“You do all that with the police up the street or maybe driving by, ’ey? Or somebody else that sees you?” Armand said. “You know why I told you about it? To see what you’d do. Now I’m gonna tell you not to think like that, not anymore till we get this business done.”
“You want me to think like you, huh?”
“I want you to take it easy, how you think.”
“I know you’re a cool fucker, Bird, but if that guy didn’t get you pissed there’s something wrong with you.”
“Sure he did,” Armand said. “The same as every time it ever happened in my life. But wait a minute, what do we have to think about right now? This guy at a gas station or two people can send us to prison?”
“I’d have still done something.”
“Listen to me. That guy at the gas station,” Armand said, tapping the side of his head with a finger, “I have him in here, I can go see him sometime if I want. Pay myself to do it. You understand? But we got this other thing to do first.” Armand touched his forehead now, tapping it with the tip of his finger. “We have to keep it here, in the front of our heads.”
Richie was stabbing the knife at the kitchen counter, trying to hit a crack in the vinyl surface. Like a kid, Armand thought. Don’t want to be told anything.
“Donna mentioned it was on the radio,” Richie said, stabbing away. “She listens to WSMA, this program called Tradio where you phone in and trade shit you don’t want no more. It’s where she got that pink robe. I go, ‘I thought you got it off the Salvation Army.’ She gets pissed you kid with her like that.”
“You through?” Armand said.
Richie looked up, the knife poised. “Am I through what?”
“Donna mention something was on the radio.”
“Oh, yeah, about the Seven-Eleven was robbed, suppose to be they said a couple hundred was taken. Bullshit, it was forty-two bucks, worst score I ever made. No, shit, I take that back. I only got twenty-eight bucks once, place down in Mississippi.”
“You told Donna it was you?”
“No, she kept talking about the girl being shot, did I hear about it, hinting around.” Richie was stabbing at the counter again. I just go, ‘Oh, uh-huh, an armed robbery, imagine that.’ See, Donna, she might suspect it was me, but it’s talking about it I think turns her on. The idea of a hardcase going in there with a gun. In her life, I bet she’s known more guys that packed one time or another than didn’t.”
“Guys in prison,” Armand said.
“Yeah, in the joint.”
“Dumb guys that got caught.”
“Hey, it can happen to anybody.”
“Not to me,” Armand said. “Listen, you gonna pick up a car tonight.”
“We got a car.”
“This is a clean one, with papers. You take the van, leave it someplace in Detroit to get stolen, like you said, and pick up this one we don’t have to worry about cops looking for.” Armand could tell from Richie’s stupid grin he liked the idea, showing some respect for a change.
“You’re a slick guy, Bird, you know it? How’d you work that?”
“How do I do something like this, I make a phone call,” Armand said. “It’s what I don’t do is the difference, what you have to learn. I don’t leave my sunglasses someplace, I don’t leave my fingerprints, I don’t do nothing ’less I work it out first and I’m sure.” He saw Donna in the hall, a glimpse of her in the pink robe going from the bathroom to the bedroom. “Then all you have to do,” Armand said, “is walk in, walk out.”
It was half-past nine. Carmen and Wayne were sitting in the living room with lamps turned on talking about a thirty-four-year-old wanted criminal named Richie Nix, referring to a “detainer list” the FBI man had shown them: the detainers indicating crimes he was wanted for in several different states, armed robbery and capital murder.
“What I can’t figure out,” Wayne said, “he’s been doing this for, what, about twenty years. He was in the Wayne County Youth Home when he was fifteen, a few years later he robs a package store in Florida, does something else in Georgia, goes to prison . . .”
Wayne stopped as a spotlight hit both windows from outside and flashed again in the foyer, on the oval glass panel in the front door. There was a silence. Wayne got up from the sofa, walked to a window and looked out.
“They’re about five minutes late.”
Carmen sat in a rocking chair they’d bought unfinished in Kentucky one winter, coming back from Florida. She had stained the chair with a clear varnish and made an olive green pad for it.
“Why get worked up? They’re doing their job.”
“What? Shining spots on the windows?”
She watched him walk back to the sofa, fall into it and stick out his blue-jean legs, the heels of his work shoes resting in the rag carpeting. They had furnished the place without much thought, farmhouse traditional; Carmen was tired of it.
“You realize we’re actually sitting here talking without the TV on? We haven’t done this since you watched me strip the woodwork.”
It reminded her again, she wanted to do something with the living room, liven it up. Keep the rocker, paint it a bright color, but get rid of that old green plaid sofa, and the duck prints her mom had given them as a combined present, housewarming and Wayne’s birthday, a month late. Her gaze moved to Wayne. She liked to look at him and wait for him to become aware of it. Their eyes would meet and they’d see how long they could stare at each other without smiling—until Carmen would do something like running the tip of her tongue over her lips or she might stick a finger in her nose.
“You want to go to bed?”
He looked over. “It’s early.”
They stared for a moment. He said, “We haven’t done much making out lately, have we?”
“It’s been days. Not even hugs and kisses,” Carmen said. The way he shook his head she could tell he was thinking of something else. “What is it you can’t figure out? You started to say something about Richie Nix, his record, he went to prison . . .”
“That’s right—three times and they let him out,” Wayne said, getting back into it. “He’s in a federal prison, he sees a guy stabbed to death, he testifies at the guy’s trial that did it and they put him in the Witness Protection Program.”
“It was his cellmate,” Carmen said, “the one that was murdered. I meant to ask Scallen about that—you notice he called it the Witness Security Program.” She saw Wayne anxious for her to finish. “But that’s beside the point.”
“I don’t know,” Wayne said. “The thing I don’t understand, here he’s supposed to be in prison for something like twenty years, am I right?”
“He was already there a few years when it happened.”
“Yeah, a few. Now they say they have to protect him, in case the guy’s buddies he testified against tried to get him. So they put him in the witness program and let him out. How can they do that?”
Carmen paused, seeing the FBI man in the kitchen talking quietly to them about a man who robbed and killed and another who was paid to kill. “I don’t think he said Richie got out, not right away. No, that’s when he was transferred to Huron Valley. He was in the witness program while he was in prison, I think three more years, and then for a little while after, till he committed a crime.” She had to add, “And that disqualified him. So all these detainers Scallen showed us, the crimes Richie Nix is wanted for now, are things he did in the last couple of years.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Wayne said. “They let him out and he starts killing people. He gets a job through a friend, what does he do? He shoots the guy and takes off.”
“There was one before his friend,” Carmen said, “another one he shot, in Detroit.”
“Yeah, he gets out—he’s pulling robberies and all of a sudden he’s killing people, too. You go down the detainer list, robbed a package store in Dayton, Ohio, shot and killed the store employee. All those others, in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, shot and killed store employee, every one of them. He finds out from Lionel where we live—that must’ve been what happened—and shoots him three times. He didn’t have to kill him. The girl in the store, she didn’t have a gun or anything, she’s a seventeenyear-old girl. He takes the money and shoots her in the head. Why does a guy like that all of a sudden start killing people?”