We found a dealer who wouldn’t care about the fine points and traded dead-even for a cheaper car that was not in Reed’s name. That gave us a clean car, which we traded again on a better model when we crossed another state line. If we had left any kind of trail it was covered.
We kept going. Heading east, leaving California as far behind as possible. The little tension that had remained with us was gone entirely when we hit Boston. Cindy was completely calm. I wasn’t, not entirely, and I knew I wouldn’t be as long as we had the plates and the press.
In a Boston hotel room I ran off two grand in twenties for spending money.
I opened a checking account in Rutland, Vermont.
I bought a weekly in Belfast, Vermont. Bought a house in Belfast, set up shop in the basement. Married Cindy, of course. That ought to go without saying.
Then I saved one-dollar bills.
And bleached them.
And turned them into twenties.
I printed a million dollars in twenties. Yes, a million dollars.
Then I got rid of the plates. I pounded them out of shape, tossed them into the hell box at the paper, made type out of them. It was better than throwing them in the river. I still own the press, however, and we use it for job printing at the Sentinel office. Handbills, stationery. Anything but money.
I make a damned good editor, the way it has worked out, and Cindy has developed into a damned good secretary. The paper needed money behind it to get out from under, and with the money I’ve poured into it, things are going pretty well.
Most of the million has been going into stocks and bonds, a little at a time. When it’s all invested we’ll probably leave Belfast, head somewhere else, some other town in some other part of the country. Buy a bigger paper, a bigger house, come in with more money and spend it without looking suspicious at all.
Sometimes we remember that very short period of time when we were hunters and hunted, criminals, murderers. Sometimes I remember Cindy putting a knife into Reed’s back, killing him. She is pregnant now, and it is difficult to reconcile this lovely incipient mother with a murderess. Just as it is difficult to believe that I myself killed four men, one with a bullet in the throat, three more with a gun butt. I don’t feel like a killer, or a criminal, or anything other than what I am — a small-town editor and publisher, a husband, an up-and-coming father.
A strange life. But a good one.
It’s ironic, building a life of good from a life of sin and evil. It’s not only ironic, it’s impossible. Things like this just don’t happen. Except maybe in fiction. But what’s the old saw about truth sometimes being stranger than fiction?
Cindy and a hell of a lot of $20 bills kind of prove it.
I’m not complaining.