Slice dje-5

by Rex Miller

  And at 07:04:10 the dispatcher gave a coded “robbery” at an address that everybody obviously made as Buckhead Mercantile Bank and Trust, and at 07:06:00 Bureau cops picked up a “robbery-in-progress” changed to “robbery with shooting” and they gave it in the clear to homicide, who of course only take over if there is a dead body on the scene, and the five detectives working the midnight-to-eight graveyard tour were all in-house and rolled on it en masse: Bill Brows, Marv Peletier, fat Dana Tuny, Jimmie Lee, and Harry Ecklemeyer.

  At 07:21:00, there were fifteen cops by the crime scene. Two uniformed officers, Ramirez and Jones. Four agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation led by SAC Howard Krug. Five Buckhead detectives, with Detective Sgt. Lee in charge of securing and seizing and protecting and preserving intact the evidence of the crime scene. Lee was in charge, as there had been a homicide committed in the course of the robbery, but he was working “with” the Federal Bureau of Investigation—plus the captain himself no less, in person, and two two-man teams of backup uniforms, all with the light bars and the sirens and the hoo-hah and the evidence van and the ambulance and employees showing up and milling around everywhere as general chaos prevailed.

  But it had already happened by the time the feebs arrived with their high tech and higher self-esteem, imbued as they were with a mandate from the Lord on High Himself. It had happened long before the captain had arrived in a cloud of Gordon's and toothpaste. (Christ, the fat son of a buck must use the stuff for a mouth-wash.) It had happened when what is usually called “opportunity” presented itself, when the detective sergeant in charge had put his people to work measuring body position, taking the money measurements, searching for spent bullets, processing the crime scene, protecting the evidence, seizing ... especially the seizing part.

  Lee'd gone through the doors where the bills were scattered everywhere—these deliciously crisp green rectangles of spendable, dependable, expendable lettuce leaves with TEN and TWENTY printed on them. These collectible, delectable, beautifully minted, verdantly tinted photographs of dead presidents that he was WALKING through, STEPPING on, this schlemazel cop who didn't get ten cents walking through this newly mown field of crisp twenties, and intoxicated by promise he opens the door and there's some more of the tellers’ pouches and that's when James Lee saw the opportunity and that's when he crossed over the line.

  You draw a line somewhere. Right? Right. Draw one. Draw it wherever it makes you comfortable. It looks like any other line—right? It's just a line.

  * * *

  Wrong. It's your line. If you cross it, you put yourself on the other side of the line and at first, because it's only a line, it looks the same from the wrong side as it did before you crossed over. Right? Right.

  Every night at Buckhead Mercantile, after the federal people make their pickup, whatever was there from the afternoon's business generally went into the seven zippered tellers’ pouches. At close of business there'd been $28,000 and change on the premises. That put a nice, round $4,000 in each of the teller's drawers, not counting the $500 in bait money that each of them always set aside in the special “grab” tray inside their drawer. It was what went in the sack first when a man stuck that Saturday-night special in the girl's face with a note that read, “Put all the money in the sack, this is a robbery,” while the hidden surveillance cameras took some charming shots of him for posterity. The bait numbers were on file with law-enforcement agencies for such a contingency.

  Just one of the hassles of a robbery/shooting like this was that they'd have to sit there working late putting all those bills back in order, figuring out which were the bait bills and which were the regular bills, making all those neat rectangular stacks, thumbing through those crisp lettuce leaves fast and sure, the way only a bank teller can do, stacking up all those green dreams.

  And what Lee saw when he let the door close behind him was three teller pouches and small bills scattered all over. There was one big stack by itself, like somebody had a fistful of cabbage crammed together and it had been knocked loose, but when it hit the floor the tens and twenties and fifties had somehow stayed together. Lee just swooped the stack up, not thinking, bent over with nobody looking and took it. He was a little hot along the ears the way he got sometimes when he was uptight, but he was ready to explain it, like somebody caught shoplifting a candy bar. He just dropped that great big handful of bucks into a deep, inside jacket pocket, out of range of prying eyes, hidden surveillance cameras, the FBI, and his fat partner. Only James Lee and his maker saw him take the step. And just that easily, he stepped over the line. And by definition he was now one of the bad guys.

