Chapter 3

When we pulled up in front of the house, the sun was starting to dip behind the western range under a sky in riot with all the colors of fire. I cut off the motor and we got out and I breathed deeply of the warm dry wind coming gently from the south. The screen door screeched open and Belle and Charlie came running out, shrilling like schoolgirls, coming to greet us like we’d been gone for weeks instead of only two days.

Belle flung herself on me, hugging me by the neck and locking her legs around my waist. “I thought you’d never get back!” she said, and kissed my ears and the top of my head.

Her ass felt wonderful in my hands and I laughed and spun us around. I was amazed at how much her bruises had improved in the brief time we’d been away. Only a smudge of yellow remained on her cheekbone, and although the flesh around her eye was still blue, it was no longer swollen. She was even prettier than I’d thought.

Charlie made the same sort of fuss over Russell and then let go of him and ran over to me as Belle turned loose and went to Russell and there was more hugging and kissing. Then Charlie looked over her shoulder at Buck, who was headed for the door with the Wink briefcase in one hand and his travel valise in the other. She gave me one more peck on the forehead and set out after him, calling, “Hey you.” Buck turned as she threw herself on him and jarred him off balance and they went down in a heap.

Belle hesitated, then went over and stood smiling down on them as Charlie straddled Buck’s stomach and mussed his hair and planted kisses on his face and babbled at him in babytalk. He cussed mildly and made like he was trying to ward her off, but you could see how much he was enjoying it, how gently he got her off him. She kept petting him as he got to his feet muttering that a man could get his back broken being greeted by such a crazy woman. Belle playslapped him on the shoulder and said, “Oh, you love it and you know it”—then gave him a sidelong hug and said, “Welcome home.”

It wasn’t often you’d see him look as surprised as he did then, but she released him before he could hug her in return. Then Charlie had her arms around him from behind and lightly nipped his ear and he let out an exaggerated yelp and squirmed free of her and said, “Christ’s sake! Didn’t you nutty broads get enough to eat while we were gone?”

We took the bags out of the car and wrapped the shotgun in a coat before carrying it to the house—in case some curious neighbor who’d been watching the welcome-home show was still looking on. Not knowing we were going to show up, Charlie and Belle had planned to make sandwiches for their supper, but now they started getting out the pots and pans to cook us a proper meal. Buck told them to forget it, we’d go out to eat. We washed up and put on clean shirts while the girls changed into nicer dresses. Charlie had taken Belle shopping for clothes and she put on a blue sleeveless one I liked a lot.

We went to a barbecue place on Main Street and gorged on pork ribs and French fries and coleslaw, joking and laughing the whole while, and the patrons sitting around us smiled at our boisterous spir its. Afterward we went home by way of the house on Callaghan Street, where we stopped and bought six bottles of moonshine and a dozen quarts of beer.

Neither of the girls had asked about the job. From the beginning of her acquaintance with Russell, Charlie had known what he did for a living, but he’d made it clear that she shouldn’t question him about his business. He might now and then deign to share something of it with her but she was never to pry. And she never did. I’d always had a hunch she was glad to have it that way, that she preferred not to know any of the specifics about the risks he took. All through supper, though, I’d caught Belle looking at me with an eagerness that went beyond her pleasure in my return. She was dying to know about the past two days, I could see it in her eyes.

Not till we were on the way back to the house did Russell tell Charlie that we were heading back out tomorrow. “We got a matter to tend to tomorrow night and then another one a couple of nights after that,” he said. “That puts us back here in four days, if my arithmetic’s correct.”

“And if nothing goes wrong,” Charlie said softly.

“Right,” Russell said. “Like the sun’ll come up tomorrow if nothing goes wrong. Like I’ll wake up in the morning if nothing goes wrong. Like we’ll be leaving after lunch if nothing goes wrong.”

Whenever he thought she was being smart-mouth with him he would come back at her even more so. He rarely did it, though, because she rarely gave him cause.

It was too dark in the car to make out Charlie’s expression in the rearview mirror. She sat very still for the span of another block and then turned and snuggled up close to him and said, “Well then, I think we ought to get to bed early, don’t you?”

I hadn’t said anything to Belle, either, about our leaving on another job tomorrow. She was sitting in front between me and Buck and I felt her hand on my leg as she leaned close and said low, “I think she’s got the right idea.”

Buck stared out at the darkness and said nothing.

Later that night, after a round of humping that left us gleaming with sweat on the moonlit bed, I told her all about it while our cigarettes flared and dimmed and a soft breeze lifted the gauzy window curtain. I told her about Bubber Vicente, the sandstorm, about Crane and Odessa and Wink, about the payroll team and how we’d taken them down, how Buck left the courier and his married honey bound together naked for the hubby to find, how the other two had looked as we drove them out of town, thinking we were going to kill them, and then the way they’d looked when they realized we weren’t.

She stroked my chest and listened without interruption. When I was done with the telling I was rigid again and she had her hand around me. I rolled up over her and she took me in.

And when we were once again spent, she whispered in my ear, “It all sounds…so fun.”

“It’s more than that,” I said. “There’s nothing like it.”

“Nothing?” She rubbed her blonde sex against my belly and made a low growl.

“Almost nothing,” I said, and laughed with her.

On the following evening we were in Blackpatch. The place was as isolated as Bubber had said—and smelled even worse, like an open grave soaked in oil and giving off gas. The nearest town was Rankin, thirteen miles away as the crow flies, but the country directly between them was too rugged and too cut up with gullies and draws to lay any kind of road, and so to get to Rankin from Blackpatch you had to drive eighteen winding miles west on a dusty junction road to the Iraan highway and then go north another eleven miles.

Bubber had said there was one other route into and out of Blackpatch, if you didn’t mind taking a chance on busting a wheel or snapping an axle. An old mule trace the copper mine had used for packing ore out to the railroad. It twisted and turned for almost twenty miles from Blackpatch out to the rail tracks flanking the Big Lake highway, emerging at a spot about thirteen miles east of Rankin with a rusted water tower and a dilapidated loading platform. Hardly anybody ever used that trail anymore, Bubber said. He’d taken it once and it was the roughest drive he’d ever made. He’d braved it in broad daylight and it took him two hours to cover the twenty miles—not counting the time it took to fix the two flats he had on the way. “I’d have to be more damn desperate than I can imagine to drive on that sonofabitch again,” Bubber said.

We’d arrived at sundown. Derricks everywhere. Pumpjacks steadily dipping like monstrous primeval birds at their feed. The old copper-mine hill stood a hundred yards or so to the east of town and the holding tank on top of it was cast in the dying red light of day. It really did look like an enormous soup can. Jagged gullies ran like black scars down the hill and right to the edge of town. The town itself was composed of four short blocks to north and south, three longer ones to east and west, and included a sizable shantyville of tents on its west side. Every building was either a store, a place of entertainment, an eatery, a hotel or a boardinghouse. Most men lived in the ragtown or in their vehicles. There wasn’t a private house in Blackpatch. Mona’s girls lived in the rooms where they worked, and Mona herself kept a room at the Wellhead Hotel.

