The Getaway Man

by Andrew Vachss

  Tim went over to the wall, where the phone was. He dialed a number. “Your friend Rochelle doing anything tonight?” he said.

  I couldn’t hear what the other person said back. Then Tim said, “Oh, she’ll like this boy, I promise you.”

  I don’t know how much Rochelle liked me, but I liked her, all right. In the morning, I drove her to work. She was a waitress, and she had the early shift.

  I saw her for a few weeks straight after that. I used some of the money from the job to buy her a bracelet she saw in a store window. Rochelle said she really liked that bracelet, so I knew I couldn’t go wrong getting it for her.

  One night, Rochelle told me her man would be back sometime the next day. The County was cutting him loose, and he would be moving back in with her. She said he was crazy jealous, and she couldn’t be seeing me anymore.

  I wasn’t upset—I had never figured on a girl like Rochelle staying with me for long.

  “Thank you for telling me,” I said. “Otherwise, I might have come by your house one day, and it could have been bad.”

  Rochelle gave me one of those looks I never understand. “Do you want your bracelet back, Eddie?” she asked me.

  “It’s your bracelet,” I told her. “I bought it for you. I guess you could tell your man you got it from—”

  “I wasn’t asking you because I was worried about … Ah, never mind, sugar. You take care of yourself.”

  She gave me a kiss with no promise in it, and then she went away.

  Later that same night, Virgil walked over to where I was working on one of the cars in the shed.

  “Rochelle was doing you a favor, Eddie,” he said. “That man of hers, Leon, he is one stone insane peckerwood. You’d have to kill him.”

  “I guess.”

  Virgil was quiet for a few minutes. Then he said, “You want her bad enough to do something like that?”

  “No,” I told him.

  “Okay, then,” he said.

  We smoked a cigarette apiece, just looking at the crescent moon. Then Virgil went back into the house.

  After that first time, we didn’t do any more test runs. Everything was for real.

  One job was a post office. We went at night. Virgil was dressed in one of those padded suits people who work in meat lockers wear. Tim swung the sledgehammer against the glass. Virgil put his arms over his head and jumped right on through where it was smashed in. The alarm went off, loud.

  Virgil ran around and opened the door from the inside, so Tim could help him.

  The alarm kept ringing. Tim said we had to keep everything under three minutes. He told me to keep watch, but not to make any noise unless the cops showed up.

  Tim and Virgil came out. They were hauling a big gray post office bag. They heaved it into the trunk and jumped in with me.

  “Drive like the Devil’s behind you, Eddie,” Tim said.

  The bag was full of all kinds of stuff. Mostly stamps. There was a little cash, not much. The big score was all the blank money orders. Tim said he knew a guy who would give us a good deal on them, but we had to turn them over fast, before the feds got the list out.

  One thing I learned from Tim: It was better to take a long time planning a big job than to do a lot of little ones in a hurry. After a while, I got to be in on the planning. Just the driving part, but that was very important, Tim said. Mostly the route for the getaway, but also what car to use, too.

  Mr. Clanton’s junkyard was so big, you could make a new car out of the parts of old ones. He showed me how to cut license plates in half and make new ones out of the pieces. Ones that wouldn’t come up stolen if a cop looked at them.

  “Can you get us something really fast?” Tim asked me one night.

  “Fast top end? Or off the line?” I said. There’s a big difference, but most people never think about that.

  “We’re gonna be chased, Eddie,” he said. “Count on it.”

  “How could the cops—?”

  “Not the cops,” he said. “It’s going to be a race. If we win, we get a lot of money. And nobody’s going to call the cops.”

  “What happens if we—?”

  “We get dead,” Virgil said. He had a big grin on his face.

  Mr. Clanton had an old Chevy stock car at his place. It used to run in Sportsman Modified over at the Speedway a few years ago. “The owner got sick of throwing away money,” Mr. Clanton told us. “The fool he had for a driver spent more time on the wall than he did on the track. They never could get themselves a decent sponsor, so I took it in trade for some motors. It’s just been sitting around here, ever since.”

