Run For the Money (2 page)

Bo watched helplessly.

Straightening up to his full six-foot two, Slick tilted back his head to the rain and let it wash over him. He let out a bellow to the skies like he was challenging the storm to a fight.

Slick lowered his head and his eyes met Bo’s again. He lifted the shotgun.

“Looks like I don’t have to wait for the yard.”

Bo strained at his cuffs, wanting at least to cover his face with his hands, but he ended up squirming like a little girl in a room full of spiders.

Slick squeezed the trigger. No sound. He pulled back on the stock and it spat out the used shell, but there were no others to reload.

Bo peeked open his eyes.

Slick got down to his knees and scanned the floor of the cabin for any spare shells. As he inched forward the steady stream of water flowing down the incline of the wrecked van ran through the opening and mixed with the blood of the two officers which coated the floor beneath their feet.

As Slick shifted his body forward, the front end of the van tilted to a steeper angle. Slick retreated.

He rose to his feet again, still gripping the shotgun.

“Guess I’ll let the storm take you. I got a gal to see and some money to spend.”

Slick hoisted himself up through the tear in the roof. Bo could hear him climb along the outside of the van and drop off.

Bo scanned around the carcass of the van for anything that could help him. He was alone.

Slick’s size 14 boot slammed against the back of the van. It rocked forward. Another boot, another inch forward.

Bo tried to shift his weight to the back of the van for counterbalance, but one more boot to the bumper and he found himself sliding with the van down an incline. He had no idea how far down it went.

Slick stood on the two-lane highway in his state-issued creamsicle orange jumpsuit holding one state trooper issue shotgun with no shells. No one else knew the gun wasn’t loaded so he still had an effective bargaining tool.

Wet leaves stuck to his legs as he stood in the midst of the tempest. Fat drops of rain landed on every part of his already soaked body. $642,000 lay less than fifty miles away with Emma. She didn’t expect to see him for another twenty-five years.

Boy, would she be surprised.

––––––––

E
mma stood naked in front of the mirror taking inventory of everything she hated about herself.

First: the hair. She tried bleaching it blond, but it never looked right so she gave in to life as a mouse-brunette. There was the ten, okay fifteen, aw hell twenty pounds she had to lose. The four moles that lined up on her chin like some sort of miniature Mount Rushmore. Her teeth, oh her teeth. Crooked wasn’t even the word.

All of this artifice, these surface imperfections and she still had a killer ass, great fleshy round tits with tiny nipples that drove men nuts. Crooked teeth or not, she could suck the memory of all other women right out of a man’s dick. But what did all that get her when spackled over with her list of imperfections? Slick Eddie.

She learned to love him over time, but the part of her pushing tears out when he got sentenced was fighting a brawl inside with the part of her that was glad to see him go. If only she’d gotten a tumble with Bo before he was sent up. Now, him she could do a little time with.

Emma got dressed in the dank chill of her basement apartment. She rented the concrete-walled space from Sylvia, an older woman who wasn’t letting her house sit around and not earn. She rented out every room in the place, except the master suite and her son Delmer’s room, to college girls. The two-story-plus-loft Victorian made her an awfully nice return on a house that was paid off in 1986.

Emma at least had her own bathroom, kitchenette and a separate bedroom with a door that locked. The other girls who had to live side by side with Delmer gave Emma jealous looks when she came and went.

She tied her hair in a ponytail and no truer description of her hair was ever uttered. Horse-like. She checked the thin windows up near the ceiling, ground level outside, to see if it was still raining. It was. The concrete walls were slick with groundwater leeching in. Mold grew in fuzzy patches on the window frames.

I’ll be glad to get the fuck out of here.

There was still planning to do. It would be too easy to just bolt out of town so soon after Slick was sent away. She was a known companion to a convicted bank robber and the money still hadn’t been recovered.

Shit, she knew that because she hadn’t given it to them.

Emma had already given her notice at the book store where she worked saying it was too much to handle when Slick went away. She needed a fresh start. She did a little research using the internet at the library and found out that the Cayman Islands were an awfully good place to go with a sack full of cash if you wanted no questions asked.