The junction road passed through the tent colony and ran directly onto the main street. We crawled along in the heavy traffic, the cafés and juke joints and pool halls all roaring with music. According to Bubber, about six hundred people lived here now—all of them men except for a couple of dozen wives, even fewer daughters, and Mona’s girls—and it sounded like they were all yelling at once to make themselves heard above the music and the incessant pounding of the drills. Drunks staggered in the streets and sidewalks, doing the hurricane walk, as we called it in New Orleans. Bubber said the local police force was paid for by the oil company. It consisted of a sheriff and two deputies and they pretty much let the workers take their fun as they pleased—mostly drinking and gambling and fighting each other, and sporting at Mona’s place. The cops intervened only in matters of flagrant robbery, deadly violence, or undue property damage.

We saw a pair of men grappling in an alley, each with a headlock on the other and stumbling around like jakeleg dancers, a small crowd looking on and laughing, most pedestrians simply passing by without paying the combatants much notice. We drove around and around until we finally found an alleyway niche to park the car in.

Buck kept the briefcase with the Wink money on his lap while we ate a supper of fried chicken in still one more clamorous café, and then we went over to the Wildcat Dance Club and introduced ourselves to Mona Holiday. She wasn’t exactly as Bubber had painted her. For one thing, she looked older than I’d expected—a few years older than Bubber, I would’ve guessed. Not that she wasn’t pretty, because she was, in a rough-edged, bottle-blonde sort of way. But she had some hard wear on her and it showed around her eyes and in the corners of her mouth, in the slack skin of her neck. But a man in love is blind to such minor flaws, of course, so none of us was all that surprised to find she was a shade less breathtaking in the actual flesh than Bubber’s description.

But she was every bit as pleasant and gracious as he’d said. She’d heard about Buck and Russell from Bubber, and she seemed truly pleased to make our acquaintance. She ushered us into her nicely appointed downstairs office and poured us all a drink—Jamaican rum, the real stuff, smuggled in by way of Mexico. We all touched glasses and she said, “Here’s yours.”

When Buck told her about the jakeleg race we’d seen in Wink, she made a disapproving face and said, “Isn’t it terrible, the spectacles some people find amusing?” She said we didn’t have to worry about being poisoned by the hooch in Blackpatch, it was some of the best moonshine to be had in West Texas. She was personal friends with Gus Scroggins—the bootlegger who brought Blackpatch its hooch from a sizable distillery in El Paso—and she would vouch for the excellence of the stuff, though she generally stayed with the factory-bottled product herself.

Bubber had told us she wouldn’t ask us our business and she didn’t. It was one more reason she fared so well—men knew she kept to her business and wouldn’t pry into theirs. She had a reputation for asking no questions and telling no tales. But neither did she ever grant a man a hump on the house or even on the cuff. It was strictly pay before play in her place. Special friends of Bubber, however, she would give a cut rate—two dollars, rather than the standard four. Were any of us, she asked with a smile, inclined to go upstairs and take advantage of this bargain?

Buck checked his watch, arched his brow, looked at Russell and me in turn, and we grinned back at him.

An hour later we were in her backroom speakeasy, ensconced at a nice corner table with a good view of the rest of the room, sipping at our labeled rum and telling each other of the girls we’d had.

Buck said the redhead he’d chosen had looked a little shocked when he dropped his pants and she got her first look at Mr. Stub.

“I say, ‘What’s wrong, honey?’ and look down at myself like I got no idea. ‘Oh that,’ I say. ‘Well, see, I borrowed some money from the bank the other day and they insisted on the most valuable thing I owned for collateral.’ That’s all it took to set her at ease. Had us so much fun it ought to be illegal.”

He wanted to hear about the pretty girl I’d picked out—brown hair and green eyes, tits shaped like pears. He’d almost selected her for himself before deciding on the redhead. When I said she’d been a lot of fun—which was true—he said he wished we had more time, he’d go back in there and have a go with her himself.

Russell said he’d enjoyed the little half-Mexican girl he’d picked. “A man’s got to have himself some variety, it’s only natural. But I’ll tell you what—truth be told, I ain’t found another woman yet as much fun as Charlie when she drops her underpants.”

I kept it to myself but I was glad to hear him say that, because in the middle of sporting with the pear-tits girl, I’d had the fleeting thought I’d rather be doing it with Belle. I’d enjoyed myself with the girl, but thinking of Belle while I was at it had left me feeling a little edgy for some reason I couldn’t put my finger on. Russell’s remark clarified things and set me at ease. He preferred putting it to Charlie but that didn’t interfere with his enjoyment of others—and why should it? Damn right.

“Of course Charlie’s more fun,” Buck said. “She don’t charge you two dollars a throw.”

Russell laughed. “By Jesus, that must be it.” He looked at me and winked. “Man’s got a point, huh, kid?”

I laughed too. “Damn sure does,” I said. And told myself he did.

We’d been nursing our rum like it was the last to be had in Texas. One drink apiece was all we were allowing ourselves till the job was done. And now, at a little before nine, it was time to get to it.

We were out to rob Gus Scroggins, the El Paso bootlegger Mona Holiday had mentioned. He was making a delivery tonight to his Blackpatch buyer, a local whiskey dealer named Lester Wills, who would have five thousand dollars to pay for the load of white lightning. Scroggins transported his moonshine in barrels loaded on trucks that looked like every other oil truck in the region. He had two deliveries to make en route from El Paso and would be carrying the proceeds from those deals—ten thousand dollars, according to Bubber’s inside man—when he met with Wills. We were looking at a take of fifteen grand in greenbacks and a load of hooch worth another five.

The transaction was to take place in an abandoned oil camp about a mile north of the Blackpatch junction road. The only way to get there was over a narrow trail laid out by an oil company that had drilled all over the region before striking it rich in Copper Hill. We’d been out there earlier in the day to have a look at the place and lay out a plan. The trail meandered around sandhills and gullies strewn with scrawny tumbleweeds, around rocky outcrops and thick patches of scrub brush. Before you’d gone a hundred yards you were out of sight of the road. At a couple of points along the trail, the oil crews had cut clearings wide enough for truck turnarounds. The camp itself had occupied a circular clearing roughly fifty yards in diameter and almost entirely enclosed by a thickly shrubbed, stony rise that had served to protect the place from windstorms. A ramshackle wooden derrick stood over a litter of oil drums and castoff machine parts. Gus Scroggins liked to make his deliveries on moonbright nights in case the Texas Rangers somehow got wind of the deal and figured to charge in and make a pinch. A lookout on the derrick could spot them coming in time to give ample warning. The bootleg party could scatter on foot into the darkness beyond the rise and the Rangers wouldn’t be able to give chase in their cars over that rugged terrain.

For the last two hundred yards before reaching the clearing, the trail assumed a slight upward grade and was flanked on both sides by high dense brush. But about forty yards from the entrance, we’d found a small open spot in the scrub. We could pull in there and turn the car around to point back toward the trail, hidden behind a pile of tumbleweeds and loose brush and ready for a fast getaway.

