“Drop your guns and the bag and step away from them,” Jeff said.
“You got to be kidding,” said the red-haired man. “There are three of us and one of you.”
Behind the man, Carrie’s head and right arm appeared at the corner of the building. Jeff was relieved.
“Look behind you,” he said.
The three men all half-turned to look, and Jeff sensed he should have said “slowly.” To Carrie it must have seemed that they were going to rush her or pull all three guns at once. She fired, the men jumped, and the noise made Jeff want to clap his hands to his ears.
Carrie seemed to enjoy the shooting. She was the first to re-cover her composure, so she pulled the trigger three times more. The first round hit the sidewalk and ricocheted up into the shin of one of the two short, bald men and dropped him to the pavement. Her second went wide and hit the brick façade of the bank. Chips flew near the night-deposit door. The redheaded man dropped the money bag and crouched, either to pick it up or to pull out a gun, as the third shot made the other short, bald man fall down. The redheaded man, seeing that his advantage had vanished, remained still. Carrie fired two more shots, one that hit the sidewalk in front of the redhead and stung him with tiny concrete fragments, and one that bounced off the brick wall of the coffee shop on the strip mall.
When she stopped firing, Jeff ventured out from behind the bank building. “Time’s up. What’s it going to be?” He felt that his voice had lost some of its authority and gone up an octave, but it seemed to be audible.
The red-haired man threw the canvas bag toward him and raised both hands. The other two men lay on the ground, blood pooling between them. Jeff kept his gun on the men, picked up the canvas bag, and retreated around the corner of the bank. He ran toward the parking structure but heard running feet ahead of him. He stopped and aimed at the sound, but the shape that dashed across his vision was small and female, so he followed her.
Carrie was surprisingly quick. She stayed ahead of him as he made his way along the side wall of the parking structure. Then he passed her and ran along the back walls of the buildings on the strip mall. There had been shots—loud, repeated shots—and the only way out now was to get into the car and be gone before the cops arrived.
He stepped up onto the pavement of the strip mall, ran for the human-sized gap in the chain-link fence and onto the big blacktop parking lot. The car seemed to be incredibly far away, sitting in the midst of the small group of cars in the splash of light near the grocery store and the pharmacy.
Now that Jeff was on empty asphalt and had a light ahead of him, he ran harder. He held the canvas bag cradled on his forearm like a football, pumping his arms and running on his toes, his head up and his strides lengthening with his momentum. As he left Carrie farther and farther behind, he ran even faster. When he was forty feet from his car, he took his keys from his pocket and pressed the remote-control key button, saw the dome light go on and the lock buttons pop up.
He flung the door open, ducked inside, started the car, then drove back the way he had run. He flicked his headlights on as he moved up on Carrie, then reached across the seat to paw the door handle down, and stopped abruptly so the door swung open beside her. She flopped onto the seat and he accelerated so her door slammed shut.
He glanced at her to be sure she wasn’t hurt. She had her knees on the floor and her elbows on the seat, and she was shaking, laughing uncontrollably.
Jeff drove to the farthest exit on the other side of the lot, pulled out to the left against the red light, and drove hard to get around the curve on Laurel Canyon to the freeway entrance past Moorpark. He swung onto the freeway heading east and accelerated, then looked at her again. “What the fuck are you laughing at?”
“It was just so amazing!” She climbed up onto her seat and fastened the seat belt. “It was the best. Thank you so, so much for taking me with you.”
“You are one crazy bitch. You could have got us both killed.”
“Am I? Thank you so much. This is the best night of my whole life!” She paused. “Is it? I think it is. Yes, it is!”
“Jesus.”
“My heart is still pounding like crazy and it won’t stop, you know?”
“Yeah.” He knew what she meant. He could feel his own pulse in his chest and his neck.
“And there’s blood, like, pumping its way into every part of me at once. The lights are actually brighter. Let’s go back to my house. I’ll give you the best sex of your life. That’s a promise.”
Jeff knew that Lila was going to be home from work soon, and she would want to see him waiting there for her. But through the upper part of the windshield he could see bright stars in the black sky, and as he pulled off the freeway, he opened his window to listen for sirens. There was still silence and the night smelled sweet. “I can stop in for a little while.”
10
JERRY GAFFNEY SNATCHED Guzman’s gun from the ground and then yanked Corona’s out of his open hand and ran after the man and woman. When he reached the back of the parking structure behind the bank, he was sure that what they’d done was slide down the embankment above the Los Angeles River, then take a run along the paved path above the concrete riverbed and come up at the Whitsett Avenue Bridge. From there they could disappear across the river into the tennis courts, or maybe just disappear into the neighborhood. Their car would be parked somewhere on that side.
He ran the quarter mile to the bridge without seeing another human being. He was far from the bank and carrying three guns. By now the cops and maybe an ambulance would be on the way. Soon he would hear the sirens.
Gaffney hated having to get rid of three perfectly good guns that hadn’t even been fired, but there wasn’t much choice. He ran to the first apartment building after the Christian Science church on Whitsett, trotted along the side to the back of the building to the Dumpster, opened a plastic trash bag, and was overpowered by the fishy smell of cat food. He put the guns inside, retied the bag, and ran.
He ran back across the bridge to Ventura Boulevard, but he’d gone only a few feet on Ventura before he realized why there had been no sirens. The street in front of the bank was full of police cruisers and other official vehicles, all of them flashing bright red and blue lights. They all must have converged on the place silently from side streets, the way cops did on burglary calls.
He approached cautiously. He could see the ambulance parked in the driveway of the parking structure. There were EMTs pushing a gurney with Guzman on it. They lifted it into the back and Corona tried to jump in after it, but a cop held on to him and kept him back.
Gaffney had thought both of them were hit, not just Guzman. Corona apparently had just decided to play dead. Part of Gaffney was angry at him. Maybe if the two of them had gone after the robbers, there would have been some chance of at least seeing their car.
Gaffney considered going up to the group, but then thought better of it. As it was, it looked as though they had been here, just the two of them, trying to make the nightly deposit, unarmed. The crazy robbers had shot at them and taken the money. If there were only two of them, then there would have been nobody to get rid of any guns.
He walked to the other side of the street and went the other way. He walked a couple of blocks west and dialed his phone.
After seven rings he heard his brother Jimmy’s voice. “Yeah?”
“It’s me. Jerry.”
“What the fuck do you want? It’s after three A.M., boy.”
“We got robbed making the night deposit from Siren. Guzman got shot, but that son of a bitch Corona played dead, so I had to stand up alone, dodge the bullets, and go after them. Now the cops have my car, so I need a ride home.”