“Where did you go then?”
“Straight to my apartment,” Cory lied, shifting uneasily in his chair. “Am I being written up for this? If I am, I’d like to have a union representative present.”
“There’s no need for that, Evans. I don’t intend to make a formal record of this meeting. Offering that woman a ride into town, even under the circumstances you outlined, was not, in my mind, very good judgment, but no report will be made if you agree to cooperate with Agent Hardesty here.”
Cory looked over at the FBI man. “Cooperate with him how?”
“I’d like to give you a little information about the woman you picked up, Officer Evans,” the agent said. “Her name is Billie Sue Neeley. The inmate she was visiting is Lester Dragg, serving six years for grand theft auto. He’s been in two, up for parole in eighteen months. The Bureau is interested in him because we know he drove the getaway car in a bank robbery down in Modesto. The two gunmen who went into the bank grabbed one million, two hundred thousand dollars that was scheduled to be picked up by an armored truck about twenty minutes later. The robbery would have gone off perfectly except that the armored truck got there early, just as the holdup men ran out of the bank and threw the two sacks of money into the getaway car. The armored truck guards opened fire on the two men before they could get into the car themselves. In the shootout, both holdup men were killed. But the getaway car, with the money in it, got away. The armored truck guards didn’t get the license number but gave a good description of the car. It turned out to be stolen. Three days later, the California Highway Patrol snagged the car in a line waiting to cross the border into Tijuana. Lester Dragg was driving; Billie Sue Neeley was a passenger. There was no sign of the money. We had no eyewitness ID that Dragg had been the driver in the bank job. All we could get him on was a state charge of grand theft auto as the driver of a stolen vehicle. And we had nothing at all on the Neeley woman; she claimed to be a hitchhiker and Dragg backed up her story.”
“So the bank robbery is why the FBI is interested,” Cory guessed.
“Exactly. If we can put Dragg next to that money, we can nail him on federal bank robbery charges, and maybe get the Neeley woman for conspiracy.”
“You think the Neeley woman knows where the money is?” Cory asked.
Agent Hardesty shrugged.
“Hard to say. She certainly isn’t spending it if she does. She lives very frugally; the only income she appears to have is an unemployment check from the state that she gets twice a month.”
So I was wrong, Cory thought. Not dirt-poor Mississippi or Alabama. An Okie from Oklahoma. Still dirt poor.
“There’s got to be some reason she’s hanging around waiting for Dragg to get out,” Hardesty continued, “and we figure it’s the money.”
“She could just be crazy about the guy,” Cory offered.
“Possibly.” Deputy Warden Duffy reentered the conversation. “She’s listed on his visitor card as his common-law wife.”
Cory nodded thoughtfully. “So what do I have to do with all this?” he asked, looking from the agent to the deputy warden.
“That remains to be seen,” Hardesty said. “You’ve accidentally made contact with her. We know she’s living in the Motel 7 on Weed Street in Sacramento.” No kidding, Cory thought.
“I’ve had her under surveillance for some time. I know where she shops, the movies she goes to, where she eats supper, everything. We thought, Deputy Warden Duffy and I, if we could arrange for you to run into her again—”
“Wait a minute,” Cory interrupted, holding both hands up, palms out, deciding to play it dumb. “If you want me to be some kind of bait to trap this woman for the FBI, you’ve got the wrong guy. I’m a corrections officer, not some kind of undercover cop. I’m not up for anything like this.”
The FBI agent and the deputy warden exchanged serious looks. “Evans,” the deputy warden said, “my decision to keep this meeting informal was based on you cooperating with Agent Hardesty. You picked up this woman yesterday in violation of regulations governing your employment. Agent Hardesty’s surveillance of her was compromised because of that—”
“I don’t see how,” Cory objected.
“I was on the bus the Neeley woman missed,” Hardesty said. “By the time I got back to that bus stop, Neeley was gone. Deputy Warden Duffy had to have the prison check all of its closed-circuit security tapes to find out how she left the institution.”
