Strip (12 page)

“Still here, eh?” he said.

“Yeah. I didn’t know if you needed anything else, so I thought I’d stay and see.”

“You’ve been doing a good job, Sherri,” he said. “The reason I came back is that I’ve been meaning to give you a little bonus.” He reached into the bulging pocket of his sport coat and pulled out a stack of bills marked “One thousand.” He had been planning to include it in the bank deposit, but for some reason he had changed his mind. He handed her the money.

“Wow, thank you,” she said. She looked at the money, then at him. She cocked her head. “What do I have to do for this?”

“Nothing. At least nothing you haven’t already been doing. It’s been nice to have somebody around who smiles.” He stepped backward, toward the door.

“I can do that,” she said. She took a quick step toward him and placed a kiss on his cheek before he opened the door and went out to his car.

He sat in the car, started the engine, drove out to the edge of the parking lot where there was a little dip to the street, and stopped. He stared into the darkest spaces he could see—the shadowy alley between a warehouse and the little factory where they customized car parts, the narrow strip of weedy land where the disused railway tracks disappeared at the back of a strip of stores. Joe Carver could be out there right now, watching for his chance.

J
EFF TURNED THE BLACK
Trans Am off Ventura Boulevard into the huge lot that ran from the Vons grocery store, past the CVS pharmacy, the Gap store, and past a dozen other stores and restaurants all the way to the chain-link fence that separated it from the two-story strip mall. Even though it was late at night, there were plenty of lights. The pharmacy and the grocery store were open twenty-four hours, so there were a few other cars on that end of the lot, and Jeff pulled to a stop among them.

He got out of the car and so did Carrie. She started walking toward the lighted glass wall of the pharmacy. “Not that way.” He pointed in the opposite direction. “The bank is back that way.”

“I want to go through the drugstore,” Carrie said. “I need a couple of things.”

“Not now.”

She stopped walking. “I won’t be able to stop on the way back, will I?”

“Well, no, but—”

“One of the things is condoms.” She stared into his eyes, watching his resolve weaken. “Maybe you’ve had enough pussy for one day. It’s okay with me.” She took a step in the direction of the bank.

He reached out and held her arm. “Maybe we could go without protection one time.”

She frowned. “Just because we’ve done it a couple of times tonight doesn’t mean I want your baby, much less anything you caught last week and don’t know about yet.”

“There’s nothing like that. I’m monog—” He tried to gulp the last two words back in, but she raised an eyebrow.

“Sure you are. Do you even know what ‘monogamous’ means?”

He was desperate to save himself. “Sure. I just meant I don’t sleep around. I saw you and you’re just so beautiful that I couldn’t resist. It was like you’re the girl I was always supposed to meet but didn’t until now.”

She smiled and patted his cheek. “You’re right. I always needed a really hot, stupid guy, but never knew it until tonight.”

“Go ahead,” he said. “You can go in and get what you need.”

She stepped off toward the pharmacy and said, “I’m not buying condoms. If you want them, you get them.”

“I thought you said—”

“I changed my mind. Now it’s up to you.”

Jeff followed her in the door, but she pretended to be shopping alone. He went to the aisle near the pharmacy counter at the back of the store and picked up two boxes of condoms. He couldn’t go home to Lila with an opened box.

He walked up to the cash register at the front of the store. He had to wait in line behind a man paying for a prescription, then watched Carrie pay for nail polish, an emery board, and hand lotion. She walked off, still pretending she didn’t know him. When he went outside, he found her waiting at the car. The man with the prescription drove away, and the lot was deserted. Jeff unlocked the trunk and they placed their purchases inside, then walked together down to the end of the parking lot, onto the strip mall where there was a pedestrian-size opening in the fence, and then to the rear of the parking structure behind the Bank of America.

They sat down to wait on the low concrete wall that enclosed the parking structure. Jeff glanced at his watch. It was 2:40. If Siren and Temptress closed at 2:00 and cleared people out on time, then it would take until around 2:45 or 3:00 to count all the money and get it ready to transport to the bank.

“It should take another fifteen, twenty minutes.”

Carrie opened her purse, took out a cigarette, and lit it.