By ten o’clock that’s where we were, sitting in the scrub shadows and watching the trail. A bright gibbous moon was midway up the eastern sky and illuminating the countryside with a ghostly blue light. The air smelled of creosote and warm dust. The Ford was well camouflaged, its license plate freshly transplanted from a car parked in the alley behind a Blackpatch pool hall. Buck and I carried a pair of pistols each—he’d given me one of the two .44 revolvers they’d taken off the payroll guys. Besides his pistol, Russell had the Remington pump.

A few minutes before eleven we heard the distant growl of a car motor from the direction of the junction road. We peered over the scrub and spied it, small and dark against the moonlit landscape, coming slowly and without lights, raising only the barest trace of dust as it wound its way toward us, now and then going out of view as it went into a dip or behind a rise. We knew it was the advance men, checking for anything out of place, for signs of a trap by Rangers or rival bootleggers or hijackers like us.

Buck had the army automatic in his hand, and I drew the .44 from my front waistband. The longbarrel .38 was snugged against the small of my back. As the car got closer we hunched back down in the scrub and sat still and quiet as stones. Pretty soon it came easing by with its engine rumbling and tires crunching over the stony trail. A black Oldsmobile sedan. Through a gap in the scrub I saw the silhouettes of two men in the car.

The Olds passed out of sight into the clearing behind the rise. We heard the engine slow to an idle and a door squeak open and bang shut—one of the guys getting out to check things on foot. The engine rumbled as the car took a slow turn around the clearing. Then its dark shape was again at the trailhead and the headlights flashed on and off, twice, in swift succession. Exactly the signal Bubber said his inside man had described. The Olds then backed up into the clearing and its motor shut off. A door opened and shut. Faint unintelligible voices. Low laughter.

Russell grunted and pointed south. Another unlighted car was coming our way. Lester Wills and his five grand. Him and his driver.

Buck patted me on the shoulder to let me know he and Russell were heading off. They pulled their dark bandannas up over their mouth and nose and tugged down their hats and vanished quietly into the brush. The camp shithouse had been placed outside the camp, at the bottom of the slope, and a path to it had been worn over the scrubby rise. Buck and Russell could quietly follow the path up through the scrub and come down behind the advance men.

I stayed put and watched the approaching car. If it had done anything other than keep coming I would’ve hurried to inform Buck and Russell. But the car steadily advanced. When it closed to within a hundred yards, I pulled up my bandanna mask and hustled away to the clearing.

The moon was higher now but the derrick’s shadow still reached across the west side of the clearing and angled halfway up the slope. The Oldsmobile was parked in front of the derrick, one of the men slouching against a front fender, his hands in his pants pockets. I couldn’t see his face under his hatbrim but his head turned to follow me as I jogged across the clearing and over to a row of barrels in the derrick’s long shadow. It looked like everything was going according to plan—Buck and Russell had taken them by surprise and disarmed them, then put one guy in the Olds’ trunk and told the other to perch on that fender and keep his mouth shut. I couldn’t see them but I knew Buck was in the shadows of a clump of yuccas near the entrance to the clearing and Russell somewhere behind the low outcrop to my right.

I was surprised to feel my pulse thumping so hard in my throat, to find my mouth nearly spitless. We’ll play it any way we have to—that was Buck’s instruction. It seemed to be taking too long for the car to get here. I thought maybe it had turned back, maybe I’d been spotted as I made for the clearing and they had retreated in alarm.

And then there the car was, a shiny Plymouth coupe, rolling slowly into the clearing. I cocked the .44.

The Plymouth made a half-turn and stopped parallel to the Olds, next to the man on the fender. The passenger door opened and Lester Wills got out. We’d had a look at him earlier that evening at a speakeasy a block over from Mona’s place, and even in this light there was no mistaking the pompadour he took such pride in he would not cover it with a hat. The driver stayed put and kept the motor running.

“What the hell you doing?” Wills said to the man. “You suppose to be in the car.”

A detail we hadn’t known.

Now Wills was looking up at the derrick and saying, “Yo, Walsh! You see them? Walsh? Hey, what the hell…?”

The man on the fender said something too low for me to make out. Buck yelled, “Stand fast, mister!”—but Wills was already spinning around and diving back into the coupe, hollering, “Go!”

Buck’s pistol started popping and showing bright yellow muzzle flashes as the car’s back wheels ripped through the sand and the Plymouth slewed toward the barrels I was hunkered behind. I jumped aside as the car made a tight turn and the open passenger door hit some of the barrels and sent them clangoring end over end.

I scrambled to my feet and Russell cut loose with the shotgun and buckshot raked the Plymouth as it angled toward the clearing exit. I fired and fired and there were loud gunfire sparks from the car and from the yuccas where Buck was and bullets were thunking the car and whanging against oil drums and there was another orange boom from Russell’s shotgun and the car veered sharply and went bounding up the rocky incline for about a dozen yards with its klaxon blaring before the motor stalled. The car slid back down on the loose rock, its rear wheels locked, and jarred to a stop at the foot of the slope and the horn quit. Steam was hissing loudly from various holes in the radiator. I couldn’t see the men inside but could hear one of them moaning.

There was a slide of stones behind me and I turned in time to see the man who’d been on the fender go scurrying into the brush at the top of the rise. I started after him but Russell called, “Forget it. He can’t warn nobody from over there.”

Buck went up to the Plymouth in a crouch and warily raised his head at the driver’s window—and just did manage to fling himself aside as a gunshot lit up the interior and a bullet caromed off some part of the window frame.

Russell yelled, “Down!” and threw the shotgun to his shoulder and fired and glass shattered and flew and he smoothly pumped and fired three more flaring loads of buckshot into the car before lowering the gun again.

The ensuing silence was enormous. Acrid gunsmoke rose off the clearing in a blue haze and slowly drifted over the rise.

Holding his .45 ready, Buck jerked open the coupe’s left door and the driver seemed to just drain out. I didn’t have to ask if he was dead. Buck picked up the man’s pistol. I wondered if one of my shots had hit him, had maybe been the fatal one—and then reminded myself how close he’d come to running over me with the car. My chest was so tight it was an effort to breathe. My hands felt charged with electricity. I was afraid Buck or Russell might see them trembling and think I was scared. The truth was, I’d never felt more alive.

Buck and I went around to the other side of the car and pointed our pistols at the door and Buck nodded to let Russell know we were set and Russell pulled open the door. Wills was slumped on the seat. Russell poked him twice with the shotgun muzzle and then yanked on him by the coat collar and Wills tumbled from the car. We stood over him and tugged down our bandannas. His breathing was ragged and wet and his eyes were closed. He was shivering like he was cold. His shirtfront and one coatsleeve and the right side of his face were dark with blood, his pompadour was skewed. Buck knelt beside him and went through his pockets. I retrieved his gun from the car floor—a .380 automatic—and stuck it in my waistband. The money was in an envelope in his pants pocket. Buck chuckled and stood up and put the envelope in his coat.

Wills suddenly arched up like he’d been stabbed in the spine, his eyes wide. His mouth moved as if he were trying to say something, but if he was he never got it out. He fell slack and gave a rasping sigh. And even in the moonlight you could tell that his open eyes weren’t seeing a damn thing anymore.

