The Getaway Man (4 page)

“I wasn’t asking you because I was
worried about … Ah, never mind, sugar. You take care of
yourself.”

She gave me a kiss with no promise in it, and then she
went away.

L
ater that same night, Virgil walked over to where I was
working on one of the cars in the shed.

“Rochelle was doing
you a favor, Eddie,” he said. “That man of hers, Leon, he is one
stone insane peckerwood. You’d have to kill him.”

“I
guess.”

Virgil was quiet for a few minutes. Then he said,
“You want her bad enough to do something like that?”

“No,” I told him.

“Okay, then,” he
said.

We smoked a cigarette apiece, just looking at the crescent moon.
Then Virgil went back into the house.

A
fter that
first time, we didn’t do any more test runs. Everything was for
real.

One job was a post office. We went at night. Virgil was
dressed in one of those padded suits people who work in meat lockers wear. Tim
swung the sledgehammer against the glass. Virgil put his arms over his head and
jumped right on through where it was smashed in. The alarm went off, loud.

Virgil ran around and opened the door from the inside, so Tim could help
him.

The alarm kept ringing. Tim said we had to keep everything under
three minutes. He told me to keep watch, but not to make any noise unless the
cops showed up.

Tim and Virgil came out. They were hauling a big gray
post office bag. They heaved it into the trunk and jumped in with me.

“Drive like the Devil’s behind you, Eddie,” Tim
said.

T
he bag was full of all kinds of stuff. Mostly stamps. There
was a little cash, not much. The big score was all the blank money orders. Tim
said he knew a guy who would give us a good deal on them, but we had to turn
them over fast, before the feds got the list out.

One thing I
learned from Tim: It was better to take a long time planning a big job than to
do a lot of little ones in a hurry. After a while, I got to be in on the
planning. Just the driving part, but that was very important, Tim said. Mostly
the route for the getaway, but also what car to use, too.

Mr.
Clanton’s junkyard was so big, you could make a new car out of the parts
of old ones. He showed me how to cut license plates in half and make new ones
out of the pieces. Ones that wouldn’t come up stolen if a cop looked at
them.

“Can you get us something
really
fast?” Tim
asked me one night.

“Fast top end? Or off the line?” I
said. There’s a big difference, but most people never think about
that.

“We’re
gonna
be chased, Eddie,” he
said. “Count on it.”

“How could the
cops—?”

“Not the cops,” he said.
“It’s going to be a race. If we win, we get a
lot
of
money. And nobody’s going to call the cops.”

“What
happens if we—?”

“We get dead,” Virgil said. He
had a big grin on his face.

M
r. Clanton had an old Chevy stock car
at his place. It used to run in Sportsman Modified over at the Speedway a few
years ago. “The owner got sick of throwing away money,” Mr. Clanton
told us. “The fool he had for a driver spent more time on the wall than
he did on the track. They never could get themselves a decent sponsor, so I
took it in trade for some motors. It’s just been sitting around here,
ever since.”

I spent a lot of time with that car. Putting in a
new engine was easy—the whole front end tilted up and there was plenty of
room to work. The suspension was the problem.

“This one was set
up to go roundy-round,” Mr. Clanton said. “Spent its whole sad life
making left turns. It’s geared real short, too.”

I told him
I was sure I could fix it, and he let me use his shop to try. Every time I made
a change, I took it out and tried it, to make sure it worked.

One
night, Virgil asked me what the hell was taking me so long. Before I could say
anything, Tim said, “Eddie knows what he’s doing.”

That made me even more determined to do it perfect.

When I was
done, the car looked like it was normal, if you didn’t get too close. I
even got the lights hooked up. There was only the one seat in the front, but we
weren’t going any long distance. The bad thing about it for a getaway car
was that it only had two doors. If you’ve got more than one man coming,
it takes longer to jump into that kind of car. But Tim said he had a plan for
that, too.

T
he building was against the side of a hill, so you had
to climb a long flight of outside stairs to get to the door on the second
floor. That was around the side; the front was the same level as the
ground—that’s where they had the strip club.

