The Best American Mystery Stories 2013

The Street Ends at the Cemetery by Clark Howard

FROM Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

AS CORY EVANS WALKED toward his car in the staff parking lot of the state prison, he had to pass the visitors’ parking lot, and that was where the woman was sitting, on a cast-iron bench bolted to the ground, under a punch-press metal sign from the prison machine shop that read BUS STOP. It was cloudy and overcast, the first threatening sprinkles of rain beginning.

Cory walked past her, giving her only a glance, but a glance was enough for his trained corrections-officer mind to snap a mental picture of her: short-cropped bleached blond hair, sharp facial features, shoulders slanted a little forward from years of poor posture, slim-a little underweight-wearing jeans that had been around, high-heeled boots scuffed at the toes. A dime-store girl. Dirt-poor southern, Mississippi, maybe Alabama. A girl who could use a real good makeover.

Cory continued past her a dozen feet, then stopped. The sprinkles of rain were increasing.

“Miss the bus?” he asked the woman.

She nodded but did not look at him or speak.

“Won’t be another one for an hour,” he said.

She shrugged. The story of her life.

“I can give you a lift into Sacramento,” he said.

“You a guard?” she asked, looking at him for the first time. Her eyes were like tracer bullets.

“I’m a corrections officer, yeah.”

“Well, I’m a convict visitor,” she said evenly. “Prob’ly wouldn’t look too good, us driving off together, you think?”

“I’m not asking you to go to a motel with me,” Cory responded, just as evenly. “Just offering you a lift into Sacramento.” Now it was he who shrugged. “Take it or leave it.”

He walked on away. Before he got to his car, the rainfall became steady and she was walking beside him.

On the drive in, windshield wipers slapping, she asked, “Don’t you want to know who I was visiting?”

“What do you mean who?”

“I mean, like my husband, boyfriend, brother-”

Cory threw her a quick glance. She had a little acne scar in front of her left ear. “Look,” he said, “even if you told me, I probably wouldn’t know who you were talking about. We’ve got fifteen hundred-plus cons in there. Unless who you were visiting happened to be on my block, in my tier, which is highly unlikely, I wouldn’t know him from Adam. You know who Adam was, right?”

“Were you born rude?” she snapped. “Or did you have to study it?”

At that point a cloak of silence dropped over the interior of Cory’s three-hole Buick, and they rode that way, the windshield wipers seeming to keep time with their heartbeats, the rain outside heavy enough now for Cory to turn on the car’s headlights. Sitting without even a glance at the other, neither spoke until they reached the city limits of Sacramento.

“Where do you want me to drop you?” Cory asked, finally breaking the uncomfortable quiet.

“The Greyhound depot’ll be fine,” she mumbled in reply.

Cory exited the interstate and drove to Seventh and L Streets, where he swung around to the main entrance of the ugly, uninviting Greyhound depot and pulled over and stopped with the engine idling.

“Listen, thanks for the lift,” she said, getting out, her tone mellower than before.

“Don’t mention it,” Cory said, his own voice less disagreeable. “Have a nice trip home.”

After she shut the passenger door and hurried toward the depot entrance, Cory drove away and made a U-turn into a parking space half a block down the street. He kept the engine running so the wiper blades would keep the windshield clear, but then the rain suddenly stopped completely and he shut the car down. From where he was parked, he had an unobstructed view of the bus depot entrance. He only had to wait five minutes before he saw the woman come back out of the door she had gone in, pause to glance around, then walk quickly away along L Street.

Leaving his car, Cory followed her at a discreet distance for several blocks, to a Motel 7 on the edge of a seedy downtown district. She walked directly to a room on the lower of the two floors, unlocked it with a key from her jeans pocket, and went inside. It was Room 121.

Cory returned to his car and drove to his own apartment, a little one-bedroom furnished place where he lived alone. He got a bottle of milk from his refrigerator and sat in an old club chair, drinking from the bottle and staring at the blank television screen for a long time, thinking about the woman. Later on, when he went to bed, he fell asleep thinking about her, wondering who she had been visiting, wondering even what her name was. He dreamed about her.

The next day, when Cory reported for his shift at the prison, the officer at the sign-in desk said, “You’re wanted in the deputy warden’s office.”

Cory frowned. “When?”

“Now.”

Cory made his way back out of the incoming-staff corridor to the prison’s executive wing, where Deputy Warden Lewis Duffy had his office. He’d been seen, Cory thought. Seen picking up a convict visitor and driving away from the prison with her!

Well, hell, that was all she wrote. As a corrections officer, he was all washed up.

When Cory was shown into the deputy warden’s office, he found himself facing not only Deputy Warden Duffy but a man he had never seen before: a conservatively dressed man in a nondescript gray suit and an out-of-style wide necktie tied in a Windsor knot on a white shirt.

“Evans,” the deputy warden said, “this is special agent Roger Hardesty of the FBI.” Cory nodded to Hardesty. “Sit down, Evans. We have a few questions for you. Did you pick up a woman in the visitors’ parking lot yesterday, after your shift, and drive away with her?”

“Yessir, I did.”

“Did you know the woman?”

“No, sir.”

“Why did you drive away with her in your car?”

“It was starting to rain. She’d missed the bus and there wasn’t another scheduled for an hour. There’s no shelter of any kind at that bus stop.” Cory shrugged. “I just offered her a ride.”

“You’re aware, are you not, of our fraternization rules regarding inmate visitors?”

“Yessir. But it wasn’t really fraternization, Warden. I just offered her a ride. Like I said, it was starting to rain-”

“Did you exchange names with her?”

“No, sir-”

“Telephone numbers, addresses, personal information of any kind?”

“No, sir. Nothing.

“Where did you take the woman?”

“To the Greyhound depot on L Street in Sacramento.”

“Where did you go then?”

“Straight to my apartment,” Cory lied, shifting uneasily in his chair. “Am I being written up for this? If I am, I’d like to have a union representative present.”

“There’s no need for that, Evans. I don’t intend to make a formal record of this meeting. Offering that woman a ride into town, even under the circumstances you outlined, was not, in my mind, very good judgment, but no report will be made if you agree to cooperate with Agent Hardesty here.”

Cory looked over at the FBI man. “Cooperate with him how?”

“I’d like to give you a little information about the woman you picked up, Officer Evans,” the agent said. “Her name is Billie Sue Neeley. The inmate she was visiting is Lester Dragg, serving six years for grand theft auto. He’s been in two, up for parole in eighteen months. The Bureau is interested in him because we know he drove the getaway car in a bank robbery down in Modesto. The two gunmen who went into the bank grabbed one million, two hundred thousand dollars that was scheduled to be picked up by an armored truck about twenty minutes later. The robbery would have gone off perfectly except that the armored truck got there early, just as the holdup men ran out of the bank and threw the two sacks of money into the getaway car. The armored truck guards opened fire on the two men before they could get into the car themselves. In the shootout, both holdup men were killed. But the getaway car, with the money in it, got away. The armored truck guards didn’t get the license number but gave a good description of the car. It turned out to be stolen. Three days later, the California Highway Patrol snagged the car in a line waiting to cross the border into Tijuana. Lester Dragg was driving; Billie Sue Neeley was a passenger. There was no sign of the money. We had no eyewitness ID that Dragg had been the driver in the bank job. All we could get him on was a state charge of grand theft auto as the driver of a stolen vehicle. And we had nothing at all on the Neeley woman; she claimed to be a hitchhiker and Dragg backed up her story.”

“So the bank robbery is why the FBI is interested,” Cory guessed.

“Exactly. If we can put Dragg next to that money, we can nail him on federal bank robbery charges, and maybe get the Neeley woman for conspiracy.”

“You think the Neeley woman knows where the money is?” Cory asked.

Agent Hardesty shrugged.

“Hard to say. She certainly isn’t spending it if she does. She lives very frugally; the only income she appears to have is an unemployment check from the state that she gets twice a month.”

So I was wrong, Cory thought. Not dirt-poor Mississippi or Alabama. An Okie from Oklahoma. Still dirt poor.

