Outlaw’s Ink

by Sophia Gray

  Maybe it's got one of their phone numbers on it, she mused, frowning down at the napkin. Maybe the handsome biker wrote it down for me when they left, but it fell under the table somehow before I could see it. Maybe there's a chance I might not need to spend tonight alone after all. The chances are slim—one of them was probably just doodling on it aimlessly while they were talking—but still, I've got nothing to lose by picking it up and taking a look, right?

  Billie bent down and snatched the napkin. She opened it up and brushed the dirt away. The blue ink was smudged and blurry from moisture that had soaked through it, but she could still faintly make out a rectangular shape. It was marked with X's and O's with arrows that reminded her of diagrams of football plays.

  No names or phone numbers. They'd probably just been talking about some game they'd watched on TV recently. Shit.

  She started to crumple the napkin up, then stopped and looked at it again. There were other marks at the edges of the rectangle, and she realized that they looked like they could be entrances and exits.

  So it's not a drawing of a football field, then, she thought. A building? The O's all appear to be inside it already, and the three X's appear to be positioned so that two of them are entering while the third one stays outside.

  She thought about the bank robbers Panzie had mentioned and remembered the way the biker had told her the other one's name was Yorick (which was obviously fake) before he could answer for himself.

  And why hadn't the handsome biker told her his name when he was flirting with her, anyway?

  A small shudder of excitement rippled through Billie's body. What if they really had been the robbers, like Panzie thought? The rectangle they'd drawn was vague, but it could easily be a map of the McMurtry Bank & Loan downtown. The O's positioned at regular intervals could be the tellers, and the final O off to the side could be Rusty, the security guard. The X's could indicate a plan for two of the bikers to enter and carry out the robbery while the third one stayed outside as lookout.

  Billie heard gunshots and glanced at the TV. On the screen, a pair of masked robbers were leveling their six-shooters at a timid-looking bank teller and ordering him to reach for the sky.

  She laughed uneasily, tossing the napkin onto the floor. Clearly, she'd been watching so many of these stupid movies that she was starting to see outlaws everywhere. Bikers of all shapes and sizes came into the bar almost every day—in groups of two, five, ten, and yes, sometimes even three.

  And the crude drawing didn't have to be a bank, did it? Her mind had probably framed it that way thanks to the power of suggestion, but it could be anything at all, really.

  Besides, nothing exciting had ever happened in Cactus Hollow—at least not in her lifetime. How could she honestly bring herself to believe that this would change now?

  She finished sweeping and grabbed the dustpan, carefully lifting the pile of dirt and tossing it into the trash before washing her hands. Then she got her coat from the back room, shrugged it on, and locked the place up again before heading to her car. As she drove home, she kept picturing the sexy biker bursting into the bank downtown tomorrow with a gun in his hand and a rakish smile on his face, commanding everyone to put their hands in the air.

  She even imagined herself as his willing accomplice, keeping her own gun trained on Kathy and Mary Jo and the other plain girls she'd grown up with who made fun of her in school and went on to work as assistant managers at the bank. She'd relish the looks of shock and terror on their faces as they tossed heavy stacks of bills into a sack, taunting them about their boring husbands and boring kids and boring lives.

  Then she and the biker would fire a couple of shots at the ceiling just to spook the tellers even more before they ran out to his bike. He’d straddle it and rev the engine as she got on behind him, wrapping her arms around him and holding him tight while they blew out of town together. They'd hole up in some ratty little motel together, laughing and making love and planning their next big score.

  Silly thoughts, she knew. But they kept her company as she warmed up a dinner of leftovers and watched another Western, one where Lee Marvin menaced Jimmy Stewart's stagecoach.

  The fantasies were even more comforting later when she was in bed with her hand between her legs, wishing she knew that biker's name so she could moan it out loud in her empty apartment.

  Chapter 6

  Panzer

  Panzer sat at his desk in the sheriff's office after midnight, staring at the fax he'd received from the state police. It included several photos from the security cameras of the previous banks, and he carefully studied the heights, weights, and postures of the three robbers in their black ski masks.

  The more he looked at them, the more he was sure that they looked like the three bikers from the bar.

  Maybe Billie had seen three different bikers earlier that day and confused them with the ones who came in later. Or maybe she'd told him she'd seen them when she actually hadn't, as some kind of joke at his expense—she made a lot of those jokes, and he didn't understand most of them.

  Either way, he knew he shouldn't have just walked away. He should have made sure.

  In one of the photos, one of the robbers had a narrow strip of skin exposed between his mask and the collar of his vest, revealing a tattoo of an eagle. And hadn't one of the bikers in the bar—the mean-looking one with red hair—had some kind of winged creature inked on the side of his neck? Panzer wasn't sure, but he cursed himself anyway. He should have walked up to the redhead and demanded to examine the tattoo...

  ...and then it would have turned out to be a skull with wings or something like that instead of an eagle, and Billie would have laughed at him, and everyone else in the bar would have laughed at him too.

