“That’s a mature way to look at it, Dale.”
“I do my best.”
“I’m glad. So how about if you introduce me to the guy and we leave it at that?”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then you don’t.”
The wind grew stronger. I could smell more rain in the air, another storm rolling in. Dale’s hair flapped in the breeze and for a second I saw the little girl I remembered, slipping off to sleep with her head on a Princess Lilliput pillowcase while I read about hepcat James Dean-looking blood drinkers who romanced the ladies across deep black fields beneath a hunter’s moon. A twinge of regret banked through me.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go meet the beau.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said, “seriously, that’s what you call him? The beau?”
“I do.”
She locked arms with me and drew me along as we threaded through the parked cars and the kids talking and getting wasted. She took me to a ’69 Chevy that looked like a 396-a speed demon, a racer with wide tires to hug the curves. Only the parking lights were on, glowing bright yellow as we approached. The radio groaned with a heavy bass.
The beau was propped up on the hood, laid out across his windshield, holding a beer and taking in the starshine. He was much older than I’d expected, maybe twenty or twenty-one. He shouldn’t have been dating a fifteen-year-old girl. My shoulders hitched.
He had darting eyes, and his nose had been broken at least once and badly set. It lent him a touch of character he hadn’t earned. He went shirtless and wore four black leather wristbands on his right forearm. Jeans cinched his waist, the seams straining as he slid off the hood. He was so skinny he looked half starved. He smelled of oil, acne ointment, and second-rate pot. A tattoo of foreign words was scrawled in black script along his left shoulder. His nose and bottom lip were pierced. He had a pencil beard that rode around the very edge of his jaw, no mustache.
“Butch, this is my brother Terry.” She gripped him around the waist so tightly he let out a little gasp. She glanced back at me. “Terry, meet Butch.”
We shook hands.
His voice had a focused edge to it, strong and clear, which I wasn’t expecting. “You’re the one who’s been out west,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“What’s that like?”
I had a hard time remembering. I strained to come up with an anecdote, a yarn, some kind of an accounting that would be good enough to tell to anyone who asked. But the harder I tried to recall the last half decade the less substantial it seemed. Fences, a lot of fencing, always in need of repair.
Luckily Butch didn’t really give a shit. He hadn’t waited for a response. “I think about heading out that way. You know, just getting on the road. Hitting three or four states in a couple days. Prairies. Farms. All those highways, all those exits. That’s glanwidot to be the life, right?”
I said, “Sure.”
I knew one thing. Dale and Butch might’ve hung around the lake most nights but they did a lot of cruising too. Nobody kept a machine like that and didn’t let out the clutch and tear up the streets. I could see them burning down Sunrise Highway, out past the barrens, flipping off the Hamptons and heading down to the beaches.
He was territorial the way most young men were, and he put on the same show. He kept a hand around her waist, rubbing his knuckles against her bare midriff, telling all the other punks around that she was his and his alone. I’d done it myself. I couldn’t hold it against him, except I did. A part of me wanted to kick his teeth out, but I supposed that was about par. It was his way of proving he had a bloom on her that her own flesh and blood never would.
He asked, “Hey, babe, can you get me another beer?”
“Of course. You want one, Terry?”
“No thanks,” I said.
She climbed into the backseat and I could hear her rattling a cooler. “We’re out. You want a Mike’s Hard Lemonade instead?”
Butch said, “What do you think?”
“I’ll be back in a minute.”
“That’s my girl.”
Dale slipped off, walking briskly but with a sexy sashay. As she moved across the area I could see her silhouette appearing every so often in the blaze of headlights.
A fine drizzle started. I liked the feel of it. Trees bucked and branches swept to and fro, the lake showing small whitecaps.
“I might have a job for you,” Butch said.
“A job?”
“Yeah. I can’t say too much about it now, not until I get all the details. It’s not a bank or anything. A jewelry store. Family-owned. We take it a week from Tuesday.”
Now I understood what he meant about hitting three or four states in a couple of days. All the highways and exits. He was fantasizing about a crime spree, taking down scores across America, being a real outlaw. Like you didn’t have to plan as much. Like it was easier to escape the cops on the I-25 in the middle of Wyoming, twenty miles to the nearest exit, than it was dodging the staties on the Wantagh Parkway. I realized why he smelled like oil. It was gun oil.
My mother had good instincts. She knew a criminal when she saw one. This kid stank of trouble. I should’ve been sharper.
“I’ve got three men already,” Butch went on. “We need another for crowd control. It’s a small shop, but they’ve got a lot of employees. Like I said, family-owned, so they’ve got Mom and Dad in back, a couple of uncles doing inventory, sisters and cousins up front working the counters. The hardware will be clean, untraceable. Unless you’ve got your own piece you’d rather use. In and out in under four minutes.”
“I don’t do that,” I said.
He frowned. “You don’t do what?”
“That.”
“Hit jewelry stores?”
“I don’t carry a gun.”
He smiled like I’d just told a joke that hadn’t quite comew undere off. “Since when?”
“Since always.”
“But you’re a Rand.”
“And we don’t do that,” I said.
“Are you kidding me?”
“I’m not.”
For some reason I was suddenly offended by the fact that he was standing here without a shirt. That scrawny chest on exhibit. His naked nipples steered toward me.
He bounced like he was being tickled and let out a small burp of a giggle. “You’re old-school thieves. You’re famous. Everybody knows what you’re all about.”
“No armed robbery.”
He cocked his head. “No exceptions, huh?”
“None.”
“Not even for a big enough payday? Let’s say, six figures?”
The kid was a fucking idiot. Jewelry was always the hardest thing to unload on a fence. Some pieces could be identified as readily as fingerprints. It had to pass through a lot of hands before anyone could turn it into cash. You saw maybe a dime off every dollar. For a five-man crew to see a hundred grand each you had to pull down a five-mil score. This mook would never be involved with that kind of a major haul.
In this town he wouldn’t even think about it unless he was in the good graces of the Thompson syndicate.
I asked the obvious question. “You do any work for Danny Thompson?”
