, again. I
couldn’t tell if she meant it was Gus in the picture. I didn’t want
to ask.

“Careful,” she said. “They have to go back in
the exact same order, otherwise he’ll know someone was
looking.”

I didn’t touch them. Vonda stacked them, so it
was like they were before. Then she went and put the box back in Gus’s
room.

I went back out to where the cars were.

I didn’t
see Vonda all that day. But we had supper together. She made a stew, with all
kinds of stuff in it. I told her it was the best I ever had, and I wasn’t
lying—Virgil never made stew.

“Thank you, Eddie. That
was sweet. Are you ready to see your movie now?” she asked me. “The
present I got for you?”

“Sure.”

“Well,
go get it!” she said, smiling at me.

The movie was Rebel
Without a Cause. The cover on the box had a guy in a leather jacket,
standing next to an old Mercury.

“It’s not about
driving, Eddie,” Vonda said. “It’s a love story. But
it’s my favorite of all time. And I wanted you to watch it with me. Is
that okay, honey?”

I told her sure it was. Just because all my
own movies are about driving doesn’t mean I couldn’t like anything
else.

We sat down together and watched. The movie was about a kid who
didn’t fit in. He never fit in. His family just moved to a new town, and
he didn’t fit in there, either.

There was a girl he really liked.
A pretty one, with dark hair. Only that girl already had somebody—the
leader of the gang he wanted to be in.

The kid in the movie, he was
trying to make the other kids like him, but it wasn’t working. They
wouldn’t let him join. So he got in a drag race with the boyfriend of the
girl he liked.

The movie went on after that, but it was right then that
I figured out how to do what I had to.

I looked over at Vonda, to see
if she understood, but she was lost in the movie.

She cried when it was
over. I couldn’t tell if she was crying sad, or crying happy. A
kid—a little, scared kid; the best friend of the guy who ended up with
the girl—he died at the end. But the rebel and the girl he liked ended up
being with each other.

A few years ago, a guy brought his Mustang
into my place. He wanted it to get off the line better. Not for real racing;
just the kind of thing some guys do at stoplights.

I told him, he
either needed more engine or a lower rear end. He asked me a lot of questions
about changing the rear end, like he never heard of such a thing.

I
went behind the car to show him something. He had a lot of stickers all over
the bumper. I remember there was a couple of Confederate flags. And one that
said, “WWJD.”

I asked him what that stood for. He told me,
“What Would Jesus Do?”

That confused me, so I asked him,
how would a person know? He said, you just have to ask yourself the question.
“What would Jesus do?” Then, whatever Jesus would do, that’s
the right thing. And you try to do it yourself.

I couldn’t see
how people could know what Jesus would do, but I didn’t say
anything.

Before, watching the movie, I was thinking I knew what I had
to do. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized, just knowing
how to do something doesn’t mean you should do it.

What would Tim do? I asked myself, inside my mind.

J.C.’s the smartest man I ever knew. He’s smart about planning
and things like that. But Tim was the smartest one about doing what’s
right. Everybody said that about him. Especially after the trial.

I
felt grief in my heart, because the one man who would know the answer I needed,
I couldn’t ask.

And then I was disgusted with myself for what I
had been thinking. Feeling bad because I couldn’t ask Tim was just
another way of feeling bad for myself, not for Tim.

I never think about
Tim or Virgil. Because, every time I do, I feel all empty and crushed, like a
soda can in one of those recycling machines.

I used to dream—not
a real dream, I guess, because I was always awake when I had it—of
breaking Tim out of prison, the way I saw in some movies.

It’s
not impossible. People break out of prison. I heard, once, guys even broke out
of death row, over in Virginia. I don’t know if that one’s true,
but I feel like it could be.

I know Tim would try, that’s for
sure.

The guys who broke out in Texas, that whole bunch of them, they
did it themselves, from inside. But, when they got out, there was a car waiting
for them.

I could do that part. If Tim could ever get out, I could be
the driver.