The deputy warden leaned forward and locked his fingers together on the desktop. “Look, Evans,” he said in an even but not unfriendly voice, “you’re not being asked to do anything but pursue an acquaintance with this woman and report back to Agent Hardesty anything she says to you. Just be friendly, that’s all. And in exchange for that, your serious breach of regulations yesterday will not become a formal report.”
“That’s kind of like blackmail, isn’t it?” Cory asked, his own voice equally even but not challenging.
“I’ll overlook that comment,” the deputy warden said. “I’ll even sweeten the pot a little bit. Cooperate in this matter and the next time a sergeant’s opening comes up, I’ll personally see that you get on the list. High on the list.” He sat back in his big swivel chair. “Now, what’s it going to be, Evans?”
Cory managed to exhale a deep breath that sounded both weary and resigned. “I guess I’m about to make a new friend,” he said.
And all the time he was thinking, An Okie from Oklahoma. And all that money.
After Cory left the office, the deputy warden sat forward again and silently drummed the fingers of one hand on the desktop.
“I hope to hell you know what you’re doing,” he said tightly to the FBI agent.
“I know exactly what I’m doing—or rather what we’re doing,” Hardesty said confidently. He smiled broadly. “Just play along with me, my friend, and you and I will cut up one million, two hundred thousand dollars in unmarked bills. As long as this guy Evans does as he’s told and doesn’t get any bright ideas of his own.”
Duffy guffawed. “That guy? Hell, Roger, he’s a prison guard! He’s about as smart as a bag of nails. You don’t have to worry about him.”
Or you either, I hope, Hardesty thought. A million two was serious money. Serious enough to give almost any man pause for thought.
“So,” Duffy asked, “where do we go from here?”
“Today’s Tuesday,” Hardesty said. “The Neeley woman has gone to the movies every Wednesday night for two months. We’ll get Evans back in here in the morning and brief him on what to do when she goes to the movies tomorrow night. Then we’ll be off and running.”
“Okay,” Duffy said. Then, as if to convince himself, he repeated it. “Okay.”
The following night, when the first showing of the evening feature was over, Cory was waiting in the doorway of a coffee shop next to the Nugget Theater. When Billie Sue Neeley emerged in the exiting audience, he stepped out to meet her.
“Need a ride?” he asked.
She stopped, startled at having been spoken to. “What do you want?” she asked, almost demanded.
“You and I need to sit down and have a talk,” Cory said. “An FBI man is watching you, and now he’s watching me because I gave you a ride day before yesterday. We need to have a serious conversation.”
Billie studied him for a long moment in the white glare of the movie theater marquee, with people moving past them on the sidewalk, talking among themselves, without even a glance at Cory and Billie. Presently she made her decision.
“Okay. Where?”
“There’s a coffee shop around the corner.”
“Let’s go,” Billie said. It was almost an order.
The place was called Cliff’s Cafe. It had a ten-stool counter and six red vinyl booths for four, all under a sea of fluorescent lights that made its patrons look somehow ill, like they belonged in an emergency room for a transfusion instead of a café for a burger. The menus were in imitation red-leather folders that matched the
vinyl booths.
“You hungry?” Cory asked conversationally when they slid into a booth.
“No,” she snapped tightly.
“Well, I am.”
When the waitress came, Cory ordered the Cliff’s Special, a quarter-pounder with cheese, bacon, and the works, served with crispy crinkle fries on the side. With it he ordered a Dr Pepper. Billie ordered black coffee.
“Well?” she asked as they waited for their order, in the same demanding tone she had used in their encounter on the street. Cory fixed her with his flat corrections-officer stare.
“Okay, here’s the story,” he said.
He laid it out for her. Everything. All that had taken place in the deputy warden’s office. He was straight with her, as he had earlier decided he would be. He told her everything—except the fact that he had followed her to the Motel 7 after she had left the bus depot. That was personal, he had decided. That was between him and her, and the deputy warden and the FBI had nothing to do with it. At that point he was not sure why he felt that way.
