“What’s the matter? It’s just Lou playin one of his practical jokes.” Lou was the bartender down at the Silk’n’Spurs on Geary, Frank’s favorite watering hole. “For a guy named Quick, sometimes you aint... Hey, Ronnie! What’s in the paper sack? Rubber turds? Ha!”
El Fabuloso was still laughing, discarding the deuce of hearts, when the muzzle rose from beneath the poncho.
“Both of you pootbutts. On the floor.” Rather than muffle Joe’s voice, the latex mask acted like a diaphragm to amplify and resonate it. When the expug made a move for the open drop safe, the Gipper’s likeness loudly vibrated: “NOW! Out here, side by side. Face down! And nothing sexy, I’ll dust ya, I swear you’ll die...”
Fabulous Frank had too often heard the selfhypnotic cadences of men desperate enough to kill to lose any time hugging the concrete. Yet Quick lay down slowly and carefully beside him as if worried about his goddam drycleaning bill. Trying to stall. Now where’s the percentage in that? The gambler in Frank was real curious. He felt something plastic looping and cinching his wrists. Those nifty new disposable cuffs the cops had started using. Seemed every new wrinkle the cops came up with, the crooks turned around and used on registered Republicans like Francis Stutz.
Joe sprang to the open safe. He set the Bullpup on the desk and scooped out several buff envelopes stuffed with cash and betting slips. He didn’t have to open them, he could feel they contained only a few hundred. That’s why the safe was open, the runners hadn’t come in yet.
Oh shit, Rooski, howled Joe’s heart as his hand searched the safe’s bottom — hardly enough cash to get you to Oakland... Hold the phone, what’s this?
Joe withdrew a velvet pouch. He used his teeth to untie its drawstrings and shook out what resembled a big compass with a blue stone hinge. Joe held it up close to the mask’s eye slit, regretting that the Gipper had always to grin, narrowing them. Christ! The hinge stone was a blue diamond bigger than Joe’s left nut! Could it save Rooski?... No, too hot to hock, raced Joe’s mind. Too big to fence. It would have to be hidden for a long time. But there wasn’t any time, not with Tarzon breathing down their necks. Time for Joe to defend himself from Rooski was running out where Front Street deadended in a basement on Jones.
“Take the Moon n you’re dead n stinkin, punk,” Quick Cicero spit.
Ronald Reagan leaped across tromboning a round in the gun and jammed the muzzle in Quick’s ear. Fabulous Frank waited for the roar, squeezed his eyes tight so flying skull shard wouldn’t poke one out.
Suddenly, commotion above; Ronnie looked at the ceiling, cursed. With wrist flourishes worthy of a rodeo roper Ronnie whipped surgical tape three times around their heads and across their mouths. Then he stuffed the cash envelopes in the paper sack, replaced the diamond necklace in its velvet pouch, stuffing this inside his clothing, and snatched the Bullpup off the desk again.
The next thing heard by Fabulous Frank, Dean of the Daily Double, was the gallop of boots up the concrete steps. The lights went out, the upstairs bolt was shot, and he and Quick Cicero were left in the dark trussed up like Christmas turkeys.
The scene upstairs did what the White House never could, aged Ronald Reagan eight years. He told Donald Duck to just wait for him at the top of the basement stairs situated right inside the entrance. Station himself in the back by the projection booth and make sure none of the audience got wise — and wait. Nothing too out of place about a jackoff in a Donald Duck suit in this theater. When Joe finished robbing the basement bank, they could slip out unnoticed.
But nooo, not this Donald Duck. The lights were up, the movie still running — looked like the Statue of Liberty blowing a freight train. And beneath the screen it looked as if Donald had organized a summary round pound. Waving the Bodyguard, he had all eleven moviegoers ranked buck-naked before the first row of seats, clothing piled at their feet like guys at an Army physical. Except half these guys had hardons in various stages of tumescence. Nervously they shifted from foot to foot, one eye on the guntoting duck, the other fastened to the Bearded Clam That Ate San Pedro, which was being squeezed down by dirty fingernails the size of steamshovels onto a flesh-toned Washington Monument.
Ronald Reagan ran down the aisle crying, “What is this, a circle jerk?”
Some porno buff al buffo was just destined to ask: “Who are these masked men?”
“Shut the fuck up!” screamed Ronald. The comic saluted. “Yo, boss.”
“Dont get mad,” begged Donald. “The projectionist opened the door and asked what I was doin in this...” Rooski touched his duckbill.
“Pack that meat in, you cumsuckin bitch!” kibitzed the comic. It was hard not admiring her enthusiasm as, vigorously posting up and down on the monument, she began blowing a shiny black submarine, glans to gonads. The comic was flogging up a big one. Ronald had to slap the Miracle Fibre feathers on the back of Donald’s head to retrieve his attention.
“Thu — that’s it. Before I could get out the gun, he slammed the projection booth door and locked it. I knew we was made so I did this...” Donald swung the two-inch barrel at his prisoners.
“Dont point that thing at me!” one yelled.
“Sorry,” Donald mumbled, dropping his bead obligingly.
“Squish... SLURP... squish,” went the onscreen orifices.
“Phone! Is there a goddam phone in the booth?” cried Ronald.
“I forgot to check. I was just waitin on you to help me clean out these guys.”
Ronald snatched the .38 from Donald and slapped the shotgun in his hands. He shouted at him to cover these perverts and ran back up the aisle. Behind him the Clam That Ate San Pedro was going whole hog, wedging the black sub up its companion valve. The screen filled with two pistons chugging in tandem into twin cylinders someone had the practical sense of humor to disguise as human genitalia.
Joe banged on the projection booth door with the Smithy butt and hollered, “Open up or I’ll blow the lock off!”
“I’m comin, OH GOD I’M COMIN!” the soundtrack answered.
Christ, and that emetic soft rock endemic to department stores and airport lounges. That shlock street characters called shoplifting music. Bad enough alone, but accompanied by the stagey grunting, arty ooomphing, and all the other phony phonetics these method players had read some smutty where and were faithfully reproducing for the silver screen — Joe was grateful that the mask was so faithful to the Gipper’s physiogomy as to reproduce his partial deafness by stopping the ears with latex.
He decided to skip shooting the doorknob. Probably only worked on TV. Just his luck, it’d ricochet and blow off his foot. He checked for telephone wires. None. Probably just an intercom to the basement.
BOOM! The shotgun blast from below stopped Joe’s heart two beats. He stared aghast at the silver screen, where the two Titan missiles had withdrawn their warheads from the Great Divide and were supposed to be geysering like twin Old Faithfuls to the strains of the “Star Spangled Banner” according to Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass — there instead gaped an enormous ragged hole ringed with smoke.
Rooski had gotten too far into the spirit of the thing and discharged at the same climactic moment.
His neglected fold bolted up the opposite aisle.
Up the ruptured screen rose the pathetic waiclass="underline" “Jo-WHOA!”
No time to stop the runaway audience. And the zip damn fool just used his real name. Luckily it matched that of the mask’s last user. In this instant Joe acknowledged to himself what perhaps he’d known all along he had to do. Had to do before Rooski did the same to him. It’ll hurt me more than you, ran the old nursery con through his head.