I didn’t know how to do anything else. If Tim ever
got word to me, I’d be waiting wherever he said. With the fastest, best
car there ever was.

But Tim never wrote me a letter, and I never wrote
him. I knew why Tim never wrote, and I wouldn’t dishonor him by going
against what he wanted.

I always read the papers, hoping. But
Tim’s name doesn’t get in the papers anymore.

There’s
other ways to get out of prison I heard about. There’s lawyers, people
with connections, politicians. They can fix things. I don’t know anything
about that for myself, but everybody in prison says that’s the way things
are. What it takes is money. Heavy money, because it has to be spread
around.

When this job is over, I’m going to find one of those
fixers, see if he can do something for Tim. I’m not sure where I would
look, but there’s people I guess I could ask.

I kept thinking,
the best person to ask would be J.C. I felt bad I couldn’t do that, but
that wasn’t a selfish feeling. Because, that time, it wasn’t me
that I was feeling bad for.

I truly believed, if Hiram was still
around, he would be a man I could ask. Not because he was a preacher, or
because he’d know what Jesus would do. Because of the kind of man he was,
to have his woman love him so deep, long after he was gone.

And she
had picked me, too, to look after Hiram’s car.

One day, I took the Thunderbird out for a drive. I knew
I shouldn’t have done it. But I just had to, even though I couldn’t
say why.

I didn’t want to go fast, or practice turns or
anything. I just wanted to drive. By myself.

The sun was bright, but it
wasn’t that hard white it gets sometimes. It was a soft, pretty glow,
like it was coming through those big colored windows they have in
churches.

The Thunderbird wanted to run, but I kept the leash tight. I
found a good station on the radio. They had a Delbert McClinton song playing.
He’s one of the ones I like the best.

I came around a long curve,
as smooth as water over river rocks. I was thinking those new shocks I had put
in were really doing the job … and then I saw the cop car.

It
was parked over the side, like it was waiting for speeders. I knew I
wasn’t speeding, but I kind of held my breath.

And then the cop
car pulled out behind me.

His light bar wasn’t flashing.

I knew the roads around there perfect. I should have, as much scouting and
practicing as I had done. I didn’t know what the troopers had in their
cars, but I was sure I could lose him if I could get off the highway.

But, sooner or later, I would have to go back to the cabin. There was no
phone there; I’d have to go myself.

And if the cops were watching
for me, everybody was finished.

I didn’t need to have Tim around
to ask what the right thing to do was.

I slowed down and moved a little
to the right, like I was letting the cop car pass.

The trooper swung
out and came alongside me. I looked over at him—that’s the natural
thing to do. And he pointed with his right hand, telling me to pull over.

I did it. The trooper pulled over, too. But not behind me, the way they
always do. In front.

The trooper got out of his cruiser and walked
toward me. I rolled down the window and reached in my wallet for my license and
registration. Even scared, it felt good, knowing I had all that, like I was a
regular person.

“Where’d you get this?” the cop asked
me.

“It’s mine,” I said. “I bought it
from—”

“No, son. I mean, where in the world did you
find yourself a fifty-five? You don’t see one of these every day. You
cherrying it out?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.
“I’ve been working on it for almost three years.”

“Damn! Mind if I take a look?”

“My
pleasure,” I said. And I wasn’t lying. I popped the hood. Then I
got out and lifted it up for him.

“That carb’s not
stock,” he said. He sounded a little disappointed.

“I got
the original back home,” I told him. “And the original exhaust
manifolds, too.”

“You going to put them back on when
you’re done?”

“I … I don’t rightly know.
I was thinking, maybe I would, someday. But it runs a lot better this
way.”

“I’ll just bet. Cold mornings, I can sit there
forever before I get mine to fire up.”

“You’ve got
one, too?”

“A fifty-six,” he said. “Goldenrod
yellow, with a white porthole top.” He looked at the seats. “Yours
was, what, red from the factory?”

“Torch red,” I told
him, proud that I knew.

The trooper walked around to the back of the
car, but he didn’t roll his shoulders the way cops do when they’re
trying to make you nervous.

