Bad Signs

by R.J. Ellory

  “How many people you killed?”

  “Not enough.”

  “How do you decide?”

  “Hell, there ain’t no decision in it. Like I said, you do what you gotta do. I mean, it’s like this, see? Some guys spend their lives lucky, always reaching the home plate before the ball. Some people have lives like that. Even their shit smells good, you know? People like us …” Earl turned and looked at Digger, and in his expression, in the flash of his eyes, there was something. Camaraderie. Fellow-feeling. Something fraternal. Digger saw it, and it filled his heart with pride. In that moment he believed that Earl Sheridan was indeed talking to him as the equal he so desired to be.

  “Some people are like that, right? Well, that ain’t me and you, my crazy little friend. We were fucked from day one. We were fucked before we even got out of bed. Tell you this now … only time I ever went to a party was by mistake. Story of my life. Walked in unexpected and they all looked at me. Maybe I convinced myself wrong. Maybe I told myself they’d all expected someone else to mail an invite. But no, it wasn’t that way. It was that most of them hadn’t even thought to ask me, and those that did? Well, those folks didn’t want me there anyway. People only think of me when I’m right there in front of them. Rest of the time I’m invisible. Know what I mean?”

  “For sure I do,” Digger replied, and believed that he did know. He knew precisely what Earl was talking about, and the more he heard this kind of thing the more he managed to convince himself that there was something common between them. Earl, if not a contemporary, if not a kindred spirit, was at least someone who could appreciate the kind of crap he’d been living with all his life. He was an ally, that much if nothing else.

  “People like us ain’t given shit, so we gotta take it. You have to keep your own self-respect. That’s the important thing. You can’t let yourself slide. You gotta stay sharp, on the money, right? Only time you’re in trouble is when you can no longer smell your own stink. Keep your wits about you. Get what you can, but don’t be foolish. Like back there at the store. They’ll figure out who it was from the car. And if they catch that little cocksucker he’ll squall like a girl anyhows. Thing is, by the time they get it all figured out, we’ll be on the beach in Ensenada drinking cervezas and getting the old trailer hitch polished good by a senorita or two.”

  “You got it all sorted out,” Digger said.

  “Hell no, we ain’t never got it sorted out really. We just do the best we can. I’m still too easygoing.” Earl grinned. “Like you boys. I shoulda killed you stone-dead an hour after Hesperia, but I’m too soft. Guy I knew back in the joint, believe me, this boy could smile as sweet as Jesus, stick a knife right through your heart, use your own damned shirttails to wipe it off, and then sit down for dinner. And he’d use the same knife to cut his steak, and hell, if he wouldn’t still be smiling. That’s the kind of guy you wanna work with. That’s the kind of businesslike attitude you gotta cultivate.”

  Digger smiled. Earl smiled too.

  “Hell, everyone’s crazy.” Earl winked. “Shit, even Moses was a basket case.”

  It took a moment, but Digger got it. They laughed like a pair of dumb hyenas. Digger could see the man behind the image then. He was no longer scared of him. At least not so much as before. In a way he felt proud. Proud that a man such as Earl Sheridan would want to keep someone like him around. He thought about the dead people back in Marana, and he had to admit that he felt very little at all for them. Then he thought about Clay, and he realized that they were different, and perhaps it was because they had different fathers. Whatever the reason, well, it didn’t matter. He couldn’t stay hitched to his little brother for the whole of his damned life. Was only right that they should go their separate ways at some point. And if not now, then when?

  So it was that they fell in together, and if Earl Sheridan’s heart was nothing but a dark and twisted muscle, then Digger’s was a heart of shadows and possibilities. If Katherine Aronson had been right, if all it took to make a bad person good was for someone to expect it of them, then Elliott Danziger was screwed from the get-go. Earl Sheridan was bad from the inside out and back again, and he attributed those same qualities to everyone he met. Earl Sheridan expected the worst of people, and here—in his newfound acolyte—he had decided to expect the very worst of all.

