The Getaway Man

by Andrew Vachss

  “Yes, sir. And this one was perfectly—”

  “I’m sure,” my lawyer said. “Now if I were to tell you that the report of the shooting team was that seven different officers fired a total of thirty-one rounds at the car in which my client was sitting, would that surprise you?”

  “No.”

  “Thank you. Now, after my client was wounded and taken into custody, you examined the interior of the car, did you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many guns did you find in the car, officer?”

  “There were no weapons in the car.”

  “By ‘weapons,’ do you mean firearms, officer? Or are you referring to weapons of any kind, such as a knife or a club?”

  “Weapons of any kind.”

  “I see. And did you search the trunk of the car as well?”

  “Yes.”

  “With the same result?”

  “No weapons were found in the trunk of the vehicle,” the cop said. His jaw was clenched so tight you could see a knot in his cheek.

  “Were any weapons found on the person of the defendant?” my lawyer asked him.

  “On … ?”

  “On my client, officer. The young man sitting right over there, at the counsel table. You see him, the one with all the bandages?”

  “No.”

  “No, you don’t see my client? Or, no, you didn’t find any weapons on my client after you shot him?”

  “Your honor!” the DA said.

  The judge stared hard at my lawyer, but anyone could see he didn’t scare him any.

  There was a lot of stuff like that, but I didn’t see what the point of it was. I saw a couple of people on the jury looking at me, but I couldn’t tell what they were thinking.

  When they called Tim’s name, it was like a shock wave hit the place. I guess nobody expected him to get on the witness stand and talk for himself. I know my lawyer told me he wouldn’t let me do it.

  But Tim didn’t act like himself up there. Tim was a man with a lot of charm. That’s what Merleen, Tim’s girl, told me once. I wasn’t sure exactly what it meant, although I knew it was true.

  On the stand that day, you would never know Tim had any charm at all. It was like he was sneering at everyone. Like they were all nothing but bugs.

  He said him and Virgil were professional robbers. They’d robbed dozens of places and nobody ever got hurt. “And if that punk manager hadn’t tried to be a hero, nobody would have gotten hurt this time, either,” Tim said. “The little asskisser was trying to show what a good boy he was, save the boss’s money. He shot my brother in the back, like the weasel coward he was. I wish I could kill him again.”

  A woman started crying, real loud. I guessed maybe she was the wife of the man Tim had shot. The judge had to bang his hammer hard a few times to get people to quiet down.

  Tim told them that, after Virgil got shot, he wasn’t able to move, and Tim couldn’t carry him and keep his gun on everyone at the same time, so he just dug in and waited for the cops, so they could get Virgil an ambulance.

  “My brother was still alive when they took him out of there,” Tim said. “I figure the cops took their time getting him to the hospital.”

  His lawyer tried to clean that one up. “You’re not saying the police are responsible for your co-defendant’s death?” he said.

  “Between them and that little weasel in the bank, they got it done,” Tim said.

  “Look at his eyes!” someone whispered behind me. “He’s a psycho.”

  The judge slammed his hammer again, until people stopped making noise.

  Tim and his lawyer were staring at each other like a pair of pit bulls on the scratch line. Finally, the lawyer shrugged his shoulders, like there was nothing he could do about things. He stepped back, away from Tim, and said, “You know a man was arrested outside the bank, don’t you?”

  “You mean Eddie?” Tim answered him. “Yeah, I knew that.”

  “Was he your accomplice?”

  “Accomplice? Eddie? Be serious. Virgil and I always do things the same way. We plan out a job, then we find some dummy to drive us. They usually never know what’s going on, unless someone starts chasing us.

  “Eddie, he’s not real swift in the head. All we told him was, if he’d drive us to the bank, wait for us, and then drive us back home, we’d pay him a couple hundred bucks. Hell, we didn’t even tell him the car was stolen.”

  “He went too far with that one,” my lawyer whispered. “Now he’s opened the door.”

