A World of Thieves

by James Carlos Blake

  Charlie made the same sort of fuss over Russell and then let go of him and ran over to me as Belle turned loose and went to Russell and there was more hugging and kissing. Then Charlie looked over her shoulder at Buck, who was headed for the door with the Wink briefcase in one hand and his travel valise in the other. She gave me one more peck on the forehead and set out after him, calling, “Hey you.” Buck turned as she threw herself on him and jarred him off balance and they went down in a heap.

  Belle hesitated, then went over and stood smiling down on them as Charlie straddled Buck’s stomach and mussed his hair and planted kisses on his face and babbled at him in babytalk. He cussed mildly and made like he was trying to ward her off, but you could see how much he was enjoying it, how gently he got her off him. She kept petting him as he got to his feet muttering that a man could get his back broken being greeted by such a crazy woman. Belle playslapped him on the shoulder and said, “Oh, you love it and you know it”—then gave him a sidelong hug and said, “Welcome home.”

  It wasn’t often you’d see him look as surprised as he did then, but she released him before he could hug her in return. Then Charlie had her arms around him from behind and lightly nipped his ear and he let out an exaggerated yelp and squirmed free of her and said, “Christ’s sake! Didn’t you nutty broads get enough to eat while we were gone?”

  We took the bags out of the car and wrapped the shotgun in a coat before carrying it to the house—in case some curious neighbor who’d been watching the welcome-home show was still looking on. Not knowing we were going to show up, Charlie and Belle had planned to make sandwiches for their supper, but now they started getting out the pots and pans to cook us a proper meal. Buck told them to forget it, we’d go out to eat. We washed up and put on clean shirts while the girls changed into nicer dresses. Charlie had taken Belle shopping for clothes and she put on a blue sleeveless one I liked a lot.

  We went to a barbecue place on Main Street and gorged on pork ribs and French fries and coleslaw, joking and laughing the whole while, and the patrons sitting around us smiled at our boisterous spirits. Afterward we went home by way of the house on Callaghan Street, where we stopped and bought six bottles of moonshine and a dozen quarts of beer.

  Neither of the girls had asked about the job. From the beginning of her acquaintance with Russell, Charlie had known what he did for a living, but he’d made it clear that she shouldn’t question him about his business. He might now and then deign to share something of it with her but she was never to pry. And she never did. I’d always had a hunch she was glad to have it that way, that she preferred not to know any of the specifics about the risks he took. All through supper, though, I’d caught Belle looking at me with an eagerness that went beyond her pleasure in my return. She was dying to know about the past two days, I could see it in her eyes.

  Not till we were on the way back to the house did Russell tell Charlie that we were heading back out tomorrow. “We got a matter to tend to tomorrow night and then another one a couple of nights after that,” he said. “That puts us back here in four days, if my arithmetic’s correct.”

  “And if nothing goes wrong,” Charlie said softly.

  “Right,” Russell said. “Like the sun’ll come up tomorrow if nothing goes wrong. Like I’ll wake up in the morning if nothing goes wrong. Like we’ll be leaving after lunch if nothing goes wrong.”

  Whenever he thought she was being smart-mouth with him he would come back at her even more so. He rarely did it, though, because she rarely gave him cause.

  It was too dark in the car to make out Charlie’s expression in the rearview mirror. She sat very still for the span of another block and then turned and snuggled up close to him and said, “Well then, I think we ought to get to bed early, don’t you?”

  I hadn’t said anything to Belle, either, about our leaving on another job tomorrow. She was sitting in front between me and Buck and I felt her hand on my leg as she leaned close and said low, “I think she’s got the right idea.”

  Buck stared out at the darkness and said nothing.

  Later that night, after a round of humping that left us gleaming with sweat on the moonlit bed, I told her all about it while our cigarettes flared and dimmed and a soft breeze lifted the gauzy window curtain. I told her about Bubber Vicente, the sandstorm, about Crane and Odessa and Wink, about the payroll team and how we’d taken them down, how Buck left the courier and his married honey bound together naked for the hubby to find, how the other two had looked as we drove them out of town, thinking we were going to kill them, and then the way they’d looked when they realized we weren’t.

