“There it is,” Jocko said. “Just up ahead.”
The crime itself began for them the moment Jocko said those words; until then there had been only the preparation for the crime. Until then the atmosphere had been relaxed and informal; now it became charged and tense. They had done this a dozen times before, and each time the risk was the same. Each time Colley and Teddy gambled whatever was in the cash register or safe against a possible twenty-five years in prison. Jocko gambled a possible life sentence; he had already taken two falls, another bust would be his third. He was twenty-seven years old and had already spent fourteen years of his life in detention centers, county jails, adolescent correctional facilities and hard-ass prisons. Colley had been sentenced to seven for the robbery-two fall, and had got out on parole after serving a little more than three. That had been shortly before last Christmas. He was twenty-eight at the time.
He had gone home to pick up his clothes and then had moved in with a girl he knew, a go-go dancer in one of the joints on Forty-ninth, just off Broadway. That had lasted about a week and a half, a total bummer. She kicked him out at the end of that time, called him a freeloader, said he wasn’t even any good in bed. He was living in a fleabag on Forty-seventh when he ran into Jocko in the bar that night. Only reason he’d sat down next to him was because he was hoping to make time with the black hooker. The next day he was holding a gun in his hand again. And two days after that, on Christmas Eve, he committed another robbery.
They knew just how to do it, they had done it together often enough and they expected to do it exactly the same way tonight. There was something athletic about their performance — an end running wide, perhaps, to receive a quarterback’s pass, a guard taking out the sole opposing tackle; or a smooth double-play combination, Tinkers to Evers to Chance — Teddy swiftly pulling the stolen automobile in toward the curb and cutting the engine, Jocko and Colley getting out on the curb side and beginning to walk purpose fully but not too swiftly toward the front door of the liquor store. There was something theatrical in their performance as well — Teddy looking bored at the wheel of the car as he lit a cigarette and let out a long stream of smoke, Colley and Jocko making small talk as they approached the store, some bullshit about Jeanine’s mother having come down with a summer cold, those were the worst kind, each of them responding to every hem and haw, every pause, every lifting of the eyebrow while robbery drummed in their heads, robbery hummed in their blood, robbery propelled them to the front of the liquor store.
And finally, there was something sexual in the way they worked together, a trio that had in the short space of eight months learned each other’s skills and shortcomings, and moved now to supplement or correct, the thrill of what they were doing undeniable; Teddy confessed one night that he always waited at the wheel of the car with an erection. There was for Colley and Jocko — Teddy never experienced this, or at least mentioned it — the feeling that they were on dope. That everything was being slowed down by a fix. Not all the way down to slow motion, but somewhere much slower than what the real tempo was.
Colley saw Jocko’s hand reach out in the shimmering August neon, saw clearly and precisely the small heart-shaped tattoo on the ball of the hand where thumb and forefinger joined, saw the fingers grasping the brass knob, and turning the knob, and easing the door open, slowly, slowly — everything moved so slowly when the juices ran high. He heard the tinkling of the bell over the door as though it were coming from a distant lush valley, and he moved into the store behind Jocko, moved on feet that seemed cushioned — he was somehow in sneakers again, though he was wearing black-leather loafers, he was running in high-topped Keds, he was ten years old and going for a base that had been chalked onto the asphalt, running in slow motion, Go, Colley, they are yelling at him. Go.
He closes the door behind Jocko. Jocko is moving across the store. The bottles are catching light and reflecting it; brilliant color explodes from the shelves and the stacked displays, bourbon browns and Scotch ambers, sauterne yellows and burgundy reds, crème de menthe greens. Jocko is walking toward the counter and Colley watches him and sees him moving through a stained-glass window toward an altar where a baldheaded priest stands in a brilliant red surplice: the counterman wearing a red cotton jacket, the pocket of it embroidered in white with the words Carlisle Liquors. Colley wonders if this is Mr. Carlisle himself, he wears the name so proudly, Carlisle Liquors, it might easily be a family crest, a proud and ancient family name, like Donato is a proud and ancient family name if your grandmother happens to come from a slum in Naples. Or is Carlisle the man’s first name? Is he perhaps Carlisle Abernathy the Third, standing there beaming behind the counter as Jocko takes forever to cross the stained-glass room.
Colley closes the door.
Has it taken him all this time to close the door? He hears the snug whisper of the door easing into the jamb, hears a tiny ear-shattering click as the strike plate engages the bolt. There is a shade on the door, he wonders if he should pull down the shade. He has never had a door with a shade before. Never on any of the dozen jobs they pulled. He wonders now if the shade on the door is the big mistake the mastermind made. Is the shade on the door the thing that is going to wreck the caper? But this is not a caper. This is a job. The job is armed robbery. You fuck up on this job, mister, you go to jail for twenty-five years.
Is Jocko at the counter yet? Colley turns from the door, glances toward the counter for just a moment, sees that the baldheaded man in the red cotton jacket is looking suspiciously at Jocko as he approaches, the smile more tentative now: Is this a holdup here? Are these two guys together, the one coming toward the counter and the other one standing over there near the door? They have to be together, otherwise why doesn’t the one near the door either start looking at the wine bottles on the rack there to the left, or else come toward the counter himself to state what sort of alcoholic beverage he wishes to purchase here in Carlisle Liquors, a proud and ancient family name... the gun is coming out of Jocko’s pants.
He holds the gun like a huge cock, waving it in the bald guy’s face. Colley suppresses a sudden urge to giggle, and looks out at the street. People are moving past slowly in the stifling heat, cool here in the store, though, air conditioner humming, no chance of anybody doing anything stupid in here, too cool in here for anything stupid. Behind him he hears the words he’s heard a dozen times before, spoken exactly the same way, the same voice-level and tone, the same inflection, “See this, mister? I’ll shoot your face off you don’t open the register fast. Now do it!”
There is another voice.
Colley ignores the words at first; they are too loaded with everything he has feared since he woke up this morning. He hears the words, of course, and he knows what they mean, but he chooses to react instead to the fact that there is another voice in the store, an unexpected voice that follows so quickly upon Jocko’s set opening speech that it seems like an altar boy’s response to a priest’s litany, and makes suddenly valid the image of the counterman-priest in his stained-glass store.
Colley is suddenly trapped inside a movie. It is a caper movie, and everything is going wrong. It is the next-to-the-last scene in the picture, where everything goes wrong. The mastermind forgot something. Or a character flaw exposes itself. In the instant before he turns toward the counter, he tries to think what it is that possibly could have gone wrong, knowing full well what it is because he has heard the words and understood them, but refuses to accept the words and the meaning of the words until he can see for himself that what the voice claims is actually so. He knows, too, that he cannot do anything to change this situation. This is the scene where everything goes wrong, and there is nothing that anyone can ever do to change it.