  When it was the DA’s turn at Tim, he practically jumped out of his chair.

  “Are you claiming your acts were justified?” he yelled.

  “Which acts?” Tim said, grinning at him.

  “Murder!”

  Tim lifted his shackled wrists so he could point his finger at the DA. “That wasn’t murder,” he said. “That was justice.” Tim’s voice was like stone. “That coward killed my brother, and I killed him.”

  The DA stuck his chest out, talking real loud. “If you and your brother hadn’t robbed that bank, this never would have—”

  “Me and Virgil robbed plenty of places,” Tim cut him off. “And all that time, we never shot nobody. Never beat anyone up. Never raped any of the women. If that punk had just kept his hand in his pocket, he’d still be alive. And me and Virgil would be down on the beach in Biloxi, spending that bank’s money.”

  “You and Virgil and your co-defendant, you mean?”

  “What co-defendant? You mean Eddie?”

  “That’s right. Your poor, innocent friend Eddie. You testified earlier that he didn’t even know the car he was found in had been stolen, is that correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Would it surprise you to know that your friend Eddie has been to jail for stealing cars?” the DA said. He stepped off a little, like he had just landed a good one.

  “Hell, no,” Tim laughed at him. “Eddie’s a natural-born sucker. Fifty to one, somebody else stole those cars, and left Eddie to take the weight.

  “That boy’s not all there in his head. He couldn’t plan to take a shower. Look at what he did, for Christ’s sake. We tell him to wait for us, and so he just sits there. And when the cops start blasting, he still sits there, like a lump of clay.”

  I could feel people looking at me. I didn’t want to look at them, and I didn’t want to look down, like I was afraid. For the first time, I looked at Tim.

  “Eddie’s not like other guys,” he told the jury. “He’s a retard. Slow.” Tim’s eyes were like chips of blue ice.

  “It’s like Eddie’s just a kid,” he said, shaking his head. “A simple, dumb kid.”

  The jury found me guilty of something, some charge I never heard of. I wasn’t guilty of the killing, or even of the robbery. I guess it probably had something to do with the car I was in.

  My lawyer was really happy. He said the most the judge could give me would be five years, and I probably wouldn’t get even that much.

  “I guess you heard how Tim made out,” he said.

  I just shook my head.

  “Capital murder,” the lawyer said. “And the jury found special circumstances. Do you know what that means?”

  I shook my head again.

  “It means the death penalty,” the lawyer said. “If he hadn’t come across like such an outlaw when he testified, they might have cut him some slack, I think. It wasn’t an intentional murder. I would have thought a life sentence would be more appropriate, myself.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  The lawyer looked at me hard, like he could stare through to the truth. I think he was mad because he knew I would never trust him.

  When you first come into prison, they keep you separate from everyone for a few weeks. They have to make sure you don’t have a disease, I guess. Once in a while, they bring you out of your cell to see a doctor or to talk to different people. Everybody asks you a lot of questions.

  One man, I guess he wasn’t a guard, bec
ause he didn’t have a uniform, it was his job to tell new guys what prison is like. I know that because he started to tell me stuff like don’t borrow money from anyone. He was reading through a bunch of papers while he was talking to me, moving his finger down the pages.

  “Oh, you’ve been in the system for a long time,” he said.

  “I guess,” I told him.

  “Well, then you already know the score,” he said.

  It was in prison that I first learned what I was. I mean, what to call myself: a getaway man.

  I learned that from J.C. He was an older guy, maybe forty or something. He was a heist man. You don’t get called that if you just stuck up a bunch of 7-Elevens, or even if you broke into places. You had to be doing big jobs, like banks. The way Tim wanted.

  J.C. had so much respect in there that the blacks left him alone, even though he wasn’t with any of the gangs. That’s really hard, to do time by yourself, no matter how much you might want to. Even the guards treated him good.

