Augie was at the service station by six A.M. He had made a clean getaway this morning, rising well before Helene. That wasn’t hard to do. His wife would sleep late and then get started with her busy day of going to the health club, lunching with friends, shopping and getting her nails done. When he got home tonight, she would complain about how tired she was, too tired to cook. They would have to go out for dinner or order something in.
Why had he hooked up with Helene? He knew the answer as he thought about her flowing blonde hair, the tight-fitting, cleavage-revealing sweaters she wore, the way her perfect backside filled out her designer jeans. It was sex, pure and simple. That was the reason he had married her.
A double bell rang as a car ran over the black rubber tubing in front of the gas pumps. Augie zipped up his tight overalls against the cool September morning as he went out to fill the customer’s tank. He stood with his hand on the gas pump nozzle and admitted to himself that he knew the reason Helene had married him.
Money.
He was no Adonis, that was for sure. He wasn’t good-looking and he was overweight. His career wasn’t glamorous and he wasn’t a great intellect. Although with Helene that certainly didn’t matter. She wasn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Augie swiped the credit card through the scanner and handed it back through the opened window to the customer.
Okay, he thought They had made their deal. Many couples did. He had been keeping up his side of things. They had a damned big house filled with all the gaudy crap Helene had picked out. He hadn’t realized how trashy the stuff was until he started robbing other houses. In a funny way, stealing had educated him, as he noticed the antiques and tasteful furnishings and art that decorated the homes in the exclusive neighborhoods in which his customers lived.
Augie was willing to live with things as they were with Helene as long as she kept her side of their bargain. He’d be damned if she was going to withhold from him. Yet that’s what she had been doing over the last few months.
She always had an excuse. She had a headache or she was too tired. He was never home and she was feeling lonely and neglected. Of course there was always something new she wanted. Another pair of earrings, a new leather jacket, or a trip to a spa with her girlfriends. If Augie came through with the goodies, Helene would come through with hers.
But things were tight right now. He couldn’t afford to pay for everything she wanted. He didn’t dare give her any of the jewelry he stole. Someone might recognize it as Helene paraded around town. And even as he fenced the loot he got from his raids, he knew where the money had to go.
He was in up to his eyeballs in that damned Larson Richards’s cheesy pizza deal. Augie had so much money invested now, that every time Richards came back with his promises that they were “almost there,” or that they just needed “a little more” to get to the closing, Augie felt he had to keep kicking in. If the pizza deal failed, Augie would lose everything.
Why had he ever let that guy talk him into it in the first place?
Augie knew the answer to that one, too. He was greedy. Greedy and insecure. When Larson Richards had tooled into the station in his big black $80,000 Mercedes, wearing his expensive suit and Italian shoes, Augie had been flattered that Richards had thought enough of him to let him in on the deal. When people saw you in mechanic’s work-clothes with grease under your fingernails, they didn’t exactly fawn all over you.
Larson had buttered him up, all right, treated Augie like an equal. And Augie had fallen for it.