  She stroked my chest and listened without interruption. When I was done with the telling I was rigid again and she had her hand around me. I rolled up over her and she took me in.

  And when we were once again spent, she whispered in my ear, “It all sounds…so fun.”

  “It’s more than that,” I said. “There’s nothing like it.”

  “Nothing?” She rubbed her blonde sex against my belly and made a low growl.

  “Almost nothing,” I said, and laughed with her.

  On the following evening we were in Blackpatch. The place was as isolated as Bubber had said—and smelled even worse, like an open grave soaked in oil and giving off gas. The nearest town was Rankin, thirteen miles away as the crow flies, but the country directly between them was too rugged and too cut up with gullies and draws to lay any kind of road, and so to get to Rankin from Blackpatch you had to drive eighteen winding miles west on a dusty junction road to the Iraan highway and then go north another eleven miles.

  Bubber had said there was one other route into and out of Blackpatch, if you didn’t mind taking a chance on busting a wheel or snapping an axle. An old mule trace the copper mine had used for packing ore out to the railroad. It twisted and turned for almost twenty miles from Blackpatch out to the rail tracks flanking the Big Lake highway, emerging at a spot about thirteen miles east of Rankin with a rusted water tower and a dilapidated loading platform. Hardly anybody ever used that trail anymore, Bubber said. He’d taken it once and it was the roughest drive he’d ever made. He’d braved it in broad daylight and it took him two hours to cover the twenty miles—not counting the time it took to fix the two flats he had on the way. “I’d have to be more damn desperate than I can imagine to drive on that sonofabitch again,” Bubber said.

  We’d arrived at sundown. Derricks everywhere. Pumpjacks steadily dipping like monstrous primeval birds at their feed. The old copper-mine hill stood a hundred yards or so to the east of town and the holding tank on top of it was cast in the dying red light of day. It really did look like an enormous soup can. Jagged gullies ran like black scars down the hill and right to the edge of town. The town itself was composed of four short blocks to north and south, three longer ones to east and west, and included a sizable shantyville of tents on its west side. Every building was either a store, a place of entertainment, an eatery, a hotel or a boardinghouse. Most men lived in the ragtown or in their vehicles. There wasn’t a private house in Blackpatch. Mona’s girls lived in the rooms where they worked, and Mona herself kept a room at the Wellhead Hotel.

  The junction road passed through the tent colony and ran directly onto the main street. We crawled along in the heavy traffic, the cafés and juke joints and pool halls all roaring with music. According to Bubber, about six hundred people lived here now—all of them men except for a couple of dozen wives, even fewer daughters, and Mona’s girls—and it sounded like they were all yelling at once to make themselves heard above the music and the incessant pounding of the drills. Drunks staggered in the streets and sidewalks, doing the hurricane walk, as we called it in New Orleans. Bubber said the local police force was paid for by the oil company. It consisted of a sheriff and two deputies and they pretty much let the workers take their fun as they pleased—mostly drinking and gambling and fighting each other, and sporting at Mona’s place. The cops intervened only in matters of flagrant rob
bery, deadly violence, or undue property damage.

  We saw a pair of men grappling in an alley, each with a headlock on the other and stumbling around like jakeleg dancers, a small crowd looking on and laughing, most pedestrians simply passing by without paying the combatants much notice. We drove around and around until we finally found an alleyway niche to park the car in.

  Buck kept the briefcase with the Wink money on his lap while we ate a supper of fried chicken in still one more clamorous café, and then we went over to the Wildcat Dance Club and introduced ourselves to Mona Holiday. She wasn’t exactly as Bubber had painted her. For one thing, she looked older than I’d expected—a few years older than Bubber, I would’ve guessed. Not that she wasn’t pretty, because she was, in a rough-edged, bottle-blonde sort of way. But she had some hard wear on her and it showed around her eyes and in the corners of her mouth, in the slack skin of her neck. But a man in love is blind to such minor flaws, of course, so none of us was all that surprised to find she was a shade less breathtaking in the actual flesh than Bubber’s description.

  But she was every bit as pleasant and gracious as he’d said. She’d heard about Buck and Russell from Bubber, and she seemed truly pleased to make our acquaintance. She ushered us into her nicely appointed downstairs office and poured us all a drink—Jamaican rum, the real stuff, smuggled in by way of Mexico. We all touched glasses and she said, “Here’s yours.”

