We saw a pair of men grappling in an alley, each with a headlock on the other and stumbling around like jakeleg dancers, a small crowd looking on and laughing, most pedestrians simply passing by without paying the combatants much notice. We drove around and around until we finally found an alleyway niche to park the car in.
Buck kept the briefcase with the Wink money on his lap while we ate a supper of fried chicken in still one more clamorous cafe, and then we went over to the Wildcat Dance Club and introduced ourselves to Mona Holiday. She wasn’t exactly as Bubber had painted her. For one thing, she looked older than I’d expected—a few years older than Bubber, I would’ve guessed. Not that she wasn’t pretty, because she was, in a rough-edged, bottle-blonde sort of way. But she had some hard wear on her and it showed around her eyes and in the corners of her mouth, in the slack skin of her neck. But a man in love is blind to such minor flaws, of course, so none of us was all that surprised to find she was a shade less breathtaking in the actual flesh than Bubber’s description.
But she was every bit as pleasant and gracious as he’d said. She’d heard about Buck and Russell from Bubber, and she seemed truly pleased to make our acquaintance. She ushered us into her nicely appointed downstairs office and poured us all a drink—Jamaican rum, the real stuff, smuggled in by way of Mexico. We all touched glasses and she said, “Here’s yours.”
When Buck told her about the jakeleg race we’d seen in Wink, she made a disapproving face and said, “Isn’t it terrible, the spectacles some people find amusing?” She said we didn’t have to worry about being poisoned by the hooch in Blackpatch, it was some of the best moonshine to be had in West Texas. She was personal friends with Gus Scroggins—the bootlegger who brought Blackpatch its hooch from a sizable distillery in El Paso—and she would vouch for the excellence of the stuff, though she generally stayed with the factory-bottled product herself.
Bubber had told us she wouldn’t ask us our business and she didn’t. It was one more reason she fared so well—men knew she kept to her business and wouldn’t pry into theirs. She had a reputation for asking no questions and telling no tales. But neither did she ever grant a man a hump on the house or even on the cuff. It was strictly pay before play in her place. Special friends of Bubber, however, she would give a cut rate—two dollars, rather than the standard four. Were any of us, she asked with a smile, inclined to go upstairs and take advantage of this bargain?
Buck checked his watch, arched his brow, looked at Russell and me in turn, and we grinned back at him.
An hour later we were in her backroom speakeasy, ensconced at a nice corner table with a good view of the rest of the room, sipping at our labeled rum and telling each other of the girls we’d had.
Buck said the redhead he’d chosen had looked a little shocked when he dropped his pants and she got her first look at Mr. Stub.
“I say, ‘What’s wrong, honey?’ and look down at myself like I got no idea. ‘Oh
He wanted to hear about the pretty girl I’d picked out—brown hair and green eyes, tits shaped like pears. He’d almost selected her for himself before deciding on the redhead. When I said she’d been a lot of fun—which was true—he said he wished we had more time, he’d go back in there and have a go with her himself.
Russell said he’d enjoyed the little half-Mexican girl he’d picked. “A man’s got to have himself some variety, it’s only natural. But I’ll tell you what—truth be told, I ain’t found another woman yet as much fun as Charlie when she drops her underpants.”
I kept it to myself but I was glad to hear him say that, because in the middle of sporting with the pear-tits girl, I’d had the fleeting thought I’d rather be doing it with Belle. I’d enjoyed myself with the girl, but thinking of Belle while I was at it had left me feeling a little edgy for some reason I couldn’t put my finger on. Russell’s remark clarified things and set me at ease. He preferred putting it to Charlie but that didn’t interfere with his enjoyment of others—and why should it? Damn right.
“Of course Charlie’s more fun,” Buck said. “She don’t charge you two dollars a throw.”
Russell laughed. “By Jesus, that must be it.” He looked at me and winked. “Man’s got a point, huh, kid?”
I laughed too. “Damn sure does,” I said. And told myself he did.
We’d been nursing our rum like it was the last to be had in Texas. One drink apiece was all we were allowing ourselves till the job was done. And now, at a little before nine, it was time to get to it.
