Swag

by Elmore Leonard

  There was a dental hygienist by the name of Donna who had a boyfriend but wasn’t going to marry him until he made as much as she did. She told them how much a dentist with a good practice could make and referred to net and gross a lot. Donna was way down at the bottom of Frank’s list of things to do.

  Sonny, the photographer’s model, was the winner of the group. But she was unresponsive to drink offers. She seldom came up to their apartment with the others. She’d lie there behind her big sunglasses and hardly ever laugh when they said something funny. Frank said she was battery-operated. You pressed a little button on her can and she’d say, “Hi, I’m Sonny. I’m a model. So fuck off.”

  Stick noticed that Frank watched her, studied her, more than he did the others. Sonny was the only one Frank had trouble talking to.

  There was a girl in the next apartment—a career lady but not one of the group—who they found out was a pro. Stick called her Mona because sometimes, through the wall, he’d hear her in there with a guy, saying things to him and moaning like she was about to die it was so good. Frank called her what’s-her-name. He was polite to her but not interested. He said a guy would be out of his mind to pay for it at the Villa Monterey. Stick never mentioned it to Frank, but he liked her. He liked her straight dark hair parted in the middle. He liked the calm expression in her eyes and the quiet way she talked, though she never said very much. She was fragile-looking, a thin little thing with bony shoulders sticking out of her sleeveless blouse. When he’d see her outside he couldn’t believe she was the same girl he’d hear moaning and carrying on through the wall. Maybe sometime, when Frank wasn’t around, he’d get talking to her in private and find out which one was the real Mona.

  They both liked the cocktail waitress, Jackie, who worked at a place called The Ball Joint and wore a kitty outfit with little ears and a tail. Jackie wasn’t the smartest girl there, but she was very friendly. Also she had the biggest pair at the Villa Monterey, even when they weren’t pushed up by her kitty outfit. She showed the group one time, in her bikini, how she placed drinks on a table, bending her knees and keeping her body straight so they wouldn’t fall out. Frank said if they ever did and hit somebody, they’d kill him. Jackie worked nights and usually didn’t drink in the afternoon, but was liable to bang on their door when she got home, two thirty in the morning, if she saw a light on and heard the hi-fi playing. It wasn’t unusual.

  Their apartment had become a little social center, with the best-stocked bar in the building. Frank started it, inviting people up, especially on weekends. After a while they could count on people dropping in whenever there was a sign of something going on.

  There’d be a good selection of career ladies.

  There might even be some of the young married set. Frank would lure them away from their cookouts with Chivas Regal and talk about car prices and inflation with the husbands while he appraised the cute little housewives.

  There might be two or three young single guys, somebody’s date, and Barry Kleiman for sure. The career ladies called Barry the Prince. Stick thought because he looked like Prince Valiant with his hair, but that wasn’t the reason. Barry was successful, owned a McDonald’s franchise, wore bright-colored sport outfits with a white plastic belt and white patent-leather loafers, and was only about twenty pounds overweight. Barry would stand with his elbows tucked in close and his wrists limp and say, “Listen, when I was a kid, the neighborhood I grew up in? It was so dirty I’d sit out in the sun for two hours and get a nice stain.” Then he’d wait for their reaction with an innocent, wide-eyed expression. Karen said he used to do Jerry Lewis imitations.

  “Not a bad guy,” Frank said. “He could be a pain in the ass, you know? But he’s not a bad guy.”

  “You go for Barry, you must really like the place,” Stick said.

  Frank seemed surprised. “Yeah, I like it. You don’t?”

  “It’s all right, I guess.”

  “All right? You ever had it like this, pouring cement?”

  No, he’d never lived in a place with a swimming pool and had a party going most of the week with two guns in the closet and fifteen hundred bucks in an Oxydol box under the sink. It was funny, he never had.

  When Frank recited his line—“Well, here we are”—instead of saying, “Are you sure?” he should say, “Where, Frank? Where exactly are we? And for how long?”

