The Getaway Man

by Andrew Vachss

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ve got a lot of them, maybe, but they don’t take up much room.”

  “But your car’s so little.”

  “The trunk’s bigger than it looks. And I can put a lot of stuff next to me in front, too.”

  “That’s not such a good idea,” Vonda said.

  “Why not?”

  “Sometimes, you can’t have everything you want. You have to pick and choose. Let’s play a game.”

  “What game?”

  “If you could only take one movie, just one, which one would it be?”

  I didn’t even have to think about it. I went and got my copy of Vanishing Point, and plugged it into the VCR.

  Vonda watched the whole thing with me. Without saying a word, like always. Only this time, she held my hand.

  When it was over, she said, “Why that one, Eddie? Why is that one your favorite of all?”

  I tried to tell her, but I think I got all confused. Vanishing Point is about a driver. A great driver, driving against people trying to catch him. All over the country. He’s not a robber or anything. Just a driver. And everybody knows he’s running, because there’s a guy on the radio who’s on his side. So the driver can listen to the radio himself, and the guy who likes him can tell him what’s going on. The cops are trying to get him, but a lot of other people are pulling for him, even regular ones.

  “It’s a perfect movie,” I said to Vonda. What I meant was, it’s not complicated, like Moonshine Highway. It’s just the driver, driving forever.

  “But he kills himself, Eddie,” Vonda said, all upset. “At the end, he sees that roadblock, and he’s speeding right for it. And he’s smiling. He knows what’s going to happen, and he’s glad.”

  “No!” I said. As soon as I heard how my voice sounded, I apologized to Vonda. “I didn’t mean to yell,” I told her. “But you don’t understand. He’s not smiling because he’s going to die. He’s smiling because he thinks he’s going to make it.”

  “But there was no room,” she said. “How could he possibly—?”

  “He was a great driver,” I said. “He had a chance.”

  Vonda was real quiet for a minute. Like she was thinking over what I said.

  “That’s what I want,” she said. “A chance. A real chance.”

  “You know what’s wrong with that movie?” Vonda said to me in the morning. “He was all alone. He should have had a girl with him; then it would be perfect.”

  I’d never thought about that.

  “He might have made it, then,” Vonda said.

  She reached over and held my hand.

  Every time J.C. came back with Gus, they would go over the job again. J.C. is real careful. That’s why we never got caught, I know.

  “You want to hear the whole plan, Eddie?” J.C. asked me one day.

  “Sure,” I said.

  When J.C. and Gus explained it to me, I was real impressed. It was so good a plan, the cops would never even figure out what happened.

  The reason they told me the whole plan was, this time, I had to do more than drive. I had another job. Scouting, J.C. called it.

  “You want a woman to fall in love with you, you have to know what to do,” Vonda told me. “You have to have some techniques.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have girlfriends, right, Eddie?”

  “Well, I’ve had girlfriends. I mean, you know, girls who.…”

  “Sure. Did any of them really love you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t guess they did.”

  “You’re the nicest guy I ever met, Eddie,” she said. “But if you want a girl to fall deep in love with you, that’s not enough.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s little … tricks. Ways to act. I’ll tell you one,” she said, in that secret voice she has, sometimes. “You want to get a girl to treat you special, take her shopping for shoes.”

  “Huh?”

  “Take her to the fanciest shoe store in town; tell her to pick out whatever she wants. I promise you, she’ll wet her panties right there in the store.”

  “Did anyone ever—?”

  “J.C. did, once,” she said, like she knew what I was going to ask her. “But he hasn’t in a long time. He’s not what I need, now.”

  I wondered what would have happened if I had taken Bonnie shopping for shoes. If I hadn’t gotten lost with Daphne.

  “What do you need, Vonda?” I asked her.

  Her eyes held me. I watched them turn a darker green. “I need a getaway man, Eddie,” she said.

  “Take her with you,” J.C. told me.

  “Vonda?”