“The
game’s upstairs,” Tim said, “but the chase is going to come
from around the front. They’ll have to call down for help.”

“What about doing their tires?” I asked him. “So they
can’t chase us.”

“You see how many cars there are in
the lot, Eddie? We don’t know which ones the bouncers drive. We’d
have to do them all. Anyway, there’s way too much traffic in the lot,
people coming in and out all the time. Anybody spots us doing the tires,
we’re done. You’ve got to
drive,
kid. All
right?”

“I got it,” I said. My chest felt big with
what Tim had called me. Same as Virgil.

I started the engine. We rolled
over to a spot right next to the bottom of the stairs. Tim and Virgil got
out.

They climbed up the stairs. I lost sight of them when they went in
the door.

I closed my eyes for a second, to fix the road I’d have
to drive in my mind. Then I waited.

Somebody came charging down the
stairs. Virgil. He grabbed the widemouth can he had stashed at the bottom, ran
about halfway back up, and started splashing gas all over the steps as he
backed down again.

Three shots blasted. Tim came flying down the
stairs, a laundry sack in one hand. When he got to where the gas was, he threw
down the sack and vaulted off. Soon as he was in the air, Virgil lit the whole
thing up.

I revved the engine, put the car in first, held the clutch
down.

Virgil threw the laundry sack in the side window. It landed right
next to me. He crawled in behind; Tim jumped in the front. They pulled their
masks off.

The flames were swallowing the stairs. I dropped the clutch.
We came out of that lot like a shotgun blast. The stock car got a little
sideways on the dirt, but I was ready for it to do that, and I never had to let
off the gas.

The road went straight as a string for about five miles
before there was any chance to turn off. I couldn’t see any lights behind
us.

“We’re gone!” Tim said, looking over his
shoulder.

We were almost to the first turnoff when I saw a pair of
pickups coming toward us. Suddenly, they slammed on their brakes, blocking the
road.

“Well, look at that. Hillbillies got themselves a CB radio,
huh?” Virgil said. I couldn’t see his face behind me, but I knew he
was grinning.

I stabbed the brakes as I gunned the engine and
downshifted all the way to second. As we started to skid, I cranked the wheel
hard over, and floored it. The stock car got sideways, powersliding right at
the two pickups. I whipped the wheel back to the left and we slipped around
them with about a yard to spare.

A big chunk of the windshield
disappeared just before I heard the shots.

“Come on,
cocksuckers!” Virgil yelled right in my ear, blasting his pistol out the
window.

Tim was somewhere under all that glass, but I could see him
moving.

Everything slowed down then. I could see it all happening, like
we were underwater. I felt a couple of shots go into the rear of the car, like
they were going into me. Tim’s face was all bloody. He was trying to get
his gun up. One of the pickups wheeled around behind us. It had a row of bright
lights in a bar across the top of its roof, blazing.

“Drive us,
Eddie!” Tim said. Real soft, but it was like a shout to me.

I
bent the stock car into that first corner, and put my right foot through the
floorboard. I’d been over those roads dozens of times, practicing. It
felt like there was a wire running from my hands direct into the front wheels,
like I was bending my own body around those curves. Once in a while I could
catch a flash of the pickup’s lights on an angle, but they never got
close enough to fire any more shots. At least, none I could hear.

When
I spotted the big tree with the giant white “X” I had spray-painted
on it, I knew we were nearly home. Just up the road a piece from the
“X” was a tight hairpin curve around a mass of rocks. I could hear
the pickup coming on. I braked deep, sliding just a little bit. Then I slowed
down even more, so we were just barely moving. I could hear Virgil slam another
clip in his pistol.

I looked over at Tim. He finally had his gun up,
but he couldn’t turn enough to aim back out his window.

The
pickup came closer. I goosed the throttle with the clutch in, making sure the
carburetor was clean. The second I saw the wash of the pickup’s lights,
we took off again. The stock car slipped around that hairpin like water through
a pipe.

The pickup thought we were going much faster than we really
were. By then, it was too late for them to slow down. I couldn’t see the
crash, but I heard it.