“Dumb bastard,” Buck said. “If he’d done like I told him he could’ve got drunk tonight, he could’ve got laid. He could’ve been around tomorrow to complain about being robbed.”

“He called the play, all right,” Russell said. “But I have to say, we’ve done smoother jobs.”

“Yeah well,” Buck said. “We got the money, ain’t we?” He checked his watch. “Let’s get set for Scroggins. He’ll be looking for the lights in about twenty minutes. Get the car, Sonny.”

I got in the Olds and cranked it up and started to bring it around to the mouth of the clearing. As Wills had done, Scroggins would wait somewhere down on the trail until he got an all-clear headlight signal before coming the rest of the way.

Buck and Russell were already at the clearing entrance and scanning the moonlit country to the south. Then Buck grabbed Russell’s arm and pointed. He whirled around and beckoned me wildly, yelling, “Come on!”

I goosed the Olds up to them and Russell yanked the door open and jumped in beside me and Buck hopped up on the running board and hollered, “Go! Go!”

I hit the gas and the tires spun on the loose trailrock and found purchase and the Olds leapt forward.

“They’re wise to us!” Russell yelled. “Kick this thing, kid!” And now I saw the cloud of dust far down the trail. And the truck that was making it. Heading away from us and back toward the junction road.

As we closed on the spot where we’d hidden the Ford, Buck hollered through the window, “Keep after him, I’m right behind you!” He jumped off and went rolling into the brush.

I stomped on the accelerator and the Olds bounced and yawed along the snaking trail, flinging up stones and raising dust, leaning one way and then the other.

“Bastards must’ve got here early,” Russell said. “Must’ve heard the shooting, that damn klaxon, something, everything. Shit!”

The truck was more than half a mile ahead of us and moving in and out of sight as it went over and around rises and outcrops. In the rearview mirror the lights of the Model A showed far behind us.

“Which way will he go when he hits the junction road?” I said.

“Not to Blackpatch,” Russell said. “Too small. Only one way in and out. He’ll head for the highway.”

“Then to Rankin?”

“Yeah. Mix in with all them other trucks. Lots of roads out of town. It’s what I’d do. He beats us there, we’ll lose him sure.”

I didn’t intend to let that happen. With my foot to the floor we went over a rise at a speed that took all four wheels off the ground. The Olds lit hard and bounced on its springs and went slewing off the trail in an explosion of dust and brush and rocks hammering the floorboards. I thought I heard a scream behind me. I kept the pedal to the floor and managed to wrench the car back onto the trail, wrestling with the wheel as we swerved all over the place, and then we were straightened out and barreling on.

“Helllllp! Christ Jeeesus! Let me out! Let me ouuuuuuut!”

The muted hollers came from directly back of me. I glanced in the rearview but saw only Buck’s headlights, even farther behind than they’d been before. Russell half-turned in his seat and shouted, “Shut the hell up, you pitiful pussy!”

The guy they’d stuck in the trunk. Walsh, Wills had called him. He had to be taking a pounding back there.

The trail rose and dipped and curved, the Olds slid, lost traction, tore through brush and banged against rocks with the undercarriage, regained the trail, powered ahead. If we didn’t blow a tire or rupture the oil pan or break an axle, I figured we could catch them. We slid through a tight turn that tilted the car so far over I was sure we were going to roll but we didn’t.

“God dammmn, boy!” Russell said. He was clutching to the dashboard and grinning crazily. “I’d say we’re going to run down the sumbitch, we don’t crash and die first.”

We went around another rise and the junction road came in view. Scroggins’ truck was making a right turn onto it, heading west toward the Rankin road.

“Yessir, yessir!” Russell whooped. “We got them. That ten grand is good as ours!”

Steam started blowing back from under the Olds’ hood panels but the motor was still going strong and I kept my foot down hard. The junction road was almost empty of other traffic at this hour, but an oil truck was coming from off to our right, heading for Blackpatch, and I could see that we’d reach the road before he passed by.

“We gonna cut it close with that sumbitch,” Russell said, watching the coming truck. “Don’t the fool see our dust?”

I made the turn onto the road with the tires shrieking. Walsh wailed in the trunk as the Olds carried all the way across the road and the left wheels went off onto the shoulder and flung up dust and the rear end fought for traction and here came the truck with its blinding headlights bearing straight at us and then the Olds’ wheels grabbed again and I cut to the right an instant before the truck went by in a whooshing blur, its horn wailing. All I could see in the rearview was a mass of dust.

I floored the accelerator once more and the Olds sped up. The steam streaking from under the hood was thicker now but on this smoother surface we were fast gaining ground. Russell was shoving shells into the shotgun.

We closed to within fifty yards of Scroggins’ truck. Thirty. Fifteen. A pair of headlights showed way behind us. I hoped they were Buck’s. Now the Olds’ engine was knocking. We’d probably torn a hole in the oil pan and were about to throw a rod.

Russell pumped a shell into the chamber and got in position at the window. “Closer!” he yelled.

I brought the Olds to within ten yards of the truck. There was no traffic in sight ahead of us, so I pulled out to the middle of the road to give Russell a better angle. He leaned out the window and took aim on the left rear wheel. The truck’s driver must’ve seen what we were up to—he cut sharply to the left as Russell fired and missed the tire and the buckshot caromed up against the truck’s underside and ricocheted every which way and some of it slung back and busted our headlamp and rang off the fender and Russell yelped.

He swore and shook his left arm, then pumped the slide and the empty shell case flew off into the dark and he set himself again. The engine was knocking louder now and I could smell it beginning to burn. Any minute now it would lose power and seize up and that would be it, we’d lose them. The driver was rocking the truck from one side of the road to the other to try to throw off our aim, but Russell took his time and gauged the truck’s movements just right and the next boom of the shotgun blew the tire apart.

The truck sagged and started fishtailing and the ruined tire flew off the rim and came back and hit the Olds’ windshield, shattering the right side and spraying us with shards and spiderwebbing the glass in front of me. I flinched and hit the brakes instinctively and too hard and the car started to skid sideways but I steered into the slide and managed to stay on the road.

The truck veered away, pitching and bouncing over the rough ground, and then swung into a tight turn and its left wheels left the ground and kept on rising and the truck capsized in a great crashing cloud of dust and skidded to a halt upside down.

And BOOM!—it exploded into an enormous, quivering sphere of orange fire.

I pulled over on the shoulder, the engine clattering like skeletons wrestling in a tin tub, black smoke streaming from the tailpipe. I switched off the ignition and we got out of the car but there was nothing we could do except watch the truck burn. The fire looked like molten gold, it was so thick and richly fueled. It lit up the countryside for a good hundred yards all around. We were thirty yards away but a light wind pressed the heat hard on our faces. Rivulets of flaming whiskey snaked from the truck in all directions over the stony ground. There were no screams, no cry at all except for Walsh’s muffled cries for help from the Oldsmobile trunk. Russell picked up a large rock and flung it against the back of the car and the trunk fell quiet.

Buck arrived and parked the Model A behind the Olds. He left the motor running and got out and came to stand beside us and stare at the fireball wreckage. He looked grieved. So did Russell. Probably so did I. It was ten thousand in cash money plus a valuable load of hooch going up in flames.

