Strip (34 page)

“I showed him my face.”

“The guy who does the robberies wears a mask.”

“Kapak never said that.”

“He was pissed off. Before you came to his house, you had already wrecked two Hummers with the crane.”

“I scared a few of his guys and took some money. I could have done worse.”

“You’re reminding me that you can kill me.”

“I can, but I don’t plan to.”

“Why not?”

“That’s not what I want. Look, I’ve had to move around a bit over the past couple of years, and I didn’t like it. I want to stay in Los Angeles, and I don’t want to have to kill anyone to do it. But if I have to, I remember how.”

“I can see you’d be fairly good at it.”

“I’m looking for a different idea,” Carver said. “Why don’t you and I talk for a bit?”

“With a shotgun on me?”

“I told you I won’t kill you.”

“My rifle is on the chair over there, and you could see I hadn’t loaded it yet.”

Carver sighed. “There’s a pistol in your jacket. That’s fine if it makes you feel better. My shotgun means it doesn’t matter. At this range I’d be able to see through the hole in you.”

“I won’t try for it. I’m not a killer either.”

“Kapak acts as though you are.”

“I killed a guy once, and Kapak found out. A girl I knew, a close friend of mine from school, got raped and murdered. The guy went to trial and got convicted. The verdict was overturned because of mishandled evidence. The only family this girl had was a mother and two little sisters, so it was up to me. I found out the killer was moving out to southern California, so I came and waited for him.”

“And today you were waiting to get me.”

“I’m starting not to be entirely happy about that. I think you didn’t rob Kapak, which means we’ve been chasing you around for nothing.”

“But you’ll do it anyway?”

“No, I won’t. I’m thinking you and I ought to try something different.”

C
ARRIE ROLLED CLOSE
to Jeff on the bed and propped her head on her hand. “You know what I think we need?”

He lay on his back feeling his breathing slowly returning to normal. He had a strong urge to keep his eyes closed, not answer, and doze off.

“You know what we need?” she repeated.

“I wasn’t planning to guess. Maybe you could get it and surprise me.”

“A machine gun.”

“Why not an atomic bomb?”

“Because it’s not practical.”

“I’m not so sure. We could get one of those little ones that you can carry in a briefcase—the kind that only blows up the city and not the whole state. We could go up to somebody, hand it to him and say, ‘Hold this for me.’ Then we’d drive away, and when we got to the next state, blow them up. Next time we had a briefcase we’d get some respect.”

“You’re making a joke out of this.”

“A machine gun
is
a joke. What would you do with it?”

“Say I walked into a bank with one. I could fire a burst into the ceiling, maybe ten or twelve rounds, and say, ‘Give me the money.’ I’ll bet people would give me the money.”

“Sounds like the 1920s.”

“I don’t mean one of those old-fashioned ones with the magazine that looks like a big disk. I mean the modern kind, the ones that soldiers carry in battle.”

“Very good choice. You’re a truly scary person and you’ve outdone yourself this time.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. There’s a big difference between sticking up an old man with a sack of cash in the street outside a bank in the middle of the night and going into the actual bank and holding it up during business hours. The first is relatively easy and not very dangerous. The second is the opposite: hard to do at all, and very risky. They have armed guards, surveillance cameras, silent alarms, bulletproof glass. If you succeed, they’ll try to slip you a bag of money that blows up and covers you with indelible ink.”

“See? That’s why a machine gun is so useful. This is just taking a rational look at all of the bank’s defenses and thinking of a single way of defeating them—fear.”

“Then the nuclear bomb would be more like it. And if we had to use it, there wouldn’t be any witnesses for miles.”

“That again?”

“Every year, thousands of banks get robbed. And every year, thousands of bank robbers get caught. The failure rate is one of the things you have to look into when you want to commit a crime. You look at what your chances are of getting caught. For bank robbery it’s like ninety-nine percent.”

“Well, what’s your idea of a better crime?”

“Let’s see. White-collar stuff. They only catch, like, ten percent of tax evaders, maybe one percent of people who sell fake designer clothes. Even murderers-for-hire get caught only about sixty percent of the time, and that’s because their client is married to the victim.”

