The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 Page 13

  Cory managed to exhale a deep breath that sounded both weary and resigned. “I guess I’m about to make a new friend,” he said.

  And all the time he was thinking, An Okie from Oklahoma. And all that money.

  After Cory left the office, the deputy warden sat forward again and silently drummed the fingers of one hand on the desktop.

  “I hope to hell you know what you’re doing,” he said tightly to the FBI agent.

  “I know exactly what I’m doing—or rather what we’re doing,” Hardesty said confidently. He smiled broadly. “Just play along with me, my friend, and you and I will cut up one million, two hundred thousand dollars in unmarked bills. As long as this guy Evans does as he’s told and doesn’t get any bright ideas of his own.”

  Duffy guffawed. “That guy? Hell, Roger, he’s a prison guard! He’s about as smart as a bag of nails. You don’t have to worry about him.”

  Or you either, I hope, Hardesty thought. A million two was serious money. Serious enough to give almost any man pause for thought.

  “So,” Duffy asked, “where do we go from here?”

  “Today’s Tuesday,” Hardesty said. “The Neeley woman has gone to the movies every Wednesday night for two months. We’ll get Evans back in here in the morning and brief him on what to do when she goes to the movies tomorrow night. Then we’ll be off and running.”

  “Okay,” Duffy said. Then, as if to convince himself, he repeated it. “Okay.”

  The following night, when the first showing of the evening feature was over, Cory was waiting in the doorway of a coffee shop next to the Nugget Theater. When Billie Sue Neeley emerged in the exiting audience, he stepped out to meet her.

  “Need a ride?” he asked.

  She stopped, startled at having been spoken to. “What do you want?” she asked, almost demanded.

  “You and I need to sit down and have a talk,” Cory said. “An FBI man is watching you, and now he’s watching me because I gave you a ride day before yesterday. We need to have a serious conversation.”

  Billie studied him for a long moment in the white glare of the movie theater marquee, with people moving past them on the sidewalk, talking among themselves, without even a glance at Cory and Billie. Presently she made her decision.

  “Okay. Where?”

  “There’s a coffee shop around the corner.”

  “Let’s go,” Billie said. It was almost an order.

  The place was called Cliff’s Cafe. It had a ten-stool counter and six red vinyl booths for four, all under a sea of fluorescent lights that made its patrons look somehow ill, like they belonged in an emergency room for a transfusion instead of a café for a burger. The menus were in imitation red-leather folders that matched the vinyl booths.

  “You hungry?” Cory asked conversationally when they slid into a booth.

  “No,” she snapped tightly.

  “Well, I am.”

  When the waitress came, Cory ordered the Cliff’s Special, a quarter-pounder with cheese, bacon, and the works, served with crispy crinkle fries on the side. With it he ordered a Dr Pepper. Billie ordered black coffee.

  “Well?” she asked as they waited for their order, in the same demanding tone she had used in their encounter on the street. Cory fixed her with his flat corrections-officer stare.

  “Okay, here’s the story,” he said.

  He laid it out for her. Everything. All that had taken place in the deputy warden’s office. He was straight with her, as he had earlier decided he would be. He told her everything—except the fact that he had followed her to the Motel 7 after she had left the bus depot. That was personal, he had decided. That was between him and her, and the deputy warden and the FBI had nothing to do with it. At that point he was not sure why he felt that way.

  When his food was served and he began to eat, and Billie began to tentatively sip at her black coffee, she studied him now more than he studied her. What she saw was a guy with a pretty ordinary face: eyes a little too close together, nose slightly hooked, one ear a bit jugged.

  Certainly not as handsome as her man in prison. Lester Dragg, except for a couple of crooked teeth, looked like Johnny Depp. Half the girls back in Atoka High had been crazy about him. But it was Billie Sue Neeley who snagged him. Lucky her, she had eventually thought wryly, but by then it was too late to turn back.

  “So how come you’re being so straight with me?” she finally asked.

  Cory locked eyes with her. “I don’t like being blackmailed by the deputy warden and an FBI agent,” he told her evenly.

