Tempted by Trouble

by Eric Jerome Dickey

  When I stopped, first I started the pump, then I pulled on my hat and a wool coat, took cautious steps, and went to the side of BP and used a pay phone to call Eddie Coyle. While the cellular rang, I listened to his hillbilly-rock music. It was a song by Kid Rock, one of his idols, the vulgar lyrics exclaiming that no one had ever met anyone who was as bad as the Kid from Detroit. Across the street was a giant billboard for one of the local newscasters. The Jewell of the South. I’d seen at least three billboards with her face on it since I hit the Georgia state line.

  Eddie Coyle answered. “Who’s calling my private line at seven in the morning?”

  “It’s the Feds. Come out with your hands up.”

  “Dmytryk?”

  “Good morning. I guess I woke you up.”

  He paused. “Where are you?”

  “Just made it to Atlanta.”

  “You’re joking. You made it here in this weather?”

  “I guess I got lucky and cruised in with no problem. I just left 285 at exit seven.”

  “Jackie’s here. She said you and she split up in Texas.”

  “I’d had enough of her.”

  “She can be a little intense.”

  I took a deep breath and smelled her on my skin. I asked, “She’s with you and your crew?”

  “No, but she called when she landed at Hartsfield yesterday. She barely made it in. Airport is shut down now and so are a lot of the roads and most of the big businesses downtown.”

  “Well, let’s get the ball rolling. I’m at the BP on Cascade Road filling up.”

  “You’re across the street from KFC and the driving range.”

  “I guess.” I looked around. “Yeah, I see a sign for Cascade Driving Range from here.”

  “I need to handle my morning constitution, then shower.”

  I took out my pocket watch, flipped it open, checked the time, and asked, “How long?”

  “Give me a couple of hours.”

  “Where the hell are you?”

  “Rome.”

  I took a deep breath and my exhaustion doubled. “Well, you knew I’d be here for the job.”

  “I didn’t expect you this soon, not in this weather. I thought you’d be here much later.”

  “Well, I’m here. I said I’d be here and I’m here.”

  “Man of your word.”

  I nodded. “If nothing else.”

  “Let me get cleaned up.”

  “Okay, Eddie Coyle. See you in two hours. More or less.”

  “Dmytryk, before I get there . . . I need to put something on the table.”

  “Something changed since L.A.?”

  “You could say that.” He paused. “Sammy and Rick were in on this job.”

  “I know. Rick, Sammy, and Jackie. But that’s changed. I’m the seat filler.”

  “I’m two men short. That disaster in L.A. left me in a bad spot.”

  “It left me in a tight spot as well.”

  He paused again. “When is the last time you heard from Cora?”

  “Cora?” Taken aback, I paused. “Why are you asking about Cora?”

  “How long has it been since you heard from her?”

  “Well, the story hasn’t changed. She left Detroit when I was working in Pasadena, Texas. Rick, Sammy, you, and me did that job. I got back and she was gone. That’s the best I can tell you. But she’s not a snitch, if that’s what you’re asking. She’s a New Yorker.”

  He paused. “She came down south.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We ran into her.”

  “We?”

  “Bishop and I.”

  “You and your brother ran into her?”

  “A few times.”

  “Where exactly?”

  “She told me that she was living in an apartment out in Oklahoma City after she left Detroit.”

  “Oklahoma City? She’s in Oklahoma?”

  “Was. She was working out that way. She got in the business and stayed in the business.”

  I took a deep breath and shook my head. “Is she incarcerated?”

  “No.”

  “Where is she?”

  “We’ve been in contact. She needed my expertise. She was in on a job at a Bank of America in Utica Square, then she was in on another job, another Bank of America in downtown Tulsa. A few months ago I’d sent Jackie over to help her out. Together they did a Chase Bank on South Lewis.”

  “So, you’ve been working with my wife?”

  “She called me and asked for assistance and I sent Jackie Brown to help her out.”

  “So Jackie and Cora are friends?”

  “They know each other, but I wouldn’t call them friends.”

  “She did three jobs in Oklahoma?”