“Are those the original skirts, or
did you get them NOS?”

“Original,” I told him.

“I’ve been looking for a pair for mine for years,” he
said. “I got the Continental kit, though.”

“I saw one
of those, once. On a fifty-seven. It looked great.”

“Gives
you more room in the trunk, too,” he said. “I’m not one of
those guys who only brings his car to shows. I drive mine.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“I know a place sells the
original paint,” he said. “They still got some in
stock.”

“For real?”

“Absolutely. When
you’re going numbers-match, it has to be all authentic,
right?”

“Right. Where’s it at, that place that sells
the paint?”

The trooper stayed with me for quite a while. Long
enough for me to smoke a couple of cigarettes. He even had one with me.

Finally, he said he had to get going. He said it was a pleasure meeting
someone else who had an old T-bird to drive, not just to keep in the garage and
only bring out on Sundays when it doesn’t rain, like some.

We
gave each other our names, and shook hands. He never asked to see my
license.

After he took off, I kept driving in that same direction for a
while, just to be sure.

I felt a happiness in me, like I had done good.
I wished Hiram’s wife could have seen me, representing his jewel.

“You got her ready to roll?” J.C. asked me, at the end of
the week. He was talking about the hearse; the truck didn’t need
anything.

“Pretty much,” I said. “I still
don’t know where Gus wants to put that stuff of his.”

“Don’t worry about it,” J.C. said. “Gus says
it’s no bigger than a little suitcase. Not like the damn money.
That’s all going to be in mixed bills, so we’re figuring about two,
three hundred pounds for every million. Going to be a lot of heavy little
sacks. That’s why we had to get the truck.”

“I
thought it was because—”

“Because the hearse
isn’t coming back? Nah. Look, Eddie, every good plan is really a simple
one. The more complicated you make it, the more that can go wrong.”

“You really plan stuff out, J.C.”

“That’s
my job,” he said.

“I guess there’s no
way.…”

“What? What’s on your mind,
kid?”

“This guy. Monty. He’s not, like, one of us,
right?”

“One of us? Oh, you mean, he’s a square john?
Sure. You think they’d let a guy with a record pilot one of those rigs?
Monty’s a guy who never would have thought of this whole plan on his own.
But, some of those citizens, once you figure out how to get their nose open,
there’s nothing they won’t do.”

“But what if
… what if he’s like … what if he’s like Kaiser
was?”

“You mean, if he’s got some friends waiting
around? Not a chance, Eddie. One,” he said, ticking off the numbers on
his fingers, “like you said, he’s not from our world. He
wouldn’t know where to find a crew could lift that heavy a weight. Two,
he don’t have a clue where we’re staying. He doesn’t know
anything about this place. All the trust’s on us, see?”

“So how does he—?”

“Soon as it’s
done, he’s got to jump. Get gone good. But Monty’s slick.
He’s been planning something like this for years, before we even met him.
Just been waiting for the right crew to come along.

“Monty’s been making regular trips to New York. There’s a
plastic surgeon up there that’s going to do his face as soon as this is
over. He’s got a whole new set of ID waiting, too, for when he can get
the new pictures taken.

“We know where he’s going to hide
out until we can get him the money. All he has to do is hold tight for a few
days, and then he disappears. They’ll never find him.”

“I guess. But if he ever does get caught,
he’ll—”

“Rat us all out, sure. So what?
He’s never seen you. Besides, if Gus’s stuff works like he says,
nobody’s even going to be looking for him, am I
right?”

“You’re right, J.C.,” I said.
“You thought of everything.”

Gus wanted
to play cards that night. Me, him, and J.C., cutthroat hearts. I didn’t
feel like doing anything with Gus anymore, but I knew I had to.

“I want to play, too,” Vonda said. She never had before.

“You can’t have betting with four players,” Gus
said.

“We can play partners,” J.C. told him. “Me and
Vonda against you and Eddie.”

“What
the fuck’s wrong with you?” Gus said to me. “Couldn’t
you see I was shooting the moon?”

