Swag

by Elmore Leonard

  “All right,” Sportree said, “about that time the bell’s going to ring and they’ll be security people all over the store, at every door and exit. The police, First Precinct, could be there before you get to the ground floor, and then it’s time to be cool. First thing, dump your pieces in a trash bin, someplace like that. Then split up and circulate. They want to search you going out, that’s fine, you just a dumb nigger, you don’t know what the fuck is going on at all. They let you out, you go home. Two days later, this man here”—he looked at Stick—“goes up to the stockroom and gets the doll box with the mark on it. He goes because nobody’s seen him before, clean-looking white gentleman. Tell me you see something wrong.” He waited.

  Frank and Leon shook their heads.

  Billy Ruiz said, “How much we going to get?”

  “No way of knowing,” Sportree said. “I told you, I give you a guarantee, five K off the top. You said beautiful. You want something else now?”

  “I want to be with him, carry it out,” Billy Ruiz said. “I don’t want somebody giving me some shit later—we didn’t do so well, here’s a humnert bills. Fuck that shit, man, right now.”

  Stick saw Sportree and Leon Woody look at each other again. “Hey, we trust each other,” Sportree said to Billy Ruiz. “Nobody going to cheat nobody. You hear Frank saying anything? Leon? No, we all in this.”

  “This guy, he picking up the money, I don’t even know him,” Billy Ruiz said.

  “He don’t know you, either.” Sportree looked over at Stick and back to Billy Ruiz. “You saying you want to pick it up, Billy? You don’t trust nobody?”

  “I go with him,” Billy Ruiz said.

  Stick saw the exchange between Sportree and Leon Woody again, their gaze meeting, each one knowing something.

  “All right, Billy,” Sportree said. “You go with him.”

  After that they sat around a little while. Sportree went out to the kitchen for something and Frank followed him. Marlys went over to the hi-fi and picked up a record sleeve. Stick looked over at Leon Woody sitting there quietly with his legs crossed. There was something he wanted to ask him. It wasn’t important, but if he got the chance, if the guy happened to look over.

  Billy Ruiz said to Marlys, “Hey, Mama, play some of that Al-ton for me, okay?”

  Marlys, reading the record sleeve, had her back to them. “You want some Alton Ellis and his Caribbean shit? I’ll give you some Stevie,” Marlys said. “Be grateful.”

  “He’s all right, his soul,” Billy Ruiz said. “It’s very close.”

  “Close about a thousand miles,” Marlys said. “Stevie can fake that reggae boogie shit better than Alton can do it straight.”

  Leon Woody was smiling, listening to them. Stick didn’t know what they were talking about. He waited until the music came on. Leon Woody looked over at him, maybe to see what he thought of it.

  “You have a little girl?” Stick said.

  “Yeah, little eight-year-old. She small, not much bigger than the doll.” Leon Woody smiled faintly. “Sportree has trouble with that name, don’t he?”

  “I got a little girl seven,” Stick said. “She’s going to be in the second grade next month.”

  “Is that right? Yeah, they cute that age, aren’t they?”

  Stick said yeah, they sure were. After that, he couldn’t think of anything to say.

  It was getting dark when they left. Frank drove. He was up, excited about what they were going to do. He tried to appear calm, but it showed in the way he took off from lights and wheeled the T-bird through traffic.

  Stick said, “That Carmen Billy Ruiz—where’d he get a name like that?”

  “He’s Puerto Rican,” Frank said. “He was a fighter once. Fought Chuck Davey—you remember him?”

  Stick said, “What I meant to say—where’d they get him, for Christ sake. He could get you in trouble, not even trying.”

  Frank said, “Don’t worry about it. Sportree’s going to handle him.”

  “Is that what he’s going to do?” Stick said, “because I’ll tell you something, I don’t see him doing anything else.”

  “He’s been going down there—he’s the one put the whole thing together.” Frank looked over at Stick. “Now that you’ve seen it, what do you think?”

  “What do I think? I think it looks like amateur night.”