  I spent a lot of time with that car. Putting in a new engine was easy—the whole front end tilted up and there was plenty of room to work. The suspension was the problem.

  “This one was set up to go roundy-round,” Mr. Clanton said. “Spent its whole sad life making left turns. It’s geared real short, too.”

  I told him I was sure I could fix it, and he let me use his shop to try. Every time I made a change, I took it out and tried it, to make sure it worked.

  One night, Virgil asked me what the hell was taking me so long. Before I could say anything, Tim said, “Eddie knows what he’s doing.”

  That made me even more determined to do it perfect.

  When I was done, the car looked like it was normal, if you didn’t get too close. I even got the lights hooked up. There was only the one seat in the front, but we weren’t going any long distance. The bad thing about it for a getaway car was that it only had two doors. If you’ve got more than one man coming, it takes longer to jump into that kind of car. But Tim said he had a plan for that, too.

  The building was against the side of a hill, so you had to climb a long flight of outside stairs to get to the door on the second floor. That was around the side; the front was the same level as the ground—that’s where they had the strip club.

  “The game’s upstairs,” Tim said, “but the chase is going to come from around the front. They’ll have to call down for help.”

  “What about doing their tires?” I asked him. “So they can’t chase us.”

  “You see how many cars there are in the lot, Eddie? We don’t know which ones the bouncers drive. We’d have to do them all. Anyway, there’s way too much traffic in the lot, people coming in and out all the time. Anybody spots us doing the tires, we’re done. You’ve got to drive, kid. All right?”

  “I got it,” I said. My chest felt big with what Tim had called me. Same as Virgil.

  I started the engine. We rolled over to a spot right next to the bottom of the stairs. Tim and Virgil got out.

  They climbed up the stairs. I lost sight of them when they went in the door.

  I closed my eyes for a second, to fix the road I’d have to drive in my mind. Then I waited.

  Somebody came charging down the stairs. Virgil. He grabbed the widemouth can he had stashed at the bottom, ran about halfway back up, and started splashing gas all over the steps as he backed down again.

  Three shots blasted. Tim came flying down the stairs, a laundry sack in one hand. When he got to where the gas was, he threw down the sack and vaulted off. Soon as he was in the air, Virgil lit the whole thing up.

  I revved the engine, put the car in first, held the clutch down.

  Virgil threw the laundry sack in the side window. It landed right next to me. He crawled in behind; Tim jumped in the front. They pulled their masks off.

  The flames were swallowing the stairs. I dropped the clutch. We came out of that lot like a shotgun blast. The stock car got a little sideways on the dirt, but I was ready for it to do that, and I never had to let off the gas.

  The road went straight as a string for about five miles before there was any chance to turn off. I couldn’t see any lights behind us.

  “We’re gone!” Tim said, looking over his shoulder.

  We were almost to the first turnoff when I saw a pair of pickups coming toward us. Suddenly, they slammed on their brakes, blocki
ng the road.

  “Well, look at that. Hillbillies got themselves a CB radio, huh?” Virgil said. I couldn’t see his face behind me, but I knew he was grinning.

  I stabbed the brakes as I gunned the engine and downshifted all the way to second. As we started to skid, I cranked the wheel hard over, and floored it. The stock car got sideways, powersliding right at the two pickups. I whipped the wheel back to the left and we slipped around them with about a yard to spare.

  A big chunk of the windshield disappeared just before I heard the shots.

  “Come on, cocksuckers!” Virgil yelled right in my ear, blasting his pistol out the window.

  Tim was somewhere under all that glass, but I could see him moving.

  Everything slowed down then. I could see it all happening, like we were underwater. I felt a couple of shots go into the rear of the car, like they were going into me. Tim’s face was all bloody. He was trying to get his gun up. One of the pickups wheeled around behind us. It had a row of bright lights in a bar across the top of its roof, blazing.

  “Drive us, Eddie!” Tim said. Real soft, but it was like a shout to me.