  And he about exploded with joy. He was so happy. He knew it was wrong, but good GOD, it felt good that little bulge of bills, that happy weight of paper in his pocket. Untraceable, embraceable, irreplaceable pounds and saw-bucks and cee notes. Smiling faces. It was all he could do not to hurry as they wrapped up the initial processing and seizure work and made their way back to the station.

  Lee had an envelope always ready in the trunk for whatever might come up—not like he'd anticipated this—but hell, sometimes it helped if one could flog a little coke sample off a dealer for an emergency holdback. A man never knew when it would come in handy—just tuck it down behind the seat of a car for a probable-cause swindle. Something to lay on a snitch as a thank-you for the Big One. A little taste just in case.

  He just put the money in the big, thick manila envelope and dropped it into the first corner mail depository he came to. He mailed it to himself care of that post-office box that was always such a cheap insurance policy. And sure enough, that's where the money went. He couldn't even count it. He tried and hit a big stack of solid twenties. A hundred double-saws in a tight stack. Two thousand dollars just in that half-inch or so of money, so he knew he had some serious bucks in there. All those fifties he'd seen had made his ears flaming red, he was sure, but when he glanced up into the rearview mirror they were still the color of yellow jaundice. He was too nervous to count it now. All he could think about was those asshole feebs and IAD and what they'd do to him if they caught him dirty, but as much as it scared him he wasn't about to go give it back. He was glad he'd picked up the lovely green stack of dirty money. The line looked the same from either side.

  BUCKHEAD SPRINGS

  Donna walked through the room in which Jack was sitting reading some reports, with his back to her. She wore very short white shorts and matching sandals, and not even the voluminous, cantaloupe-colored sweatshirt could disguise her fabulous breasts, which were quite large and unusually high and firm.

  She felt a glow of warmth just at the sight of those broad shoulders and the unruly black hair that was now flecking with more than a bit of gray.

  “Old man,” she teased gently, her fingers in his hair from behind, “you are getting white up here."

  “Umm,” he said.

  “Did I ever tell you that white-haired men turn me on?"

  “Hmmmmm."

  “Really. The sexiest thing in the world is a guy with a great head of pure white hair. If you get gray let's dye your hair, okay? Bleach it out real white.” Her hands slid down on the big shoulders. “You need a haircut, by the way."

  “Nag, nag,” he said.

  “That's me.” She came around and sat beside him, scrunching up very close. “Nag, nag, nag,” she was whispering right in his ear, and he let the report fall to the floor. “Hope I'm not disturbing you,” she kidded him gently. “Were you reading something?” she asked him with mock innocence.

  “Reading? Who, ME?"

  “I'm sorry if I bothered you,” she lied as she took the lobe of his left ear in her teeth, then leaned around into his face and kissed him ceremoniously, carefully, as if she were passing a mouthful of sacramental wine to him. Or like people playing a game in which they had to pass something with their mouths and couldn't touch each other with their hands.

  He received the kiss in kind with his tips and tongue only, neither of them
touching otherwise, finding a new way to say it by mouth-to-mouth exploration, kissing the way they so often did.

  “Kiss me forever,” Donna said.

  “Yes.” Jack knew what she meant. He wanted to kiss her each time like it was going to be the last time. He would kiss her sometimes while getting ready to leave in the morning and he'd be late to work by ten minutes because they couldn't stop and it would inflame them. They learned to plan around it and he started leaving earlier. They would never let this marriage reach the peck-on-the-cheek stage. Huh uh. Not this one.

  “You taste good. Did you just brush your teeth?"

  “Hmmm,” she told him. They kissed with the unashamed abandon and sense of fun that marked all of their lovemaking. “You taste good, mmmmmf,” she said, and he shut her up.

