“I’d have to watch your game,” Jackie said, “see what you could do.”
“That’s what I been thinking,” Harry said. “Or get these boys to play hold ’em with you. They’re breeders, have almost the money I do. I tell them you’re my niece visitin from college. Loves poker and thinks she’s pretty darn good. I say, ‘You fellas want to play Jackie if I stake her?’ You bet they do. They win they see it as takin my money.”
Harry, sipping his drink, said, “Keeneland, I use to do a skit for the bar crowd with a driver I had, the African colored guy. I’d chide him for the way he’s dressed in my racing colors. He’d say, ‘But, Boss, is your wife dresses me.’ Watchin you play I was thinkin how I could use you in a humorous exchange, a skit we’d make up.”
Jackie said, “You’re kidding, right?”
Chapter Twenty-four
A former convict named Delroy Lewis ran the show: hired Floy, an eighteen-year-old street kid who stole cars he sold to chop-shops-good-looking expensive ones, Mercedes and BMW Floy’s favorites-picked up mostly from big shopping mall lots using tools took him twenty seconds to jimmy the door, a half minute to start her up. Sometimes he’d settle for a Chrysler or Buick, the big Honda lately, a roomy car that gave the girls space to relax and smoke a doobie on their way to work.
Floy parked on the street and went in the apartment house had a fire escape going this way and the other down the front of the building and pushed a number.
Cassie came on saying, “What kind a car?”
“Gray Beamer. Had it washed for y’all.”
Cassie said, “Be down in five minutes.”
Delroy had told Floy, “They not down in a half hour, leave. I’ll give them a talkin to.”
They finally got done dressing and came out to the car looking like fashion-conscious bag ladies in their outfits they got from Goodwill, hip-huggers under their raincoats, sporty little beach hats, brims turned down, Janie wearing a Detroit Tigers baseball cap; the three carrying shiny bags from ladies’ stores.
They got in the car, Kim saying to Cassie, “You know you’re wearing your fuck-me heels?”
Cassie said, “They sound cool on marble floors.”
Kim said, “What if we have to run for the car?”
“I could have on sneakers,” Cassie said, “we’re still fucked. You think Floy’s gonna wait for us?”
“I was told,” Floy said to his rearview mirror, “y’all take more than six minutes to come out, I take off. Delroy say to worry about my own young ass.” Floy turned in his seat to look right at the girls. “Nobody say what you doin’s easy but, come on, you walk in cool and walk out your shoppin bags full of green. Delroy told me hisself, you the best chicks robbin banks he ever had. The man loves you.”
Janie said, “That’s why he hits us?”
“You don’t listen to him, what you expect? Hey, but you get home he gives you all the Oxy you want, don’t he? You ladies of leisure aren’t you, between jobs?”
Cassie said, “We get picked up, you know who’s going down with us.”
Floy said, “Hey, all I am’s your driver.”
“Not you,” Cassie said, “Delroy. He never goes near the bank.”
“He tells us what it looks like inside,” Kim said, “and when there aren’t a lot of people.”
Cassie said, “Floy, what’s that worth?”
“A pat on the head,” Floy said, “the man’s tall enough. The man might go fifty bucks. He holds on to his dollar, let’s you do it for weed and pills.”
“And a few hundred,” Kim said, “each time.”
“He let you out to spend it?”
“Once in a while.”
“You his bank-job slaves.”
Janie said, “I go back to strippin I become a blow job slave. This ain’t so bad, we don’t ever get picked up.”
“We miss a job,” Cassie said, “we have to do one alone.”
“You ever did it you weren’t high,” Floy said, “you wouldn’t do it.”
He pulled up a half block from the bank and waited while they toked, put on shades, fixed their hats and cap down on their head good, and got out with their shopping bags.
Floy said, “Give you a full ten minutes to do your business. You cool with it? Be cool, I see y’all a little later.”
They weren’t listening.
He watched them get out and walk down the street to the bank.
T hey stopped at a glass-top table in the middle of the floor and used the backs of bank forms to write the notes they’d give the tellers. Cassie said, “I like, ‘Give me five grand or I’ll kill you.’ ” She looked at her note and added a word.
Kim said, “How do you spell withdrawal, with an a or an e?”
Janie said, “I ask for all hunnerts, the girl says she has to go get ’em. I say, ‘All right, a hunnert fifties.’ I end up taking what she gives me.”
Cassie said, “Tell her how much you want, for Christ sake.”
Kim said, “Why don’t we write the same thing three times?”
Cassie handed her note to Kim. “Here, write it the same way, all capitals. ‘GIVE ME FIVE GRAND OR I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU,’ with three exclamation marks, so she knows you mean it.”
Kim wrote the notes and they walked over to three different tellers.
In a few minutes Janie came away from the window first with her bag of bills. She felt awful, she had cramps. If they had to do another bank soon she’d stay in bed.
Now Cassie was coming.
“It works, doesn’t it? Where’s Kim?”
She was still at a window.
“Now she’s coming,” Janie said.
The bank chicks walked out and got in the BMW.
F loy listened to the girls on the way home, back to somemes (T1)moking weed now and talkative, relieved to be out of there.
Cassie saying, “We do that one before?”
Kim saying, “Banks all look alike to me.”
Cassie: “The teller goes, ‘This is my second robbery in the past month.’ Calm about it. I ask her if it was us. No, it was a guy that time. I asked how much he took. She said only a few hundred and split. Ran out the door.”
“Mine looks at the note and freaks,” Kim said. “Kept going on about having a child at home. I told her would she please empty her drawer? It wasn’t her money.”
“I told my girl,” Cassie said, “to keep a couple hundred for yourself. How’s the bank know we didn’t take it? You know what she said? ‘Really…?’ I bet she did too.”
Floy, looking at the rearview, said, “Y’all did all right, huh?” Watching Cassie count the take.
“Not bad,” Cassie said, touching Floy’s shoulder with a couple of hundred in her hand.
Floy took it saying, “Hey, I’ll boost a car for you ladies any time you want. But how come the cops aren’t on to y’all by now? Four banks already, in town or close by.”
“They think we’re working girls,” Kim said, “having fun on our lunch break.”
Floy thought they looked like weird females, walk in the bank out of sunshine in their raincoats. How come nobody seemed to notice them? He said to Janie, “Honey, you all right? You not joinin in.”
“She doesn’t feel much like doing banks,” Cassie said. “She’s got the curse.”
R aylan believed marshals were more like big-city cops than most kinds of federal agents. It’s why he walked