  It was like getting excited and moving to Florida and having the Atlantic Ocean down the street and palm trees and a nice tan all year and wondering. Now what? Sitting in a marina bar, watching gulls diving at the waves and seeing the charter boats out by the horizon, it didn’t make the beer taste better. He’d tell himself this was the life and go home and have to take a nap before supper.

  He wondered if he missed working, putting in a nine-ten-hour day driving the big transit mix and pouring the footings for the condominiums that would someday wall out the ocean from Key West to Jacksonville Beach. There was plenty of work down there. It was on his mind a lot and he wasn’t sure why, because the thought of going back to hauling cement bored the shit out of him.

  He’d say to himself, What do you want to do more than anything?

  Go see his little girl.

  All right, but what do you want to do with your life?

  He’d think about it awhile and picture things.

  He didn’t see himself owning a cement company or a chicken farm or a restaurant. He never thought much about owning things, having a big house and a powerboat. He didn’t care one way or the other about clothes. He’d never been much of a tourist. The travel brochures made it look good and he could see himself under a thatched roof with a big rum drink and some colored guys banging on oil drums, but he’d end up thinking. Then what do you do? Go in and get dressed up and eat the American Plan dinner and listen to the fag with the hairpiece play his cocktail piano and get bombed for no reason and go to bed and get up and do it over again the next day. He could picture a girl with him, on the beach, under the thatched roof. A nice-looking, quiet girl. Not his ex-wife. He never pictured his ex-wife with him and he never pictured the girl as his wife.

  Maybe, Stick told himself, this was the kind of life he always wanted but never realized it before. Hold up one or two places a week, make more money than he could spend, and live in a thirty-unit L-shaped authentic California apartment building that had a private swimming pool and patio in the crotch of the L and was full of career ladies laying around waiting for it.

  It sounded good.

  Didn’t it?

  Yeah, Stick guessed it did.

  6

  THEY LIKED SUPERMARKETS. GET A polite manager who was scared shitless and not more than a few people in the store, that was the ideal situation, worth three or four gas stations even on a bad day. The only trouble with supermarkets, they were big. You never knew who might be down an aisle somewhere.

  They hit the Kroger store in West Bloomfield early Saturday morning.

  It looked good. No customers yet. The checkout counters were empty. The only person they saw was a stockboy stamping prices on canned goods. Stick asked him for the manager, saying he’d been called about a check that’d bounced and he wanted to cover it. He followed the boy to the back and waited, holding the swinging door open, seeing the manager back there talking to a Budweiser deliveryman and a few of the checkout girls drinking coffee. When the manager and the stockboy came out, Stick let the door swing closed. And when the manager said, “May I have your name, please?” Stick said, “No sir,” taking the Smith from inside his jacket, “but you can give me your money.”

  The manager said, “Oh my God,” and the three of them paraded up to the front where Frank was waiting. Frank got the cash register key from the manager and headed for the checkout counters. Stick and the manager and the stockboy went into the cashier’s enclosure, Stick bringing a Kroger bag with him.

  The manager kept saying, “Oh my God.” He told Stick he’d only been manager here one week. Stick said well, he was gett
ing good experience, wasn’t he? The stock-boy was a heavy-boned, rangy kid who kept staring at him, making him nervous, until Stick told him to lay on the floor, facedown. He told the manager to clean out the cash drawer and open the safe. The manager had to get a piece of paper out of his wallet with the combination written on it, then kept missing numbers as he turned the dial and would have to start over again; but finally he got it open and pulled out a trayful of bills and personal checks. When he started to count the bills, Stick told him never mind, he’d do it later. The manager thanked him.

  “What about these?” the manager said, picking up the checks.

  “Keep ’em,” Stick said.

  “I appreciate that very much,” the manager said. “I really do.”

  “Just the bills,” Stick said, “no change. You can keep that, too.”

  “Thank you,” the manager said. “Thank you very much.”

