Strip

28

CARRIE ROLLED CLOSE to Jeff on the bed and propped her head on her hand. “You know what I think we need?”

He lay on his back feeling his breathing slowly returning to normal. He had a strong urge to keep his eyes closed, not answer, and doze off.

“You know what we need?” she repeated.

“I wasn’t planning to guess. Maybe you could get it and surprise me.”

“A machine gun.”

“Why not an atomic bomb?”

“Because it’s not practical.”

“I’m not so sure. We could get one of those little ones that you can carry in a briefcase—the kind that only blows up the city and not the whole state. We could go up to somebody, hand it to him and say, ‘Hold this for me.’ Then we’d drive away, and when we got to the next state, blow them up. Next time we had a briefcase we’d get some respect.”

“You’re making a joke out of this.”

“A machine gun is a joke. What would you do with it?”

“Say I walked into a bank with one. I could fire a burst into the ceiling, maybe ten or twelve rounds, and say, ‘Give me the money.’ I’ll bet people would give me the money.”

“Sounds like the 1920s.”

“I don’t mean one of those old-fashioned ones with the magazine that looks like a big disk. I mean the modern kind, the ones that soldiers carry in battle.”

“Very good choice. You’re a truly scary person and you’ve outdone yourself this time.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. There’s a big difference between sticking up an old man with a sack of cash in the street outside a bank in the middle of the night and going into the actual bank and holding it up during business hours. The first is relatively easy and not very dangerous. The second is the opposite: hard to do at all, and very risky. They have armed guards, surveillance cameras, silent alarms, bulletproof glass. If you succeed, they’ll try to slip you a bag of money that blows up and covers you with indelible ink.”

“See? That’s why a machine gun is so useful. This is just taking a rational look at all of the bank’s defenses and thinking of a single way of defeating them—fear.”

“Then the nuclear bomb would be more like it. And if we had to use it, there wouldn’t be any witnesses for miles.”

“That again?”

“Every year, thousands of banks get robbed. And every year, thousands of bank robbers get caught. The failure rate is one of the things you have to look into when you want to commit a crime. You look at what your chances are of getting caught. For bank robbery it’s like ninety-nine percent.”

“Well, what’s your idea of a better crime?”

“Let’s see. White-collar stuff. They only catch, like, ten percent of tax evaders, maybe one percent of people who sell fake designer clothes. Even murderers-for-hire get caught only about sixty percent of the time, and that’s because their client is married to the victim.”

“I don’t think we’re ready to do murders for hire.”

“That’s a relief. I like working for myself.”

“I mean no murders at all. Look, baby. What you’ve been doing lately is like a childish prank—robbing one business over and over. We’re going to have to grow up.”

He opened one eye and looked at her. “In what sense?”

“Let me describe what you do. You pull a small robbery and get maybe twenty thousand dollars if you’re lucky. Then you spend the next couple of months going out all night, drinking and picking up girls, and sleeping all day until the money is gone.”

“I haven’t picked up any girls since I met you.”

“I’m describing nature. A giraffe is a giraffe, and it eats leaves, whether it’s eating leaves right now or not.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

“Sure.”

“Do you also see what’s wrong with it?”

“Eating leaves?”

“No.”

“Picking up girls?”

“No again.” With her free hand she swung her pillow in a rapid arc downward onto his head like a sack of disdain. “There’s no progress. Every month or two, you start all over again with nothing.”

He pushed the pillow off his face. “I’ve made great progress lately.”

“You have?”

“Sure. Now when I go out all night and sleep all day, I’ve got you with me. That’s a big improvement. And now, instead of twenty thousand, we’ve got, like, eighty thousand in cash. We could go on like this for a long time, since there’s no need to flash a lot of big bills picking up girls. You are one already, and we only need one.”

“It’s just over a hundred and twenty thousand.”

“The money?”

“Yes. You don’t even count it, do you?”

“No. That’s the whole point of being a bandito. You don’t have to count your money.”

“Are you challenged by arithmetic?”

“No, but I’ve thought about this.”

“No, you haven’t.” She sat and glared at him for a few seconds. “What is it?”

“Limits. If I count the money and match it off against a certain number of days, then there are things I can’t do, can’t afford. If I don’t, then I’m free. If I want something, I buy it. I know that when I need to, I can get more money. I give up knowing exactly how many dollars are in the bag at every moment in exchange for not having to know. It’s a good deal.”

She looked at him in alarm. “Oh my God. You’re starting to sound smart, like a wandering Zen master or something. Let me get over that feeling. It’ll take a minute.”

