When Howie’s car pulled up she was ready. She crouched by the doorway, gun in hand, waiting. The car door flew open and she heard his footsteps on the gravel path. He pulled the door open, calling out jubilantly that it had gone like clockwork, just like clockwork, then he caught sight of Ray’s corpse on the floor and did a fantastic double take. When he saw her and the gun, he started to say something, but she emptied the gun into him, four bullets, one after the other, and all of them hit him and they worked; he fell; he died.
She got the bag of money out of his hand before he could bleed on it.
The rest wasn’t too difficult. She took the rope with which she’d been tied and rubbed it back and forth on the chair leg until it finally frayed through. Behind the cabin she found a toolshed. She used a shovel, dug a shallow pit, dropped the money into it, filled in the hole. She carried the gun down to the water’s edge, wiped it free of fingerprints, and heaved it into the creek.
Finally, when just the right amount of time had passed, she walked out to the highway and kept going until she found a telephone, a highway emergency booth.
“Just stay right where you are,” her father said. “Don’t call the police. I’ll come for you.”
“Hurry. Daddy. I’m so scared.”
He picked her up. She was shaking, and he held her in his arms and soothed her.
“I was so frightened,” she said. “And then when the one man came back with the ransom money, the other man took out a gun and shot him and the third man, and then the man who did the shooting, he and the woman ran away in their other car. I was sure they were going to kill me but the man said not to bother, the gun was empty and it didn’t matter now. The woman wanted to kill me with the knife but she didn’t. I was sure she would. Oh, Daddy—”
“It’s all right now,” he said. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
She showed him the cabin and the two dead men and the rope. “It took me forever to get out of it,” she said. “But I saw in the movies how you can work your way out, and I wasn’t tied too tight, so I managed to do it.”
“You’re a brave girl, Carole.”
On the way home he said, “I’m not going to call the police, Carole. I don’t want to subject you to a lot of horrible questioning. Sooner or later they’ll find those two in the cabin, but that has nothing to do with us. They’ll just find two dead criminals, and the world’s better off without them.” He thought for a moment. “Besides,” he added, “I’m sure I’d have a hard time explaining where I got that money.”
“Did they get very much?”
“Only ten thousand dollars,” he said.
“I thought they asked for more.”
“Well, after I explained that I didn’t have anything like that around the house they listened to reason.”
“I see,” she said.
You old liar, she thought, it was a hundred thousand dollars, and I know it. And it’s mine now. Mine.
“Ten thousand dollars is a lot of money,” she said. “I mean, it’s a lot for you to lose.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“If you called the police, maybe they could get it back.”
He shuddered visibly, and she held back laughter. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “All that matters is that we got you back safe and sound. That’s more important than all the money in the world.”
“Oh, Daddy,” she said, hugging him, “oh, I love you, I love you so much!”
Nothing Short of Highway Robbery
I eased up on the gas pedal a few hundred yards ahead of the service station. I was putting the brakes on when my brother Newton opened his eyes and straightened up in his seat.
“We haven’t got but a gallon of gas left if we got that much,” I told him. “And there’s nothing out ahead of us but a hundred miles of sand and a whole lot of cactus, and I already seen enough cactus to last me a spell.”
He smothered a yawn with the back of his hand. “Guess I went and fell asleep,” he said.
“Guess you did.”
He yawned again while a fellow a few years older’n us came off of the front porch of the house and walked our way, moving slow, taking his time. He was wearing a broad-brimmed white hat against the sun and a pair of bib overalls. The house wasn’t much, a one-story clapboard structure with a flat roof. The garage alongside it must have been built at the same time and designed by the same man.
He came around to my side and I told him to fill the tank. “Regular,” I said.
He shook his head. “High-test is all I got,” he said. “That be all right?”
I nodded and he went around the car and commenced unscrewing the gas cap. “Only carries high-test,” I said, not wildly happy about it.
“It’ll burn as good as the regular, Vern.”
“I guess I know that. I guess I know it’s another five cents a gallon or another dollar bill on a tankful of gas, and don’t you just bet that’s why he does it that way? Because what the hell can you do if you want regular? This bird’s the only game in town.”
“Well, I don’t guess a dollar’ll break us, Vern.”
I said I guessed not and I took a look around. The pump wasn’t so far to the rear that I couldn’t get a look at it, and when I did I saw the price per gallon, and it wasn’t just an extra nickel that old boy was taking from us. His high-test was priced a good twelve cents a gallon over everybody else’s high-test.
I pointed this out to my brother and did some quick sums in my head. Twelve cents plus a nickel times, say, twenty gallons was three dollars and forty cents. I said, “Damn, Newton, you know how I hate being played for a fool.”
“Well, maybe he’s got his higher costs and all. Being out in the middle of nowhere and all, little town like this.”
“Town? Where’s the town at? Where we are ain’t nothing but a wide place in the road.”
And that was really all it was. Not even a crossroads, just the frame house and the garage alongside it, and on the other side of the road a cafe with a sign advertising home-cooked food and package goods. A couple cars over by the garage, two of them with their hoods up and various parts missing from them. Another car parked over by the cafe.
“Newt,” I said, “you ever see a softer place’n this?”
“Don’t even think about it.”
“Not thinking about a thing. Just mentioning.”
“We don’t bother with nickels and dimes no more, Vernon. We agreed on that. By tonight we’ll be in Silver City. Johnny Mack Lee’s already there and first thing in the morning we’ll be taking that bank off slicker’n a bald tire. You know all that.”
“I know.”
“So don’t be exercising your mind over nickels and dimes.”
“Oh, I know it,” I said. “Only we could use some kind of money pretty soon. What have we got left? Hundred dollars?”
“Little better than that.”
“Not much better, though.”
“Well, tomorrow’s payday,” Newt said.
I knew he was right but it’s a habit a man gets into, looking at a place and figuring how he would go about taking it off. Me and Newt, we always had a feeling for places like filling stations and liquor stores and 7-Eleven stores and like that. You just take ’em off nice and easy, you get in and get out and a man can make a living that way. Like the saying goes, it don’t pay much but it’s regular.