  Earl truly believed that nothing he ever did came out of blind anger. Sure, he had plenty of things to be angry about. Too many to list. But he never permitted that force to go tornadoing around the place arbitrarily. A power like that needed to be controlled and channeled. A man had to have self-discipline. A man was measured by his actions, and thus his actions should be measured.

  This was what he believed, and he was going to believe it for just a few hours more.

  They arrived at Wellton, Yuma County, a handful of minutes after noon.

  Earl was hungry. Digger just wanted to hold Chester Bartlett’s sidearm and point it at someone. He wanted to know what it felt like, even if the thing wasn’t loaded. The anticipation of such a thing was far more meaningful and important than lunch.

  “We’re eating before anything else,” Earl said. “It’ll give us a little time to settle after the journey. We can get a measure for the place.”

  Driving down the main road it seemed perfect. Not too big, not too small. The bank—Yuma County Trust & Savings—was pretty much as Earl had imagined it would be. That was what he was interested in. The bank. The money inside. How far they would make it was dependent upon how much they could get. There’d be two or three tellers, a loans manager, an assistant manager, a general manager—all of them deskbound, pen-pushing cowards without an ounce of guts between them. Closest they’d ever get to challenging anything was shooing strays out of the yard. A bank like that would handle traffic for all the farmers and breeders and cattlemen in the county. Monday afternoon, start of the new week, an entire five days’ stock of cash delivered in only hours before. Sweet as candy and twice as rich.

  A block and a half down and over to the other side of the main drag they found a diner. Half a dozen regulars, people familiar enough with whatever was going on in Wellton to glance in their direction but give them no real pause for thought. Earl Sheridan didn’t know, but Wellton was the last real town on I-8 before the county line at Yuma, and then you either went right to California or left to Baja. Wellton was on the Gila River. They got boatmen and ferry travelers, people from San Diego en route to Phoenix, and for what it was worth a couple of unremarkable strangers were nothing to get excited about.

  Earl took a stool at the counter, asked for a menu.

  “Menu’s on the wall,” the waitress told him. She was fifty, maybe fifty-five, too much makeup, her hair lacquered into a monstrous beehive. She was trying to look ten years younger and just made the whole deal worse as a result.

  “We’ll have the meatloaf,” Earl said. “Coffee for me, RC for him.”

  Earl tapped a smoke out of the pack and lit it. They didn’t speak before they ate. Earl wanted to think. Digger didn’t want to interrupt the thinking. The meatloaf was garbage—dry and tasteless, but Earl hosed ketchup all over it and wolfed it down. Digger sucked down the ice-cold cola like it was his last drink before the desert.

  Quarter to one and they were back in the car. Earl smoked a couple more cigarettes. He had the barrel of the shotgun down in the well, the butt alongside his thigh. He held the revolver, checked the chamber several times. One had gone on Lester, three on Harvey. There were only two bullets left. He had eight shotgun shells, and that was that.

  “You fired one of these before?” he asked Digger.

  “One time,” Digger said.

  “Well, it ain’t rocket science. Usually just pointing the damned thing is enough to get people cooperating.” He handed him the gun. “I’m giving you this ’cause I trust you enough, but I don’t have a conscience, son, I really don’t. I may even shoot you yet, but right now it’s gonna take more than one of us to rob that place and I
have a mind to get it done.”

  Digger held the gun like he would a woman’s breast—gentle, like he loved it. “You can trust me,” he said. “And you don’t need to shoot me, but if you do then I’m gonna be happy that you was the one that did it.”

  Earl smiled, and there was an odd twist in his expression. “Shit, son, I believe you is as crazy as me.”

  Just as Garth Nixon and Ronald Koenig reported back to the Anaheim Field Office that they had the Hesperia pickup outside a gas station in Marana, Earl Sheridan and Elliott Danziger got out of Frank Jacobs’s Oldsmobile and started back down toward the Yuma County Trust & Savings to commit perhaps the most ill-advised and badly planned bank robbery in Arizona’s history. Earl figured himself for John Dillinger, was thinking of beers and blow jobs in Mexico. Digger could feel the weight of Chester Bartlett’s revolver in his pants pocket, and for some reason it made him feel like a real man. Clay? Hell, Clay had no idea what he was missing out on. This was gonna be a gas.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  First and foremost, there was a security guard. His name was Alvin Froom. Alvin was all of five seven, little more than one fifty. He wasn’t a big man—never had been, never would be, but he had a mean temper, perhaps fueled by resentment about his size and stature. The .44 he carried was too big for him, but it gave him a sense of well-being. He’d shot little more than trees in the woods and busted Frigidaires in the dump site, but he hit more than he missed despite the kick of the thing.