  Billie gave him a knowing look. “Wouldn’t have anything to do with the money, would it?” She picked up one of his crispy crinkle fries and ate it.

  “They seem to think you know where it is,” he told her. She took another one of his fries, salted this one, and munched some more. “Thought you weren’t hungry,” he reminded her.

  “I don’t know where the money is,” Billie said, ignoring his last remark.

  “I get the feeling that this FBI agent thinks you might be able to find out where it is.”

  “That agent wouldn’t by any chance be named Hardesty, would he?”

  “Yeah. You know him?”

  “He’s been leaning on me ever since Les and I got caught in that hot car trying to cross into Mexico. See, he blew it that day, big-time. If he’d let us cross, he could have paid the Mexican border cops to bump us back into the U.S. and then he’d have had Les on a federal rap, international transportation of a stolen vehicle. But he jumped the gun. Got itchy about finding the money, prob’ly. So all he could do is turn Les over to the California law and get him sent up on a stolen car rap. Once he got Les put away, he started stalking me. I told him a hunnerd times I didn’t know what Les had done with that bank take, but he just never believed me.” Billie sighed a weary sigh and continued to eat his crispy crinkle fries. But her eyes narrowed slightly.

  “What does Hardesty expect you to get out of me?”

  “I don’t know.” Cory finished his burger and pushed his plate with the rest of the fries over to her. “Maybe he thinks you’ll fall for me, drop Lester, and decide to split the money with me.”

  Billie grunted softly. “Won’t work. Nothing personal, but you’re not my type.” Her remark got no reaction at all from Cory. Billie’s eyes narrowed even more, not in suspicion now but curiosity. “Well?” she finally challenged.

  “Well what?”

  “Aren’t you going to say I’m not your type either? I mean, I’m a convict’s girl and you’re a prison guard, for God’s sake!”

  Cory finished the last of his Dr Pepper and set the bottle aside, shrugging. “I guess I don’t know exactly what kind of woman is my type. I haven’t had much luck with women.”

  When they left the café, Cory walked her back to the Motel 7.

  “So what do you think?” Billie asked when they got to the door of her room. “Where does this go from here?”

  “I don’t know. I guess we just play it out and see where it takes us.”

  “I guess,” Billie agreed.

  She went on into her room and Cory walked away, toward his apartment.

  Inside, Billie parted the curtains of the room’s small window and watched him walking away. With the palm of one hand rubbing up and down her thigh, she watched him until he was out of sight. She had been a long time without a man.

  During visiting hours the next day, an agitated Lester Dragg tapped one knuckle on the metal visiting room table that separated them. It was an open visiting room where inmates and visitors could touch, hug, kiss, snack on junk food from state-owned vending machines, and in some cases transfer drugs and other contraband. But Lester Dragg was not interested in doing any of that. Lester Dragg was only interested in the hack named Evans that Billie Sue had met.

  “What else did he tell you about Hardesty?” Lester was particularly curious about the FBI agent.

  “Nothing,” Billie explained patiently, “except what I already told you.” She s
ighed audibly. “Why? I mean, what’s so important about him?”

  “What’s so important about him is that he’s the fed that’s been trying to cut some kind of deal with me about the money.”

  “You never told me about anything like that,” Billie said, surprised.

  “I didn’t think you needed to know, Billie Sue!” he snapped. “Sometimes the less you know, the safer I feel.”

  Billie looked away for a moment. Lester had a way of hurting her feelings like that. It usually happened when he was upset about something. Or when he was angry. She had begun to notice that when he was upset or angry, he didn’t look so much like Johnny Depp anymore.

  Brushing aside her hurt feelings, Billie asked, “What do you want me to do about him? The corrections guy?”

  “I don’t know. Just play along with him for the time being, I reckon. See if you can figure out what Hardesty and that deputy warden are planning. But be careful what you say to him. And whatever you do”—he pointed a threatening finger at her—“don’t tell him that you told me about meeting him. You got that straight?”

  “I got it, Les.”

