Feast for Thieves (23 page)

I nodded and turned toward the kitchen. Another mistake. Such a tiny mistake it was—turning my back on Crazy Ake. Did I really think he wanted a cup of coffee?

A sudden thud sounded on the side of my head. It was one of those star-seeing whacks you hear about in books but can’t quite
describe until it happens to you. My knees grew soggy but I kept standing. Crazy Ake walloped me again with his rifle’s butt. My mind reeled. My head wasn’t thinking straight but I spun around anyway and moved to get my guard up. The next blow flew toward my chin. The rifle came at me too fast for me to stop.

He set the rifle down on the floor so as not to damage it, I reckoned. I recoiled, and another blow came to my cheekbone with his fist. I was staggering now, wobbling on my feet. He slugged me in the gut and I was finished. I coughed and hacked and went to my knees, struggling for my next breath. Last thing I remember seeing was his boot fly toward my jaw.

After that I knew no more.

“Ain’t no cash at all, ain’t that right?” came an angry voice.

I struggled to open my eyes.

Crack!
Crazy Ake hit me bare-knuckled on my face. I struggled to sort out my surroundings. We were still in the parsonage, I could see by the familiar floor, though I was tied now with ropes to one of my hard-backed chairs. A gag was stuffed in my mouth. I tried to glare at him. My mind blurred.

Crack!
Crazy Ake busted his fist against my jaw again. My head felt on fire. He drug over another chair, turned it around backward, and sat down in front of me. He picked up his rifle in his left hand. He was about three feet away, and I could smell the sweet-ugly scent of whiskey on his breath.

“You think I’m stupid, Rowdy? You haven’t gone anywhere since we last spoke. No digging. No tracking. No traveling to old barns. All you did since our last talk was cut trees!” Crazy Ake’s voice rose and he yanked the gag free of my mouth. “What have you done with my money? Answer me when I speak to you!”

I spat blood and managed a frown. “How much you wanna know?”

“Just tell me where it went!” He slapped the side of my head.

For a moment I saw stars, then my head cleared and I said, “It’s all back in the bank.”

“Back in the bank?!” the man spluttered. He was frothing at the mouth again and he stood up, paced from one side of the parsonage to the other, then sat back down and tried to breathe so it wasn’t uneven. “Now … why in the name of all that’s hallowed would our money go back to the bank?”

I tried to steady my breathing. The man was as loony as he was wily, and I knew he didn’t want to hear the full truth. All he wanted was a solution to getting rich—and I didn’t have one, same as him. What was I gonna say—
Take a seat, Crazy Ake, and lemme tell you a fun story about a war hero turning into a preacher, about a fella overcoming his less-than-stellar past
. I spat again. Well, my past was catching up to me now. The key for me was to be as truthful as possible without revealing more than he wanted to know. I found my voice: “I encountered the sheriff, and the sheriff struck a bargain with me. I need to fulfill my role as preacher for one year, or else he’ll come down on me with the full weight of the law. That’s what I’ve been doing this whole time.”

Crazy Ake shook, like he didn’t have any place to land with this information. “What kind of idiot follows a plan like that?”

“The plan kept me out of jail.” I tried to shrug nonchalantly and not reveal to him my changed ways. That was too much information for him to handle in his escalated state. “The sheriff is head of the deacon board. It’s a rough town. He reckoned I could do the job.”

Crazy Ake slapped my head once more for good measure, then snorted in disgust—“So you’re a real reverend. Well, I doubt that.” I could see his eyes were working in his head. Working hard. He was already on to the next thing. He didn’t want to kill me so much as he wanted his loot, and it takes at least two fellas to rob any place of substance. He wanted me alive more than he wanted me dead.

“I agree that staying out of jail is respectable,” he added. “But lost cash is lost cash, so here’s what we’re going to do. We’re gonna finish this job and we’re gonna do it right this time. Up in Rancho Springs, I know folks there—and one got his hands on a Kraut 88. Know what that is, boy?”

I nodded.

“His gun’s on wheels. He assembled it for me once just to brag. Only took two and a half minutes. It could shoot down a plane if needed. But we don’t need to shoot down no plane. All we need is a vehicle big enough to haul it, and that’s where you and the DUKW come in.” He grinned. He’d already worked out a new plan.

I tried to swallow and spat again.

“The job won’t be at Cut Eye this time,” Crazy Ake continued. “The bank in Rancho Springs holds ten times as much. We’ll wait until nightfall, haul the gun to the side wall, and blow a hole clear through. We’ll use my truck as a getaway vehicle, same as last time, but we’ll have a third man stay in my truck to keep it running. I reckon we’ve got a solid five minutes from the time the blast hits to when the law shows up. You and I will sprint into the vault, fill as many sacks as we can carry in three minutes, and shuttle out the loot to the truck in a jiffy. You savvy all that? Answer me, boy. Yes or no.”

I paused and knew in the predicament I was in there was only one option I could choose and stay alive. Slowly I answered, “Yes.”

He busted me on the jaw with his fist again. “You were a military man, Rowdy!”

I nodded.

He smiled wide. “When you address me, you say ‘yes sir.’”

TWENTY

C
razy Ake’s truck was parked in the bushes a quarter mile down the road. He left his rifle on my kitchen table so as not to be seen, pulled a .38 special out of an ankle holster around his lower leg, and kept the revolver aimed at my back as we walked down Lost Truck Road to retrieve his vehicle.

“Why you carry a tow bar?” I asked, nodding with my chin toward a mess of tools he kept in back of his pickup.

“For stealing police cars. Now shut up and get a move on. You drive.”

