The Best American Mystery Stories 3

by Edited by James Ellroy

Lewis locked eyes with him but did not answer. Ralph wet his lips. Swallowing, he moved one hand to reach under the counter. There was a red telephone under there that was Cicero Charley Waxman’s hotline. Just taking it off the hook without saying anything was enough to send a quartet of thugs from the neighborhood to check out the problem.

  Before Ralph could get to the receiver, however, Lewis reached over and grabbed his arm. “Keep both hands up on the counter, Ralph,” he said quietly.

  Hoxie walked over and drew his son-in-law’s chromed revolver. “Do what the man say,” he ordered.

  Ralph looked at Lewis in utter disbelief. “Are you out of your mind, Lewis?”

  Before anyone could say anything else, another knock sounded at the door. Lewis quickly pulled Ralph around the counter. He jerked his head at Hoxie and the black man hurried to stand behind where the door swung open. Potts stood with him.

  “Open the door, Ralph,” Lewis instructed, nudging him toward it.

  “You’re crazy,” Ralph muttered.

  “Open it.”

  Ralph did as he was told, and immediately through the door came a pair of burly men, each carrying two suitcases. Before it could register with them what was happening, Potts slammed the door behind them and locked it, and Hoxie stepped out to face them with the revolver leveled.

  “Put the bags down and stay real still!” Lewis snapped, all nervousness dissolved from his voice by adrenaline.

  “Do what he says,” Ralph told the men. “He’s crazy. Don’t make trouble.”

  The couriers remained still while Potts relieved each of them of an automatic pistol and fished around in their coat pockets until he found the keys to the suitcases.

  “All right, get in that closet,” Lewis then ordered. “You too, Ralph.”

  It was a small closet behind the counter, the door usually open, with shelves on which the parlor kept pads of betting slips, boxes of ballpoint pens, rolls of calculator tape, cartons of disposable coffee cups, and other supplies. There was hardly room for all three men to squeeze in together. As Ralph followed the two couriers in, he shook his head in pity at Lewis.

  “You’ve bought yourself a lot of trouble, Lewis, for a few thousand bucks.”

  “A few thousand, huh?” Lewis smirked.

  “That’s what I said, smart guy. A few. What, did you think you and your friends were going to get rich here today?”

  “Four suitcases full of money,” Lewis pointed out. “A week’s take from all of Cicero Charley’s parlors —”

  “That’s not parlor money,” Ralph said evenly. “That’s football-game parlay-card money from all the cigar stores and candy stores and bars. Ninety-five percent of it is minimum bets. You’ve got yourself four bags of mostly dollar bills, Lewis. Maybe twenty, twenty-five thousand, maximum.” Ralph pointed a stiff finger at him. “But you got a million bucks’ worth of grief from Cicero Charley.”

  A stunned look on his face, Lewis guided his friend into the closet and closed the door. Turning, he found Hoxie and Potts staring at him with sick expressions. Stepping over to Potts, he took the suitcase keys out of his hand.

  “Do the door,” he said to Hoxie.

  The black man shoved the revolver into a coat pocket, drew a ball-peen hammer from under his belt, and from another pocket got out a handful of four-inch carpenter nails. As he proceeded to nail the closet door shut, Lewis knelt and unlocked one of the suitcases. It was filled with sheaves of cash held together by rubber bands. Checking half a dozen of them, he found that Ralph had been telling him the truth: there were occasional fives and tens mixed in the currency, but the vast majority of the bills were singles.

  “We done stepped in something soft now,” Hoxie said, looking down from his hammering.

  “What the hell we gonna do?” Potts asked, his voice breaking as he stood there incongruously with a large automatic pistol in each hand.

  “For now, we’re gonna follow the plan and get out of here,” Lewis said. He bobbed his chin at Hoxie. “Finish the door.” To Potts, “Get the car.” He himself tore all the phone wires out of the wall, including the hotline.