  “The newspaper had called them the Freeway Bandits because all of the banks were near the interstates. When men rob a bank, it’s a blip. When women rob a bank, it’s news.”

  “What else did Cora say when you ran into her?”

  “She said that you took her out on a job once. She told me, not in detail, but she mentioned that you did.”

  “Yeah. In Guthrie. Small bank. Farmers and Merchants. It was sixteen hours from Detroit. We left late one Thursday night, did the job, made it to Detroit in time for church on Sunday morning.”

  “Decent score?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “In this business, that is always the point. The penalty is too high to take small risks.”

  “The score was nothing life changing, but the practice was good and the getaway was easy. It helped keep the lights on and food on the table.”

  “Maybe that was why she went back to that area. After Jackie left, Cora stayed and things went bad in Oklahoma and she needed some help, so she contacted me to help fix her problems.”

  I waited for him to run out of words before I asked, “What went bad?”

  “It’s not important. It’s been resolved. The bodies are buried. Let’s move on.”

  “You have a number so I can call her?”

  “I have her number. But you won’t be needing it.” Eddie Coyle paused. “Cora is with me.”

  “What do you mean with you?”

  “I mean what I said, Dmytryk. She’s with me.”

  An instant headache attacked me; a new level of anger made me want to scream, made me want to attack the world, but I kept it all suppressed.

  I had learned that from Henrick. A calm man could make more ground than an angry fool.

  He said, “I just wanted you to know she’s in on this with us.”

  “My wife is with you.”

  “I didn’t hesitate nor did I stutter.”

  “For how long?”

  “We’ll talk. We’ll sit down and talk face-to-face, like men, not over the phone.”

  “She left Detroit and came down here to be with you.”

  “That’s not what happened. She left Detroit and went wherever she went, ended up back in Oklahoma, and now she’s here for a while. She’s in on this job.”

  “But she’s back here and she’s with you.”

  “We’ll talk.”

  I swallowed, gritted my teeth, felt my heartbeat pounding like drums inside my ears.

  Eddie Coyle said, “Cora is riding down to Atlanta with me.”

  “Hold up. She’s in Rome with you now?”

  “She is.”

  “Jackie knew about this?”

  “Keep Jackie out of this.”

  “She’s been with me since L.A. She rode in my car from L.A. to Fort Worth.”

  “I know.”

  “This is interesting, Eddie Coyle. This is really interesting.”

  “You want to pass on this job? If you do, I respect that and understand.”

  “Respect.”

  “It’s your call. I could use you. We don’t have enough people, not with Sammy and Rick out of the picture. This is an important job and, our differences aside, it could make a big difference in your life.”

&nbs
p; I hesitated. “Let’s talk. Come down from your throne in Rome and let’s have a sit-down.”

  “We’ll be down as soon as we get cleaned up.”

  It sounded like he was smiling. On the streets behind me, winds blew and traffic crawled. It felt like I was trapped in Atlanta. My insides were cursing and screaming, the exhaustion making this seem like a bad dream, but I tightened my lips and refused to let Eddie Coyle get the best of me.

  Eddie Coyle added, “By the way, Rick didn’t make it. He expired a few hours ago.”

  I said, “Does his wife know?”

  “She knows and she knows to keep her mouth closed. If we have to visit her, it won’t be to bring flowers. So all she has to do is tell them she knew nothing.”

  “I’m real sorry to hear Rick didn’t make it.”

  “No you’re not. None of us are. And he wouldn’t be sorry if you had died.”

  “He was a good guy.”

  “Depending on the situation and with whom he was dealing, he could be conceived of as such.”

  “Well, he was a good guy to me. And that was all that mattered.”

  “Rick’s dying is the good news.”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “The bad news is that the security guard died too.”

  “If we’re caught, it’s a capital case.”

  “If you’re caught.”

  “Me and Jackie.”

  “There would be no way anyone would know Jackie was in on the job, right?”

  I gritted my teeth. “You’re right. It’s all on me.”

  “Exactly. If that ship sinks, leave her on the life raft.”

