by Stephen King
“Good fuckin luck,” Poke said, still sulking. “We’re doin a helluva job. You know what we got, besides that dope and the guns? We got sixteen bucks and three hundred fuckin credit cards we don’t dare use. What the fuck, we don’t even have enough cash to fill this hog’s gas tank.”
“God will provide,” Lloyd said, and spit-sealed the bomber. He lit it with the Connie’s dashboard lighter. “Happy fuckin days.”
“And if you want to sell it, what are we doing smokin it?” Poke went on, not much mollified by the thought of God providing.
“So we sell a few short ounces. Come on, Poke. Have a smoke.”
This never failed to break Poke up. He brayed laughter and took the joint. Between them, standing on its wire stock, was the Schmeisser, fully loaded. The Connie blazed on up the road, its gas gauge standing at an eighth.
Poke and Lloyd had met a year before in the Brownsville Minimum Security Station, a Nevada work farm. Brownsville was ninety acres of irrigated farmland and a prison compound of Quonset huts about sixty miles north of Tonopah and about eighty northeast of Gabbs. It was a mean place to do short time. Although Brownsville Station was supposed to be a farm, nothing much grew there. Carrots and lettuce and peas got one taste of that blaring sun, chuckled weakly, and died. Legumes and weeds would grow, and the state legislature was frantically dedicated to the idea that someday soybeans would grow. But the kindest thing that could be said about Brownsville’s ostensible purpose was that the desert was taking a Christless long time to bloom. The warden (who preferred to be called “the boss”) prided himself on being a hardass, and he hired only men he considered to be fellow hardasses. And, as he was fond of telling the new fish, Brownsville was mostly minimum security because there was no place to run to if you went under the wire. Some did, but most were brought back in two or three days, sunburned, glareblind, and eager to sell the boss their shriveled raisin souls for a drink of water. Some of them cackled madly, and one young man who was out for three days claimed he saw a large castle some miles south of Gabbs, a castle with a moat. The moat, he said, was guarded by trolls riding big black horses. Some months later when a Colorado revival preacher did a show at Brownsville, this same young man got Jesus in a big way.
Andrew “Poke” Freeman, in for simple assault, was released in April of 1980. He had occupied a bed next to Lloyd Henreid, and had told him that if Lloyd was interested in a big score, he knew about something interesting in Vegas. Lloyd was willing.
Lloyd was released on June 1. His crime, committed in Reno, had been attempted rape. The lady was a showgirl on her way home, and she had shot a load of teargas into Lloyd’s eyes. He felt lucky to get only two to four, plus time served, plus time off for good behavior. At Brownsville it was just too fuckin hot to misbehave.
He caught a bus to Las Vegas, and Poke met him at the terminal. This is the deal, Poke told him. He knew this fellow, “one-time business associate” might describe him best, and this guy was known in certain circles as Gorgeous George. He did some piecework for a group of people with mostly Italian and Sicilian names. George was strictly part-time help. What he did mostly for these Sicilian-type people was to take things and bring things. Sometimes he took things from Vegas to L.A.; sometimes he brought other things back from L.A. to Vegas. Smalltime dope mostly, freebies for big-time customers. Sometimes guns. The guns were always a bring, never a take. As Poke understood it (and Poke’s understanding never got much beyond what the movie people call “soft focus”), these Sicilian-type people sometimes sold iron to independent thieves. Well, Poke said, Gorgeous George was willing to tell them the time and place when a fairly good haul of these items were in stock. George was asking twenty-five per cent of what they realized. Poke and Lloyd would crash in on George, tie him and gag him, take the stuff, and maybe give him a couple of biffs and baffs for good measure. It had to look good, George had cautioned, because these Sicilian-type people were no one to fool around with.
“Yeah,” Lloyd said. “That sounds good.”
The next day Poke and Lloyd went to see Gorgeous George, a mild-mannered six-footer with a small head which sat incongruously above his roofbeam shoulders. He had a full head of waved blond hair, which made him look a bit like the famed wrestler.
He had had second thoughts about the deal, but Poke had changed his mind again. Poke was good at that. George told them to come around to his house the following Friday evening around six. “Wear masks, for God’s sake,” he said. “And you bloody my nose and black my eye, too. Jesus, I wish I’d never gotten into this.”