  Just like they always did.

  Damn it, why did he always feel like no matter what decision he made, it was the wrong one?

  When he and Billie had been in high school together, he'd taken her to the movies almost every weekend so they could watch Westerns, thinking it'd strengthen their friendship to the point where it could become something more. Instead, it just gave her a taste for wild, reckless outlaw types.

  He'd behaved like a perfect gentleman toward her and treated her with nothing but respect, only to watch her fall in lust with a never-ending string of foul-mouthed, dirty-minded boys who snuck cigarettes and swallows of whiskey between classes. He started drinking beer to impress her, and she mocked him relentlessly for trying to seem like a “bad boy” when he so clearly wasn't and never would be.

  And when he got old enough, he became a deputy and later ran for sheriff, thinking that the gun and badge would remind her of the heroes from their beloved Westerns and finally earn her respect. But the first time she saw him in uniform, she howled with laughter, saying he looked like Dudley Do-Right from the old Bullwinkle cartoons.

  And year after year, it was “Panzie” this and “Panzie” that, no matter how many times he told her he hated that nickname. As though his feelings simply didn't matter to her.

  He wished he could just forget about Billie and move on, but even if he could—and he knew damn well that he couldn't—it wasn't like there were other women in town who would be willing to date him. He was well aware of how everyone made fun of him behind his back, even though he tried not to let it show. They all thought he was an awkward, potbellied, slow-witted lump of a man who'd only become a lawman because he knew nothing dangerous would ever happen here.

  But those robbers in the photos...it was them. The bikers. He was ninety percent sure of it.

  Still, ninety percent was not a hundred.

  He briefly thought about calling Coop Scanlon at the bank tomorrow morning, just to put him on alert in case he was right. But then what? The robbery wouldn't happen after all, and Coop and the rest of the people in town would have another hearty chuckle at his expense.

  Panzie, the useless donut-muncher. Panzie, the boy who cried “wolf.” Panzie, who was actually dumb enough to believe he
could stop a real crime.

  Panzie, Panzie, Panzie.

  No, he decided. He wouldn't call Coop or tell anyone about his suspicions. Not even Broyles, his deputy—who had an IQ of about 80, and was the only person in town who actually seemed to look up to him. He'd keep it to himself, but he'd keep his cruiser parked close to the bank tomorrow anyway, just out of sight. Just in case.

  If Panzer was wrong, no one would ever have to know.

  But if he was right...

  Well, maybe he could arrest some real criminals for once in his career, and earn the respect of Billie and the rest of Cactus Hollow.

  Panzer put down the faxed pages, put his feet up, leaned back in his office chair, and dozed off. He dreamed of exciting shoot-outs, of headlines and medals and Billie's voice in his ear as she made love to him and called him her hero.

  Chapter 7

  Billie

  Billie woke up in her cluttered studio apartment and rolled over in bed, looking at the clock on her nightstand. It was 10:52 a.m., which meant the bank had been open for almost two hours.

  I wonder if those three guys have robbed the place yet, she thought. This idea made her laugh as she got up and walked to the bathroom, preparing to start her day.

  But as she scrubbed herself in the shower, the thought started to become less and less silly the more she considered it. By the time she had toweled off and started brushing her teeth, she had almost convinced herself that the bikers really could be the robbers Panzie had told her about.

  What if they actually had held the place up already?

  Billie spat out her toothpaste, rinsed, and went over to switch on the TV. She flipped around the channels to see if any of the regular programming had been interrupted by news of a heist at McMurtry Bank & Loan. Instead, all she saw was the usual array of daytime talk shows, infomercials, and grainy reruns of programs from the '60s. At one point, she heard the high-pitched whine of the Emergency Broadcast System cut into “The Andy Griffith Show” and she got excited for a moment, but it turned out to be a tornado warning for southern Oklahoma.

  She sighed and switched off the set, telling herself she should have known better than to get her hopes up about anything so thrilling or dangerous happening in Cactus Hollow.

  Still, as she slipped into a pair of red panties and fastened her mismatched black bra, she couldn't shake a mild sense of anxiety. What if the robbery ended up happening after all, and she missed it? Why not take a drive downtown and look in on the bank, just to make sure? Worst-case scenario, there wouldn't be one and she'd feel like an idiot for thinking it might—at which point, she could buy a chili dog and a cup of ice cream down at Pembleton's Pop Shop and have a good laugh at herself.

  Besides, it was her day off, and she certainly didn't have anything better to do.

  Billie pulled on a pair of black jeans, a gray t-shirt, and a pair of old sneakers. Then she went downstairs, got in her little red coupe, and drove downtown. She parked in front of If The Shoe Fits, the town's only shoe store, which was right next to the bank. She couldn't hear any alarms or commotion coming from the building. She just saw one of the young part-time tellers finishing a cigarette out front during her break.

  She checked the clock on her dashboard. 11:41.

  So now what? How long would she sit here and wait for a bank robbery that would probably never happen?