Another truck was approaching from the west, slowing down as it drew closer. The driver leaned out the window and we turned back toward the fire to hide our faces from him. “Hey!” he called out. “What the hell happened?” But none of us turned around or answered him, and if he’d been thinking about stopping he changed his mind. His gearbox clashed and the engine wound up and he rolled on by.

And then on top of the odors of burning gasoline and oil and alcohol came a sickening smell unlike any I’d ever known, one I couldn’t begin to describe for the lack of anything to compare it with.

“Jesus,” Buck said. “Been a while since I had a whiff of that.”

“Since France,” Russell said. “Since them flamethrowers.” He’d rolled up his left sleeve and was examining two small bloody spots on his arm where he’d been hit by ricocheting buckshot.

More headlights came in view a long way down the road.

“Well hell, we best get a move on,” Buck said, and we headed back to the Ford.

“What about him?” Russell said, nodding at the Olds.

Buck shrugged. “He don’t know who we are or even what we look like. If you owned that load of hooch, wouldn’t you wonder why he’s the only one still alive? Maybe wonder if he was some kind of inside man? Let him try and talk his way out of it.”

“What if he is the inside man?” I said.

“Tough luck for him,” Buck said. “You drive.”

I went around to the other side of the Model A and slid in behind the wheel. Buck sat in the shotgun seat and Russell got in back. I wheeled the car onto the road and got rolling.

“I got to tell you, kid,” Buck said, “that was some piece of driving. It was all I could do to keep you in sight.”

I smiled my pleasure at the compliment.

He looked back at Russell. “What say, little brother? This boy shake you up some with that hairy ride?”

“Naw,” Russell said. “Not so bad a change of pants and a few drinks won’t fix me right up.”

Bubber Vicente was as blackassed as we were by the loss of Scroggins’ money and the truckload of moonshine.

“We wouldn’t’ve lost a nickel or a drop of hooch if we’d had better information,” Buck said, “but nobody told us the advance men were supposed to be in certain places when Wills showed up. That’s why the job went to hell.”

“Well, don’t look at me,” Bubber said from behind his desk. “Ain’t my fault you didn’t now it. I didn’t know it either, goddammit. And neither did the inside man or he’d’ve told me.”

“Well, an inside man worth his salt should’ve known it,” Buck said.

“Yeah, well, I can’t argue with you there,” Bubber said. He scratched his beard and looked both angry and sad.

“Whatever his cut’s supposed to be,” Buck said, “I’d reconsider it if I was you.”

“I been doing that very thing while we been sitting here discussing things,” Bubber said. “His cut’s come way down, I’ll tell you. And I don’t believe he’ll complain about it a whole lot, neither, not once he understands how his information wasn’t all it should’ve been.” He lit a cigarette and exhaled a long stream of smoke. “But don’t you boys go shining me on about the risk you run. Robbery’s supposed to be risky. Otherwise everybody’d be doing it.”

Buck looked away for a moment and then broke into a wide smile. Bubber laughed and shook his finger at him. He knew he had a point.

“It’s why I got out of you all’s end of the business,” he said. We knew he’d been an armed robber before he started fencing and then finally became a setup man. “The riskiness got to me. You never know how a job’ll go, and it ain’t in my nature to take a lot of chances. Then again, that’s exactly what some men like about the robber life.” He smiled around at the three of us. “Or so I been told.”

We all grinned back at him.

Buck had given Bubber his portion of the takes from Wink and Wills—$4, 375. The remaining money cut three ways would give each of us a little over $2, 700. Buck had put all our money in his valise. On the ride back from Wink I’d asked him and Russell what was to keep somebody from holding out on Bubber, how he could know for sure how much his men really got from a job.

“Well now, think about it, Sonny,” Russell said. “The inside man’s done told him what the job’ll bring and Bubber’s figured his cut of it. You can’t hand him any less than he’s expecting unless you and the inside man give him the same explanation for the difference. To get away with it, you’d have to know who the inside man is and be able to bring him into the cross. But even if you could do that, you’d be robbing Peter to pay Paul. Where’s the percentage?”

“What’s more,” Buck said, “you and Paul would have it on each other that you cheated Peter, and you’d both always be worried that the other might let it slip. No sir, any way you figure it, it’s bad business to cross a partner. You make a deal, kid, you’re best off sticking to it.”

“In other words,” I said, “just because it’s a world of thieves out there…”

“…don’t mean there ain’t no rules to it,” he said. “Smartass.”

Now Bubber pushed back in his chair and looked around at us. “You boys still on for Midland tomorrow? I can get somebody else for it if you ain’t.” Midland was only about twenty miles up the road and was where he’d set up our next job.

“Goddam right we are,” Buck said. “Why wouldn’t we be?”

“Well, I mean, after a scrape like you all had last night, some guys might not be too eager to do another job right away.”

“Up yours, Bubber,” Buck said. “We been in closer scrapes than last night. We’re doing Midland.”

Bubber raised his palms defensively. “Okay, okay, good enough. Now how about we let our hair down some? Drinks are on me.”

We went out of the office and into the smoky speakeasy and settled at Bubber’s private table in the back corner. We drank and talked and heard the latest jokes going around Odessa. There was a good band playing up on a small stage and all of us now and then got up to dance with some of the women in the place.

Bubber’s partner, Earl Cue, hadn’t been around all evening, and when Buck asked after him, Bubber said he’d been in the hospital since yesterday and probably wouldn’t get out till tomorrow.

“He caught him a case of the runs from a bad batch of stew he ate over at Stella’s Café,” Bubber said. “It wasn’t the runs that put him in the hospital, though—except I guess in a way it was. Earl lives in a boardinghouse, see, and has to share a bathroom with about seven other fellas. Bathroom’s occupied as often as not, and sometimes when somebody gets a call of nature he’s got to go out back and use the two-holer. It’s what happened to Earl yesterday morning. A big old tool-pusher named Harvey Neumann was out there on one of the holes, taking his ease with a cigar and the newspaper, and he said old Earl came charging in with his belt undone and his pants already unbuttoned and he just did manage to slap his ass over the other hole before cutting loose with his load. Even in the stink of that jake it smelled like he was shitting dead cats, according to Harvey. Earl didn’t set there but a few seconds, though, before he lets a hell of a holler and jumps to his feet with the shit still coming out of him and splattering all over everything, including Harvey’s pants and shoes. Well, that naturally riled Harvey something terrible and he jumped up too and socked Earl a good one in the jaw and laid him out cold. Said he did it without thinking, which ain’t hard to believe, considering the situation. Then he saw how Earl’s balls were all swole up like apples and he right away knew Earl had been bit by a spider. Ain’t the first time it’s happened to some poor fella who didn’t rattle a stick around the hole before setting down on it. Can’t really fault Earl for not taking the time for such precaution, I guess, but that’s what can happen when you don’t. A man can’t be too careful, even when he’s caught short. Anyway, that’s how he come to be in the hospital with swole-up balls and a broke jaw. I’ll be sure and tell him you asked after him. He’ll appreciate it.”

