Back on the sidewalk she slipped me a ten and gave me her spare keys to the outer courtyard gate and to the apartment. She kissed me full on the mouth and pressed her belly hard against me and said she’d be home around eight and for me not to overexert myself.
“At least not till I get back,” she said, licking a fingertip and putting it to my lips. She laughed and waggled her fingers at me and I watched the play of her long trim legs as she strode off down the street.
Jimmyboy Dolan had partnered with Buck and Russell for about a year. But he was a bad gambler and got in arrears for close to a thousand dollars at one of Cockeye Calder’s clubs. Cockeye wasn’t one for complex negotiations with anybody who owed him money or tried to cheat him. Everyone knew about the Memphis cardsharp who got caught doing tricks at one of Cockeye’s tables and paid for his folly with the fingers of one hand. Cockeye told Jimmyboy he had a month to pony up what he owed. He charged him a daily interest that doubled the debt the first week. Jimmyboy could’ve paid him off with his cut from a job he did with Buck and Russell a few days later but that wasn’t his way. He made a partial payment on the debt and spent the rest on good times and gambling at other clubs around town. Who knows what he was thinking. When his month was up he got a visit from a pair of Cockeye’s collectors. His tally had inflated to almost five thousand dollars by then but he could only come up with a few hundred. Their disappointment was so great they sawed off his right foot.
When Buck and Russell introduced me to him about three months later, Jimmyboy was working as a car mechanic and living in the back room of the garage and doing his best not to provoke certain kinds of people anymore. He had to give Cockeye Calder all but five dollars of his pay every week and figured to clear his debt in about five years. He wore a cumbersome prosthesis that wasn’t much more than a heavy block of wood shaped like a fat dark boot. He walked like he was dragging a ball and chain and the wood foot clumped with every step. Watching him make his way to the men’s room, Russell whispered, “I thought I had a limp.”
I found him all alone in the garage and he seemed pleased to see me. “Hey, Sonny boy!” he said. “Ain’t seen you in a coon’s age, man. Where the hell you been keeping yourself?”
I told him I’d been living with a girl in Atlanta for the past nine months and then recently got a note in the mail from Buck saying he and Russell were moving, but for some damn reason he hadn’t told me where. He only said to come see Jimmyboy. So, here I was. Where were they?
He didn’t know, but he believed they’d left town, probably left the whole damn state. They’d stopped by the garage about four months ago for just long enough to say so long.
“I figure they were feeling the heat from the Bogalusa job, don’t you?”
“What Bogalusa job?”
I didn’t know about that? By the time he’d read about it in the newspaper the bank robbery was two days old and Buck and Russell were one day gone. What happened was, a customer tried to be a hero and jumped on one of the two robbers. While the other robber beat the hero on the head with a pistol to get him loose of his partner, the guard retrieved the gun they’d made him drop and opened fire, shooting three times and wounding a woman in the leg but missing both robbers before one of them shot him in the stomach. The bandits ran out and hijacked a car and made a getaway—but without a dime of the bank’s money. The guard died a few hours later.
“They came and told you about it?”
“No man, I saw it in the paper.”
“How’d the paper know it was them?”
“It didn’t. The cops didn’t either. What happened is, the one the hero grabbed lost his hat and sunglasses in the scuffle and a couple of people got a good look at him before he put them back on. The paper had a police sketch in it and wanted to know if anybody recognized him. Well, it wasn’t no photograph, but it was a good enough likeness I knew I was looking at Russell.”
“And they hijacked a car?”
“What the paper said. Sounds like somebody’s driver lit a shuck ahead of schedule, you ask me.”
“Yeah, it does. Anybody who’d do that is likely to rat out his partners if he gets in a spot. And there’s the guys who recognized the newspaper sketch. I can see why they left town.”
“Hey, Sonny, never in the world would I breathe a word to anybody.”
“I know,” I said. “But you couldn’t’ve been the only one to recognize the sketch. What I don’t get is why tell me to come see you if they didn’t tell you where they were going.”
“Well hell, man, to pick up what they left for you. I thought that’s what you come for.”
He clumped off into his little back room, its door screeching on its hinges, and returned a minute later with an envelope of the same sort they’d left with Brenda Marie. It was smudged with grease but still sealed.
The note inside said: “Star fill sta next RR depot Houston. See Miller.”
It made me proud that they’d thought it was even possible I might break out. And because they knew I’d come looking for them if I did, they’d left this trail for me, despite their own good reasons not to, being on the run themselves. That was them.
Jimmyboy wanted to buy me a drink at a speak down the block but I begged off, saying I had a ladyfriend waiting. I promised to take him up on the offer in a day or two.
I repacked my bag and took fifty dollars from the cash Brenda Marie kept in her desk. Then wrote a note: I had a lead on Buck and Russell and was sorry to go like this but I had to catch the next train. I owed her more than the money and I’d be back as soon as I could and blah blah blah.
I folded the note and propped it against the radio in the living room. Then went out and turned the lock and slipped the key under the door. Then went to the station and bought a ticket and read magazines and drank coffee until my train boarded and then chugged off into the darkness.
The sign for Star’s filling station stood atop a high pole and was visible from the front steps of the depot. The late-morning sun was warm and I walked down the street with the Gladstone in hand and my suit jacket slung over my shoulder. The building was fronted by a row of gasoline pumps, its windows dust-coated, its sideboards paint-peeling and warped. A mechanic was bent over the open hood of a Model T at the far end of the lot. Across the street was a small grocery where a man in an apron stood in the door and watched me.
A little bell tinkled over the door when I went in. A husky sandy-haired guy with a toothpick in his mouth sat behind the counter reading an adventure magazine. He looked at me over his reading glasses and then out at the pumps to see if I had a car waiting for gas. He had a drinker’s face—puffy bloodshot eyes, his nose and cheeks webbed with red veins.
“If you selling something, boy, save your breath.”
“You Mr. Miller?”
“Mr. Faulk.”
“There a fella named Miller around here?”
“Sometimes.”
“Where can I find him?” I said.
He rolled the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. “What you want with him?”
“I got business with him.”
“What business is that?”
“Private business. Look mister, just tell me where I can find him.”