  He took her hands across the table, and his voice softened the way it did when he wanted something. “Listen, honey, if you should get, you know, friendly with this hack, to the point where he might consider doing you a favor, well, go for it, okay?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, if you put out to him a little, you might could ask if he could maybe get me transferred out of the goddamned laundry. All that bleach I have to handle is making my hands raw.”

  Billie stiffened, but only inside so he wouldn’t notice. “Are you saying it’s okay for me to go to bed with this guy if he’ll get you transferred to a better job?”

  “Well, yeah,” Lester said, shrugging innocently. “I mean, it wouldn’t be for real or anything. Just something you’d do for me, honey, to make my life a little easier. You understand what I mean, don’t you, babe?”

  “Yeah, Lester. Sure, I understand.”

  Walking back to the bus stop after the visit, Billie Sue felt like the back of her neck was on fire.

  That evening Cory came by the motel in his car to get her and they went downtown to an Italian restaurant that was considerably nicer than Cliff’s Cafe had been. Cory ordered a bottle of Barolo, and as they drank wine and waited for their dinner, Billie told him about her visit with Lester.

  “I can’t believe he actually asked me to do that,” she complained. “I mean, I’m supposed to be his girl and he actually asked me to go to bed with you to get him a better job assignment!”

  “Wouldn’t have worked anyway,” Cory said. “I’m just a level-one corrections officer. Only sergeants and higher can get an inmate transferred.” He studied her for a moment, then said, “You look very nice tonight. No boots, no worn-out jeans.” She was wearing dress slacks and heels, with a scooped-neck long-sleeved sweater.

  She shrugged. “Well, I didn’t want you to think I was a complete Okie from Muskogee. I do know how to dress. Lester makes me dress down when I visit the prison; he says it keeps the guards from hitting on me.”

  Cory smiled. “Officers aren’t likely to hit on women who visit inmates. Mostly they think of them as sluts—you know, tattoos, nose rings, half a pound of makeup, trying to look good for the loser inside.”

  “Do you think I’m one of those?” Billie asked frankly. “A slut?”

  “No, I don’t.” Cory looked away. “I have a confession to make. I followed you to the motel that first night, after I let you out at the bus depot. I had a feeling you’d come back out, so I waited. And I followed you.”

  “Why are you telling me this now?”

  “I guess I wanted you to know that I was interested in you even before all this business with the deputy warden and the FBI guy started.”

  Billie tilted her head a bit. “Interested in me how? Getting laid?”

  “No. Not at that point. Although I’m sure it would eventually have come to that. But just then I only felt that I’d like to know more about you: what your name was, where you came from, how you got to where you are now.” Abruptly he stopped talking, as if unsure what to say next.

  “Well, you already know my name,” she told him in a throaty voice that he took notice of for the first time. “As to where I came from, we called it Dustburg. I was a sharecropper’s kid. One of thirteen. Got pulled out of school when I was twelve to work in the fields. It wasn’t a real fun life. One of my brothers was retarded everywhere but between his legs; me and my sisters slept with big rocks in bed to fight him off with.

  “On Saturdays we’d all pile onto the back of Daddy’s flatbed and go into town. That was a real big deal. We’d drive past five hundred telephone poles until we came to a sign that said city limits. After a while I got to where I’d think, so what? A tacky little one-street nothing full of dirt-poor people who lived on a steady diet of revivals every Sunday.” She took a long swallow of Barolo. “So you want to know where I came from? I came from nowhere.”

  “That where you hooked up with Lester?”

  “Yeah. When I was old enough I started slipping away from the rest of the herd on Saturday afternoons and hanging out at a juke joint. A typical Okie dive, one of those shot-and-a-beer holes in the wall with a couple of drop-pocket pool tables, an old Wurlitzer that still took nickels, a few card tables, and a steady stream of would-be Romeos trying to look like something special but coming off like nothing no-how. Lester was one of them. But somehow...” Her voice momentarily drifted off and she stared down at the red circle in her wineglass.

  “Let me guess,” said Cory quietly. “Somehow Lester was different.”

  Billie snapped back to real time and her expression tightened. “You making fun of me?”

