Authors: Elmore Leonard
He said, "Can you see leaving here to live in Findlay, Ohio? Jesus. What was the other place, Lima?"
"Lima," Carmen said, "like the beans."
"Yeah, I imagine there's all kinds of structural work down in Lima, Ohio. Can you see moving out and not telling anybody? Not even your mom? . . . Wait a minute, maybe it isn't such a bad idea."
Carmen didn't say anything.
Wayne sipped his beer, watching her. "What're you thinking about?"
"If we did have to change our names," Carmen said, "I was thinking it might be fun, huh? Pick whatever name you want."
"The only one I'd ever think of using," Wayne said, "you know what it is? Mats."
"After your great-grandfather."
"My dad's."
Carmen had seen pictures of him: Wayne with a bushy mustache, Mats the lumberjack, who'd come from Sweden to northern Michigan. Wayne's mother and dad were still up there, near Alpena, growing Christmas trees on three hundred and twenty acres.
"My dad wanted to name me Mats."
"But your mom won," Carmen said, "and named you after a movie star. Moms get away with murder. Mine, you probably think, named me after the girl in the opera."
"Tell you the truth," Wayne said, "I never thought about it."
"She didn't. She named me after Guy Lombardo's brother, Carmen Lombardo, he sang with the band. His big number was 'Sweethearts on Parade.' Mom said it was her and Dad's song when they were going together."
"You're putting me on," Wayne said. "Aren't you?"
"I could change my name to Bambi," Carmen said, "except I'd be afraid you might shoot me. How about Kim? Barbie, Betsy, Becky . . . You have to be little and cute to have one of those."
"You're cute."
"No, I was cute in high school, I outgrew it. When you're really cute that's all you have to be, you make a career out of it. Someone asks you what you do, you say, 'Nothing, I'm cute.' " She looked out at the police car parked in the yard.
Wayne watched her for a moment. "We don't seem too shook up over this."
"If we did move away for a while," Carmen said, turning to him, "we don't see your folks that often, we could be back before they knew we were gone."
"Or go up there to the farm," Wayne said, "if we have to hide, which irks the shit out of me. Or go down to Florida, visit your dad. That wouldn't be hard to take. I think what they said is bullshit, we stay with relatives there's a chance they could find us. I'm leaning more toward what you said, it doesn't have anything to do with the Mafia."
"But they want to believe it does," Carmen said, "and if they're right . . . well, we'd be better off in Cape Girardeau than here."
"I never heard of it."
"It's on the Mississippi . . ."
"I still never heard of it," Wayne said. "You can't tell much from the literature." He took a sip of beer. "What do you think it's like?"
"I don't know," Carmen said. "You want to find out?"
Wayne didn't answer, looking out the window now at the police car. "We'd have to tell Matthew. Make up a story for your mom. Tell her I've become a boomer, gone down to Missouri to work on permit, they got this two-story structure they're putting up."
"It'd be a change," Carmen said.
Wayne turned to look at his wife. "You wouldn't mind doing it, would you?"
"Well, if it's a choice of going to Cape Girardeau or getting shot at." She took a sip of beer and said, "Every once in a while I wonder what it would be like to be someone else. See the way they look at things and what their life is really like."
"You're telling me," Wayne said, "you'd rather be somebody else than who you are?"
"No, I don't mean become someone else, permanently."
"You're just nosy then."
"There was a movie we saw a long time ago," Carmen said, "where Jack Nicholson takes on another man's identity who died and then finds out people are after him thinking he's the guy?"
"Yeah . . . ?"
"I don't remember the name of it or what reminded me. It isn't anything like what we're into at all."
"Jack Nicholson's in it and they're in Spain? He's driving around in a red convertible with this broad he picked up?"
"That's the one."
He watched her nod, calm as always, that clear look in her eyes. Sometimes she knew things before he could figure them out and she'd tell him you had to feel as well as think. Feel what? She'd say, just feel, that's all.
"Why can't we go anywhere we want?"
She didn't answer him.
"We can. Who's gonna stop us?" Arguing with himself.
She touched her hair and seemed to shrug. "They have a house for us, two bedrooms . . ."
"I can just see it."
"It sounded nice, on the edge of a woods."
