You’d think they’d stake out convenience stores. But those’re a joke, and with the closed-circuit TV you’re going to get your picture took, you just are. So nobody who knows the business, I mean really knows it, hits them. And banks, forget banks. Even ATMs. I mean, how much can you clear? Three, four hundred tops? And around here the Fast Cash button gives you twenty bucks. Which tells you something. So why even bother?
No. We wanted cash and that meant a drugstore, even though they can be tricky. Ardmore Drugs. Which is a big store in a little town. Liggett Falls. Sixty miles from Albany and a hundred or so from where Toth and me lived, farther west into the mountains. Liggett Falls is a poor place. You’d think it wouldn’t make sense to hit a store there. But that’s exactly why—because like everywhere else people there need medicine and hairspray and makeup, only they don’t have credit cards. Except maybe a Sears or Penney s. So they pay cash.
“Oh brother,” Toth whispered again. “Look.”
And he made me even madder, him saying that. I wanted to shout, Look at what, you son of a bitch? But then I could see what he was talking about, and I didn’t say anything. Up ahead. It was like just before dawn, light on the horizon. Only this was red, and the light wasn’t steady. It was like it was pulsing, and I knew that they’d got the roadblock up already. This was the only road to the interstate from Liggett Falls. So I should’ve guessed.
“I got an idea,” Toth said. Which I didn’t want to hear but I also wasn’t going to go through another shootout. Sure not at a roadblock where they was ready for us.
“What?” I snapped.
“There’s a town over there. See those lights? I know a road’ll take us there.”
Toth’s a big guy, and he looks calm. Only he isn’t really. He gets shook easy, and he now kept turning around, skittish, looking in the back seat. I wanted to slap him and tell him to chill.
“Where’s it?” I asked. “This town?”
“About four, five miles. The turnoff, it ain’t marked. But I know it.”
This was that lousy upstate area where everything’s green. But dirty green, you know. And all the buildings’re gray. These gross little shacks, pickups on blocks. Little towns without even a 7-Eleven. And full of hills they call mountains but aren’t.
Toth cranked down the window and let this cold air in and looked up at the sky. “They can find us with those, you know, satellite things.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“You know, they can see you from miles up. I saw it in a movie.”
“You think the state cops do that? Are you nuts?”
This guy, I don’t know why I work with him. And after what happened at the drugstore, I won’t again.
He pointed out where to turn, and I did. He said the town was at the base of the Lookout. Well, I remembered passing that on the way to Liggett Falls that afternoon. It was this huge rock a couple of hundred feet high. Which if you looked at it right looked like a man’s head, like a profile, squinting. ltd been some kind of big deal to the Indians around here. Blah, blah, blah. He told me, but I didn’t pay no attention. It was spooky, that weird face, and I looked once and kept on driving. I didn’t like it. I’m not really superstitious, but sometimes I am.
“Winchester,” he said now, meaning what the name of the town was. Five, six thousand people. We could find an empty house, stash the car in a garage, and just wait out the search. Wait till tomorrow afternoon — Sunday—when all the weekenders were driving back to Boston and New York and we’d be lost in the crowd.
I could see the Lookout up ahead, not really a shape, mostly this blackness where the stars weren’t. And then the guy on the floor in the back started to moan all of a sudden and just about give me a heart attack.
“You. Shut up back there.” I slapped the seat, and the guy in the back went quiet.
What a night.
We’d got to the drugstore fifteen minutes before it closed. Like you ought to do. ‘Cause mosta the customers’re gone and a lot’ve the clerks’ve left and people’re tired, and when you push a Glock or Smitty into their faces, they’ll do just about anything you ask.
Except tonight.
We had our masks down and walked in slow. Toth getting the manager out of his little office, a fat guy started crying and that made me mad, a grown man doing that. He kept a gun on the customers and the clerks, and I was telling the cashier, this kid, to open the tills and, Jesus, lie had an attitude. Like he’d seen all of those Steven Seagal movies or something. A little kiss on the cheek with the Smitty and he changed his mind and started moving. Cussing me out, but he was moving. I was counting the bucks as we were going along from one till to the next, and sure enough, we were up to about three thousand when I heard this noise and turned around and what it was, Toth was knocking a rack of chips over. I mean, Jesus. He’s getting Doritos!
I look away from the kid for just a second, and what’s he do? He pitches this bottle. Only not at me. Out the window. Bang, it breaks. There’s no alarm I can hear, but half of them are silent anyway and I ‘m really pissed. I could’ve killed him. Right there. Only I didn’t. Toth did.
He shoots the kid, blam, blam, blam. And everybody else is scattering and he turns around and shoots another one of the clerks and a customer, just bang, not thinking or nothing. Just for no reason. Hit this girl clerk in the leg, but this guy, this customer, well, he was dead. You could see. And I’m going, What’re you doing, what’re you doing? And he’s going, Shut up, shut up, shut up …And we’re like we’re swearing at each other when we figured out we hadta get outa there.
So we left. Only what happens is, there’s a cop outside. That’s why the kid threw the bottle. And he’s outa his car. So we grab another customer, this guy by the door, and we use him like a shield and get outside. And there’s the cop, he’s holding his gun up, looking at the customer we’ve got, and the cop, he’s saying, It’s OK, it’s OK, just take it easy.
And I couldn’t believe it, Toth shot him, too. I don’t know whether he killed him, but there was blood so he wasn’t wearing a vest it didn’t look like, and I could’ve killed Toth there on the spot. Because why’d he do that? He didn’t have to.
We threw the guy, the customer, into the back seat and tied him up with tape. I kicked out the taillights and burned rubber outa there. We made it out of Liggett Falls.
That was all just a half hour ago, but it seems like weeks.
And now we were driving down this highway through a million pine trees. Heading right for the Lookout.
Winchester was dark.
I don’t get why weekenders come to places like this. I mean, my old man took me hunting a long time ago. A couple of times, and I liked it. But coming to places like this just to look at leaves and buy furniture they call antiques but’s really just busted-up crap …I don’t know.
We found a house a block off Main Street with a bunch of newspapers in front, and I pulled into the drive and put the Buick behind it just in time. Two state police cars went shooting by. They’d been behind us not more than a half mile, without the lightbars going. Only they hadn’t seen us causa the broke taillights, and they went by in a flash and were gone, going into town.
Toth got into the house, and he wasn’t very clean about it, breaking a window in the back. It was a vacation place, pretty empty and the refrigerator shut off and the phone, too, which was a good sign — there wasn’t anybody coming back soon. Also, it smelled pretty musty and had stacks of old books and magazines from the summer.
We took the guy inside, and Toth started to take the hood off this guy’s head and I said, “What the hell’re you doing?”
“He hasn’t said anything. Maybe he can’t breathe.”