Cinderella Sims, page 12
I watched Baron come in and got ready for another punch. Then something snapped inside me. I wasn’t going to take another beating no matter what happened. A bullet couldn’t hurt a hell of a lot worse than one of Baron’s punches. At least I would die trying. Either way I would be dead, but this would be faster and easier and a lot more exciting.
“Don’t hit me, Baron.”
“You ready to talk?”
“There’s nothing to say.”
He had a gun in one hand, Reed’s gun, and this time he decided to give me the gun in the teeth. I suppose he figured I would stand there and wait for it.
He figured wrong.
He swung and I ducked and came up under the arm, fastening my hand on it and pivoting. Baron went across the room and into the wall, landing head first. The gun remained with me, which was the general object of the whole thing.
Lori was close to me, which was her mistake. I grabbed her just in time, held her in front of me and kept my gun pointed at Greaseball. He had the only other gun in the room and he couldn’t shoot without hitting Lori. I held onto her and her fright was a live thing in the room. She was scared stiff, shaking and quaking.
I found out why.
Greaseball wasn’t the sentimental type. Lori was between me and his gun, so he did the obvious thing under that set of circumstances.
He shot her.
She let out a very sick moan, and then I was holding a heap of dead flesh instead of a live and lovely woman. It was something sick to think about but I didn’t waste time thinking. There were more important things to do.
I shot Greaseball in the throat and watched him die.
“Don’t do it, Reed.”
He was halfway to Greaseball’s gun when my voice stopped him. He hesitated for a minute, then straightened up. I had him cold.
“Don’t move,” I said. “Stay right there. It’s nice and cozy there. You can relax and enjoy yourselves.”
I kept my gun on them while I backed out the door, then slammed it fast and turned the key in the lock. I left the key there and hoped it would give them a hard time. With luck the police would get there just at the right time—before Reed and Baron got out and after I was far away.
With luck.
I passed up the elevator and took the stairs two and three at a time. I never moved so fast in my life. I was at the second floor when I heard the noise.
A gunshot. Reed, probably, shooting the lock off the door. I should have taken his gun.
The hell with it. You can’t think of everything.
I got out of the lobby and into the street. God knows how. If anybody looked suspicious, I did. And if anybody was all dressed up with no place to go, I was. No car, no money, no nothing. I should have stayed up there and let Baron beat me to death.
Their car.
That would do it—give me an out and take their car away from them all at once. Maybe they had left the keys in it. It always happens that way in the movies. But, dammit, I wasn’t in a movie. Still, you never could tell. I looked around and found their car and ran at the big Mercury at top speed, trying at the same time to look nonchalant as all hell. I don’t think I managed it.
The car was there. And the keys, God bless ’em, were still resting gently in the ignition.
That wasn’t all. There was another extra dividend in the car.
A woman.
“Get in, Ted. Don’t waste any time. There’s no time, hurry, you’ve got to hurry. I’ll explain later. Just get in the car.”
Cindy.
She drove even better than she made love. We got out of downtown Phoenix, out of residential Phoenix, out of suburban Phoenix, out of Phoenix entirely. She kept the gas pedal as close to the floor as she could and I looked out of the rear window for cops and robbers. It seemed inevitable that one or the other would catch up with us. We led a charmed life. We left Phoenix behind and I almost relaxed.
“Okay,” I said. “Now you talk.”
She sighed. “I suppose I have to. How much do you know already?”
“Most of it. I knew most of it before they picked me up. They filled me in on the rest.”
I told her what I knew and she nodded. There wasn’t anything more. I had all the details.
“You,” I said. “You were ditching me, huh? That makes sense, I guess. But why did you stick around and save my neck? That part doesn’t make any sense at all.”
She took a breath. “I wasn’t ditching you.”
“Sure. You were waiting for me to join you in the wilds of Transylvania.”
“Ted—”
“I’m a big boy now,” I said. “You can give it to me straight now, Cindy. You don’t have to play games with me anymore. The truth is plenty.”
“I’m telling you the truth.”
“Sure you are. You never told a lie in your life. Starting with the time you chopped down the cherry tree you’ve been a model of honesty. Sure.”
“Ted—”
“The truth is enough, Cindy. If you’d just—”
“Damn you!”
I looked at her. The damn you! line had almost sent the car off the road. She was steady now but her eyes were blazing and I could tell how mad she was.
“Listen to me,” she said. “Don’t interrupt and don’t play the little boy that’s been getting crapped on from all sides. Just shut up and listen to me.”
I shut up and listened to her.
“I wasn’t running out,” she said. “I knew what was happening the minute I saw you drive by with Lori. You and that perfumed panther.”
“De mortuis,” I said. “Speak well of the dead.”
“She’s dead?”
“Dead as silent movies.”
“You killed her?”
“Greaseball killed her. Then I shot Greaseball.”
“Greaseball? That must be Musso.” She described him and the description fit.