When his food was served and he began to eat, and Billie began to tentatively sip at her black coffee, she studied him now more than he studied her. What she saw was a guy with a pretty ordinary face: eyes a little too close together, nose slightly hooked, one ear a bit jugged.
Certainly not as handsome as her man in prison. Lester Dragg, except for a couple of crooked teeth, looked like Johnny Depp. Half the girls back in Atoka High had been crazy about him. But it was Billie Sue Neeley who snagged him. Lucky her, she had eventually thought wryly, but by then it was too late to turn back.
“So how come you’re being so straight with me?” she finally asked.
Cory locked eyes with her. “I don’t like being blackmailed by the deputy warden and an FBI agent,” he told her evenly.
Billie gave him a knowing look. “Wouldn’t have anything to do with the money, would it?” She picked up one of his crispy crinkle fries and ate it.
“They seem to think you know where it is,” he told her. She took another one of his fries, salted this one, and munched some more. “Thought you weren’t hungry,” he reminded her.
“I don’t know where the money is,” Billie said, ignoring his last remark.
“I get the feeling that this FBI agent thinks you might be able to find out where it is.”
“That agent wouldn’t by any chance be named Hardesty, would he?”
“Yeah. You know him?”
“He’s been leaning on me ever since Les and I got caught in that hot car trying to cross into Mexico. See, he blew it that day, big-time. If he’d let us cross, he could have paid the Mexican border cops to bump us back into the U.S. and then he’d have had Les on a federal rap, international transportation of a stolen vehicle. But he jumped the gun. Got itchy about finding the money, prob’ly. So all he could do is turn Les over to the California law and get him sent up on a stolen car rap. Once he got Les put away, he started stalking me. I told him a hunnerd times I didn’t know what Les had done with that bank take, but he just never believed me.” Billie sighed a weary sigh and continued to eat his crispy crinkle fries. But her eyes narrowed slightly.
“What does Hardesty expect you to get out of me?”
“I don’t know.” Cory finished his burger and pushed his plate with the rest of the fries over to her. “Maybe he thinks you’ll fall for me, drop Lester, and decide to split the money with me.”
Billie grunted softly. “Won’t work. Nothing personal, but you’re not my type.” Her remark got no reaction at all from Cory. Billie’s eyes narrowed even more, not in suspicion now but curiosity. “Well?” she finally challenged.
“Well what?”
“Aren’t you going to say I’m not your type either? I mean, I’m a convict’s girl and you’re a prison guard, for God’s sake!”
Cory finished the last of his Dr Pepper and set the bottle aside, shrugging. “I guess I don’t know exactly what kind of woman is my type. I haven’t had much luck with women.”
When they left the café, Cory walked her back to the Motel 7.
“So what do you think?” Billie asked when they got to the door of her room. “Where does this go from here?”
“I don’t know. I guess we just play it out and see where it takes us.”
“I guess,” Billie agreed.
She went on into her room and Cory walked away, toward his apartment.
Inside, Billie parted the curtains of the room’s small window and watched him walking away. With the palm of one hand rubbing up and down her thigh, she watched him until he was out of sight. She had been a long time without a man.
During visiting hours the next day, an agitated Lester Dragg tapped one knuckle on the metal visiting room table that separated them. It was an open visiting room where inmates and visitors could touch, hug, kiss, snack on junk food from state-owned vending machines, and in some cases transfer drugs and other contraband. But Lester Dragg was not interested in doing any of that. Lester Dragg was only interested in the hack named Evans that Billie Sue had met.
“What else did he tell you about Hardesty?” Lester was particularly curious about the FBI agent.
“Nothing,” Billie explained patiently, “except what I already told you.” She sighed audibly. “Why? I mean, what’s so important about him?”
“What’s so important about him is that he’s the fed that’s been trying to cut some kind of deal with me about the money.”
“You never told me about anything like that,” Billie said, surprised.
“I didn’t think you needed to know, Billie Sue!” he snapped. “Sometimes the less you know, the safer I feel.”
