Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (23 page)

           
There’s no way out, Frank thought.
But somewhere, at some point, I’ve got to protect myself. Joey’s a nasty piece
of shit. I shouldn’t be here with him at all, but here I am.
^cc
We’ll
have to drive the route,” he said. “See what looks good.”

           
“Okay, Frank,” Joey said. “And I’ll
get the hand grenade, too. Just in case.”

*
 
*
 
*

           
As it turned out, they did use the
hand grenade, but not in the way Joey had in mind. A hand grenade, yes, but
nonviolent.

           
The situation was, out around
Smithton and Floraville, another area where the old man had a long empty ride
between pickups, at an intersection in farm country, there was a stop sign.
That was where they took him over, running out from both sides of the road as
he halted, pulling the ski masks down over their faces, Frank pulling open the
driver’s door as Joey hurled himself into the car on the passenger side, put
his hands on the old man, and yanked him out from behind the wheel. The old man
screamed, and Frank got his hands on the wheel, his right foot on the
accelerator, and they shot out into the intersection, swinging around hard to
the right.

           
The old man was yelling—what are you
doing, are you crazy, do you know whose car this is, all this shit—and Joey
cuffed him across the head to shut him up, the three of them wedged together in
the front seat. Frank didn’t look in the rearview mirror, not wanting to know
how close that other car was; it would be on their asses, he knew that much,
coming along at top speed.

           
The narrow farm road was another
right turn. Frank was so keyed up, so nervous about this part of it, that he
almost took the turn too hard and rammed them into a tree. But he recovered,
the tires digging into the oiled-gravel surface, spraying stones everywhere as
they jolted on down the empty road, and when now he did dare look in the mirror
that other car, a gray Toyota, was way the hell and gone behind them, a lot
farther than he would have thought. Perfect.

           
The little bridge was a mile down
this road, over a fastrunning shallow boulder-strewn stream; Frank slammed on
the brakes and they shuddered to a stop on the bridge, the terrified old man
pressing his palms against the dashboard to keep from going out the windshield.
Frank glared past him at Joey, screwing around with the hand grenade: “Drop the
fucking thing, Joey!”

           
“Bight! Bight!” Joey dropped the
grenade out the window, throwing the pin after it. Frank accelerated, and in
the mirror he saw the roadway back there suddenly produce a red and yellow
bouquet of flame, with black leaves of smoke. The chasing
Toyota
spun and shuddered and squealed to a stop,
short of the explosion. The road gaped open over the stream. Nobody would be
driving down this way any more today.

           
The beat-up old pickup truck Frank
had stolen this morning was still there behind the burned-out shell of an old
farmhouse. Frank steered in next to it, pulled the key from the ignition, and
jumped from the car. Fie hadn’t taken anything today, not even a beer, but he
was all hopped-up, adrenaline pumping through him. Fie almost felt as though,
if he were to speak, his voice would come out all high-pitched and weird, like
somebody who’s been sniffing helium. Fie couldn’t keep still, but had to go
over and touch the pickup, then bounce back to the car, where Joey was still
backing out, looking in at the old man. “Shit,” Joey said.

           
Frank paid no attention. The hard
fast driving is what had keyed him up like this. If he held a light bulb it
would glow, he knew it would. “He can stay in there,” he said, talking over the
top of the car at Joey. “He can stay in there till we’re gone.”

           
“Oh, yeah, he’ll stay in there,”
Joey said. “You’re fucking right he will.”

           
Something in Joey’s voice finally
caught Frank’s attention, and he bent to look through the open driver’s door at
the old man, who had gone on sitting in there, tilted slighdy to the left now,
staring out the windshield as though they were still doing eighty-five down the
farm road. “Aw, Christ,” Frank said, seeing the old guy stare, seeing how his
mouth hung open, how his hands were curled in his lap, how he didn’t move.
Straightening, feeling like shit, he again looked across the top of the car at
Joey.
^cc
We gave him a heart attack or something.”

           
Joey’s response was to reach up and
pull the ski mask off and throw it on the ground, revealing his heavy face
covered with gleaming sweat. “One less problem,” he said. “Open the trunk,
Frank.”

           
One less problem. What a scumbag.
Get away from this creep, Frank told himself, do it the first chance you get.

           
Stripping off his own ski mask, he
moved to the back of the car and used the key still in his hand to unlock the
trunk, now leaving the key chain to dangle from the lock as he lifted the trunk
and looked inside.

           
Bags, boxes. All jumbled in there
with an umbrella and a can of STP and some other junk and the spare. Bags,
boxes. Money.

           
“Well, here it is,” Frank said,
feeling heavy in his mind because of the old man. He reached in for a shoe box,
glancing over at Joey, and Joey had a little shitty .22 in his hand. “Oh, you
fuckhead!” Frank cried, and threw the shoe box as Joey fired, and the bullet
zzizzed away into the world like a bee.

           
The cocksucker’s gonna kill me,
Frank thought, disgusted and scared and tired of the whole fucking thing, as he
bent and ran down the side of the car, knowing Joey was coming around the trunk
after him. Me with nothing, and no time, and nowhere to go, and he can’t miss
me every time with that fucking gun.

           
The old man. Frank reached in and
gave him a yank and pulled him out of the car, holding him up against himself
like a dress he was testing to see if it was the right size, holding the old
man’s body with his left arm around the chest, forearm up along the chest, hand
around the old man’s wrinkled neck, pressing that body close while his right
hand frisked the guy's pockets and Joey came around the back of the car, the
.22 held out in front of himself. He looked angry and pestered when he saw
Frank standing there holding the old man up in front of himself. “What the fuck
are you doing, Frank? Put the old guy down!”

           
“Fuck you, Joey.”