  “You see any other broads around here? A cop spots you driving around, doing nothing, he could decide he wants to stick his nose in. But he sees you with a woman, he’ll think you’re looking for a good spot to pull over and get some.”

  “If it’s okay with Vonda.…”

  “It’ll be okay with her,” J.C. said.

  “It’s the only place I can get what I need,” Gus said to J.C. “Ordnance like that, it doesn’t fall off a truck. And I’m not dealing with some fucking clerk off the base. These are people I did business with before.”

  “We’ll be back in a few days,” J.C. said to Vonda. “Keep your eye on Eddie.”

  He gave her a hard smack on the bottom. I could see Vonda’s face over his shoulder; she didn’t like it.

  The days got filled, then. When I wasn’t doing my scouting, I was working on the cars. The truck and the hearse, I mean. Once in a while, on my Thunderbird.

  Vonda was with me almost all the time. Telling me about how to be with girls. Or watching movies with me.

  One time, she even cleaned the Thunderbird. Real close cleaning, like it was a pot she was scrubbing.

  It took her a few hours, working hard. “That was my workout for today,” she said.

  I told her the Thunderbird looked new inside.

  “See,” she said, “I’m good for some things.”

  “Vonda, you’re—”

  She put two fingers on my lips to keep me quiet. Then she ran off, back to the cabin.

  That night, she asked me to bring my VCR into the cabin, so we could watch the movies there.

  I liked it better in the barn, but she looked like it would mean a lot to her, and I didn’t want to disappoint her.

  When the movie was over, she went into the bathroom. When she came out, all she had on were a pair of her high heels. Red ones.

  I couldn’t say anything.

  “Eddie,” she said, real soft. “Remember when I showed you my scar? From the cigarette? Remember when you kissed it? That was a sweet thing to do. It’s a sweet place to kiss. If I asked you real nice, would you do it again?”

  From then on, Vonda was my girl. My secret girl.

  “You sure it’ll all go up?” J.C. asked Gus, after they had been back for a couple of days.

  “A drop like that? Guaranteed,” Gus told him. “Be nothing left but some bone fragments, if that.”

  “It’s all got to burn. Otherwise, they’ll keep looking.”

  “It’s a hundred to one, with a full tank of gas, that it’ll happen just from the impact,” Gus said. “But what we picked up makes it a sure thing. Even if they find traces, they’ll figure we brought the stuff with us to blow the box, in case the drivers didn’t give over when we threw down on them.”

  He looked sideways at me and winked. “Yeah,” he said. “I finally get some use out of what they taught me.”

  Gus meant the army. He talks about that a lot. He hadn’t liked it there; that’s where something happened to one side of his face. His right eyebrow is split in half, like he has two of them over just the one eye.

  But even though Gus says he hated the army, it never sounded so bad to me, when he talked about it.

  I wanted to ask him questions, but I never did. I’m always afraid of sounding stupid, but that wasn’t it. With a man like Gus, it’s better if he
doesn’t think you’re too interested in anything about him.

  It was great riding with Vonda, even if I couldn’t show her how good a driver I was. J.C. said to be extra careful not to attract any attention. Mostly, I just went over the different routes, and Vonda wrote down the mileage and kept time.

  One day, Vonda slid next to me on the seat. She put her left hand on the inside of my right thigh. Not grabbing me or anything, just holding it there.

  Right then, I thought about us just taking off. Just go from there. Drive.

  But I didn’t have a real plan. And Vonda deserved a better chance than just trying to run a roadblock.

  When they told me how we were going to make the plan work—“selling the scam,” J.C. called it—I got a little spooked.

  Gus could see it in my face, and he laughed at me. “They don’t bite, Eddie,” he said.

  Getting the bodies turned out to be easy. It was the first time we used the hearse. I was the driver. Late one night, we went to this cemetery J.C. knew about. It was a long drive, because he said we couldn’t do it close to our base.

  After we put the dirt and sod back, it still didn’t look that good, even in the dark, I didn’t think. But J.C. said it was a cemetery for people who died broke, and nobody would be visiting their graves.

