The Getaway Man

by Andrew Vachss

  “I’m sorry,” Brenda said to Virgil.

  He acted like she wasn’t there.

  Tim opened the car door. A little girl got out. All I could see was that she was real skinny, with light brown hair, wearing a big yellow T-shirt that covered her all the way down to her knees. She walked down the path with Tim until I couldn’t see them anymore.

  They were gone a good while. Brenda kept trying to say something to Virgil, but he never spoke to her.

  “Eddie, would you do me a favor?” he asked me.

  “Sure.”

  “Go in the house and get my pistol.”

  “Which one?” I said.

  “Any of them’ll do,” Virgil told me.

  “Virgil.…” Brenda said.

  By the time I got back with Virgil’s pistol, Tim and the little girl were coming back up the path. Tim opened the door to the car, and the little girl got in. Tim held out his hand, and she grabbed it for a second. Then Tim came back up the rise toward us.

  “You filthy whore,” Tim said to Brenda. His voice was so soft and quiet I almost couldn’t hear it. “You didn’t just find out about Wallace fucking that little girl. You also found out she was pregnant, huh? So now you’re worried about your own ass. Like always.”

  “She’s lying, Tim!”

  “Lying about what? Lying about when she came to you and told you Wallace was grabbing her, and you slapped her face and told her Wallace was the man of the house? Lying about when Wallace whipped her with his belt until she was bloody, and you didn’t do nothing? Lying about the time you woke up in the night and found Wallace in her bed?”

  Tim moved closer to Brenda. She took a step back.

  “Tell me, Brenda,” he said. “I really want to know.”

  “I swear I—”

  “I told you about swearing, Brenda. Remember before, when I said if Mom was alive she’d spit on you? Well, if Mom knew what you did to that little girl, she’d fucking kill you, sister or no.”

  “What am I going to do?”

  “You, huh? What you’re going to do, you’re going to drive Janine down to the Welfare and tell them the truth. The truth, you dirty bitch. If I find out you protected Wallace, I’ll come looking for you, understand?”

  “But if Janine tells, Wallace’ll—”

  “Here,” Tim said, handing her some bills. “You don’t go back home, understand? You go to a motel. There’s enough there for a couple of weeks, food and everything. It may take a few days for the law to pick Wallace up, but he’s not making bail once they do, and you’ll be able to go back home.”

  “A motel’s no place for a—”

  “Janine’s not going to be with you, Brenda. You leave her with the Welfare.”

  “But she’ll end up in—”

  “Wherever she ends up, it’ll be better than being with you.”

  Brenda started crying. “You don’t understand, Tim,” she said. “You’re not a woman.”

  “Neither are you,” Tim said.

  We were at the kitchen table later that night, when Tim said, “We’ve got a job, Eddie.”

  “Okay.”

  “Thing is, there’s no shares this time. There won’t be any money. So we’ll just pay you cash, like we hired you, fair enough?”

  “Sure,” I said. I got up and walked outside. Quick, before anything showed on my face.

  I was out there a long time. I never felt so sad in my whole life.

  I heard them come up behind me. I didn’t turn around.

  “You want some sausage?” Virgil said. He knows it’s my favorite.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “I don’t blame him,” Tim said. “Who’d want to eat a meal with a pair of stupid assholes like us?”

  I didn’t say anything. I knew my voice would shake if I did.

  Both of them came around so they were facing me.

  “We apologize, Eddie,” Virgil said. “We never meant to insult you.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “No, it isn’t,” Virgil said. “We never should have offered you money. We should have just asked if you’d drive us.”

  I didn’t want to talk. I felt like crying, only I was too sad.

  “No, that’s not right,” Tim said. “Eddie, we shouldn’t have asked you at all.”

  I looked right in his eyes.

  “You’re with us,” Tim said. “We’re with you. Blood is bullshit. Brenda’s not our kin, Eddie. You are.”

  Right then was the best moment I ever spent on earth.

  I stayed the next few days at the house. We all worked on our piece of what we had to do.

  “Janine’s with the Welfare,” Tim said, when he got off the phone. “Nobody knows where Brenda is.”

  “They pick up Wallace?” Virgil asked.

  “No. And they’re not going to.”

  “How come?” I said. “Once that little girl tells who—”

  “Janine’s not going to tell,” Tim said.

  “Why not?”

  “We made a pact,” Tim said. “A blood pact, between kin. If she told, you know what would happen?”

  “Wallace would go to prison?”

  “Maybe. And even if he did, it’d be only for a couple of years. What’s that?”

  “He has to be worried, though,” Virgil said. “Wondering if the hammer is going to drop.”

  “He’s not worried about the law,” Tim said. “He’s worried about us.”

  “He doesn’t know—”

  “Sure, he knows, little brother. You think that whore Brenda wasn’t on the phone to him first thing? Hell, she’s probably with him right now. It’s for damn sure Wallace hasn’t been sleeping at their place. He’s not going to give us a chance to catch him alone. Specially not after dark.”

  Tim had a plan. We gave it a couple of weeks, then we went out to do the job.