“If you see anybody, hide behind this wall and don’t leave the butt here either. I saw a show on TV where they got somebody’s DNA from the filter.”

“There’s an ashtray right there with, like, fifty or sixty butts in it. Are they going to test all of them?”

“You think Bank of America doesn’t have the money?”

After an interval that indicated she was ignoring him, she put out the cigarette, then wrapped the butt in a tissue and put the tissue in her purse. That action seemed to remind her that she had a gun in there. She lifted the gun, looked down the barrel, removed the full magazine, and slid it back in. Then she handed the gun to Jeff. “Pull back that slide thing for me, will you? I don’t want to break a nail, and I need to crank a bullet into the chamber or it won’t work.”

“You don’t need a round in the chamber. We’re not shooting anybody.”

“Just do it, will you?” She held it out by the barrel.

He took it, chambered a round, and handed it back gingerly. “Just keep the safety on and be sure it doesn’t go off.”

“Thank you.” She put it back in her purse, took out another cigarette, and then pushed it back into the pack. She slid off the wall, moved quietly to the side of the bank building, and flattened herself against the wall. Jeff didn’t know whether she had seen someone or was just too excited to keep still.

A car pulled up and stopped by a parking space in front of the bank. Three large men got out of the car. They all wore dark suits, the kind that security people or pit bosses in casinos wore—work clothes for these men, tight-fitting and all the same. Two of the men were stocky Hispanics in their late twenties, with shaved heads and mustaches. The other was taller and less muscular, with red hair. He carried a maroon canvas bag like the one Jeff had taken from the older man a month ago, but this one was bulging as though it held more money than the last one. That was probably why there were three of them. His heartbeat began to speed up.

The two stocky, bald men turned toward the boulevard and scanned the sidewalks. When they did, Jeff could see that the backs of their necks were tattooed with some curly, unreadable writing. They backed up to flank the red-haired man as he approached the front of the bank building.

Jeff whispered in Carrie’s ear, “Stay here. I’m going around to the other side.” She nodded and whispered something back, so he set off around the building. He was already ten steps away from her before he realized what she’d said. It was “I’ll cover you,” just like in the movies. What did that even mean? He wasn’t sure, and he didn’t have time to guess. He had to be around the building before the three men put the canvas bag in the steel door contraption built into the wall of the bank.

Jeff reached the front corner of the building, tugged the ski mask over his head, then peeked around the building. The tall man had his arm extended, reaching for the handle of the night deposit door.

“Hold it,” he called. It was just the right sound level, because they all turned their heads toward him in a single motion. They saw he had his gun in his hand aimed in their general direction.

The red-haired man stared at him with a fierce watchfulness but lowered his hand away from the night deposit. He shifted the canvas bag from his right hand to his left, to free his gun hand.

“Drop your guns and the bag and step away from them,” Jeff said.

“You got to be kidding,” said the red-haired man. “There are three of us and one of you.”

Behind the man, Carrie’s head and right arm appeared at the corner of the building. Jeff was relieved.

“Look behind you,” he said.

The three men all half-turned to look, and Jeff sensed he should have said “slowly.” To Carrie it must have seemed that they were going to rush her or pull all three guns at once. She fired, the men jumped, and the noise made Jeff want to clap his hands to his ears.

Carrie seemed to enjoy the shooting. She was the first to re-cover her composure, so she pulled the trigger three times more. The first round hit the sidewalk and ricocheted up into the shin of one of the two short, bald men and dropped him to the pavement. Her second went wide and hit the brick façade of the bank. Chips flew near the night-deposit door. The redheaded man dropped the money bag and crouched, either to pick it up or to pull out a gun, as the third shot made the other short, bald man fall down. The redheaded man, seeing that his advantage had vanished, remained still. Carrie fired two more shots, one that hit the sidewalk in front of the redhead and stung him with tiny concrete fragments, and one that bounced off the brick wall of the coffee shop on the strip mall.

When she stopped firing, Jeff ventured out from behind the bank building. “Time’s up. What’s it going to be?” He felt that his voice had lost some of its authority and gone up an octave, but it seemed to be audible.