  When Buck told her about the jakeleg race we’d seen in Wink, she made a disapproving face and said, “Isn’t it terrible, the spectacles some people find amusing?” She said we didn’t have to worry about being poisoned by the hooch in Blackpatch, it was some of the best moonshine to be had in West Texas. She was personal friends with Gus Scroggins—the bootlegger who brought Blackpatch its hooch from a sizable distillery in El Paso—and she would vouch for the excellence of the stuff, though she generally stayed with the factory-bottled product herself.

  Bubber had told us she wouldn’t ask us our business and she didn’t. It was one more reason she fared so well—men knew she kept to her business and wouldn’t pry into theirs. She had a reputation for asking no questions and telling no tales. But neither did she ever grant a man a hump on the house or even on the cuff. It was strictly pay before play in her place. Special friends of Bubber, however, she would give a cut rate—two dollars, rather than the standard four. Were any of us, she asked with a smile, inclined to go upstairs and take advantage of this bargain?

  Buck checked his watch, arched his brow, looked at Russell and me in turn, and we grinned back at him.

  An hour later we were in her backroom speakeasy, ensconced at a nice corner table with a good view of the rest of the room, sipping at our labeled rum and telling each other of the girls we’d had.

  Buck said the redhead he’d chosen had looked a little shocked when he dropped his pants and she got her first look at Mr. Stub.

  “I say, ‘What’s wrong, honey?’ and look down at myself like I got no idea. ‘Oh that,’ I say. ‘Well, see, I borrowed some money from the bank the other day and they insisted on the most valuable thing I owned for collateral.’ That’s all it took to set her at ease. Had us so much fun it ought to be illegal.”

  He wanted to hear about the pretty girl I’d picked out—brown hair and green eyes, tits shaped like pears. He’d almost selected her for himself before deciding on the redhead. When I said she’d been a lot of fun—which was true—he said he wished we had more time, he’d go back in there and have a go with her himself.

  Russell said he’d enjoyed the little half-Mexican girl he’d picked. “A man’s got to have himself some variety, it’s only natural. But I’ll tell you what—truth be told, I ain’t found another woman yet as much fun as Charlie when she drops her underpants.”

  I kept it to myself but I was glad to hear him say that, because in the middle of sporting with the pear-tits girl, I’d had the fleeting thought I’d rather be doing it with Belle. I’d enjoyed myself with the girl, but thinking of Belle while I was at it had left me feeling a little edgy for some reason I couldn’t put my finger on. Russell’s remark clarified things and set me at ease. He preferred putting it to Charlie but that didn’t interfere with his enjoyment of others—and why should it? Damn right.

  “Of course Charlie’s more fun,” Buck said. “She don’t charge you two dollars a throw.”

  Russell laughed. “By Jesus, that must be it.” He looked at me and winked. “Man’s got a point, huh, kid?”

  I laughed too. “Damn sure does,” I said. And told myself he did.

  We’d been nursing our rum like it was the last to be had in Texas. One drink apiece was all we were allowing ourselves till the job was done. And now, at a little before nine, it was time to get to it.

  We were out to rob Gus Scroggins, the El Paso bootlegger Mona Holiday had mentioned. He was making a delivery tonight to his Blackpatch buyer, a local whiskey dealer named Lester Wills, who would have five thousand dollars to pay for the load of white lightning. Scroggins transported his moonshine in barrels loaded on trucks that looked like every other oil truck in the region. He had two deliveries to make en route from El Paso and would be carrying the proceeds from those deals—ten thousand dollars, according to Bubber’s inside man—when he met with Wills. We were looking at a take of fifteen grand in greenbacks and a load of hooch worth another five.