  “Come on—”

  “Come on where? You got a guy with a little girl used to steal TV sets. You got a crazy Puerto Rican living on dope and a guy runs a bar telling you what to do. A bus driver’s suit—you imagine that crazy fucking guy walking in in a bus driver’s suit? Is he going to have one of those change things on him?”

  “He knows what he’s doing,” Frank said, “Sportree. Listen, that’s why I took it to him. Everything he gets into, it goes. He doesn’t touch something he doesn’t make out.”

  Stick said, “What’s he touching? He’s sitting home watching the fucking ball game while you clowns are running around the store with a doll box. I thought you said it was your idea.”

  “It was, the basic idea, yeah, when I find out Marlys’s working in the office. But it was Sportree worked it out. You got any doubts or questions, talk to him about it.”

  “I’m talking to you. I don’t even know the guy, what do I want to talk to him for, like I work for him now or something? We got a nice thing going, two grand a week, we can’t even spend it all, you want to go hold up a department store.”

  “You know for how much?”

  “He said you didn’t know.”

  “He told Billy we didn’t know. We’re talking about minimum, I mean minimum, a hundred grand.”

  “You’re crazy,” Stick said. “It’s all charge accounts there, and checks.”

  “Uh-unh, not the downtown store. Half the people go there are colored. You think they all got charge accounts?”

  “I don’t know—” Stick said.

  “I know you don’t. Listen, fourteen floors of cash registers, every floor the size of a city block. People come in, buy all kinds of things, some on charge, some pay with a check, and a bunch of them, man, a bunch of them, have to pay strictly cash, because that’s all they’ve got.”

  “Anybody ever do it before?”

  “Not the whole thing,” Frank said, “that any of us can remember. Ten years ago, maybe more than that, a guy got twelve hundred from a cashier on the mezzanine. All small stuff.”

  “Small stuff like what we’ve been doing.” Stick said, “and getting away with. Now all of a sudden you want to do the whole fucking thing at once.”

  “I’ll talk to you when you calm down,” Frank said. “It’s staring you in the face and you can’t even see it.”

  “Relax, huh?”

  “Right. Relax and think about it. We walk in—it’s waiting there in little gray sacks—and pick it up. Christ, you’re outside, what’re you worried about?”

  “I’m outside—till I go in with that crazy Puerto Rican.”

  “I told you, what’re you worried about him for? I talked to Sportree, he said, Don’t worry about Billy.”

  “I’m not worried, because I’m not going to have anything to do with it,” Stick said. “Nothing.”

  20

  STICK LINED UP FOUR PAY phones on Farmer Street, behind the J. L. Hudson Company.

  He did this after he’d given in and told Frank okay, but this was the last one, and found out this part of the plan hadn’t been thought out at all. What if he went in the bar to call and some guy was using the phone? What if he went in the doughnut shop or the drugstore, the same thing? What if all of a sudden the Brink’s truck comes and everybody around there decided to make phone calls? Sportree hadn’t planned it at all. He’d gone through the motions. If they made it, fine; if they didn’t, well, it wasn’t his ass, he wasn’t out a thing.

  Stick didn’t like relying on other people he didn’t even know.

  He didn’t like Arlene knowing about them—Christ, just to add a little more to i
t—and not knowing where Arlene was and what she was thinking. She hadn’t been home all week and he hadn’t told Frank about her yet.

  He told himself he was dumb. He should’ve stayed out of this, not learned anything about it. If he wasn’t afraid of Frank and he didn’t owe him anything, then why was he doing it?

  Maybe he felt he did owe him something. Frank could’ve put him in jail, but he didn’t. Shit no, Frank needed him.

  He should’ve left for Florida. Right after shooting the two black guys, the next morning, he should’ve left and not said a word to Frank.

  Now he was into something with three more black guys. Christ, everybody on the street, half the people anyway, seemed to be black. He wondered where everybody was going—if they had someplace to go. Or if they were out of work and just walking around downtown. It was a nice day, mid-seventies, the sky fairly clear. Maybe because some auto plants were shut down. What do you want, a job or a clear sky? He looked across at Hudson’s—old, dark-red building filling the block and rising up fifteen floors, then narrowing into a tower that went up another five stories. He wondered where they kept the flag they displayed across the front of the building on some of the U.S. holidays, the biggest American flag ever made.

