Gaffney hated having to get rid of three perfectly good guns that hadn’t even been fired, but there wasn’t much choice. He ran to the first apartment building after the Christian Science church on Whitsett, trotted along the side to the back of the building to the Dumpster, opened a plastic trash bag, and was overpowered by the fishy smell of cat food. He put the guns inside, retied the bag, and ran.
He ran back across the bridge to Ventura Boulevard, but he’d gone only a few feet on Ventura before he realized why there had been no sirens. The street in front of the bank was full of police cruisers and other official vehicles, all of them flashing bright red and blue lights. They all must have converged on the place silently from side streets, the way cops did on burglary calls.
He approached cautiously. He could see the ambulance parked in the driveway of the parking structure. There were EMTs pushing a gurney with Guzman on it. They lifted it into the back and Corona tried to jump in after it, but a cop held on to him and kept him back.
Gaffney had thought both of them were hit, not just Guzman. Corona apparently had just decided to play dead. Part of Gaffney was angry at him. Maybe if the two of them had gone after the robbers, there would have been some chance of at least seeing their car.
Gaffney considered going up to the group, but then thought better of it. As it was, it looked as though they had been here, just the two of them, trying to make the nightly deposit, unarmed. The crazy robbers had shot at them and taken the money. If there were only two of them, then there would have been nobody to get rid of any guns.
He walked to the other side of the street and went the other way. He walked a couple of blocks west and dialed his phone.
After seven rings he heard his brother Jimmy’s voice. “Yeah?”
“It’s me. Jerry.”
“What the fuck do you want? It’s after three A.M., boy.”
“We got robbed making the night deposit from Siren. Guzman got shot, but that son of a bitch Corona played dead, so I had to stand up alone, dodge the bullets, and go after them. Now the cops have my car, so I need a ride home.”
“Where you at?” Jerry could hear the jingle of Jimmy’s belt buckle, so he knew Jerry was pulling on his pants while he held the phone under his chin.
“Just about to Ventura and Coldwater. I’m going to head north on Coldwater, so I should be just about to Riverside by the time you get your dead ass in gear.”
“Right. See you.” He hung up.
Jerry Gaffney punched in Manco Kapak’s cell phone number, but then decided not to complete the call. He dialed Kapak’s home number, rang it, and heard Spence’s voice. “Mr. Kapak’s residence.”
“Spence. It’s Jerry Gaffney.”
“What’s up?”
“We got ambushed at the bank—me, Guzman, and Corona. Guzman took a round in the left leg. He’s in an ambulance, and Corona’s with the cops.”
“How did you happen to be the one not shot or arrested? Just lucky?”
“Don’t pull that on me. Guzman was down, Corona was playing dead, so I took all three guns and went after the bastards alone. After that the cops arrived. If they’d found guns on those two, they’d have been in trouble.”
“What do you need—a ride home?”
“No, Jimmy’s got that. I want you to tell Manco what happened.”
“Too busy to call? Low phone battery?”
“Jesus, I called to ask you for a favor. If you won’t do it, just tell me.”
“No, just savoring the peculiarity of the situation. He’s not home yet, but I’ll tell him what happened. How many were there?”
“Two. I suppose the one must have been Joe Carver and the other was a girl.”
“A girl.”
“Yes, a girl. The guy wore a ski mask. He said to give him the money. I told him he had to be kidding. But the girl was behind us. She didn’t wait for the rest of the discussion, just opened up. She was crazy, probably on drugs. She didn’t even do a good job of cover, just shot Guzman and stood there in the open jerking the trigger, so shots went all over the place.”
“That’s enough to tell Kapak for now. I’ll call him.” Spence hung up.
Jerry kept walking along the dark street. Coldwater was all apartment buildings from Ventura to Moorpark. As he walked, he looked into the windows that were still lighted at 3:00 A.M., wishing he were behind one of them. Even at this hour, a few cars were out, and every time he heard an engine and saw the sidewalk ahead begin to glow and pick up his walking shadow, he felt tense. It could be his brother, Jimmy, coming to end his ordeal, or one of the cop cars that must be fanning out farther and farther by now, searching for the guy and the girl.
Jerry was beginning to have an uneasy feeling about Kapak. There were certain guys who had fate on their side, and others who didn’t. He had always believed that Manco Kapak had it, but now he wasn’t so sure.
There were lots of times when a leader lost his luck. When he did, everybody around him was in for a rough time. Everything they tried to do was five minutes late, one man short. He and Jimmy had been working with Calvin Sturgess in the hijacking business when the universe turned its back on him. They stopped a big semi late at night in North Carolina. There had been one guy who was supposed to jump into the cab of the truck and drive it another fourteen miles to a particular stretch of the woods where it could be unloaded. Instead of getting out to let him do it, the truck driver pulled out a gun and shot him in the chest, and then ran into the woods by the side of the road.
The truck driver was out there somewhere in the dark with a gun. The truck was stalled on the side of the highway, and none of the three able-bodied crew had any idea how to move an eighteen-wheeler anywhere. They managed to get about thirty cases of single malt Scotch out of the truck and into their cars before they needed to leave. They left at least a hundred in the truck, wrecked the springs of two cars, and had to abandon one of them outside the next town after their own driver bled out in the back seat. That night was when the Gaffneys decided to make their new start in California. Later, he heard Sturgess and the others all got caught within a month.
Jerry heard the familiar engine of his brother’s six-year-old Ford, turned, and saw it pulling up. He got in and Jimmy drove him away. “We’d better get you up to Kapak’s house right away, don’t you think?”
“No, I don’t,” said Jerry. “It’s after three, half the people out are cops, and I’m tired. Why should I go see him?”
“Because he expects it, and he’s paying us every week whether we do anything useful or not.”
“I called Spence and he agreed to tell him what happened.”
Jimmy looked at Jerry, concerned. “Spence is too fucking smart to trust. If he feels like it, he could really screw you.”
“He has no reason to.”
“There’s a good argument. Now I feel better. Jerry, when you’re guarding money and it doesn’t get to the bank, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to think you took it. Kapak might be thinking that already. If Spence nods his head—”
“Haven’t you maybe begun to feel the wind change a little bit?”
“What are you talking about? Who pays attention to the wind in California?”
“Not the wind out there, the one in here.” He pointed to his head. “First Kapak gets himself robbed of the day’s take right in front of a bank on a major street. Then we all spend a month looking for the thief. When we finally find him, he batters the shit out of two Hummers with a crane and makes us glad to get out alive. The guy then walks into Kapak’s house for a visit, and the next day Kapak is having a doctor picking bits of glass out of his privates. I haven’t heard there was any damage to Joe Carver. Now there’s tonight. We were carrying over thirty- eight thousand in that bag, right into an ambush. We’re in a crossfire between Carver and a crazy woman.”
“So the wind has changed.” Jimmy shivered involuntarily. He hoped his brother hadn’t seen it. To prevent it happening again, he closed his window and fiddled with the car’s air conditioning. The truth was that he held his brother at an uneasy distance, because Jerry was the one who had inherited their mother’s gift—if it was a gift. Seeing flashes of the future had never revealed anything to her but more drudgery and disappointment, but she was unerringly accurate. Jimmy said, “All of those things are annoying, but I don’t know if it’s a big deal.”
