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  “If you forgot to check for gas, I’ll fucking kill you, Devil.”

  “It’s got gas.”

  I pulled three or four more times, and by then I was beginning to get nervous, standing up in the rain in that boat, wearing that mask and hat, pulling at a motor cord that wouldn’t start the engine.

  Then it caught, died a little, caught on another pull, then rumbled happily. I have never felt so relieved in my life.

  I sat down where I could hold the throttle on the motor and started us across the lake. On the far side, I could see above the lake, up on the little ridge. I saw highway lights, and there was a big light out by the dock. Even from that distance, the light falling on the dock boards made it look like a long jaundiced tongue.

  The rain was beginning to be a problem. The wind was picking up with it, and the lake was lashing the boat, which was riding up and down like a bucking horse.

  Julie got sick, leaned over and puked in the boat; some of it splashed on Nancy’s shoes.

  “Goddamn it, you little witch.”

  “I’m sorry,” Julie said. “I couldn’t help it.”

  “I ought to put you in the water.”

  “Leave her alone,” I said. “Stay cool.”

  As we got closer to the other side, I saw a man come walking out on the dock. He was wearing a rain slicker and a hat and had two suitcases. He stopped there and turned his back and looked toward the ridge. That should be Rose. Expecting us where I first said we were coming. He thought we were going to stroll out on the dock and take the suitcases. That’s what I had hoped for. I looked hard, but I didn’t see anyone else.

  The rain was washing Julie’s hair down over her mask, but she was smart enough to keep her hands in her lap. She acted as if she might heave again, then didn’t.

  By the time the man on the dock heard the boat over the wind and the rain and realized we were running without lights, having just the dock light to guide us, we were almost there. He turned and moved to the edge of the dock with the suitcases.

  I banked the boat so that it slid in sideways and bumped up against one of the dock supports. I idled the engine, pulled my gun, and pointed it up at the man on the dock. “You might want to drop those suitcases so we can check them over.”

  “All right,” he said.

  When she heard the man’s voice, Julie turned her head a little, curious-like, and I knew right then that she didn’t recognize that voice. It wasn’t Rose, but a cop. I didn’t even know what Rose looked like, and the guy on the dock had a rain slicker and a hat on and his back to the light, so I couldn’t see him very good, but it didn’t matter.

  “You don’t want anything to happen to the kid,” I said. “And it will be nice for you if nothing happens to you. I’m a damn good shot.”

  I wasn’t, but I figured it was the way to go.

  “It’ll be all right,” the man said.

  “You bet it will,” Nancy said.

  The man dropped the suitcases, which were larger than I’d expected, into the boat. Nancy opened one. In the rain-smeared light from the dock, I could see a row of bills.

  “Look under those bills, make sure it’s all money.”

  She did, and it was. She checked the other suitcase and it was the same.

  Nancy closed the cases up.

  “All right, here’s what’s going to happen,” I said. “Julie, you stand up, slowly. Don’t want to swamp us.”

  This was a solid precaution. The boat was really jumping in that rain, all those waves.

  Julie stood up slowly, staggered a bit, but managed to keep her feet under her.

  I didn’t stop looking at the man on the dock. He made any kind of move, I wouldn’t have any choice but to shoot him. I didn’t want to do that. But I figured if he was there, others were close by. Rose had double-crossed us.

  “Julie, you turn to your right until I say stop…okay, stop. Now you reach up with both hands and lean slightly forward.”

  When she did that, her hands were touching the dock.

  “Help her up,” I said to the man, and when he reached out to take her hands, Nancy used the gig in the boat to push us off from the dock, and I geared the motor up and swung us back out to the broader part of the lake and started motoring across.

  I looked back once and saw the man pull her up onto the dock. He reached under his coat, and I said, “Lay down.”

  Nancy dove flat in the boat, and I tried to get as small as I could and still maintain the throttle. A pistol shot slapped the water near us. I had the boat full-throttled now and it was hopping like nobody’s business. Another shot sang out across the night and I think it hit somewhere behind us.