  The teller looked at her watch, took one final drag from the cigarette, flicked it away, and went back inside.

  Ten minutes passed. Then another five.

  Boredom started to set in, and Billie realized she should have brought a book. She decided that if nothing happened in the next sixty seconds, she'd stop watching the bank, grab some lunch, and pick up a bottle of whiskey before heading home. A bit of day-drinking and movie-watching sounded like a good way to spend her day off. If she couldn't watch cops and robbers in real life, at least she could usually find some on TV.

  For the rest of her life, whenever Billie looked back on that moment, she knew that if she'd ended up just driving away and taking shots of liquor during commercial breaks, she'd have remained in Cactus Hollow and her day-to-day routine would have continued uneventfully just as it always had.

  But she stayed just long enough to hear the roar of motorcycle engines approaching and hunkered down in the driver's seat, eager to watch the action.

  In that moment, her life changed forever.

  Chapter 8

  Carter

  Carter opened his eyes slowly, squinting against the harsh sunlight. He pulled himself into a sitting position, his back aching from the hard ground he'd been sleeping on. Once he and the other Metal Monsters left the saloon the previous night, they'd made camp next to a cornfield near the northern edge of town, bundling into their sleeping bags and staring up at the night sky until their eyelids became heavy and they started to snore.

  As got up, he heard a frantic rustling sound and looked over at its source, rubbing his eyes. Oiler was pawing through their belongings with a frightened expression on his face as Hazmat watched him impatiently.

  When Hazmat saw that Carter was awake, he bent down and cuffed Oiler upside the head, jerking a thumb at their president. “See? I told you not to make so much fuckin' noise, or you'd wake 'im up.”

  Oiler scowled up at Hazmat. “Well, someone's gotta find the thing, since you were stupid enough to lose it!”

  “I didn't lose it, I probably just threw it away,” Hazmat countered hotly. “I swear, I dunno what you're so bent out of shape about. It's not like anyone told me I was supposed to keep it. What, was I in the john or somethin' when we suddenly decided we had to hold onto every little thing? We never did that before.”

  “Because we never had something like that before, you nimrod!” Oiler yelled.

  “Easy, easy,” Carter said, raising his hands in a calming gesture. “What's all this about?”

  “It ain't about nothin',” Hazmat grunted. “Oiler's just gettin' his tampon in a twist 'cause he can't find that dumb napkin from last night. You know, the one you drew the map on?”

  Carter shrugged. “So what? I mean, I can draw another one in the dirt here if you need me to, but the plan's basically the same as the last few places, so...”

  “It's evidence!” Oiler moaned. “Jesus, I wouldn't expect Hazmat to understand this, but you're supposed to be the smart one. It was a diagram of our whole plan for the robbery, and I was sure you or Haz would take it with us when we left the bar. Instead we left it God-knows-where for God-knows-who to find, and now we have to call the whole thing off or we'll end up in handcuffs for sure.”

  “Whoa, no one's calling anything off,” Carter said. “Get a grip on yourself. It was just a wadded-up napkin with some X's and O's sketched out on it. We didn't even draw anything to show that it was supposed to be a bank, and you're acting like we all wrote our full names on it and signed it 'Your Bank-Robbing Pals' or something.”

  “Besides, it probably got swept up with the rest of the trash last night,” Hazmat added.

  “Yeah, unless someone picked it up, looked at it, and figured out what we were planning,” Oiler insisted.

  “Do you go around picking used napkins up off the ground, Oiler?” Hazmat chortled. “You must end up touching a lot of dried come and boogers that way.”

  “Oh, everything's a friggin' joke to you, isn't it?” Oiler exploded. “It's all a big laugh, right? Well, let's see you keep crackin' your funnies when we're in a federal pen surrounded by rapers and killers, an' no one there to watch our backs after lights-out. Not gonna be such a big comedian then, are you?”

  “Jesus,” Hazmat said, rolling his eyes. “Everything's a goddamn soap opera with you. What a whining, mincing little bitch you are sometimes.”

  “Oiler, there's no way anyone found that napkin,” said Carter. “And even if someone did, they wouldn't know what was on it. Now, I know you're nervous and I'm trying to respect that, but we've already decided that we're doing this. There may only be th
ree people in this MC, but only one of them is the president, and that's me. And I say we go forward with it, period. You want in? Awesome. You don't? Fine, take your share from what we've already gotten and best of luck to you. But this thing is happening today at noon, and that's all there is to it.”

  Oiler squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose as he considered his options. Finally, he sighed, opening his eyes again.

  “Okay, fine. I'm still in. But before we go through with it, you have to promise me that we'll at least have a quick look around the bank to make sure that sheriff isn't there waiting for us. Deal?”

  “Deal,” Carter agreed. He was willing to say whatever it took to shut Oiler up and make sure they'd do this. Unbeknownst to Hazmat and Oiler, Carter had still made a promise to someone to rob this particular bank—and it was one of the few promises he'd ever made in his life that he intended to keep, no matter what.