“Coupla weeks after you left for college,” Billy said, “I got in a fight and hit the dude over the head with a beer mug and was afraid I’d killed him, so I quick split. Then in San Antonio this fella offered me a job shuttling hot cars from one part of Texas to another. Went real good for a few months before I got pulled over for a dead taillight on a five-year-old Mercedes Coupe. Did two years at Goree Unit before I got paroled. My last few months there I got to know a robber named Gary Duval who was getting out two weeks before me and needed a partner. Asked was I interested and I said yeah. When I got out we met up and he introduced me to the robbery trade. Near to five months ago. We hit nothing but bagmen who make daily collections from the street sellers and then deliver the week’s take to the dealers. I tell you, bud, I never known juice like it. The gamblers got a saying, maybe you know it. They say won money is sweeter than earned money, and I guess it is. In gambling, though, the money’s the only thing at stake and your biggest risk is going broke. But every time you go out to do a robbery you’re staking your ass, and that risk beats just everything. It makes robbed money the sweetest kind there is, let me tell you. Anyhow, we worked out of Port Arthur, where Gary rented a house. He’d buy tips on bagmen—their pickup routes, where they lived, all that—and we were doing two rips a month. By “we,” I mean me and Gary and a driver named Bud. We always used a stolen car and Gary and I carried cut-off 12-gauge pumps. We’d hit them on the morning of delivery day. Wait down the street from where they live till they come out. Most of them got a bodyguard who usually does the driving. When they got in their car, Bud would zoom up and block them and Gary and me would jump out and poke the shorties in their faces on either side of the car and Gary’d strip the bagman of his piece and the money while I took the driver’s gun and snatched the keys outta the ignition, then we’d jump back in the car and get gone. We were doing good till one night little more than two weeks ago when Bud starts coughing blood and we take him to the emergency room and two days later he dies. We still didn’t have a driver when Gary goes to this bar in Bridge City with a redhead whose husband’s on the road a lot, and they’re drinking at the bar when hubby comes through the front door with a revolver in his hand. The way the bartender told it to the cops the hubby never said a word, just bam-bam-bam-bam, shot Gary four times. People screaming, running out the doors. Wifey tried to make a run for it and bam-bam he shoots her in the ass and down she goes. She’s still crawling for the side door and he’s walking toward her and reloading when the bartender pulls his own piece and shoots hubby in the brainpan and that was all she wrote. I heard about it on the radio the next day, and there I was with zero partners. That was two days ago. The kicker is, three days ago a fix-up guy Gary knows—one of those guys who for a price can fix you up with information, partners, buyers, whatever you need—he’d called Gary to ask were we interested in meeting a San Antone guy in need of two partners for some kinda major league score. Said the guy was Mexican but spoke good English. It’d cost us a grand for a meet, same as the Mex. Gary’d been wanting to move up from bagman rips, so he says yeah and goes and gives the fix-up the money and gets the time and place for the meet, which was at this fancy little café four nights from then.”
“Meaning tomorrow,” Axel says.
“Meaning tomorrow. But my problem is—”
“You need a partner,” Axel says. “I’m in.”
Billy gawked at him. “Jesus, man! Just like that? I thought I’d have to talk and talk and you’d still say no on account you’re—”
“I just want to know, why come to me?”
Billy grinned. “Well, hell, you never did lack for sand or, well … strike me as a toe-the-line sort. I’ve heard some of the stories they tell around Brownsville about those old-time Wolfe badasses and their outlaw ways. Always had a hunch you might have a touch of those ways in you.” Only now did Axel grasp how well Billy had come to know him. Quicker than I’ve come to know myself, he thinks. “Good hunch. Like I said, I’m your huckleberry.”
“You’re sure? I mean … you got a family, dude.”
“I know what I’ve got.”
“You can’t say nothing to your wife. I ain’t saying she can’t be trusted, just that—”
“She’ll never know a thing.” Axel put his elbow on the table and raised his hand as if challenging him to arm-wrestle.
Billy laughed and clasped it. “Amberlight Tavern, downtown,” he said. “Eight o’clock tomorrow night. I’m Billy Jones, you’re Axel Smith. Wear a jacket.”