  The Brink’s truck was coming south on Farmer, the way Sportree had said it would. Stick went inside the bar on the corner. Nobody was using the phone. He stepped into the booth and made the call.

  When the phone rang, Frank turned from the wall, ripped off the sheet of paper that said OUT OF ORDER, and picked up the receiver.

  “Toy department.”

  That was all he said. A moment later he hung up and nodded as he turned.

  Leon Woody was playing with a game called Mousetrap, watching the little metal ball rolling through a Rube Goldberg contraption that set off a chain reaction of things hitting things that finally dropped a plastic net over the mouse. Leon Woody left the counter, carrying a big greenish Hudson’s shopping bag with a doll box inside, and walked down the main aisle to the men’s room.

  Frank watched him go inside. He started down the aisle.

  Leon Woody came out of the men’s, followed by Carmen Billy Ruiz in the Air Force blue bus driver’s suit and peaked cap. Frank was ten feet behind them when they went through the door beneath the exit sign.

  The stairway took one turn to the fifteenth floor. None of them said anything; the sound of their steps filled the stairwell. Leon Woody opened the door and stepped back to let Billy Ruiz go ahead of him. Billy hesitated.

  Leon Woody said, “Take out the piece, hold it flat against your leg, you dig? Go past the elevators, down on the right side. That’s this hand here. You see the door, credit department. Don’t say nothing. Nod your head, they say anything to you.”

  Frank, waiting on the stairs, watched Billy Ruiz take out the gun he had given him, Stick’s .38 Chief’s Special. He could feel his own, the big Python, in the pocket of his safari jacket. The store was air-conditioned, but it was hot in the stairwell. Leon Woody glanced back at him and went through the door.

  Frank hurried to catch it before it closed—like he didn’t want to be left behind. He went out on the fifteenth floor, cutting diagonally across the main aisle, past the bank of elevators. Billy Ruiz was thirty feet ahead, taking his time. Leon Woody paused by the optical department to look at glasses frames. Frank came up next to him.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “He’s all right,” Leon Woody said. “Be cool.”

  They moved on, past theatrical display boards and ticket windows, past the travel service and portrait studio. There were no customers anywhere. Billy Ruiz turned into the credit department. They were fifteen feet behind him now. A face appeared at a teller’s window. The door next to the window opened. Billy Ruiz went through. Leon Woody sprinted the last few yards and caught the door. Frank went in behind him, pulling the Colt Python.

  He heard Billy Ruiz say, “Turn around, everybody. I mean everybody, get down on the floor.”

  Frank saw their faces briefly, their eyes with the startled expressions, two older women and a young man. Marlys wasn’t in the room. They got down on their hands and knees, the women awkwardly, and lowered themselves to the carpeting. Billy Ruiz covered them, holding the .38 straight out and down. Leon opened the doll box without taking it out of the shopping bag and set it on a table against the wall where five gray-canvas sacks were waiting. Leon looked at them a moment, then walked over to a door with a frosted-glass window and opened it a little at a time, looking in.

  Marlys’s eyes rose from her typewriter, but her fingers continued to move over the keys for another few moments. The door beyond her desk was open to an office where a man sat half turned from his desk, talking on a phone and gesturing with his free hand. They couldn’t hear his voice. Leon Woody stepped away from the frosted-glass door. Marlys came out, closing it behind her, and Leon nodded toward the sacks.

  Frank watched her walk over to the table. She paused, then touched three of the sacks and looked up at Leon Woody. When Leon nodded, she walked back to her office, went in, and closed the door. Like that, not a word.

  Leon dropped two of the sacks into the doll box, then the three Marlys had indicated. Frank watched him, not understanding. What difference did it make which ones went in first? He wanted to touch Leon’s arm, get his attention, frown at him or something.

  He heard Billy Ruiz say, “Jesus!” Like he was sucking in his breath.

  Frank looked over and saw him raising the .38-it didn’t make sense—raising it up to an angle above his head.

  Leon Woody yelled at him, “Hold it!”