“I’m almost sorry Lori’s dead,” she said, not sounding the least bit sorry. “But you didn’t have to hop in with her. You didn’t have to be so hot to get next to her.”
“That wasn’t it,” I lied. “She had a gun on me.”
“Crap.” The word was an explosion. “I saw what you were doing to her in the car. I saw your hands on her.”
I looked ashamed.
“So there you were,” she said. “You and Lori. And I knew that any minute the whole batch of you were going to pour through the door. What in hell was I supposed to do, Ted? Wait for you? Wait for Baron to beat me to death? Is that what you wanted me to do?”
Strangely enough, I had nothing to say. This sort of changed things. She hadn’t been taking a powder on me. I had been two-timing her, and she had every right in the world to be sore.
“I took the bag and left,” she said. “I sat in the diner across the street and waited for them to come back. They went upstairs and I got in the car. God knows I shouldn’t have waited for you. I should have left then and there and to hell with you. But I waited.”
“And saved my life.”
“And saved your life. You saved mine once and now we’re even. You can leave now if you want. It’s been fun, Ted. I like being around you. Maybe I’ll drop you a postcard once in a while.”
“If you’re still alive.”
She stared at me.
“Where do you go from here?” I wanted to know. “Going to play the same game? Hide and tip them and run when they catch up with you?”
“Probably.”
“You’ll run forever,” I said. “Or they’ll catch you and kill you. Doesn’t sound so brilliant to me. Maybe I’m just a dull-witted type, but there has to be an easier way to make a living.”
“You got a better way?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe I should throw the money away,” she said. “Maybe I should toss it out of the car and to hell with it. A hundred grand. You want me to throw it away, Ted?”
A few hours back I would have answered yes to that. But that was before a lot of things, before Lori died in my arms and before I put a bullet in Musso’s throat. Before Baron hit me and before I decided that someday, somehow, I was going to kill him.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want you to throw it away.”
“Then what?”
I thought about it. I had an idea, a good idea. Maybe.
“Later,” I said to her. “Later, when we have more time to talk.”
“We? You’re still coming along for the ride?”
“I’m still coming,” I said. “Later.”
“Tell me more, Ted.”
I shook my head. “Two questions first. How many more in the mob?”
“Bunkie Craig, the one you put in the hospital. And Casper.”
“Who’s Casper?”
“A snake,” she said. “A weak little man with cold eyes. I never liked him.”
There wasn’t anybody in the mob worth liking. “Where’s Casper?”
“At the hangout.”
“And where’s that?”
“San Francisco. Why, Ted?”
“Later,” I told her. “When there’s time for it. You know how to get there?”
“Of course. Why?”
“Later,” I said again. “First there’s something else we have to get out of the way. See that motel?”
She nodded.
“Pull over,” I said. “Lock the schlock in the trunk. And come with me. We’re going to make love.”
She pulled over and locked the schlock in the trunk and followed me into the office.
It was life again, living again, seeing and hearing and tasting and smelling and touching again.
It was the world.
It had been good with her before. But now it was like nothing before, like nothing ever. Now she was hiding nothing, concealing nothing, holding nothing back from me. Now she was mine and I was hers, and we were together now and forever, and it was very good.
We made it take a long time. I undressed her, with the lights out in the motel room and soft light filtering through from the half-open closet door. I took off her clothes slowly and ran my hands over that body, that perfect body, letting my hands linger where they liked to linger.
Then she undressed me.
I kissed her and it was good. Her mouth was warm and wetter than wine. Her arms were around me and her body was very warm, very sweet, very firm and soft and perfect against my body.
“Ted—”
My hands found her breasts, held them, stroked them. The nipples stood at attention and saluted. I kissed them and she started to squirm.
“Now, Ted!”
But not yet. Not for a while, not for an eternity, not until neither of us could stand waiting any longer. Not until the world flew by at half-mast.
Then it was time. It began.
There were sounds outside that I did not hear. They didn’t matter. There was a world outside but it existed for me no longer. There was a woman beneath me and she was the only important entity in God’s world.
She moaned my name, moaned once and twice and three times. I clutched her and held her and loved her with every atom of my being. It was getting better now, getting to a peak where no adjectives applied, getting to perfection. And you cannot describe perfection.
You can only enjoy it.
The peak approached and blinded us. We were there together now, to the very top of the world. Then, all at once, there was no world beneath us.
Only Cindy and I, alone together, floating in free fall in space.
It was over. I held her while she cried salty tears.
I lay on my back and thought about things. I thought about the way I had led Reed and Baron to her, lead them to her room so that they could kill her.
And hated myself.
I knew something now. I knew that we were together as long as we lived, knew that nobody on earth could keep us apart. I knew that the world was our world now, that it belonged to us, that we had it by the tail.
“Ted?”
I took her hand.
“What you were going to tell me,” she said. “You can tell me now.”
She was right. Now we had no secrets.
I took a deep breath, let it out slowly. I reached over for the cigarettes on the night table, lit two of them and gave one to her. For several moments we smoked side by side in silence.