  Moments later, Potts pulled up in a rented Buick and opened the trunk. Lewis and Hoxie carried the suitcases out one at a time and loaded them. Then they all crowded into the front seat and Potts drove off.

  “We got two decisions to make,” Lewis said tensely. “One: Do we follow our plan to spring the kid — or do the three of us make a run for it now? Two: If we do spring him, do we give him part of the money or just cut him loose?”

  “Making a run from here ain’t gonna give us much of a head start,” Potts reasoned. “We started this because we were sorry for the kid. If we don’t go ahead with that part of it, we’ll really feel like fools. I think we ought to spring him.”

  “Me too,” Hoxie agreed. “But I don’t think we ought to split the dough with him. We gon’ need it a lot worse’n him. I mean, Cicero Charley ain’t gon’ be after him. I say give him the clothes we bought him and a few hundred bucks. Let him take his chances.”

  Lewis thought it over for a few moments, then concurred. “Sounds fair to me. Head for the hospital.”

  ~ * ~

  They parked in the visitors’ lot of the Cook County Hospital complex and unobtrusively made their way to the Radiology Building. When they got upstairs to Outpatient Radiology, they entered and signed in as usual, then took separate seats in the familiar waiting room as they always did. From past experience, Lewis had already calculated that the odds were five to four that they wouldn’t have to wait more than fifteen minutes. He was right; they only had to wait eleven.

  When the two prison guards walked in with Alan Lampley between them, they proceeded, as usual, directly to the treatment room door. As they were about to enter, Lewis nodded to Potts and the lanky Southerner jumped to his feet and drew one of the guns taken from the money couriers.

  “Don’t shoot or I’ll move!” he ordered. The guards, Alan Lampley, Lewis, and Hoxie all looked at him with mixed expressions. Potts swallowed and said, “I mean, don’t m-m-move or I’ll shoot!”

  “Take it easy, mister,” one of the guards said. “Nobody’s moving.”

  Hoxie quickly stepped up behind the guards and disarmed them. “We gon’ be able to open a gun shop pretty soon,” he muttered.

  Just then, the door to the treatment room opened and the radiology technician came out. Potts turned the gun on him. “Hand it! Put your holds up! Damn it, I mean hold it and put your hands up!”

  The technician froze. Alan Lampley looked around incredulously. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “You’ll find out in a minute,” Lewis told him. “All right, everybody into the treatment room. Move it!”

  In the treatment room, Lewis searched the guards, found keys, and unlocked Alan Lampley’s cuffs and waist chain. “Get out of that jumpsuit,” he said. To the technician, he said, “Take off that lab coat and your pants. Hurry up!”

  In less than five minutes, Lewis and the others had the two guards and the technician, in his underwear, handcuffed and chained to the floor-mounted Cobalt-6o X-ray machine in the treatment room.

  “You won’t get away with this,” one of the guards warned.

  “Five to two you’re right,” Lewis agreed. He turned to his cohorts and their liberated prisoner. “Okay, let’s go. Straight down to the fire stairs at the end of the hall.”

  Six minutes later, they were in the rented Buick, driving off the parking lot.

  ~ * ~

  From the rear seat, where he sat with Hoxie, Alan Lampley said, “You guys are crazy. You just got yourselves in a hell of a lot of trouble.”

  “We thought you’d consider it a favor,” Lewis said wryly. “So you wouldn’t have to spend your last six months or so in prison.”

  “I don’t have six months,” Alan said. “They figure three at the most.”

  “Well, three, then,” Potts said, glancing back over his shoulder from the driver’s seat. “Wouldn�
��t you rather be out than in?”

  “Sure, I would,” Alan admitted. “But not for the trouble you guys are into now. I mean, why’d you do it? You don’t even know me, or anything about me —”

  “Yeah, we do, son,” said Hoxie. “We know why you’re in jail; about your sister and that drug dealer an’ all.”

