boots.
Her eyes sat on purple cushions, not eye shadow.
“Looks okay,” Hinch said.
“Don’t kill the engine just in case.”
“Don’t worry, Fure.”
Furia stepped up to the plant door. He walked on the balls of his feet like an actor playing a thief. As he walked he felt for his shoulder holster the way other men feel for their zippers.
He knocked three times. One, two-three.
The pair in the car sat very still. Hinch was looking into the rearview mirror. Goldie was looking into Furia.
“He’s taking his sonofabitch time,” Furia said.
“He chickened out maybe,” Hinch said.
Goldie said nothing.
The lock turned over and Howland stood in the moonlight like a ghost in shirtsleeves.
“Took your sonofabitch time,” Furia said. “Where’s the gelt?”
“The what?”
“The moo. The payroll.”
“Oh.” Howland yawned suddenly. “On my desk. Make it snappy.” His teeth clicked like telegraph keys. He kept sneaking looks at the deserted lot.
Furia nodded at the Chrysler and Hinch got out in one move: he was behind the wheel, he was on the macadam. Goldie stirred but when Furia gave her the look she sat back.
“Has he got the rope?” Howland asked.
“Come on.” Furia jabbed at Howland’s groin playfully. The bookkeeper backed off and Hinch laughed. “What’s the stall? Let’s see that bread.”
Howland led the way, hurrying. His steps echoed, Furia’s and Hinch’s did not. Hinch was wearing gloves now, too. He was carrying a black flight bag.
Howland’s desk was in a corner of the outer office near the window. There was a greenshade light over the desk.
“Here it is.” He yawned again. “What am I yawning for?” he said. “Where is the rope?”
Hinch pushed him aside. “Hey, man,” he said. “That’s a mess of bread.”
“Twenty-four thousand. You don’t have to count it. It’s all there.”
“Sure,” Furia said. “We trust you. Start packing, Hinch.”
Hinch opened the flight bag and began stuffing the bundles of bills in. Howland watched nervously. Into his nervousness crept alarm.
“Hey, you’re taking too much,” Howland protested. “We had a deal. Where’s mine?”
“Here,” Furia said, and shot him three times, one-and-two-three in a syncopated series. The third bullet went into Howland no more than two inches above the first two as the bookkeeper’s knees collapsed. The light over the desk bounced off his bald spot. His nose made a pulpy noise when it hit the vinyl floor.
Furia blew on his gun the way the bad guy did it in Westerns. It was a Walther PPK, eight-shot, which he had picked up in a pawnshop heist in Jersey City. It had a double-action hammer and Furia was wild about it. “It’s better than a woman,” he had said to Goldie. “It’s better than you.” He picked up the three ejected cases with his left hand and dropped them into his pocket. The automatic he kept in his right.
“You cooled him pretty,” Hinch said, looking down at Howland. Blood was beginning to worm out on the vinyl from under the bookkeeper. “Well, let’s go, Fure.” He had all the money in the bag, even the rolls of coins, and the bag zipped.
“I say when we go,” Furia said. He was looking around as if they had all the time in the world. “Okay, that’s it.”
He walked out. Hinch lingered. All of a sudden he was reluctant to leave Howland.
“Where’s the rope, he says.” When Hinch grinned his mouth showed a hole where two front teeth had been. He was wearing a black leather windbreaker, black chinos, and blue Keds. He had rusty hair which he wore long at the neck and a nose that had been broken during his wrestling days. His eyes were small and of a light, almost nonexistent, pink-gray. “We forgot the gag, too, pidge,” he said to Howland.
“Hinch.”
“Okay, Fure, okay,” Hinch said. He catfooted after Furia, looking pleased.
“I knew it,” Goldie said. Hinch was backing the Chrysler around.
“You knew what?” Furia had the flight bag on his lap like a child.
“The shots. You killed him.”
“So I killed him.”
“Stupid.”
Furia turned half around and his left hand swished across her face.
“I don’t dig a broad with lip neither,” Hinch said approvingly. He drove across the lot on the bias, without lights. When he got to the turnout he braked. “Where to, Fure?”
“Over the bridge to the cloverleaf.”
Hinch swung left and switched on the riding lights. There was no traffic on the outlying road. He drove at a humble thirty.
“You asked for it,” Furia said.
There was a trickle of blood at the corner of Goldie’s pug nose. She was dabbing at it with a Kleenex.
“The thing is I don’t take names from nobody,” Furia said. “You got to watch the mouth with me, Goldie. You ought to know that by this time.”
Hinch nodded happily.
“What did you have to shoot him for?” Goldie said. In his own way Furia had apologized, they both understood that if Hinch did not. “I didn’t set this up for a killing, Fure. Why go for the big one?”
“Who’s to know?” Furia argued. “Howland sure as hell didn’t sound about our deal. Hinch and me wore gloves and I’ll ditch the heater soon as we grab off another one. So they’ll never hook those three slugs onto us, Goldie. I even picked up the cases. You got nothing to worry about.”
“It’s still the big one.”
“You button your trap, bitch,” Hinch said.
“You button yours,” Furia said in a flash. “This is between me and Goldie. And don’t call her no more names, Hinch, hear?”
Hinch drove.
“Why I plugged him,” Furia said. “And you had a year college, Goldie.” He sounded like a kindly teacher. “A three-way split is better than four, I make it, and I never even graduated public school. That shlep just bought us an extra six grand.”
Goldie said fretfully, “You sure he’s dead?”
Furia laughed. They were rattling over the bridge spanning the Tonekeneke River that led out of town; beyond lay the cloverleaf interchange and the through road Goldie called The Pike, with its string of dark gas stations. The only light came from an allnight diner with a big neon sign at the other side of the cloverleaf. The neon sign said elwood’s diner. It smeared the aluminum siding a dimestore violet.
“Stop in there, Hinch, I’m hungry.”
“Fure,” Goldie said. “My folks still live here. Suppose somebody spots me?”
“How many years you cut out of this jerk burg? Six?”
“Seven. But-”
“And you used to have like dark brown hair, right? And go around like one of them Girl Scouts? Relax, Goldie. Nobody’s going to make you. I’m starved.”
Goldie licked the scarlet lip under the smudge on her nostril. Furia was always starved after a job. At such times it was as if he had been weaned hungry and had never made up for it. Even Hinch looked doubtful.
“I told you, Hinch, didn’t I? Pull in.”
