“He won’t believe you hit me.”
“Suppose I did hit you? Not hard, but enough to leave a mark so you could point to it for proof.”
He grinned suddenly. “Sure, Carole, you’ve been good to me. The first time, when he made that first phone call, you were real good. I’ll tell you something, the idea of killing you bothers me. And you’re right about Howie. Here, belt me one behind the ear. Make it a good one, but not too hard, okay?” And he handed her the gun.
He looked completely astonished when she shot him. He just didn’t believe it. She reversed the gun in her hand, curled her index finger around the trigger, and pointed the gun straight at his heart. His eyes bugged out and his mouth dropped open, and he just stared at her, not saying anything at all. She shot him twice in the center of the chest and watched him fall slowly, incredibly, to the floor, dead.
When Howie’s car pulled up she was ready. She crouched by the doorway, gun in hand, waiting. The car door flew open and she heard his footsteps on the gravel path. He pulled the door open, calling out jubilantly that it had gone like clockwork, just like clockwork, then he caught sight of Ray’s corpse on the floor and did a fantastic double take. When he saw her and the gun, he started to say something, but she emptied the gun into him, four bullets, one after the other, and all of them hit him and they worked; he fell; he died.
She got the bag of money out of his hand before he could bleed on it.
The rest wasn’t too difficult. She took the rope with which she’d been tied and rubbed it back and forth on the chair leg until it finally frayed through. Behind the cabin she found a toolshed. She used a shovel, dug a shallow pit, dropped the money into it, filled in the hole. She carried the gun down to the water’s edge, wiped it free of fingerprints, and heaved it into the creek.
Finally, when just the right amount of time had passed, she walked out to the highway and kept going until she found a telephone, a highway emergency booth.
“Just stay right where you are,” her father said. “Don’t call the police. I’ll come for you.”
“Hurry. Daddy. I’m so scared.”
He picked her up. She was shaking, and he held her in his arms and soothed her.
“I was so frightened,” she said. “And then when the one man came back with the ransom money, the other man took out a gun and shot him and the third man, and then the man who did the shooting, he and the woman ran away in their other car. I was sure they were going to kill me but the man said not to bother, the gun was empty and it didn’t matter now. The woman wanted to kill me with the knife but she didn’t. I was sure she would. Oh, Daddy—”
“It’s all right now,” he said. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
She showed him the cabin and the two dead men and the rope. “It took me forever to get out of it,” she said. “But I saw in the movies how you can work your way out, and I wasn’t tied too tight, so I managed to do it.”
“You’re a brave girl, Carole.”
On the way home he said, “I’m not going to call the police, Carole. I don’t want to subject you to a lot of horrible questioning. Sooner or later they’ll find those two in the cabin, but that has nothing to do with us. They’ll just find two dead criminals, and the world’s better off without them.” He thought for a moment. “Besides,” he added, “I’m sure I’d have a hard time explaining where I got that money.”
“Did they get very much?”
“Only ten thousand dollars,” he said.
“I thought they asked for more.”
“Well, after I explained that I didn’t have anything like that around the house they listened to reason.”
“I see,” she said.
You old liar, she thought, it was a hundred thousand dollars, and I know it. And it’s mine now. Mine.
“Ten thousand dollars is a lot of money,” she said. “I mean, it’s a lot for you to lose.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“If you called the police, maybe they could get it back.”
He shuddered visibly, and she held back laughter. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “All that matters is that we got you back safe and sound. That’s more important than all the money in the world.”
“Oh, Daddy,” she said, hugging him, “oh, I love you, I love you so much!”
Nothing Short of Highway Robbery
I eased up on the gas pedal a few hundred yards ahead of the service station. I was putting the brakes on when my brother Newton opened his eyes and straightened up in his seat.
“We haven’t got but a gallon of gas left if we got that much,” I told him. “And there’s nothing out ahead of us but a hundred miles of sand and a whole lot of cactus, and I already seen enough cactus to last me a spell.”
He smothered a yawn with the back of his hand. “Guess I went and fell asleep,” he said.
“Guess you did.”
He yawned again while a fellow a few years older’n us came off of the front porch of the house and walked our way, moving slow, taking his time. He was wearing a broad-brimmed white hat against the sun and a pair of bib overalls. The house wasn’t much, a one-story clapboard structure with a flat roof. The garage alongside it must have been built at the same time and designed by the same man.
He came around to my side and I told him to fill the tank. “Regular,” I said.
He shook his head. “High-test is all I got,” he said. “That be all right?”
I nodded and he went around the car and commenced unscrewing the gas cap. “Only carries high-test,” I said, not wildly happy about it.
“It’ll burn as good as the regular, Vern.”
“I guess I know that. I guess I know it’s another five cents a gallon or another dollar bill on a tankful of gas, and don’t you just bet that’s why he does it that way? Because what the hell can you do if you want regular? This bird’s the only game in town.”
“Well, I don’t guess a dollar’ll break us, Vern.”
