“You see Cushing?” Barney said.
“Huh-uh.”
“I didn’t, either.”
I asked him for a cigarette and when I got it going, I told him what the chief had said, about the found money maybe belonging to the bank robber.
“No wonder Cushing’s following us,” Barney said.
“He probably thinks we can lead him to the robbery money.”
“And to the robber. Wouldn’t he get some kind of award?”
“Reward, Barney. You always say that. It’s reward.”
“Up yours.”
“Spoken like a truly mature person.”
Barney said, “How we gonna get to Roy without Cushing finding out?”
“We’ll just have to be careful.”
He poked the sack. “You swipe him some pretty good stuff?”
“He’s probably so hungry he’d eat shoe leather.”
“You wanna go?”
“Let’s look for Cushing first.”
One nice thing about the clubhouse, you’ve got spy holes all over the place. I wish my house had a few spy holes, too. You never know when they’ll come in handy.
Barney took one wall and I took the other. We both looked for any sign of Cushing’s car. But there was just blanched prairie and the burning malodorous city dump and small frame houses on this particular edge of town.
So we went. We cut wide around the dump, Barney saying what he always said (“I’ll bet there’s a lot of valuable stuff in there if you just had the time to look through it all”) and then saw the railroad tracks gleaming in the last few minutes of fiery sunlight.
All that separated us from the tracks was a wide area of dusty gravel. We were just walking over to it when Barney said, “Oh, God! Look!”
And there, maybe three hundred yards behind us, came Cushing’s unmarked police car.
“What’ll we do?” Barney said.
“Just calm down.”
“Huh?”
“Just calm down, Barney, or he’ll know something’s wrong for sure. Just keep walking. But instead of turning up toward the tracks, we’ll turn the other way to the crick.”
Cushing’s tires made a lot of slow crunching noise on the gravel.
He got alongside us, doing maybe five, six miles an hour, and said, “How’re my little girl friends doing tonight?” He had on dark shades and he grinned like a killer.
We didn’t say anything. We just kept walking toward the hill that would eventually slope down to the crick. There was a pussy willow tree there that gave a lot of shade during the day.
“You girls stop right there. I want to talk to you.”
I heard him jerk on his emergency brake and then get out of the car. You could smell the gas and oil and heat of the motor.
He walked over in front of us. We’d stopped walking, just like he’d told us to.
“The sack. What’s in it?”
“Nothing special,” I said. Then, “We’re going hiking tonight so we brought some food for a snack.” I was getting so good at this lying business that I was starting to scare myself.
He took the sack, opened it and then shoved his hand way down inside it. I thought of the time Johnny Worchester did that with this old sack he’d found near the crick one day and this giant milk snake was coiled up inside. Legend has it that Johnny filled his pants right on the spot.
Cushing found the piece of chocolate cake. “Look here what I found.” He grinned. “I always heard that your mom was a real fine cook, Tom.”
“She is.”
“Why don’t I find out for myself and try this piece of cake?”
“That isn’t yours, Cushing, it’s mine.”
“That’s right, darling, it is your cake, isn’t it?” At which point he took the cake and squeezed it in his fist, squishing and scrunching till there would be no way to separate the cake from the waxed paper. Now it was just this little brown ball.
He threw the cake back into the sack and then dropped the sack at my feet. “That story of yours is bullshit,” he said.
“What story?” I said.
“About finding that money by the crick.”
“That’s where we found it,” I said.
“You know where the rest of that money is, don’t you?”
“Rest of what money?” Barney said.
“Rest of the bank robbery money, that’s what money,” Cushing said. “That’s where you little girls are going tonight, isn’t it? To get some more of that money?”
“We’re going for a hike,” Barney said.
“To Hampton Hill,” I said.
“Watch the stars,” Barney said.
“Have a little snack,” I said.
We were pissing him off and it was great. He just stood there, this bully-boy cop with his bully-boy gun and his bully-boy Hollywood shades, and he knew we were lying to him and there wasn’t a goddamn thing he could do about it.
“You girls have yourselves a real nice time tonight,” he said.
And right away I knew something was wrong, the sly way he said it.
“I’ll see you later.”
And then he turned around and walked back to his car and got in and drove away.
I watched his tail lights flare as he turned the corner, then go out of sight behind the Solar Oil Company depot.
Gone. Cushing was gone. And he shouldn’t have been. Not that fast anyway. Not without ragging us a lot more than he did.
“Pretty cool the way you stood up to him,” Barney said. “Maybe he’ll leave us alone now.”
“Barney, he’s up to something.”
“Up to what?”
“I don’t know and that’s what scares me.”
“Maybe he’ll go talk to Clarence.”
“Nah. He wouldn’t do that. He’s up to something else.”
We walked and night lifted us up gently in the palm of its dark hand. The tracks thrummed again with the energy of distant trains and the jays and wrens and ravens sang their birdy asses off. It was cooler now, and so the night smelled not just of heat but of flowers and mown grass and fast chill creek water.
We crossed the tracks and jumped over the water and went up the slope to the warehouse that sat silent all in deep shadow and moonlight.
I felt nervous about everything but I couldn’t exactly say why so I just kept walking to the warehouse, gripping the sack tighter.
We went in through the front window the way we had last night and then walked the length of the floor to the closet.
Roy wasn’t there. I shined my Boy Scout flashlight all over the inside. There was no sign of him. Everything was gone except for two stubbed-out cigarette butts and dried red spots on the dirty, tiled floor. No doubt what the red spots were. Everything else he’d taken with him. Leaving no traces made sense, I thought. That way the cops would never know he’d even been here.
But it all bothered me. Roy hadn’t looked too good last night, certainly not good enough to travel. Not very far anyway.
And then Barney said, “Listen.”
I didn’t hear it at first, not with all the electricity humming in the power lines above us and the frogs by the creek and an airplane somewhere up by the round golden moon.
But then I heard it.
Some faint noise at the front of the building.
Barney wasn’t quite inside the closet. Now he peeked his head out the door.
“See anything?” I whispered.
He shook his head.
We were getting spooked was all, I thought. Came in here and found Roy gone. No wonder we were getting spooked.
And then I heard it again. Some faint scuffing sound somewhere at the front of the building.
“In here,” I whispered, pulling him into the closet.
We waited in the darkness. Our breaths came in huge ragged gasps. We smelled of night and heat and sweat. Faintly, I could smell the food we’d brought Roy last night.