  “That’s him,” Tim said. “The fat fuck in the brown jacket. But there’s a lot of traffic.…”

  “It’s all right,” I told him, as we drove past the poolroom on the other side of the street.

  The poolroom was one of those places where you could make a bet, or shoot dice, or buy different kinds of things. Out front, they had some benches, and a bunch of little tables and chairs. People played dominos and cribbage out there, or they could eat one of the sandwiches they sold inside the place. They did a lot of business.

  I made another pass, then I double-backed and came at it from downwind.

  Wallace was out front, at one of the tables, having a beer with a couple of other guys. It wasn’t luck that we found him. Tim said he was there regular—he spent most of his days at the poolroom, either inside or out.

  Virgil was in the backseat, with the window down. He had a canvas sack filled with sand draped over the sill, to make a rest for his rifle. Tim was up front, next to me. He had a pistol in each hand.

  We were all dressed in the same white jackets. Tim and Virgil pulled the black stockings over their faces. We all had on black gloves. I was wearing a white cowboy hat and sunglasses.

  Cars were parked in front of the poolroom, but there was space between them. I came to a stop.

  Wallace never looked our way.

  “Back us up just a little,” Virgil said. “I need a better angle … yeah!”

  I pulled the lever into low, held the brake down with my left foot and fed the car a little gas. I watched the left mirror to make sure we weren’t going to get blocked when we pulled out. Then I said, “Okay.”

  A bomb went off just behind my head. Then Tim opened up with both pistols, like he was spraying with a pair of garden hoses. I moved my left foot off the brake as I stomped down on the gas.

  I slipped through traffic as smooth as I could, trying to balance speed with not calling attention to us. I had to bust a red light at one corner, but that wasn’t so unusual, the way people around there drove.

  A few blocks later, a squad car came right at us, siren blasting. But he went on by, probably heading to
the poolroom.

  Once I was sure nobody was chasing us, I pulled in behind the bus depot and Virgil jumped out. He had a duffel bag over his shoulder. Inside was all three guns, the stocking masks, my cowboy hat, and two pair of gloves—I kept mine, because I was still handling the wheel.

  After that, we were okay. I drove Tim all the way across town, to where he was parked. He was going to pick Virgil up from the bus depot, like he just came in from out of town.

  That left me alone. I wasn’t worried about an APB on the car. It was a grayish Toyota Camry; looked like a million other cars on the road. I just drove it through the alleys until I found a nice quiet spot. Then I climbed out, leaving the door open and the engine running, just like that guy in the Camaro, a long time ago.

  It came out just the way Tim said it would. They had the chief of police on TV. He was a square-faced guy, wearing a regular suit. The woman asking him questions had a lot of makeup on. Her hair was blonde, stiff, like a helmet.

  “The shooting appears to have been gang-related,” the chief told her. “We’ve been charting a significant increase in drug trafficking in our area recently. We attribute this to an influx of gangs from major metropolitan areas. This is typical of their pattern; they’re like salesmen trying to establish new territories.”

  “Is it true that you already have suspects?” the woman said.

  “I don’t want to comment at this time,” he said. “We don’t want to say anything that might compromise an ongoing investigation.”

  I thought maybe they were just trying to trick us, make us think they didn’t know what really had happened. But then they showed the TV woman talking to a couple of the people who had been there, outside the poolroom. They both said it was black guys who had done the shooting, a whole carful of them.

  We probably would have gone on forever, except for that little bank. Tim was the one who found it. He studied up on things like that, and he was a real good planner.

  The bank was about an hour’s drive away from where we were. It was an old one, sitting on some high ground outside the town. Tim told us the bank was there even before the town got built up, when the only thing around was the mill.

  “It was a company town,” Tim said.

  “What’s that?” I asked him.

  “That’s when the only work is for this one company, Eddie,” he said. “Like when there’s a mine, and nothing else. So the mining company owns the houses the workers live in, and it owns the stores they buy their goods in, too.

  “It’s like being in prison. If you have money on the books, you can get stuff from the commissary, right? Candy bars, cigarettes … even vitamins in some joints. And things for your cell, like a radio. But the deal is, there’s only the one commissary, so you don’t have a choice. If they want to sell Milky Way bars for five dollars, and you want a Milky Way bar, you pay that five dollars.”

  “But it’s not like real prison,” I said. “So how come the people in those towns, why don’t they just get in their cars and drive someplace else to shop?”

  “Things were different back then,” Tim said. “Back when they had those company towns, if you lived there, you probably didn’t have a car. Besides, you didn’t have any cash money. They just paid you in scrip.”

  “What’s scrip?”

  “Like a piece of paper that you could use for money. But it was only good in the stores the company owned.”

  “Isn’t that crooked?” I asked him.

  “Our granny thought it was,” Tim said. “She was the one who told me and Virgil about company towns.”

  “Because she lived in one?”

  “Sure did. She and my granddad, a long time ago. She was a real old lady when she told us about it.”

  “Your granddad was a miner?”

  “Not for long, he wasn’t,” Virgil said.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “He went into business for himself,” Tim said. He was smiling, like he does when he’s happy.