Billie looked away for a moment. Lester had a way of hurting her feelings like that. It usually happened when he was upset about something. Or when he was angry. She had begun to notice that when he was upset or angry, he didn’t look so much like Johnny Depp anymore.
Brushing aside her hurt feelings, Billie asked, “What do you want me to do about him? The corrections guy?”
“I don’t know. Just play along with him for the time being, I reckon. See if you can figure out what Hardesty and that deputy warden are planning. But be careful what you say to him. And whatever you do”—he pointed a threatening finger at her—“don’t tell him that you told me about meeting him. You got that straight?”
“I got it, Les.”
He took her hands across the table, and his voice softened the way it did when he wanted something. “Listen, honey, if you should get, you know, friendly with this hack, to the point where he might consider doing you a favor, well, go for it, okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, if you put out to him a little, you might could ask if he could maybe get me transferred out of the goddamned laundry. All that bleach I have to handle is making my hands raw.”
Billie stiffened, but only inside so he wouldn’t notice. “Are you saying it’s okay for me to go to bed with this guy if he’ll get you transferred to a better job?”
“Well, yeah,” Lester said, shrugging innocently. “I mean, it wouldn’t be for real or anything. Just something you’d do for me, honey, to make my life a little easier. You understand what I mean, don’t you, babe?”
“Yeah, Lester. Sure, I understand.”
Walking back to the bus stop after the visit, Billie Sue felt like the back of her neck was on fire.
That evening Cory came by the motel in his car to get her and they went downtown to an Italian restaurant that was considerably nicer than Cliff’s Cafe had been. Cory ordered a bottle of Barolo, and as they drank wine and waited for their dinner, Billie told him about her visit with Lester.
“I can’t believe he actually asked me to do that,” she complained. “I mean, I’m supposed to be his girl and he actually asked me to go to bed with you to get him a better job assignment!”
“Wouldn’t have worked anyway,” Cory said. “I’m just a level-one corrections officer. Only sergeants and high
er can get an inmate transferred.” He studied her for a moment, then said, “You look very nice tonight. No boots, no worn-out jeans.” She was wearing dress slacks and heels, with a scooped-neck long-sleeved sweater.
She shrugged. “Well, I didn’t want you to think I was a complete Okie from Muskogee. I do know how to dress. Lester makes me dress down when I visit the prison; he says it keeps the guards from hitting on me.”
Cory smiled. “Officers aren’t likely to hit on women who visit inmates. Mostly they think of them as sluts—you know, tattoos, nose rings, half a pound of makeup, trying to look good for the loser inside.”
“Do you think I’m one of those?” Billie asked frankly. “A slut?”
“No, I don’t.” Cory looked away. “I have a confession to make. I followed you to the motel that first night, after I let you out at the bus depot. I had a feeling you’d come back out, so I waited. And I followed you.”
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“I guess I wanted you to know that I was interested in you even before all this business with the deputy warden and the FBI guy started.”
Billie tilted her head a bit. “Interested in me how? Getting laid?”
“No. Not at that point. Although I’m sure it would eventually have come to that. But just then I only felt that I’d like to know more about you: what your name was, where you came from, how you got to where you are now.” Abruptly he stopped talking, as if unsure what to say next.
“Well, you already know my name,” she told him in a throaty voice that he took notice of for the first time. “As to where I came from, we called it Dustburg. I was a sharecropper’s kid. One of thirteen. Got pulled out of school when I was twelve to work in the fields. It wasn’t a real fun life. One of my brothers was retarded everywhere but between his legs; me and my sisters slept with big rocks in bed to fight him off with.
“On Saturdays we’d all pile onto the back of Daddy’s flatbed and go into town. That was a real big deal. We’d drive past five hundred telephone poles until we came to a sign that said city limits. After a while I got to where I’d think, so what? A tacky little one-street nothing full of dirt-poor people who lived on a steady diet of revivals every Sunday.” She took a long swallow of Barolo. “So you want to know where I came from? I came from nowhere.”
The Best American Mystery Stories 2013 Page 13