“They ain’t got no more!”
Virgil yelled.

W
hen we got back, we found out that Tim was all cut
up, but none of it was too bad. I didn’t even know I’d been nicked
until Tim’s girl Merleen finished cleaning him up and came over to
me.

“Your ear’s bleeding, Eddie,” she said.

“Probably some glass, like Tim got,” I told her.

“Let me see … Damn! The whole lobe is about gone. You must
have had a bullet go right by your face.”

“I don’t
remember anything like that.”

“It’s all …
burned, too. Like you got shot up close,” Merleen said.

She
poured some alcohol on my ear, then covered it with some white ointment from a
tube. She wrapped a lot of tape all around my ear, real tight. It looked
stupid, but it didn’t hurt.

By then, I figured out what had
happened, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want Virgil to feel
bad.

“
Y
ou feel bad about it?” Mr. Clanton asked
me.

He meant that we had to cut up the stock car and get rid of all
the pieces.

“No, sir,” I told him.

“That car
was a
horse
for you boys,” Mr. Clanton said.

I wanted to
explain to him. How I didn’t care about cars, just about driving. But I
thought that would sound dumb, so I just shook my head like I was sad. That was
what Mr. Clanton expected of me, I think.

V
irgil showed me how to
bury money in mason jars, like they use for canning. Money’s only paper.
If you don’t seal it up real tight, it could rot on you, especially if
you left it a long time.

We couldn’t spend most of the money
right away, Tim said. The men who were in that poker game had people all over
the place. If we started throwing money around, word could get back to
them.

I asked Tim if he would hide my share for me.

“I’ll hide half of it for you, Eddie,” he said.
“The other half, you have to hide for yourself.”

“How
come?”

“You can never have all your money in one
place,” he said. “What if I had to come back for my own money? In a
hurry, you understand. I might not have time to cover my tracks. Anyone coming
hot on my heels would find your share, too.”

“If that
happened, you could take my share with you.”

“Eddie
… you can’t
always
get away. Not every time. If I got
caught,
all
the money would be gone. Yours, too,
understand?”

“I guess I do. But I could
always—”

“Half,” Tim said. “No
more.”

V
irgil was a real good cook. Specially his barbeque. He
made his own pit on the side of the house, out of some special bricks that came
from a famous barbeque oven in Kansas City. Virgil said, after a lot of years,
the bricks get to hold a flavor, and whatever you cook in them gets some of
that flavor, too.

I was never sure when Virgil was having fun with
me, when he told me things, but his barbeque was good enough he could have
opened a restaurant. Tim was always after him to do that. He said we all had to
have regular, legitimate businesses to be in, because stickup men never die of
old age, and we couldn’t just keep on the way we were forever.

Virgil said we were going to all do it, someday. We’d have a big
barbeque joint. Virgil would be the cook, and Tim would be the manager.

“And we’ll have a beautiful little garage right next to
it,” Tim said. “Maybe a body shop, or a place for motors. Right,
Eddie?”

“Sure,” I said. But I was really wishing they
had asked me to work in the restaurant.

W
e were all out by the
barbeque pit one afternoon. Virgil had been doing something with the meat all
day—he had all different kinds, not just pork, like you see in some
places—and he was just starting to put it on the fire. A car pulled up.
An old one, is all I remember about it.

A woman got out of the front
seat. She was kind of heavy, with long straight brown hair.

“Brenda,” Tim said to Virgil.

The woman walked over to
where we were standing.

“I got to talk to you,” she said to
Tim.

Tim looked over at Virgil. Then he moved his head to the side a
little bit, so you could see he was listening.

“Wallace.…” the woman said.

“I’m not
doing this again, Brenda,” Tim said. “That’s your man. And
that’s your choice. You think I forgot what happened before?”

“This is—”

“What, Brenda? This is
different? How many times you come around here, looking for money because
Wallace beat your ass and took your check? But that wasn’t enough for
you, right? You wait until I’m off somewhere and sneak yourself up here.
Virgil, he takes one look at your face all bashed up, and what does he
do?”