  Alvin had a wife. Her name was Rosetta, perhaps after the stone. She was most of two forty, and then some. Why Alvin chose such a big girl was a puzzle to many. Maybe little guys were afraid they’d be carried away by a strong wind so they got someone real heavy to hold on to. The relationship was good. They were friends before marriage, had stayed friends afterward. Alvin figured there were some men who went home only to fight with their wives. As far as he was concerned, there were enough battles beyond the door, and the last thing he needed was to find them once inside.

  Monday morning Alvin was on the ball. He’d had a good night’s sleep, a good breakfast, and after work he and Rosetta were heading out to a new picture theater in Yuma to see a movie. The manager, Audie Clements, was in his office. Loans manager, Lance Gorman, was dealing with the younger of the Leggett sons from the T-Bone Ranch, a fifteen-hundred-acre place that sat in the vee between 95 and the Gila River, and the tellers—June Fauser, Laurette Tannahill and Jean Rissick—were tending to one another’s business in between the odd customer. Monday morning was generally slow, and this one looked no different.

  It stayed no different until a problem came through the door in the shape of two men—the taller, older one carrying a double-barrel, the younger with a .38.

  The taller one didn’t say a word. He had the gun up ahead of him and in Alvin’s face before Alvin had a chance to blink. He told the younger one to take Alvin’s gun, and the younger one did so.

  “My name is Mr. Heartache,” the taller one said, “and this here is Mr. Trouble.”

  The younger one grinned like a fool. He had an unremarkable face, but there was something about his eyes that seemed strange. That’s what they would recall when asked. Amidst the shock, the disbelief, the few that could remember anything about appearances simply commented on the younger one’s eyes.

  “I’ll say this just once and once only,” Mr. Heartache went on. “You may think you have seen us before, but believe me when I tell you that you have not. Fail to cooperate, fail to do exactly and precisely what we tell you to do, and whatever heartache and trouble you might have experienced before will be nothing compared to today. Do we all understand one another?”

  June Fauser, the oldest and longest-serving of Yuma County’s bank officials, had hit the silent alarm the moment Mr. Heartache opened his mouth. Wellton sheriff, Jim Wheland, was mobilizing himself and three deputies. They had dry-run such scenarios a number of times, and there had been an incident in the spring of ’61 resulting in the successful arrest of an armed bank robber. Wheland was sober, straightlaced, levelheaded, and businesslike. He was also ex-military, had served in Korea in the mid-fifties, and there was very little about smalltime hoodlums that concerned him. This was the class of individual into which he placed the likes of Sheridan and Danziger. He had no idea that he was about to face a death row escapee with homicidal intent.

  Quarter past one and Earl Sheridan had Alvin Froom, Audie Clements, Lance Gorman, June Fauser, Laurette Tannahill, and Danny Leggett up against the right-hand wall with their hands on their heads. Jean Rissick—because she was not much older than twenty-three or -four and pretty as a picture—was employed to bag up whatever cash was at the tellers’ stations. Beyond that Earl wanted to know about the safe.

  “The s-safe is pretty m-much empty,” Audie Clements told him nervously. He figured the straight truth was the only thing that would give him odds on surviving this nightmare. “We—we empty out on a Friday night, and then we don’t get a delivery in before about three or four on a Monday afternoon. Everyone around here knows that—”

  Sheridan stuck the shotgun in Clements’s face and told him that he was not from around here.

  “I d-don’t know what to say, mister. You got the right day, but you’re about three hours early.”

  It was then that Sheridan heard cars out front. He sent Digger to the door.