  And Frank didn’t know what was going on, until he looked up, in the direction the .38 was pointing, and saw the window above the row of file cabinets and the guy outside, strapped in a safety harness with a cloth over his shoulder and a squeegee in his hand, standing on the window ledge.

  The guy had been there all the time and they hadn’t seen him, concentrating on the three people getting down on the floor. The guy standing there, leaning out away from the window, trying to get away from it, fifteen floors up and no place to hide.

  Frank wanted to run—seeing the guy staring at them scared to death—get the hell out of here and keep running, forget it, call it off, the whole thing, like it hadn’t happened.

  Leon Woody said, very quietly, “Shit . . . man seen the whole show. I don’t know where my head’s at.” And he shook it from side to side, almost as if to make sure he was awake. He said then, “Billy—”

  Billy Ruiz shot the guy twice, through the glass, shattering the pane, and they saw the red spots blossom on his white T-shirt and his head snap back, maybe screaming—there was a sound, a woman screaming—the guy straining against the harness before his feet slipped from the ledge and his legs and hips dropped away and they could see only the top half of him in the shattered window, his head hanging forward, motionless. The woman inside the room was still screaming.

  Billy Ruiz went for the door and Leon said, “Walk, man, don’t run. Same way we came.” Frank was right behind him, then stopped as Leon shoved the Hudson’s shopping bag into his arms and took the Python in both hands.

  “Let me have it.”

  “What for?”

  “I’ll get rid of it.”

  “Where you going?”

  “Hey, be cool, we all going together.”

  Frank didn’t understand, but he couldn’t argue. He let go of the gun and held the Hudson’s bag in front of him, his arms around it. It wasn’t as heavy as he had thought it would be.

  There were a few shoppers down toward the end of the aisle, by display cases. None of them seemed to be looking this way. The rest of the aisle was empty.

  The three of them were close together going through the exit door to the stairway. Then Frank had to stop. Holding the box in front of him, he almost piled into Leon Woody standing at the top of the stairs looking down, waiting. Past him, Frank could see Billy Ruiz reaching the landing where
the stair made its turn.

  “Go on, for Christ sake.”

  Leon Woody didn’t move or say anything. He raised the Colt Python, aiming it down, and shot Billy Ruiz between the shoulder blades, the explosion filling the stairwell as Billy Ruiz was slammed against the wall and slid partway down the rest of the stairway.

  Leon Woody moved now. Frank watched him, his profile, bending over Billy Ruiz. He told himself to drop the box or throw it at him and get out, back through the door. He knew he wouldn’t make it, though. Leon Woody was looking up, the Python in his hand pointing at him but not aimed at him.

  “Come on, man,” Leon Woody said, “what you waiting for? You know where to put it, back behind. It’s already marked. Then go down the fourth floor, get the escalator. Maybe I see you outside.”

  Frank watched him go through the door to the toy department. By the time Frank got there, stepping over Billy Ruiz, not looking at him, Leon wasn’t anywhere around.

  The voice inside Frank Ryan wasn’t in condition; it had gone to fat and was pretty weak when it told him he had fucked up and the whole thing was an awful mistake. The voice did get through, and in those words, but Frank barely heard it and it didn’t take much to smother the voice completely. A couple of Scotches-on-the-rocks.

  Stick said, “Well?”

  Frank stood at the bar, between two of the bamboo stools, holding onto the drink. He heard the faint sound of a girl laughing, coming from the patio below, then silence again.

  “Well what? It’s done.”

  “I never saw so many police cars,” Stick said. “I would say within ten minutes of the time I called, no more than that, they’re all over the place, completely around the store, and these guys are running in with their riot guns.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Frank said. “They’re waiting at the bottom of the escalator, four of them with their guns out. Anybody looks suspicious, ‘Would you mind stepping over here?’ They’re going through packages, searching people, even women.”

  “How’d you get out?”

  “How’d I get out? I walked out. What’re they going to find on me? ‘Hey, what’s going on, Officer?’ And they give you something about a routine investigation—five hundred cops in the place, shotguns, riot outfits, everything, it’s a routine investigation.”