  Another chill hit me before I asked, “Did Rick come out of his coma before he died?”

  “No idea. I just know he didn’t recover from his lead poisoning.”

  Again I paused.

  In that space of time I saw Rick’s face, heard him telling me that he had things to tell me after the job, things that he wasn’t at liberty to say in the presence of Sammy and Jackie.

  I said, “So, you’re serious. Cora is really there with you in Rome.”

  “I’m not one for jokes, not at this hour of the day.”

  “Me. You. Cora. And Jackie.”

  “And Bishop.”

  I licked my wounded lips. “So it’s the five of us.”

  “If you’re still in, and I want you to be, it’s the five of us plus one.”

  I asked, “Who is the felon hiding behind curtain number six?”

  “At the moment, that’s not relevant.”

  “The inside man.”

  “Of course. The inside man is number six.”

  Coldness embraced my heart. I cleared my throat and asked, “Where am I going?”

  “Thumbs Up in East Point.”

  “Back by the airport.”

  “You can take I-285 back toward Hartsfield and get off at Camp Creek.”

  “Afraid not. The interstate is a parking lot and everything is at a standstill.”

  “You can take the streets. You know where Delowe Drive is?”

  “Let me get a pen and paper out of my coat pocket.”

  Eddie Coyle told me where to go and I scribbled down the directions.

  He said, “Dmytryk, this is an important job. I want everything to be civilized.”

  “As civilized as it can be.”

  Back inside my car, I took Jackie’s gun, made sure it was loaded, and put it in my pocket.

  13

  Delowe Drive was a narrow street that a man could miss if he blinked. Eddie Coyle just happened to leave that out, so I drove about two miles too far and ended up down by the West End Mall before I back-tracked. Every mile or a so there was an accident or a car that had slid off the road into a building or a pole. In this weather, that added another forty-five minutes to my trip in the bowels of hell.

  Once I exited the prestigious Cascade, I saw how the less fortunate lived. It was like being in Detroit. Or North Carolina. It was like being in New Orleans. The poor were scattered all over the country and the rich lived in pocket communities with walls high enough to keep the poor away. Foreclosures were behind those walls too. A lot of Jacks and Jills had fallen hard.

  I passed a man standing at a bus stop, a man who looked like Rick, but when I looked in my rearview mirror he was gone. I rubbed my eyes and kept moving forward.

  A few seconds later, at another bus stop I passed a man who looked like Sammy.

  Again, when I looked in my rearview mirror, that man was gone too.

  I swallowed and felt the lightness in my head and inside my body.

  Something told me that I was already dead, that I had died back in Los Angeles. But the pain I felt in my heart told me that I was still alive.

  When I landed in East Point, my first impression was that I had driven back in time and landed in Mayberry. It was a nice area with a high concentration of banks. I counted at least six banks within two blocks. Across the street from Thumbs Up, what used to be a nice-size church had been turned into a Bank of America. Banks had been planted in every direction I looked. It was a forest of federally insured financial institutions. But a police precinct sat in the heart of all that old Southern money. Response time to a robbery in this area had to be under a minute.

  I hoped this wasn’t what Eddie Coyle had in mind. It would be L.A. all over again.

  Thumbs Up was inside a refurbished building on White Way, had a brick façade and an open dining room. Waiters and waitresses were rushing back and forth. The sleet wasn’t coming down in East Point at the moment, but it was cold enough for me to have flashbacks of walking along the Detroit River. I shook those memories away, tried to make them vanish the way a child erased drawings from an Etch A Sketch. The establishment wasn’t overflowing, but they had plenty of business; more than enough people were coming and going to make the owner proud.

  I hadn’t eaten a decent meal since Los Angeles. The food smelled so good my stomach started doing cartwheels. I had to get away from the aroma before I lost my mind and ran inside and started grabbing food from plates, so I swallowed my hunger pains and walked that strip impatiently waiting on Eddie Coyle, strolled down to the MARTA station that was at the corner, walked around the block, everybody I passed saying good morning like I was their first cousin. It looked like this was another area clustered with banks. A Bank of America sat across the street from the diner and at least two more were a thirty-second job from that one. I saw police driving like wasps circling a nest, kept my eyes away from the cops, and pretended I was just another local checking out the mom-and-pop businesses that populated East Point, Georgia.