           
Frank backed slowly away, afraid of
tripping over something, patting and patting the old guy's clothes, feeling
something in the right side coat pocket. Let it not be a roll of quarters,
okay, God?

           
Joey tried a shot at Frank’s head,
but couldn’t see enough of it. Frustrated and angry, moving forward after
Frank, he pumped two shots into the old man’s body, but a .22 doesn’t deliver
much of a wallop. He should have brought a .45; that would go through the old
man and Frank and the tree behind him. But the .22 just made the old man’s body
bump against Frank, as though he had the hiccups.

           
And Frank’s hand was in that pocket,
as Joey trotted toward him now, wanting to be close enough to bring him down
regardless of the old man. Frank’s hand was in the pocket, and closing on it,
and bringing it out, and it was a Smith & Wesson Chiefs Special .38
revolver. He stuck his right arm out, pointing at Joey’s astonished face as
though to say,
The joke’s on you, Joey!
And
scrambled his brains with two shots into that fat skull.

*
 
*
 
*

           
Switch license plates, pickup and
the old man’s car. Throw all the boxes and bags into the pickup cab, on the
floor and passenger seat. Drive like hell, don’t slow down, don’t even think,
until outside
Terre Haute
,
Indiana
. Swipe a Honda off the street there, moving
all the goddamn boxes and bags into its backseat, head for
Indianapolis
. Along the way, suddenly get the shakes,
terrible shakes. Pull the car off the road, go behind some bushes, throw up,
have diarrhea, cold sweats, uncontrollable trembling, blinding headache. Clean
up a little, crawl back to the Honda, sit in there as weak as a kitten, finally
get it moving again, go on to Indianapolis, around to Weir Cook Airport there. Go
into the long-term parking, get the ticket on the way in, drive around, find a
nice Chevy Celebrity with no dust on the windshield—so it hasn’t been here
long, in the longterm lot—pull in next to it, switch the goods to the Chevy’s
backseat, drive on out of there (little joke with the tolltaker about being in
the wrong lot), head on into Indianapolis and buy a big cheap suitcase there.
Then push the Chevy across
Indiana
and into the night, keep the foot hard on the accelerator until Welcome
to
Ohio
. Three hundred twenty miles and two states
away. Find a motel northwest of
Dayton
, put all the bags and boxes into the big
new suitcase and schlep it into the room. Take a long shower. Stand there in
the running hot water, thinking about childhood; haven’t thought about that
shit for years. Think and think, remembering all different kinds of stuff,
everything lost and gone. Cry a little in the shower, face all snotty. Tap the
forehead against the tiles a little. But what’s the use? Nothing to be done,
right? You’re where you are, and that’s where you are.

           
Frank turned off the water and
stepped out of the shower. Life goes on.

*
 
*
 
*

           
Frank’s underwear hung on the
radiator, his socks were draped over a lampshade to dry in the heat from the
bulb, and his shirt hung from the swag chain next to the hanging lamp over the
round fake-wood veneer table. Wearing a motel towel, he called a couple of
places that in the local phone book claimed they’d deliver food twenty-four
hours a day. Three didn’t answer, one said the motel was too far away, and then
a pizza place said they’d do it, but he’d have to pay a ten-dollar delivery
fee, and it would take a minimum of forty-five minutes. “Sure,” Frank said.
“Room 129.”

           
He wasn’t even sure he could eat.
His stomach hurt, all right, but not like normal hunger, though he hadn’t eaten
anything now for maybe fourteen hours. But sooner or later this reaction to the
incident with Joey and the old man would have to wear off, and
then
he’d be hungry.

           
Meantime, he opened the boxes and
bags, stacking the money on the round table, adding it up, and it came to
$57,820. Less than the eighty grand he’d been promised, but more than the half
that would have been his share if Joey hadn’t been such a total unrelieved
piece of shit.

           
He kept out a couple hundred for
use, and when he stuffed it in his wallet he noticed that card in there from
the lady lawyer in
Nebraska
. Mary Ann Kelleny. Well, she wouldn’t be much help in
Ohio
—or in
Illinois
, either, come to that—but still he hung on
to the card. She’d been okay, Mary Ann Kelleny. The only decent thing that had
happened to him since he’d got out this last time.

           
He remembered her advice: don’t do
the little jobs, do one great big job. Okay, Mary Ann, I did one great big job,
and it wasn’t all that great, okay? Granted, it wasn’t five million, but I can
retire for a
while
anyway, on
fifty-seven grand. Is that what you had in mind, Mary Ann?

           
Grinning at the idea of how the lady
lawyer would react if she’d known how literally he was taking her advice, Frank
put the rest of the money back into the suitcase, stacking it in rows. It took
about half the space now as when it had been in all the different kinds of
packages.

           
The old guy probably had
grandchildren. He probably had candy in some of his other pockets.

           
Sure. At least he’d had a gun, there
was that to say for him. No longer smiling, Frank put the gun in the suitcase
with the money, and closed the suitcase, and put it on the floor in the
doorless closet.

           
He wasn’t sure why he was keeping
the gun. He still didn’t believe in violence, in fact more than ever he didn’t
believe in it, but now he’d been
in
violence, and somehow everything was changed. Of course he’d been around
violence all his life, in the pen and on the streets, but never in that personal
horrible way. It had been
around
him,
but he’d never been in the middle of it, doing it and receiving it, feeling the
bullets thud into a dead man’s body,
using
a dead man’s body like that. A simple burglar, slides in, slides out, like a
raccoon in the attic; that’s what he was, that’s all he’d ever hoped to be. But
now it was different. It was changed. He was in an altered landscape now, one
he didn’t know about yet, and the gun was his talisman.