“There’s got to be some reason she’s hanging around waiting for Dragg to get out,” Hardesty continued, “and we figure it’s the money.”

“She could just be crazy about the guy,” Cory offered.

“Possibly.” Deputy Warden Duffy reentered the conversation. “She’s listed on his visitor card as his common-law wife.”

Cory nodded thoughtfully. “So what do I have to do with all this?” he asked, looking from the agent to the deputy warden.

“That remains to be seen,” Hardesty said. “You’ve accidentally made contact with her. We know she’s living in the Motel 7 on Weed Street in Sacramento.” No kidding, Cory thought.

“I’ve had her under surveillance for some time. I know where she shops, the movies she goes to, where she eats supper, everything. We thought, Deputy Warden Duffy and I, if we could arrange for you to run into her again-”

“Wait a minute,” Cory interrupted, holding both hands up, palms out, deciding to play it dumb. “If you want me to be some kind of bait to trap this woman for the FBI, you’ve got the wrong guy. I’m a corrections officer, not some kind of undercover cop. I’m not up for anything like this.”

The FBI agent and the deputy warden exchanged serious looks. “Evans,” the deputy warden said, “my decision to keep this meeting informal was based on you cooperating with Agent Hardesty. You picked up this woman yesterday in violation of regulations governing your employment. Agent Hardesty’s surveillance of her was compromised because of that-”

“I don’t see how,” Cory objected.

“I was on the bus the Neeley woman missed,” Hardesty said. “By the time I got back to that bus stop, Neeley was gone. Deputy Warden Duffy had to have the prison check all of its closed-circuit security tapes to find out how she left the institution.”

The deputy warden leaned forward and locked his fingers together on the desktop. “Look, Evans,” he said in an even but not unfriendly voice, “you’re not being asked to do anything but pursue an acquaintance with this woman and report back to Agent Hardesty anything she says to you. Just be friendly, that’s all. And in exchange for that, your serious breach of regulations yesterday will not become a formal report.”

“That’s kind of like blackmail, isn’t it?” Cory asked, his own voice equally even but not challenging.

“I’ll overlook that comment,” the deputy warden said. “I’ll even sweeten the pot a little bit. Cooperate in this matter and the next time a sergeant’s opening comes up, I’ll personally see that you get on the list. High on the list.” He sat back in his big swivel chair. “Now, what’s it going to be, Evans?”

Cory managed to exhale a deep breath that sounded both weary and resigned. “I guess I’m about to make a new friend,” he said.

And all the time he was thinking, An Okie from Oklahoma. And all that money.

After Cory left the office, the deputy warden sat forward again and silently drummed the fingers of one hand on the desktop.

“I hope to hell you know what you’re doing,” he said tightly to the FBI agent.

“I know exactly what I’m doing-or rather what we’re doing,” Hardesty said confidently. He smiled broadly. “Just play along with me, my friend, and you and I will cut up one million, two hundred thousand dollars in unmarked bills. As long as this guy Evans does as he’s told and doesn’t get any bright ideas of his own.”

Duffy guffawed. “That guy? Hell, Roger, he’s a prison guard! He’s about as smart as a bag of nails. You don’t have to worry about him.”

Or you either, I hope, Hardesty thought. A million two was serious money. Serious enough to give almost any man pause for thought.

“So,” Duffy asked, “where do we go from here?”

“Today’s Tuesday,” Hardesty said. “The Neeley woman has gone to the movies every Wednesday night for two months. We’ll get Evans back in here in the morning and brief him on what to do when she goes to the movies tomorrow night. Then we’ll be off and running.”

“Okay,” Duffy said. Then, as if to convince himself, he repeated it. “Okay.”

The following night, when the first showing of the evening feature was over, Cory was waiting in the doorway of a coffee shop next to the Nugget Theater. When Billie Sue Neeley emerged in the exiting audience, he stepped out to meet her.

“Need a ride?” he asked.

She stopped, startled at having been spoken to. “What do you want?” she asked, almost demanded.

“You and I need to sit down and have a talk,” Cory said. “An FBI man is watching you, and now he’s watching me because I gave you a ride day before yesterday. We need to have a serious conversation.”

Billie studied him for a long moment in the white glare of the movie theater marquee, with people moving past them on the sidewalk, talking among themselves, without even a glance at Cory and Billie. Presently she made her decision.

“Okay. Where?”

“There’s a coffee shop around the corner.”

“Let’s go,” Billie said. It was almost an order.

The place was called Cliff’s Cafe. It had a ten-stool counter and six red vinyl booths for four, all under a sea of fluorescent lights that made its patrons look somehow ill, like they belonged in an emergency room for a transfusion instead of a café for a burger. The menus were in imitation red-leather folders that matched the vinyl booths.

“You hungry?” Cory asked conversationally when they slid into a booth.

“No,” she snapped tightly.

“Well, I am.”

When the waitress came, Cory ordered the Cliff’s Special, a quarter-pounder with cheese, bacon, and the works, served with crispy crinkle fries on the side. With it he ordered a Dr Pepper. Billie ordered black coffee.

“Well?” she asked as they waited for their order, in the same demanding tone she had used in their encounter on the street. Cory fixed her with his flat corrections-officer stare.

“Okay, here’s the story,” he said.

He laid it out for her. Everything. All that had taken place in the deputy warden’s office. He was straight with her, as he had earlier decided he would be. He told her everything-except the fact that he had followed her to the Motel 7 after she had left the bus depot. That was personal, he had decided. That was between him and her, and the deputy warden and the FBI had nothing to do with it. At that point he was not sure why he felt that way.

When his food was served and he began to eat, and Billie began to tentatively sip at her black coffee, she studied him now more than he studied her. What she saw was a guy with a pretty ordinary face: eyes a little too close together, nose slightly hooked, one ear a bit jugged.

Certainly not as handsome as her man in prison. Lester Dragg, except for a couple of crooked teeth, looked like Johnny Depp. Half the girls back in Atoka High had been crazy about him. But it was Billie Sue Neeley who snagged him. Lucky her, she had eventually thought wryly, but by then it was too late to turn back.

“So how come you’re being so straight with me?” she finally asked.

Cory locked eyes with her. “I don’t like being blackmailed by the deputy warden and an FBI agent,” he told her evenly.

Billie gave him a knowing look. “Wouldn’t have anything to do with the money, would it?” She picked up one of his crispy crinkle fries and ate it.

“They seem to think you know where it is,” he told her. She took another one of his fries, salted this one, and munched some more. “Thought you weren’t hungry,” he reminded her.

“I don’t know where the money is,” Billie said, ignoring his last remark.

“I get the feeling that this FBI agent thinks you might be able to find out where it is.”

“That agent wouldn’t by any chance be named Hardesty, would he?”

“Yeah. You know him?”

“He’s been leaning on me ever since Les and I got caught in that hot car trying to cross into Mexico. See, he blew it that day, big-time. If he’d let us cross, he could have paid the Mexican border cops to bump us back into the U.S. and then he’d have had Les on a federal rap, international transportation of a stolen vehicle. But he jumped the gun. Got itchy about finding the money, prob’ly. So all he could do is turn Les over to the California law and get him sent up on a stolen car rap. Once he got Les put away, he started stalking me. I told him a hunnerd times I didn’t know what Les had done with that bank take, but he just never believed me.” Billie sighed a weary sigh and continued to eat his crispy crinkle fries. But her eyes narrowed slightly.

“What does Hardesty expect you to get out of me?”

“I don’t know.” Cory finished his burger and pushed his plate with the rest of the fries over to her. “Maybe he thinks you’ll fall for me, drop Lester, and decide to split the money with me.”

Billie grunted softly. “Won’t work. Nothing personal, but you’re not my type.” Her remark got no reaction at all from Cory. Billie’s eyes narrowed even more, not in suspicion now but curiosity. “Well?” she finally challenged.

“Well what?”

“Aren’t you going to say I’m not your type either? I mean, I’m a convict’s girl and you’re a prison guard, for God’s sake!”