“Lord Jesus,” Russell said. “I guess the only good thing you could say about an experience like that is you ain’t likely to have too many worse ones.”

“I know it,” Bubber said. “Spiderbite in the balls—can you imagine what that feels like?”

“I believe maybe I can,” Buck said.

Bubber was eager to know what we thought of Mona. We said she was every bit as beautiful and smart and gracious as he’d said she was. He asked if we’d sampled the wares in her house and we said they were first-rate. He was beaming with pride. He said he’d thought he’d been in love before but he didn’t know what real love was until he met Mona. Jesus, he had it bad. It was all we could do to keep a straight face, listening to him go on and on about her.

We laughed out loud, though, when he told of a time when they were going at it hot and heavy and she called out the name “Natty” in the middle of things. She didn’t even know she’d said it until after ward, when she noticed Bubber had sulled up a little and she asked what was wrong.

“Who the fuck’s Natty?” he said.

Turned out to be an old boyfriend, a leg-breaker she’d lived with for a time in Tucson. She swore she hadn’t thought of him in years and assured Bubber she’d gotten over him long ago. Maybe so, Bubber told her, but hearing her call out another man’s name at a moment like that had a way of taking the edge off his pleasure.

“Well,” she’d said, “would you rather I was doing it with him and saying your name, or doing it with you and saying his?”

“Now I ask you, boys,” he said, “how’s a man supposed to answer a question like that?”

“Don’t allow for nothing but hard choice,” Russell said.

“They never do,” Buck said.

“What you think, Sonny?” Bubber said.

“I’d tell her I’d rather she did it with me and called out my name,” I said—and smiled real big.

Bubber stared at me without expression for a moment, then turned to Buck and Russell and all three of them busted out laughing.

“He’s real young, ain’t he?” Bubber said.

It was close to eleven o’clock as we made our way through Midland’s residential streets, the trees along the sidewalks casting long shadows in the light of a yellow-horned moon low in the western sky. A rich aroma came off the paper sacks of Mexican food on the front seat between me and Buck, but the last thing on our minds at the moment was eating. Buck took a pillowcase from under the seat and put it in his coat pocket.

We came into a well-kept neighborhood of spacious lawns and white paling fences. Most of the homes already dark and asleep, but a big two-story house in the middle of the block was showing faint yellow light behind drawn curtains, a shadowy porch with a pair of wooden armchairs. There were three cars in the driveway and three more out in front, all of them brandnew. I parked the Model A at the head of the row of cars by the fence and cut off the lights but left the motor running. We stayed put for a minute, but nobody came to the door or moved a window curtain to have a look outside. Russell racked a shell into the chamber of the Remington pump.

“All right, boys,” Buck said. “In and out, slick as a dick.”

He and Russell got out of the car and I handed Buck the sacks of food one at a time and then got out too. They went through the front gate and left it open wide while I used my clasp knife to puncture a tire on each of the three cars by the fence, catching the smell of stale air with each hissing deflation. I went to the driveway and did the same thing to the cars there, then I put the knife away and hustled up to the porch. Buck and Russell already had their bandannas on and I pulled mine up too.

The house belonged to a man named Allford, a onetime wildcatter who’d struck it big up around the Red River before coming out to drill in West Texas. With him tonight were the president of the biggest construction company in the county, a rancher from up around Lubbock, two other local oilmen, and a bootlegger from Hobbs. According to Bubber, these six well-heeled buddies came together at Allford’s house once a month to play high-stakes poker. The game ran from six in the evening till six in the morning and the rules required that every man buy $2, 500 worth of chips and stay in the game till the end of it or he went bust, whichever came first. In any case, we knew there’d be at least fifteen grand at the table.

Thanks to Bubber’s inside man we also knew that it was their poker-night custom to make a late-night telephone call to Concha’s Café in town and order some food and have it delivered to the house. Tonight they had called for one sack of chicken tacos, one of enchiladas, one of sugar-and-cinnamon doughnuts. As we stood on the porch, ready to make our move, the deliveryman from Concha’s was lying bound and gagged in the back seat of his car in an alley five bocks away.

“Set?” Buck said. Russell and I nodded and pressed ourselves back against the wall so we couldn’t be seen from the little window in the front door. I had the .380 in hand. Buck sucked a deep breath and then gave the door a hard rapping. He wore a baseball cap, the better to look like a deliveryman, and held the three sacks in front of him, one on top of the other, to hide the masked lower part of his face. He rapped again, and the curtain must’ve pulled away from the little window—a small cast of light illuminated the food sacks and Buck’s hands holding them, his cap. A man’s gruff voice said, “Concha’s?”

“Yeah,” Buck said.

The lock turned and the door swung inward and a brighter wash of light fell over Buck as he passed the sacks in to somebody—and then pulled the .45 and raised it and said, “Not a word, Mac—just back up real easy.” He went into the house and Russell and I followed.

A beefy half-bald guy in shirtsleeves and carrying a .38 in a shoulder holster was holding the sacks of food and gawking at us like we were a magic trick. He was the bootlegger’s bodyguard and his face had the baggy look of somebody who’d been dozing. He was probably wondering how he was going to explain this to his boss.

Buck snatched the guy’s gun from the holster and stuck it in his own pants. He pointed at the sofa and the man sat down on it. The bottoms of the food sacks were dark with grease and he held them off his lap to keep from staining his white trousers. Russell had the shotgun leveled at the guy from the hip. I stood back by the door where I could cover the whole room.

The house was laid out exactly as we’d been told. The parlor was spacious and expensively furnished, the adjoining dining room as well. A door at the rear of the dining room opened to the kitchen, and a staircase at the near end of the hall led up to the family bedrooms and the maid’s room. A telephone was mounted on the wall at the foot of the stairs and Buck yanked out the cord. As he started toward the kitchen a woman’s voice called out, “Was that the food, Warren?” and she came out into the dining room, drying her hands on a dish towel. She saw us and stopped short.

Buck raised his pistol at her and put a finger to his masked mouth. The woman stood silent. He beckoned her into the parlor and she came. She looked scared but not so much as I’d expected. She was tall and middle-aged and had the weathered face of somebody who’d spent much of her life out of doors, a country woman’s face. Hands rough and big-knuckled.

At the far end of the hallway and to the left, next to the back door, was an arched passageway to the kitchen. There were three doors on the right side of the hall—the first to a den, the next to a bathroom, the last to a billiards room. That last one was the one we wanted.

“Take the sacks,” Buck said softly to the woman, and the Warren guy handed them up to her, making a face when a drop of grease spotted his pants leg. Russell took the woman by the elbow and steered her into the hallway to where she couldn’t see the sofa—or the swat Buck gave the guy across the nose with the barrel of the .45. She heard it, though, and the groan he let out, and she tried to look around Russell to see what it was, but he gently pushed her back and shook his head.

It was a wonder the Warren guy stayed conscious. He had his hands over his nose but the blood ran out between his fingers and down into his sleeves and dripped on his white shirt and pants. His eyes were streaming and he was gasping against the pain and moaning low. You bust somebody’s nose like that, it hurts so bad he goes nearly mute—and lets go of any notion he might’ve had to try to jump you.

