the lot and parked near the front door. It wasn’t a particularly large place, but through the front windows it looked jammed with goods. I figured it for a main supplier to a lot of the camps around there, and it must’ve recently received deliveries of new stock. There were a couple of other trucks in the lot, and one car, so there were at least three customers in there and who knew how many employees. Too many for one man to watch. It was a two-man job, but I didn’t want Belle out of the car. I was about to say forget it and tell her to get going again, but then a couple of guys came out, each with a boxful of groceries. As they were putting their goods in one of the trucks, another man came out with two big sacks and got in the car. A minute later both car and truck were gone.
I decided to wait a little longer. I took the paste-on mustache from my pocket and put it on, turned to Belle and said, “Okay?” She smiled and winked. She had a big wad of gum going in her mouth. I checked the .380 and put it back into my waistband against my side.
Five minutes later two more guys came out with groceries and got into the other truck and left. Ours was the only vehicle in the lot. I had her pull the car up directly in front of the entrance with the passenger side toward the door. Then I got out and went in, the screen door jingling a little bell hung atop the frame.
There were several aisles of shelves and a pair of men were replenishing them with canned goods from various open cartons. The younger guy was big, beefy, with a red face and curly hair, the other was grayhaired, shorter and leaner, but I could see a family resemblance. The younger one looked at me and I nodded a greeting. The elder said, “Help you, sir?”
“Need some cigarettes,” I said.
The elder motioned to the younger and went back to his shelving. The younger left off what he was doing and went around behind the front counter where the register was. “What kind you want?” he said.
“Old Golds,” I said. “Two packs.” I stood sideways so I could watch his father too.
He set the smokes on the counter and I brought out the automatic. “Don’t even think about going for a gun,” I said.
For a second he looked at me like he wasn’t sure he’d heard me right—and then like I was some longtime enemy he recognized.
The old man stood up and said, “We ain’t got a gun here, mister. A shotgun in the house out back is all, I swear.”
“Give me every greenback in the till,” I said to the younger.
“Hell I will,” he said.
In all the jobs I’d done with Buck and Russell, in all the jobs they’d done without me, nobody, so far as I knew, had ever said no when they were under the gun.
“Want to get shot, asshole?”
“I ain’t scared of you.”
Well goddam, I thought.
“Justin,” the elder said. He had his hands half raised. “Take it easy, mister. The boy don’t mean it. You can have what we got.”
“Do so mean it,” the Justin one said.
The roadster’s klaxon sounded. Somebody was pulling in.
I kept the gun on the younger but spoke to the elder. “Listen, mister,
“Yessir,” the grayhead said. He hustled around the counter and pushed Justin aside and chinged open the drawer and started grabbing up handfuls of bills and sticking them in a paper bag. He shoved the bag across the counter at me and I snatched it up.
As I started backing toward the door the little bell tinkled and I lowered the gun to my waist to hide it. I turned to see a burly guy in oil-stained workclothes come walking in. The guy smiled and nodded at me and then looked past me and his eyes widened and his mouth fell open and I was already dropping to my haunches as I spun around to see the old man raising a shotgun.
The blast was loud as a cannon in those close quarters. My hat shifted on my head and I heard a crashing behind me and the oil guy started screaming.
It was a single-barrel breechloader so that was his only shot. I stood up slowly, my heart ramming against my ribs and my ears ringing. The old man was holding the smoking weapon like it was something he’d been caught stealing. The Justin one stood there with his mouth open.
“You son of a bitch,” I said to the elder. I put the .380 in his face and cocked it.
He said, “Oh,
She held the six-inch straight out in front of her with both hands and her aspect was all readiness in spite of her bulging cheek.
“Yeah,” I said. I reached over the counter and took the shotgun from the elder. “Let’s go!”
I ran out behind her. She’d left the passenger door open and she dove in and slid up behind the wheel as smoothly as if she’d been doing it all her life. I tossed in the shotgun and was only partway in the car when it leaped forward and I almost fell out but caught hold of the doorjamb and pulled myself inside.
“Holy shit, girl!”
She made a tight left turn in the lot, slinging my door wide open as she wheeled us onto the highway, then floored the accelerator and the door swung back and slammed shut and we barreled off into the darkness.
Twenty minutes later we were on some truck road deep in a forest of derricks illuminated by field lights and flaring gas heads. She pulled over to the shoulder and stopped. The road lay empty in both directions, and there was no sign of anyone at any of the nearest derricks. There was only the steady pounding of the drills and the hiss of the flaring blue gas heads. I pitched the shotgun into a scrub patch.
Neither of us had said a word since tearing away from the store, and I thought maybe she was going to be sick. The roadster’s cab was dimly lit by the field lights and she was turned toward me, but I couldn’t see her face in the shadow of her hat brim. I hadn’t been aware of how much my hands were shaking until I lit a cigarette. I passed it to her and she spat her gum out the window and took a couple of deep drags and handed the cigarette back and I took one more pull and flicked it away. She took off her hat and let her hair fall to her nape and I saw the glitter of her eyes. She pressed against me and kissed me like she was trying to breathe me into herself. Then her hands were at my belt buckle and I raised my hips so she could tug my pants down to my thighs. She pulled up her skirt and straddled me on the seat, tugged aside the hem of her panties and mounted me. I bucked and bucked into her and we were kissing each other’s mouth and eyes and ears and I squeezed her breasts and she bit my neck and then both of us yelled and clutched each other harder….
When we got back on a main road I pulled into a diner parking lot and made fast work of swapping the roadster’s plates with those on a Plymouth. We then sped on to Rankin and checked into the Dustdevil Motor Inn. Not until after I’d counted the take—$650, a tidy sum for a grocery heist—did I discover the pellet holes in the crown of my hat.
I sat on the bed and wiggled a couple of fingers through the holes.
“Look here how close I came to getting my stupid head blown off,” I said.
She came and stood beside me, wearing only a towel around her hips after her showerbath. Her hair was still wet and her skin gleamed. She put her fingers in the holes.
“I felt it,” I said. “I didn’t realize what it was.”
“Feel this,” she said, and held my hand to her breast. Her heart was racing.
“It ain’t slowed down even a little,” she said. Nor had the brightness in her eyes reduced.
She let the towel slide from her hips.
We had more than enough now to cover our Fort Stockton expenses for a good while, but she thought we deserved to treat ourselves to a good time in some town of greater size than Fort Stockton.
“You know what I mean,” she said. “Someplace with a real nice dance club. I’ve always wanted to go to a fancy dance club. And with a nice dress shop where I can buy myself something fine and pretty to wear there.”
Midland was fifty miles up the road, but we weren’t about to visit there in a car I’d stolen from that town
