The Getaway Man (19 page)

“That carb’s not
stock,” he said. He sounded a little disappointed.

“I got
the original back home,” I told him. “And the original exhaust
manifolds, too.”

“You going to put them back on when
you’re done?”

“I … I don’t rightly know.
I was thinking, maybe I would, someday. But it runs a lot better this
way.”

“I’ll just bet. Cold mornings, I can sit there
forever before I get mine to fire up.”

“You’ve got
one, too?”

“A fifty-six,” he said. “Goldenrod
yellow, with a white porthole top.” He looked at the seats. “Yours
was, what, red from the factory?”

“Torch red,” I told
him, proud that I knew.

The trooper walked around to the back of the
car, but he didn’t roll his shoulders the way cops do when they’re
trying to make you nervous.

“Are those the original skirts, or
did you get them NOS?”

“Original,” I told him.

“I’ve been looking for a pair for mine for years,” he
said. “I got the Continental kit, though.”

“I saw one
of those, once. On a fifty-seven. It looked great.”

“Gives
you more room in the trunk, too,” he said. “I’m not one of
those guys who only brings his car to shows. I
drive
mine.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“I know a place sells the
original paint,” he said. “They still got some in
stock.”

“For real?”

“Absolutely. When
you’re going numbers-match, it has to be all authentic,
right?”

“Right. Where’s it at, that place that sells
the paint?”

The trooper stayed with me for quite a while. Long
enough for me to smoke a couple of cigarettes. He even had one with me.

Finally, he said he had to get going. He said it was a pleasure meeting
someone else who had an old T-bird to drive, not just to keep in the garage and
only bring out on Sundays when it doesn’t rain, like some.

We
gave each other our names, and shook hands. He never asked to see my
license.

After he took off, I kept driving in that same direction for a
while, just to be sure.

I felt a happiness in me, like I had done good.
I wished Hiram’s wife could have seen me, representing his jewel.

“
Y
ou got her ready to roll?” J.C. asked me, at the end of
the week. He was talking about the hearse; the truck didn’t need
anything.

“Pretty much,” I said. “I still
don’t know where Gus wants to put that stuff of his.”

“Don’t worry about it,” J.C. said. “Gus says
it’s no bigger than a little suitcase. Not like the damn money.
That’s all going to be in mixed bills, so we’re figuring about two,
three hundred pounds for every million. Going to be a lot of heavy little
sacks. That’s why we had to get the truck.”

“I
thought it was because—”

“Because the hearse
isn’t coming back? Nah. Look, Eddie, every good plan is really a simple
one. The more complicated you make it, the more that can go wrong.”

“You really plan stuff out, J.C.”

“That’s
my job,” he said.

“I guess there’s no
way.…”

“What? What’s on your mind,
kid?”

“This guy. Monty. He’s not, like, one of us,
right?”

“One of us? Oh, you mean, he’s a square john?
Sure. You think they’d let a guy with a record pilot one of those rigs?
Monty’s a guy who never would have thought of this whole plan on his own.
But, some of those citizens, once you figure out how to get their nose open,
there’s nothing they won’t do.”

“But what if
… what if he’s like … what if he’s like Kaiser
was?”

“You mean, if he’s got some friends waiting
around? Not a chance, Eddie. One,” he said, ticking off the numbers on
his fingers, “like you said, he’s not from our world. He
wouldn’t know where to find a crew could lift that heavy a weight. Two,
he don’t have a clue where we’re staying. He doesn’t know
anything about this place. All the trust’s on us, see?”

“So how does he—?”

“Soon as it’s
done, he’s got to jump. Get gone good. But Monty’s slick.
He’s been planning something like this for years, before we even met him.
Just been waiting for the right crew to come along.

“Monty’s been making regular trips to New York. There’s a
plastic surgeon up there that’s going to do his face as soon as this is
over. He’s got a whole new set of ID waiting, too, for when he can get
the new pictures taken.

“We know where he’s going to hide
out until we can get him the money. All he has to do is hold tight for a few
days, and then he disappears. They’ll never find him.”

