The Vengeful Virgin

didn’t wear falsies, either. Of course, neither do I. But hers were a little bigger, I think. But, then.”

I waited. She didn’t speak for a moment. I drove toward the outskirts of town. I had wanted everything to run smoothly between us. It wasn’t going to be that way. I didn’t know how to tell her we were really running now because we had to run.

Only I had the money.

I’d thought “I”—not we.

She said something. Then she said, “Oh, darling.” Then she said, “Please...” It came out as a kind of sob. She moved across the seat and I slowed the car, wondering, What now?

She shoved the white bag on the floor and put her arms around me.

“I believe you,” she said. “I believe you.”

She kissed the side of my face, with her arms around my neck, purring to herself the way she did, and half- kneeling on the seat. “Don’t you see how it was?” she said. “I just couldn’t stand it. That’s all. I love you, Jack—I love you.” She kissed me on the mouth, and hugged me some more. “I couldn’t stand it. I love you so much—so much.”

I got a look at her eyes and they were mad for a second. I mean mad, not angry. Then that went away.

“I believed you right away,” she said. “But the thought of sharing you with something like that—with anyone—it would be too much.”

“You never shared me.”

“I know, Jack. I’m sorry. Can’t you see?”

“I guess.”

“Don’t try to make me feel worse, now.”

“I’m not.”

“I wanted to hurt you—to make you feel as bad as I felt.” She leaned in tightly against me, kissing me, and purring. I nearly drove the car off the street. “All right, now?” she said. There was something husky in her tone.

“Yeah. I couldn’t do anything with her, Shirley.”

“I understand.”

“We can talk sensibly now?”

“Yes.” She knelt there on the seat with her arms around me, her eyes shining. Her hair was tumbled down around one side of her face. “You’re my man,” she said. “And I love you.”

I patted her thigh.

“I got the money without any trouble at all,” she said. “Isn’t it really better getting it all, instead of leaving some behind? We’ll never come back for it. Don’t you see?”

“It was the chance itself,” I said. “I wasn’t sure you could bring it off. It doesn’t matter now.”

She sank back on the seat, watching me, smiling with a kind of secretiveness. She looked a million. Ten million. I felt really good all of a sudden.

“Shirley?”

“Yes?”

I told her about Miraglia and the police at my apartment, and how we had to run for sure, now. How there was no other way out.

Fourteen

She said a lot of things, and carried on some, but I finally got her calmed down. She was scared. But so was I.

What scared me was the thought of losing that money.

Boiled down, nothing else mattered. That much money was worth being scared about, and it was worth taking chances for. I could have spent my whole life in the store and never managed to gouge even a small part of what we had out of sales.

“You knew this all the time, and you let me act like I did,” she said. “I’m sorry, Jack.”

She really meant it.

“Listen,” I said. “We’re not going to have time to talk now. First off, it’ll take them a little time to find out about this car....”

“That girl saw it.”

“I know, I know. Don’t you think I realize that? It can’t be helped. I was planning to trade it off for still another. We can’t do it, now. If we steal one, that won’t help.”

“What will we do? Where will we go?”

“Easy, now. Keep hold of yourself. There’s only us, you know? We can’t take a bus, a train, or a plane. They’ll be watching them. They’ll sure as hell set up road blocks before long. They’ve probably already contacted the bank. They’re at your place. They’re looking for us right now. The one chance we have got is this car, until they find out about it.”

“Yes, Jack.”

I headed across town toward the junkyard district.

“They’ll have the license number before the day’s out. But there are a lot of cars exactly like this one on the highways, everywhere. I’m going to swipe a plate off a wrecked car in a junkyard, then we’ll scram.”

“Where?”

“Not far. We’ll take back roads, head north maybe fifty or seventy miles, and rent a place. Anything. A cabin someplace. Then when everything cools down, we’ll take off. The big mistake would be to try and make it now. We’d never make it, Shirley.”

She just looked at me.

I made it to a junkyard I knew of, where it was self-service. I parked down the street, told her to lie on the seat, out of sight. Then I went over to the yard, and told the man I was looking for an old Stromberg carburetor to fix up a hot rod I was building for my kid. He said to have a look around.

“I’ll need pliers and a screw driver.”

He grumbled, and loaned me the tools.

I found a plate for this year, got that off the car it was on, and slid it under my shirt and belt, at my back. Then I located a carb, and tore it off fast.

“You’ll need a kit,” he said. “This is all shot to hell.”

“I know it.”

“I sell kits.”

“Well, I figured...”

“It’s no good without you fix it, pal.”

“Okay. I’ll take the kit, then.”

I paid for the stuff, and went back to the car. She was lying on the seat, looking like a scared rabbit.

I was beginning to feel fine. We had a good chance.

We drove out of town, taking the back routes, and stopped the first chance so I could change the plates. Shirley sat in the car, tuning the radio. She’d been quiet ever since we left town, and that bothered me a little. I buried the plate that was on the car. Then I heard her call.

“Jack. Hurry!”

Well, I went over there, and it was on the radio. She picked up the tail end of a news flash, but even at that, it was pretty explicit.

They were holding Henry Lamphier in a jail cell for his own protection. He had sworn to kill us both. The police were having a bad time with him. We were suspected of murdering both Victor Spondell and Mayda Lamphier, and they had it all straight down the line, even though they claimed they weren’t positive. They theorized Mayda Lamphier had somehow surprised us in the act of letting Victor die, and we’d had to do away with her. They uncovered everything. The pad with the list of stuff at my place, Miraglia’s name, everybody’s name, all the gimmicks. It added up. I don’t know, maybe there was something inevitable about it, because they’d even dug up the bloody blanket.

A young cop got credit for that. He had put himself in what he figured was my place, since the Medical Examiner had claimed there would have been a lot of blood, and we had probably wrapped Mayda in