  I was really pushing that old engine by then, and we were making good time. Even if the cop was able to get back to his car and call in, I doubted they’d be waiting on the opposite side of the lake. I think the boat was a surprise to them.

  When we got to the other side, I rode the boat up on the bank a little, and Nancy got out and took the suitcases of money, struggling with them. I tossed the gun onto the sand.

  I stood up in the boat and took off that stupid disguise, and Nancy, still wearing hers, said, “What are you doing?”

  “What’s it look like? I’m taking my clothes off. I’m going to scuttle the boat. Can you unhitch the trailer?”

  She nodded that she could. I wadded my clothes around my shoes and tossed them onto the shore, used the gig to push the front of the boat off the sand, and back-motored until I was out a bit, where it was deep, and then I killed the engine. Naked, I took the ax and stood up and swung hard for the bottom of the boat. It took a couple of strikes, but finally I split the bottom, and water came in quick.

  I dove over the side, and instantly I thought maybe I had been too damn smart.

  The water was nearly impossible to swim in. It kept lifting me up and throwing me around, and once, I went under pretty deep, had to fight with all I had to keep from drowning.

  When I made it to the surface, the water leaped and carried me toward the shore. I assisted it by swimming hard. I got to the sand and crawled up on it.

  Nancy was standing there in the rain. She had removed the mask but left the hat on. She had the mask in one hand, my pistol in another.

  “You got a nice ass, Ed.”

  “Glad to know it.”

  I got dressed quickly, grabbed my hat, and put it on, but by then we were both drenched to the bone. Nancy had unhitched the trailer, and together we pushed it out into the water. It glided a bit, dipped, then hung up slightly, but the weight of it and the savage water pulled it loose from the shore. It slid under the waves and disappeared. If they found it, it was just an old trailer without a license plate or any kind of number to identify it.

  We got in the car, Nancy behind the wheel this time. She placed the pistol on top of where she had stacked the two suitcases on the seat. I picked it up. I laid it on my knee.

  Nancy started laughing. “Goddamn, I thought you were going to drown back there, Ed.”

  “What would you have done if I had?”

  “Why, I would have driven home, of course.”

  (58)

  As we rode along, Nancy’s dark mood grew lighter. She would laugh about nothing suddenly, then she’d look at me and smile with those nice white teeth. She was still wearing that stupid Easter hat with the rain-drenched feather.

  “Boy, are you going to get some pussy when we get home.”

  “I can stand that.”

  “We might fuck on top of all this money. Spread it on the bed and screw on top of it.”

  “I think it’ll be fine in the suitcases.”

  “We did it.”

  “Yeah. We did.”

  “I wasn’t sure it was going to happen, but we got it done.”

  “We did at that.”

  “Goddamn it.”

  “I take it you’re moderately excited.”

  She laughed.

  We got back to the shed and parked the car, then
we took our disguises and put them in the box under the plyboard and plugged the hole with a rag. I took the time to coat some dirt over all of it. If someone was really looking, they could see the rag and might wonder about it, but in the morning, I’d come out and remove the box and fill the whole thing in using the wheelbarrow to move the dirt I had piled up at the back of the shed.

  We went up to the house, each of us carrying a suitcase, me with my gun back in my waistband. Nancy actually did dump the contents of the case she was carrying on the bed.

  There was a lot of money there.

  I sat the case I was carrying on the floor and, following Nancy’s lead, started taking my clothes off.

  It was a raucous night, and when I woke up late morning with the sun edging between the blinds, Nancy was out of bed, and a twenty-dollar bill was jammed between my butt cheeks.

  After removing that, I rolled out of bed and sat on the edge of it. I was thinking we had done all right last night. No one got killed, and we had a lot of money.

  I walked over to the blinds and pinched one up and looked out. It was no longer raining. The day was bright.

