What's The Worst That Could Happen?

49

Friday night in New Jersey. The Stan Murch/Tiny Bulcher crime spree against the Garden State was getting into high gear. Having borrowed a different car—a Chrysler van, to give Tiny his roominess again—they had headed across the George Washington Bridge, to begin their outrages in the northern part of the state.

Between 9:00 P.M . and midnight, moving steadily southward toward the neighborhood of Big Wheel Motor Homes, doing each of their incursions in a different county to lessen the likelihood that the authorities would connect them all, they broke into a plumbing supply company and removed a pipe cutter, entered a major new building’s construction site to collect the Kentucky license plates from front and rear of an office trailer there, and forced illegal entry into a drugstore to collect a lot of high-potency sleeping pills. The hamburger they bought.

A little later that night, in the comforting darkness of a half-full parking lot behind a movie house half a mile from Big Wheel Motor Homes, waiting for the dobermans to go to sleep, luxuriating in the roominess of the van, and watching the rare police car pass with the occasional traffic, Tiny said, “I went out west once.”

“Oh, yeah?”

Tiny nodded. “Guy from prison owed me some money, from a poker game. Supposed to pay up when he got out. Instead, I heard, he went out west, worked in one of those places, whada they call it, uh, rodeo.”

“Rodeo,” Stan echoed. “With the horses and all?”

“Lots of animals,” Tiny said. “Mostly what they do, they throw ropes on animals. People go out, pay good money, sit in the bleachers, you’d think they’re gonna see something, but no. It’s just some guys in dumb hats throwing ropes on animals, and then these people in the bleachers get up and cheer. It’d be like you’d go out to a football game, and the players come out, but then, instead of all the running and passing and tackling and plays and all that, they just stood around and threw ropes on each other.”

“Doesn’t sound that exciting.”

Tiny shook his head. “Even the animals were bored,” he said. “Except the bulls. They were pissed off. Minding their own business, they have to deal with some simpleton with a rope. Every once in a while, one of those bulls, they get fed up, they put a horn into one of those guys, give him a toss. That’s when I stand up and cheer.”

Stan said, “What about your friend?”

“He wasn’t exactly my friend,” Tiny said, and moved his shoulders around in reminiscence. When he moved like that, the joints down deep inside there made crackle sounds, which he seemed to enjoy. “They have all these extra guys there,” he told Stan, “to open the gates and close the gates and chase the animals around, and this guy was one of them. I went over, I said I’d like my money now, you know, polite, I don’t ever have to be anything but polite—”

“That’s true,” Stan said.

“So he said,” Tiny went on, “gambling debts from prison were too old to worry about, and besides, he had all these friends out here with sidearms. So I could see he didn’t intend to honor his debt.”

Stan looked at Tiny’s dimly seen face in the darkness here inside the van, and there didn’t seem to be much expression in it. Stan said, “So what happened?”

Tiny chuckled deep in his chest, a sound like thunder in the Pacific Ocean, one island away. He said, “Well, I threw a rope around him, tied the other end to a horse, stuck the horse back by the tail with the bowie knife I took off the guy—Did I mention I had to take a bowie knife off him?”

“No, you didn’t mention that.”

“Well, I did, and stuck the horse with it.” Tiny made that distant-thunder chuckle again. “They’re probably both still running,” he said. “Well, the horse, anyway.” Then he rolled his shoulders some more, made that crackle sound, and said, “Let’s go see how the dogs are doing.”

The dogs were doing fine, dreaming of rabbits. Tiny and the borrowed pipe cutter opened the main gate, and Stan went in with his new key and climbed up into the Invidia, which he liked just as much by night as he had during the day. He steered the big machine around the sleeping dogs, letting them lie, and then paused out on the street while Tiny shut the gate behind him so police patrols would not be alerted prematurely.

Tiny climbed aboard, looked around at the interior of the Invidia, and said, “Not bad, Murch, not bad.”

“We call it home,” Stan said, and drove away from there.

They had one last misdeed to perform before finally leaving New Jersey in peace. At an auto repainting shop in yet another county, once they’d gone through the ineffectual locks, they picked up two gallons of high-gloss silver automobile body paint, an electric paint sprayer, and two rolls of masking tape.

After that, it was just a matter of picking up their passengers. Stan hadn’t wanted to drive this big monster into Manhattan if he didn’t have to, so everybody else was coming out, to be met at prearranged locations. First, he picked up the four who’d come over to Hoboken on the PATH train, saving some muggers there who’d been just about to make a mistake. Then he went on to Union City and gathered in the three who’d taken the bus over from the Port Authority terminal through the Lincoln Tunnel. And finally he drove up to Fort Lee, where he connected with the three who’d driven across the George Washington Bridge in a car they’d found somewhere.

From Fort Lee, it was nothing at all for the big Invidia, green tonight but going to be silver by some time tomorrow, with its new Kentucky license plates firmly in place, to get up onto Interstate 80 and line out for the West, just one more big highballing vehicle among the streams of them, all aglow with running lights in yellow and red and white, rushing through the dark.

“Home away from home,” somebody said.

“Shut up and deal,” said somebody else.