  The transaction was to take place in an abandoned oil camp about a mile north of the Blackpatch junction road. The only way to get there was over a narrow trail laid out by an oil company that had drilled all over the region before striking it rich in Copper Hill. We’d been out there earlier in the day to have a look at the place and lay out a plan. The trail meandered around sandhills and gullies strewn with scrawny tumbleweeds, around rocky outcrops and thick patches of scrub brush. Before you’d gone a hundred yards you were out of sight of the road. At a couple of points along the trail, the oil crews had cut clearings wide enough for truck turnarounds. The camp itself had occupied a circular clearing roughly fifty yards in diameter and almost entirely enclosed by a thickly shrubbed, stony rise that had served to protect the place from windstorms. A ramshackle wooden derrick stood over a litter of oil drums and castoff machine parts. Gus Scroggins liked to make his deliveries on moonbright nights in case the Texas Rangers somehow got wind of the deal and figured to charge in and make a pinch. A lookout on the derrick could spot them coming in time to give ample warning. The bootleg party could scatter on foot into the darkness beyond the rise and the Rangers wouldn’t be able to give chase in their cars over that rugged terrain.

  For the last two hundred yards before reaching the clearing, the trail assumed a slight upward grade and was flanked on both sides by high dense brush. But about forty yards from the entrance, we’d found a small open spot in the scrub. We could pull in there and turn the car around to point back toward the trail, hidden behind a pile of tumbleweeds and loose brush and ready for a fast getaway.

  By ten o’clock that’s where we were, sitting in the scrub shadows and watching the trail. A bright gibbous moon was midway up the eastern sky and illuminating the countryside with a ghostly blue light. The air smelled of creosote and warm dust. The Ford was well camouflaged, its license plate freshly transplanted from a car parked in the alley behind a Blackpatch pool hall. Buck and I carried a pair of pistols each—he’d given me one of the two .44 revolvers they’d taken off the payroll guys. Besides his pistol, Russell had the Remington pump.

  A few minutes before eleven we heard the distant growl of a car motor from the direction of the junction road. We peered over the scrub and spied it, small and dark against the moonlit landscape, coming slowly and without lights, raising only the barest trace of dust as it wound its way toward us, now and then going out of view as it went into a dip or behind a rise. We knew it was the advance men, checking for anything out of place, for signs of a trap by Rangers or rival bootleggers or hijackers like us.

  Buck had the army automatic in his
hand, and I drew the .44 from my front waistband. The longbarrel .38 was snugged against the small of my back. As the car got closer we hunched back down in the scrub and sat still and quiet as stones. Pretty soon it came easing by with its engine rumbling and tires crunching over the stony trail. A black Oldsmobile sedan. Through a gap in the scrub I saw the silhouettes of two men in the car.

  The Olds passed out of sight into the clearing behind the rise. We heard the engine slow to an idle and a door squeak open and bang shut—one of the guys getting out to check things on foot. The engine rumbled as the car took a slow turn around the clearing. Then its dark shape was again at the trailhead and the headlights flashed on and off, twice, in swift succession. Exactly the signal Bubber said his inside man had described. The Olds then backed up into the clearing and its motor shut off. A door opened and shut. Faint unintelligible voices. Low laughter.

  Russell grunted and pointed south. Another unlighted car was coming our way. Lester Wills and his five grand. Him and his driver.

  Buck patted me on the shoulder to let me know he and Russell were heading off. They pulled their dark bandannas up over their mouth and nose and tugged down their hats and vanished quietly into the brush. The camp shithouse had been placed outside the camp, at the bottom of the slope, and a path to it had been worn over the scrubby rise. Buck and Russell could quietly follow the path up through the scrub and come down behind the advance men.

  I stayed put and watched the approaching car. If it had done anything other than keep coming I would’ve hurried to inform Buck and Russell. But the car steadily advanced. When it closed to within a hundred yards, I pulled up my bandanna mask and hustled away to the clearing.

  The moon was higher now but the derrick’s shadow still reached across the west side of the clearing and angled halfway up the slope. The Oldsmobile was parked in front of the derrick, one of the men slouching against a front fender, his hands in his pants pockets. I couldn’t see his face under his hatbrim but his head turned to follow me as I jogged across the clearing and over to a row of barrels in the derrick’s long shadow. It looked like everything was going according to plan—Buck and Russell had taken them by surprise and disarmed them, then put one guy in the Olds’ trunk and told the other to perch on that fender and keep his mouth shut. I couldn’t see them but I knew Buck was in the shadows of a clump of yuccas near the entrance to the clearing and Russell somewhere behind the low outcrop to my right.