Cory finished the last of his Dr Pepper and set the bottle aside, shrugging. “I guess I don’t know exactly what kind of woman is my type. I haven’t had much luck with women.”

When they left the café, Cory walked her back to the Motel 7.

“So what do you think?” Billie asked when they got to the door of her room. “Where does this go from here?”

“I don’t know. I guess we just play it out and see where it takes us.”

“I guess,” Billie agreed.

She went on into her room and Cory walked away, toward his apartment.

Inside, Billie parted the curtains of the room’s small window and watched him walking away. With the palm of one hand rubbing up and down her thigh, she watched him until he was out of sight. She had been a long time without a man.

During visiting hours the next day, an agitated Lester Dragg tapped one knuckle on the metal visiting room table that separated them. It was an open visiting room where inmates and visitors could touch, hug, kiss, snack on junk food from state-owned vending machines, and in some cases transfer drugs and other contraband. But Lester Dragg was not interested in doing any of that. Lester Dragg was only interested in the hack named Evans that Billie Sue had met.

“What else did he tell you about Hardesty?” Lester was particularly curious about the FBI agent.

“Nothing,” Billie explained patiently, “except what I already told you.” She sighed audibly. “Why? I mean, what’s so important about him?”

“What’s so important about him is that he’s the fed that’s been trying to cut some kind of deal with me about the money.”

“You never told me about anything like that,” Billie said, surprised.

“I didn’t think you needed to know, Billie Sue!” he snapped. “Sometimes the less you know, the safer I feel.”

Billie looked away for a moment. Lester had a way of hurting her feelings like that. It usually happened when he was upset about something. Or when he was angry. She had begun to notice that when he was upset or angry, he didn’t look so much like Johnny Depp anymore.

Brushing aside her hurt feelings, Billie asked, “What do you want me to do about him? The corrections guy?”

“I don’t know. Just play along with him for the time being, I reckon. See if you can figure out what Hardesty and that deputy warden are planning. But be careful what you say to him. And whatever you do”-he pointed a threatening finger at her-“don’t tell him that you told me about meeting him. You got that straight?”

“I got it, Les.”

He took her hands across the table, and his voice softened the way it did when he wanted something. “Listen, honey, if you should get, you know, friendly with this hack, to the point where he might consider doing you a favor, well, go for it, okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, if you put out to him a little, you might could ask if he could maybe get me transferred out of the goddamned laundry. All that bleach I have to handle is making my hands raw.”

Billie stiffened, but only inside so he wouldn’t notice. “Are you saying it’s okay for me to go to bed with this guy if he’ll get you transferred to a better job?”

“Well, yeah,” Lester said, shrugging innocently. “I mean, it wouldn’t be for real or anything. Just something you’d do for me, honey, to make my life a little easier. You understand what I mean, don’t you, babe?”

“Yeah, Lester. Sure, I understand.”

Walking back to the bus stop after the visit, Billie Sue felt like the back of her neck was on fire.

That evening Cory came by the motel in his car to get her and they went downtown to an Italian restaurant that was considerably nicer than Cliff’s Cafe had been. Cory ordered a bottle of Barolo, and as they drank wine and waited for their dinner, Billie told him about her visit with Lester.

“I can’t believe he actually asked me to do that,” she complained. “I mean, I’m supposed to be his girl and he actually asked me to go to bed with you to get him a better job assignment!”

“Wouldn’t have worked anyway,” Cory said. “I’m just a level-one corrections officer. Only sergeants and higher can get an inmate transferred.” He studied her for a moment, then said, “You look very nice tonight. No boots, no worn-out jeans.” She was wearing dress slacks and heels, with a scooped-neck long-sleeved sweater.

She shrugged. “Well, I didn’t want you to think I was a complete Okie from Muskogee. I do know how to dress. Lester makes me dress down when I visit the prison; he says it keeps the guards from hitting on me.”

Cory smiled. “Officers aren’t likely to hit on women who visit inmates. Mostly they think of them as sluts-you know, tattoos, nose rings, half a pound of makeup, trying to look good for the loser inside.”

“Do you think I’m one of those?” Billie asked frankly. “A slut?”

“No, I don’t.” Cory looked away. “I have a confession to make. I followed you to the motel that first night, after I let you out at the bus depot. I had a feeling you’d come back out, so I waited. And I followed you.”

“Why are you telling me this now?”

“I guess I wanted you to know that I was interested in you even before all this business with the deputy warden and the FBI guy started.”

Billie tilted her head a bit. “Interested in me how? Getting laid?”

“No. Not at that point. Although I’m sure it would eventually have come to that. But just then I only felt that I’d like to know more about you: what your name was, where you came from, how you got to where you are now.” Abruptly he stopped talking, as if unsure what to say next.

“Well, you already know my name,” she told him in a throaty voice that he took notice of for the first time. “As to where I came from, we called it Dustburg. I was a sharecropper’s kid. One of thirteen. Got pulled out of school when I was twelve to work in the fields. It wasn’t a real fun life. One of my brothers was retarded everywhere but between his legs; me and my sisters slept with big rocks in bed to fight him off with.

“On Saturdays we’d all pile onto the back of Daddy’s flatbed and go into town. That was a real big deal. We’d drive past five hundred telephone poles until we came to a sign that said city limits. After a while I got to where I’d think, so what? A tacky little one-street nothing full of dirt-poor people who lived on a steady diet of revivals every Sunday.” She took a long swallow of Barolo. “So you want to know where I came from? I came from nowhere.”

“That where you hooked up with Lester?”

“Yeah. When I was old enough I started slipping away from the rest of the herd on Saturday afternoons and hanging out at a juke joint. A typical Okie dive, one of those shot-and-a-beer holes in the wall with a couple of drop-pocket pool tables, an old Wurlitzer that still took nickels, a few card tables, and a steady stream of would-be Romeos trying to look like something special but coming off like nothing no-how. Lester was one of them. But somehow…” Her voice momentarily drifted off and she stared down at the red circle in her wineglass.

“Let me guess,” said Cory quietly. “Somehow Lester was different.”

Billie snapped back to real time and her expression tightened. “You making fun of me?”

Cory shook his head. “Just trying to get to know you, Billie.” It was the first time he had spoken her name, and he could tell by the look on her face that it meant something to her.

It was during their dinner, well into a second bottle of Barolo, that Billie Sue seriously considered for the first time the face of the man sitting across from her: the smooth, clean angles of his jaw, the straight white teeth, lips that a woman might yearn to have all over her body-and she looked into his light blue, almost gray eyes and in an instant she was a goner. Forget about Lester, let the prick rot in prison, she was hungry for it and she was going to do it with this prison guard-excuse me, corrections officer-this very night. Come hell or high water, or boll weevils at harvest time.

At three o’clock in the morning, Cory and Billie sat up in her bed at the Motel 7, turned on a forty-watt light on the nightstand, and shared a bottle of warm Mexican beer from a six-pack they had picked up on the way from the restaurant where they had dinner. Billie’s room was a one-star C &T: cheap and tacky. Coin-operated TV, swamp cooler instead of air conditioner, hot and cold running cockroaches.

“Christ, what a pigsty,” Cory observed, looking around for the first time without raw lust on his mind. “I’ve seen landfills that were more appealing.”

“Lester’s idea,” Billie said blandly. “He said if I lived anywhere more expensive, I’d attract attention.”

“Good old Lester. All heart.”

Billie finished the beer in the bottle they were sharing and got out of bed to walk naked over to a table to get another. Cory, seeing her undressed and upright for the first time, saw that she was a little heavy in the thighs and had a line of proud flesh across one shoulder blade.

“Don’t be looking at my thighs,” she chastised, walking back. “I know they’re thick.”

“I didn’t notice,” Cory lied. “I was looking at the scar on your back. How’d you get it?”

“My daddy whipped me with a bridle strap after he caught me coming out of the juke joint with Lester. Mama made him stop after he drew blood, else I’d have more scars. My sister Lillie Lee has got five of them, crisscrossed. Daddy caught her naked in the back of a pickup truck with a neighbor’s boy.” Billie got back in bed, took a swallow from the new bottle, and handed it to Cory. “Well, Mr. Corrections Officer, where the hell do we go from here?”