  Frank was at the third checkout counter, digging the bills out of the cash register and stuffing them in a Kroger bag. He looked up to see a woman with hair curlers pushing a cart toward him. He was taken by surprise and his hand went into his jacket for the Python. He’d looked down the aisles and hadn’t seen anyone in the store. The woman began unloading her cart—coffee, milk, bread, and a few other items—not paying any attention to him. Frank brought his hand out of the jacket. The best thing to do was get rid of her, fast. He said, “How’re you this morning?” and began ringing up the groceries, not looking at her. She was a pale, puffy woman with a permanent scowl etched in her face. And the hair curlers—in case anyone thought she wasn’t ugly enough she had light-blue plastic curlers wrapped in her light-blue hair.

  The woman squinted at him. “You’re new.”

  “Yes, ma’am, new assistant manager.”

  “Where’s your white coat?”

  He was going to say that a jacket and sunglasses was the new thing for assistant managers, you cluck, you dumb, ugly broad, but he played it straight and told her they were getting him a white coat with his name on it. He punched the total and said, “Four sixty-eight, please.”

  The woman was digging in her purse, looking for something. She took almost a minute to bring out a piece of newspaper, unfold it, and hand it to him.

  “Coupon for the coffee,” the woman said. “Twenty cents off.”

  Frank took the coupon and looked at it. “Okay, then that’s four forty-eight. No, wait a minute.” He noticed the date on the coupon. “This offer’s expired. It’s not, you know . . . redeemable anymore, it’s no good.”

  “I couldn’t come in yesterday,” the woman said. “It’s not my fault. I cut the coupon out and there it is.”

  “I’m sorry,” Frank said. “It says, see? Thursday and Friday only. Big letters.”

  “I’ve been coming here fifteen years, using the coupons,” the woman said. “My husband and I. We buy all our groceries, our dog food, everything here. I’m one day late and you’re going to tell me this is no good?”

  “I’m sorry, I wish there was something I could do about it.”

  “Yesterday Earl took the car, had Timmie with him. All day he’s gone, didn’t even feed Timmie the whole while, and I had to sit home alone.”

  “All right—” Frank said.

  “After all the money this store’s made off us,” the woman said. “I could’ve been going to Farmer Jack, Safeway. No, I come here and then get treated like I’m somebody with food stamps.”

  Frank was about to give in, but he changed his mind. He looked right at the lady now and said, “I got an idea. Why don’t you take the coupon—okay?—and the one-pound can of Maxwell House coffee and shove ’em up your ass.”

  When they were in the stolen car, the Kroger bags on the floor, turning out of the parking lot, Frank said, “That fucking Earl. He stays out with their car all day, their dog, his old lady gets pissed off and makes life miserable for everybody. Jesus.”

  Stick wasn’t listening. He was anxious. He waited for Frank to finish and said, “The manager, you know what he says when I’m leaving? Honest to God, he says, ‘Thank you very much, sir, and come back again.’ ”

  “That poor fucking Earl,” Frank said. “I sure wouldn’t want to be him.”

  They got a little over seventeen hundred at Kroger’s. The story in the paper said “about three thousand.” Typical. Four days later, to show you how it could go, they hit a place and didn’t get anything. The guy wouldn’t give them the money.

  It was a good thing it didn’t happen on their first job. They would have quit. The guy was Armenian, a little bald-headed, excitable Armenian who ran a party store. No liquor, but imported beer and wine and expensive gourmet items, and the store was in a good location, out North Woodward near Bloomfield Hills. They went in on a Saturday night at ten. Frank took out his Python and Stick turned the OPEN sign around to CLOSED and pulled the shade down on the glass door.

  Right away the little Armenian said, “What do you want to do this to me for? I never done nothing to you. I never saw you before.” He stood there with his hands raised in the air.

  Frank said, “Sir, put your hands down, will you?”

  “I don’t want this happening to me,” the Armenian said in his high, excitable voice. “Since I move out here it never happen before. Never. Good people live out here. Why aren’t you good people? You don’t have to do this to me.”

