“Eating leaves?”
“No.”
“Picking up girls?”
“No again.” With her free hand she swung her pillow in a rapid arc downward onto his head like a sack of disdain. “There’s no progress. Every month or two, you start all over again with nothing.”
He pushed the pillow off his face. “I’ve made great progress lately.”
“You have?”
“Sure. Now when I go out all night and sleep all day, I’ve got you with me. That’s a big improvement. And now, instead of twenty thousand, we’ve got, like, eighty thousand in cash. We could go on like this for a long time, since there’s no need to flash a lot of big bills picking up girls. You
“It’s just over a hundred and twenty thousand.”
“The money?”
“Yes. You don’t even count it, do you?”
“No. That’s the whole point of being a bandito. You don’t have to count your money.”
“Are you challenged by arithmetic?”
“No, but I’ve thought about this.”
“No, you haven’t.” She sat and glared at him for a few seconds. “What is it?”
“Limits. If I count the money and match it off against a certain number of days, then there are things I can’t do, can’t afford. If I don’t, then I’m free. If I want something, I buy it. I know that when I need to, I can get more money. I give up knowing exactly how many dollars are in the bag at every moment in exchange for not having to know. It’s a good deal.”
She looked at him in alarm. “Oh my God. You’re starting to sound smart, like a wandering Zen master or something. Let me get over that feeling. It’ll take a minute.”
“Take your time.”
She sat motionless for a few seconds, then stood up. “I can’t take my time. This brings me to another topic that’s loosely related, and urgent.”
“What is it?”
“I know you hate it when there’s something you ought to know, but I don’t tell you.”
“No, I don’t.”
“This you would.”
“Is it your boyfriend?”
She got up off the bed and looked down at him, her eyes wide with surprise. “Yes.”
“What about him?”
“He’s flying into LAX in just over—oops, just under—three hours. When he gets there, he’s going to pick up his suitcase at the baggage claim, and he’s going to want someplace to put it.”
“Like your house.”
“It’s his house, technically.”
“What’s the technicality?”
“He bought it and paid for it, his name is on the deed, and he lived here before I met him.”
“Three hours isn’t a lot of time.”
“No.”
“So I assume you know what you’re going to do.”
“I’ve been avoiding thinking about it as long as I could.”
“Are you going to choose between him and me?”
“Didn’t you hear me just five minutes ago talking about our future?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“At first I was going to stay with him and see you on the side just for a treat once in a while, but then I asked myself why, if you can have the treat all the time, you wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t think of an answer, so I’ve decided you’re the keeper.”
“Is this guy violent?”
“Well, you know how guys are. Once they find out somebody else has been there too, if you know what I mean, it makes them all hormonal.”
“You could kill me and tell him I’m a burglar.”
“Keep trying.”
“We could kill each other. He’d feel responsible.”
“Please stop with the killing. It’s making me upset.”
“We could skip all the way back to Plan A, which is to pack up fast and run away.”
“Shouldn’t that have been the first thing you said? I mean, if it is Plan A.”
“It’s not a good idea to settle for the obvious right away, without exploring other options.”
“Let’s get the heck out of here,” she said. She went to her dresser and began putting on clothes. As she opened a drawer and put on a garment, she would take all the others like it and set them in a pile on the bed. When she came to the closet, she took out a large suitcase, opened it, and began placing the piles of folded clothes inside.
When it looked as though the suitcase was completely full, she went into the next room and returned with a lot of bills, canceled checks, and papers. “Can’t leave these papers here. I don’t want him tracing us and turning up later.”
“He would do that?”
“I’m out of space. Can you fit the bag of money in your suitcase?”
“I’ll try to find room.” He didn’t like the way she changed the subject, but it told him the answer. He quickly got his suitcase out of the closet, tossed his clothes into it, and then unhooked the big laundry bag from the hook on the door, put it in on top, then closed and zipped the suitcase.
“Are you just about ready?”
“Yes,” he said. “Want to take one last look around? I’d sure hate to have to come back while he’s home and ask him for your great-grandma’s cameo brooch.”
“Don’t worry. I already did my walk-through yesterday.”
He picked up his suitcase, then hers, and walked to the door. As he set the suitcases down to open it, he turned to her and said, “But you didn’t take anything that wasn’t, strictly speaking, yours, right?”
The door swung open, hit the two suitcases and knocked them over onto the floor. Jeff had just enough time to leap backward before the man who had applied the force to the door came after it. Jeff had time to see a shaved head, a patch of black beard, a wide mouth with bared teeth, as the charging man tripped over the suitcases and belly-flopped past him onto the kitchen floor.
Jeff said, “Hold on, now. We don’t need to do this. We can talk like grownups,” by which he meant “Don’t hurt me.”
The man rolled and his legs scissored at Jeff’s calves to trip him to the floor.
Jeff jumped up and backward to avoid the legs, but he hit his back on the wall and dropped straight down onto the man’s ankle.
“Yaaah!” the man howled. “You son of a bitch! I’ll kill you!”
“No, Roger! He didn’t do anything to you,” Carrie said. Jeff felt in his heart that this wasn’t exactly true, but said nothing.
The man snarled through clenched teeth, “In a minute you’ll be wearing his balls for a necklace.”
“Stop it, Roger. He didn’t know you existed.”
“But he’ll remember me forever.” With frightening agility, the big man rose to a crouch and sprang at Jeff, his arms wide to gather him in.
Jeff could see that he would not escape the span of stretched muscles and big, grasping hands. He reacted in a reflex to protect himself from the tackle. He lunged forward between the arms and lifted his right knee as he pounded both forearms into the back of the man’s head, hammering the head downward to meet his knee with considerable force. He half-heard and half-felt the man’s nose break.
The man’s momentum expended itself, plowing both of them into the kitchen counter. Jeff toppled, and the