The red-haired man threw the canvas bag toward him and raised both hands. The other two men lay on the ground, blood pooling between them. Jeff kept his gun on the men, picked up the canvas bag, and retreated around the corner of the bank. He ran toward the parking structure but heard running feet ahead of him. He stopped and aimed at the sound, but the shape that dashed across his vision was small and female, so he followed her.

Carrie was surprisingly quick. She stayed ahead of him as he made his way along the side wall of the parking structure. Then he passed her and ran along the back walls of the buildings on the strip mall. There had been shots—loud, repeated shots—and the only way out now was to get into the car and be gone before the cops arrived.

He stepped up onto the pavement of the strip mall, ran for the human-sized gap in the chain-link fence and onto the big blacktop parking lot. The car seemed to be incredibly far away, sitting in the midst of the small group of cars in the splash of light near the grocery store and the pharmacy.

Now that Jeff was on empty asphalt and had a light ahead of him, he ran harder. He held the canvas bag cradled on his forearm like a football, pumping his arms and running on his toes, his head up and his strides lengthening with his momentum. As he left Carrie farther and farther behind, he ran even faster. When he was forty feet from his car, he took his keys from his pocket and pressed the remote-control key button, saw the dome light go on and the lock buttons pop up.

He flung the door open, ducked inside, started the car, then drove back the way he had run. He flicked his headlights on as he moved up on Carrie, then reached across the seat to paw the door handle down, and stopped abruptly so the door swung open beside her. She flopped onto the seat and he accelerated so her door slammed shut.

He glanced at her to be sure she wasn’t hurt. She had her knees on the floor and her elbows on the seat, and she was shaking, laughing uncontrollably.

Jeff drove to the farthest exit on the other side of the lot, pulled out to the left against the red light, and drove hard to get around the curve on Laurel Canyon to the freeway entrance past Moorpark. He swung onto the freeway heading east and accelerated, then looked at her again. “What the fuck are you laughing at?”

“It was just so amazing!” She climbed up onto her seat and fastened the seat belt. “It was the best. Thank you so, so much for taking me with you.”

“You are one crazy bitch. You could have got us both killed.”

“Am I? Thank you so much. This is the best night of my whole life!” She paused. “Is it? I think it is. Yes, it is!”

“Jesus.”

“My heart is still pounding like crazy and it won’t stop, you know?”

“Yeah.” He knew what she meant. He could feel his own pulse in his chest and his neck.

“And there’s blood, like, pumping its way into every part of me at once. The lights are actually brighter. Let’s go back to my house. I’ll give you the best sex of your life. That’s a promise.”

Jeff knew that Lila was going to be home from work soon, and she would want to see him waiting there for her. But through the upper part of the windshield he could see bright stars in the black sky, and as he pulled off the freeway, he opened his window to listen for sirens. There was still silence and the night smelled sweet. “I can stop in for a little while.”

J
ERRY GAFFNEY SNATCHED
Guzman’s gun from the ground and then yanked Corona’s out of his open hand and ran after the man and woman. When he reached the back of the parking structure behind the bank, he was sure that what they’d done was slide down the embankment above the Los Angeles River, then take a run along the paved path above the concrete riverbed and come up at the Whitsett Avenue Bridge. From there they could disappear across the river into the tennis courts, or maybe just disappear into the neighborhood. Their car would be parked somewhere on that side.

He ran the quarter mile to the bridge without seeing another human being. He was far from the bank and carrying three guns. By now the cops and maybe an ambulance would be on the way. Soon he would hear the sirens.

Gaffney hated having to get rid of three perfectly good guns that hadn’t even been fired, but there wasn’t much choice. He ran to the first apartment building after the Christian Science church on Whitsett, trotted along the side to the back of the building to the Dumpster, opened a plastic trash bag, and was overpowered by the fishy smell of cat food. He put the guns inside, retied the bag, and ran.

He ran back across the bridge to Ventura Boulevard, but he’d gone only a few feet on Ventura before he realized why there had been no sirens. The street in front of the bank was full of police cruisers and other official vehicles, all of them flashing bright red and blue lights. They all must have converged on the place silently from side streets, the way cops did on burglary calls.