  My cellular vibrated. It was Eddie Coyle. He was five minutes away.

  I adjusted my fedora, rubbed my hands, and hurried my anger and anxiety back toward the diner.

  The gun was inside my pocket, the .22 that Jackie had given me in Fort Worth.

  Christmas music and cheerful employees in Santa Claus hats aggravated me with kindness as I waited inside Thumbs Up. Nausea rose inside of me and I went to the bathroom and locked the door, stood with my head over the toilet, but nothing happened. I coughed, dry heaved, and spat. Then I washed my hands and splashed warm water on my rugged face before I went back and waited off to the side, found room on a bench. From there I stared out at the streets with fear, anger, and impatience. I didn’t see them pull up, but I saw them coming from the parking lot across the street.

  They must’ve arrived in East Point while I was in the bathroom battling queasiness. I was feeling miserable but Cora was smiling and laughing. She was wearing a goddamn black fedora. That was insult to injury. She was wearing a fedora, glowing and skipping ice puddles in the bitter cold. Her hair hung from her hat, hair that was the color of honey. She had colored her hair. She was smoking a cigarette. So was Eddie Coyle. I knew that he only smoked Marlboro Blacks. I’d made her stop smoking a year before we married.

  Eddie Coyle tossed his smoke, then my wife took a long pull and tossed hers,
her final exhalation sending a stream of cancer from her beautiful lips. Fumes rose around her head and face like she was a starlet in a movie from the 1940s. I wiped my face and did my best to look my best, not wanting either of them to see me looking as angry or as battered as I was feeling. Head to toe I felt like crap, but I fought the exhaustion.

  Then I blinked a hundred times, swallowed, tried to remove the bitterness from my palate.

  Cora looked like she had put on close to thirty pounds and none of it was muscle. Despite that added softness, she fit in with the women in the area and still managed to look like she had stepped off the cover of a magazine that featured stories penned by Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, maybe a pulp story about a mysterious, buxom woman who carried a gun, a woman who had sex for fun and shot people for the same reason. My elusive wife had gray wool pants that stopped around the middle of her calves. Toreador pants. She also had on a dark turtleneck, black boots that looked like they cost as much as a fur coat from Windsor.

  Eddie Coyle knew I was watching.

  He strutted next to Cora, hand in hand with her, like they were newlyweds the morning after. He had on dark jeans and boots, and an oversize American flag belt buckle held up his jeans. He had on an old sweatshirt that advertised for McCain and Palin, bold lettering underneath their grinning faces, THE MAVERICK AND THE MILF. MILF was twice the size of maverick. Eddie Coyle wore that outdated sexist misogynistic political advert in Obama country and walked like he was looking for a street fight. Knowing Eddie Coyle, he was looking for a brawl. Starting a fight was his cup of coffee.

  Pain rose up inside me, the epicenter of that flaming ache trying to destroy that thing in my chest that was shaped like a fist wrapped in blood.

  It had been 380 days since her legs moved away from each other on my behalf, 380 days since she moaned because of me, 380 sunrises and sunsets since she welcomed me into the warmth that lived between her thighs.

  Customers had to pass through two glass doors to come inside Thumbs Up. The first glass door brought people out of the horrible weather and deposited them inside a vestibule just big enough for a newsstand that housed rags like Creative Loafing, Sunday Paper, and Rolling Out. That was where my wife was when she looked through the second glass door. She saw me and froze. She stared and blinked over and over like she was trying to wake from a nightmare, like she was trying to make a monster disappear. I raised my hand and waved just to let her know that it was me. For a moment she had a dolorous expression, as did I. Maybe she thought this meeting was coincidental, but in the next blink her eyes widened. She realized Eddie Coyle had brought me here intentionally. Her nostrils flared and happiness abandoned her face. My nostrils flared and my face became the snarl of a rabid dog.