A World of Thieves

by James Carlos Blake

  “Old Golds,” I said. “Two packs.” I stood sideways so I could watch his father too.

  He set the smokes on the counter and I brought out the automatic. “Don’t even think about going for a gun,” I said.

  For a second he looked at me like he wasn’t sure he’d heard me right—and then like I was some longtime enemy he recognized.

  The old man stood up and said, “We ain’t got a gun here, mister. A shotgun in the house out back is all, I swear.”

  “Give me every greenback in the till,” I said to the younger.

  “Hell I will,” he said.

  In all the jobs I’d done with Buck and Russell, in all the jobs they’d done without me, nobody, so far as I knew, had ever said no when they were under the gun.

  “Want to get shot, asshole?”

  “I ain’t scared of you.”

  Well goddam, I thought.

  “Justin,” the elder said. He had his hands half raised. “Take it easy, mister. The boy don’t mean it. You can have what we got.”

  “Do so mean it,” the Justin one said.

  The roadster’s klaxon sounded. Somebody was pulling in.

  I kept the gun on the younger but spoke to the elder. “Listen, mister, somebody better open that register right goddam now and put all the bills in a sack. I don’t mean maybe.”

  “Yessir,” the grayhead said. He hustled around the counter and pushed Justin aside and chinged open the drawer and started grabbing up handfuls of bills and sticking them in a paper bag. He shoved the bag across the counter at me and I snatched it up.

  As I started backing toward the door the little bell tinkled and I lowered the gun to my waist to hide it. I turned to see a burly guy in oil-stained workclothes come walking in. The guy smiled and nodded at me and then looked past me and his eyes widened and his mouth fell open and I was already dropping to my haunches as I spun around to see the old man raising a shotgun.

  The blast was loud as a cannon in those close quarters. My hat shifted on my head and I heard a crashing behind me and the oil guy started screaming.

  It was a single-barrel breechloader so that was his only shot. I stood up slowly, my heart ramming against my ribs and my ears ringing. The old man was holding the smoking weapon like it was something he’d been caught stealing. The Justin one stood there with his mouth open.

  “You son of a bitch,” I said to the elder. I put the .380 in his face and cocked it.

  He said, “Oh, God”—and then the door banged open and I whirled and came within a hair of shooting Belle.

  She held the six-inch straight out in front of her with both hands and her aspect was all readiness in spite of her bulging cheek.

  “Okay?” she said in a muffled voice. The oil guy was still hollering on the floor, rolling from side to side and clutching his bloody shoulder.

  “Yeah,” I said. I reached over the counter and took the shotgun from the elder. “Let’s go!”

  I ran out behind her. She’d left the passenger door open and she dove in and slid up behind the wheel as smoothly as if she’d been doing it all her life. I tossed in the shotgun and was only partway in the car when it leaped forward and I almost fell out but caught hold of the doorjamb and pulled myself inside.

  “Holy shit, girl!”

  She made a tight left turn in the lot, slinging my door wide open as she wheeled us onto the highway, then floored the accelerator and the door swung back and slammed shut and we barreled off into the darkness.

  Twenty minutes later we were on some truck road deep in a forest of derricks illuminated by field lights and flaring gas heads. She pulled over to the shoulder and stopped. The road lay empty in both directions, and there was no sign of anyone at any of the nearest derricks. There was only the steady pounding of the drills and the hiss of the flaring blue gas heads. I pitched the shotgun into a scrub patch.

  Neither of us had said a word since tearing away from the store, and I thought maybe she was going to be sick. The roadster’s cab was dimly lit by the field lights and she was turned toward me, but I couldn’t see her face in the shadow of her hat brim. I hadn’t been aware of how much my hands were shaking until I lit a cigarette. I passed it to her and she spat her gum out the window and took a couple of deep drags and handed the cigarette back and I took one more pull and flicked it away. She took off her hat and let her hair fall to her nape and I saw the glitter of her eyes. She pressed against me and kissed me like she was trying to breathe me into herself. Then her hands were at my belt buckle and I raised my hips so she could tug my pants down to my thighs. She pulled up her skirt and straddled me on the seat, tugged aside the hem of her panties and mounted me. I bucked and bucked into her and we were kissing each other’s mouth and eyes and ears and I squeezed her breasts and she bit my neck and then both of us yelled and clutched each other harder….