  “Anyway,” said Lewis, “we’re doing it for ourselves, too. We pulled a stickup this morning to get enough dough so we could all live out what time we got left in a little style. On’y thing is, we didn’t get as much as we figured. But we can still give you enough dough to get out of town, maybe go out to Las Vegas or L.A. or someplace and at least die a free man.”

  “Canada,” Alan said. “I want to go to Canada.”

  Lewis grimaced. “What the hell for? It’s cold up there. Don’t you wanna go someplace warm?”

  “I’ve got an uncle in Canada,” Alan explained. “He went up there years ago to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War. He’s got a little badger ranch up near Moose Jaw, that’s in Saskatchewan. Raises badgers and harvests their hair like people shear sheep for their wool. They use the hair to make expensive shaving brushes. If I could get up to my uncle’s ranch, I know he’d let me stay there and look after me for the time I’ve got left.”

  “Wouldn’t work,” Lewis said, shaking his head. “You couldn’t get there without no ID of any kind: no driver’s license, no passport, nothing. You’d never get in.”

  “I’d get in, all right,” Alan promised. “I’ve been up there and gone on fishing trips with my uncle. There’s places in the Grasslands National Park on the Montana border where you can just walk into Canada like you were crossing the street. You just get me a Greyhound bus ticket to Shelby, Montana. I’ll take it from there.”

  Lewis and Potts exchanged looks, and Hoxie nodded to them in the rearview mirror. “You got a deal, kid,” Lewis said.

  ~ * ~

  In the motel room they had rented, about a mile from O’Hare Airport, Alan showered and dressed in the new clothes they had bought for him while Lewis and the others opened the four stolen suitcases, dumped all the money on one of the beds, and set about counting it.

  “Throw all the ones on the other bed,” Lewis said. “I’ll start putting them in hundred-dollar bunches with rubber bands. You guys sort the bigger bills.”

  “That ain’t gonna be hard,” Potts cracked.

  While they were counting, Alan finished getting ready and came into the room. He looked distressed. “I can’t do this,” he said. “I can’t let you guys go on with this plan. It’s not fair. I’m going to get away and you guys are going to get caught and go to prison. Then in three months or so, I’m going to be dead and they’re going to be bringing you guys in from Joliet for radiation treatments — and you’re going to die in prison.” He shook his head determinedly. “It’s all wrong. Look, if I give myself up, maybe they’ll go easy on you. Maybe you’ll just get probation.”

  The three men who had freed him exchanged glances, each in his own way moved by Alan’s concern.

  “Look, Alan,” said Lewis, “it’s nice of you to feel that way about us, but the fact is, it ain’t only you and us and the cops that are involved in this thing. See all this money here? We stole it from Cicero Charley Waxman, a mobster — and Cicero Charley don’t grant probation. If he catches up with us, we’re dead — and he’ll catch up with us just as easy inside prison as out.”

  “Maybe easier,” Hoxie amended.

  Potts went over and draped an arm around Alan’s shoulders. “What he’s saying, old buddy, is that we’re up to our necks in this thing. Ain’t no way out for us now. We got to play it right to the end. It just might turn out that the only thing we get out of this is knowing we helped you get away. You take that away from us an’ it could turn out that we done it all for nothing. You don’t want to do that to us, do you?”

  “No,” Alan shook his head, “I don’t.”

  “You best get on up to that little badger ranch then,” Hoxie told him quietly. “That way we get something out of it.”

  “All right,” Alan said, lowering his eyes. He looked like he might cry.

  Lewis guided Alan over to one of the open suitcases, which was now neatly packed with bundles of currency. “There’s three thousand dollars in one-dollar bills, another fifteen hundred in fives and tens, and here” — he handed Alan a separate bundle — “is another five hundred in mixed bills to put in your pocket. Potts is going to drive you over to the Greyhound terminal near the airport. He’ll go in and buy you a ticket on the first bus leaving; it’s safer for him to do it, ‘cause there won’t be no pictures of us out yet. Then you take the ticket and get on the bus. Wherever it takes you, you can start out from there for Canada. Eight to five you’ll make it.”