“Damned if I know,” Cory said. “If you knew where that money was, we could just take it, blow a goodbye kiss to Lester, the deputy warden, and that FBI agent, and fly away to paradise.” He fixed her in an unblinking stare. “But you don’t know where it is, do you?”

“Nope. Wish I did.” Everything comes down to the money, she thought.

“How’d you and Lester end up in California?” Cory asked, changing the subject.

Or was he changing the subject? she wondered. Was he trying to get to know her a little better or just moving the conversation around to where the money came back into the picture? Damn it all anyway.

“After my daddy whipped me,” she addressed his question, “Lester said to hell with Oklahoma, we’re going out to sunny California and get us jobs as movie extras. He said he looked enough like Johnny Depp that it would be a cinch for him, and he allowed that while I wasn’t no raving beauty, I could prob’ly pick up a few jobs anyway. So we hopped into his falling-apart Mustang and hit the old interstate. Got as far as Joseph City, Arizona, when the car broke down. Sold it for junk and bought us Trailways bus tickets to L.A. Lester got a job at a gas station and I started waiting tables in a coffee shop. Neither one of us had a clue about becoming movie extras. It was at the gas station that Lester met the two slickers that got him involved in the bank job. One of them was a Mexican dude, the other was some kind of surfer type who had worked as a bag boy in a grocery market across the street from the bank they tried to rob. He had seen the armored truck make its pickup week after week and figured the bank must have loads of cash ready to go just before the pickups. The bank was in Modesto, a little town up north of L.A., just a branch, only four teller windows and no guard, but it was in a strip mall and had a lot of business traffic, so they figured the take would be pretty good-never dreamed of no million, two hundred thousand! Lester said they guessed maybe a hundred thou tops. They offered him ten thousand to wait outside and drive the getaway car. We planned to use our share and head for Hawaii. Lester wanted to get a job as a lifeguard on Waikiki Beach, and he said I could go back to waiting tables again-”

“Good old Lester,” Cory said again, grunting audibly. “Always picking a glamour job for himself and waiting tables for you.”

Billie grunted back. “Tell me about it. Took me a while to tumble to that, but I finally got wise. Except by then I didn’t have no place to go, so I just hung with Lester.”

“Too bad you and I don’t have that bank money. Make life a lot different for you.”

Billie sat up and twisted around on the bed until she was facing him. “You always swing back to talking about the money, don’t you, honey? What’s on your mind, really?”

Cory shrugged. “What difference does it make? You don’t know where the money is, right?”

“Right. Don’t have a clue.”

Cory fell silent for several moments, eyes downcast, staring at the beer bottle it was now his turn to hold, with Billie’s naked breasts prominent in his peripheral vision. His lips were pursed as he molded his thoughts for what he would say next. When he finally spoke, he looked back at Billie’s face without blinking and said, “How much do you think it would be worth to Lester if I could get him out of prison?”

“Get him out when?” she asked, surprised.

“Soon,” Cory told her. “Very soon.”

The next morning Cory was back with the deputy warden and FBI agent Hardesty.

“I don’t think the Neeley woman knows where the money is,” he told them, “but I think I can get Lester to lead you to it if you can find a way to spring him. She says he wants a transfer out of the laundry detail. I was thinking maybe-the dairy farm?”

Hardesty and Duffy exchanged surprised looks. “You mean help him escape?” Duffy asked, aghast.

“Why not?” Cory reasoned. “He would be taken right back into custody by Agent Hardesty and returned here before there was any record that he was ever out.”

Hardesty rubbed his chin. “Not a bad idea,” he said.

“But what if we can’t follow him once he’s out?” Duffy worried. “We could lose him.”

“Not a problem,” Hardesty assured him. “If we provide a car for him, I’ll have a silent tracker signal unit attached to it that we can follow from our own car.”

“How about using my car for Lester once he’s out?” Cory suggested. “The Neeley woman is familiar with it, she’ll be comfortable in it.”

Hardesty shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

Duffy grimaced, looking agitated.

“Look, here’s how we can work it,” Cory said. “I tell the woman I can arrange to get Lester transferred to the dairy farm. It’s a job he can simply walk away from. I say that she and I can be parked in my car at a highway rest stop about a mile from the farm. I tell her I’ll do it for, say, a hundred thousand of the bank money. When Lester gets to the car, we pick him up and head for wherever the money is. Once we get there, you two show, make the collar, and it’s a done deal.”

Hardesty was smiling, but Duffy was shaking his head. “I don’t know,” the deputy warden said. “It goes against my grain, letting a con walk away like that.”

“Look,” Hardesty reasoned, “you won’t exactly be letting him walk away. You’re giving him a short furlough is all. And technically he’ll still be in custody, because Evans here is going to be with him all the time-and Evans is a corrections officer. See?” He turned to Cory. “I like it, Evans. I think it’ll work. But are you sure you can set it up?”

“Positive. Actually, it was the Neeley woman’s idea. She started talking about getting Lester transferred out of the laundry, and I just took it from there. I didn’t even have to ask for a share of the bank money; she offered it.” Cory grinned. “She thinks I’m just a dumb prison guard out to make some easy money.”

“Well, won’t she be surprised?” Hardesty said with a chuckle.

Won’t a lot of people, Cory thought.

At a prison visiting room table, Billie Neeley and Lester Dragg leaned forward on their elbows to converse privately.

“You sure you can trust this dude?” Lester asked uneasily.

“Sure as rain, baby,” Billie answered confidently. “The guy’s a big hick. You should have seen his eyes bulge when I offered him a hundred grand.”

“Yeah, well, he ain’t gonna get no hunnerd grand,” Lester said, pouting. “Ten grand, maybe, if ever’thing goes smooth.” He paused, then frowned suspiciously. “You go to bed with this dude to get him to do this?”

“Hell, no!” Billie declared. “Didn’t have to. Oh, I let him cop a few feels, so he prob’ly thinks he’s got something going, but he’s wrong.” Reaching over, she took one of Lester’s hands. “You’re the only one for me, sugar. Always have been.”

“Well, all right then,” Lester said triumphantly. “I’m counting on you, babe. Don’t you let me down, hear?”

“I’d never let you down, sugar. You mean the world to me, you know that.”

She squeezed his hand for emphasis.

In Cory’s apartment, where Billie Sue had been spending the nights, she and Cory sat across from each other at his little dinette table.

“Okay, listen up,” Cory said solemnly. “This situation is coming down to the wire. We’ve got to put all our cards on the table.” He locked eyes with her. “I think it’s about time you tell me where the money is.”

Billie stiffened, biting her lower lip. Their eyes were like riveted bolts; neither of them even blinked. After a heavy moment, Billie took a deep, almost tortured breath.

“It’s in a public storage facility down in Modesto, where the bank was robbed.”

Cory frowned. “Why haven’t you already grabbed it? Or told me about it earlier so we could grab it together? You still hung up on Lester, is that it?”

“No, damn it to hell!” She began blurting words like machine gun rounds. “Lester says the storage facility has a cyclone fence around it that’s wired to a twenty-four-hour security company. There’s a keyboard on the gate with a six-digit code for people to get in after hours, and Lester never told me the code. It’s a great big place and I don’t even know which unit he rented, and anyway he said he put this big combination padlock on the door, and Lester didn’t tell me the combination either, so I couldn’t get into the damned locker even if I did know which one it was.”

She was crying now and pounding the table with both fists, so Cory had to reach out and grab her wrists to stop her. “Okay, okay, okay! It’s okay! Calm down…”

It took a couple of minutes, but he managed to get her calm and got her some tissues to dry her eyes. But even so, she was still agitated, exuding a high-strung energy he had never seen in her before.

“I didn’t know what to do.” She seemed to be arguing with herself. “Tell you, don’t tell you, lie to Lester, don’t lie to Lester, try to keep all my stories straight-”

“Listen to me.” He held her hands firmly across the table. “You do know where this storage place is, right?”