“I’m
sorry,” I said.

“Get with the program, kid. We’re
down damn near a hundred bucks already.”

“Few weeks from
now, you’ll be lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills,” J.C.
told him.

I knew J.C. and Gus wouldn’t be going away anymore.
So I wasn’t disappointed when Vonda stopped watching my movies with me.
She stopped exercising, too.

The only time I saw her was when she
came out to the barn one day with J.C. and Gus.

“Hey,
what’s with the front door on that hearse?” Gus asked me.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“How come it opens
from the front? It looks weird.”

“They’re called
‘suicide doors,’” I told him. “They used to make all
cars like that.”

“I can see why they call them that.
Christ, you could fall right out on your face.”

“Not if
you’re careful. And I figure it gives me an extra second or so if I have
to get out fast.”

“That’s why Eddie’s the
ace,” J.C. said. “Best getaway man in the business.”

Even with all I knew about him by then, it meant a lot to me, that he said
that.

“You’re sure he hasn’t got a move?”
Gus asked J.C. that same night.

“You and Eddie, Jesus
Christ,” J.C. said. “Monty’s got nothing. He’s the
one’s got to trust us. He’s taking the armored car, but
we’re taking the money.”

Gus didn’t say anything.

J.C. took a long deep breath. Then he let it out slow, like he was
trying to keep his temper.

“All right,” he said, looking at
both of us, “one more time. Two men are making the run in the armored
car. One of them is Monty. The other guy, the one behind the wheel, he
doesn’t know anything. We’ll be behind those rocks; nobody can see
us from the road. When they get close, Monty pulls his piece, makes the other
guy drive up to us.

“Monty keeps him under the gun; Gus slips
behind him with that pad of chloroform and clamps him down. He goes out like a
light, be unconscious for a good hour, minimum.

“When the guy
wakes up, he’s in the armored car, a few miles away from where we took
him. He’s cuffed to the steering wheel, but his radio’s disabled,
and every fuse has been pulled, so his horn and lights don’t work.

“Even when the cops finally find him, all he can tell them is that
Monty was in on it. He never sees our faces, never hears us talk. But we make
sure he sees the hearse … that’s Eddie’s job.

“The way the cops dope it out, the robbers and Monty all pile in the
hearse to make a getaway. The driver loses control around the curve just
opposite the quarry, and it goes over the edge.

“When they
finally get down there to examine the wreck, they won’t find any actual
bodies, just little tiny pieces of them, all burned. Even if
there’s enough left to DNA, none of it’s our DNA. So even
if they don’t buy it complete, the only person they can ever look for is
Monty.

“And even if they do catch Monty someday, so what? Sure,
like Eddie already asked me, he’d rat us out in a heartbeat. But
what’s he got to tell them? Meanwhile, time’s passing, and the
statute of limitations is running. This isn’t a murder; it’s a
robbery. Sooner or later, they’ll have to throw in the towel.”

“Yeah,” Gus said. “All Monty’s got to do is drive
the armored car down the road a few miles, nice and slow, then ditch it and
disappear. That’ll give us plenty of margin, especially if the base calls
him on the radio while he’s still behind the wheel.”

“And the cops, they’ll think we took Monty with us,” J.C.
said, smiling. “Right over the edge.” He turned to look at me.
“Hey, Eddie, you sure that ground won’t take tracks?”

“Car tracks, just a little, maybe,” I said. “But never
us, walking back.”

“Can’t you fix something with the
gas pedal, make it go over by itself?” J.C. asked me.

“No.
I mean, I could, but it might not work. The only way to be sure is to
put it in drive, and all three of us shove it over. I’ve got the idle set
up real high. It’ll be easy.”

“Isn’t there
something I could do, too?” Vonda said.

“All you have to do
is sit right here,” J.C. said. “We’ll be back with enough
money to light you up like a Christmas tree.”

Saturday, we all
stayed up. When J.C.’s cell phone buzzed, I jumped a little. But it was
only Monty, saying that it wasn’t going to be that night.

