Killshot

was Donna, Donna Mulry. She was retired now, actually forced out, after twenty-five years working in corrections, and didn’t like the way they’d treated her. Richie Nix believed she was close to fifty, old enough to be his foster mom (he never knew his real one), but she was a little thing with a nice shape, a big butt on her for her size and not too bad-looking. Donna had retired to Marine City, the next town up the river, and spent four hours a day driving a school bus for the East China Township system. She’d come home ready to play Yahtzee, which she loved, or watch TV, have some drinks. Donna introduced him to her favorite, Southern Comfort and 7-Up. It was pretty good. After a while she’d ask him what kind of Campbell soup and frozen gourmet dinner he wanted, Donna never having learned to prepare a meal for less than twelve hundred people at a time. She’d have on her sparkly cat-lady glasses and her orange hair a pile of curls trying to look young and sexy for him. She was always fussing over him. He let her pierce his ear and stick a little diamond in it. He let her wash his hair with a special conditioner to take out the oil and bring back its natural luster, but drew the line at letting her cut it. Long hair made you feel you could do what you wanted. Short hair was what you had entering prison life. She’d say, “Honey, don’t you want to look nice for your Donna?”

Richie knew he could do better than her and her frozen dinners. He was being nice to Donna in return for her being nice to him in the joint. Otherwise she was not in his class. Hell, he had an NCIC sheet that printed out of that national crime computer as tall as he was: six feet in his curl-toed cowboy boots with three inner soles inside. His ambition was to rob a bank in every state of the union—or maybe just forty-nine, fuck Alaska— which he believed would be some kind of record, get him in that book as the All-American Bank Robber. He had thirty-seven states to go but was young.

Right now Richie was considering a score he’d lined up that was way different than robbery. It was higher class and took some thought.

Meanwhile he spent his leisure time drinking Southern and Sevens and watching TV with Donna pawing him or listening to her tell him how, after devoting her life to corrections, they had treated her like dirt. Richie’s opinion was that if you liked corrections it meant you wanted to live with colored, because that’s what it amounted to. He’d tell her from experience. The first place he was sent, the Wayne County Youth Home, stuck in Unit Five North with twenty guys, all colored. In Georgia, when he got the six-to-eight for intent to rob and kidnap, he did three and a half at Reidsville, most of it stoop labor, all day in the pea fields with them. Hell, he’d been eligible to serve time in some of the most famous prisons of the south, Huntsville, Angola, Parchman, and Raiford, all of them full of colored, but had lucked out down there and only drew the conviction in Georgia. Okay, then the two years in the federal joint at Terre Haute, they were mostly white where he was. But then the transfer to Huron Valley put him back in with the colored again. How could she like living among guys, white or colored, that would tear your ass out for the least reason? Donna said, “Women are good for a prison. They have a calming effect on the inmates and make their life seem more normal.” Richie said, “Hey, Donna? Bull shit.”

He’d get tired of lying around and go for a drive in Donna’s little Honda kiddycar, go over to Harsens Island on the ferry and wonder about those summer homes boarded up, nobody in them. Stop at a bar on the island where retired guys in plaid shirts came in the afternoon to drink beer, waiting out their time. It was depressing. Donna told him to stay out of the bar at Sans Souci, Indians from Walpole Island drank there and got ugly. Oh, was that right? Richie dropped by one evening and glared for an hour at different ones and nobody made a move. Shit, Indians weren’t nothing to handle. Go in a colored joint and glare you’d bleed all the way to the hospital.

The score he had a line on had come about sort of by accident. One night bored to death listening to Donna and watching TV, Richie slipped out to hold up a store or a gas station and couldn’t find anything open that looked good. So he broke into a house, a big one all dark, on Anchor Bay; got inside and started creeping through rooms— shit, the place was empty. He hadn’t noticed the for sale sign in the front yard. It got Richie so mad he tore out light fixtures, pissed on the carpeting, stopped up the sink and turned the water on and was thinking what else he could do, break some windows, when the idea came to him all at once. He thought about it a few minutes there in the dark, went out and got the name and number off the for sale sign.

Nelson Davies Realty.