The big night came. Poke and Lloyd took a bus to the corner of George’s street and put on ski-masks at the foot of his walk. The door was locked, but as George had promised, not too tightly locked. There was a rumpus room downstairs, and there was George, standing in front of a Hefty bag full of pot. The Ping-Pong table was loaded down with guns. George was scared.
“Jesus, oh Jesus, I wish I’d never gotten into this,” he kept saying as Lloyd tied his feet with clothesrope and Poke bound his hands with Scotch brand filament tape.
Then Lloyd biffed George in the nose, bloodying it, and Poke baffed him in the eye, blacking it as per request.
“Jeez!” George cried. “Did you have to do it so hard?”
Poke plastered a piece of adhesive tape across George’s mouth. The two of them had begun to gather up the swag.
“You know something, old buddy?” Poke said, pausing.
“Nope,” Lloyd said, giggling nervously. “Not a thing.”
“I wonder if ole George there can keep a secret.”
Lloyd stared thoughtfully at Gorgeous George for a long hard minute. George’s eyes bugged back at him in sudden terror.
Then Lloyd said, “Sure. It’s his ass too.” But he sounded as uneasy as he felt.
Poke smiled. “Oh, he could just say, ‘Hey guys. I met this old friend and his buddy. We shot the shit for a while, had a few beers, and what do you think, the sons of bitches came over to the house and ripped me off. Sure hope you catch em. Here’s what they look like.’ ”
George was shaking his head wildly, his eyes capital Os of terror. The guns were in a heavy canvas laundry sack they had found in the downstairs bathroom. Now Lloyd hefted the bag nervously and said, “Well, what do you think we ought to do?”
“I think we ought to pokerize him, ole buddy,” Poke said regretfully. “Only thing we can do.”
Lloyd said, “That seems awful hard, after he put us onto this.” “‘Hard old world, buddy.”
“Yeah,” Lloyd sighed, and they walked over to George.
“Mph,” George said, shaking his head wildly. “Mmmmmnh! Mmmmph!”
“I know,” Poke soothed him. “Bitch, ain’t it? I’m sorry, George, no shit. Catch on his head, Lloyd.”
That was easier said than done. Gorgeous George was whipping his head wildly from side to side. He was sitting in the comer of his rumpus room and the walls were cinderblock and he kept rapping his head against them. Didn’t even seem to feel it.
“Catch him,” Poke said serenely, and ripped another piece of tape from the roll.
Lloyd at last got him by the hair and managed to hold him still long enough for Poke to slap the second strip of adhesive neatly across George’s nose, thereby sealing all his tubes. George went purely crazy. It went on for almost five minutes before George was completely still. He bucked and scrabbled and thumped. His face got as red as the side of old dad’s barn. The last thing he did was to lift both legs eight or ten inches straight up off the floor and bring them down with a crash. It reminded Lloyd of something he had seen in a Bugs Bunny cartoon or something, and he chuckled a little, feeling a bit cheered up. Up until then it had been sort of gruesome to see.
Poke squatted beside George and felt for his pulse.
“Well?” Lloyd said.
“Nothin tickin but his watch, ole buddy,” Poke said. “Speakin of which . . .” He lifted George’s meaty arm and looked at his wrist. “Naw, ju
st a Timex.” He let George’s arm drop, shattering the crystal.
George’s car keys were in his front pants pocket. And in an upstairs cupboard they found a Skippy peanut butter jar half filled with dimes, and they took those, too. There was twenty dollars and sixty cents in dimes.
George’s car was a wheezy old Mustang with bald tires. They left Vegas on US 93 and went southeast into Arizona. By noon of the next day, day before yesterday, they had skirted Phoenix on the back roads. Yesterday around nine they had stopped at a dusty old general store two miles beyond Sheldon on Arizona Highway 75. They knocked over the store and pokerized the proprietor, an elderly gentleman with mail-order false teeth. They got sixty-three dollars and the old man’s pickup truck.
The pickup truck had blown two tires this morning. They had crossed the state line from Arizona into New Mexico earlier on and they stood by the truck, not sure what to do next. Along had come the white Continental and solved all their problems.