It
was a bad week after that. With J.C. and Gus around all the time, Vonda could
hardly talk to me. But, sometimes, when no one was looking, she’d give me
a quick little secret squeeze.

I spent a lot of time in the barn. But I
never watched any of my movies.

The next week was like my first week
in prison. It never seemed to get closer to another day.

Saturday
night, J.C.’s phone went off again. When he hung up, he said,
“It’s show time.”

We went out to the freezer for the
bodies. They were too slippery to handle; we had to wrap them in blankets.

Gus and me loaded the bodies in the back of the hearse. J.C. kept looking
at his watch, saying, “Plenty of time, plenty of time.”

When I first poked the nose of the hearse out of the barn, a spring rain
was slanting down.

“Roads’re going to be greasy,”
Gus said.

“Eddie knows what he’s doing,” J.C. told
him.

I felt good about what J.C. had said. But Gus was right, and I
paid close attention.

I could feel the extra weight in the back right
through the wheel. More weight back there helps keep you from sliding, but if
the rear end ever does break loose, it makes it harder to catch, too. The trick
to driving on wet roads is to stay smooth—it’s jerky moves that get
you sideways.

J.C. was right about there being plenty of time. When
the armored car showed up, we had been waiting in the hearse for over an
hour.

We were pretty much hidden behind the big pile of rocks, but I
could see the whole road out of the windshield, even with the wipers off. I had
my window down, too.

The armored car slowed way down and pulled over.
It kept coming, real slow, until it was back in the brush near where we were.
Its lights went off.

Two men got out, wearing uniforms. They started
walking over toward where we were hiding in the hearse.

When they got
close, I could see one man was holding a pistol, aimed at the other one’s
back.

They stopped not twenty feet from where we were. The one without
the gun turned around, so they were facing each other.

I started the
engine, so I could pull out and let the armored car driver see us.

“You’re crazy if you think you can get away with this,”
the man without the gun said. “They’ll know—”

The shots came so sudden I felt a jolt in my chest. The noise bounced off
the rocks like thunder inside a cave. One of the men fell to the ground.

“Fuck!” J.C. said.

Him and Gus ran over to where the
man in uniform was standing, still holding his gun. I stayed in the
driver’s seat.

I heard them saying things to each other. I
couldn’t make it all out, but I could tell J.C. was mad. He put his palm
up like a traffic cop, telling me to keep the hearse where it was.

J.C.
held out his hand, and the man in uniform gave over his pistol. J.C. took it,
but he didn’t point it at anyone, just held it down at his side.

Then J.C. said something, pointing his finger at the man’s chest. The
man and Gus each took one of the dead man’s legs and dragged him over to
the hearse. I heard them open the big wide door from the outside, and the thump
he made when they heaved him in.

I never turned around. My job was to
watch the road. Anyway, I wouldn’t have been able to see much with all
those bodies piled up in the back.

I saw the man and Gus walk over to
where J.C. was waiting. J.C. pointed again. The man in the uniform climbed into
the armored car. He drove across to the other side of the road, to where the
truck was hidden behind the curtain.

J.C. and Gus walked over on foot.
They guided the driver backing up until he was in the right place.

The
driver of the armored car got out. Rain beaded on the windshield, but I could
see the shapes of three men moving, loading the money into the truck.

It didn’t take long. The man in the uniform got back into the armored
car, and drove off, heading out the way they had been going at first.

J.C. and Gus ran across the road to the hearse. They jumped in the back and
slammed the door behind them.

“Go!” J.C. said to me.

I creeped forward until I was sure it was clear. Then I nailed the gas and
we swung out onto the road, heading for the quarry.

It was exactly 1.3
miles away; I had checked it a dozen times. But I’d also sprayed my
“X” on a big rock just ahead of it, just to be sure.

When I
saw the “X,” I hit the brakes to let the rear tires take a set, and
spun the wheel to the right. The hearse slid right into the spot where we were
supposed to get out and start pushing it.

“Let’s
move!” J.C. said.

