The only problem would be getting to the subway station handily. He was five-six, and pudgy, his legs a bit short, his wind even shorter. He was going to have to sprint that block and hope no one played hero. If he knew San Francisco, though, no one would.
He looked back at the check-cashing center just in time to see the Armored Transport of California truck pull up. He checked his watch: as with last week, just about five-twelve. There was a picture insignia of a knight’s helmet on the side of the truck. The rest of the truck painted half black and half white, which was supposed to suggest police colors, scare thieves. Ash wouldn’t be intimidated by a paint job.
He’d heard that on Monday afternoons they brought about fifteen grand into that check-cashing center. Enough for a down payment on a franchise, somewhere, once he’d laundered the money in Reno.
Now, he watched as the old, white-haired black guard, in his black and white uniform, wheezed out the back of the armored car, carrying the canvas sacks of cash. Not looking to the right or left, no one covering him. His gun strapped into its holster.
The old nitwit was as ridiculously overconfident as he was overweight, Ash thought. Probably never had any trouble. First time for everything, Uncle Remus.
He watched intently as the guard waddled into the checkcashing center. Ash checked his watch, timing the pick-up process, though he wasn’t sure why he should, since he was planning to rob him on the way in, not on the way out. But he had the impression from the books that you were supposed to time everything. The reasons would come clear later.
A bony, stooped Chicano street eccentric — aging, toothless, with a squiggle of black mustache and sloppily dyed black hair — paraded up the sidewalk to stand directly in front of Ash’s window. Crazy old fruit, Ash thought. A familiar figure on the street here. He was wearing a Santa Claus hat tricked out with junk jewelry, a tattered gold lamé jacket, thick mascara and eyeliner, and a rose erupting a penis crudely painted on his weathered cheek. The inevitable trash-brimmed shopping bag in one hand, in the other a cane made into a mystical staff of office with the gold-painted plastic roses duct-taped to the top end.
As usual the crazy old fuck was babbling free-form imprecations, his spittle making whiteheads on the window glass. “Damnfuckya!” came muffled through the glass. “Damnfuckya for ya abandoned city, ya abandoned city and now their gods are taking away, taking like a bend-over boy yes, damnfuckya! Yoruba Orisha! The Orisha, cabrón! Holy shit on a wheel! Hijo de puta! Ya doot, ya pay, they watch, they pray, they take like a bend-over boy ya! El-Elegba Ishu at your crossroads shithead pendejo! LSD not the godblood now praise the days! Damnfuckya be sorry! Orisha them Yoruba cabrones!”
Yoruba Orisha. Sounded familiar.
“Godfuckya Orisha sniff ’round, vamanos! Chinga tu madre!”
Maybe the old fruit was a Santeria loony. Santeria was the Hispanic equivalent of Yoruba, and now he was foaming at the mouth about the growth of his weird little cult’s power. Or maybe he’d done too much acid in the sixties. Or both.
The Lebanese guys who ran the espresso place, trying to fake it as a chic croissant espresso parlor, went out onto the sidewalk to chase the old shrieker away. But Ash was through here, anyway. It was time to go to the indoor range, to practice with the gun.
On the BART train heading to the East Bay, on his way to the target range, Ash let his mind wander, and his eyes followed his mind. They wandered foggily over the otherwise empty interior of the humming, shivering train car, till they focused on a page of a morning paper someone had left on a plastic seat. It was a back-section page of the Examiner, and it was the word Yoruba in a headline that focused his eyes. Lurching with the motion of the train, Ash crossed the aisle and sat down next to the paper, read the article without picking it up.
Yoruba, it said, was the growing religion of inner-city blacks — an amalgam of African and Western mysticism. Ancestor worship with African roots. Supposed to be millions of urban blacks into it now. Orisha the name of the spirits. Ishu El-Elegba was some god or other.
So the Chicano street freak had been squeaking about Yoruba out of schizzy paranoia, because the cult was spreading through the barrio. Next week he’d be warning people about some plot by the Vatican.
Ash shrugged, and the train pulled into his station.
Ash had only fired the automatic once before — and before that hadn’t fired a gun since his boyhood, when he’d gone hunting with his father. He’d never hit anything in those days. He wasn’t sure he could hit anything now.
But he’d been researching gun handling. So after an hour or so — his hand beginning to ache with the recoil of the gun, his head aching from the grip of the ear protectors — he found he could fire a reasonably tight pattern into the black, manshaped paper target at the end of the gallery. It was a thrill being here, really. The other men along the firing gallery so hawk-eyed and serious as they loaded and fired intently at their targets. The ventilators sucking up the gunsmoke. The flash of the muzzles.
He pressed the button that ran his paper target back to him on the wire that stretched the length of the range, excitement mounting as he saw he’d clustered three of the five shots into the middle two circles.
It wasn’t Wild Bill Hickok, but it was good enough. It would stop a man, surely, wouldn’t it, if he laid a pattern like that into his chest?
But would it be necessary? It shouldn’t be. He didn’t want to have to shoot the old waddler. They wouldn’t look for him so hard, after the robbery, if he didn’t use the gun. Chances were, he wouldn’t have to shoot. The old guard would be terrified, paralyzed. Putty. Still...
He smiled as with the tips of his fingers he traced the fresh bullet holes in the target.
Ash was glad the week was over; relieved the waiting was nearly done. He’d begun to have second thoughts. The attrition on his nerves had been almost unbearable.
But now it was Monday again. Seven minutes after five p.m. He sat in the espresso shop, sipping, achingly and sensuously aware of the weight of the pistol in the pocket of his trench coat.
The street crazy with the gold roses on his cane was stumping along a little ways up, across the street, as if coming to meet Ash. And then the armored car pulled around the corner.
Legs rubbery, Ash made himself get up. He picked up the empty, frameless backpack, carried it in his left hand. Went out the door, into the bash of cold wind. The traffic light was with him. He took that as a sign, and crossed with growing alacrity, one hand closing around the grip of the gun in his coat pocket. The ski mask was folded up onto his forehead like a watch cap. As he reached the corner where the fat black security guard was just getting out of the back of the armored car, he pulled the ski mask down over his face. And then he jerked the gun out.
“Give me the bag or you’re dead right now!” Ash barked, just as he’d rehearsed it, leveling the gun at the old man’s unmissable belly.
For a split second, as the old black guy hesitated, Ash’s eyes focused on something anomalous in the guard’s uniform; an African charm dangling down the front of his shirt, where a tie should be. A spirit-mask face that seemed to grimace at Ash. Then the rasping plop of the bag dropping to the sidewalk snagged his attention away, and Ash waved the gun; yelling, “Back away and drop your gun! Take it out with thumb and forefinger only!” All according to rehearsal.
The gun clanked on the sidewalk. The old man backed stumblingly away. Ash scooped up the bag, shoved it into the backpack. Take the old guy’s gun, too. But people were yelling, across the street, for someone to call the cops, and he just wanted away. He sprinted into the street, into a tunnel of panic, hearing shouts and car horns blaring at him, the squeal of tires, but never looking around. His eyes fixed on the downhill block that was his path to the BART station.