The driver pulled over, leaned out, and said: “Need any help?”
“Sure do,” Poke had said, and pokerized the guy right on the spot. Got him dead-bang between the eyes with the .357 Mag. Poor sucker probably never even knew what had hit him.
“Why don’t you turn here?” Lloyd said, pointing to the junction coming up. He was pleasantly stoned.
“Sure could,” Poke said cheerfully. He let the Connie’s speed drop from eighty to sixty. Drifted it to the left, right wheels barely leaving the ground, and then a new piece of road was unrolling in front of them. Route 78, due west. And so, not knowing they had ever left it or that they were now the perpetrators of what the newspapers were calling a TRI-STATE KILL-SPREE, they reentered Arizona.
About an hour later a sign came up on their right: BURRACK 6. “Burlap?” Lloyd said foggily.
“Burrack,” Poke said, and began twisting the Connie’s wheel so that the car made big graceful loops back and forth across the road. “Whoop! Whoop!”
“You want to stop there? I’m hungry, man.”
“You’re always hungry.”
“Fuck you. When I get stoned, I get the munchies.”
“You can munch my nine-inch hogleg, how’s that? Whoop! Whoop!”
“Seriously, Poke. Let’s stop.”
“Okay. Got to get some cash, too. We’ve thrown off enough fuckin pursuit. We got to get some money and shag ass north. This desert shit makes no sense to me.”
“Okay,” Lloyd said. He didn’t know if it was the dope working on him or what, but all of a sudden he felt paranoid as hell, even worse than when they’d been on the turnpike. Poke was right. Stop outside this Burrack and pull a score like they had outside of Sheldon. Get some money and some gas station maps, ditch this fucking Connie for something that would blend into the scenery, then get going north and east by the secondary roads. Get the fuck out of Arizona.
“I’ll tell you the truth, man,” Poke said. “All of a sudden I feel as nervous as a longtail cat in a room fulla rockin chairs.”
“I know what you mean, jellybean,” Lloyd said gravely, and then it hit them both funny and they broke up.
Burrack was a wide place in the road. They shot through it and on the other side was a combination cafe, store, and gas station. There was an old Ford wagon and a dust-streaked Olds with a horse trailer behind it in the dirt parking lot. The horse stared out at them as Poke wheeled the Connie in.
“This looks like just the ticket,” Lloyd said.
Poke agreed. He reached into the back for the .357 and checked the loads. “You ready?”
“I guess so,” Lloyd said, and took hold of the Schmeisser.
They walked across the baked parking lot. The police had known who they were for four days now; they had left their fingerprints all over Gorgeous George’s house, and in the store where the old man with the mail-order dentures had been pokerized. The old man’s pickup had been found within fifty feet of the bodies of the three people who belonged with the Continental, and it seemed reasonable to assume that the men who had killed Gorgeous George and the store owner had also killed these three. If they had been listening to the Connie’s radio instead of the tape-player they would have known that Arizona and New Mexico police were co-ordinating the largest manhunt in forty years, all for a couple of smalltime grifters who could not quite comprehend what they might have done to start such a fuss.
The gas station was self-service; the clerk had to turn on the pump. So they went up the steps and inside. Three aisles of canned goods went up the room toward the counter. At the counter a man in cowboy clothes was paying for a pack of smokes and half a dozen Slim Jims. Halfway down the middle aisle a tired-looking woman with coarse black hair was trying to decide over two brands of spaghetti sauce. The place smelled of stale licorice and sun and tobacco and age. The proprietor was a freckled man in a gray shirt. He was wearing a company cap that said SHELL in red letters against a white field. He looked up as the screen door slapped shut and his eyes widened.
Lloyd put the wire stock of the Schmeisser against his shoulder and fired a burst at the ceiling. The two hanging lightbulbs shattered like bombs. The man in the cowboy clothes began to turn around.
“Just hold still and nobody’ll get hurt!” Lloyd shouted, at which point Poke made him a liar by blowing a hole through the woman looking at the sauces. She flew out of her shoes.
“Holy gee, Poke!” Lloyd hollered. “You didn’t have to—”
“Pokerized her, ole buddy!” Poke yelled. “She’ll never watch Lawrence Welk again! Whoop! Whoop!”
