“Lord Jesus,” Russell said. “I guess the only good thing you could say about an experience like that is you ain’t likely to have too many worse ones.”
“I know it,” Bubber said. “Spiderbite in the balls—can you imagine what that feels like?”
“I believe maybe I can,” Buck said.
Bubber was eager to know what we thought of Mona. We said she was every bit as beautiful and smart and gracious as he’d said she was. He asked if we’d sampled the wares in her house and we said they were first-rate. He was beaming with pride. He said he’d thought he’d been in love before but he didn’t know what real love was until he met Mona. Jesus, he had it bad. It was all we could do to keep a straight face, listening to him go on and on about her.
We laughed out loud, though, when he told of a time when they were going at it hot and heavy and she called out the name “Natty” in the middle of things. She didn’t even know she’d said it until afterward, when she noticed Bubber had sulled up a little and she asked what was wrong.
“Who the fuck’s Natty?” he said.
Turned out to be an old boyfriend, a leg-breaker she’d lived with for a time in Tucson. She swore she hadn’t thought of him in years and assured Bubber she’d gotten over him long ago. Maybe so, Bubber told her, but hearing her call out another man’s name at a moment like that had a way of taking the edge off his pleasure.
“Well,” she’d said, “would you rather I was doing it with him and saying your name, or doing it with you and saying his?”
“Now I ask you, boys,” he said, “how’s a man supposed to answer a question like that?”
“Don’t allow for nothing but hard choice,” Russell said.
“They never do,” Buck said.
“What you think, Sonny?” Bubber said.
“I’d tell her I’d rather she did it with me and called out my name,” I said—and smiled real big.
Bubber stared at me without expression for a moment, then turned to Buck and Russell and all three of them busted out laughing.
“He’s real young, ain’t he?” Bubber said.
It was close to eleven o’clock as we made our way through Midland’s residential streets, the trees along the sidewalks casting long shadows in the light of a yellow-horned moon low in the western sky. A rich aroma came off the paper sacks of Mexican food on the front seat between me and Buck, but the last thing on our minds at the moment was eating. Buck took a pillowcase from under the seat and put it in his coat pocket.
We came into a well-kept neighborhood of spacious lawns and white paling fences. Most of the homes already dark and asleep, but a big two-story house in the middle of the block was showing faint yellow light behind drawn curtains, a shadowy porch with a pair of wooden armchairs. There were three cars in the driveway and three more out in front, all of them brandnew. I parked the Model A at the head of the row of cars by the fence and cut off the lights but left the motor running. We stayed put for a minute, but nobody came to the door or moved a window curtain to have a look outside. Russell racked a shell into the chamber of the Remington pump.
“All right, boys,” Buck said. “In and out, slick as a dick.”
He and Russell got out of the car and I handed Buck the sacks of food one at a time and then got out too. They went through the front gate and left it open wide while I used my clasp knife to puncture a tire on each of the three cars by the fence, catching the smell of stale air with each hissing deflation. I went to the driveway and did the same thing to the cars there, then I put the knife away and hustled up to the porch. Buck and Russell already had their bandannas on and I pulled mine up too.
The house belonged to a man named Allford, a onetime wildcatter who’d struck it big up around the Red River before coming out to drill in West Texas. With him tonight were the president of the biggest construction company in the county, a rancher from up around Lubbock, two other local oilmen, and a bootlegger from Hobbs. According to Bubber, these six well-heeled buddies came together at Allford’s house once a month to play high-stakes poker. The game ran from six in the evening till six in the morning and the rules required that every man buy $2, 500 worth of chips and stay in the game till the end of it or he went bust, whichever came first. In any case, we knew there’d be at least fifteen grand at the table.
Thanks to Bubber’s inside man we also knew that it was their poker-night custom to make a late-night telephone call to Concha’s Café in town and order some food and have it delivered to the house. Tonight they had called for one sack of chicken tacos, one of enchiladas, one of sugar-and-cinnamon doughnuts. As we stood on the porch, ready to make our move, the deliveryman from Concha’s was lying bound and gagged in the back seat of his car in an alley five bocks away.
“Set?” Buck said. Russell and I nodded and pressed ourselves back against the wall so we couldn’t be seen from the little window in the front door. I had the .380 in hand. Buck sucked a deep breath and then gave the door a hard rapping. He wore a baseball cap, the better to look like a deliveryman, and held the three sacks in front of him, one on top of the other, to hide the masked lower part of his face. He rapped again, and the curtain must’ve pulled away from the little window—a small cast of light illuminated the food sacks and Buck’s hands holding them, his cap. A man’s gruff voice said, “Concha’s?”
“Yeah,” Buck said.
The lock turned and the door swung inward and a brighter wash of light fell over Buck as he passed the sacks in to somebody—and then pulled the .45 and raised it and said, “Not a word, Mac—just back up real easy.” He went into the house and Russell and I followed.
A beefy half-bald guy in shirtsleeves and carrying a .38 in a shoulder holster was holding the sacks of food and gawking at us like we were a magic trick. He was the bootlegger’s bodyguard and his face had the baggy look of somebody who’d been dozing. He was probably wondering how he was going to explain this to his boss.
Buck snatched the guy’s gun from the holster and stuck it in his own pants. He pointed at the sofa and the man sat down on it. The bottoms of the food sacks were dark with grease and he held them off his lap to keep from staining his white trousers. Russell had the shotgun leveled at the guy from the hip. I stood back by the door where I could cover the whole room.