“Sure I do,” she said irritably. “I been sending a thirty-dollar money order there every month for two damn years! I ought to know where it is! Let go of my hands, you’re hurting me.”

Cory released her, rose, and came around the table to kneel beside her. “Listen to me.” He reached up to stroke her hair. “Everything’s going to be okay. I’m going to arrange to get Lester out and the three of us are going to Modesto and get that money. And when we do get it, we’re going to leave old Lester high and dry, and you and I are going to disappear together, how does that sound?”

Billie Sue sputtered a little. “Well-can we do that-I mean, can we get away with it-I mean, what about that warden and that FBI guy-and what about Lester-do we have to kill him?”

“Hell, no, baby. We’re not killers. We’ll just leave Lester locked in his own storage locker. Somebody will find him the next day when he makes enough noise. But we’ll be long gone by then.”

Gently Cory pulled her head down and kissed her tenderly on the lips, tasting the salt from her tears. He continued to stroke her hair.

“This is going to work for us, baby. I’ve got it all figured out.”

In Duffy’s office the next morning, the deputy warden and Agent Hardesty told Cory the plan was ready to be put into operation. Inmate Lester Dragg had been transferred outside the walls to the prison dairy farm.

“It’s an honor assignment,” Duffy reminded them. “No walls, just a cyclone fence with no razor wire across the top, and the last head count of the day is at six o’clock. Escape can be effected by going to some remote corner of the pasture, climbing over the fence, and simply walking away. Since the inmates assigned there are nonviolent first offenders with only a short time to serve, no one has ever taken advantage of that easy way out. Lester Dragg will be the first.”

“Then we’re all set,” Cory said. “The Neeley woman is convinced that she got me to arrange his transfer to the farm for a hundred grand cut of the bank money. When she sees him tomorrow, she’ll tell him it’s all arranged for that night. He’ll walk over to the highway and the Neeley woman and I will pick him up in my car.” He looked at Hardesty. “You have that tracking transmitter?”

“I’ve got it in my car in the visitors’ parking lot.”

“Good. I’ll pull my car around from the staff lot and you can put it on. You need tools?”

“No, it’s magnetic. I just clamp it to anything metal on the undercarriage. The GPTS receiver sits on my dashboard.”

“What’s GPTS?” the deputy warden asked, frowning. Cory and Hardesty exchanged disdainful glances.

“Global Positioning Tracking System,” Hardesty said. “I’ll explain how it works when we’re following them.”

The deputy warden shook his head doubtfully. “I don’t know. This thing is getting pretty involved. I mean, transferring him outside the walls with no notice, then having him just walk away-suppose somebody catches him? And this business of following him with some kind of gadget stuck to the bottom of a car-I just don’t know…”

Hardesty rose and leaned over Duffy’s desk, both hands planted palms down. “Look,” he said, calmly but firmly. “This is going to work. All we have to do is stick to the plan, see? It’s that simple. Relax and stick to the plan. Nothing will go wrong. Okay?”

The way Hardesty was leaning over the desk, Deputy Warden Duffy could see under his open coat front the service revolver the FBI agent carried. It was an intimidating sight. “Okay,” he blurted. “Okay. We’ll just stick to the plan.”

“Fine.” Hardesty straightened, and to Cory said, “Let’s go get your car set up.”

After Cory and Hardesty left his office, Deputy Warden Duffy unlocked a bottom desk drawer and removed his old service revolver, a.38 S &W Special. In case anything did go wrong, he didn’t want Hardesty to be the only one there with a gun.

Outside the prison, when Cory and Hardesty had their cars parked alongside each other, Hardesty opened a small box about the size of a deck of playing cards and began unwrapping its contents. As he did so, he asked casually, “What’s your opinion of Duffy?”

“In what way?” Cory asked back.

“You think he’s up for this? He seems kind of shaky to me.”

“I noticed that,” Cory agreed.

“How do you feel about it? The plan, I mean.”

“I think it’s good. I think it’ll work. There’s only one thing that bothers me.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“The cut. I think I deserve a cut. All I’ve been promised out of this is a future promotion to sergeant. While you and Duffy divide a million two in cash. After all I’ve done to move this plan along, that doesn’t seem quite fair.”

Hardesty paused in what he was doing and fixed Cory in a flat stare. “Well, tell me, Officer Evans, what do you think would be fair?”

“If you and Duffy are splitting the money evenly, that’s six hundred thousand apiece. If each of you kicked in a hundred grand for me, you’d both still have half a mil left-”

“And you’d have two hundred thou-”

“Plus those sergeant’s stripes.”

Hardesty smiled, not his professional FBI smile but a George Bush kinder, gentler smile. “I’ve been wondering when you’d make your pitch, Evans. I’ve been expecting it. You’re smart. And you’re reliable. Two things that Duffy isn’t. How would you feel about an even fifty-fifty split between you and me?”

“How could you do that?” Cory asked with obvious interest.

“Easy. The two of us take the money and hit the road. We lock the deputy warden, the escaped convict, and his slut girlfriend in the storage garage with a new lock I’ll bring with me.”

Hardesty’s smile now morphed into one of almost evil delight. “How Duffy will explain things when they’re found will be his problem. You and I will be, as the old chain-gang song goes, long gone to Bowling Green.”

“How can you manage that? You’d be a missing FBI agent.”

Now Hardesty chuckled. “I resigned from the Bureau a year ago, when I first started working on this plan. I just never got around to telling Duffy about it. So nobody’ll be looking for me. And if you’re smart, you’ll drop off your resignation at the prison’s administrative office in the morning, effective immediately, so nobody’ll be looking for you either. We just go our separate ways, me in my car, you in yours.”

Now it was Cory who smiled. “Only problem with that is, you can follow me with your GPTS tracker. That would make me a little nervous.”

“Hell, I’ll give you the monitor,” Hardesty said, shrugging. “Look, kid, we’ve got to trust each other to make this work. I’m not greedy. I’ll settle for six hundred thou if you will. Have we got a deal?”

Cory thought about Billie Sue sitting in his apartment, and Duffy sitting back in his deputy warden’s office, and Lester Dragg who had been sitting in his prison cell for two years, and all that money lying in a storage unit a hundred and twenty miles away in Modesto…

“Yeah,” he told Hardesty, “we’ve got a deal.”

Hardesty finished unwrapping the item he had taken from the small box and showed it to Cory. It was slightly smaller than the box, made of metal, bluish in color, and was completely covered all the way around except for a small indented switch on one edge. “This side is magnetized,” he told Cory, demonstrating by laying it gently on the side of a car door, to which it attached without falling off. “The magnetized side has an ultra-high field strength which gives it a very strong resistivity once attached, so that even if your car should hit a large bump, the device will not fall off.”

Hardesty got a rolled-up blanket from the back seat of his car and unrolled it under the rear of Cory’s Buick. Removing his coat, he handed it to Cory to hold for him while he lay down and scooted well under the car so that only his feet remained extended. Very carefully he placed the tracking device on the side of the vehicle’s muffler and switched it on.

“Go look at the monitor on the dashboard of my car,” he called to Cory. “Tell me if the screen has turned from black to blue.”

Hardesty watched Cory’s feet at he walked round to Hardesty’s car. While Cory was so occupied, Hardesty removed a second tracker, already unwrapped, from his trouser pocket, switched that one on also, and attached it to the opposite side of the muffler from the first one.

“The screen is blue,” Cory called over.

“Okay, good.” Hardesty scooted back out from under Cory’s car and pulled the blanket out, rolling it back up and tossing it into his car again. With his coat back on, he showed Cory how the tracking monitor on his dashboard worked. It was about the size of a paperback book, with most of its front being taken up by a small screen. Slowly turning a global-assist dial, he had Cory watch while a map materialized and a white blip blinked on and off, indicating exactly where Cory’s Buick was parked-right next to them. “Now I’ll always know where you are until this thing we’re doing is over,” he said with a wink. Unless, he thought, Cory double-crossed him and removed the first tracker. In which case, he would still know where Cory was, by simply changing the monitor’s frequency to the second tracker. As a former longtime FBI agent, Hardesty knew that a man couldn’t be too careful when dealing with dishonest people.