“I guess. But if he ever does get caught,
he’ll—”

“Rat us all out, sure. So what?
He’s never seen you. Besides, if Gus’s stuff works like he says,
nobody’s even going to be
looking
for him, am I
right?”

“You’re right, J.C.,” I said.
“You thought of everything.”

G
us wanted
to play cards that night. Me, him, and J.C., cutthroat hearts. I didn’t
feel like doing anything with Gus anymore, but I knew I had to.

“I want to play, too,” Vonda said. She never had before.

“You can’t have betting with four players,” Gus
said.

“We can play partners,” J.C. told him. “Me and
Vonda against you and Eddie.”

“
W
hat
the fuck’s wrong with you?” Gus said to me. “Couldn’t
you see I was shooting the moon?”

“I’m
sorry,” I said.

“Get with the program, kid. We’re
down damn near a hundred bucks already.”

“Few weeks from
now, you’ll be lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills,” J.C.
told him.

I
knew J.C. and Gus wouldn’t be going away anymore.
So I wasn’t disappointed when Vonda stopped watching my movies with me.
She stopped exercising, too.

The only time I saw her was when she
came out to the barn one day with J.C. and Gus.

“Hey,
what’s with the front door on that hearse?” Gus asked me.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“How come it opens
from the front? It looks weird.”

“They’re called
‘suicide doors,’” I told him. “They used to make all
cars like that.”

“I can see why they call them that.
Christ, you could fall right out on your face.”

“Not if
you’re careful. And I figure it gives me an extra second or so if I have
to get out fast.”

“That’s why Eddie’s the
ace,” J.C. said. “Best getaway man in the business.”

Even with all I knew about him by then, it meant a lot to me, that he said
that.

“
Y
ou’re sure he hasn’t got a move?”
Gus asked J.C. that same night.

“You and Eddie, Jesus
Christ,” J.C. said. “Monty’s got nothing. He’s the
one’s got to trust
us
. He’s taking the armored car, but
we’re taking the money.”

Gus didn’t say anything.

J.C. took a long deep breath. Then he let it out slow, like he was
trying to keep his temper.

“All right,” he said, looking at
both of us, “one more time. Two men are making the run in the armored
car. One of them is Monty. The other guy, the one behind the wheel, he
doesn’t know anything. We’ll be behind those rocks; nobody can see
us from the road. When they get close, Monty pulls his piece, makes the other
guy drive up to us.

“Monty keeps him under the gun; Gus slips
behind him with that pad of chloroform and clamps him down. He goes out like a
light, be unconscious for a good hour, minimum.

“When the guy
wakes up, he’s in the armored car, a few miles away from where we took
him. He’s cuffed to the steering wheel, but his radio’s disabled,
and every fuse has been pulled, so his horn and lights don’t work.

“Even when the cops finally find him, all he can tell them is that
Monty was in on it. He never sees our faces, never hears us talk. But we make
sure
he sees the hearse … that’s Eddie’s job.

“The way the cops dope it out, the robbers and Monty all pile in the
hearse to make a getaway. The driver loses control around the curve just
opposite the quarry, and it goes over the edge.

“When they
finally get down there to examine the wreck, they won’t find any actual
bodies, just little tiny
pieces
of them, all burned. Even if
there’s enough left to DNA, none of it’s
our
DNA. So even
if they don’t buy it complete, the only person they can ever look for is
Monty.

“And even if they do catch Monty someday, so what? Sure,
like Eddie already asked me, he’d rat us out in a heartbeat. But
what’s he got to tell them? Meanwhile, time’s passing, and the
statute of limitations is running. This isn’t a murder; it’s a
robbery. Sooner or later, they’ll have to throw in the towel.”

“Yeah,” Gus said. “All Monty’s got to do is drive
the armored car down the road a few miles, nice and slow, then ditch it and
disappear. That’ll give us plenty of margin, especially if the base calls
him on the radio while he’s still behind the wheel.”

“And the cops, they’ll think we took Monty with us,” J.C.
said, smiling. “Right over the edge.” He turned to look at me.
“Hey, Eddie, you sure that ground won’t take tracks?”