  Cory shook his head. “Just trying to get to know you, Billie.” It was the first time he had spoken her name, and he could tell by the look on her face that it meant something to her.

  It was during their dinner, well into a second bottle of Barolo, that Billie Sue seriously considered for the first time the face of the man sitting across from her: the smooth, clean angles of his jaw, the straight white teeth, lips that a woman might yearn to have all over her body—and she looked into his light blue, almost gray eyes and in an instant she was a goner. Forget about Lester, let the prick rot in prison, she was hungry for it and she was going to do it with this prison guard—excuse me, corrections officer—this very night. Come hell or high water, or boll weevils at harvest time.

  At three o’clock in the morning, Cory and Billie sat up in her bed at the Motel 7, turned on a forty-watt light on the nightstand, and shared a bottle of warm Mexican beer from a six-pack they had picked up on the way from the restaurant where they had dinner. Billie’s room was a one-star C&T: cheap and tacky. Coin-operated TV, swamp cooler instead of air conditioner, hot and cold running cockroaches.

  “Christ, what a pigsty,” Cory observed, looking around for the first time without raw lust on his mind. “I’ve seen landfills that were more appealing.”

  “Lester’s idea,” Billie said blandly. “He said if I lived anywhere more expensive, I’d attract attention.”

  “Good old Lester. All heart.”

  Billie finished the beer in the bottle they were sharing and got out of bed to walk naked over to a table to get another. Cory, seeing her undressed and upright for the first time, saw that she was a little heavy in the thighs and had a line of proud flesh across one shoulder blade.

  “Don’t be looking at my thighs,” she chastised, walking back. “I know they’re thick.”

  “I didn’t notice,” Cory lied. “I was looking at the scar on your back. How’d you get it?”

  “My daddy whipped me with a bridle strap after he caught me coming out of the juke joint with Lester. Mama made him stop after he drew blood, else I’d have more scars. My sister Lillie Lee has got five of them, crisscrossed. Daddy caught her naked in the back of a pickup truck with a neig
hbor’s boy.” Billie got back in bed, took a swallow from the new bottle, and handed it to Cory. “Well, Mr. Corrections Officer, where the hell do we go from here?”

  “Damned if I know,” Cory said. “If you knew where that money was, we could just take it, blow a goodbye kiss to Lester, the deputy warden, and that FBI agent, and fly away to paradise.” He fixed her in an unblinking stare. “But you don’t know where it is, do you?”

  “Nope. Wish I did.” Everything comes down to the money, she thought.

  “How’d you and Lester end up in California?” Cory asked, changing the subject.

  Or was he changing the subject? she wondered. Was he trying to get to know her a little better or just moving the conversation around to where the money came back into the picture? Damn it all anyway.

  “After my daddy whipped me,” she addressed his question, “Lester said to hell with Oklahoma, we’re going out to sunny California and get us jobs as movie extras. He said he looked enough like Johnny Depp that it would be a cinch for him, and he allowed that while I wasn’t no raving beauty, I could prob’ly pick up a few jobs anyway. So we hopped into his falling-apart Mustang and hit the old interstate. Got as far as Joseph City, Arizona, when the car broke down. Sold it for junk and bought us Trailways bus tickets to L.A. Lester got a job at a gas station and I started waiting tables in a coffee shop. Neither one of us had a clue about becoming movie extras. It was at the gas station that Lester met the two slickers that got him involved in the bank job. One of them was a Mexican dude, the other was some kind of surfer type who had worked as a bag boy in a grocery market across the street from the bank they tried to rob. He had seen the armored truck make its pickup week after week and figured the bank must have loads of cash ready to go just before the pickups. The bank was in Modesto, a little town up north of L.A., just a branch, only four teller windows and no guard, but it was in a strip mall and had a lot of business traffic, so they figured the take would be pretty good—never dreamed of no million, two hundred thousand! Lester said they guessed maybe a hundred thou tops. They offered him ten thousand to wait outside and drive the getaway car. We planned to use our share and head for Hawaii. Lester wanted to get a job as a lifeguard on Waikiki Beach, and he said I could go back to waiting tables again—”