had a certain comicbook handsomeness, and had done something to it. The big cat that purred under the hood hadn't come from Kenosha, Wisconsin, not without modifications. The brakes, the shocks, everything about the car felt different from anything that had ever rolled off any assembly line anywhere. Now the car was sleek and powerful and perfectly under control, and Hughes drove it as though it were part of himself – as though it were a prosthetic device attached to his fingertips. Grofield, watching him in silent admiration, felt that Hughes could make the car do what he wanted simply by looking at it and raising an eyebrow.
The best driver for anything, including going quickly away from where you no longer want to be, is not the guy who will kick the car across the state, the guy who loves speed – the best driver is the guy who loves cars. He'll get more out of the car, and he'll live longer.
They did very little talking together on the drive south. Hughes at one point told him about the financing. 'I'm doing it on two grand. That's probably cutting it close, but I don't want to waste money.'
'I agree.' The normal thing was for the string that actually did the job to repay the financer two hundred percent, if the job worked out. The risk was high enough to make that kind of repayment necessary. The two thousand Hughes had borrowed would be paid back with four thousand off the top of whatever the job brought in.
'I got a local man,' Hughes said. He never looked away from the windshield, but his face changed expressions just as though he were looking at the person he was talking to. 'A doctor,' he said. 'Can you feature that? A guy I know told me about him, two three years ago.'
'As a matter of fact,' Grofield said, 'a guy I've used a couple of times is a doctor, too. In New York. If you ever need any financing there, look him up. Doctor Chester Ormont, on East Sixty-seventh Street in Manhattan.'
'My man in St. Louis is Doctor Leon Castelli, on Grove Avenue.' Hughes looked a question at the windshield. 'How come doctors? I can't figure it.'
'Unreported income,' Grofield said. 'I don't think I've ever worked a job that wasn't financed by somebody's unreported income. There's certain classes of people that tend to get paid in cash, without records, so they don't report their entire earnings to the income tax people. Like doctors, they get a lot of patients that pay cash.'
Hughes grinned at the windshield. 'Everybody's got a hustle,' he said.
'There's safety deposit boxes all over this country,' Grofield said, 'packed with cash that was never reported to Internal Revenue. And these people can spend a few hundred of it, but if they start to spend in the thousands over their reported income level, they might attract the wrong kind of attention. So it's all just sitting there, in cash, in safety deposit boxes.'
'Wouldn't you like the master key?' Hughes asked.
'As a matter of fact, yes.'
'But why use that money to finance operations like us? I mean, I know why
'They hate to see money lie fallow,' Grofield said. 'Doctors in particular, they're the investing kind, they like to know their money's out there working for them. The money in the safety deposit box is gravy scooped off the top, they get to keep one hundred cents on every dollar of it, but they want more. They want to see it work, they want to see it bring home some friends.'
Hughes shook his head. 'What good is it? Money's to spend.' He grinned at the windshield. 'That's why I'm broke all the time. When I've got it, I party.'
'I spend it, too,' Grofield said, thinking of his theater.
'But not these doctors, huh? Castelli gives me two grand, it comes out of his safety deposit box. I give him back four grand, the whole bundle goes in the safety deposit box?'
'Probably.'
'Then what's the point? If he can't take a chance on spending the two, he sure can't take a chance on spending the four. So what the hell's the point?'
'I don't know,' Grofield said. 'A different kind of mind from ours.'
'Yeah. So that's why they're doctors, and we're-' he shrugged, looking at the windshield '-whatever we are.'
That was the end of that conversation. They drove for a while in silence, until Hughes asked if Grofield minded the radio. He said he didn't, and they listened to a hillbilly station after that.
Route 3 would have eventually taken them to the bottom of the state and across into Kentucky if they'd stayed with it, but instead they crossed the river at Cape Girardeau. They picked up 61 there, dropped south again, got onto 62, and cut southwest across the ankle of Missouri, entering Arkansas at St. Francis. Their destination was about ten miles beyond that, near Piggott.
5
It was a pyramid-shaped hill, fairly tall, and the whole side facing the road was strewn with junked cars and parts of cars, all silently rusting in the late afternoon sun. Three smallish trees jutted improbably out of the metal at odd points on the hillside, pale green with the fresh leaves of spring, and a narrow dirt road meandered up through the junk as though a bulldozer had gone through just once, shoving everything out of its way. Up at the top stood an old clapboard farmhouse, two stories high, rambling this way and that over the crest of the hill as though it had melted somewhat from its original shape. The siding was the gray of weathered wood that hasn't been painted for at least a quarter century.
Grofield said, 'It's beautiful.'
Hughes grinned at the windshield and turned off onto the twin-rut dirt road; it ran level for about a hundred feet, before climbing the hill. 'I guess Purgy don't mind it,' Hughes said.
They'd come two hundred twenty-five miles in just over four hours; it was now late afternoon, and the sunlight reflecting from windows and windshields up and down the hill was tinged with orange, so that it looked as though rust was reflecting light.