  I never thought a man like him would ever talk to me.

  One day, a guard came around to my cell. He told me I was being discharged into population. I went with him into the main part of the prison.

  They gave me a cell. I could see right away it wasn’t a good one. Too close to where they have to rack the bars to let you off the block, so it would be noisy all the time. But at least I was the only one in it.

  The first thing I did when I got to go out into the yard was to look around for guys I’d been with in the kiddie camps. We all knew we’d go to prison someday, and some of us made promises, to stick together and everything, when we met up again. But I didn’t see any of the guys I knew from before.

  Except for one—Toby. When I first spotted him, he was walking with the boss of one of the white power gangs. I watched until he went off by himself. I figured Toby could talk me up with the gang; get me in, too.

  But when I came up to him on the yard, Toby wouldn’t talk to me. He acted like he didn’t know me at all. His eyes had colored stuff on the lids, like a girl’s. And when he walked away, I could see someone had cut the back pockets off his jeans.

  Where we were before, Toby had never been anybody’s kid. I could see the state prison was different. That made me nervous, but I knew I could never show that to anyone.

  That was the same day I met J.C. I was standing by myself, watching Toby walk away, wondering what I was going to do. I didn’t know that much about prison, but I knew I couldn’t make it in there all by myself.

  J.C. just walked up to me, and asked me how I got there.

  You’re not supposed to do that, I know. Not when you’re in a real prison, for grownups. But J.C. was bigger than the rules. I had to answer him. His voice was like the stuff they put in air conditioners. That stuff is so cold you can’t touch it or you’ll get burned. J.C. had a couple of guys with him. Older guys. Their eyes didn’t have anything in them at all.

  “I was the driver,” I told him.

  “Yeah, I know that,” J.C. said. I wondered how he could know, but I didn’t say anything.

  I guess a couple of minutes went by before J.C. realized I wasn’t going to say anything else, not unless he asked me to.

  “How come you didn’t get in the wind when you first heard the shots inside the bank?” he asked me.

  “Tim and Virgil were still there,” I said.

  “You heard the sirens, right? You knew the cops were rolling?”

  “They were still inside,” I told him.

  He looked at one of the guys with him. I’d seen that look before.

  “That was solid,” J.C. said. “That’s the first thing a real getaway man has to have. Balls. No nerves, and balls of steel. Am I right?”

  One of the other guys said he was. I didn’t think he was asking me.

  A few nights later, I went off the block. I knew I couldn’t just stay in my cell all the time, or people would get ideas about me.

  I didn’t know when the test would come, but I wanted it to be where there would be guards close by.

  I went over to the rec room, to watch the TV. There were plenty of empty chairs.

  In just a minute, a black guy came over and sat down next to me. He was my height, but much wider. He had huge muscles all over him, like armor. He was smiling, friendly. His teeth were very white. I didn’t look in his eyes. He smelled clean and bitter, like laundry soap.

  This was the test. I knew what would come next. If I talked to him, he’d see if my voice was under control. If I sounded scared, then he’d be nice. Tell me what a bad place the prison was if you didn’t have a friend. Maybe offer to protect me from certain people in there, pat my arm to make me feel better. Then he’d ask me to go someplace with him. Someplace where we could talk.

  But if I didn’t answer him, he’d pretend to get mad. He’d say I had disrespected him, or something like that.

  It didn’t matter how he was going to get it started, it was always going to end the same way.

  I knew I’d have to try and hurt him bad, if I ever wanted to be left alone. My best bet was to jump him first, but I was, like, paralyzed, trying to make myself move.

  There was only one guard in the rec room. He was watching the TV.

  I was looking at the floor, trying to see if there was anything I could use on the black guy. I wished I had a knife. I didn’t know how to use one—I mean, sure I knew how to use one, but I’m not a pro at it, like some guys you hear about when you’re locked up—but I know, some people, if you just show them a blade, they’ll back off.