“Okay,” I said slowly. “Here it is.”
9
We left the car there in the morning. It was hot and we didn’t need it anymore. That wasn’t all we left behind. We left the twenties.
In ashes.
We burned them in the motel room, burned a few bills at a time in the john and flushed the ashes in the toilet. Have you ever watched close to fifty grand converted into smoke and ashes?
It’s quite a sight.
We saved a couple bills. Not many. Enough for food and hotel bills and bus fare to San Francisco. That was all we needed. Any more would have been taking chances.
We weren’t taking any chances.
We left the car and we left the motel and we left the ashes. We walked down the road to the nearest town. It had a bus stop. The bus made a few stops until it reached a town that had a little more to say.
The bus from that town went to Frisco. We were on it, tense and excited and a little scared. Not too scared. We were growing up, Cindy and I. It was going to take a lot to scare us. Parts of us were steel, tough and strong.
“It’s a chance,” she said.
“We’ve taken plenty of them. We’ve taken worse chances than this one. We’ve stuck our necks out in front of Reed and Baron. This is nothing next to that.”
“I know.”
“This is the only way,” I told her. “You can look at it mathematically. It’s an equation.”
“A human equation.”
“Maybe. Maybe two and two is four. Maybe something a lot more complex than that. But it adds up just the same. It adds up and makes sense.”
“I know, Ted.”
“The phony stuff. The fifty grand. It was worth plenty to Reed and Baron. Worth double its face value. But it was strictly a closed market, baby. A closed market is a buyer’s market. You didn’t have something you could turn around and sell to anybody else. Reed was the only customer. And he wasn’t buying. He was going to kill for it.”
I lit a cigarette. I wasn’t sure whether or not you could smoke on the bus. It was one of those hick bus lines, not Greyhound or anything, and for all I knew smoking wasn’t allowed. I didn’t really care. “So you played it the only way. Getting in touch with him, getting him to come down, then running when he showed. Didn’t make much sense, but then neither did anything else.”
“He was the only customer.”
“That’s just it,” I said. “This way it’s different. What Reed has is what’s valuable. Especially with the bad stuff gone. Now his plates and his paper can set somebody up for life. With no chance involved.”
“Somebody like us,” she breathed. It was a prayer. I hoped it would be answered.
“Somebody like us. Somebody very much like us, in fact. All we have to do is take it.”
“Sure,” she said. “That’s all.”
I put out the cigarette. “We can manage it,” I said. “Let’s go over it again. Casper’s the only one at the hangout?”
“As far as I know. Bunkie Craig may be there. If he’s out of the hospital.”
“Is that where he would go?” She nodded.
“He might be out. It’ll be just as well that way, come to think of it; get him out of the way. Nobody else knows about the deal?”
“Just the guy who fixed the plates.”
“What about him?”
“He won’t talk,” she said softly. “I read about him a few days ago. They found his body in a ditch. Reed doesn’t believe in letting people know too much. Not unless they’re with him all the way. The boy was hired, then fired, then dead. That’s how it goes with Reed.”
“Four left,” I said. “Reed and Baron, Casper and Craig. Lori and Musso are dead. Just the four of them.”
“Four,” she echoed.
“Four. Then you and me and the money. No set sum, Cindy. As much as we ever want. As much as we ever need.”
Thinking about the kid Reed had killed must have jarred her a little. It showed in her face. Not obviously, but I knew her well enough to see it.
“We could just get out of it,” she said. “We burned the money. They don’t have to chase us any more.”
“You really think so?”
She looked at me.
“They’ll chase us until we’re dead.” I said. “Because they don’t know we burned that money. Because we know more than they want us to know. We can’t beg out now. We either go through with it or run like rabbits.”
“You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry, Ted.”
“That’s okay.”
“I don’t think sometimes.”
“Forget it.”
I held her hand and lit two more cigarettes.
We were tired when we hit Frisco. Tired enough to sleep. Not because we wanted to sleep, not because we wanted to waste any time. Because we had to be rested, had to be fit when we laid it on the line.
And there were plans to make. I bought a box of shells for the gun, practiced with it empty so I would be able to aim it straight. Hitting Musso had been dumb luck. I’d have to be good this time.
Then we hit the sack. We stayed at a second-grade hotel—good enough so we wouldn’t draw stares, cheap enough so we could afford it.
And close to the hideout.
The gang’s headquarters was a frame house on Grand Street, a clapboard affair that needed painting badly. I got a look at it from the cab. It looked like any other house on the block, no better, no worse—and certainly no more likely to hold a counterfeiting printing press and a gang of thieves. I caught my breath when I looked at it. I wondered who the neighbors were, what Reed did when door-to-door salesmen dropped by. Things like that.
And I could feel the excitement. We were close now, too close to turn back, ready to roll. I had a tough time sitting still. That’s how I react to tension. I get a surplus of nervous energy and there has to be a way to dissipate it. I felt like hitting somebody but there was nobody handy to hit. There would be. Later.
