The Bigsby desk clerk directs him to Earl’s Café. He goes to the café in shirtsleeves, the pincers hidden under his draped jacket. A waitress guides him to Earl Cue in the rear-room speakeasy. Earl still wearing the jaw wires but much improved in his enunciation for all his practice. When he insists on knowing the lean gray man’s business with Bubber, the man says it’s a business proposition which he is not at liberty to discuss with anyone else.
Well sir, Earl tells him, I happen to be Mr. Vicente’s business partner, so any business deal you have for him is gonna have me in it too.
Very well then, the gray man says, why don’t we go see Mr. Vicente and the three of us discuss it?
No can do, Earl says. Mr. Vicente is out of town right now and no telling when he’ll be back. Could be another week, maybe two, no telling.
I see, the gray man says. And where might Mr. Vicente be, then?
He might be someplace that’s none of your business, grandpa, Earl Cue says, nettled by this old goat’s obvious supposition that Bubber’s the main man of the partners.
The gray man smiles and says, Yes, of course. Tell you what, Mr. Cue, why don’t I explain my proposition to you? After all, if it doesn’t interest you, what chance do I have of winning over Mr. Vicente?
Well now, Earl Cue thinks, that is way more like it. He makes a show of checking his watch. I guess I got the time to hear it.
Actually, the gray man says, it’ll be better if you see it. He tells Earl of two hundred cases of prime Scotch whisky he has stored in an old warehouse outside of town. He has to move the stuff immediately, he says, and whispers a price that is half the going rate. Would Mr. Cue care to see the goods for himself, maybe taste a sample to assure himself of their authenticity?
Well hell, Mr. Cue says, why not?
It takes much longer to drive out to the isolated warehouse than it does to gain the information he desires. No witnesses but jackrabbits in the brush and horned lizards in the rocks, a pair of buzzards wheeling in the white sky—and no auditors but them to the screams that shortly ensue.
Fifteen minutes after entering the dilapidated building, John Bones emerges from its dim confines, brushing dust and smears of cobweb from his hat and coat sleeves. Earl Cue will not come out again for another five weeks, when his remains are removed by authorities after being discovered by a pair of roving boys in search of a day’s adventure.
“It’s them,” Russell said, squinting into the high-power binoculars against the glare of the sun. “Truck number 526.” He moved the glasses in a slow pan and then held on something. “Yowsa—there’s old Buckaroo. Looking over here, all sneaky like. Ten to one he knows it’s us.” His voice was tight, the way it got when he was up for it. I remembered when he’d bought the binoculars for Charlie at some roadside café in the middle of nowhere. It seemed a long time ago.
We were on the crest of a sand hill, the roadster idling on the narrow trail of crushed rock. I was behind the wheel, Belle next to me, Russell in the rumble seat. The surrounding country was shaped of rolling sand mounds and rocky outcrops, cactus and scrub brush. We had the top down and Belle’s bare shoulders in her sundress were pink with sunburn. Russell and I were in rolled shirtsleeves. We all wore sunglasses and hats. The sky was clear except behind us, where a darkly purple bank of thunderheads had risen high in the east and was slowly heading our way. We’d yet to see rain in West Texas.
The site was about 250 yards away. To the naked eye the truck was a dark shape on the far side of the site, the men of the work party only speck figures. Then Russell passed the glasses up to me, and I spotted two of the guards by their uniforms. One was on this side of the site, the other way over on the other, standing at the truck with one foot up on the running board like he was talking to somebody in the cab, probably the third guard. Both of the guards in view carried shotguns. The convicts wore prison whites and were scattered around the area, which had already been cleared of brush. They were busting up the rocky outcrops with sledgehammers and picks and clearing away the broken stone, laboring in a dusty yellow haze, lifting and toting the larger chunks, scooping the smaller ones into wheelbarrows, dumping all of it outside the perimeter of the site. But even with the field glasses, at this distance it was hard for me to tell one convict from another. It didn’t surprise me that Russell could—his hawkeye was why they’d made him a sniper in the war.
“See him?” Russell said. I could hear the smile in his voice.
“No.”
“Look at the two cons closest to the near guard.”
I sighted in on the guard, then the convicts a few yards from him. They were loading rocks by hand into a wheelbarrow. Now one of them started away with a barrowload and the other looked our way and for a minute I wasn’t sure, and then I was.
“Got him,” I said.
“Like he knew we were coming today,” Russell said.
“The guard’s looking over,” I said.
“Wondering who the hell we are,” Russell said. “Let’s get on down there. Off with the hat, girl.”
Belle took off her hat and shook her hair out, and I put the roadster in gear and got us moving again. When we got down there she would turn on the smile. We figured the sight of a woman in our bunch would ease their wariness. Except for that advantage, Russell figured to do it just like he had at Sugarland. He would call out to the guard that we were looking for the Burchard Oil drill site but had obviously taken a wrong turn, and could he give us directions. When the guard got close to the car he’d put a gun in his face and I’d jump out and relieve him of the shotgun and put it to his head and he’d tell the other two guards to come on over to us with their hands up and empty. Russell would cover them from the car and Buck would grab up their weapons while I disabled the truck and Belle got in the rumble seat with Russell. Then Buck and I would hop in the car and I’d wheel it around and barrel us out of there.
The night before, after Russell had gone over the plan with us, Belle had whispered to me in bed, “Will it really be that simple, one-two-three?” I said the plan had worked well for them once before and left it at that. I could feel her wanting to say something else but she didn’t. For a minute I felt like some kind of liar for not admitting my doubts to her—then told myself there was no reason to think the thing wouldn’t go as well this time.
But of course you never know. Even from the crest of the sand hill, parts of the trail between us and the work site had been hidden from view behind other mounds. We were within forty yards of the site when we came around a rise and saw a pair of large rocks that had been placed in the trail to block it. They were too big for the car to clear, and if we tried driving around them we’d get stuck in the sand for sure. And the trail was too narrow to turn the car around on it.
“Fuck a duck,” Russell said. “The inside guy didn’t say anything about this.” His right hand was down out of sight and I knew he had the revolver in it.
The near guard came out to the trail and started toward us, the butt of his shotgun braced on his hip. The other guard was coming at a brisk stride from the far side of the site. Prisoners were looking our way even as they went on wielding their tools.