Buck gave me a wink, then whispered into the woman’s ear and steered her down the hall ahead of him. He and Russell stood to either side of the farthest door and Buck nodded at her and she carefully balanced the sacks on one arm and opened the door with her free hand. Somebody in the room said, “Hey now—about time that chili-belly chow got here!”

Buck shoved her into the room and he and Russell ran in and Buck shouted, “Hands on the table—on the table—now, now, now!”

Somebody started swearing and there was a smack and a yelp and the same voice said, “Ah goddam, ah shit!” the way you do when you hit your thumb with a hammer.

I knew Russell was holding them under the shotgun and I heard Buck tell them to empty their pockets, to pull them inside out. He told somebody to clear the table, put it all in the bag, faster, goddammit, faster.

I stood by the front door, pointing the .380 down the hall, ready to shoot whoever I had to. The Warren guy was trying to stem the blood from his broken nose, but each time he put his head back he’d start choking and have to sit up again and add to the mess on his clothes. The woman came out of the room and stopped short when she saw me. I gestured with the pistol for her to get the hell out of there and she hurried through the rear passageway into the kitchen.

They weren’t in there two minutes before coming out again, Buck first, gun in one hand, the pillowcase with the money in the other, two revolvers in the front of his waistband. Then Russell backed out of the room, saying, “First man out gets splattered.” He shut the door and came sidling down the hall, watching behind him.

“Go,” Buck said. I slung open the front door and went out fast, taking the porch steps two at a time, running up the walkway and hearing Buck coming behind me and laughing low.

I went through the gate and started for the Ford—and then there was a loud blast and somebody cried out.

I turned and saw Buck at the gate, looking back at Russell down on all fours on the walkway. The woman was at the door with a smoking single-barrel shotgun, breaking it open to reload again. She darted behind the wall as Buck brought up the .45 and fired three fast rounds, two smacking the wall, the third caroming off the doorjamb and smashing something of glass in the living room.

Russell up now, using the Remington like a cane and striding awkwardly. Buck hustling to him, putting an arm around him from the side, starting back toward the gate. The woman leaned around the door and fired in the same instant I did. My bullet by pure chance hit some part of the shotgun and it seemed to wrest itself from her hands. She yipped and ducked out of sight.

But Buck and Russell were down. As I ran to them Buck rose to one knee, still holding the moneybag and his pistol. Russell was cursing low, struggling to get up on hands and knees. I stuck my gun in my pants and bent down to take hold of him and lugged him upright and felt the warm dampness of his back.

“Jeeesus!” he said.

“Go on!” Buck said.

I half-dragged Russell out the gate and to the Ford, glancing back to see Buck up on his feet and backing toward the gate. At the idling car I opened a rear door and pushed Russell onto the seat but he slipped to the floorboard, swearing, his legs still outside the car.

Gunfire sounded behind us—Buck’s .45, other pistols.

I shoved Russell’s legs up onto the seat and shut the door. Then looked back for Buck but didn’t see him.

And then did. Sprawled on the walkway and not moving at all.

Dead. The word in my mind like a whisper.

A bullet whined off the car roof not a foot from my head and another punched into the front door at my hip. I crouched and ran around to the other side of the car and scrambled in behind the wheel—gunshots cracking, men shouting and swearing, slugs clanging through the hood panel and ringing off the engine, thunking the sides of the car, popping through the window glass.

I yanked the gearshift into low and gunned the Ford out into the street and went wheeling around the first corner at a wide lean, skidding a little and nearly hitting a car parked at the curb. I took rights and lefts at random, glad as hell for the emptiness of the streets at this hour but not sure now which way the highway was. Then we were at the edge of town and I got my bearings and knew the main road was to my right and I cut over in that direction. But then the motor started missing and began to lug. I pumped and pumped the accelerator to no avail. Maybe a bullet hit the gas line or the fuel pump, something. Before we’d gone another block the engine quit altogether and I coasted into a grocery store parking lot.

Except for the moon, the only illumination on the street was from a small naked bulb burning over the entrance to the grocery. I sat in the silenced car with my hands locked on the steering wheel. Russell groaned in the back. I couldn’t form a clear thought. Then I saw a sales lot just across the street, with a dozen or so cars on it.

A truck was coming down the street and I waited for it to go by and saw its headlights wash over some bum curled up on a bench at the corner. Then the truck was past and I told Russell I’d be right back, but I wasn’t sure he even heard me. I jogged over to the lot and slipped into a little Model A roadster with its top up and ducked my head under the dashboard. It didn’t take but a minute to snip and strip the ignition wires with my clasp knife and twist them together. I hit the starter and the motor cranked right up.

I drove across the street and pulled up beside the sedan, looked all around to make sure the coast was clear, then got out and opened Russell’s door and told him we had to change cars. I helped him out of the Ford, saying sorry, man, sorry, as he flinched and moaned and cursed me for the pain I was causing him. He wanted to know where his shotgun was and I said probably back in the yard where he dropped it and he cursed me for that too.

“Love that shotgun,” he said.

I got him into the roadster, his coat sopping now, my hands slick with his blood. I shut his door and went around and got behind the wheel. He was slumped in the seat, grunting with almost every breath. I got us rolling.

“Buck?” he said.

I shook a cigarette out of my pack and leaned forward to light it, steering with my forearms, then held it out to him but he turned away from it.

“Where’s he?” he said.

“He went down,” I said.

“Went down got caught or…went down got killed?”

“Killed.” The word brought up a surge of bile behind it and for a moment I thought I’d throw up. I swallowed and cleared my throat hard. My eyes burned. I said it again to prove I could. “They killed him is what I mean.”

I turned onto the Odessa highway and gave the roadster the gas. The road had been badly washboarded by heavy truck traffic and the shock absorbers took a beating as we jarred along. Russell moaned low.

“For sure?” he said.

“Sure looked it.”

“Looked it?”

“That’s right, man. Shit.”

I could feel him staring at me. I swerved around a sizable pothole only to run right over another with such impact it was a wonder the tire didn’t blow. Russell sucked a deep breath against the pain, then let it out in a long sigh.

By sunrise he was stitched and bandaged and full of drugs against pain and infection, asleep in the isolated house of a tall silver-haired surgeon named Gustafson. Many of the doctor’s patients were associates of Bubber Vicente, gunshot men in need of surgical repair who could not risk going to a hospital and piquing official curiosity about their wounds. Such emergencies usually came to Gustafson in the wee hours, as we had tonight.

According to Bubber, Gustafson had once had a prosperous practice in Dallas. But he’d gotten a socially prominent young woman in the family way, and because neither of them wanted to get married, he felt obliged to help her get shed of the problem. He attended to her in his office, but complications came up and he had to rush her to a hospital in order to save her life. “And like they say after a lynching,” Bubber said, “the jig was up.” Only the family’s wish to keep the scandal out of the newspapers saved him from prison, but he still lost his license. Ever since then he’d had to practice underground. In addition to the office he maintained in his Odessa house, he had one in Blackpatch—in Mona Holiday’s dance club—where he kept a well-trained nurse on daily duty and himself went three days a week. “He hates Blackpatch as much as everybody else,” Bubber said, “but it’s the last place in the world where anybody’s ever gonna ask to see his license, and he makes a steady dollar down there.” In addition to treating injured oil workers, he tended to the medical welfare of Mona’s girls, helping them stay free of venereal disease and pregnancy, and relieving them of either problem when preventive measures failed.