Her research was less than scientific, but satisfied her urge to find an island on which to get lost.

The plan was to go to Miami for a few weeks, get a P.O. Box, be seen around town and act like she was setting up a new life and then bust out for the islands with the money.

For the moment, she needed a withdrawal from the bank of Slick’s booty. That meant heading out late for a stop at the storage unit. She knew once she was there she wouldn’t be able to resist counting a little bit more of it, rolling around on top of it. That first night she even got so worked up she held two paper-wrapped bundles in one hand and finger-fucked herself with the other. When she came, she rubbed a big wad of bills all over her pussy, getting them wet and sticky. Still legal tender, though.

She locked the door behind her and crept up the stairs.

Delmer was there. She jumped and swallowed a scream.

At thirty-three years old you could hardly call Delmer a boy, but for all the brain power he exhibited it was all you could think of when you spoke to him. He stood tall and rotund and awkward as a newborn cow. The constant slick of sweat on his forehead even reminded Emma of afterbirth. The way the old woman babied him it was a wonder she ever cut the cord.

None of the girls in the house liked to be around him. There were rumors he breast fed until age ten.

Delmer had a special fixation on Emma. Probably because she’d been there for over two years, much longer than the one or two semester stays the college girls had.

“Goin’ out?”

“Yeah, Delmer. I was”

“Where to?”

“I got stuff to do. Don’t you?”

“Naw. It’s my bedtime.”

He took up the whole doorframe at the top of the stairs so Emma was trapped until she could divert his attention, but she wasn’t holding anything shiny at the moment.

“Well, then you should go to bed,” she said cheerily, the way a kindergarten teacher talks.

“You look good.”

“Thanks Delmer.” She sighed. Guys like Slick and Delmer. Such was her lot in life. Curse her mother for the crooked teeth and mole genes.

“You goin’ out?” he said again.

“You know what?” Emma turned on the steps. “I just remembered I forgot something. I guess I’ll stay in. See you later Delmer.”

She descended the stairs under his looming watch.

––––––––

L
ike a drunk college kid with his hand in a cup of water, the rain made Bo piss his pants. The thick fog of unconsciousness contributed to the pants wetting, but he was awake now and soaked through from the rain much more than the piss.

The van rested comfortably on a set of train tracks at the bottom of a fifty-foot incline, one Bo had ridden all the way down. The van barely qualified as a vehicle any more. Roof ripped open, tires shorn off, windshield gone and passenger cabin caved in, pine branches embedded in the frame, floor cracked open. The fault line in the steel floor ran right across where the eye hook that held Bo to the floor used to sit. He was untethered from the twisted metal of the van, but still shackled to himself.

His world moved slow, a feeling he was not unused to. Since he was twelve, Bo had been a serious self-medicator. He’d come to like the slow feeling, not the speed. All efforts were on procuring the pot and pills to keep things mellow and slow. Vicodin and Percocet were favorites. OxyContin would do in a pinch. His time doing crystal meth nearly did him in. He found a person inside he didn’t like when he was on speed, but the person who moves slow, that was a dude he could hang with.

He blinked rain water out of his eyes. Lightning flashed, thunder right on its heels. Across from him in the open carcass of the transport van were Slick’s old shackles. In the handcuffs, jutting out like a middle finger, was the key.

Bo moved as quick as his syrupy brain would allow and kept a death grip on the tiny key. Losing it in the chaos of the wreckage and the storm would be game over.

He went for the leg shackles first. Bent over, it was hard going without the light of the electrical storm above to help him find the miniscule opening. He was sixteen all over again, trying to figure out where to put his dick into Christine Tordello.

The light flashed and he took a mental picture of the hole in the shackles and jammed the key inside. But the light stayed. Bo looked up. Train.

The noise of the storm, the cottony muffle of his hearing from the shotgun blast and the probable concussion from his ride down the hill made him fail to notice the van had come to rest on a set of tracks at the bottom of the ridge, nor did he hear the sound of an approaching locomotive.