Richie had seen the company’s green-and-gold signs all over the Anchor Bay area from Mount Clemens to Algonac and had heard their radio ads in the car: sound effects like a gust of wind whistling by, gone, and a voice says, “Nelson Davies just sold another one!” He seemed to recall they had a new subdivision they were selling too, built on a marsh landfill they called Wildwood, a whole mess of cute homes, twenty or thirty of them.

Pretty soon after, while Donna was out driving her school bus, Richie called up Nelson Davies, got his cheerful voice on the line and said, “Them Wildwood homes are going fast, huh?” Nelson Davies said they sure were and began telling him why, listing features like your choice of decorator colors, till Richie cut him off saying, “I bet they’d go even faster if they caught fire.”

Nelson Davies asked who this was, no longer cheerful.

Richie said, “Accidents can happen in an empty house, can’t they?”

Nelson Davies kept asking who this was.

“I understand you already have one messed up,” Richie said. “It can happen anytime. Call the police, they’ll keep a lookout for a while, but how long? They get tired and quit it could happen again, huh? Or you can pay so it won’t, like insurance. You get ten thousand in cash ready and I’ll come pick it up sometime. If you don’t have it when I come, you’re dead. If I see police cruising around that subdivision you’re also dead. You understand? You get ready, ’cause you don’t know when I’m gonna walk in the door. Or which one that comes in I’m gonna be.” Richie paused to think about what he’d just said. He believed it made sense. “I’ll tell you something else. You remember a guy working in a Amoco station, one up in Port Huron, was shot dead last year during a holdup? Not last summer but the one before?”

The real estate man said he wasn’t sure, he might’ve read about it.

“Well, that was me. The guy had this big roll of bills in his pocket. I knew it was there, I saw it, but he didn’t want to take it out. I said, ‘Okay, I’ll give you three seconds.’ By the time he started to reach in his pocket I was at three and it was too late. So I blew him away. You understand? I won’t hesitate to blow you away you give me any trouble. Or I find out you have cops in your office pretending to be real estate salesmen. Shit, I know a cop when I see one. Look him in the eye I can tell in a minute. See, you won’t know me from any other home buyer that comes in, but I’ll know who you got there in the office and if any’re cops. If I see any I won’t do nothing then, I will later on, some other time. Say you come out of your house to go to work, I could hit you with a scope-sight rifle. You understand? There’s no way you can fuck with me. Ten thousand when I come to collect or you’re a dead real estate man.”

That was how he’d set it up four days ago.

The guy should have the money by now, ten thousand, a figure Richard had used in estimating how much he could make robbing a bank in every state of the union, a half million dollars minus Alaska. Except that robbing a bank by yourself you only had time to hit one teller and the most he’d ever scored was $2,720 from a bank in Nor- wood, Ohio. Another thing different about this one, besides the score, you had to look the part of who you were supposed to be, walk in that office as a young home buyer. The other day he’d swiped a sport coat at Sears, a gray herringbone, the sleeves a little too long but it was okay. Donna got excited and bought him some shirts and ties, thinking he was dressing to look for a job.

So here he was sitting in Henry’s drinking beer, wondering if he might go semicasual and wear the it’s nice to be nice T-shirt under the sport coat. Thinking of that but mostly thinking about getting a car for tomorrow. He couldn’t use Donna’s. Once he drove away from the real estate office with all that money he was gone. If somebody read the license number they could I.D. him through her. Or if he took her car Miss Corrections would turn him in for walking out on her. So he’d have to steal one. Go out in the parking lot after it got dark, see if any fool left their key in the car. People did that, rings of keys they didn’t want to carry— stick it under the seat. Otherwise, since he didn’t have a tool to punch out the ignition, he’d have to wait for people to come out after they finished their dinner and get in the car with them. Or him or her. That meant taking the person on a one-way trip in the country. But shit happens, if that’s the way it had to be. At least he could pick and choose.

He watched an ’86 Cadillac pull into the lot and park. Baby blue with an Ontario plate. Richie liked it right away. He watched the guy get out of the car, short and stocky, his hair slicked back, adjusting his coat, Jesus, getting ready to make his entrance. Richie waited. There he was, the hostess taking him to a table by the front windows. Shit, the guy looked like an Indian. Most likely got paid today. Got all dressed up in his suit and tie to come in here for the dinner.

Richie liked the car and liked the guy more and more the way he sat there all alone ordering one drink after