  When we got back on a main road I pulled into a diner parking lot and made fast work of swapping the roadster’s plates with those on a Plymouth. We then sped on to Rankin and checked into the Dustdevil Motor Inn. Not until after I’d counted the take—$650, a tidy sum for a grocery heist—did I discover the pellet holes in the crown of my hat.

  I sat on the bed and wiggled a couple of fingers through the holes.

  “Look here how close I came to getting my stupid head blown off,” I said.

  She came and stood beside me, wearing only a towel around her hips after her showerbath. Her hair was still wet and her skin gleamed. She put her fingers in the holes.

  “I felt it,” I said. “I didn’t realize what it was.”

  “Feel this,” she said, and held my hand to her breast. Her heart was racing.

  “It ain’t slowed down even a little,” she said. Nor had the brightness in her eyes reduced.

  She let the towel slide from her hips.

  We had more than enough now to cover our Fort Stockton expenses for a good while, but she thought we deserved to treat ourselves to a good time in some town of greater size than Fort Stockton.

  “You know what I mean,” she said. “Someplace with a real nice dance club. I’ve always wanted to go to a fancy dance club. And with a nice dress shop where I can buy myself something fine and pretty to wear there.”

  Midland was fifty miles up the road, but we weren’t about to visit there in a car I’d stolen from that town barely more than two weeks earlier. So we headed east, puttering along with the top down under a sky less hazy than usual, and three hours later we were in San Angelo.

  Under the names of Mr. and Mrs. Mitch Russell we checked into the brandnew Riverside Hotel, which a streetcorner cop had advised us was the best in town. I asked the bellboy if there was someplace nearby where a man might get a bottle of labeled spirits, and he said, “Name your preference, pal.” I said bourbon would be vastly appreciated, and a couple of limes if he could manage it. Twenty minutes later he was back with a paper-sacked fifth of bourbon and a roller tray holding a bucket of ice, the limes, two seltzer bottles and two tumblers. I gave him a lavish tip.

  Belle loved everything about the hotel. She said she’d never been in any place so fine. She went around the room, touching the flowers in the dresser vase, the furniture, the bedcovers, the towels and soaps and shampoos in the bath, as if making sure everything was real. I said if she thought this place was fancy she ought to see the hotels in New Orleans.

  “Will you show me New Orleans one of these days?” she said.

  “Sure,” I said. “I think you’d like it.”

  She came into my arms and tucked her head under my chin. “I think I’d love it,” she said.

  We went out and found a dress shop, but each dress she tried on she liked better than the one before, and after nearly two hours she still couldn’t decide between three of them. She and the salesgirl kept blabbing on and on about yokes and bratelles and peplums, hems and flounces and God-knows-what. I settled the matter by buying all three dresses for her. She gave me a kiss full on the mouth and smiled at the salesgirl and s
aid, “Aren’t I the lucky one?”

  The girl was goodlooking, with a deep Texas accent and thick honey hair, and she grinned and said, “He’s a regular sugar daddy, only lots younger and better-looking than most, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

  Belle winked at her and said she didn’t mind at all. I would’ve been lying if I’d said I wasn’t enjoying myself.

  From there we went to a Mexican restaurant for a lunch of guacamole and strips of roast kid in a red chile sauce, with flour tortillas so freshly hot they powdered and almost burned our fingers. Across the street was a lush green park with the Conchos River running through it, and when we were done eating we went for a long walk in the shade of the cottonwoods along the bank. Then back to the hotel and I fixed us each a glass of bourbon and Coke full of crushed ice and a touch of lime juice, something I’d learned from Russell. She took a careful sip and grinned and said she loved it. We filled the tub with bubble lotion and got in it together and sipped the drinks slowly. After a long soak we soaped each other up and then rinsed off and dried each other with thick towels and went to bed and made love and then napped until dark.