  Nancy was little-girl whistling in the kitchen. I strolled in there naked. She was wearing nothing but an apron and she was frying bacon. As she moved about, her bare butt bounced. Scrambled eggs were already on plates, and the toast popped up when I walked in, as if it had been waiting on me.

  She looked at me and smiled. “I like what you’re not wearing,” she said.

  “And I think you have a fashion trend going there.”

  We were just a couple of big goofy kids with a lot of money and no clothes on.

  We sat at the table and ate as we were. When we finished with our breakfast and coffee, we went back to the bedroom, repacked the money, and made love until it was late afternoon.

  At that point, I got dressed, went out and put my pistol back in the Cadillac glove box, then walked over to the shed, leaned the plywood sheet against the wall, and struggled the box out of the hole.

  I broke the box boards up with a hammer and took the pieces out to the barrel. I put the busted boards inside and got the masks out of the truck, and Nancy brought the hats out. I poured a bit of gasoline from the can from the garage into the barrel and lit it.

  A blaze licked up from the barrel as bright and hot as the opening of hell. The stuff inside caught good, and in less than an hour, it was all burned to charcoal and wispy ash.

  We hid the suitcases of money in the shed for a reason we were uncertain of. I think the idea of it being in the house somehow seemed less safe.

  “If someone decides we might be in on this, they’ll look this place over, and they won’t have much trouble finding these suitcases,” I said.

  “No one has any reason to suspect anything.”

  “Just saying, we got to think like they might, and if they do come snooping around, we don’t want to leave anything lying out in the open. Especially two suitcases filled with money.”

  “I might have an idea for where to put it,” she said. “But we’ll need to wait until night.”

  While we were waiting, I drove over to the filling station, put a quarter in the newspaper rack, bought a paper.

  When I got back to the house, I opened the paper on the kitchen table, and right there on the front page was Julie. She looked like a drowned rat. A raincoat was tossed over her shoulders, and a thin man with a slick head and an expression like he had passed a kidney stone and was glad of it had his arm around her back. The caption identified him as her father, Esau Rose. It definitely wasn’t the man we saw on the dock.

  I mentioned that to Nancy. She swiveled the paper around on the table so she could see it, then nodded.

  “Yeah. I’m reasonably sure the man on the dock was that cop, McGinty. Built like him. I couldn’t tell in all that rain, but I know it wasn’t Rose, who, as you can see,” she said, tapping her finger on the newspaper, “is a slight man.”

  I read where Julie said her kidnappers treated her well enough, all things considered, but made her stay in some kind of underground storage with an air vent. She didn’t have it exactly right, but she was close. “The man was the nicest. He had a sweet voice. The woman brought me food, but she seemed ill-tempered. I don’t know what would have happened to me had it just been her.”

  I read a little more, didn’t see anything that worried me about her being onto us.

  Nancy took the paper away from me and read it.

  “Bitch,” she said. “I treated her just fine. You and your sweet voice.”

  (59)

  When everything seems to be going well, that’s when you have to watch for the turd in the punch bowl.

  Nancy’s plan was simple, but it was a lot of work for me. What I was going to do was dig up the grave where the pony was in the box, crack the lid, and hide the money in there.

  The hole where we had Julie wouldn’t do. It wasn’t deep enough, plus the horse crate wouldn’t be expected.

  I did it during the night with the porch light giving me a few rays and the big golden finger of the drive-in giving me some more of the same. Still, it wasn’t like working in daylight, but the time we had chosen for me to do it was best.

  The ground was a little soft from the rain the night before, but let me tell you, digging a hole like that, it’s more work than you can imagine, which of course was part of the reason a lot of dead dogs ended up tossed in the woods and why a backhoe was used to dig holes like this one.

  By the time I was finishing up, I was exhausted. Walter or Nancy had turned out the drive-in light, so all I had was the weak back-porch glow, some starlight, and the little penlight, which I had stuck into the side of the grave once I got down in it.