“I don’t think we’re ready to do murders for hire.”

“That’s a relief. I like working for myself.”

“I mean no murders at all. Look, baby. What you’ve been doing lately is like a childish prank—robbing one business over and over. We’re going to have to grow up.”

He opened one eye and looked at her. “In what sense?”

“Let me describe what you do. You pull a small robbery and get maybe twenty thousand dollars if you’re lucky. Then you spend the next couple of months going out all night, drinking and picking up girls, and sleeping all day until the money is gone.”

“I haven’t picked up any girls since I met you.”

“I’m describing nature. A giraffe is a giraffe, and it eats leaves, whether it’s eating leaves right now or not.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

“Sure.”

“Do you also see what’s wrong with it?”

“Eating leaves?”

“No.”

“Picking up girls?”

“No again.” With her free hand she swung her pillow in a rapid arc downward onto his head like a sack of disdain. “There’s no progress. Every month or two, you start all over again with nothing.”

He pushed the pillow off his face. “I’ve made great progress lately.”

“You have?”

“Sure. Now when I go out all night and sleep all day, I’ve got you with me. That’s a big improvement. And now, instead of twenty thousand, we’ve got, like, eighty thousand in cash. We could go on like this for a long time, since there’s no need to flash a lot of big bills picking up girls. You
are
one already, and we only need one.”

“It’s just over a hundred and twenty thousand.”

“The money?”

“Yes. You don’t even count it, do you?”

“No. That’s the whole point of being a bandito. You don’t have to count your money.”

“Are you challenged by arithmetic?”

“No, but I’ve thought about this.”

“No, you haven’t.” She sat and glared at him for a few seconds. “What is it?”

“Limits. If I count the money and match it off against a certain number of days, then there are things I can’t do, can’t afford. If I don’t, then I’m free. If I want something, I buy it. I know that when I need to, I can get more money. I give up knowing exactly how many dollars are in the bag at every moment in exchange for not having to know. It’s a good deal.”

She looked at him in alarm. “Oh my God. You’re starting to sound smart, like a wandering Zen master or something. Let me get over that feeling. It’ll take a minute.”

“Take your time.”

She sat motionless for a few seconds, then stood up. “I can’t take my time. This brings me to another topic that’s loosely related, and urgent.”

“What is it?”

“I know you hate it when there’s something you ought to know, but I don’t tell you.”

“No, I don’t.”

“This you would.”

“Is it your boyfriend?”

She got up off the bed and looked down at him, her eyes wide with surprise. “Yes.”

“What about him?”

“He’s flying into LAX in just over—oops, just under—three hours. When he gets there, he’s going to pick up his suitcase at the baggage claim, and he’s going to want someplace to put it.”

“Like your house.”

“It’s his house, technically.”

“What’s the technicality?”

“He bought it and paid for it, his name is on the deed, and he lived here before I met him.”

“Three hours isn’t a lot of time.”

“No.”

“So I assume you know what you’re going to do.”

“I’ve been avoiding thinking about it as long as I could.”

“Are you going to choose between him and me?”

“Didn’t you hear me just five minutes ago talking about our future?”

“That’s not an answer.”

“At first I was going to stay with him and see you on the side just for a treat once in a while, but then I asked myself why, if you can have the treat all the time, you wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t think of an answer, so I’ve decided you’re the keeper.”

“Is this guy violent?”

“Well, you know how guys are. Once they find out somebody else has been there too, if you know what I mean, it makes them all hormonal.”

“You could kill me and tell him I’m a burglar.”

“Keep trying.”

“We could kill each other. He’d feel responsible.”

“Please stop with the killing. It’s making me upset.”

“We could skip all the way back to Plan A, which is to pack up fast and run away.”

“Shouldn’t that have been the first thing you said? I mean, if it is Plan A.”

“It’s not a good idea to settle for the obvious right away, without exploring other options.”

“Let’s get the heck out of here,” she said. She went to her dresser and began putting on clothes. As she opened a drawer and put on a garment, she would take all the others like it and set them in a pile on the bed. When she came to the closet, she took out a large suitcase, opened it, and began placing the piles of folded clothes inside.

