The generator was right up front. Stuff had been shoved to the back to make room for it—furniture so crappy it was unlikely that Goodwill would take it, a five-foot floor lamp, other junk, two sixty-inch televisions, couple of TiVo minis, and a metal box the size of a toaster oven with a cheap combination lock on it.
The bolt cutters laughed as I cut the lock. Five pounds on the handles did the trick. Lucy lifted the top and shined a flashlight in.
“I was right,” she said.
“Yeah, what?”
“Gold bars.”
Yeah, right.
I nudged her aside, and . . . gold bars. Not many, but size beats quantity every time.
There were three—not the one-ounce kiddie-size bars but big, fat ten-ounce Perth Mint bars, 99.99 percent pure, worth around twelve thousand dollars each at today’s spot prices. Tossed in like an afterthought were three or four little one-ounce Asahi bars, 9999 stamped on their golden faces.
“It’s amazing,” Lucy said, “how much you can accumulate when you save milk money starting in like the fourth grade.”
“Ain’t that the truth.” I found a little paper envelope, opened it, and a safe-deposit key slid out onto my palm. I put it back. Nothing else of interest in the box. I put the pieces of the lock in a pocket. A missing lock would say less than a lock that had been cut.
“Now what?” Lucy said.
“Now we get out of here.”
There was no thought of taking the gold. We weren’t there for that. We weren’t thieves. No telling where or how Arlene had gotten that gold, although I wasn’t thinking milk money.
I rolled the door back down and secured it with the second of the two locks I’d bought from Stan.
Speaking of which, something like a golf cart rolled around the corner of a line of sheds and Stan himself yelled, “Hey! Hey, you!” A heavy-duty flashlight lit us up.
We ran.
A golf cart carrying five hundred pounds doesn’t accelerate like a Formula One racecar. Doesn’t corner well either. It wasn’t a real contest. Lucy took the two pipes, and I had the bolt cutters. We made it to the fence well ahead of Stan, popped through, and high-stepped through the sage aided by the beam of Stan’s big flashlight, tracking us until we were over a hundred yards out.
Three minutes later, we were outside the Cadillac at Little Joe’s, scrubbing blue paint off our faces with washcloths we’d prepared in advance. Iron pipe and bolt cutters in the trunk. I got behind the wheel, nosed the car into the road, and a cop car went by with lights, no siren. Not going fast, either, so it was hunting.
“Probably looking for us,” Lucy said.
“Uh-huh.” I took off in the same direction as the cruiser, turned off south at the first opportunity. Back at T&T, Stan would look around but find nothing wrong with the units unless he happened to notice that one of them had a new lock on it. Arlene would have a fit next time she tried to get into the place.
I took a right at the next big intersection and went west until I saw Interstate 15 ahead, circled around to find an on-ramp, then took us north and east.
“Back to Arlene’s?” Lucy asked.
“Yep. Gotta hustle if we’re gonna get a room.”
“Good. I love that place.”
I took us up to eighty-five, held it there until we reached the turnoff to US 93, then went north at seventy.
Lucy rubbed my neck. “You were gonna tell me something. Said you’d tell me later. It’s later now, and this road is boring, especially at night, so now’s a good time.”
“I don’t remember. How about a hint?”
“It was something about a bathroom window, which sounds kinda iffy.”
“Iffy? It’s a true story and my finest hour.”
“Sounds like I’m in for it, but go ahead.”
So I told her about the chickadee in Bend, Oregon, last year and how I’d gone through a window in the men’s room to escape. The chickadee was Sophie, a voluptuous Mexican girl, and she’d called me a shithead in the back alley behind the bar after I’d landed on the ground. I still didn’t know how she’d thought to go out back in time to watch me slither headfirst out that window.
As it turned out, the road was so boring I ended up giving Lucy more of the story than it required. She was quiet for half a minute, then said, “All these women have huge tits, Mort.”
“Not my fault. I don’t plan these things.”
“Still.”
I glanced over at her. She was a shadow in the dash lights. “I told you about my fiancée, Jeri. She was about your size.”
“On top, you mean?”
“Yes. She was perfect, too. Like you.”
She didn’t say anything for another mile. Then, “I would still marry you. Tonight, if you ask. We could go back to Vegas, be all hitched up two hours from now. You said not to say that again, but it’s been three days, and nothing’s changed.”
Sometimes words just get you in trouble. I reached over, took her hand, and kissed her palm. Didn’t say a thing.
She made a happy sound. “That mean we’re engaged?”
After ten miles of silence, Lucy said, “Picasso.”
“Gesundheit.”
She ignored that. “What do you think of his paintings, since it’s still boring out here?”
“Picasso’s?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Is that what his stuff is called? Paintings?”
She sighed.
“Well,” I said, “most mornings before I get out of bed I give his work a moment of penetrating thought—”
“Seriously, Mort.”
Seriously—I had a flashback to a discussion I’d had with my ex-wife, Dallas, about orchestras, classical music, and my being a philistine. My position was that the conductor was nothing but a glory-hog who could be replaced by one of those wacky wind-puppet things that whip and twist in the wind, promoting fast food and
