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  “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 neighbor’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—”

  “Good old Lester,” Cory said again, grunting audibly. “Always picking a glamour job for himself and waiting tables for you.”

  Billie grunted back. “Tell me about it. Took me a while to tumble to that, but I finally got wise. Except by then I didn’t have no place to go, so I just hung with Lester.”

  “Too bad you and I don’t have that bank money. Make life a lot different for you.”

  Billie sat up and twisted around on the bed until she was facing him. “You always swing back to talking about the money, don’t you, honey? What’s on your mind, really?”

  Cory shrugged. “What difference does it make? You don’t know where the money is, right?”

  “Right. Don’t have a clue.”

  Cory fell silent for several moments, eyes downcast, staring at the beer bottle it was now his turn to hold, with Billie’s naked breasts prominent in his peripheral vision. His lips were pursed as he molded his thoughts for what he would say next. When he finally spoke, he looked back at Billie’s face without blinking and said, “How much do you think it would be worth to Lester if I could get him out of prison?”

  “Get him out when?” she asked, surprised.

  “Soon,” Cory told her. “Very soon.”

  The next morning Cory was back with the deputy warden and FBI agent Hardesty.

  “I don’t think the Neeley woman knows where the money is,” he told them, “but I think I can get Lester to lead you to it if you can find a way to spring him. She says he wants a transfer out of the laundry detail. I was thinking maybe—the dairy farm?”

  Hardesty and Duffy exchanged surprised looks. “You mean help him escape?” Duffy asked, aghast.

  “Why not?” Cory reasoned. “He would be taken right back into custody by Agent Hardesty and returned here before there was any record that he was ever out.”

  Hardesty rubbed his chin. “Not a bad idea,” he said.

  “But what if we can’t follow him once he’s out?” Duffy worried. “We could lose him.”

  “Not a problem,” Hardesty assured him. “If we provide a car for him, I’ll have a silent tracker signal unit attached to it that we can follow from our own car.”

  “How about using my car for Lester once he’s out?” Cory suggested. “The Neeley woman is familiar with it, she’ll be comfortable in it.”

  Hardesty shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

  Duffy grimaced, looking agitated.

  “Look, here’s how we can work it,” Cory said. “I tell the woman I can arrange to get Lester transferred to the dairy farm. It’s a job he can simply walk away from. I say that she and I can be parked in my car at a highway rest stop about a mile from the farm. I tell her I’ll do it for, say, a hundred thousand of the bank money. When Lester gets
to the car, we pick him up and head for wherever the money is. Once we get there, you two show, make the collar, and it’s a done deal.”

  Hardesty was smiling, but Duffy was shaking his head. “I don’t know,” the deputy warden said. “It goes against my grain, letting a con walk away like that.”

  “Look,” Hardesty reasoned, “you won’t exactly be letting him walk away. You’re giving him a short furlough is all. And technically he’ll still be in custody, because Evans here is going to be with him all the time—and Evans is a corrections officer. See?” He turned to Cory. “I like it, Evans. I think it’ll work. But are you sure you can set it up?”

  “Positive. Actually, it was the Neeley woman’s idea. She started talking about getting Lester transferred out of the laundry, and I just took it from there. I didn’t even have to ask for a share of the bank money; she offered it.” Cory grinned. “She thinks I’m just a dumb prison guard out to make some easy money.”

  “Well, won’t she be surprised?” Hardesty said with a chuckle.

  Won’t a lot of people, Cory thought.

  At a prison visiting room table, Billie Neeley and Lester Dragg leaned forward on their elbows to converse privately.

  “You sure you can trust this dude?” Lester asked uneasily.

  “Sure as rain, baby,” Billie answered confidently. “The guy’s a big hick. You should have seen his eyes bulge when I offered him a hundred grand.”

  “Yeah, well, he ain’t gonna get no hunnerd grand,” Lester said, pouting. “Ten grand, maybe, if ever’thing goes smooth.” He paused, then frowned suspiciously. “You go to bed with this dude to get him to do this?”

  “Hell, no!” Billie declared. “Didn’t have to. Oh, I let him cop a few feels, so he prob’ly thinks he’s got something going, but he’s wrong.” Reaching over, she took one of Lester’s hands. “You’re the only one for me, sugar. Always have been.”

  “Well, all right then,” Lester said triumphantly. “I’m counting on you, babe. Don’t you let me down, hear?”

  “I’d never let you down, sugar. You mean the world to me, you know that.”

  She squeezed his hand for emphasis.

  In Cory’s apartment, where Billie Sue had been spending the nights, she and Cory sat across from each other at his little dinette table.

  “Okay, listen up,” Cory said solemnly. “This situation is coming down to the wire. We’ve got to put all our cards on the table.” He locked eyes with her. “I think it’s about time you tell me where the money is.”

  Billie stiffened, biting her lower lip. Their eyes were like riveted bolts; neither of them even blinked. After a heavy moment, Billie took a deep, almost tortured breath.

  “It’s in a public storage facility down in Modesto, where the bank was robbed.”

  Cory frowned. “Why haven’t you already grabbed it? Or told me about it earlier so we could grab it together? You still hung up on Lester, is that it?”

  “No, damn it to hell!” She began blurting words like machine gun rounds. “Lester says the storage facility has a cyclone fence around it that’s wired to a twenty-four-hour security company. There’s a keyboard on the gate with a six-digit code for people to get in after hours, and Lester never told me the code. It’s a great big place and I don’t even know which unit he rented, and anyway he said he put this big combination padlock on the door, and Lester didn’t tell me the combination either, so I couldn’t get into the damned locker even if I did know which one it was.”