“Take your time.”

She sat motionless for a few seconds, then stood up. “I can’t take my time. This brings me to another topic that’s loosely related, and urgent.”

“What is it?”

“I know you hate it when there’s something you ought to know, but I don’t tell you.”

“No, I don’t.”

“This you would.”

“Is it your boyfriend?”

She got up off the bed and looked down at him, her eyes wide with surprise. “Yes.”

“What about him?”

“He’s flying into LAX in just over—oops, just under—three hours. When he gets there, he’s going to pick up his suitcase at the baggage claim, and he’s going to want someplace to put it.”

“Like your house.”

“It’s his house, technically.”

“What’s the technicality?”

“He bought it and paid for it, his name is on the deed, and he lived here before I met him.”

“Three hours isn’t a lot of time.”

“No.”

“So I assume you know what you’re going to do.”

“I’ve been avoiding thinking about it as long as I could.”

“Are you going to choose between him and me?”

“Didn’t you hear me just five minutes ago talking about our future?”

“That’s not an answer.”

“At first I was going to stay with him and see you on the side just for a treat once in a while, but then I asked myself why, if you can have the treat all the time, you wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t think of an answer, so I’ve decided you’re the keeper.”

“Is this guy violent?”

“Well, you know how guys are. Once they find out somebody else has been there too, if you know what I mean, it makes them all hormonal.”

“You could kill me and tell him I’m a burglar.”

“Keep trying.”

“We could kill each other. He’d feel responsible.”

“Please stop with the killing. It’s making me upset.”

“We could skip all the way back to Plan A, which is to pack up fast and run away.”

“Shouldn’t that have been the first thing you said? I mean, if it is Plan A.”

“It’s not a good idea to settle for the obvious right away, without exploring other options.”

“Let’s get the heck out of here,” she said. She went to her dresser and began putting on clothes. As she opened a drawer and put on a garment, she would take all the others like it and set them in a pile on the bed. When she came to the closet, she took out a large suitcase, opened it, and began placing the piles of folded clothes inside.

When it looked as though the suitcase was completely full, she went into the next room and returned with a lot of bills, canceled checks, and papers. “Can’t leave these papers here. I don’t want him tracing us and turning up later.”

“He would do that?”

“I’m out of space. Can you fit the bag of money in your suitcase?”

“I’ll try to find room.” He didn’t like the way she changed the subject, but it told him the answer. He quickly got his suitcase out of the closet, tossed his clothes into it, and then unhooked the big laundry bag from the hook on the door, put it in on top, then closed and zipped the suitcase.

“Are you just about ready?”

“Yes,” he said. “Want to take one last look around? I’d sure hate to have to come back while he’s home and ask him for your great-grandma’s cameo brooch.”

“Don’t worry. I already did my walk-through yesterday.”

He picked up his suitcase, then hers, and walked to the door. As he set the suitcases down to open it, he turned to her and said, “But you didn’t take anything that wasn’t, strictly speaking, yours, right?”

The door swung open, hit the two suitcases and knocked them over onto the floor. Jeff had just enough time to leap backward before the man who had applied the force to the door came after it. Jeff had time to see a shaved head, a patch of black beard, a wide mouth with bared teeth, as the charging man tripped over the suitcases and belly-flopped past him onto the kitchen floor.

Jeff said, “Hold on, now. We don’t need to do this. We can talk like grownups,” by which he meant “Don’t hurt me.”

The man rolled and his legs scissored at Jeff’s calves to trip him to the floor.

Jeff jumped up and backward to avoid the legs, but he hit his back on the wall and dropped straight down onto the man’s ankle.

“Yaaah!” the man howled. “You son of a bitch! I’ll kill you!”

“No, Roger! He didn’t do anything to you,” Carrie said. Jeff felt in his heart that this wasn’t exactly true, but said nothing.

The man snarled through clenched teeth, “In a minute you’ll be wearing his balls for a necklace.”

“Stop it, Roger. He didn’t know you existed.”

“But he’ll remember me forever.” With frightening agility, the big man rose to a crouch and sprang at Jeff, his arms wide to gather him in.

Jeff could see that he would not escape the span of stretched muscles and big, grasping hands. He reacted in a reflex to protect himself from the tackle. He lunged forward between the arms and lifted his right knee as he pounded both forearms into the back of the man’s head, hammering the head downward to meet his knee with considerable force. He half-heard and half-felt the man’s nose break.

The man’s momentum expended itself, plowing both of them into the kitchen counter. Jeff toppled, and the man’s arms closed on his waist in a powerful clamp. As Jeff hit the floor, Carrie shrieked, and he could already feel the man’s hands clawing their way up his body toward his throat.

