The scuffing sound came closer.
By now I knew what it was. Somebody walking across the floor, trying to be quiet.
Then somebody said, voice echoing in the darkness of the empty warehouse, “You girls having fun in there?”
“Shit,” I said to myself.
Cushing had followed us.
We didn’t make a big deal of it. I mean we didn’t put our hands up or anything. We just walked out and stood in this little patch of moonlight with all the rat droppings crunching beneath our feet and then Cushing just came out of the shadows and said, “You girls are pretty easy to track. All I had to do was park my car on the other side of the oil depot and give you a few minutes and then start following you.”
He pointed to the left cuff of his buff blue summer suit. The cuff was all muddy. “Except I took a wrong step when I got to the crick.” He smiled. “I should send you little ladies the cleaning bill.”
“How come you followed us?” Barney said.
“No more of your bullshit, OK?” Cushing said. “I’m sick and fucking tired of your bullshit. When I ask you a question this time, I want a straight fucking answer or there’ll be hell to pay. You two little girls understand me?”
He’d just exploded like that, no warning at all. He was a scary guy, no doubt about it.
“Now,” he said, “where’s Roy Danton?”
“Who’s Roy Danton?” I said.
He took one step forward and slapped me so hard I couldn’t see for maybe a minute.
The whole side of my face felt hot and numb and I couldn’t get rid of the stars flashing in my eyes.
“Where is Roy Danton?”
I wasn’t sure I could do it but I wanted to try. I opened my mouth, eager to see what I’d say next. “I don’t know any Roy Danton.”
Before he could slap me again, Barney jumped in between us. “Leave him alone!”
This time he grabbed Barney and shoved him all the way back into the closet where he bounced off the back wall and dropped to the floor. Then he grabbed me and started slapping again. Two, three times, hard vicious slaps. I saw more stars. I tried hitting back and kicking back but he was too big and too skilled, like some mutant older brother.
“That’s what this bag was for, wasn’t it?” he said. “You were bringing Danton some food.”
He’d let me go now and I started backing up to the closet.
Cushing took a flashlight from his jacket, a small silver one like Doc Anderson uses when he wants you to say Ahhh and look at your tonsils, and then he pushed past me and went into the closet.
All I kept thinking of were the dried drops of blood on the floor.
Cushing looked up and down, his flashlight like a giant firefly in the darkness, and Barney just sat on the floor and watched him and rubbed the back of his head where it had collided with the wall.
I stood inside the door, to the right of Cushing, and that was how I saw the water drop from the ceiling to the top of Barney’s head. Barney reached up and patted his head and then brought his finger away. There was a dark smear on the back of his fingers.
I looked up. It wasn’t water dripping from the ceiling. It was blood. And I had a pretty good idea whose blood it was, too.
A few seconds later, Cushing found the blood from yesterday. He kept his light pointed down to the floor, right on it.
He got down on his haunches for a closer look.
“How bad was his wound?” he said.
“Whose wound?” Barney said.
For a moment, Cushing looked as if he was going to hit Barney again.
“Do you little girls have any idea how much trouble you’re in?”
We didn’t say anything.
“This means Wayland, the juvenile detention home. You know the kind of boys you’ll meet in that home? Did you hear about the stabbing they had there last year? Two kids just about your age stabbed to death in their sleep? And Wayland’s just where you’ll be going once I tell the chief that you’ve been helping that bank robber hide out.”
And right then another drop of blood fell. I saw Barney’s head jerk up and his eyes scan the ceiling and his hand go up and touch his scalp again.
Cushing had been watching me, not Barney.
“Your old man won’t be able to help you out of this one, believe me,” he said. “And neither will the chief, even if he wants to, which he probably won’t.”
Barney was staring at me and pointing to his head.
“You’ve only got one choice,” Cushing droned on. “And that’s to tell me the truth. Tell me everything that happened. And then tell me where he was going when he left here.”
“Milwaukee,” I said.
“Milwaukee?”
“He knows people there and when he left this morning, that’s where he was headed.”
“He left this morning?”
“Right.”
“What time?”
“Just about dawn. That’s what he said he’d do anyway.”
The lies were coming so good and so quick I was scaring myself again.
“If he left this morning, how come you came out here tonight?”
“He said he’d leave some money for us,” Barney said.
He was getting good at it, too.
“Did he?”
“No,” Barney said, making himself look real dejected.
Cushing smiled. “That’s where you girls are naive. Trusting a bank robber like that.”
We were silent.
“Milwaukee,” Cushing said again. “He say who he knew there?”
“Some name. I don’t remember exactly,” I said.
“Try.”
“John,” I said.
“I thought it was Don,” Barney said.
“John or Don or something like that,” I said.
“John or Don or something like that, huh?” Cushing said, and then backhanded me hard enough to push me all the way across the closet floor. I banged my head against the back wall just the way Barney had.
He turned off the light. “You little girls have yourselves a real nice hike.”
And then he left.
He went out of the closet and back across the wide, moonlit floor and out the front window.
We just sat there, frozen, listening to his footsteps recede, listening to him become just one more faint noise in the night.
“Shit,” Barney said.
I got my Boy Scout flashlight out and aimed it up at one of the ceiling tiles, which were very wide and very dark, which was why the dripping blood hadn’t shown.
“Roy?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Be careful. This may be a trick. He may be right outside. One of you boys go watch for him, all right?”
“I’ll go watch,” Barney said.
It took Roy several minutes to get down. He was dirty and sweaty and he looked even weaker than he had yesterday. He clutched his satchel of bank money tight against his wound. Some of his blood was smeared on the satchel.
In case you’re wondering how he got up and down, he had a rope tied to a paint-splattered aluminum stepladder he’d found. After he used the ladder to climb up to the beams above the ceiling panels, he pulled the ladder up behind him.
“I wondered if you boys could keep our little secret so I thought I’d better get up there in case the law came looking for me,” he said, as he started in on the food.
He didn’t eat much and that’s one way I knew he was worse than he’d been last night. When you’re real sick, you lose your appetite. He was in a lot of pain. Every few seconds a spasm would come and make him groan.
When he was done trying to eat, he took the pack of Chesterfields Barney had stolen and put one in his mouth.
He took out his Zippo. He got the lighter to his cigarette but when he tried to flick the spark up—
The lighter tumbled from his hands, a dim flash of metal in the weak dusty beam of my flashlight. The lighter made a metallic chinking sound when it hit the floor.