He had extracted six buckshot pellets from the area around Russell’s left shoulder blade and another six from the hamstring muscle of the same leg that got shot up in the war. Red-eyed and haggard by the time he was finished, Gustafson told me Russell would have to stay off the leg for a month and then need crutches for another couple of months before he could start getting by with a cane—which, he was sorry to say, he would probably need for the rest of his life. He said we could let Russell sleep for a little while longer but then we’d have to get him out of there. He couldn’t risk having fugitives in his house for very long. He gave me a bottle of pills to give Russell for the pain and then went back to bed.

While the doc had been attending to Russell, Bubber made a telephone call to an associate in Midland and asked him to get whatever information he could about the card game robbery. The associate called back sometime after sunrise, while I was drinking my umpteenth cup of coffee. He reported that a man named Loomis Mitchum, no record of previous arrests, was in the county jail under charges of armed robbery and assault in regard to a card game holdup. He’d first been taken to the hospital with a head wound—which proved to be nothing more than a bullet graze on the skull. He’d also had a couple of shotgun pellets in his shoulder. Neither wound serious enough to keep the cops from taking him to jail as soon as he’d been patched up. He’d probably go in front of a judge inside the next two weeks. The robbery was pretty much open-and-shut, but the money had been recovered at the scene. And an able lawyer could likely wiggle him out of the assault rap, especially since the only two persons Mitchum had injured were both known crooks and neither one was eager to press the matter in court. Warren Taos, who’d had his nose broken, was an ex-convict who’d done time for manslaughter, and Leo “Bad Dog” Richardson, who’d suffered a broken arm, was a bootlegger several times arrested but never yet convicted. All in all, the chances were good that Loomis Mitchum would get no more than eighteen months at the state road prison at Santa Rita—in Reagan County, about seventy miles from Fort Stockton—and draw parole in six.

“I’ll get him a lawyer who makes sure that’s how it goes,” Bubber told me.

I hadn’t realized the tightness of the grip I’d been keeping on myself until we got the news Buck was alive. Bubber must’ve read the relief on my face. He smiled and punched me on the arm and said, “Hell kid, we ought to know they can’t never hurt that uncle of yours by shooting him in his hard head.”

I tried to smile but could feel the bad job I did of it.

“I didn’t want to say nothing about it before,” Bubber said, “but it’s too bad he was the one holding the loot.”

Yes it was. And then I remembered the Wink money. It had been in Buck’s valise. And the valise had been under the front seat of the Model A.

Bubber winced when I told him.

Forty minutes later I was back in Midland, driving Bubber’s Chrysler up and down the streets, searching for the grocery store where I’d left the Ford, the town even more unfamiliar in all this day light and heavy traffic. Fool, I kept thinking, fool. And then there the store was—and the Model A, right where I’d left it, only now there were other cars in the lot too. I’d been afraid it would be gone by now, towed away by the cops, that somebody would’ve called them to report a car with a bunch of bullet holes in it. Then again, the holes weren’t readily noticeable except up close, and people generally weren’t very observant, anyway. I turned into the lot and drew up next to the Model A, remembering now that I’d left the back passenger door wide open, telling myself somebody probably closed it as a favor, but feeling a hollowness in my gut.

The valise wasn’t there. Not under the seat stained dark with Russell’s blood, not in the trunk, not anywhere in the car. I went in the grocery and studied the bored-looking woman at the register, the freckled kid stocking the shelves, the chubby manager being harried by some woman about the poor quality of his produce. None of them had found the money—you could tell by looking at them. I went back out and stood on the glaring sidewalk and regarded the passing traffic.

Maybe somebody had seen us switch cars and then looked through the Model A the minute we were gone. Maybe that bum on the bench across the street hadn’t been asleep, or maybe some other tramp had come along. Maybe a cop had happened on the car and found the dough and was now making plans on how to spend it.

I got back in the Chrysler and drove across the street and around the block and parked at a corner that gave me a good view of the Ford in the lot. I was hoping whoever had taken the valise had made off in a haste, before he’d searched the rest of the car, before he knew what the valise held. Once he knew, he might start wondering if there was more money still in the Model A and maybe come back for another look. It was a stupidly desperate hope and I knew it, but I sat there till noon before conceding that the money was gone for good.

When I got back to Gustafson’s, Russell was dressed and waiting for me on the doctor’s backporch couch, lying on his side to keep his weight off the wounds. The doc was still sleeping and Bubber had gone back to the hotel to get some rest too. Earl Cue had brought Russell a fresh change of clothes and helped him to get dressed and then kept him company while they waited for me to return. Russell was smiling, so I knew Bubber had given him the news about Buck.

“He looked dead, huh?” he said to me. He was dopey yet from the drugs. His smile was lopsided and his speech was heavy and slow. “Better get some specs, kid.”

“I’ve never been happier to be wrong,” I said. My voice nearly cracked on the words but both of them had the good grace not to smile about it. I started to tell Russell about the Wink money but he said Earl had already informed him.

“I feel like such a goddam fool,” I said. “About Buck. About the money. Christ.”

“You thought he’s dead,” Russell said thickly. “The only reason you left, I know. And don’t worry about the money. Can always get money.”

“At’s rye, hell widdit,” Earl Cue said, nodding sagely. “Kin awheeze ged munny.”

Sipping juice through a straw, Earl looked even more skeletal than the last time I’d seen him. He’d been released from the hospital the day before but was still in tender shape from his outhouse misadventure. His left cheek was swollen and purple and he couldn’t speak very clearly for the wires clamping his jaws. He had to wear baggy pants and walk bowlegged in order to accommodate his balls, which he said weren’t as swollen anymore but were still sore as hell.

“Bubber’s getting Buck a lawyer,” Russell said. “Pay him back after our next job.” He squinted against a stab of pain.

“Bess geddum home,” Earl said to me. “Leddum ress.”

“You sound like a damn rummy,” Russell said.

“Ook ooze talken.”

I helped Russell out to the roadster. Earl tried to help, but he had enough pain of his own to contend with, grunting and grimacing as much as Russell as we made our slow limping way to the car. The passenger side of the seat was darkly stained with dried blood. I got Russell settled into the seat and Earl shook our hands and said, “Gome, gessum ress, eel up.”

He slept for most of the drive to Fort Stockton, now and then groaning, shifting on the seat to try to ease his pain. As we went through McCamey the boomtown clamor woke him.

He stared around at the heavy traffic, the air hazed and acrid with gas and oil fumes. Then scrutinized the interior of the roadster. “Oughta got one with a damn radio,” he said. And went back to sleep.

A few miles farther along he woke again and looked at me like he’d just been told something very important and had to share it immediately.

“Busted him out one time, I’ll do it again,” he said. “We’ll do it, Sonny.”

And closed his eyes once more.

III