The man in the cowboy clothes kept turning. He was holding his smokes in his left hand. The harsh light falling through the show window and the screen door pricked out bright stars on the dark lenses of his sunglasses. There was a .45 revolver tucked into his belt, and now he plucked it out unhurriedly as Lloyd and Poke were staring at the dead woman. He aimed, fired, and the left side of Poke’s face suddenly disappeared in a spray of blood and tissue and teeth.
“Shot!" Poke screamed, dropping the .357 and pinwheeling backward. His flailing hands raked potato chips and taco chips and Cheez Doodles onto the splintery wooden floor. “Shot me, Lloyd! Look out! Shot me! Shot me!" He hit the screen door and banged back through it and sat down hard on the porch outside, pulling one of the aged doorhinges loose.
Lloyd, stunned, fired more in reflex than in self-defense. The Schmeisser’s roar filled the room. Cans flew. Bottles crashed, spilling catsup, pickles, olives. The glass front of the Pepsi cooler jingled inward. Bottles of Dr Pepper and Nehi and Orange Crush exploded like clay pigeons. Foam ran everywhere. The man in the cowboy clothes, cool, calm, and collected, fired his piece again. Lloyd felt rather than heard the bullet as it droned by nearly close enough to part hair. He raked the Schmeisser across the room, from left to right.
The man in the SHELL cap dropped behind the counter with such suddenness that an observer might have thought a trapdoor had been sprung on him. A gumball machine disintegrated. Red, blue, and green chews rolled everywhere. The glass bottles on the counter exploded. One of them had contained pickled eggs and immediately the room was filled with the sharp odor of vinegar.
The Schmeisser put three bullet holes in the cowboy’s khaki shirt and most of his innards exited from the back to splatter a Budweiser sign that showed the world-famous Clydesdales. The cowboy went down, still clutching his .45 in one hand and his deck of Luckies in the other.
Lloyd, bullshit with fear, continued to fire. The machine-pistol was growing hot in his hands. A box filled with returnable soda bottles tinkled and fell over. A calendar girl wearing hotpants took a bullet hole in one magical peach-colored thigh. A rack of paperbacks with no covers crashed over. Then the Schmeisser was empty, and the new silence was deafening. The smell of gunpowder was heavy and rank.
“Holy gee,” Lloyd said. He looked cautiously at the cowboy. It didn’t look like the cowboy was going to be a problem.
“Shot me!” Poke brayed, and staggered back inside. He cl
awed the screen door out of his way with such force that the other hinge popped and the screen fell off onto the porch. “Shot me, Lloyd, look out!”
“I got him, Poke,” Lloyd soothed, but Poke seemed not to hear. He was a mess. His right eye blazed like a baleful sapphire. The left was gone. His left cheek had been vaporized, and you could watch his jaw work on that side as he talked. Most of his teeth were gone over there, too. His shirt was soaked with blood.
“Stupid fuck blew me up!” Poke screamed. He bent over and got the .357 Mag. "I’ll teach you to shoot me, you numb fuck!”
He advanced on the cowboy, a rural Dr. Sardonicus. He put one foot on the cowboy’s butt like a hunter posing for a picture with his trophy, and prepared to empty the .357 into his head. Lloyd stood watching, gape-mouthed, the smoking machine-pistol dangling from one hand, still trying to figure out how all of this had happened.
At that moment the man in the SHELL cap popped back up from behind the counter, his face screwed up in an expression of desperate intent, a double-barreled shotgun clutched in both hands.
“Huh?” Poke said, and looked up just in time to get both barrels. Lloyd decided it was time to leave. Fuck the money. There was money everywhere. He wheeled and exited the store in large shambling strides, his boots barely touching the boards.
He was halfway down the steps when an Arizona state police cruiser wheeled into the yard. A trooper got out on the passenger side and pulled his pistol. “Hold it right there! What’s going on in there?”
“Three people dead!” Lloyd cried. “Hell of a mess! Guy that did it went out the back! I’m gettin the fuck out!”
He ran to the Connie and had actually slipped behind the wheel when the trooper yelled: “Halt! Halt or I’ll shoot!”
Lloyd halted. The keys weren’t in the fucking thing anyway.