  We took supper in a good steakhouse across the street—filets as thick as my wrist and heaped with finely sliced fried onion rings—then went back to the hotel and descended the wide staircase to the ballroom. Belle was wearing one of her new dresses, a little black number that hugged her hips and had a short fringed hem and a sort of halter top cut way low in the back. She was a knockout.

  The dancefloor was crowded this Friday night and the big band up on the stand was damned good, finishing up an excellent rendition of “Stardust.” Then it started in on “Am I Blue?” and we took to the floor.

  We’d just finished kicking up our heels to “Baby Face” and were applauding along with the other dancers when the brass section swung into the opening bars of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love.”

  “Let’s sit this one out,” I said. “We can go outside for a minute if you want.”

  She shook her head. “There’s no need. That song doesn’t bother me anymore, really it doesn’t.”

  “Sure?”

  “You know,” she said, “it’s funny, but everything from before feels…I don’t know…made up. Like it all happened to somebody else, somebody I hardly know anymore and I’m glad of it.”

  She gave me a peck on the lips and a smile and asked if I’d be a real sweetie and get her a cold Coke while she went to powder her nose. “Meet you at the refreshment bar,” she said. “Then we’ll get back to showing these suckers how to dance.”

  The lounges were on the other side of the room and down a hallway, and she drew a good bit of attention as she made her way around the edge of the dancefloor. I went to the bar and ordered two Cokes. There was a scattering of small tables along the walls to either side of the bar, all of them occupied, but then a couple got up to return to the floor and I was quick to take over their spot.

  I was nearly done with my Coke when I caught sight of her emerging from the crowd. Her face was tight with excitement, a look I’d come to know well. She didn’t see me at the bar and scanned around and I waved to catch her attention. She spotted me and came over and sat down.

  “What?” I said.

  Her eyes had that peculiar light they took on when she was really wound up. She sucked a deep draft of her Coke through the straw, took a look back toward the dancing crowd, then leaned close to me. “Listen to this. When I came out of the ladies’ room just now? These two fellas come out of the gents’ and start talking to me. They’d been doing some drinking, you could tell, and I took them for just a couple of funny drunks. Then one of them says to me, ‘Look here,’ and steps over by this big potted plant and stands sort of half-turned so nobody but me and his buddy can see, and he takes a roll of bills out of his coat pocket and I mean to tell you, Sonny, it was this thick.” She held her thumb and forefinger three inches apart. “Looked bigger than a Coke bottle except fat at both ends. The top bill was a hundred, I swear. And the other one says real low in my ear, ‘Name your price, honey. One time around the world for each of us.’”

  I stood up. “Come point them out.”

  “Sonny, sit down. Please. Just listen a minute Okay?”

  I sat. “I’ll kick their ass.” It was an effort to keep my voice down.

  “I told them I had to make a phone call but I’d be right back. They’re waiting for me in the lounge hallway.”

  I started to get up again but she flapped her hand at me to sit back down.

  “Listen to me,” she said. “You want to get them? Let’s really get them. I had this idea—I mean it just bang came to me when that galoot said what they wanted.”

  “What the hell are you—”

  “What if you went up to the room right now and then I took them up there?”

  Her expression was pure readiness, her green eyes sparking. She slid her hand across the table and gripped mine.

  “What do you say?” she said.

  Twenty minutes later I was in the bathroom, the door slightly ajar, the room in darkness, when I heard her key rattling in the lock and then their laughter as they came in.

  There was the click of a lamp switch—but the bathroom was situated in such a way that all I could see through the cracked door was a narrow portion of the back wall and part of the window.

  The room door shut. The guys laughed louder. Sloppy kissing sounds, murmurings, chucklings. One of them said something I didn’t catch except for “Molly, honey.” I felt my pulse in my eardrums.