  “What business?”

  “Same one we’re in, Eddie,” he said.

  “What happened to him?”

  “The law got him,” Virgil said.

  “He went to prison?”

  “Never once,” Tim said. “My granddad got shot down by the law. They came to take him, and he wouldn’t go.”

  Tim said the bank would be swole up with money by noon every Thursday. That’s because Thursday was payday at the mill, and everyone came to the bank to cash their check. The armored car made the delivery early in the morning. The first shift at the mill ended at three, so we had what Tim called a window—we had to get in and out while it was still open.

  “I’ve been looking at that little bank for over a year now,” he told me and Virgil. “There’s only one guard, and he’s about a hundred years old. Spends all his time jawing with the customers, like it was a general store, or something. There’s only one camera, and we can take that out with spray paint. I guess there’s silent alarms and stuff, but all we need is about five minutes in there, then Eddie gets us all gone.”

  Tim leaned way back in his chair, puffing on his cigarette like it was a big cigar.

  “Boys,” he said, “that little bank, it’s like a cherry on top of a chocolate cupcake. All we got to do is pluck it off.”

  I never found out what happened inside that little bank, not until the trial.

  It was just after two in the afternoon when we pulled up. Tim said that’s the time it was always slow in the bank, specially on Thursdays.

  Virgil had a double-barreled sawed-off. Those are good for scaring people, Tim said. Much better than a pistol. Virgil carried the shotgun under his coat, against his chest, held there by a loop of rawhide around his neck. Tim had a pair of pistols, like he always used to carry.

  “Five minutes, Eddie,” Tim said to me. Then him and Virgil went into the bank.

  The clock on the dashboard was one of those digital ones. It said 2:09.

  The clock said 2:12 when I heard the crack of a pistol. Then the boom of Virgil’s shotgun.

  People started screaming.

  I started the engine and backed the car up to the front door of the bank.

  There was more gunfire. Then it got real quiet.

  I got out and opened both back doors. I jumped back in the driver’s seat and watched the mirror to see when Tim and Virgil came out.

  I heard the sirens, off in the distance.

  I put the getaway car in gear, holding it in place with the brake.

  The dashboard clock said 2:17 when the first trooper’s car roared up. There was another right behind it. And then a whole bunch more.

  The cops piled out. They hid behind their cars, aiming their guns at the door of the bank. One of them had a loudspeaker in his hand. He yelled at me to get out of the car and get on the ground.

  I waited for Tim and Virgil.

  Then the cops started shooting.

  I woke up in the hospital. There were tubes running out of me. I don’t know how much longer it was before I could feel the shackles around my ankles.

  The cops came. And men in suits. They asked me a lot of questions. I was so dizzy that it was easy not to answer them.

  The nurse had red fingernails. She was kind of chunky, but she looked pretty in her white uniform.

  “Did you really rob that bank?” she asked me, real soft, when nobody was around.

  “Huh?” I said.

  She got a nasty look on her face. Then she picked up a big needle and gave me a shot.

  One day, a lawyer came. An old guy, with a lot of heavy black hair he combed straight back. “Can you tell me what happened?” he asked me.

  “Huh?” I said.

  They tried us all together. All of us that was left. The lawyer showed me the papers that said they were charging Tim and me, for two counts of capital murder and four pages of other stuff. They didn’t charge Virgil, because Virgil was dead.

  “That second count is felony murder,” the lawye
r said to me. “If a person dies during the commission of a felony, everybody involved in the crime can be held responsible.”

  “I don’t understand,” I told him. It was the truth.

  “The prosecution’s theory is that, after the robbers had lined everyone up, one of them went into the cages. It was then that the assistant manager pulled a gun. He shot the one with the shotgun. The other robber then shot him, killing him instantly.

  “The robber with the shotgun fired a blast, but it didn’t hit anyone. Apparently, he was mortally wounded, and the other one wouldn’t leave him. They were brothers, maybe that explains it.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “The reason you’re charged with the homicides is that you were part of the robbery attempt. The wheelman, obviously. It’s not clear to me why you didn’t take off before the police arrived.…”

  He let his words trail off, the way people do when they want you to finish what they’re saying. But I didn’t.

  I was still bandaged up by the time we started the trial, but they kept me ankle-cuffed anyway. Tim had a bunch of chains around his waist.

  All the time they were putting on one witness after another, Tim never looked at me. Not once.

  His lawyer never asked one single question. But when they started to bring me into it, my lawyer got up, like he had business to take care of.

  “Officer,” he asked the cop on the stand, “how many shots would you estimate were fired at the car in which my client was sitting?”

  “I couldn’t say. If he’d gotten out of the car when we—”

  “More than five shots, officer?”

  “I think so.”

  “More than ten?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, officer, isn’t it a fact that every single shot fired by the State Police has to be logged in and accounted for? Every single bullet?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Can you tell us where we would find out that information, please? Where is it all collected?”

  “That would be with the shooting team,” the cop said. He was watching my lawyer like a bird on the ground watches a cat.

  “That team reviews all police shootings, to determine if they were justified, is that correct?” my lawyer asked him.