I closed my eyes for a split second. I could
see the black car from my dream, coming for me out of the night.

I
stomped the gas. The hearse shot forward.

“What the fuck are
you—!?” Gus yelled. I could hear him, clawing his way over the
bodies to get to me.

I knew it was less than a hundred yards to the
edge. I yanked on the cable I had connected to the gas pedal, locking it in
place.

The hearse charged into the dark, eating up ground. I was
counting to four in my head.

“Eddie!”
J.C. screamed.

I felt Gus’s hands grabbing for me. I leaned way
forward, shoved open the suicide door and dived out. Just like in Vonda’s
movie.

The back of the hearse flashed past my eyes. The ground came up
and smashed me. I thought I was paralyzed for a minute—I couldn’t
get any breath, but my eyes were wide open.

The hearse went over the
edge, engine roaring. I saw the taillights blink red, once.

Breath
came into me. I got up, slow. My teeth had gone into my lip, and I was bleeding
a little. My left ankle wouldn’t take too much weight. But I was okay.
Nothing broken.

I looked up and saw I was really close to the edge. I
crawled the rest of the way, moving careful because it was so dark.

Just as I looked down, I heard the explosion.

Gus had been right.
The blackness below lit up in a giant fireball.

I limped back to the
road, feeling a little more strength in the ankle. Then I started back to where
we left the truck, cutting through the woods. It was much shorter that way. I
knew, because I had practiced.

The truck started right up. I drove
the load of money back to the cabin over the back roads. It took a long time,
but I kept myself from doing anything stupid.

I did three wide loops
around where the cabin was, but nobody was following me. Finally, I drove up
and put the truck in the barn. I sat there a minute, listening.

Nothing.

I opened the Thunderbird’s trunk. I could see that
all the sacks of money from the truck wouldn’t fit; we would have to
leave some of it. But that was okay; we’d still have enough to last
forever.

I limped over to the cabin, sadness and pride swirling
together in my chest.

There was only one little light on, in the front
window.

I went up the steps and opened the door. Vonda was sitting at
the kitchen table. “Eddie,” she said.

There was someone
over in the corner, standing in a shadow. When he moved, I could see he had a
pistol in his hand.

Vonda turned and looked over at him. That’s
when I knew who he was.

Monty.

Her getaway
man.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ANDREW VACHSS has been a federal
investigator in sexually transmitted diseases, a social services caseworker,
and a labor organizer, and has directed a maximum-security prison for violent
youth. Now a lawyer in private practice, he represents children and youths
exclusively. He is the author of numerous novels, including the Burke series,
two collections of short stories, and a wide variety of other material,
including song lyrics, poetry, graphic novels, and a “children’s
book for adults.” His books have been translated into twenty languages,
and his work has appeared in Parade, Antaeus, Playboy, Esquire, The New
York Times, and numerous other forums. He lives and works in New York
City, his native home, and the Pacific Northwest.

The dedicated Web
site for Vachss and his work is
www.vachss.com

ALSO BY ANDREW VACHSS

Flood

Strega

Blue Belle

Hard Candy

Blossom

Sacrifice

Shella

Down in the Zero

Born Bad

Footsteps of the Hawk

False Allegations

Safe House

Choice of Evil

Everybody Pays

Dead and Gone

Pain Management

Only Child

A Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Original, February 2003

Copyright
© 2003 by Andrew Vachss

All
rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division

of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by

Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
and
colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This
book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,
and incidents either
are the products of the author’s imagination
or are used
fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead,
events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library
of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vachss, Andrew H.

The getaway man / Andrew Vachss.

p.  cm.—(Vintage crime/Black Lizard)

ISBN
1-4000-7511-4

1. Criminals—Fiction.  I.
Title.  II. Series.

PS3572.A33 G48  2002

813'.54—dc21        2002028885

www.vintagebooks.com

v1.0

eBook Info

Title:

The Getaway Man

Creator:

Andrew Vachss

Publisher:

Trade

Format:

OEB

Date:

2003-2-24

Language:

English