“Don’t kill him!” Carrie shrieked.

He raised his left forearm to keep the man’s clawlike grasp from closing on his throat. With his right fist he delivered a series of short, hard punches to the man’s face and left ear.

The man released his grip and raised his arm to fend off Jeff’s right hand and turned his face away. Jeff used the moment to give a great, wrenching turn to speed him in that direction, scrambled away, and got to his feet.

The man was still so unimpressed with Jeff that as he too rose, he barely looked in Jeff’s direction. Instead, he glared at Carrie while he touched his bleeding nose tentatively, and then his battered left ear.

Jeff had no hope now of escaping the fight or ending it. All he could see was the inviting sight of the big man’s momentary inattention. He advanced and delivered eight rapid punches, throwing each as he pushed from his back foot, so he battered the man backward with each one, until the man was pinned against the front of the stove.

Jeff felt the elation of battle, the hard, clean impact as his fists struck again and again in adrenaline-fueled fury. But slowly, he began to sense that something was not right. The exertion of pounding this man was making his arms tired. As he hit the man, he could see that the swollen eyes were open and watching him. There was a cold, reptilian quality to the way the eyes held him.

He hadn’t seen it before, but there was no question of what it was. The big man was watching, waiting for him to wear himself out. In another few minutes, Jeff would barely be able to hold his arms up, barely be able to dance to avoid the thick arms. But when that moment came, the big man might be marked and bruised, but he would not be exhausted. He would still be able to fight. It would be his turn.

Jeff looked into the eyes, at the cold hatred behind them, and he knew that the man was keeping track, making his own personal calculation of his hurt. He was, in some perverse way, happy because he was soon going to exact a ferocious reprisal.

Carrie was suddenly at Jeff’s elbow. “Roger, it doesn’t matter what you do, I’m not going back with you, so I’m leaving now.” She picked up her suitcase and started to drag it toward the door.

It occurred to Jeff that to an observer it would look as though he was not the one who needed help, but he was, and Carrie’s announcement that she was leaving was not good news. He kept swinging, knowing his punches were hitting more and more sloppily. He had to keep punching, because he knew that if his punches stopped, Roger’s would start.

When Carrie spoke, Roger seemed electrified. He straightened and stared at her with the sort of anger that he had been lavishing on Jeff. He ducked low so Jeff’s next swing missed him, and lunged at Carrie.

When Roger moved, Jeff’s eye settled on the iron skillet on the stove that had been hidden behind his body. He snatched it up and swung it in a single, desperate backhand motion. It hit the back of Roger’s head and made a sound like a hammer hitting a coconut. Roger’s lunge changed midway into a dive to the floor. He slid a couple of feet on the smooth kitchen floor, then lay still.

Jeff stood motionless for a moment, the skillet now hanging from his hand, trying to catch his breath while he watched Roger for signs that he might get up.

Carrie had the door open and she was tugging her suitcase out onto the steps. “What are you waiting for? Round two?”

Jeff set the skillet on the stove, clutched the handle of his suitcase, but felt too tired to lift it. He extended the handle, wheeled it to the doorway, and bumped it down the steps. He hurried to the car, wondering if he should have tied Roger up, or done something to prevent him from following.

Carrie was waiting, having put her suitcase in the back seat instead of waiting for him to open the trunk. He lifted his in too, got into the driver’s seat, and turned to her. “Are you leaving your car here?”

“Technically, it’s only my car because it’s the one he let me use. Don’t worry. I didn’t leave him any keys.” She gave him an appraising glance. “You want me to drive?”

“No, thanks.” He started the car and backed down the driveway, feeling relieved when he got past the door without having Roger burst out into his path. He hit the button to lock the doors, pulled into the street, shifted, and headed to the turn that would take him down the hill.

“Jeez,” she said. “I thought you were going to get us killed in there. Haven’t you been in a fight before?”

“What do you mean? Roger is a very big, strong guy, and he didn’t manage to hit me even once.”

“He was getting ready to, and it would have been awful. You can’t dance around like that and tap him. I could tell it was just pissing him off. That’s why I decided to make him freak out like that—so you would have to come to your senses to save me.”

“Come to my senses?”

“Yes. Before he killed you. We’re both very lucky that the place he was coming from was the airport. Anyplace else and he’d have had a gun.”

“Don’t you ever date anybody who’s not a criminal?”

She shrugged and smiled sweetly. “I guess all this time I’ve been searching for you.”