“You heading out next week,” Lee asked. “Headed for Vegas?”
Mark nodded.“Vegas, and then on to Wichita.”
“Don’t know if it would fit in with your plans,” Lee said, “but I’d sure like to see Vegas, play the tables for a day or two.”
Mark grinned.“You getting to like this flying?”
Lee nodded, grinning at him.
“Might arrange it, if you can get the time off.”
“I can get the time off. I’ll be in town next Thursday on some business, I can get a lift in. Don’t suppose you could pick me up there, on your way? I’d pay for your gas to Vegas. Fellow told me there was an emergency landing strip just outside of town, at the junction to Jamesfarm.”
Mark scratched his head.“I was going to leave Wednesday, but what the hell, for the price of gas, I’m flexible. Sure, hell yes, I’ll pick you up, say Thursday evening? Smoother ride over the mountains when the air’s cool. I know the strip, I had a leaky oil line coming back from Vegas one time. That strip saved mefrom burning up the engine. How will you get back from Vegas?”
“I’ll hop a bus. How about six-thirty or seven, Thursday night?”
“Make it eight-thirty, I’ll have some things to clear up, that night. Take us an hour and a half to Vegas. My girlfriend doesn’t get off until nine.” He grinned at Lee. “This thing burns thirty gallons an hour.”
Laughing, Lee crawled up into his seat.“I can make that much in an hour or two at the blackjack table.” He snapped on the goggles, buckled his seat belt, tucked the brown paper packages securely between his legs, patting the forty-five. Wherever the ghost cat was, he wondered if he was in for the ride to Vegas as well, if he’d be with him for the rest of this gig, for the bad time Lee expected to endure before he headed for the border, rich and living free.
26
Two hours after Brad Falon had slipped into Morgan’s blue Dodge, and Morgan pulled away from the tree-shaded curb near the automotive shop, Falon himself sat in the driver’s seat, with Morgan sprawled in the back, passed out cold. Leaving the Graystone, in front of which he had parked, and driving sedately through town, Falon returned to park behind the apartment. Making sure Morgan was still deep under, and seeing that the windows were down partway so the comatose man wouldn’t suffocate, Falon left the car. Walking across the few feet of tarmac, he entered the apartment building through the back door. He didn’t go upstairs to his girlfriend’s place where he’d been living, he’d fill Natalie in later. She’d go along with whatever he said, whatever he told her to say. Crossing the small lobby to the front door, the afternoon sun glittering in through its carved glass panes, he left the building and crossed the street to the little neighborhood market where he liked to buy magazines and sweets. He purchased a pack of gum and a candy bar, and talked idly with the owner, remarking on the time, which was just two-thirty, and setting his watch by the store clock. Leaving the market, he entered the lobby through the frontdoor again as if he were going on up to their apartment. Instead he continued out the back, where he slid into Morgan’s car. He had left his own black Mustang in plain view parked in front of the building.
In the backseat of the Dodge, Morgan hadn’t moved, he was still deep under. Smiling, Falon drove the few blocks to the elementary school and parked in the alley behind the gym. Getting out, he dropped a small metal box into one of the refuse cans, and eased his hand in to pull a tangle of brown, wadded paper towels over it. Getting backin the car, he drove the nine blocks to Shorter Street, its maple trees shading the entries to several small businesses, the barber shop, a sandwich shop, a women’s clothing store, a bank, a dry goods and a five-and-dime, stores supplying most of the necessities of the small town except for livestock feed, lumber, and gardening supplies, which could be acquired just a few blocks over. Parking beneath a large live oak half a block from Rome Southern Bank, again he left the windows cracked open to the hot afternoon. Pocketing his loaded .38, he tossed a light windbreaker over Morgan so he wouldn’t be easily noticed from the sidewalk, and he left the engine running.
Rome Southern wasn’t the biggest bank in town but it was on the quietest street. Paradoxically, it was just two blocks from Morgan Blake’s house. Falon had driven by there just a couple of days ago, had seen the little Blake girl coming down the street, no mistaking her dark eyes, exactly like Becky’s. When heslowed, she’d looked up at him, startled. Becky’s eyes, yes, and even as she ran from his car behind the nearest house, something had twisted in his belly.
All during high school Becky had refused to go out with him—she was Becky Tanner then—using the poor excuse that she was dating Morgan. He told her she could be going with them both, that he’d show her a real good time, better than Morgan ever could, but she’d had a snotty, stuck-up attitude. She wouldn’t date him, wouldn’t give him a tumble—when a tumble was all he wanted. He hadn’t forgotten or forgiven that.
He left Morgan’s car at exactly two forty-five, and approached the bank. He had already changed shirts with Morgan and put on Morgan’s greasy work boots. To make his hands look like Morgan’s he had rubbed black watercolor paint from the child’s paint box into the creases between his fingers and around his nails and the cuticles, wiping off the excess. He had wiped his prints off the tin paint box, and smeared the colors all together in a wet mess. Who would think anything about a ruined paint box that some kid threw away? Earlier, getting Morgan settled in the backseat, he had pulled half a dozen hairs from Morgan’s head and placed them in an envelope, which was now safe in his jacket pocket.
Approaching the bank, he took from his other pocket a blue wool stocking cap, the kind you’d wear in winter, and pulled it on. The street and sidewalk were empty except for three small children bouncing a ball against a storefront a block away, paying no attention to him. Just out of sight of the bank’s glass doors, he pulled the cap down over his face, lining up the two eyeholes hehad cut in the front. Then, with his hand on the revolver in his pocket, the hammer cocked, he shoved in through the bank’s front door.
The portly, uniformed security guard had been looking up at the wall clock checking it against his pocket watch. Adjusting the watch, which was five minutes slow, satisfied it was time to close up, he started across the tile lobby to lock the door and pull the shades. He glanced across to the teller’s window, where Betty Holmes was placing paper collars around packs of tens, putting away the last of her change. She, too, was eager to lock up for the evening. She smiled at the elderly guard, flipping her long, pale hair over her shoulder. She liked Harry Grogan, he had been at this job ever since he retired from the police force fifteen years before, long before she came to work here. She knew he could feel the years weighing on him, just as her father complained about the aches and discomforts of increasing age. She knew Harry meant to quit soon and help his wife, Esther, at home where Esther still took in sewing. Grogan planned to put in a bigger garden and try canning some beans and homemade vegetable soup which was, in every household with a garden, a favorite winter staple. Harry said Esther never had time for canning and she’d sure be glad of the help. Betty watched Grogan ease the heaviness of his service revolver, lifting his belt away from his body as he moved toward the bank’s front door—then everything happened fast, the sudden thrust inward of the heavy glass door, the masked figure exploding in jamming a revolver into Harry’s belly as Harry reached for his gun.