probation. It taught me something. My cellmate taught me a lot more. He was an embittered old dynamiter whose lungs were eroding. Forget the elaborate, complicated jobs, the old lag urged me. Smash-and-grab. Hit-and-run. In, out, and away in four minutes. I listened, and was convinced.
I didn't apply for parole. I did the bit and came out with no strings on me. When I hit the street, I had to shake the FBI tails waiting for me to go back for the unrecovered bank loot. I went up into the Pacific Northwest to get away from them. I took a job in a lumber camp. I became handy with an axe, and I practiced with a handgun until I was the equal of any circus trick-shot artist.
I came out of the woods when I figured I had the prison smell off me. Inside, I'd made plenty of contacts. I could pick and choose. I'd made up my mind I was going to do things my way. I contacted a man and laid down a few rules. They included scouting the job in advance to make sure it was worthwhile, thus holding the action down to a job or two a year. He was agreeable, and we went to work.
The time spent in the lumber camp had given me a legitimate occupation. Everywhere we went I passed as a tree surgeon. I could do the work, and I kept a name clean to work under. I always worked a couple of months a year. They were never going to get me again with that no-visible-means-of-support gag.
My partner and I had a two-year run that was peaches and cream. We took five banks for the equivalent of a comfortable living. Then a suspicious husband came home early one night and my partner wound up on a slab in the morgue.
I found another partner. All told, I ran through five of them in thirteen years. None of them cashed in on a job with me. They all insisted in branching out for themselves. They'd have been better off if I'd kept them busier, but how much money can a man spend? I've never been a high liver.
Bunny was my last partner, and the best. We'd needed a driver for the Phoenix job, and we imported a kid from Juarez who panicked during the show. I took a slug in the arm trying to hold things together during the getaway. Bunny went on to Florida while I was hiding out, healing. He sent me a thousand a week in hundreds, registered mail. I didn't want my share of the swag around until I was a hundred percent mobile again.
The cash was mailed to me from Hudson, Florida, where Bunny holed up. The regularity of the registered letters to me attracted the curiosity of the Hudson postmistress, Lucille Grimes. She mentioned it to her boyfriend, a local deputy, Blaze Franklin. He steamed open an envelope, found the cash, decided on a shakedown, and went after Bunny.
He didn't get the bulk of the loot. Not then. I knew something had happened to Bunny when the mail stopped coming. I drove to Florida when I could travel. It took me a while, but I ran down Lucille Grimes and Franklin, and what was left of Bunny. I evened the score for my partner, but I ended up in the prison wing of the state hospital for a long healing period.
I was out now, and I intended to stay out.
6
A knock at the cabin door woke me in the morning.
When I opened it, no one was there, but a bag of groceries was propped up against the wall. I carried it inside. After I unloaded it, the kitchen table was covered with coffee, tea, salt, sugar, butter, bread, milk, cereal, hamburger, and two TV dinners. That was one thing about Blind Tom's: the price was high, but service came with it. Anyone staying at one of Tom's cabins never had to leave it unless he chose. A shopping list Scotch-taped to the outside of the door each night would provide the supplies delivered in the morning.
I put the perishables in the refrigerator. I wasn't looking forward to eating my own mediocre cooking during the interval it took me to heal properly. I'm a fair subsistence cook and that's about all. Taking my meals in the cabin guaranteed privacy, though, and for that I was prepared to put up with my own culinary shortcomings.
Thinking about the necessary healing period sent me into the bathroom. I wanted to see my new face. The day before, I had had fleeting glimpses of myself in the cruiser's rearview mirror, but never so that I could see the overall effect. Then last night when I reached the cabin and tried to see myself in the dim light of the low-wattage bulb illuminating the water-spotted mirror, most of my new face was in shadow. All that showed up was my clean, bare skull with its spider web of perforations from sutures. Now in the bright morning light I could see myself clearly.
The scarred, crimson, rough-looking features that confronted me in the mirror were no surprise. Neither was the upper body with its patchwork effect where missing healthy skin had been transferred to other areas. There was one surprise, though. Dr. Afzul had given me the features of a man ten years younger. Not a handsome man, but then it had never been a handsome face. It was certainly a different face. I made a mental note that I still owed the little plastic surgeon ten thousand dollars. He had certainly earned it.
I left the bathroom and rummaged in a closet until I found a pair of faded swimming trunks and sneakers. I pulled them on, left the cabin, and descended the steeply winding, rutted path to the river's edge. Each spring after the high water receded, Tom had truckloads of sand dumped in front of each of the riverbank cabins. The result was instant beaches. All the cabins were strategically placed along the winding channel so that none commanded a view of any of the others.
I waded out into the cool water and splashed around for a moment. Then I swam the seventy or eighty feet to the opposite bank, rested a bit, and swam back. Each morning I intended to add another lap to my morning swim to restore muscle tone lost during the months in the hospital.
I stayed only ten minutes in the early-morning sun. Dr. Afzul had warned me that my tender new skin would have to be treated to sunshine only in brief, gradually increased doses. When I left the water and started to climb up the path to the cabin, a grunting sound to the left caused me to detour. Twenty yards along the riverbank I came upon an arrangement of telephone poles and steel cable interlaced with barbed wire. This was Cordelia's dwelling place. She lay there sunning herself on a mudbank.
If I had changed since Cordelia last saw me, the same was true of her. She had been a svelte five-foot maiden 'gator. Now she was a barrel-bodied ten-footer, and if Blind Tom were to be believed, complacently steeped in 'gator sin. At the sound of my approach she opened her eyes, fixed me with a cold stare, and closed them again.
I returned to the cabin and breakfasted on cereal, milk, and a cup of coffee. I waited half an hour and did a few of the RAF exercise series, then took out the.32 Sauer I had acquired from Blind Tom and cleaned it carefully with tools and gun oil I found in a drawer. In a couple of days I'd take it out into the woods to sight it in and learn its shooting characteristics.
I skipped lunch in favor of the river again. The spring-fed coolness of the swift current was wonderfully refreshing, and I prudently made myself return to the cabin to avoid the sun's rays before I was actually ready. I took a nap in the afternoon, and in the early evening I broiled a part of Blind Tom's hamburger. Afterward I took a chair outside the cabin and cocked it up against the wall. I sat in the swift-gathering twilight and listened to the increased volume of woods noises. The river breeze swept the majority of mosquitoes inland, leaving me comparatively unmolested.
By the time darkness fell and the river disappeared from sight if not from sound, the day-long combination of sunshine and exercise resulted in stifled yawns. I fought off sleep while I did some mental arithmetic. In the very near future, money was going to be a problem. In order to move on I needed a car, which Tom would have to purchase for me. It needn't be much car, but any kind of transportation worthy of the name wouldn't return much change from a thousand dollars.
I also needed a hairpiece. I didn't want Tom to know my need for one, so it would have to be one of the first orders of personal business when I left the cabin. I didn't see how I could stretch my stay at the cabin much longer than three months without leaving my bankroll dangerously low before I had made a connection. I hoped that three months would be long enough to restore a normal color so that I wouldn't be the conspicuous beneficiary of plastic surgery, but regardless, I'd have to be moving on.
I knew my next stop. I planned to drive to Mobile and look over the Golden Peacock, a nightclub. When it had been run by Manny Sebastian, the place also had functioned as a meeting spot and armament center for a hardcore underworld elite, those who operated on a major scale behind a gun. Manny Sebastian was buried under a mangrove root in a Florida swamp, but no one knew it except me. Sebastian had been one of the preliminary