I said I guessed not and I took a look around. The pump wasn’t so far to the rear that I couldn’t get a look at it, and when I did I saw the price per gallon, and it wasn’t just an extra nickel that old boy was taking from us. His high-test was priced a good twelve cents a gallon over everybody else’s high-test.
I pointed this out to my brother and did some quick sums in my head. Twelve cents plus a nickel times, say, twenty gallons was three dollars and forty cents. I said, “Damn, Newton, you know how I hate being played for a fool.”
“Well, maybe he’s got his higher costs and all. Being out in the middle of nowhere and all, little town like this.”
“Town? Where’s the town at? Where we are ain’t nothing but a wide place in the road.”
And that was really all it was. Not even a crossroads, just the frame house and the garage alongside it, and on the other side of the road a cafe with a sign advertising home-cooked food and package goods. A couple cars over by the garage, two of them with their hoods up and various parts missing from them. Another car parked over by the cafe.
“Newt,” I said, “you ever see a softer place’n this?”
“Don’t even think about it.”
“Not thinking about a thing. Just mentioning.”
“We don’t bother with nickels and dimes no more, Vernon. We agreed on that. By tonight we’ll be in Silver City. Johnny Mack Lee’s already there and first thing in the morning we’ll be taking that bank off slicker’n a bald tire. You know all that.”
“I know.”
“So don’t be exercising your mind over nickels and dimes.”
“Oh, I know it,” I said. “Only we could use some kind of money pretty soon. What have we got left? Hundred dollars?”
“Little better than that.”
“Not much better, though.”
“Well, tomorrow’s payday,” Newt said.
I knew he was right but it’s a habit a man gets into, looking at a place and figuring how he would go about taking it off. Me and Newt, we
always had a feeling for places like filling stations and liquor stores and 7-Eleven stores and like that. You just take ’em off nice and easy, you get in and get out and a man can make a living that way. Like the saying goes, it don’t pay much but it’s regular.
But then the time came that we did a one-to-five over to the state pen and it was an education. We both of us came out of there knowing the right people and the right way to operate. One thing we swore was to swear off nickels and dimes. The man who pulls quick-dollar stickups like that, he works ten times as often and takes twenty times the risks of the man who takes his time setting up a big job and scoring it. I remember Johnny Mack Lee saying it takes no more work to knock over a bank than a bakery and the difference is dollars to doughnuts.
I looked up and saw the dude with the hat poking around under the hood. “What’s he doing now, Newt? Prospecting for more gold?”
“Checking the oil, I guess.”
“Hope we don’t need none,” I said. “ ’Cause you just know he’s gotta be charging two dollars a quart for it.”
Well, we didn’t need any oil. And you had to admit he did a good job of checking under there, topping up the battery terminals and all. Then he came around and leaned against the car door.
“Oil’s okay,” he said. “You sure took a long drink of gas. Good you had enough to get here. And this here’s the last station for a whole lot of highway.”
“Well,” I said. “How much do we owe you?”
He named a figure. High as it was, it came as no surprise to me since I’d already turned and read it off of the pump. Then as I was reaching in my pocket he said, “I guess you know about that fan clutch, don’t you?”
“Fan clutch?”
He gave a long slow nod. “I suppose you got a few miles left in it,” he said. “Thing is, it could go any minute. You want to step out of the car for a moment I can show you what I’m talking about.”
Well, I got out, and Newt got out his side, and we went and joined this bird and peeked under the hood. He reached behind the radiator and took ahold of some damned thing or other and showed us how it was wobbling. “The fan clutch,” he said. “You ever replace this here since you owned the car?”
Newt looked at me and I looked back at him. All either of us ever knew about a car is starting it and stopping it and the like. As a boy Newt was awful good at starting them without keys. You know how kids are.
“Now if this goes,” he went on, “then there goes your water pump. Probably do a good job on your radiator at the same time. You might want to wait and have your own mechanic take care of it for you. The way it is, though, I wouldn’t want to be driving too fast or too far with it. ‘Course if you hold it down to forty miles an hour and stop from time to time so’s the heat won’t build up—”
His voice trailed off. Me and Newt looked at each other again. Newt asked some more about the fan clutch and the dude wobbled it again and told us more about what it did, which we pretended to pay attention to and nodded like it made sense to us.
“This fan clutch,” Newt said. “What’s it run to replace it?”
“Around thirty, thirty-five dollars. Depends on the model and who does the work for you, things like that.”
“Take very long?”
“Maybe twenty minutes.”
“Could you do it for us?”
The dude considered, cleared his throat, spat in the dirt. “Could,” he allowed. “If I got the part. Let me just go and check.”
When he walked off I said, “Brother, what’s the odds that he’s got that part?”
“No bet a-tall. You figure there’s something wrong with our fan clutch?”
“Who knows?”
“Yeah,” Newt said. “Can’t figure on him being a crook and just spending his life out here in the middle of nowhere, but then you got to consider the price he gets for the gas and all. He hasn’t had a customer since we pulled in, you know. Maybe he gets one car a day and tries to make a living off it.”