  Alan shook hands with Lewis and Hoxie, and left with Potts.

  Lewis and Hoxie went back to counting dollar bills.

  ~ * ~

  When Potts returned, Lewis and Hoxie were watching television.

  “We made the evening news,” Lewis told him.

  “Made it bigtime,” Hoxie added. “Lead story.”

  “They got a picture of the kid on there, but none of us yet. We got the city cops, state police, and FBI after us. They got the feds in on it ‘cause they say we’re prob’ly gonna leave the state and that’s something called ‘Interstate Flight.’ How’d the kid do?”

  “Good,” said Potts. “Got him on a bus to Omaha, Nebraska. He said he can make Montana easy from there, then just walk into Canada through the woods.” Potts looked at one of the beds, which was piled with bundles of money. “All counted, huh?”

  “All counted,” Lewis confirmed. “My friend Ralph estimated it pretty close. Total take was twenty-three thousand six hundred and twelve dollars. Minus the five grand we gave the kid, leaves us with eighteen thousand six hundred twelve. That comes to sixty-two hundred and four bucks apiece.”

  “Damn poor wages,” Hoxie muttered, “considering we got all that law plus Cicero Charley after us.”

  “Yeah, sixty-two hunnerd ain’t gonna get us far,” said Potts.

  “We could still make Buenos Aires,” Lewis pointed out. “At least we’d be out of the country, and each have five grand to last us down there.”

  “Count me out,” Potts said. “I got my wife and three kids to think about. Only reason I went in on this was I figured to have enough money to send for them, so’s they could be with me when I die. Since that ain’t worked out, I’ll prob’ly just send my share of the dough to them and go on the bum around the city here until I get picked up.”

  “Hell, you can send them my puny little share, too,” said Hoxie. “I’ll go on the bum with you. Anything to get out of my daughter’s basement.”

  “There is one other thing we could do,” Lewis said quietly. He was sitting with his eyebrows knitted together in a frown, looking like a cross between James Cagney and an owl. “I don’t know if you guys would go for it or not. “

  “Well, let’s hear it. I mean, we ain’t never let you down yet, have we?” Potts said drily.

  “Yeah, tell us all about it,” Hoxie declared. “Hell, we wouldn’t be where we are today if it wasn’t for you, my man.”

  “I thought of something while we was counting all them dollar bills,” Lewis explained. “It was something my friend Ralph said to me one Thursday morning when he let me into the parlor early to lay my bets. He said I was lucky he was letting me in at all — especially on Thursday. Because Thursdays and Fridays was count days. Thursdays and Fridays. If the chump change from parlay cards comes in on Thursdays, the serious money from track and sports betting must come in on Fridays. I picked the wrong day for us. The big bucks should be delivered in the morning.”

  Hoxie looked askance at him. “Lewis, are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  “Next thing you know,” Potts said, “you’ll be wanting to hold up a bank.”

  “I thought about that,” Lewis admitted, “bu
t with the security and alarms and all, I figured it was nine to five we’d get caught.”

  “And you think we won’t get caught if we rob the same place tomorrow that we robbed today?” Hoxie asked incredulously.

  “That’s exactly what I think,” Lewis said. “Right now, Cicero Charley thinks he’s lucky that we hit him on Thursday. Ralph’s already admitted to him that he let me in on Thursdays only. Cicero Charley’s got no idea I even know that Friday is a count day, too. Plus which, by now he already knows from the news what else we done, springing the kid, and he knows the law’s after us. Right now, he figures we’re running for our lives. He wouldn’t think in a million years that we’d hit him again tomorrow.”

  “That friend of yours, Ralph, ain’t gonna open the door again,” Potts pointed out.