  Then she began kissing him more gently. Little kisses. Hot, quick, wet smooches around his lips and in the hollow above his chin, and he kissed her softly on the cheeks. Her cheeks always felt so surprisingly smooth to him, so satiny and feminine. He could never get used to the surprise of her wonderfully smooth skin. And he kissed her eyes closed, barely touching the silky lashes, and a hand touched her. The hard point of a breast shot an electrified current through the palm of his hand and his kisses slid off of her face and onto the pulse at the side of her throat and soon clothing was on the floor and he was seeking the source of that strong pulse with his lips and tongue.

  He kissed her heartbeat where it throbbed beneath her beautiful chest and worked eastward over to the side of one of her large and ripe breasts, where he mashed his face into a lovely expanse of white skin and told her everything she need know about them in an eloquent statement of adoring, hot kisses. He spent a lot of time right there on the side of the mountain and then he climbed to the top, moving around to the nipple, then back to the other, moving back across the heartland, then climbing the other, just because it was there. He let it excite him the way it invariably did, sucking both breasts then, tonguing nibbling chewing hungrily devouring then going south down through tummyland, south of the border, traveling down with those inflamed kisses and a tongue that was starting to set her on fire. But he didn't make the trip this time because his hardening desire was pulling him back up, and then both of them were back on the sofa, and she was opening up for him and they were coming together like two halves of a puzzle built in separate rooms, assembled independently; then the pieces joined together in a mating that never failed to delight each of them with the perfection of the fit. “I want you,” she said in a hot whisper. “Yes, honey,” he agreed, “I want you too. So much.” But the reality was that he was somewhere else in that part of him where the deepest desire was kindled. He suddenly realized that he had crawled inside himself and was watching his own performance. GRADING himself or something. And the ludicrous discovery softened his ardor just as she heard him say, So much, and she wondered what she had done. She had been accused once of coming on too strong by a previous lover and it had stayed with her, as the fiercest critiques so often will.

  He said nothing. He only kept kissing her, but now in a different way, and after a bit he rolled over, wondering what it was that had passed through his subconscious, like a cold, dark shadow. Donna wondered what she'd done this time to attack the fragile male ego bastion. Both of them thinking these things but said nothing. Donna wanted to say, “It's okay, my sweet. No big deal.” But she thought it inappropriate and dangerous and silly anyway. Saying it was no big deal was saying that it might have been a big deal, having all this go on inside her head. Jack wanted to put his face in that pillow of luxuriantly dark hair and just breathe her in till the bad jazz blew away. But neither of them did anything.

  CHICAGO

  He spotted her on Randolph, walking slowly, looking straight ahead, and his eyes targeted first on the thin fabric of the white dress that reminded him for some reason of an actress in the movies. His computer showed him a mental image and he pulled the car over to the curb, lowering the window as he forced a huge, crinkly smile onto his face. She was thin, ordinary-looking, anywhere from nineteen to twenty-three years old, alone, and she met all the requisite minimums.

  One may have trouble understanding how this 460-pound killer with the bandaged face could work his magic. The fact that this was not an unattractive young woman makes it all the more incomprehensible to some, but age, sex, personality, they have very little to do with the phenomenon that a man like Daniel Bunkowski exploits.

  His eyes saw a female form alone and zeroed in on the legs, which were silhouetted through the thin material of the dress by the sunlight. The fact that she wore a dress—that alone triggered a whole battery of responses in him. Then there was her vulnerability. Who can say why some individuals project this quality and others do not? Vulnerability runs the full range of a wide and complicated spectrum of auras—from projected vulnerability, a far different thing, to true vulnerability, the brand of the profile one so often sees among life's casualties. This young woman had that thing. It was a quality the star-maker machinery looks for in females. When you find it in concert with overt sexuality, the package is dynamite. But in this one it simply said to Daniel, I am vulnerable to the taking.