No time for what-ifs. This wasn’t a sprint to the end of the tunnel or a quick make-it-off-the-bridge moment in time. This was move-your-ass-or-get-squashed.

Bo turned to his right and took as long a stride as his leg shackles would allow which wasn’t much. It took three shuffling steps before he jumped out the back of the van which was blown open the way he’d seen photographs of cars in downtown Baghdad. Bo fell into a tangle of weeds and shrubs.

The train never saw the van. It ran through at full speed and took the van with it, a giant wad of gum stuck to the front of the engine. A dozen boxcars followed and helped push the broken bones of the van, with two dead corrections officers inside, for two miles down the track before it could stop.

Bo felt down to his ankles. He exhaled deeply. The key was still there in the lock. He undid his legs and then his wrists thinking,
Fucking hard to be mellow when there’s a goddamn freight train two feet from your face.

––––––––

T
he walk back down the two-lane highway was so hurricane-wet Slick may as well have been swimming. He saw what he wanted. A diner with nothing else around it and only a few cars in the parking lot stood getting as soaked as he was. Red neon rimmed the top of the metal and glass building. Deep ruts in the gravel of the parking lot collected muddy water deep enough for a midget to take a bath.

Slick picked up his pace despite gaining a few pounds of mud on his boots as he neared the entrance. Shotgun in hand, still empty but he’d never tell, he kicked through the glass door, rattling dusty venetian blinds and cracking the glass as he did.

“Hands up motherfuckers! Now, which one’s got the best car?”

There were four patrons and three workers inside. Two men in their sixties sat in a booth together against the window, two men eating alone each sat at the counter with a respectful distance between them lest either one think the other was there for anything like a conversation. Trudy, the waitress, stood mannequin-still behind the counter. Jesus, the cook, peered out from the pass-through in the kitchen and Roy, the owner, fat with dry skin flaking off his bald head, stood astride the cash register ready to stuff it in his pants and bolt out the back if he needed to. No orange popsicle-looking motherfucker was getting his night’s till. Not on a shitty night like tonight.

No one answered Slick’s question. “Come on out of there, Mex!” He used the barrel of the pump action to direct Jesus out from the kitchen. “And you two, grab a stool. Sit where I can see you.” The two older men raised their hands up and slowly crossed to the counter, filling in the two seats between their fellow patrons. Tears rolled down Trudy’s cheeks taking long streaks of mascara with them.

“You!” He pointed the barrel at the counter man closest to him. “Strip.”

The man was approximately his size. Tall anyway, not as broad, but that would’ve been too much to hope for. He wore a plaid flannel shirt with a down vest over it. Jeans and Timberlands. Must belong to the pickup in the lot, thought Slick.

Plaid man slid off the stool slowly, unsure what to do.

“You want I should take off my clothes?”

“Well, I sure don’t see any pole so I guess that’s what strip means in this scenario, Dipshit. You think I like this outfit?”

Jesus tapped Roy on the back of his shoe with his own foot. Roy turned slowly, a little with his neck, mostly with his eyes and saw what Jesus showed him. An eight-inch chef’s knife he held flat against the inside of his forearm. Roy nodded slow, like a base coach.

The vest came off, the flannel, the jeans. Slick unzipped his jumpsuit, shook his arm out while holding the gun with the other then repeated the action. He jumped up and down a few times to get the suit to fall to his ankles and then stepped out, leaving the orange blob like a wet seal skin on the linoleum floor. His tight white briefs clung to his pelvis showing everything God gave him. Trudy looked away.

“Toss ‘em over. T-shirt too.” The man threw the plaid shirt and jeans to Slick and removed his t-shirt. White deodorant stains ringed the pits.

One handed, Slick began to put on the new outfit.

“You want me to wear yours now?”

“I don’t give a fuck what you do, son.” The man was ashamed, standing in his briefs, suddenly cold and acutely aware he wasn’t packing what Slick was and he didn’t mean the gun.

“So who’s got the best car?”

Eyes all around. No one volunteered.

The jeans were tight and the wetness of his legs didn’t help, but Slick managed to get them buttoned. He looked to the owner, Roy. “You. What do you drive?”