  I bent the stock car into that first corner, and put my right foot through the floorboard. I’d been over those roads dozens of times, practicing. It felt like there was a wire running from my hands direct into the front wheels, like I was bending my own body around those curves. Once in a while I could catch a flash of the pickup’s lights on an angle, but they never got close enough to fire any more shots. At least, none I could hear.

  When I spotted the big tree with the giant white “X” I had spray-painted on it, I knew we were nearly home. Just up the road a piece from the “X” was a tight hairpin curve around a mass of rocks. I could hear the pickup coming on. I braked deep, sliding just a little bit. Then I slowed down even more, so we were just barely moving. I could hear Virgil slam another clip in his pistol.

  I looked over at Tim. He finally had his gun up, but he couldn’t turn enough to aim back out his window.

  The pickup came closer. I goosed the throttle with the clutch in, making sure the carburetor was clean. The second I saw the wash of the pickup’s lights, we took off again. The stock car slipped around that hairpin like water through a pipe.

  The pickup thought we were going much faster than we really were. By then, it was too late for them to slow down. I couldn’t see the crash, but I heard it.

  “They ain’t got no more!” Virgil yelled.

  When we got back, we found out that Tim was all cut up, but none of it was too bad. I didn’t even know I’d been nicked until Tim’s girl Merleen finished cleaning him up and came over to me.

  “Your ear’s bleeding, Eddie,” she said.

  “Probably some glass, like Tim got,” I told her.

  “Let me see … Damn! The whole lobe is about gone. You must have had a bullet go right by your face.”

  “I don’t remember anything like that.”

  “It’s all … burned, too. Like you got shot up close,” Merleen said.

  She poured some alcohol on my ear, then covered it with some white ointment from a tube. She wrapped a lot of tape all around my ear, real tight. It looked stupid, but it didn’t hurt.

  By then, I figured out what had happened, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want Virgil to feel bad.

  “You feel bad about it?” Mr. Clanton asked me.

  He meant that we had to cut up the stock car and get rid of all the pieces.

  “No, sir,” I told him.

  “That car was a horse for you boys,” Mr. Clanton said.

  I wanted to explain to him. How I didn’t care about cars, just about driving. But I thought that would sound dumb, so I just shook my head like I was sad. That was what Mr. Clanton expected of me, I think.

  Virgil showed me how to bury money in mason jars, like they use for canning. Money’s only paper. If you don’t seal it up real tight, it could rot on you, especially if you left it a long time.

  We couldn’t spend most of the money right away, Tim said. The men who were in that poker game had people all over the place. If we started throwing money around, word could get back to them.

  I asked Tim if he would hide my share for me.

  “I’ll hide half of it for you, Eddie,” he said. “The other half, you have to hide for yourself.”

  “How come?”

  “You can never have all your money in one place,” he said. “What if I had to come back for my own money? In a hurry, you understand. I might not have time to cover my tracks. Anyone coming hot on my heels would find your share, too.”

  “If that happened, you could take my share with you.”

  “Eddie … you can’t always get away. Not every time. If I got caught, all the money would be gone. Yours, too, understand?”

  “I guess I do. But I could always—”

  “Half,” Tim said. “No more.”

  Virgil was a real good cook. Specially his barbeque. He made his own pit on the side of the house, out of some special bricks that came from a famous barbeque oven in Kansas City. Virgil said, after a lot of years, the bricks get to hold a flavor, and whatever you cook in them gets some of that flavor, too.

  I was never sure when Virgil was having fun with me, when he told me things, but his barbeque was good enough he could have opened a restaurant. Tim was always after him to do that. He said we all had to have regular, legitimate businesses to be in, because stickup men never die of old age, and we couldn’t just keep on the way we were forever.

  Virgil said we were going to all do it, someday. We’d have a big barbeque joint. Virgil would be the cook, and Tim would be the manager.

  “And we’ll have a beautiful little garage right next to it,” Tim said. “Maybe a body shop, or a place for motors. Right, Eddie?”