“So tell him what to do with his fan clutch.”
“Then again, Vern, maybe all he is in the world is a good mechanic trying to do us a service. Suppose we cut out of here and fifty miles down the road our fan clutch up and kicks our water pump through our radiator or whatever the hell it is. By God, Vernon, if we don’t get to Silver City tonight Johnny Mack Lee’s going to be vexed with us.”
“That’s a fact. But thirty-five dollars for a fan clutch sure eats a hole in our capital, and suppose we finally get to Silver City and find out Johnny Mack Lee got out the wrong side of bed and slipped on a banana peel or something? Meaning if we get there and there’s no job and we’re stuck in the middle of nowhere, then what do we do?”
“Well, I guess it’s better’n being stuck in the desert.”
“I guess.”
Of course he had just the part he needed. You had to wonder how a little gas station like that would happen to carry a full line of fan clutches, which I never even heard of that particular part before, but when I said as much to Newt he shrugged and said maybe an out-of-the-way place like that was likely to carry a big stock because he was too far from civilization to order parts when the need for them arose.
“The thing is,” he said, “all up and down the line you can read all of this either way. Either we’re being taken or we’re being done a favor for, and there’s no way to know for sure.”
While he set about doing whatever he had to do with the fan clutch, we took his advice and went across the street for some coffee. “Woman who runs the place is a pretty fair cook,” he said. “I take all my meals there my own self.”
“Takes all his meals here,” I said to Newt. “Hell, she’s got him where he’s got us. He don’t want to eat here, he can walk sixty miles to a place more to his liking.”
The car that had been parked at the cafe was gone now and we were the only customers. The woman in charge was too thin and rawboned to serve as an advertisement for her own cooking. She had her faded blonde hair tied up in a red kerchief and she was perched on a stool smoking a cigarette and studying a True Confessions magazine. We each of us ordered apple pie at a dollar a wedge and coffee at thirty-five cents a cup. While we were eating a car pulled up and a man wearing a suit and tie bought a pack of cigarettes from her. He put down a dollar bill and didn’t get back but two dimes change.
“I think I know why that old boy across the street charges so much,” Newt said softly. “He needs to get top dollar if he’s gonna pay for his meals here.”
“She does charge the earth.”
“You happen to note the liquor prices? She gets seven dollars for a bottle of Ancient Age bourbon. And that’s not for a quart, either. That’s for a fifth.”
I nodded slowly. I said, “I just wonder where they keep all that money.”
“Brother, we don’t even want to think on that.”
“Never hurt a man to think.”
“These days it’s all credit cards anyways. The tourist trade is nothing but credit cards and his regular customers most likely run a monthly tab and give him a check for it.”
“We’ll be paying cash.”
“Well, it’s a bit hard to establish credit in our line of work.”
“Must be other people pays him cash. And the food and liquor over here, that’s gotta be all cash, or most all cash.”
“And how much does it generally come to in a day? Be sensible. As little business as they’re doing—”
“I already thought of that. Same time, though, look how far they are from wherever they do their banking.”
“So?”
“So they wouldn’t be banking the day’s receipts every night. More likely they drive in and make their deposits once a week, maybe even once every two weeks.”
Newt thought about that. “Likely you’re right,” he allowed. “Still, we’re just talking small change.”
“Oh, I know.”
But when we paid for our pie and coffee Newton gave the old girl a smile
and told her how we sure had enjoyed the pie, which we hadn’t all that much, and how her husband was doing a real good job on our car over across the street.
“Oh, he does real good work,” she said.
“What he’s doing for us,” Newt said, “he’s replacing our fan clutch. I guess you probably get a lot of people here needing new fan clutches.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” she said. “Thing is I don’t know much about cars. He’s the mechanic and I’m the cook is how we divvy things up.”
“Sounds like a good system,” Newt told her.
On the way across the street Newt separated two twenties from our bankroll and tucked them into his shirt pocket. Then I reminded him about the gas and he added a third twenty. He gave the rest of our stake a quick count and shook his head in annoyance. “We’re getting pretty close to the bone,” he said. “Johnny Mack Lee better be where’s he’s supposed to be.”
“He’s always been reliable.”
“That’s God’s truth. And the bank, it better be the piece of cake he says it is.”
“I just hope.”
“Twenty thousand a man is how he has it figured. Plus he says it could run three times that. I sure wouldn’t complain if it did, brother.”
I said I wouldn’t either. “It does make it silly to even think about nickels and dimes,” I said.
“Just what I was telling you.”
“I was never thinking about it, really. Not in the sense of doing it. Just mental exercise, keeps the brain in order.”
He gave me a brotherly punch in the shoulder and we laughed together some. Then we went on to where the dude in the big hat was playing with our car. He gave us a big smile and held out a piece of metal for us to admire. “Your old fan clutch,” he said, which I had more or less figured. “Take hold of this part. That’s it, right there. Now try to turn it.”
I tried to turn it and it was hard to turn. He had Newt do the same thing. “Tight,” Newt said.