one in the kitchen. He didn’t wake up till I cut his throat. I’d killed with a knife before but never cut a throat— although I’d come close one time, when I was still a kid—but I’d seen Brando do it and knew they didn’t make much noise that way, just a kind of gargle like water going down a partly clogged drain. I thought I’d be able to avoid the mess better than Brando had, but I wasn’t. I had to trade my bloody shirt for a clean one of the guy’s, and I went out with my ruined coat rolled under my arm. He’d made off with about five hundred dollars but I found less than fifty in the place.
After that job I started using an ice pick for the close work. You had to be more exact with a pick but it was a hell of a lot neater.
In the other case, the robber hit a Texas City club for three grand and then went to hide at his brother’s house on the Pearl River, a few miles south of Jackson, Mississippi. The place was so isolated I didn’t have to be very clever about it. I waited till dark and then left the car in among the pines and walked back up the road to the house. I found his car parked around in back where it couldn’t be seen from the road. I peeked in all the windows and saw that there was nobody in the place except him and a girl. He was in his undershorts, the girl in T-shirt and panties. I couldn’t spot a gun anywhere.
I kicked open the door to the kitchen where they were having supper and shot him through his open mouth before he could even stand up. The back of his head splattered the wall behind him and he drained off his chair.
The girl shrieked and jumped away from the table and then clapped her hands over her mouth like she wasn’t all that new to situations suddenly gone bad and knew that rule number one was shut up. But her eyes were huge with fear. She was a slim bob-haired blonde with freckles and nice legs. She looked about seventeen. One of her cheeks had a pale purple bruise.
“Where’s the guns?” I said.
“He aint got but the one.” She nodded at the kitchen counter behind me. I picked it up—a snubnose five-shot .38—and dropped it in my coat pocket. Then I stepped out the kitchen door to see if any lights had come on anywhere, some nearby cabin, some neighbor in the woods who maybe heard the .44’s blast, but there was nothing. I went back in and shut the door.
“The money?” I said. And was pleasantly surprised when she led me into the bedroom—being careful to keep from stepping in any of the blood spreading from the guy’s head—and pulled a valise out of the closet. She put it on the bed and opened it to show the cash.
“I knew it had to be somebody’s,” she said. “I knew he didn’t win it in no card game.” Her accent was swamp rat to the bone.
I riffled through the money. It looked to be almost all there.
“I don’t know how much all he spent of it,” she said. “I got about four dollars in my shirt yonder. You want I should get it?”
“Never mind,” I said.
“You gonna hurt me?” She looked all set for a bad answer.
“You help him steal it?”
“No sir, I never did any such.”
“Then I’ve got no reason to hurt you.”
“Truth to tell, I didn’t never expect to see him again. Then he shows up in Port Allen a coupla weeks ago and says he’s hit the jackpot and to come on if I was coming. Momma said he was no-count and I was a harebrained fool to go with him and she was right both times.”
“You the one to rat on him?”
She shook her head. “Probably his brother Carl. He was all the time beating on Carl and finally run him off from his own house—can you imagine? I wouldn’t blame Carl a bit if he told on him.”
She glanced toward the kitchen and her mouth tightened. “I told him he hit
I knew her story without having to hear it. I knew a dozen just like it: sweet girl takes up with some mean bastard who mistreats her till she goes sour and sometimes gets pretty mean herself. Some of them might deserve a slap now and then—some of them needed it—but none of them deserved to be made mean. This one was headed that way but might still take a lucky turn.
“What’s your name, girl?”
“Sally. It’s Sally May Ritter.”
“Can you drive that car out there, Sally?”
“Yessir. I kinda can.”
I took about three hundred from the valise and gave it to her. I told her to go to the second nearest depot, not the nearest one. “Park a few blocks away and then walk to the station. Get yourself a ticket to anywhere else.”
She stared at the money and then at me.
“And try to be more careful about the company you keep,” I said.
She said she aimed to be. Then said, “Where you from, anyway?”
“Someplace else. Now get a move on.”
She was packing a bag fast as I went out the door.
When we didn’t know where a robber had lammed, Rose would put out the word on him. If the bastard ever showed his face in Texas again, we’d hear about it.
Next thing the guy knew, there I’d be.
There were times, of course, when everything was running smoothly, when nothing was out of order and Brando and LQ and I didn’t have much to do but exercise in the gym or play cards or go to the police range and take a little target practice. Times when the only duty to come our way was to drive Rose to Houston or Corpus Christi to tend to some matter in person like he sometimes had to do.
But such times were pretty rare and never lasted more than a few days—praise Jesus, as LQ was prone to say in moments of gratitude.
When I got back to the Club, Mrs. Bianco said to go on into the office. Rose was on the phone and Big Sam was in an easy chair, puffing a cigar and sipping a glass of wine. Sam gestured for me to sit in the chair beside his. I took a Chesterfield from the case on the desk. Rose did too and I leaned over and lit it for him. I sat down and Sam punched me lightly on the arm and said, “Jimmy the Kid.”
“Right,” Rose said into the phone. “Louisiana Street. They’re expecting you this afternoon. Just fill in the forms and get the signatures. I told them if they signed today the machines would be there tomorrow afternoon.”
He listened for a moment. “Yeah…Yeah…Right. Railyard warehouse got plenty in stock. Soon as they sign, let the warehouse know and they’ll get the shipment out to Houston…Okay. Yeah.”
He hung up and scribbled something on a sheet of paper, then leaned back and looked at me and Sam and gave a tired sigh that struck me as a touch theatrical.
“I swear to Christ, there’s times I wish I was still a barber,” he said. “A barber can whistle while he works, know what I mean? Can sing while he does his job. Shoot the shit with the customers. Talk about sports, pussy, stuff in the papers.
Sam looked at me and winked. It wasn’t the first time we’d heard this complaint from Rose—but it was sentimental bullshit. He wouldn’t last two days back in a barber shop before he’d be scheming at how to outfox the big-time crooks at their own games, both the legal and the illegal ones, just like he and Sam had been doing all these years.
He saw how Big Sam and I were smiling. “Go to hell, both you.”
He poured me a glass of wine and refilled his own. Then held his glass across the desk and said, “Salute,” and Sam and I clinked ours against it.
He wanted to know if I’d picked up on anything today that might connect to the Dallas guys. I said I
