The dispatcher came back with, “You got the plates?”
“Not yet. I’m just coming up.”
“Let us know,” she said, sounding bored. Probably the two-hundredth Tahoe call she’d taken that day.
As he got closer, he could see that the plates weren’t the ones he was looking for. He stopped, and said, “I got a plate for you. Could you run this?”
He read off the plate, and then got out of the patrol car. He could see somebody in the driver’s seat, sitting there, but looking at him in her mirror. That was nothing new; everybody did that; but the car’s engine was running. That wasn’t quite right, not when gas was $3.50 a gallon and rising.
Card left his door open so he could hear the dispatcher, and loosened the gun on his belt; the excited dispatcher came back, her voice urgent: “Dan, those plates go to a Ford F150 so there’s something wrong there-”
And at that moment Jimmy and Tom, with the masks on their faces, burst through the front door of the bank and out into the street, carrying grocery bags in which they’d put the stolen currency.
The first part of the robbery had gone just fine. They’d crashed through the front door, found three women inside, one behind the counter and two more in a side office, gossiping; there were no customers. Jimmy pulled down the women in the office while Tom pointed his gun around aimlessly and thought about shooting Jimmy in the back, but Jimmy was so on top of everything, so manic, that Tom chickened out and wound up waving his pistol at the mousy-looking woman behind the counter.
Jimmy shouted, “Get the money, get the money, get the money. .”
They’d both brought paper grocery sacks inside with them, and Tom ran around behind the counter and started scooping money out of the cash drawers and into his sack, and Jimmy shouted at the boss woman in the office, “Open the safe, open the safe”-he pointed the rifle at the other woman’s head-“or I’ll shoot this woman right here, right now.”
The boss woman scurried into a back room that had a two-foot-by-two-foot safe built into a concrete wall. She fumbled with the combination a couple of times, then got it. There were stacks of money on small shelves inside. Jimmy, though disappointed by the small size of the safe, scraped the money into his bag and then shouted at Tom, “Let’s go. Let’s go.”
He didn’t shoot anybody, because this was a robbery, not a killing. The two lines didn’t cross in his mind. Jimmy held the gun on the women until Tom got to the lobby, and they both burst into the sunshine at the same instant.
The cop was a complete surprise.
The cop was standing there, just down the street, and was pulling his pistol from his holster. Jimmy and Tom burst through the door and, when they saw him, came to a stumbling halt, and then Jimmy shouted at Tom, “Go,” and he fired a shot at the cop, missing, and they both ran. The cop started shooting at them, missing three times, and then just as Jimmy got to the car, fired a fourth shot that hit Jimmy on the back of the thigh and knocked him down.
Tom went down at the same time, frightened by the gunfire, did a squirming turn on his stomach, and started pulling the trigger on his 9-millimeter. He was firing purely out of panic, hardly knowing where the cop was. Card had ducked behind his car door and, as luck would have it, raised his head behind the window glass just in time to catch one of Tom’s panicky 9-millimeters.
The slug punched through the glass and then through the frontal bone of Card’s forehead, through his brain, to the parietal bone at the back of his head. By the time it got to the parietal bone it had shed so much mass that instead of punching through, it deflected and spent a few hundredths of a second rattling around inside Card’s brain, which Card didn’t know because he was already dead.
He fell in the street, on his back, and in a last dead reflex motion, threw his arms out to his sides, so that he looked like a picture of a dead man.
Jimmy dragged himself to the car and crawled in, and bleated, “I’m hit bad. Man, I’m hit bad.” He’d brought the guns and money with him.
Tom was in the back, with his bag of money, and he shouted, “Go, go,” and Becky put her foot down and cried, “How bad are you? How bad?”
“It’s pretty fuckin’ bad,” Jimmy cried. “Jesus, it hurts so bad.”
Jimmy had planned to go fourteen miles straight up County 9, then left on 99, a side trail, then up a jigsaw path of back roads to the house of an old man who’d once hired Jimmy’s father to cut a bunch of dead trees and grind out the stumps. Jimmy had been made to go along and help, and he’d remembered two things: that the old man was an asshole, and that he was isolated. He lived alone in an old farmhouse with a garage on the side, farming a half-section, making just enough, in a good year, to keep himself in a decent truck and a winter vacation on the Gulf Coast.
Jimmy figured to kill the old man and take his truck. They’d lock the Boxes’ car in the old man’s garage, and since nobody liked the old fucker, it could be weeks before anybody went looking for him. Probably not until it became obvious that he wasn’t doing his spring plowing. By that time, they’d be. . somewhere else.
He hadn’t told Tom where he was planning to go, because Tom. .
He no longer trusted Tom. Truth to tell, Tom’s days on earth were numbered, and truth to tell, that number was One.
But they didn’t go to the old man’s place, not then. They wound up in a cornfield. Sometimes, the corn didn’t get harvested before the snow fell, and wound up standing through the winter. Eight miles out of town, down a narrow side road, they saw a field like that, and Jimmy, screaming with the pain of the rough roads, pointed them down into a dry ditch, then sideways to the field. They didn’t care about the car, and drove it right over the fence and into the cornfield. They could be seen from the air, but not from the road.
Jimmy was hurt bad, but not as bad as he might have been. The cop’s bullet had blown open a wound along the outside of his thigh, almost like the flesh had been gouged out with an ice-cream scoop. There was blood everywhere. Becky got a blouse out of her bag and made a bandage and tied it tight around the wound, knotting the bandage with the arms of the blouse.
Blood began soaking through, but it didn’t seem uncontrolled.
Becky said, “We gotta get some medicine. Some pain medicine.”
“Where we gonna do that?” Jimmy groaned. His face was white as a dead man’s, his teeth showing yellow against his white skin.
“They’re gonna be all over this place,” Becky said. “Tom shot that cop, and he wasn’t moving. He might be dead. In an hour, we won’t be able to move. Not until night.”
“Well, what’re we gonna do?” Tom asked. “He’s hurt too bad.”
“I’m getting better since we stopped,” Jimmy said, but then he groaned again.
“We passed that little house, not more than a half mile back there,” Becky said. “We could go back, see if they got any medicine.”
Jimmy said, “You’re just going to say, ‘Can we borrow some medicine?’”
“I’ll take a gun,” Becky said.
“You think you can pull a trigger?”
“As good as you. I’ll come back, fix your leg as good as we can, then we’ll. . go on.”
Jimmy groaned and finally said, “I can’t think of anything else.”
“We’ll leave you in the car. You can run it if you get cold,” Becky said. “I don’t think it’s even a half mile back there, we’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Back in a half hour.”
Jimmy looked at Tom: “What do you think?”
“I think you need that medicine,” Tom said. “If we’re lucky, we could get something to kill the pain.”
“Okay,” Jimmy said, and after a minute, “Don’t leave me. Becky, don’t leave me.”
Neither Becky nor Tom was in very good cardiovascular shape. They jogged and walked when they ran out of breath, then jogged some more; the house was actually only six hundred yards back down the road, and they were