  Even as he pulled to the curb, hitting the electric window controls and reminding himself not to turn his face too far to the right while he was speaking to her, he was sizing up his pitch by her appearance, the clothing, the shoes, the degree of cleanliness, the gait of her walk, the purposefulness or lack of purpose in her physical movements, the tilt of her head now and the way it changed when his voice drew her eyes, the eyes themselves—which so often will give it all away even in the most practiced liar—the hair, the hands and what she was carrying, everything about her told him a quick story. It said, VICTIM.

  “Hi.” There was no response as she turned. “Excuse me,” and a mumble of words followed, calculated to pull her over by the side of the newly stolen wheels.

  “What?” She moved a little, warily.

  “Do you have any idea why I can't get across the [something] to the other side of [something else]?” The inflection was that of a sincere question, his eyes cast downward as if in a map, his Pillsbury-Doughboy-meets-FrankenKong face a pleasant, beaming, lost, wrinkled, jowly, and deceptively cherubic mask of fat and friendly exasperation.

  “Huh?” She had moved closer and looking into the front seat of the car she saw a huge man of indeterminate age staring and shaking his head at a street map.

  “Can you help me?” he asked, pointing at the map. She moved closer, right by the window and he had her then. He knew if he could get them within touching distance he had them. Always. That was the reality of the track record.

  If they were reluctant to get within arm's length, it usually meant that they were too wary to con into the vehicle. But if they got that close to him, he always had them. They'd get in a car with Daniel Bunkowski no matter if he was bleeding, drenched in sweat, covered in sewer filth, or immaculate and in a rented summer tux. The ease with which a victim went with Daniel seemed to be in almost inverse proportion to the social acceptability of his appearance. It was as if anybody who looked like THAT couldn't possibly be a bad guy too. It was too much of a cliché, perhaps.

  The trust factor. He began working on it now with the girl. His eyes never looked at anything but the map, and at her eyes. He let himself blink a lot, squint, shake his head, and put more movement into his normally static and inert facial features, sniffing, grimacing, scowling, licking his ups, shaking his head, all the while the torrent of words flooded out of his mouth, a river of busy verbiage lapping against her resistance.

  “When I tried to cut through there it was a one way street, see?"

  “Yeah. They got the town all screwed up now with the one-ways."

  “Yeah. They got the town all fucked up now.” He said the word to her naturally, really bummed out by the crazy street system. “You can't find your way around for shit.” The big head moved, the words testing her probing getting t
he lay of the land and the temperature of the water.

  “Yeah,” she agreed, laughing, the phrase “fucked up” as common to her as blue sky.

  “I haven't been here in a few years,” he said. “Are you from here or what?” Big friendly smile.

  “God, no. I came here with Mom a couple years ago. We're from California."

  “No shit,” he said, his face lighting up like a Christmas tree. “Where ‘bouts in California?

  “Bakersfield,” she told him.

  “Oh, God. That's wild. I'm from L.A."

  They both laughed.

  “No kiddin?” she said, having to stop herself from saying “no shit.” And he was telling her the first thirty-five things he could remember from doing time with cons from the Los Angeles area, saying things about how great it was out on the Coast, how much it sucked back here, and in the wave of California dreaming and nostalgia for the palm trees and the ocean and all, she was soon sitting in the front seat of the car and the car was moving then as he talked and, yeah, she agreed, “I can't wait to get outta this shitty city.” And he laughed like that was the funniest remark he'd ever heard in his life. And she smiled at his recognition of her wit and acumen and personality.

  “God, what happened to you?” she said, natural as you please. He told her about the accident on his Harley, and they talked bikes for a while. God. How cool, she told him, “I love bikes.” And before he could stop her she was off and running on the long and intensely boring tale of how somebody named whatever asshole name—Kevin or whatever—used to take her riding in the “hills,” and that went on to the point where it was starting to give Daniel a headache to concentrate even fractionally on the pitch so he finally had to interrupt her and say, “Hey, excuse me and all, but shit, I just gotta ask. Have you ever done any modeling?"