hand in indication that the matter was something he didn’t fully understand or care to discuss. Things between them didn’t look to have improved much while we’d been away.
He looked from Belle to me and then at her again. “I’m sure she’ll be glad to know you’re back.”
Belle got the hint. “I’ll just go and see how she’s doing,” she said. She fluttered her fingers at me and went out the back door.
He poured the last of his bottle into the tumbler. I got another glass down from the cabinet and opened one of the new bottles and built up his drink and poured myself one. We touched glasses and took a sip.
“So?” he said.
I opened my valise and reached in and took out two big handfuls of currency and dropped them on the table. Russell smiled and picked up a few bills and spread them in his hand like oversized playing cards.
“That new money won’t never feel as real as these,” he said. The federal government was replacing all paper money with bills only about half the present size, and lots of people felt about it the way he did—the smaller money didn’t look or feel as real. “Don’t tell me you hit a bank,” he said.
He put the money back in the valise and I gave him a quick rundown on the jobs, focusing on the lucrative San Angelo caper.
“She made him
“Guy thought his days were done. I think he pissed his pants.”
“And it was her idea to take them down?”
“Forty-five-hundred-dollar idea,” I said.
“Ain’t no end to her surprises,” he said. “Here’s to her.” We clinked glasses.
“It’s more than enough here to pay off Bubber for the lawyer and Gustafson too,” I said. “I’d say we’re sitting pretty.”
“Pretty much,” Russell said. “Only we owe Bubber for something else too.” He gestured at the map and note in front of him.
I pulled my chair around beside his. It was an oil map of Reagan County, showing various oil field sites, each with a lot of numbers and hieroglyphics around it, and the truck trails that connected them to the main roads. The only town shown was Big Lake, where the east-west and north-south highways intersected. A few other county roads were on the map too. Under a penciled arrow pointing west from Big Lake was written “Rankin, 30 mi.” A large penciled X indicated as being five miles east of the western county line and twenty miles north of the highway to Rankin was labeled “S.R.R.C.” There was a smaller X below and southeast of the larger one and “6 mi” scribbled alongside the arrow between them. A squiggly pencil line ran west from the small X to the north-south highway, and the distance between them was noted as half a mile.
“What’s all this?” I said.
“From Bubber,” he said. “He didn’t waste any time after he got your telegram.”
The map and the letter had arrived yesterday morning, hand-delivered by a guy who’d shown up at the door and told Charlie he’d been instructed to give the material to no one but Russell or me. Russell heard her arguing with him and came out on his crutch. The guy gladly accepted his offer of a glass of beer before heading off. Russell didn’t say whether Charlie had joined them in the beer, but my guess was she hadn’t.
The letter was actually a long note, addressing no one in particular and unsigned. It was written in pencil in an awkward hand—by some inside man, Russell figured, maybe a Santa Rita inmate but more likely by a hack. It described the prison’s daily routine and recent work assignments, including Loomis Mitchum’s. Every day the prison sent out a half-dozen work crews to various kinds of jobs. Mitchum was assigned to a crew of eleven other cons overseen by three guards, including the driver, every guard armed with a pump shotgun. The big X showed the location of the Santa Rita camp, and the little one below it was where Mitchum’s crew had been working at clearing a new drilling site for an oil company. The squiggly line was a truck trail joining the site to the north-south Big Lake highway. Although Mitchum’s crew was scheduled to work at this site for another few weeks, the note said, labor assignments were subject to change at any time, so there was no certainty of how much longer Mitchum would actually be at that site. Wherever they were assigned, however, each crew always went out on the same truck, and each truck carried an identifying number on the doors. Mitchum’s crew was transported on truck 526.
“It’s practically the same setup as when I busted him out of Sugarland,” Russell said.
“Except like this guy says, no telling when they’ll put Buck on some other job. Maybe he’ll still be on this job when your leg’s all better, maybe he won’t. We’ll have to see how—”
“That’s why we’ll do it tomorrow,” Russell said. “They could take him off the road anytime. They could transfer him to some other joint, a tighter one. You never know. All I know is it ain’t likely to get no easier than Santa Rita. So we get him tomorrow.”
I saw that he was absolutely serious. “Russell,” I said, “we haven’t even had a look at the place. And we need a third man. And you can hardly
“I ain’t
It took me a moment to understand he was talking about Belle.
“You should see your face, kid,” he said. “What? Were you bullshitting me about how good she is?”
I was seized by some misgiving I couldn’t name. “No, man, she did fine,” I said. “It’s only that, well, this is a whole different thing….”
“It ain’t
“Hell no, man,” I said. And thought,
“I hope not, kid. Last thing we need’s a partner with his head up his ass over some chippy.”
The crack stung but I took it. If he saw it made me sore he’d think he’d hit a nerve, that he was right that I’d gone sappy—and he wasn’t right, goddammit. He wasn’t.
“It’s just that she might not want to be in on something like this,” I said. It sounded lame even to me.
“Well, I know one way to find out real fast,” he said. “We’ll ask her.”
What could I say? “Okay by me.”
“But listen, kid, yea or nay, with or without her, you and me go get him tomorrow. Right?”
“Hell yeah, man.”
He grinned. He knew as well as I did what she was going to say.
We’d do it like he and Jimmyboy had done it at Sugarland. Russell was sure he could cover at least two of the guards from the roadster’s rumble seat, but in any case he could cover at least one of them. I’d be the one to get out and disarm the hacks and disable the prison truck. If we needed a backup outside the car, Belle would do it.
We had just finished roughing out the plan when the girls came in. Charlie had obviously been crying. She went to the cabinet over the sink and got a fresh pack of cigarettes and busied herself opening it. Belle got a bottle of Coke from the Frigidaire and pried off the cap with the opener attached to the end of the counter and then went and sat on a stool by the stove. Charlie lit a smoke and took a few deep drags and stared at Russell, who stared right back.
“So?” she said. “You make up your mind?”
“There was nothing to make up about it,” he said.
“You’re going to do it, then?”
“What’s it look like?” he said.
“Goddammit, Russell, can’t you for once give me a straight answer?
“What’s it look like?”
She ran her eyes over the papers and maps, her face a mix of anger and despair. I glanced at Belle but she was staring down at her soda pop.
“I can’t do this anymore,” Charlie said. “I can’t always be waiting around to see if you’ve been…to see if you come back in one piece.”
Russell sighed and looked bored. A man who’d heard all this too many times.
“You make me feel like one of those fools in the romance magazines,” she said. “But you don’t give a damn, do you? It doesn’t matter one bit that I love you, does it? Well, I’ll tell you something, Russell, you’re going to…ah,