  “Cops,” Digger said. “Three cars.”

  “Mo. Ther. Fuck. Er.” Sheridan emphasized each syllable violently. He turned to Audie Clements. He put the shotgun in his face once again. “You got an alarm here?”

  “An alarm?” Clements shook his head. “No, not unless you try the safe.”

  “Liar. Fucking liar,” Sheridan said. He swung the butt of the gun sideways. Sharp, a real kick to it, and the solid stock impacted against the side of Clements’s face with a ferocious sound. He went down silently, bleeding from the corner of his mouth before he even hit the ground.

  “Who set off the alarm?” Sheridan said.

  June Fauser looked resolute—terrified, but determined not to show it. Laurette Tannahill and Jean Rissick were holding each other. Jean was crying. Until that point she’d imagined Earl Sheridan as quite handsome. Both of them, in fact, though the younger one was still very young to be involved in something such as this. Until now, well, this had been a story to tell the girls. Now the scenario had taken on a completely different pitch and tone. Now it looked like someone was maybe going to die.

  “Who?” Earl repeated, and his voice came like a gunshot. He lowered the shotgun toward Clements’s spread-eagled body and rested the barrels against his temple. “Who? Tell me now or his head is mystery meat from here to the sidewalk.”

  June Fauser stepped forward. She opened her mouth to speak.

  The only thing that issued from her lips was a stunned Uuuuggghhh. Both barrels, released simultaneously, provided sufficient force to fold her in the middle like a rag doll. She slumped backward against the heavy wooden barrier with a sickening crunch. Lifeless, she simply slid to the floor and lay there.

  Jean and Laurette started screaming. Earl snatched the revolver from Digger and fired a single shot into the ceiling.

  “Silence!” he hollered.

  Digger looked as scared as Danny Leggett. The guy in the convenience store was one thing, but this was turning out to be something else entirely. Had he had any piss in his bladder it would have been all across his pants once again. Now he knew that he was in this for keeps. There was no way back. It was just forward from now on. Roll with it, or die.

  Earl handed Chester Bartlett’s gun back to Digger, reloaded the shotgun, and centered the room. He leveled the weapon at waist-height. Jean, Laurette, Danny Leggett, Alvin Froom, and Lance Gorman gave him their undivided attention. Audie Clements would be alive for another eight minutes and then a blood vessel would burst in his brain and kill him. June Fauser, fifty-one years old—mother twice, grandmother four times over, married for thirty-two years, resident
of Wellton for thirty-seven—was already long gone. She’d been dead before she hit the counter.

  “Now, where is the rest of the fucking money?” Earl said calmly. He knew if he killed enough people he’d get out of there. That was the basic difficulty with most robberies. People lost their nerve. They were afraid to shed a little blood. The ones that got away were the ones who didn’t back down when it came to the shoot-outs. And hell, he was already on his way to the hangman. If they got him alive then it wouldn’t make a gnat’s asshole worth of difference.

  “Wh-what Mr. Clements said w-was right,” Lance Gorman ventured. Not a brave man by nature, he nevertheless understood that with the incapacitation of the manager, the absence through sickness of the assistant manager, it was his job as loans manager to step up to the plate. It was sometimes necessary to take your place and say what was needed.

  What he said, however, was not what Earl needed to hear, so Earl unloaded the shotgun one more time. This time he went for the head, and took most of the left side clean away with a single barrel.

  Now it was bedlam. Alvin Froom fainted, as did Jean Rissick. Laurette Tannahill, spattered from thigh to throat in brain matter and blood, screamed like a fire siren. Digger, thinking that perhaps he needed to show his colors and make his mark, walked toward her and aimed the gun at her face. She didn’t quiet down as he’d imagined she would. She just screamed more. Blood was now pouring from a nasty gash above her left ear. Danny Leggett just stood there like a tailor’s dummy in a store window. His eyes were wide, his mouth open, the front of his pants all dark and wet where he’d pissed himself.

  Earl put a shell in the empty barrel. He grabbed the back of Laurette’s dress and hustled her toward the door.