  That’s when I figured out why J.C. and Gus had brought back that giant freezer from one of their trips away. After we put the bodies inside, I helped chop up the coffins. Then we burned everything.

  “How come I never see you with a gun, Eddie?” Vonda asked me one day.

  “I don’t know anything about guns,” I said. “Anyway, that’s not what I do, guns. I’m the driver.”

  “J.C. and Gus always have guns on them,” Vonda said.

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t you ever worry … ? I mean, if something happened. If you got into trouble and you needed a gun, what would you do?”

  “I’d drive,” I told her. “I’d drive everyone out of trouble.”

  I didn’t see Vonda for all the rest of that day. At night, I went out to the barn to watch my movies, but she didn’t come.

  I was polishing the Cadillac the next morning when Vonda came up to me. She was wearing her exercise clothes, but she hadn’t started yet.

  “What difference does it make if it’s so shiny?” she asked me.

  “It’s supposed to look like it’s out on business,” I said. “J.C. says, in this part of the country, folks sometimes have their funerals at dawn, soon as it gets light. So if anyone sees a hearse driving at four in the morning, they’ll think it’s on its way to a graveyard, somewhere.”

  “J.C. thinks of everything,” Vonda said.

  I could tell from her voice something was wrong. It was just a little tone laid over the top of what she was saying, but I knew Vonda real well, and I picked up on things like that.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked her.

  “J.C. thinks of everything,” she said. “But he doesn’t think of everyone. Do you understand, Eddie?”

  I could tell this wasn’t any time to be saying I did when I didn’t, the way I do, sometimes. “No,” I said.

  Vonda looked over her shoulder, back at where the cabin was. Then she looked at me, like she was waiting for me to say something more.

  After a little bit, she reached around me to where my pack of cigarettes was, and took one for herself.

  “Don’t light that here,” I told her.

  “Why not? You smoke in here.”

  “Not this close to where I’m working. You see that carburetor over there? It’s the old one off my T-bird. I’m soaking it in stuff that would go right up if a spark hit it.”

  “I thought you said you put a new one in it.”

  “Well, I did. And it works fine. But that one there is the original, and I thought I’d like to save it. So I’m getting all the gunk out before I rebuild it.”

  She made a little noise.

  “You can smoke over by where I watch movies, Vonda. I’ll come over and have one with you, okay?”

  “Not now,” she said. “If J.C. wanders on out here, I want it to look like you were working on the car and I just stopped to say hello. If he sees us over by your couch, he’s going to get ideas. And when J.C. gets ideas, I get hurt.”

  “All right. I can just go back to—”

  “Eddie, listen to me. What I said before? About J.C. looking out for everything? I want you to think about that.”

  “I don’t have to think about it,” I said. “J.C. looks out for everyone with his plans. And I look out for everyone when I drive. That’s the way it is.”

  J.C. and Gus took off again just after supper. Vonda went into the room she shared with J.C., and closed the door.

  I went out to the barn. Not to watch my movies. I wanted to see if this idea I had for the Cadillac was going to work, and I needed to weld something up to try it out.

  When I saw someone come into the barn, I took off the goggles I was wearing.

  It was Vonda. She had on a pair of jeans and a pink top, one of those tube things you can just pull off.

  She came over to where I was working. Her hair was in a ponytail, tied with a pink ribbon. She had a lot of lipstick on. Long silver earrings. “Let’s go to the movies,” she said.

  I stood up. “Which one would you like to—”

  “Not those movies, Eddie. I know where there’s a better one playing. Come on.”

  Vonda got in the front seat of the hearse. Up there, it was just like a regular car, a big Cadillac. She slid over, so I could get behind the wheel.

  “This is our own private movie, Eddie. Special.”

  “I don’t—”

  “If you trust me, you’ll get a reward,” she said. “Just trust me, Eddie. Close your eyes, and you’ll see a movie in your mind. Just like we were at the drive-in.”

  She moved in close to me. I put my arm around her and looked through the windshield. It was so dark there that I didn’t have to close my eyes. But I did, because I had promised.