"We have a woods," Wayne said, "right out there."
The sheriff's deputy from the living room came in carrying a cup and saucer. He didn't look at Wayne. He said to Carmen, "I wonder if you could spare a refill?"
"You having trouble," Wayne said, "staying awake?"
The deputy glanced at him with his blank look, but didn't answer. Carmen poured him a cup of coffee. She got a milk carton from the refrigerator and brought it to the counter where the deputy was helping himself to sugar.
Carmen said, "Would you like some cookies? Or I can make you a sandwich."
Stirring his coffee, the deputy said, "Like what kind?"
Carmen paused. Wayne watched her reconsider and tell him, "Why don't you take the cookies, all right?"
He did, a plateful of chocolate chip with his coffee, back to the living room where the television was going, television laughter letting the deputy know what was funny.
Wayne said, "We have to get out of here."
Carmen nodded. "I think so."
"We'll give them three weeks to find those guys and that's it," Wayne said. "Deer season opens we're coming home."
Chapter
12
ARMAND HAD TOLD RICHIE, "All right, from now on you don't leave my sight. You go off and do crazy things."
"All I did was blow out a couple of their windows. I didn't get caught, did I? I brought us the car." A nice one, an all-black Dodge Daytona with smoked-glass windows as dark as the body. Stuck in Donna's garage all week. If it was clean why hide it? The Bird had only one thing on his mind:
"You don't leave my sight."
"Okay then," Richie had said, "how about when I go to the bathroom? You want to watch? How about when I give Donna a jump and you're in there looking at The Price Is Right? Or you're eating again. Or when I don't hear no snoring in the house and I know you're taking your turn. You want me to come along? She could take us both at once; she's old meat but wiry as hell. Be something to do. How about it, Bird, want me to ask her? Or do we keep pretending you're not fucking her? Youthink I'd be jealous or what? How long we gonna sit here, Bird? You think I act crazy, shit, this is what makes me. Like being in the hole only there's TV and little stuffed animals with you, a half-breed Indian hit man and a female corrections officer, queen of the cons. Shit, I may as well be in stir. How long, Bird?"
"Okay," Armand had said finally, "we stick our heads out, see what's going on."
Now they were riding along in the black car past open fields in the night, the radio and heater on, the blower going, Richie driving with the seat pushed way back, stiff-arming the wheel, raising his voice over the rock music coming out of the speakers, saying to his Indian buddy in the dark, "The first time? The first time was a guy name Kevin, suppose to be a friend of mine."
Armand hunched over to turn the radio down a notch. "He snitch on you or what?"
"No, I was clean, right out of the joint with this new identity they gave me . . . Wait a minute. Shit, this is weird. You ask me what was my first time and right away I think of this guy Kevin I knew from before. But there was the guy at Terre Haute, my cellmate. Some guys wanted him taken out, so they slip me a knife and say if I don't kill him they're gonna kill me. So I did. But then when I was brought up I laid it on those guys, testified in court I saw the one guy cut my cellmate's throat. He got like ninety-nine years added on to the ninety-nine he was doing and I got transferred out. Maybe by testifying I talked myself into believing it wasn't me that cut the guy. You know what I'm saying? So I don't remember it as my first one. Or it was 'cause I used a knife, I don't know. Then when I got my release it was this guy Kevin I knew hired me to repossess cars and shit. This one time--listen to this--I had to go in a nursing home and repossess a wheelchair, this battery-run tri-cart, they cost just under twenty-five hundred. I have to lift this cripple woman out of it, put her in bed, she's going 'Oh, please, I have multiple scarosis, I can't get around without my wheelchair.' Man, I hated to do it, but she was three months behind. What was I suppose to do? I had car payments, rent--see, I was back with Laurie, that's my wife, I'd hardly seen her in four years. She said it broke her heart to visit me in the joint, so she didn't come too much."
Armand turned the radio off, getting rid of that irritating noise. Richie looked at him and Armand said, "What about this guy Kevin?"
"I was just getting to him. See, here's Kevin, he finds out I'm being sent up he tells me he'll look after Laurie, if she got sick or anything, as a friend."
"I can see it coming," Armand said.
