married couple and asked them three times if their children were in the machine. And Kathryn gave her an eye like “Beat it,” although the old woman didn’t quite get it and kept on puttering around till Kathryn had to slam the door in her face.
They were wrung-out, road-tired, nerve-frazzled, and finally alone.
George locked the door behind them. They hadn’t brought a change of clothes or even a toothbrush. She carried the grip, and George carried some Log Cabin bourbon.
They drank from some tiny glasses found in the bathroom. And they drank some more. Kathryn took a shower, and when she came out George was next to the bed counting the cash, splayed open from the spread to the sheets. Stacks of twenties had been laid out in row after row, and Kathryn walked to him, feeling lazy-eyed from the booze, and dropped her towel, seeing herself in the long mirror over George. George sat astride a ladder-back chair, shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow, and his eyes moved up from the money and to his naked wife.
He smiled.
She stretched and fell back into the cash, some of the twenties knocked up into the air with a woosh, and she thought George might’ve been sore. But she should’ve known better. He about tripped getting off his seat and wrestling for his belt, not even removing his socks, garters, and shoes as he turned off a lamp and mounted her. In the moonglow from the window, he took her hard from behind, making animal grunts and saying how much he loved her and how beautiful she was, and all that tripe, as she pushed back hard against him and stretched out her arms before her, her finely manicured hands breezing through a stack of bills and making sure not a single one of ’em was marked.
They did it once in the bed, and then she straddled him in the chair. He looked good in the moonlight, like a lantern-jawed hero, and she liked the way the glow made her skin soft and white and young. Her arms and legs reached around George R. Kelly. Her hands clutching stacks of twenties as she rode him.
“I love you, Kit. I sure love you.”
“I love you, too,” she said, soft and meaning it, “you dumb ape.”
12
Harv’ey watched Boss Shannon toss feed from a metal bucket to his chickens, those pin- eyed creatures scratching and squawking and shit-ting all around them. Boss moped and looked down at his brogan shoes when the bucket fell empty, standing there, hens pecking at his feet and at the empty ground, when he finally raised his head and asked: “Where’d you find him?”
“He was wandering in the pasture,” Harvey said, studying Boss’s face and coolly slipping his right hand into his pocket, squinting into the early morning. “His feet were all cut up, and he was talking to himself. I couldn’t make out a thing he was saying till we got him back to the car. Urschel thought I was Tom Slick. Imagine that. King of the Wildcatters.”
“You kill him?”
Boss thought of himself as a hero, the salt of the earth, a hearty country man bred of solid stock, with years of wisdom behind him. But Harvey Bailey only saw a white-haired old fool who was greedy and reckless and would sell out his own boy for a nickel. Harvey studied the man’s beaten face and drooped shoulders until Boss grew restless in the open yard, the empty bucket shaking in his hand.
“You gonna kill me?” Boss asked. “’Cause if you are, I need to talk to Ora just a moment. There are things that need tending, and I’d prefer if I could write my own eulogy.”
“How much are they getting?” Verne Miller asked, hopping down from the front porch of Shannon ’s house. He wore a big.45 in his waistband and a freshly pressed shirt.
“I don’t rightly know.”
“What was that hog’s name?” Harvey asked.
“I believe it was President Hoover,” Miller said. “I never saw a hog corn-hole a man before, but I believe it could happen. I think he liked the way you smelled. Imagine that wet snout on the back of your neck, Boss.”
“Sweet Jesus.”
“How much?” Harvey asked.
“Two hundred.”
“What?”
“Two hundred thousand.”
“Don’t lie to us.”
“I swear on it.”
“Whew.”
“What are they going to do with Urschel?”
“Turn ’im loose,” he said. “They don’t mean no harm to him.”
Harvey looked to Miller. Miller shrugged.
“So they’re coming back?” Harvey asked.
“Of course.”
“And we’ll all have a meet,” Harvey said.
“Don’t seem right,” Boss Shannon said, gaining a sense of himself and splatting some tobacco juice into the dust. “Don’t seem fair.”
“YOU THINK HE’S DEAD, DON’T YOU?” KIRKPATRICK ASKED.
“If you study on the worst, the worst will happen,” Jones said. “They were never gonna release him in Kansas City. These are some pretty cunning men we’re dealing with. Real professionals.”
“You think they’re mad at me? For bringing you along?”
“If they’d been really spooked,” Jones said, “they wouldn’t have made the drop.”
“Tell me again what they said on the telephone.”
“He called me a fat old man. How do you like that?”
It was the middle of the night when the
“Maybe he was talking about someone else,” Kirkpatrick said.
The all-nighter was empty, and Jones stretched out his boots on the seat in front of him. He had a notebook open on his lap, and in the flickering artificial light he worked on a report to Hoover about the whole caper, from the time the kidnappers made contact through the letter to the drop just a few hours ago. The exchange had happened so quickly after Kirkpatrick had stepped from the Yellow Cab that Jones had lagged behind, and when he’d caught up on the street the Gladstone had already been snatched with Kirkpatrick barely seeing a thing.
Kirkpatrick had described the man. The same one Berenice Urschel had described as the big fella with the machine gun. About six feet. Foreignlo oking.
“I should’ve done something,” Kirkpatrick said. “If I’d brought my gun I could’ve forced them to take me to Charlie. If he’s dead, I’ll never forgive myself. I let down the family.”
“If you’d acted like a fool, then he would be dead.”
Kirkpatrick nodded. His eyes looked hollow, the skin on his face stretched to the bone.
“Like I said, these men are professionals. They had a solid plan. They carried it out and got their money. Now they’ll just look for a safe place to turn him loose.”
“What if he knows too much?”
“Quit studying on the worst and the what could be,” Jones said, snapping the notebook closed and placing it back in his satchel. “All we can do is wait it out. Mrs. Urschel will need a strong man with some horse sense.”