  I tried to see one of my movies, but, instead, I saw my dream. The black car pulling up. I knew there was no driver. I knew it was me who was supposed to be behind the wheel.

  Vonda made a little humming noise. I felt her pull my zipper down. Felt her hand.

  Vonda took me in her mouth. Not a kiss, like she had done before, but real deep this time. I closed my eyes tighter. She made that humming noise again, louder. I put my hand in her hair, but I didn’t hold her head down.

  When I let go, Vonda made a different noise.

  She stayed there, with her head in my lap. Licking me dry, the way a cat does.

  Her hair felt like ribbons of silk in my hand.

  I kept my eyes closed.

  Vonda pulled her mouth away from me. “You think I’m dirty, don’t you, Eddie?”

  “Nobody would ever think that about you, Vonda,” I told her.

  “J.C. does,” she said. “J.C. thinks I’m a dirty little whore. He calls me that, plenty of times. And he’s right, too.”

  “Vonda.…”

  “He is right, Eddie. J.C. makes me go with other guys, sometimes. When he wants something.”

  “You mean, like a pimp?”

  “No. That’s not J.C. A hooker could never make enough money for a man like him. J.C.’s not a pimp. He’s a man who plans. And when he needs information for one of his plans, sometimes, he makes me be the one who gets it for him.”

  “I don’t under—”

  “One time, J.C. and Gus wanted to hijack a shipment of computers. A whole truckload of them. But they couldn’t be sure about the routes. Where the driver would stop off for a break, stuff like that. So he sent me in.”

  “Sent you in to the factory?”

  “No, Eddie,” she said, in a sad voice. “Sent me in to work on one of the drivers for that company. He used to come into this club where I danced. J.C. made me play up to him, so I could get him talking.”

  I thought about the
doctor. The one with the gold coins. I wondered how long Vonda had been with J.C. If it had been her who.…

  “That’s not being a whore,” I said. “It’s more like being … a spy, maybe.”

  “Spies don’t have to go to bed with the people they’re spying on.”

  “Sometimes they do,” I told her. “I saw it in a—”

  “This wasn’t a movie,” she said. Her voice had gone from sad to sharp. “This was real life. And this guy wasn’t a Russian spy; he was a truck driver. That’s something J.C. always says: a man can’t eat pussy with his mouth closed. And, once it’s open.…”

  “Why do you have to talk like that?”

  “I’m sorry, Eddie,” she said. Her voice was back to being sad. “It’s not the way I like to talk, not really. It’s just that being around J.C. and Gus all the time, I started to sound like them. Now it’s a habit, I think.”

  After I was sure the truck was running perfect, I took it out near the spot where it was going to happen. J.C. says it’s no good just measuring with your eyes; the only way is to take the thing itself and see if it will fit.

  I drove the truck down into where we would be leaving it. And I was glad I had listened to J.C., because it didn’t fit right. When I walked back out onto the road and took a look back, I could still see the truck pretty good. I couldn’t tell how it would look at night, but I knew we couldn’t take a chance.

  Gus showed me how to make curtains out of branches and leaves. You cut some branches that have some heft to them, but they still have to bend, so they hold their tension when you put them in place. Then you lay smaller branches across, like a lattice. Finally, you weave even smaller branches—ones with leaves on them—in between the slots. Unless someone gets real close, it looks just like part of the forest. At night, it would be impossible to tell.

  Gus said to build the curtains back at the cabin, then, when we’re ready, we could move them in the back of the truck. It would only take a little while to set them up.

  “Where did you learn to make these things?” I asked Gus. “In the army?”

  “Where else?” he said. He was squeezing his exercisers in both fists. They’re just a pair of wooden handles connected by a spring. I tried them once. It takes a lot of power to make them close all the way. I could barely do it ten times with my right, and I couldn’t hardly do it at all with my left. Gus can do it for hours, so fast you can hear the handles click against each other when he closes his fists. “Just one of the many valuable skills they taught me.”