  She was crying now and pounding the table with both fists, so Cory had to reach out and grab her wrists to stop her. “Okay, okay, okay! It’s okay! Calm down . . .”

  It took a couple of minutes, but he managed to get her calm and got her some tissues to dry her eyes. But even so, she was still agitated, exuding a high-strung energy he had never seen in her before.

  “I didn’t know what to do.” She seemed to be arguing with herself. “Tell you, don’t tell you, lie to Lester, don’t lie to Lester, try to keep all my stories straight—”

  “Listen to me.” He held her hands firmly across the table. “You do know where this storage place is, right?”

  “Sure I do,” she said irritably. “I been sending a thirty-dollar money order there every month for two damn years! I ought to know where it is! Let go of my hands, you’re hurting me.”

  Cory released her, rose, and came around the table to kneel beside her. “Listen to me.” He reached up to stroke her hair. “Everything’s going to be okay. I’m going to arrange to get Lester out and the three of us are going to Modesto and get that money. And when we do get it, we’re going to leave old Lester high and dry, and you and I are going to disappear together, how does that sound?”

  Billie Sue sputtered a little. “Well—can we do that—I mean, can we get away with it—I mean, what about that warden and that FBI guy—and what about Lester—do we have to kill him?”

  “Hell, no, baby. We’re not killers. We’ll just leave Lester locked in his own storage locker. Somebody will find him the next day when he makes enough noise. But we’ll be long gone by then.”

  Gently Cory pulled her head down and kissed her tenderly on the lips, tasting the salt from her tears. He continued to stroke her hair.

  “This is going to work for us, baby. I’ve got it all figured out.”

  In Duffy’s office the next morning, the deputy warden and Agent Hardesty told Cory the plan was ready to be put into operation. Inmate Lester Dragg had been transferred outside the walls to the prison dairy farm.

  “It’s an honor assignment,” Duffy reminded them. “No walls, just a cyclone fence with no razor wire across the top, and the last head count of the day is at six o’clock. Escape can be effected by going to some remote corner of the pasture, climbing over the fence, and simply walking away. Since the inmates assigned there are nonviolent first offenders with only a short time to serve, no one has ever taken advantage of that easy way out. Lester Dragg will be the first.”

  “Then we’re all set,” Cory said. “The Neeley woman is convinced that she got me to arrange his transfer to the farm for a hundred grand cut of the bank money. When she sees him tomorrow, she’ll tell him it’s all arranged for that night. He’ll walk over to the highway and the Neeley woman and I will pick him up in my car.” He looked at Hardesty. “You have that tracking transmitter?”

  “I’ve got it in my car in the visitors’ parking lot.”

  “Good. I’ll pull my car around from the staff lot and you can put it on. You need tools?”

  “No, it’s magnetic. I just clamp it to anything metal on the undercarriage. The GPTS receiver sits on my dashboard.”

  “What’s GPTS?” the deputy warden asked, frowning. Cory and Hardesty exchanged disdainful glances.

  “Global Positioning Tracking System,” Hardesty said. “I’ll explain how it works when we’re following them.”

  The deputy warden shook his head doubtfully. “I don’t know. This thing is getting pretty involved. I mean, transferring him outside the walls with no notice, then having him just walk away—suppose somebody catches him? And this business of following him with some kind of gadget stuck to the bottom of a car—I just don’t know . . .”

  Hardesty rose and leaned over Duffy’s desk, both hands planted palms down. “Look,” he said, calmly but firmly. “This is going to work. All we have to do is stick to the plan, see? It’s that simple. Relax and stick to the plan. Nothing will go wrong. Okay?”

  The way Hardesty was leaning over the desk, Deputy Warden Duffy could see under his open coat front the service revolver the FBI agent carried. It was an intimidating sight. “Okay,” he blurted. “Okay. We’ll just stick to the plan.”

  “Fine.” Hardesty straightened, and to Cory said, “Let’s go get your car set up.”

  After Cory and Hardesty left his office, Deputy Warden Duffy unlocked a bottom desk drawer and removed his old service revolver, a .38 S&W Special. In case anything did go wrong, he didn’t want Hardesty
to be the only one there with a gun.

  Outside the prison, when Cory and Hardesty had their cars parked alongside each other, Hardesty opened a small box about the size of a deck of playing cards and began unwrapping its contents. As he did so, he asked casually, “What’s your opinion of Duffy?”

  “In what way?” Cory asked back.

  “You think he’s up for this? He seems kind of shaky to me.”

  “I noticed that,” Cory agreed.

  “How do you feel about it? The plan, I mean.”

  “I think it’s good. I think it’ll work. There’s only one thing that bothers me.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “The cut. I think I deserve a cut. All I’ve been promised out of this is a future promotion to sergeant. While you and Duffy divide a million two in cash. After all I’ve done to move this plan along, that doesn’t seem quite fair.”

  Hardesty paused in what he was doing and fixed Cory in a flat stare. “Well, tell me, Officer Evans, what do you think would be fair?”

  “If you and Duffy are splitting the money evenly, that’s six hundred thousand apiece. If each of you kicked in a hundred grand for me, you’d both still have half a mil left—”

  “And you’d have two hundred thou—”

  “Plus those sergeant’s stripes.”

  Hardesty smiled, not his professional FBI smile but a George Bush kinder, gentler smile. “I’ve been wondering when you’d make your pitch, Evans. I’ve been expecting it. You’re smart. And you’re reliable. Two things that Duffy isn’t. How would you feel about an even fifty-fifty split between you and me?”

  “How could you do that?” Cory asked with obvious interest.