  “Sure,” I said. But I was really wishing they had asked me to work in the restaurant.

  We were all out by the barbeque pit one afternoon. Virgil had been doing something with the meat all day—he had all different kinds, not just pork, like you see in some places—and he was just starting to put it on the fire. A car pulled up. An old one, is all I remember about it.

  A woman got out of the front seat. She was kind of heavy, with long straight brown hair.

  “Brenda,” Tim said to Virgil.

  The woman walked over to where we were standing.

  “I got to talk to you,” she said to Tim.

  Tim looked over at Virgil. Then he moved his head to the side a little bit, so you could see he was listening.

  “Wallace.…” the woman said.

  “I’m not doing this again, Brenda,” Tim said. “That’s your man. And that’s your choice. You think I forgot what happened before?”

  “This is—”

  “What, Brenda? This is different? How many times you come around here, looking for money because Wallace beat your ass and took your check? But that wasn’t enough for you, right? You wait until I’m off somewhere and sneak yourself up here. Virgil, he takes one look at your face all bashed up, and what does he do?”

  “I didn’t mean for him to—”

  “You’re a no-good, lying bitch, Brenda,” Tim said. His voice was as calm as if he was asking you if you wanted a beer. “You think, because we’re kin, you get to play us over and over, don’t you?”

  “Tim, I swear—”

  “Don’t fucking swear,” Tim said. “It wasn’t the judge who sent my brother over that time, Brenda. It was you.”

  “I’m sorry. You know I never would—”

  “You never would what?” Virgil said. His voice was soft and quiet, like Tim’s. “Get me some County time for whipping that piece of shit Wallace? Yeah, you’d do that. You did that. But you know what, Brenda? That’s not why I’m done with you, even if you are Mom’s baby sister. I didn’t mind doing the time. I thought it was worth it. I figured that was it for Wallace; he’d be afraid to show his mangy face around you. And then what happens?”

  “Vir
gil.…”

  “You take up with him again,” Virgil said, still quiet. “I’m on a fucking road gang, and Wallace is back with his favorite piece of ass.”

  “There’s nothing for you here, Brenda,” Tim said. “We never thought we’d see you again, and that’s the way we wanted it. You may be a stupid slut, but you’re not that stupid, you didn’t know how we felt about you. If Mom was alive, she’d spit on you for what you did to Virgil, so don’t come around using her name like you did before.”

  “It’s not for me,” the woman said. Her face was all twisted up, like she was going to cry, but she didn’t. “It’s about Janine.”

  “I don’t know any Janine,” Tim said.

  “She’s Wanda and Roy’s girl,” Brenda said. “You know Wanda was killed by that drunk driver year before last. And then Roy took with the cancer. He’s been in the hospital, just waiting to die. So I took Janine to live with me. Since I’m a blood relative and all.”

  “Yeah, you’re a good-hearted woman, all right,” Tim said. “How big a check’s the government giving you for her?”

  “That isn’t why I did it,” Brenda said. “If I didn’t come through, Janine would have gone to a foster home. And you know what they’re like.”

  “Get to it, Brenda,” Virgil told her. “I got meat waiting that’s more important to me than you are.”

  “Who’s this?” Brenda said, looking at me.

  “None of your business,” Tim said. “Nothing around here is any of your business. This is a man we trust. You don’t want to talk in front of him, tell your story walking.”

  “She’s in the car,” Brenda said.

  “Who?”

  “Janine. I had to bring her with me. She’s only twelve. I couldn’t leave her in the house alone.”

  “Brenda.…” Tim didn’t sound so patient anymore.

  “Wallace has been messing with her!” she said. “I just found out, I swear. I don’t know what to do. She’s scared of him. I can’t go to the police, because—”

  “You stay here,” Tim said, cutting her off. “Stay here, and don’t say a fucking word. Nobody’s listening to you, anyway.”

  Tim walked down to where Brenda’s car was sitting. I saw him tap on the window. In a minute or so, the window came down. I could see someone was in there, but I couldn’t make out anything about them.