“Yes,” Colley answered. It was still the truth. No need to lie, after all.
“Mm,” Teddy said.
There was another silence.
“Colley?” he said.
“Yeah?”
“When you split, is Jeanine going with you?”
“Yeah.”
“Where you going?”
“We thought Canada,” he said immediately and intuitively. Teddy was worried and Teddy was suspicious, and he did not want Teddy to know they were headed in the opposite direction, toward Florida. Teddy might dope it out for himself, but Colley wasn’t going to help him. He suddenly did not trust Teddy at all.
“So far, I’m the only one the cops ain’t on to,” Teddy said. “You they already made, and Jocko they’ll make from whatever shit he left on the Cobra. Me, there’s a chance they’ll ask around and people will say ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, the Jew with the glasses, yeah a good friend of Jocko’s, I seen them around a lot together.’ Or maybe the guy who set us up...”
“We don’t know for sure we were set up.”
“Well, if we were, okay? Before now he didn’t tell the cops who was going to do the job, he only told them it was coming off. But now a cop’s been killed, so he suddenly gets religion. He knows by now they already made you, so he figures he’ll score a couple of points with the law. Bango, he nails Jocko and me in the same breath. I’m saying maybe, Colley.”
“I follow you,” Colley said. “But I don’t think we were set up. I ain’t sure, but if that was the case...”
“I’m only saying maybe. On the other hand, let’s say it was a complete and total coincidence, okay? The bulls were in there waiting for anybody to hit, and we walked in out of the blue. Which means I’m clean. They know you, and they’re gonna know Jocko very soon, but they don’t know me, Colley.”
“That’s right.”
“So, Colley, do I have to worry?”
“About what?”
“About somebody dragging me in this thing where so far I’m clean?”
“Who’s gonna do that, Teddy?”
“You tell me.”
“Why would I drag you in it?”
“Make things easier for yourself,” Teddy said. “They pick you up, you might want to cop a plea.”
“You’re giving me ideas,” Colley said, and tried a laugh. Teddy did not laugh with him.
“Colley, I don’t want to have to worry about you.”
“You don’t have to worry.”
“Colley, I never done time in my life, and I don’t want to have to start worrying about it now. I got a wife and two kids, I don’t want to get fucked up this late in my life.”
“What do you want from me, Teddy?”
“I want your word, Colley. That if they pick you up, you don’t know who was driving the car, you never saw the driver in your life.”
“Yeah, okay, fine,” Colley said.
“You promise?”
“I promise, yeah. Relax, willya?”
“Because, Colley... I find out you snitched on me, I’ll make sure you don’t ever snitch on anybody else ever again. They send you to jail, Colley, they send me to jail, we could be in different jails a thousand miles apart, you’ll still be sorry you snitched. I got friends in every fuckin jail in this country, they’ll kill a man for a package of Bull Durham. I mean it, Colley.”
“That’s a good way to keep my friendship,” Colley said. “Threaten me, that’s a very good way.”
“It ain’t my fault this went wrong,” Teddy said. “I wasn’t in the store. It was you guys who fucked up. I coulda drove off, remember, but I came back to help you.”
“Thanks,” Colley said.
“Just remember,” Teddy said.
“The Three Musketeers,” Colley said.
“Yeah, bullshit,” Teddy said, and hung up.
Colley slammed down the receiver. From across the room, Jeanine was watching him.
“He’s worried, huh?” she said.
“Yeah. Fuck him,” Colley said, and went back to the dresser and began looking through the drawers again.
In the bottom drawer he found two guns: a Smith & Wesson .32 and a Walther P-38. He loved that German gun. He’d loved it even when he was seven or eight years old, and his mother took him to the movies with her and he saw pictures about World War II, with all those Nazis carrying this very sleek and deadly handgun. He knew the gun as a Luger in those days. He used to do a German imitation, hold his right hand out with the index finger extended, “You zee vot I am holdink here in mein handt? Dot’s a Luger, mein Herr, und I know how to use it.”
Stamped onto the metal just below the breech of the gun were the words Carl Walther Waffenfabrik Ulm/Do. He didn’t know what Waffenfabrik meant but he loved the look of the word, those fuckin Germans had style. Under that was stamped P-38 Cal. 9mm. The official name of the gun was the Walther P-38 Automatic, and the caliber was 9mm Luger, which is why there was a box of 9mm cartridges in the top drawer of the dresser. He hefted the gun in his hand, smiling. It was a beautiful piece, and Jocko had kept it in fine condition. Colley slipped the magazine out of the butt and loaded it with eight cartridges he took from the box in the drawer. He put another cartridge into the breechblock, and then tucked the gun into the left-hand side of his belt.
The .32 was not one of his favorites. The Model 30 was a six-shooter that came with either a two-, three- or four-inch barrel. This particular gun had a two-inch barrel, and Colley was grateful for that because it made it small enough to carry in the right-hand pocket of his pants. He had pulled his sports shirt out of his pants to cover the Walther, unbuttoning the two shirt buttons just above his belt so he could reach inside for a quick cross-draw. But the .32, even with the two-inch barrel, was a tough gun to carry tucked in your pants; you really needed a holster for it. There was no question of the sight snagging on anything in his pocket; it tapered back smoothly from the open end of the gun to a point midway between the muzzle and the cylinder. He rolled out the cylinder now, took six cartridges from the box in the drawer, loaded the gun, and then put it in his pants pocket.
He felt good again.
“Look,” Jeanine said, and turned toward the window. “The sun’s coming up.”
Jeanine was wearing a pleated white skirt and a lime-colored blouse that picked up the color of her eyes. A white scarf was wrapped low on her forehead, blond hair falling loose on either side of her face. She wore no stockings, and she drove the small red car with her handbag on the seat beside her, white leather to match her sandals. Her right hand rested on the handbag, just over the clasp. There was forty-seven dollars in that bag; Colley had watched her count it out earlier, when they were taking stock. The car was Jocko’s, a 1971 Pinto with New York plates. It had been parked in the lot behind the building, in the space allotted to apartment 5G. Jeanine was driving because Colley was a convicted felon on parole and the state wouldn’t grant him a license. Jeanine’s own license had been issued to her in Dallas, and was valid through September of that year.
Into a small valise Jeanine had brought up from Dallas, Colley had packed some of Jocko’s sweaters and shirts, a dozen handkerchiefs and six pairs of socks. Aside from the clothes he had on his back, that was it. In the right-hand side pocket of his trousers, he was carrying the Smith & Wesson. In the waistband of his trousers, on the left-hand side, he was carrying the Walther. The boxes of cartridges for both pistols were in the glove compartment, together with the registration for the car. Colley’s wallet was in his left-hand side pocket — the hip pocket was the sucker pocket, easily slashed with a razor blade; the best place to carry your stash was close to your balls, where you could feel anybody trying to lift it. Inside that wallet, there was sixteen dollars in cash — a ten, a five and a single. Together with what Jeanine had in the handbag, that gave them a total of sixty-three dollars. From the minute they counted up the cash this morning, Colley knew he would have to do another robbery. The only question was how soon. He thought about this all the way crosstown, and he thought about it on the way over the bridge into New Jersey. He did not want to do the robbery too early in the morning cause there’d be nothing in the till. But he wanted to do it while they were still in Jersey; he had relatives in Jersey, he’d been to Jersey before, it felt familiar to him. He was afraid of what lay beyond. He had studied the Mobil Guide map only briefly when they climbed into the car, and the names of those Southern states made him nervous.