We were out to rob Gus Scroggins, the El Paso bootlegger Mona Holiday had mentioned. He was making a delivery tonight to his Blackpatch buyer, a local whiskey dealer named Lester Wills, who would have five thousand dollars to pay for the load of white lightning. Scroggins transported his moonshine in barrels loaded on trucks that looked like every other oil truck in the region. He had two deliveries to make en route from El Paso and would be carrying the proceeds from those deals—ten thousand dollars, according to Bubber’s inside man—when he met with Wills. We were looking at a take of fifteen grand in greenbacks and a load of hooch worth another five.
The transaction was to take place in an abandoned oil camp about a mile north of the Blackpatch junction road. The only way to get there was over a narrow trail laid out by an oil company that had drilled all over the region before striking it rich in Copper Hill. We’d been out there earlier in the day to have a look at the place and lay out a plan. The trail meandered around sandhills and gullies strewn with scrawny tumbleweeds, around rocky outcrops and thick patches of scrub brush. Before you’d gone a hundred yards you were out of sight of the road. At a couple of points along the trail, the oil crews had cut clearings wide enough for truck turnarounds. The camp itself had occupied a circular clearing roughly fifty yards in diameter and almost entirely enclosed by a thickly shrubbed, stony rise that had served to protect the place from windstorms. A ramshackle wooden derrick stood over a litter of oil drums and castoff machine parts. Gus Scroggins liked to make his deliveries on moonbright nights in case the Texas Rangers somehow got wind of the deal and figured to charge in and make a pinch. A lookout on the derrick could spot them coming in time to give ample warning. The bootleg party could scatter on foot into the darkness beyond the rise and the Rangers wouldn’t be able to give chase in their cars over that rugged terrain.
For the last two hundred yards before reaching the clearing, the trail assumed a slight upward grade and was flanked on both sides by high dense brush. But about forty yards from the entrance, we’d found a small open spot in the scrub. We could pull in there and turn the car around to point back toward the trail, hidden behind a pile of tumbleweeds and loose brush and ready for a fast getaway.
By ten o’clock that’s where we were, sitting in the scrub shadows and watching the trail. A bright gibbous moon was midway up the eastern sky and illuminating the countryside with a ghostly blue light. The air smelled of creosote and warm dust. The Ford was well camouflaged, its license plate freshly transplanted from a car parked in the alley behind a Blackpatch pool hall. Buck and I carried a pair of pistols each—he’d given me one of the two .44 revolvers they’d taken off the payroll guys. Besides his pistol, Russell had the Remington pump.
A few minutes before eleven we heard the distant growl of a car motor from the direction of the junction road. We peered over the scrub and spied it, small and dark against the moonlit landscape, coming slowly and without lights, raising only the barest trace of dust as it wound its way toward us, now and then going out of view as it went into a dip or behind a rise. We knew it was the advance men, checking for anything out of place, for signs of a trap by Rangers or rival bootleggers or hijackers like us.
Buck had the army automatic in his hand, and I drew the .44 from my front waistband. The longbarrel .38 was snugged against the small of my back. As the car got closer we hunched back down in the scrub and sat still and quiet as stones. Pretty soon it came easing by with its engine rumbling and tires crunching over the stony trail. A black Oldsmobile sedan. Through a gap in the scrub I saw the silhouettes of two men in the car.
The Olds passed out of sight into the clearing behind the rise. We heard the engine slow to an idle and a door squeak open and bang shut—one of the guys getting out to check things on foot. The engine rumbled as the car took a slow turn around the clearing. Then its dark shape was again at the trailhead and the headlights flashed on and off, twice, in swift succession. Exactly the signal Bubber said his inside man had described. The Olds then backed up into the clearing and its motor shut off. A door opened and shut. Faint unintelligible voices. Low laughter.
Russell grunted and pointed south. Another unlighted car was coming our way. Lester Wills and his five grand. Him and his driver.
Buck patted me on the shoulder to let me know he and Russell were heading off. They pulled their dark bandannas up over their mouth and nose and tugged down their hats and vanished quietly into the brush. The camp shithouse had been placed outside the camp, at the bottom of the slope, and a path to it had been worn over the scrubby rise. Buck and Russell could quietly follow the path up through the scrub and come down behind the advance men.