"Yeah, well, I didn't think nothing about it till one night me and Kevin are in this bar after work and right out of nowhere he goes, 'I want you to know something. I never fucked Laurie while you were in prison, not once.' I start to think, well, shit, what'd he tell me that for if he didn't? It must mean he did."
"Sure he did," Armand said. "How you gonna stop him, you're doing time."
"I go home ask Laurie, 'You ever go to bed with Kevin?' Her eyes get big, she goes, no, she swears she never did. I hit her a few times, she still claims she never did, swears to it on her Bible. Okay, I'm thinking, maybe they didn't. Couple of days later I come home, she's gone, cleared out with all her stuff. What does that tell you?"
"We're coming to the road where you turn, before you get to that little airport," Armand said. "Sure, she's scared you're gonna find out the truth. She was betraying you."
"And Kevin was fucking her, he musta been. I decide I'd get me a gun and settle the score with him."
"So he was your first one," Armand said, "as you like to see it."
Richie didn't say anything making the left turn onto a hard-packed gravel road, got the Daytona straightened out to head through country, past empty fields, and started to grin as he looked at Armand. "You aren't gonna believe this. There was another one before Kevin. See, I quit my job, I didn't want to have nothing to do with him till I got myself a gun and stuck it in his face. Man, it tore me up. Here I was working, I had a new name, I was James Dudley, I was clean. I think of it now, the only job I ever had in my life was in the repo business and what's that but legal stealing. I said, shit, go on back to your trade, what's the difference, you can't trust nobody anyway. So I picked up a thirty-eight, not the one I got now, a cheap one--Detroit, you can get any kind of piece you want, buy it off a schoolkid. Okay, I'm ready to go see Kevin. I think I'm ready, but you know what? I never shot anybody before. I was gonna shoot that migrant, the one I picked up in Georgia, but I never got a chance to. I'm thinking, I want to be cool when I shoot Kevin, I want to know what's gonna happen. See, I needed cash too, so what I did, I practiced on the guy in the grocery store I held up, little greaseball-looking guy, you seen 'em. Anyway I put three in him and I think, Hey, nothing to it. Aim and squeeze, right? I forgot what I scored, not a whole lot. So by the time I got to Kevin--I caught him in the office late, 'Hi, Kev, how you doing?' and put five in him to make sure--he was actually my third. Though I still think of him, I don't know why, as my first. Weird, huh?"
Armand didn't say anything.
This guy was crazy. Armand remembered his first one like it was yesterday, the Italian coming into the barbershop, offering them a job saying, "The Degas brothers, stick-up guys, 'ey? Think you're tough . . ."
They came to an intersection, a stop sign showing in the Daytona's headlights, the crossroad dark both ways. Richie went through it without slowing down.
Armand didn't say anything.
He was watching now for the road ahead of them to begin curving to the left, remembering the last time they drove to the ironworker's house and Richie wouldn't do what he was told, drove past the house to take a look and when they made the U-turn and approached from this direction, Armand remembered, he'd had the same thoughts then as he did now. That he was going to end up shooting Richie before this was over or right after. Something would come up between them . . .
"The house is just around this curve."
"I know it."
He knew everything in that tone he thought was cool.
"Then slow down," Armand said.
The headlights swept over a sod field and they were close now, the ironworker's place coming up on the left, beyond that mass of trees. Armand looked for cars as Richie braked and let the Dodge coast toward the house, Richie saying it didn't look like anybody was home, or else they were in the sack already. Armand sat hunched close to the smoked-glass windshield. There was something in the yard he didn't remember from the other time. He hit Richie's arm, telling him, "Pull over."
"Where?"
"By the house. Aim the lights at it."
Richie cut the wheel and came to a stop, headlights shining on dark windows, and there, in the front yard, a Nelson Davies FOR SALE sign.
Armand sat back in the seat trying to think--telling himself it didn't mean they were gone, you don't move till you sell your house--but it was hard to think with Richie talking about the goddamn real estate man, saying there he was again, saying it was like starting all over, it was like this was where he came in, seeing that sign. Finally he shut up. It was quiet for a while in the car.
Till Richie said, "Well, shit, what do we do now, Bird?"
"Don't worry about it."
"Yeah, but they're gone."
"Listen to me," Armand said. "You listening to me? Don't worry about it."