When it looked as though the suitcase was completely full, she went into the next room and returned with a lot of bills, canceled checks, and papers. “Can’t leave these papers here. I don’t want him tracing us and turning up later.”

“He would do that?”

“I’m out of space. Can you fit the bag of money in your suitcase?”

“I’ll try to find room.” He didn’t like the way she changed the subject, but it told him the answer. He quickly got his suitcase out of the closet, tossed his clothes into it, and then unhooked the big laundry bag from the hook on the door, put it in on top, then closed and zipped the suitcase.

“Are you just about ready?”

“Yes,” he said. “Want to take one last look around? I’d sure hate to have to come back while he’s home and ask him for your great-grandma’s cameo brooch.”

“Don’t worry. I already did my walk-through yesterday.”

He picked up his suitcase, then hers, and walked to the door. As he set the suitcases down to open it, he turned to her and said, “But you didn’t take anything that wasn’t, strictly speaking, yours, right?”

The door swung open, hit the two suitcases and knocked them over onto the floor. Jeff had just enough time to leap backward before the man who had applied the force to the door came after it. Jeff had time to see a shaved head, a patch of black beard, a wide mouth with bared teeth, as the charging man tripped over the suitcases and belly-flopped past him onto the kitchen floor.

Jeff said, “Hold on, now. We don’t need to do this. We can talk like grownups,” by which he meant “Don’t hurt me.”

The man rolled and his legs scissored at Jeff’s calves to trip him to the floor.

Jeff jumped up and backward to avoid the legs, but he hit his back on the wall and dropped straight down onto the man’s ankle.

“Yaaah!” the man howled. “You son of a bitch! I’ll kill you!”

“No, Roger! He didn’t do anything to you,” Carrie said. Jeff felt in his heart that this wasn’t exactly true, but said nothing.

The man snarled through clenched teeth, “In a minute you’ll be wearing his balls for a necklace.”

“Stop it, Roger. He didn’t know you existed.”

“But he’ll remember me forever.” With frightening agility, the big man rose to a crouch and sprang at Jeff, his arms wide to gather him in.

Jeff could see that he would not escape the span of stretched muscles and big, grasping hands. He reacted in a reflex to protect himself from the tackle. He lunged forward between the arms and lifted his right knee as he pounded both forearms into the back of the man’s head, hammering the head downward to meet his knee with considerable force. He half-heard and half-felt the man’s nose break.

The man’s momentum expended itself, plowing both of them into the kitchen counter. Jeff toppled, and the man’s arms closed on his waist in a powerful clamp. As Jeff hit the floor, Carrie shrieked, and he could already feel the man’s hands clawing their way up his body toward his throat.

“Don’t kill him!” Carrie shrieked.

He raised his left forearm to keep the man’s clawlike grasp from closing on his throat. With his right fist he delivered a series of short, hard punches to the man’s face and left ear.

The man released his grip and raised his arm to fend off Jeff’s right hand and turned his face away. Jeff used the moment to give a great, wrenching turn to speed him in that direction, scrambled away, and got to his feet.

The man was still so unimpressed with Jeff that as he too rose, he barely looked in Jeff’s direction. Instead, he glared at Carrie while he touched his bleeding nose tentatively, and then his battered left ear.

Jeff had no hope now of escaping the fight or ending it. All he could see was the inviting sight of the big man’s momentary inattention. He advanced and delivered eight rapid punches, throwing each as he pushed from his back foot, so he battered the man backward with each one, until the man was pinned against the front of the stove.

Jeff felt the elation of battle, the hard, clean impact as his fists struck again and again in adrenaline-fueled fury. But slowly, he began to sense that something was not right. The exertion of pounding this man was making his arms tired. As he hit the man, he could see that the swollen eyes were open and watching him. There was a cold, reptilian quality to the way the eyes held him.

He hadn’t seen it before, but there was no question of what it was. The big man was watching, waiting for him to wear himself out. In another few minutes, Jeff would barely be able to hold his arms up, barely be able to dance to avoid the thick arms. But when that moment came, the big man might be marked and bruised, but he would not be exhausted. He would still be able to fight. It would be his turn.