“Car tracks, just a little, maybe,” I said. “But never
us, walking back.”

“Can’t you fix something with the
gas pedal, make it go over by itself?” J.C. asked me.

“No.
I mean, I
could,
but it might not work. The only way to be sure is to
put it in drive, and all three of us shove it over. I’ve got the idle set
up real high. It’ll be easy.”

“Isn’t there
something I could do, too?” Vonda said.

“All you have to do
is sit right here,” J.C. said. “We’ll be back with enough
money to light you up like a Christmas tree.”

S
aturday, we all
stayed up. When J.C.’s cell phone buzzed, I jumped a little. But it was
only Monty, saying that it wasn’t going to be that night.

It
was a bad week after that. With J.C. and Gus around all the time, Vonda could
hardly talk to me. But, sometimes, when no one was looking, she’d give me
a quick little secret squeeze.

I spent a lot of time in the barn. But I
never watched any of my movies.

T
he next week was like my first week
in prison. It never seemed to get closer to another day.

Saturday
night, J.C.’s phone went off again. When he hung up, he said,
“It’s show time.”

We went out to the freezer for the
bodies. They were too slippery to handle; we had to wrap them in blankets.

Gus and me loaded the bodies in the back of the hearse. J.C. kept looking
at his watch, saying, “Plenty of time, plenty of time.”

W
hen I first poked the nose of the hearse out of the barn, a spring rain
was slanting down.

“Roads’re going to be greasy,”
Gus said.

“Eddie knows what he’s doing,” J.C. told
him.

I felt good about what J.C. had said. But Gus was right, and I
paid close attention.

I could feel the extra weight in the back right
through the wheel. More weight back there helps keep you from sliding, but if
the rear end ever does break loose, it makes it harder to catch, too. The trick
to driving on wet roads is to stay smooth—it’s jerky moves that get
you sideways.

J
.C. was right about there being plenty of time. When
the armored car showed up, we had been waiting in the hearse for over an
hour.

We were pretty much hidden behind the big pile of rocks, but I
could see the whole road out of the windshield, even with the wipers off. I had
my window down, too.

The armored car slowed way down and pulled over.
It kept coming, real slow, until it was back in the brush near where we were.
Its lights went off.

Two men got out, wearing uniforms. They started
walking over toward where we were hiding in the hearse.

When they got
close, I could see one man was holding a pistol, aimed at the other one’s
back.

They stopped not twenty feet from where we were. The one without
the gun turned around, so they were facing each other.

I started the
engine, so I could pull out and let the armored car driver see us.

“You’re crazy if you think you can get away with this,”
the man without the gun said. “They’ll know—”

The shots came so sudden I felt a jolt in my chest. The noise bounced off
the rocks like thunder inside a cave. One of the men fell to the ground.

“Fuck!” J.C. said.

Him and Gus ran over to where the
man in uniform was standing, still holding his gun. I stayed in the
driver’s seat.

I heard them saying things to each other. I
couldn’t make it all out, but I could tell J.C. was mad. He put his palm
up like a traffic cop, telling me to keep the hearse where it was.

J.C.
held out his hand, and the man in uniform gave over his pistol. J.C. took it,
but he didn’t point it at anyone, just held it down at his side.

Then J.C. said something, pointing his finger at the man’s chest. The
man and Gus each took one of the dead man’s legs and dragged him over to
the hearse. I heard them open the big wide door from the outside, and the thump
he made when they heaved him in.

I never turned around. My job was to
watch the road. Anyway, I wouldn’t have been able to see much with all
those bodies piled up in the back.

I saw the man and Gus walk over to
where J.C. was waiting. J.C. pointed again. The man in the uniform climbed into
the armored car. He drove across to the other side of the road, to where the
truck was hidden behind the curtain.

J.C. and Gus walked over on foot.
They guided the driver backing up until he was in the right place.

The
driver of the armored car got out. Rain beaded on the windshield, but I could
see the shapes of three men moving, loading the money into the truck.

It didn’t take long. The man in the uniform got back into the armored
car, and drove off, heading out the way they had been going at first.