Billie Sue Neeley was not, as Cory imagined, sitting in Cory’s apartment waiting for him, but instead was in her own shabby little Motel 7 room preparing for her part in the escape from prison of Lester Dragg.

One of the main things in her preparation was to count how much money she had left of the $20,000 Lester had given her to subsist on in the event that after the bank robbery that had gone so badly they did not successfully escape to Mexico. Immediately following his getaway with the two canvas sacks of cash, Lester had marshaled up a rare presence of mind and located a storage facility in which to conceal the loot, even purchasing a heavy-duty combination padlock from a selection on sale in the rental office.

In the garage-size unit, he had used a pocket knife he habitually carried to cut open one of the locked canvas money bags and remove $20,000 in mixed unmarked currency, which he subsequently boxed up at a nearby private post office and mailed to Billie Sue Neeley care of General Delivery in Modesto. All this was accomplished in one hour immediately following his getaway from the bank. His hastily formed plan was to escape to Mexico, lie low for a while on several hundred dollars he had taken for expenses, then when things cooled down following the holdup send Billie Sue back to Modesto to pick up the package at General Delivery. They would then go somewhere and live off that money until it was safe enough to retrieve the bulk of the loot from the rental facility.

It was a brilliant plan, doubly so being conceived so quickly in the mind of an oaf like Lester. And it may well have worked had he and Billie Sue not been stopped trying to cross into Mexico in a car stolen, unknown to Lester, by his two now deceased cohorts the evening prior to the robbery. After Lester’s apprehension and subsequent conviction for grand theft auto, Billie Sue, who could not be charged with anything, moved to Sacramento to be near the prison where he was incarcerated and to live, as he sternly instructed, a very frugal, almost indigent low-profile life, so as not to suggest that she or Lester had any knowledge of the whereabouts of all that bank loot, which in fact had never left, and still remained within two miles of the bank from which it had been stolen.

Billie kept the $20,000 from General Delivery hidden in a space under the bottom drawer of a shabby dresser in the dumpy motel in which Lester insisted she lived. Access to the money, from which she removed only a pittance at a time, was by removing the drawer completely, revealing a four-inch space between the dresser and the floor upon which it stood. Billie had no qualms about the possible theft of the money; only an imbecile would think of stealing anything from the premises of a Motel 7.

Now, however, after her last visit with Lester, during which the plan for his escape had been finalized, he had given her specific instructions to take out all of the remaining money and to use part of it to buy him a handgun. He had explained exactly how she was to do it.

The name of the establishment to which Billie had been directed, on information Lester had been given by a fellow convict, located on the fringe of what passed for Sacramento’s skid row, was the Three Balls Pawn Shop. It had, as was customary for such a business, an overhang above its entrance, with three shiny white balls, under which was a sign that read MONEY TO LOAN.

When Billie Sue entered, she was greeted by a smallish, balding man wearing a hearing aid. “I’d like to buy a gun,” she said.

“The ones I have are back here,” the pawnbroker said, with not a hint of surprise. He led her to the rear of the store. “These are the ones I have that are out of pawn and available for sale. Did you have anything particular in mind?”

“A thirty-eight-caliber.”

“I have two,” the pawnbroker said, opening the display case and taking out a revolver and an automatic. Billie frowned. Lester had not told her there would be a choice of models. “The Smith and Wesson revolver is seven hundred dollars,” she was told, “and the Colt automatic is eight hundred.”

Beginning to feel nervous, and silently thinking what a complete ignorant asshole Lester was, Billie said, “I’ll take that one,” pointing to the Colt.

“Of course. You realize that California has a three-day waiting period before you can actually take the weapon with you.”

Now she recalled the rest of the ignorant asshole’s instructions. “Oh? I was told by a friend that the waiting period could be waived for a thousand-dollar fee.”

The pawnbroker frowned. “Who, may I ask, is the friend who told you that?”

“His name is Lester Dragg. He’s in Folsom.”

“Ah, yes. I did receive a message about him. You are, ah, prepared to pay cash for the purchase and the waiver fee?”

“Yes.” Billie looked down at the display again. “What’s that little one over there in the corner?”

“Oh, that. That’s a Guardian twenty-five-caliber automatic. Not very powerful. Only holds six shots-”

“I’ll take that also.”

“It’s two-fifty. And you’ll have to pay for another waiting-period waiver, you know.”

“That’s okay. I’d like bullets for both of them, too.”

“Well, I’m not licensed to sell ammunition. I have some of my own, however, and I can load each piece for you for fifty dollars. Let’s see now, that comes to thirty-one hundred dollars even. You did say cash, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” Billie stepped over to another counter, turned her back on the pawnbroker, and counted the exact amount from her purse. Moments later she left the pawn shop with the two loaded pistols in a plain brown bag.

The night of the escape was upon them.

Cory packed a few belongings in a duffel bag and retrieved his service revolver, a.357 Ruger GP-100, which he was required to wear only when assigned to perimeter duty outside the walls of the prison or on tower duty inside.

Out at his car, he put the pistol under the driver’s seat and spread a vinyl raincoat on the ground behind the car. With a pen light, he scooted under the car and located one of the tracking devices Hardesty had attached to the car’s muffler. Removing it, he scooted back out, tossed the device into some bushes, and drove off to pick up Billie Sue at the Motel 7.

In her room at the motel, Billie had also packed a small overnight bag she had and put the little Guardian automatic in a pocket of her coat. She wrapped the larger pistol she had bought for Lester Dragg in a newspaper, which she put into a grocery bag that contained a six-pack of beer. Then she sat down to wait for Cory.

Hardesty, wearing his usual service revolver as well as a.32-caliber backup pistol in an ankle holster, drove his own car onto the prison staff parking lot just as Deputy Warden Duffy exited the administration building and came onto the lot to join him. As Duffy got into Hardesty’s passenger seat, he unobtrusively adjusted himself to accommodate the pistol he had stuck in the waistband of his trousers.

“Everything okay?” he asked nervously.

“Everything’s fine,” Hardesty replied quietly. He drove off the lot and turned onto the highway toward Sacramento.

As they drove, Duffy looked off in the distance at the night lights just coming on at the prison dairy farm where Lester Dragg had started work that day and from where, with Duffy’s help, he was probably blithely escaping at that very moment. Duffy’s mouth went dry. From an inside coat pocket he took a flask and drank from it.

“What the hell’s that?” Hardesty asked gruffly.

“Scotch,” Duffy said. “Want some?”

“No thanks,” Hardesty said. “But you go ahead.” Let the fool get smashed, he thought. Be easier to handle him that way.

Reaching to the dashboard, Hardesty turned on the tracking monitor and watched its small screen fade from black to blue. Adjusting a dial, he watched a blip materialize on the location of the apartment building where Cory Evans lived. The blip settled and remained steady. Hardesty frowned. Cory’s car was not moving yet.

Cory drove up to the door of Billie’s room at the motel. Watching for him out the window, she came out at once and he opened the trunk to put her bag in with his duffel.

“What’s that?” he asked, bobbing his chin at the grocery bag she carried.

“Six-pack of Budweiser,” she said. “I figured we could drink one each and give the rest to Lester.”

They got in the car. Billie took two bottles of beer into the front seat and set the grocery bag on the back seat. Cory started the car and pulled away from the motel. “Can’t say I’m going to miss that dump,” Billie muttered to herself.

Twilight had settled and low clouds were hanging in the sky like gauze. The first light raindrops hit the windshield and Cory turned the wipers on low. “Looks like Lester might get a little wet walking to the highway,” he said.

Billie Sue glanced at him but said nothing.

Hardesty was watching the blip on the monitor. It was still not moving. Glancing down at the car’s digital clock, he wet his lips. Something was wrong. He began turning the monitor’s frequency dial.

“What’s the matter with that thing?” Duffy asked testily. “Isn’t it working?”

“It’s working fine,” Hardesty snapped. “Have another drink.”