Crazy Ake slid into the passenger’s seat, and when we got back to the parsonage he had me hitch up his truck to the rear of my DUKW with the tow bar, then come inside while he retrieved his rifle. We headed back outside and he stored his rifle in the cab of his truck for safekeeping and kept his revolver pointed at me.

We climbed in the DUKW and I started the engine, then backtracked down Lost Truck Road, turned left on Highway 2, and headed through Cut Eye with him sitting in the seat beside me, his revolver pointed low and out of sight toward my stomach. His truck rattled along nicely behind us, and to anyone who saw it, it looked like their preacher was giving a neighborly pull to a fella whose truck broke down and needed a tow. Gummer wasn’t at his filling station when I pulled up, and I felt a bit of panic brush over me, although I didn’t have a plan for tipping him off anyway. I topped up both of the DUKW’s tanks as well as the gas
tank in Crazy Ake’s truck, and we headed northward up Highway 2 for the four-hour drive to Rancho Springs.

The DUKW roared along easily at an even 45 m.p.h. My face must have looked a mess, but Crazy Ake had the good sense to scrunch a ball cap tight on my head while we were still back at the parsonage and throw aviator sunglasses over my eyes. He’d been planning on beating my face for a while, I gathered. We didn’t talk none as we drove. There wasn’t nothing more to say. I knew I was being commandeered into doing another bank job with him, and for the time being the only plan I could think of was to shut up and keep driving.

By eight p.m. the outskirts of Rancho Springs were in sight, and when we came to a regrettably familiar dirt road, Crazy Ake ordered me to pull off the highway near a thicket of trees. I started sweating something mighty fierce. A man with his connections both in and out of prison was a man with eyes throughout the country, but I confess I hadn’t given much thought to who our third party would be until a possum scuttled across the start of a long driveway. We drove the remaining fifty yards up the dirt tracks to our destination and when we came to the front of the ramshackle old pigsty, we screeched to a stop. Crazy Ake stayed where he was sitting and fired a single shot into the air. Sally Jo Chicory ambled out the front door and scratched underneath her armpit.

“Rance!” she yelled, turning into the house. “This one’s for you.”

Two minutes passed before Rance walked out. He was dressed in army fatigues and carrying a carbine, which he aimed directly at us. He squinted, broke into a long laugh, and called, “So this is your crew!”

Crazy Ake called nothing back but turned to me and hissed, “Get out. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

I climbed out of the DUKW and Crazy Ake climbed out behind me. We walked over to where Rance stood near the porch.
He lowered the rifle. Crazy Ake nodded in Rance’s direction then cast a glance toward me.

“Rance Chicory, I believe you already know this sorry excuse for a man. We’re here to do what I talked to you about last time I came around.”

Rance nodded. “When you want to go?”

“Tonight.”

“Fine by me, but you trust this scum to do the job right?”

A corner of Crazy Ake’s mouth turned up in a smile. “When it comes to Rowdy Slater we’ve got security. How’s the rat doing?”

Rance laughed. “His little cutie-pie is just about ready for work, I’d say.” He eyed me closely. “What happened to your face, boy?”

I hated this man with every ounce of my being but kept silent.

Rance shrugged. “No matter. Gun’s in the barn. Let’s hook up the gear and go to town.”

Crazy Ake slapped Rance on the shoulder like an old friend and motioned to me to walk ahead. My stomach was growling something fierce. I glanced toward the house but didn’t see no sign of Sunny. Just as well. I didn’t want for her to see any of this.

The barn doors felt cold in my hands as I creaked them open. The 88 antiaircraft gun squatted behind the doors. It stood taller than a man, was about the size of an automobile, although wider, and its huge muzzle of a gun stuck out from on top of the mount. Neither of the two men lifted a finger and I surmised they wanted me to do the heavy work, which was no problem. I swung the muzzle rest up to vertical and secured the gun to it, disengaged the gear clutch, released the hand brake, and connected the prime mover to the drawbar. The 88 was a marvel of a killing machine, one that could easily take out a tank.

“All right,” Crazy Ake said, surveying my handiwork. “Go get the DUKW and hitch ’er up.”

We strode back over to the vehicles and I disconnected Crazy
Ake’s truck and let it roll free. Rance let Crazy Ake take a breather and kept his rifle aimed at me while Crazy Ake lit a cigarette and relaxed. I fired up the DUKW and backed it over to the open barn doors. The two greasy apes ambled behind me, smoking and jawing, and I climbed out, checked the gun to see if the recoil, recuperator, and rammer cylinders were filled with the proper oil levels, then hooked up the 88 to the back of the DUKW.

“Okay then.” Rance was all smiles. “What time you got?”

Crazy Ake studied his watch. “Time to rob a bank.” He grinned. “While we’re waiting, your woman got any more of that beef brisket on the stove?”

Rance rubbed his belly. “Might as well fill up while we wait. What about him?” He glared at me.

“Rope or chain. It don’t matter to me.”

Rance bustled off to a sidewall of the barn where an old horse rope was coiled and hanging, then brought the rope back, knotted my hands behind my back and my feet together with the rope, then tied the other end fast to the German gun. He stuck a rag in my mouth as a gag, then they walked off toward the house together leaving me alone and tied.

Silence fell, except the scurrying around of a mouse somewhere high over my head in the hay. An hour passed and darkness closed in around me as I stood tied against the gun. I tried to think of a plan, even something to take my mind off the job at hand. Maybe there was a poem that Bobbie had quoted to me once that I could remember, a song we’d sung in church, a verse I’d read that would give me some cheer. But nothing came to mind. All I could think was all was lost. Another hour went by and then another. From the open doors of the barn I could glimpse the night sky. The moon rose and another hour went by, and then another. I reckoned it was close to midnight when I heard a screen door burst open then slam shut, and two shadows walked toward me.