  That damn grave was deep.

  Eventually, I was standing on the crate. I had dug a little space at the end of the crate, so I stepped off there, used the edge of the shovel to pry it open. It was some real work, and when I got the lid off and laid it on its edge in the grave, a stench came out of there like you wouldn’t believe. I’d thought it would have lost its reek by then, but that damn sure wasn’t the case. It had been contained, and the odor was nauseating.

  I pulled the butt end of the penlight out of the grave wall, shone it in the box. Inside there was the dark, flat shape of the horse. Hair had come off the body, and the skin had slipped off of it in places. I could see white fragments of bone poking out here and there, like busted chopsticks sticking through paper.

  I pushed the penlight back into the side of the grave. I had pulled the suitcases down there with me, but before that, I had taken out five thousand and hid it away in my room at the drive-in. I didn’t mention it to Nancy.

  I stuck the shovel up in the ground, took hold of the cases, and slipped them into the crate. I was about to put the lid on when there was a flashlight beam shining down on me, and a voice said, “That’s all right. Leave it open.”

  The light was bright and I couldn’t see but a couple of shadow shapes behind it. I put my hand up, covering the top of my eyes, tried to adjust my vision, and then the light went out and white spots were swimming in front of my eyes.

  A moment later my vision cleared up, and I could see who was up there. Right then I felt like the biggest fool that had ever lived.

  It was Walter and Nancy.

  (60)

  Nancy held the turned-off flashlight. Walter had a gun pointed at me. It wasn’t a big gun, but I figured it would do the job.

  “Look at you, pilgrim,” Walter said. “Your damn donkey’s in a ditch now, ain’t it, tough guy?”

  He had a grin so wide, it looked like a row of piano keys.

  I laughed a little. Not because I thought anything was funny, but it was either that or start crying.

  Even in poor light Nancy looked good, wearing white shorts and a white top, her hair bouncing on her shoulders. I could see the toes of her white tennis shoes poking over the edge of the grave.

  She looked like she was ready for a picnic
, and I was the lunch.

  “Nancy, you are one hell of a con, girl.”

  “Coming from you,” she said, “that makes me proud. But, hey, it wasn’t all con. I liked you a lot.”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Walter said.

  Nancy’s voice was soft and sweet, way she used it in bed. “It’s okay, baby. I said like, not love.”

  I shook my head. I leaned on the shovel. Walter was right. I was a huge donkey’s ass, and I knew something else right then. He wasn’t her cousin.

  I looked up at Walter.

  “You’re next, Walter. Like me, you’re thinking she’s your woman, but she’s already two or three moves ahead of you. Maybe more. She ought to have her pussy listed as a lethal weapon. She’s going to end up having two suitcases filled with money, and you and me, we’re both going to end up down here riding on the pony.”

  “She’s not going to kill you. I am.”

  “Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Watch your back, Walter. Damn, you saw the long game, didn’t you, girl?”

  “It really isn’t anything personal,” Nancy said.

  “Pretty personal from this end.”

  Walter squatted down on the side of the grave and pointed the gun right at me. He was enjoying this, not wanting to end it too quickly. This and the money were his big payoff. When I was done for and the money was buried with me and that stinking horse, they could sit quietly for a while, then come back and dig up the money at a later date and move on. If idiots came in colors, I’d be all of them.

  “How long you been in on this, Walter?”

  “Nancy figured early on you could do some things needed to be done. Nancy used to do a little work for me in Dallas, and along came Frank. Just another john, big and dumb, and we started looking to the future. Drive-in, cemetery, it all looked great to us. She married him for the pot of gold. Looked good to you too, didn’t it?”

  “Turns out it’s not much of a pot. Drive-in doesn’t really make much money, and I haven’t buried a dead dog yet.”

  “Adjustments here and there,” Walter said. “That’s what life’s about. In fact, I’m just about to adjust you.”