  “It won’t hurt at all, you do what I tell you,” Frank said. “You understand? Now put your fucking hands down!”

  Stick found the guy’s wife in the back room, a little dark-haired lady with a moustache, clutching her hands in front of her like she was praying. Stick said, “Everything’s going to be all right, Mama. Nothing to worry about.” He moved her into the toilet compartment, closed the door, and poked around the storage room that was stacked high with beer and soft-drink cases.

  Frank looked up from the cash register when Stick came back out.

  “He’s got a safe or he hid it somewhere.”

  Stick shook his head. “Not out there.”

  “Thirty-eight bucks and change,” Frank said. “For tomorrow. He’s cleaned out the drawer.”

  Stick went over to the Armenian, turned him around to face the shelves, and felt the pockets of his white store coat.

  “Nothing.”

  “It’s somewhere,” Frank said.

  “All the money I have, in the cash register,” the Armenian said to the shelf of canned smoked oysters and clams. “I don’t have no more than that.”

  “Hey,” Frank said, “come on. All day you make thirty-eight bucks? Where is it? You hide it someplace?”

  “I took it to the bank.”

  “No, you didn’t. You been here all day.”

  “My wife took it.” His voice went higher as he said, “Where is my wife—what did you do to her!”

  “This guy here raped her,” Frank said.

  Stick made a face like he was going to get sick.

  “Now I’m going to rape her, you don’t tell us where the money is.”

  The Armenian didn’t say anything. He was considering whether he should give up the money or let his wife get raped again.

  “Come on,” Frank said to him, touching the back of the Armenian’s head with the Colt Python, “where is it! You don’t get it out by the time I count three, I’m going to blow your bald head apart. . . . One.”

  “Do it!” the Armenian said in his high voice.

  “Two.”

  “Kill me! You take my money, kill me!”

  “Three.”

  Frank clicked the hammer back with his thumb. The Armenian’s shoulders hunched rigid and held like that. Stick waited, feeling his own tension.

  After a moment Frank said, “Shit.”

  There was no point in wasting any more time. They could tear the place apart and not find anything.

  Frank said to the Armenian, “You’re lucky, you know that? You’re dumb fucking lucky, that’s all.”

  After they left and
were driving away, Stick said, “Shit, we forgot the thirty-eight bucks.”

  There weren’t any textbooks on armed robbery. The only way to learn was through experience.

  They found out gas stations weren’t as good as they looked. Hand the kid a twenty and watch him go over to the manager or owner who’d take a wad out of his pocket and peel off change. But it didn’t amount to that much: a bunch of singles and fives. There were too many people using credit cards now. Also, the high-volume service stations, where the money would be, always had five or six guys working there, using wrenches and tire irons, some hard-looking guys, maybe not too bright, who might see the gun pointing at them and decide to take a swing anyway. In their three gas station hits they went in and got out fast, the best take seven-eighty, which they figured was about as good as you could do.

  They crossed off gas stations and altered a couple of their ten rules for success and happiness, finding it was all right to be polite, but you still had to scare the guy enough so he’d know better than to try and be a hero. It was all right, too, to dress well, look presentable. But they realized they’d better not become typecast or pretty soon the police would be writing a book on the two dudes who always wore business suits and said please and thank you. So they wore jackets sometimes, and raincoats. Stick had a pair of coveralls he liked he’d bought at J. C. Penney. They were comfortable and no one seemed to bother looking at him. Frank liked his pale-tan safari jacket with the epaulets. Very sharp, big in California. He liked the way the Python rested in the deep side pocket and didn’t show. Usually, after a job, they kept the guns locked in the glove compartment of the T-bird. Stick thought they should put them away somewhere, hidden. But Frank said it was better to have them handy; they saw a place they liked, they were ready. Keep them in the apartment, some inquisitive broad could be snooping around and find them. Ho ho, what’re these two business types doing with loaded firearms? Stick wasn’t convinced, but he couldn’t think of a better place to keep them.