Still north of Sacramento, they now passed the rest stop where Cory and the woman were to pick up Lester Dragg. Hardesty drove another mile, then turned into a truck stop and parked.

Leaning forward, he manipulated the frequency dial more slowly and a few seconds later was able to pick up a new blip, this one moving away from Sacramento toward them. It was a signal from the second tracking device Hardesty had placed on Cory’s car.

That son of a bitch, he thought. He crossed me. Hardesty’s jaw tightened. Okay. Fine. Now there wouldn’t be a split of any kind.

He would leave four people locked in that storage garage.

At the rest stop up the highway, Cory pulled his Buick into a spot next to several cement picnic benches and turned off the headlights.

“How will he know we’re here?” he asked Billie.

“He’ll know.”

“How do we find him?”

“He’ll find us.”

At that moment a knuckle rapped on the passenger-side window. Billie unlocked the door and got out. In the subdued light of the rest stop, Cory saw her embrace a slim figure with a head of thick black hair combed straight back. “Hey, baby,” he heard a male voice say.

“Hey, sugar,” Billie answered. “Get in the back seat; there’s a little surprise for you.”

As Lester got in the back seat, Billie slid back in front next to Cory. “Okay, let’s go,” she said. “Cut over to Route 99 and head south.”

Hardesty watched the blip of Cory’s car as it drove away from the rest stop and swung left onto the state highway going south. Calculating that he was about six miles behind Cory, he pulled back onto the highway and eased down on the accelerator to catch up.

“That gadget working all right now?” Duffy asked edgily from the passenger seat.

“Working just fine.” Hardesty threw the deputy warden a disgusted look. Couldn’t depend on anybody anymore, he thought. “Have another drink, why don’t you? Help you to relax.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” Duffy said, retrieving the flask from his inside coat pocket again. As he drank, he felt the reassuring grip of the pistol sticking out of his waistband. Nobody was going to put anything over on him, he thought a little woozily. No, sir.

Outside, the pesky rain increased to a steadier downpour. Hardesty turned the car’s windshield wipers on to high. The slap-slap-slap of the rubber blades made Duffy feel a bit drowsy. His eyelids lowered a little.

In Cory’s car, the modicum of tension that had risen when Lester Dragg first got in had dissipated after they reached Highway 99 and turned south. Lester was drinking his second beer, and having found the gun Billie Sue had bought for him, had it tucked securely under his left thigh.

Billie had turned on the radio, found a country-and-western station, and was humming along to a Freddy Fender song about wasted days and wasted nights.

“How far are we going?” Cory asked Billie Sue after a bit, as if he did not already know. Lester answered for her.

“Don’t you worry about how far we’re going, Mr. Screw,” he said with a loud belch. “Jus’ keep on driving.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Damn straight on that. You ain’t the boss out here.”

The rain had increased by now to a heavy downpour, and Cory kept his speed at 55 as they kept driving, monotonously, past the next off-ramp, past the next lights up ahead in the California rural darkness, and then through stretches of nothing but the wet night.

Cory had checked his odometer at the rest stop where they picked up Lester, so he knew when they passed the off-ramp for Stockton that they were within a half-hour or so of their destination. That was confirmed by a highway sign just outside Stockton that read MODESTO 25.

Inside the car, the windshield began to steam up from the body heat of the occupants.

Hardesty by now had come up to within a dozen car lengths of Cory’s Buick and was following in a trained law enforcement pattern of nondetection observance: a frequent change of lanes in the flow of traffic, occasionally exiting the highway at an off-ramp, then crossing the underpass street and reentering via an on-ramp, where he accelerated just enough to again come within range of Cory’s blip on the monitor.

Next to him, Duffy’s head was leaning against the passenger window and he was not quite snoring but breathing heavily. Drunken fool, Hardesty thought. He began to contemplate pulling over, putting a round into Duffy’s temple, and dumping him on the side of the road. He even considered killing them all: four bodies in that storage garage, locked in with a bicycle lock he had purchased that morning-hell, it might be weeks before anybody noticed the stench and found them. By then he would be living easy down in Argentina, where there was no extradition treaty with the U.S.-assuming that he was ever even connected with the bodies.

Suddenly, as he was considering his options, Hardesty saw Cory’s blip leave the highway at an off-ramp next to a sign that read MODESTO NEXT RIGHT.

I’ll be damned, he thought, as he approached the same off-ramp. That was the town where the bank heist went down. Could it be that the money never left town?

Hardesty shook his head in disbelief.

Lester Dragg directed Cory along the outer limits of Modesto to a small industrial district of modest factories and warehouses until they came to a cul-de-sac, where he had Cory turn in.

A block down, at the dead end, was a high cyclone fence with a slider gate in its center. Above the gate was a sign: SECURITY STORAGE RENTALS. Just below the sign and to the left was a solid concrete post housing an infrared, touch-sensitive digital keypad under a two-inch-thick Plexiglas cover. All of it was brightly lit by an overhang of sulfur lights.

“Pull up to the gate, screw,” Lester Dragg ordered Cory. “Keep the motor running.” Stepping out of the car, he showed Cory the.38 automatic he now held in one hand. “Don’t try anything funny, see? I mean business.”

“I’m cool,” Cory replied. “All I want is my hundred grand.”

As Lester walked over to the entry post, Cory eased his left hand down to the Ruger pistol under the seat.

Billie noticed his movement but said nothing. She rested one hand on her purse, where she had the.25-caliber Guardian.

When Hardesty saw that Cory had pulled into a cul-de-sac, he immediately turned off his headlights and parked. Scoping out the situation in front of him, he made a quick, trained assessment that he had to act quickly or chance losing Cory’s car inside the security fence, which might or might not have an exit gate at the rear.

Next to him, Duffy was in what looked to Hardesty to be a drunken stupor; he was slouched down in the passenger seat, wheezing quietly through his nose. Take care of him later, Hardesty decided, and got out of the car, not closing the door all the way to avoid noise.

Stealthily, in the cover of shadows, he moved in a low crouch toward the security fence, service revolver in hand.

At the gatepost Lester touched a series of imprinted squares on the Plexiglas that were directly over the infrared keyboard numbers below it. With each touch, a soft beep sounded. After selecting eight numbers, Lester touched a side key marked ENTER. As soon as he did, a buzzer sounded and the gate began to slide open.

Lester hurried back to get in the car.

Hardesty by now had moved as close to Cory’s car as he could get without exposing himself to the gate’s sulfur lights. The air around him was humid and he was sweating.

Taking a chance that the three people in Cory’s car were all watching the sliding gate and none of the car’s rearview or side-view mirrors, and crouching as low as he could, he crossed the deserted street and dashed into shadows on the opposite side. Remaining totally still, watching the car until he was certain his movement had not been detected, he took a deep breath, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped his face clean of perspiration.

Calculating the distance to the gate, wondering how long it remained open after each code entry, he moved forward inch by inch toward the edge of the sulfur lights’ reach.

When the gate was all the way open, Lester Dragg ordered, “Go! Inside, make a right turn!”

Cory shifted gears and eased the Buick over a speed bump on the entry drive. Once inside, as ordered, he turned right.

“Go down to Section D and turn left,” Lester said. “You’ll see the signs.”

Cory handled the steering wheel with one hand as he slipped the Ruger up with his other and rested it against his left thigh.

Hardesty saw Cory’s car make its right turn inside the fence, and seconds later he heard a buzzer again and the gate began to slide closed.

Straightening from his crouch, he broke into a run, pistol at the ready in case he was seen, and sprinted toward the moving gate. It seemed to be moving faster than he was running.

Son of a bitch! he thought. Fresh sweat broke over his forehead and ran past the corners of both eyebrows into his eyes, stinging.

The gate lumbered on, like a train.

Hardesty’s heart pumped like a jackhammer.

After they’d turned into Section D of the facility’s interior and driven about fifty yards past a succession of identical closed garage doors, Lester told Cory to stop.

“Pull up in front of number 276 there.”

Cory eased the Buick to a stop and turned off the ignition, leaving the key in it.