  “Whoa now, boys, hold your horses!” Belle said loudly, her laughter sort of tinny. “Lookee there the good bourbon I got. Why don’t we pour us a…now, behave yourself, you rascal, we got all night! Why don’t we all have us a little drink and—”

  I didn’t catch the rest of it for the sudden blaring of a big band playing “Always.” One of them had turned on the radio on the bedside table.

  We hadn’t counted on that. The signal we’d arranged was “Here’s to wicked times,” which she’d say when she had them standing together by the chest of drawers, where the bourbon was. I’d come out and get the drop on them and she’d snatch up her own gun from under the pillow. But with the radio up so loud I couldn’t make out what anybody was saying, only the guys’ harsh laughter.

  Damn the signal. I was about to pull the door open when it swung in hard and hit me in the forehead and knocked me back against the sink and my feet went out from under me. A large man was in the doorway with his hand at his fly—and quick as a cat he was all over me before I could raise the gun. He gripped my gun wrist with one hand and started punching with the other, cussing a blue streak. He must’ve had thirty pounds on me and was damn strong. I tried to cover up with my free arm but still caught some on the face and neck and then I tucked my chin down and took the next ones on top of the head. They hurt like hell but then he yowled and I knew he’d busted his hand. I grabbed him by the hair and lunged sideways and rammed his head hard against the rim of the bathtub. He groaned and lost his hold on me and I got better leverage and banged his head again and this one knocked him cold.

  I got untangled from him and scrambled to my feet and rushed into the other room and there was Belle—standing beside the bed and holding the cocked Colt in the other guys’ face. One of her straps was broken and her top hung down and exposed a breast. The guy sat on the edge of the bed looking terrified, hands way up. “Always” was still blasting.

  “Belle!” I said.

  She didn’t even look at me. She jabbed the guy in the forehead with the muzzle of the gun and he fell on his back and said, “Jesus, lady…please!”

  She held the gun to his eye. “Want to tear my dress some more, highroller? Want another grab up under my skirt?”

  “No, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” He shut his eyes and gritted his teeth.

  She tapped his teeth with the muzzle and said, “Open up.” Then slid a good portion of the barrel into his mouth—and now his
eyes couldn’t get any bigger.

  The telephone rang. She looked at it and then at me, her face blank. It rang again. I went over and turned down the radio and picked up the receiver.

  The front desk. They’d received a complaint from the room next door about the loud music. Could we please be more considerate? I saw myself in the mirror, my nose bleeding, a dark swelling over one eye and on one cheek. The knots on my scalp hurt but didn’t show. “Certainly,” I said. “My apologies.”

  I hung up. Belle still had the pistol barrel in the guy’s mouth.

  “The desk clerk wonders if you’d be kind enough not to shoot that asshole,” I said. “They’re afraid the noise might disturb some of the guests.”

  She held the blank look on me a moment longer—and then grinned wide and beautifully.

  We bound their hands behind them with their own belts and gagged them with towels. It wouldn’t take much effort to get free of the belts, but that’s how I wanted it. The guy on the bathroom floor had a concussion for sure, maybe a skull fracture, and the sooner he made it to a hospital the better. At least he was breathing and it looked to me like he’d stay that way. He’d been the one to flash the roll of money at Belle—$3, 500, by my hasty count before I stuck the wad in my coat. The other guy was carrying a little more than a grand, and that roll went into my coat too. They’d told Belle they were drilling contractors just back from setting up a new field in Mexico and about to start a job outside San Angelo.

  Belle hurriedly changed dresses, and because I didn’t want to raise any curiosity about my bruises, I sent her down to the desk to check us out while I finished putting our stuff in the valises. I told the guy on the bed he ought to be more careful about the women he took up. He nodded like he meant it. When she telephoned me from the lobby to say we were set to go, I pulled my hat low and grabbed our bags and took the elevator down.

  I went out the front door and a moment later she pulled up in the roadster. She slid over to the passenger side and I got behind the wheel.