  I didn’t think that black guy would back off, even if I had a knife. I could tell he’d done this before.

  I wished Toby hadn’t done what he did.

  The black guy was talking to me. I couldn’t make out any words—just the sound, like my ears were full of water.

  I knew it had to happen soon.

  And then another black guy came up to us. He was older than the one who was trying to bulldog me; he even had gray in his hair.

  I snuck a peek around the room, but everybody was looking away from us.

  The older guy didn’t say anything. He just shook his head at the one sitting next to me—side to side, like he was saying no.

  The guy with all the muscles got up, like he just remembered something he forgot to do.

  The two black guys walked off together. Nobody else came over. I sat by myself for the whole rest of TV time.

  A couple of days later, J.C. and his men found me again. They stood around me, but I didn’t feel all hemmed in; I felt safe.

  “At the trial, Tim took all the weight, didn’t he?” J.C. said. “Told the jury you didn’t even know what was going on. Just a dumb kid he and his brother talked into driving them to the bank. That’s why you’re only doing a nickel, not sitting up in the death house with Tim.”

  “I never said anything,” I told him.

  “At the trial? Why should you? Tim was putting it all on him and his brother. And his brother, he didn’t make it. All you had to do was sit there.”

  “I didn’t say anything even before that. When the cops had me.”

  “Why not? They must have wanted you to roll over, testify against the others. Offered you a deal.”

  “I would never do that,” I said.

  He looked at the guys with him again. But it was a different look, that time.

  After that, I was with J.C. Everybody knew it.

  J.C. was short—near the end of his sentence—when I met him. He got out almost two years before me. But, by that time, it was okay—I could live there by myself. It was like J.C. had left his protection on me.

  One night, before he left, J.C. told me I didn’t want a parole.

  I nodded okay.

  “That doesn’t sound crazy to you, Eddie? What I just said?”

  “Not if you say it,” I told him.

  Then J.C. explained: If I was going to be a getaway man, I couldn’t have some parole officer checking on me all the t
ime. A good getaway man is responsible for everyone who goes out on the job. He has to get them home safe.

  “What if your P.O. just dropped in the same day you were working?” J.C. said. “You’re not home, that isn’t going to stop him. Those motherfuckers don’t need a warrant to search your house if you’re on parole. You see what that could do?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “For you, parole is a chump play,” J.C. said. “With good time and all, you’ll max out only a few months later, anyway. If you were doing thirty years, and they offered you a parole after ten, well, you’d have to take that. But with the time you’ve got, it doesn’t make any sense to expose yourself.”

  The parole board was easier than I thought. J.C. had told me a few tricks I could use to mess things up, but I didn’t need any of them.

  The parole people asked me if I felt any remorse for the man who was killed inside the bank. I knew they didn’t mean Virgil. I told them I had nothing to do with what happened, like J.C. told me to. One lady on the board said I had to learn to take responsibility. She said that a lot. I told her I didn’t do anything.

  They all started yelling at me, then. I didn’t answer them back. And I didn’t get the parole.

  When I’d paid everything they said I owed, they let me out. J.C. was right—it wasn’t much longer than if I’d gotten that parole.

  Prison’s full of guys who have gotten out before, and come back. They always complain that your clothes get old while you’re locked up. So when you make it out, the first thing you need to do is get some clothes that are in style.

  I guess the good thing about the kind of clothes I wear is that they don’t get old. I was glad of that, because I only had the fifty dollars gate money they give you, plus sixteen dollars on the books from my job on the cleaning crew in Four Block.

  They pay your bus fare back to your hometown. If you don’t have a hometown, you can go anyplace in the state you want, one-way.

  I took the bus west, just like J.C. said. At the end of the line, I walked over to the highway and thumbed a ride. It didn’t matter to me where the guy was going, but I remembered not to say that. All I really needed was to get to another town, so I could get on another bus, and go back east, away from the flatlands.