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 long-term 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.