“Okay, get out, screw.” Lester touched the back of Cory’s head with the gun. “Don’t try nothing funny.” In the rearview mirror, Cory saw Lester look over at Billie Sue. “You get out too, sugar.”

As Cory opened the driver’s door and slid out, he quickly slipped the Ruger under his coat into his waistband.

“Stand over there,” Lester ordered Cory. “Come over here, sugar,” he told Billie. He handed her his gun. “Keep him covered.”

Lester turned his attention toward a large combination padlock on the garage door handle.

Billie stood with Lester’s gun pointed at Cory. Her expression was stern, fixed in concentration; her eyes met with Cory’s in the pale light of a single bulb above the garage door. Remaining where he had been told to stand, Cory shrugged and held his hands out, palms up. Whatever.

With a sharp click, Lester jerked the big padlock open. “All right!” he said triumphantly. Throwing the latch, he rolled open the overhang door and a light came on inside.

The eyes of all three turned to look.

Two dust-covered gray canvas sacks lay there, padlocked at one end, with one of them slit partly open to reveal bundles of bank-banded currency.

A million two.

Hardesty watched from the end of the Section D drive.

He had barely made it through the closing gate, the weight of which had impacted his right elbow, causing, he was certain, a minor fracture. It hurt like hell. But he was not about to let it bother him. Switching the gun to his left hand, he had taken off at a trot in the direction Cory’s car had turned.

When he reached Section D and looked down the drive of identical garage doors, he saw Cory’s car parked partway down, in front of a square of light shining out from what appeared to be an open garage door.

Bingo, he thought.

A million two.

Holding his right elbow tucked close to his side to try to relieve the throbbing pain of the fracture, he began walking at a brisk pace toward the square of light, perspiration once again wetting his forehead and his palms. When he was almost there, he paused, knelt down, placed his pistol on the ground, and briskly rubbed the palm of his left hand on his trouser leg to get it completely dry. Having to hold the gun in his left hand, he did not want it slippery as well. Having come this far, everything had to be perfect now, no slip-ups.

Pleased with himself for being so careful, Hardesty stood back up, gun in hand, and cautiously resumed his approach. But after a few steps he froze and flattened himself in the foot-deep inset of one of the garage doors.

Someone had emerged from the lighted open garage door.

Cory, ordered by Lester, came out of the garage, reached into the Buick, and pressed the button to pop open the trunk. Seeing Cory’s duffel and Billie’s overnight bag, Lester threw Billie a suspicious look.

“Planning a little trip with this screw, sugar?” he asked tightly. “Gonna leave poor Lester behind, maybe?”

To Cory he snapped, “Get that junk out of there-quick!” Cory removed the two pieces of luggage and set them inside the garage. “Now put the two bank sacks in the trunk and get back inside,” Lester directed.

Peering from his concealment at what was going on, Hardesty saw the money sacks put into Cory’s trunk and the two men move back into the garage.

Now or never, he decided.

Moving quickly, he reached the open garage door and confronted the three people inside.

“Freeze!” he shouted, leveling his gun. “FBI!” To Lester he ordered, “Drop that weapon, Dragg!”

Lester stopped cold, the gun at his side, but he did not drop it.

Hardesty stepped over to Billie Sue and jerked her next to him, pointing his gun at her head. “Drop that weapon, Dragg, or I’ll kill your woman!”

Lester laughed and raised his gun. “Go ahead, kill her. I don’t need the lying bitch no more.” Aiming at Hardesty, he squeezed the trigger.

The automatic’s hammer came down on an empty chamber.

Looking aghast at the gun, Lester rapidly worked the trigger three more times before realizing in horror that the gun was not loaded.

Then it was Hardesty who laughed. “You brainless, lowlife moron,” he said, pushing Billie Sue aside. “You’re too stupid to go on living.”

Hardesty shot Lester twice, dead center in the chest, exploding his heart, slamming his body back eight feet, dropping him like a man hit by a truck. Then he turned his gun on Cory, who was reaching for his Ruger. But before Hardesty could fire, his head was hit at close range as Billie Sue shot him in the temple with her Guardian 25.

Cory had his Ruger out now, and he and Billie Sue faced each other with guns leveled. They stood like that for a long, taut moment. Then Billie Sue spoke.

“Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Let’s,” said Cory.

The sliding gate opened automatically from the inside for vehicles wanting to exit. Cory eased the Buick out, their own luggage back in the trunk with the million two, the bodies of Lester and Hardesty securely locked behind them in Unit 276, the rental on which, Billie Sue pointed out, was paid up three months in advance.

We’re free and clear now, Cory thought. Billie was snuggled up beside him. There was nothing else to worry about. All the pieces were now in place.

All the pieces-

Except for Duffy.

The first bullet hit the Buick’s windshield, shattering glass in Billie’s face. She screamed.

The second shot was low, smashing into the car’s radiator. Cory swerved and slammed sideways into the back of a van parked in front of a warehouse. When the Buick came to a jolting halt, steam gushing from under the hood, a third bullet burst the driver’s-side window and grazed the back of Cory’s neck before plowing into a seatback.

Cory saw Duffy now, stumbling toward the car like a drunken madman, brandishing a pistol and shouting.

“You don’t put anything over on me!” he yelled. “No, sir!”

Kicking open the driver’s-side door, Cory rolled out, firing his own weapon. The two men exchanged shots, one of Duffy’s rounds striking Cory in the right side, an in-and-out hit that spun him but did not bring him down, while four of Cory’s bullets laced Duffy’s chest, sending him flailing back like a rag doll.

As Cory struggled over to the car, his sense of smell was hit with the acrid fumes of gasoline. One of Duffy’s shots had hit the gas tank.

In the car, Cory found Billie sobbing, hands covering her face, blood trickling down between her fingers. “Come on, baby,” Cory said, taking one of her arms and dragging her across the seat.

Then another shot cracked through the silence and hit the car. Duffy, not quite dead, had managed to fire one final round, and it hit the Buick’s already punctured gas tank. The rear of the car exploded in a burst of growling flame.

“Come on, baby!” Cory said again, desperately urgent now. As he got Billie almost out, another, smaller eruption of flame licked out and caught both of them, searing the sides of their faces, singeing their hair.

Limping, half dragging Billie, Cory managed to get them just far enough away not to be blown up when the rest of the Buick exploded.

Along with the million two in its trunk.

Sirens began piercing the humid air as police cruisers, fire engines, and ambulances converged on the cul-de-sac from all directions. On a narrow side street a block away, Cory managed to walk Billie along a row of older frame houses, where porch lights were being turned on and people were coming out to see what was going on.

At the end of the block, where the houses stopped and only the dark night remained, Cory paused where an old man in a wheelchair sat looking toward the fiery sky above the cul-de-sac.

“Say, mister,” Cory asked, “does this street lead out of town?”

“This street?” the old man replied, peering curiously at their injured faces. “This street don’t lead nowheres. This street ends at the cemetery.”

Cory grunted quietly, said, “Thanks, mister,” and laboriously moved on.

As he and Billie went on their way, the old man saw blood on the sidewalk and started wheeling toward a police cruiser that pulled up to block the other end of the street.

They rested on the grassy ground next to the large headstone of a grave about twenty yards inside the cemetery. There was enough light from a full moon for them to see each other.

Billie’s face was shredded on both sides from the windshield glass and burned on one side from the gasoline fire, and most of her hair was burned off one side of her head.

Cory’s face and hair were seriously charred on one side, his neck wound painfully seared by the fire, and his stomach gunshot wound bubbling air-blood past the hand he held pressed tightly over it in a futile attempt to stop the flow. He had looked at his bloody hand under a streetlight just before they entered the cemetery and seen that the blood was streaked with black. The bullet had nicked his liver.

As they sat with their backs against the cold surface of the headstone, two police cruisers pulled up at the cemetery entrance and four officers got out and moved cautiously onto the grounds.

“I don’t want to go on, Cory,” Billie managed to choke out.

“Neither do I, baby,” Cory replied.

They both drew their guns.