“You’re a pretty girl, Marie,” he says.
She does not look up.
“You want me to come back here at six o’clock?”
She puts the check on the counter face-down, and then she looks up into his face. He thinks she is going to tell him to go to hell. Instead, she says, “Do what you like.”
“I’d like to come back,” he says.
“Fine,” she says.
“Okay, I’ll be back at six.”
“Fine.”
“You live near here?”
“Yes.”
“You got a car?”
“I take a bus.”
“Cause all I’m driving is a pickup truck.”
“That’s okay.”
“Okay,” he says, and picks up the check. “Do I pay this here?”
“Yes,” she says.
“Okay,” he says, and takes out his wallet, and wonders if he’s supposed to tip her. He’s just made a date with her, is he supposed to tip her? He pays her the exact amount on the check, and she gives him a look, and he can’t tell whether she’s still sore because of what he said earlier, or whether she’s sore now because he stiffed her. “Well, I’ll see you later,” he says, and walks away from the counter. At the checkout, he takes off the blue cap and hands it to the cashier. She looks inside it for a price tag, and then rings up the sale. The plate-glass windows at the front of the store are behind her. Through them Colley can see the pickup truck. Alongside the truck is a white car marked NEW JERSEY STATE POLICE.
“That’s a dollar forty-seven,” the cashier says.
The police car is empty. Colley can see the trooper in the cab of the pickup truck, rummaging around. He can only assume that fat Will Hollip got out of the storage shed and called the state police to tell them a man had shot his brother’s valuable and gentle German shepherd and stole a pickup truck besides. Otherwise, why would a trooper be going through the truck now? He will find the Smith & Wesson in a minute. He will thumb open the glove compartment and find the gun. Colley turns immediately from the checkout counter and walks to where Marie is sitting reading the funnies again. She just cannot tear herself away from Dick Tracy, this girl. She has already read four panels of the strip. By Christmas she will have finished the whole page. He imagines being in bed with her. He imagines trying to talk to her afterwards. It will be like talking to a yak.
“Marie,” he says, “is there a back door to this place?”
“Why?” she says, and looks up from the comics into his face. Her eyes dart past him to the front door.
Colley turns at once. The door is opening. The trooper is coming inside. He has his gun in his hand. Colley does not know what kind of gun it is, but he knows that the troopers in some states use .357 Magnums, and he knows a bullet from a Magnum can tear off your head. The gun in the trooper’s hand is a big one, it could easily be a Magnum. Colley starts moving toward the back of the drugstore. He does not think the trooper has seen him yet. He figures the reason the trooper has his piece in his hand is because he’s had a report on a stolen pickup truck, and he’s found the truck and there’s a weapon in the glove compartment. Which is enough reason for him to proceed with caution. To him, proceeding with caution means having his own weapon in his hand as he enters the drugstore in front of which the pickup truck is parked.
Colley is moving down the center aisle, shelves on his left and right, shelves of perfume, Band-Aids, toothpaste, cologne, razor blades, shaving cream, deodorants, menstrual pads: he is moving between shelves of stationery and monster models, playing cards and boxes of candy; he is moving between shelves of magazines and paperback books. He spots the door at the back of the place, a glass door with a metal push bar across it about waist-high. He tries the door, and it is locked. He glances back over his shoulder. The trooper has moved from the checkout counter to the lunch counter. He is talking to Marie, and she is pointing toward the rear of the store.
The door is wired for a burglar alarm, metal strips creating a border design around the glass. He knows the alarm isn’t on, otherwise it would ring every time somebody came in the front door. Besides, an alarm going off would only bring cops, and he has a cop here already, looking toward the back of the store and nodding. In a minute he will come through the store yelling. And maybe shooting. Colley brings back his foot and kicks out flatfooted at the deadbolt lock. The door doesn’t budge. He kicks at it again. The cop is coming down the center aisle now. His gun is out in front of him. Colley thinks he has been here before. He has certainly been here before with a cop coming down the aisle at him holding a gun. This cop is not holding the gun in his left hand. This cop is not holding up a shield. This cop is just coming down the aisle very fast. There is also one other difference. Colley does not have a gun.
“Hey, you!” the cop yells.
There are garbage cans and rakes and rubber hoses in the back part of the store, sprinklers, trowels, bags of fertilizer — this is the gardening section of this drugstore that’s a supermarket. There are metal garbage cans and plastic garbage cans. He picks up one of the heavy metal cans and hurls it at the glass door, but it just bounces off the fuckin door, the door has got to be made of steel though it only looks like glass. He picks up a rake and swings it at the door, and the wooden handle of the rake breaks in half, and the door still hasn’t got a dent in it. The cop is yelling “You, hey you!” and there is nothing Colley can do now but run toward the front of the store again, either that or be taken. There are three aisles in the store, and the cop is running down the center aisle, the gun getting bigger and bigger as he comes closer and closer. Colley breaks for the aisle on the left, and the gun goes off like a cannon, putting a huge hole in the glass door behind him. Colley is sure it is a Magnum now, and he is afraid of it, he does not want to get shot with a Magnum.
He is running up an aisle that has glassware in it, Pyrex dishes and serving bowls and drinking glasses and brandy snifters, this is some drugstore. He knows that when the cop reaches the end of the center aisle, he will come around into this aisle, and he will drop to one knee and steady his firing arm and put a big hole in Colley’s back. He has already fired his warning shot, and he is shouting “Halt! Halt or I’ll shoot!” as he comes running down the center aisle, Colley going in the opposite direction up the aisle on the left. There is a space above the shelves, an open space, the drugstore has a high vaulted ceiling and the shelves are really only dividers between the aisles. He climbs the divider on his right the way he climbed that fence in the Bronx, only now he is knocking glasses and dishes and cups and saucers to the floor; the entire glasswares department of this fine drugstore-super-market-department store is crashing into the aisle as he climbs the divider and rolls over the top of it as if it is a back-yard fence, and drops into the middle aisle. The blue hat drops from his head. He does not stop to pick it up.
He comes sprinting up the aisle, heading straight for the checkout counter. The cashier has stopped reading her confession magazine, there is a true story unfolding right here where she works, and she is watching Colley goggle-eyed as he runs toward her. For no good reason, she starts screaming. Behind him, the trooper has figured out that Colley isn’t in the aisle on the left any more, he has climbed over the divider and is in the center aisle again. But Colley has a good lead on him, and even when the trooper opens fire behind him, he feels confident he is going to make it through the checkout counter and out of the store. The cashier ducks, she is afraid she’s going to get shot by accident. Colley runs past her and veers sharply to his left, toward the front door. In a minute he is outside in the parking lot. He does not know whether to keep running, or take the pickup truck, or steal the trooper’s car. He wonders if the trooper has left his keys in the car. He doubts it.