Strip Read online

  “Drop your guns and the bag and step away from them,” Jeff said.

  “You got to be kidding,” said the red-haired man. “There are three of us and one of you.”

  Behind the man, Carrie’s head and right arm appeared at the corner of the building. Jeff was relieved.

  “Look behind you,” he said.

  The three men all half-turned to look, and Jeff sensed he should have said “slowly.” To Carrie it must have seemed that they were going to rush her or pull all three guns at once. She fired, the men jumped, and the noise made Jeff want to clap his hands to his ears.

  Carrie seemed to enjoy the shooting. She was the first to re-cover her composure, so she pulled the trigger three times more. The first round hit the sidewalk and ricocheted up into the shin of one of the two short, bald men and dropped him to the pavement. Her second went wide and hit the brick façade of the bank. Chips flew near the night-deposit door. The redheaded man dropped the money bag and crouched, either to pick it up or to pull out a gun, as the third shot made the other short, bald man fall down. The redheaded man, seeing that his advantage had vanished, remained still. Carrie fired two more shots, one that hit the sidewalk in front of the redhead and stung him with tiny concrete fragments, and one that bounced off the brick wall of the coffee shop on the strip mall.

  When she stopped firing, Jeff ventured out from behind the bank building. “Time’s up. What’s it going to be?” He felt that his voice had lost some of its authority and gone up an octave, but it seemed to be audible.

  The red-haired man threw the canvas bag toward him and raised both hands. The other two men lay on the ground, blood pooling between them. Jeff kept his gun on the men, picked up the canvas bag, and retreated around the corner of the bank. He ran toward the parking structure but heard running feet ahead of him. He stopped and aimed at the sound, but the shape that dashed across his vision was small and female, so he followed her.

  Carrie was surprisingly quick. She stayed ahead of him as he made his way along the side wall of the parking structure. Then he passed her and ran along the back walls of the buildings on the strip mall. There had been shots—loud, repeated shots—and the only way out now was to get into the car and be gone before the cops arrived.

  He stepped up onto the pavement of the strip mall, ran for the human-sized gap in the chain-link fence and onto the big blacktop parking lot. The car seemed to be incredibly far away, sitting in the midst of the small group of cars in the splash of light near the grocery store and the pharmacy.

  Now that Jeff was on empty asphalt and had a light ahead of him, he ran harder. He held the canvas bag cradled on his forearm like a football, pumping his arms and running on his toes, his head up and his strides lengthening with his momentum. As he left Carrie farther and farther behind, he ran even faster. When he was forty feet from his car, he took his keys from his pocket and pressed the remote-control key button, saw the dome light go on and the lock buttons pop up.

  He flung the door open, ducked inside, started the car, then drove back the way he had run. He flicked his headlights on as he moved up on Carrie, then reached across the seat to paw the door handle down, and stopped abruptly so the door swung open beside her. She flopped onto the seat and he accelerated so her door slammed shut.

  He glanced at her to be sure she wasn’t hurt. She had her knees on the floor and her elbows on the seat, and she was shaking, laughing uncontrollably.

  Jeff drove to the farthest exit on the other side of the lot, pulled out to the left against the red light, and drove hard to get around the curve on Laurel Canyon to the freeway entrance past Moorpark. He swung onto the freeway heading east and accelerated, then looked at her again. “What the fuck are you laughing at?”

  “It was just so amazing!” She climbed up onto her seat and fastened the seat belt. “It was the best. Thank you so, so much for taking me with you.”

  “You are one crazy bitch. You could have got us both killed.”

  “Am I? Thank you so much. This is the best night of my whole life!” She paused. “Is it? I think it is. Yes, it is!”

  “Jesus.”

  “My heart is still pounding like crazy and it won’t stop, you know?”

  “Yeah.” He knew what she meant. He could feel his own pulse in his chest and his neck.

  “And there’s blood, like, pumping its way into every part of me at once. The lights are actually brighter. Let’s go back to my house. I’ll give you the best sex of your life. That’s a promise.”

  Jeff knew that Lila was going to be home from work soon, and she would want to see him waiting there for her. But through the upper part of the windshield he could see bright stars in the black sky, and as he pulled off the freeway, he opened his window to listen for sirens. There was still silence and the night smelled sweet. “I can stop in for a little while.”

  10

  JERRY GAFFNEY SNATCHED Guzman’s gun from the ground and then yanked Corona’s out of his open hand and ran after the man and woman. When he reached the back of the parking structure behind the bank, he was sure that what they’d done was slide down the embankment above the Los Angeles River, then take a run along the paved path above the concrete riverbed and come up at the Whitsett Avenue Bridge. From there they could disappear across the river into the tennis courts, or maybe just disappear into the neighborhood. Their car would be parked somewhere on that side.

  He ran the quarter mile to the bridge without seeing another human being. He was far from the bank and carrying three guns. By now the cops and maybe an ambulance would be on the way. Soon he would hear the sirens.

  Gaffney hated having to get rid of three perfectly good guns that hadn’t even been fired, but there wasn’t much choice. He ran to the first apartment building after the Christian Science church on Whitsett, trotted along the side to the back of the building to the Dumpster, opened a plastic trash bag, and was overpowered by the fishy smell of cat food. He put the guns inside, retied the bag, and ran.

  He ran back across the bridge to Ventura Boulevard, but he’d gone only a few feet on Ventura before he realized why there had been no sirens. The street in front of the bank was full of police cruisers and other official vehicles, all of them flashing bright red and blue lights. They all must have converged on the place silently from side streets, the way cops did on burglary calls.

  He approached cautiously. He could see the ambulance parked in the driveway of the parking structure. There were EMTs pushing a gurney with Guzman on it. They lifted it into the back and Corona tried to jump in after it, but a cop held on to him and kept him back.

  Gaffney had thought both of them were hit, not just Guzman. Corona apparently had just decided to play dead. Part of Gaffney was angry at him. Maybe if the two of them had gone after the robbers, there would have been some chance of at least seeing their car.

  Gaffney considered going up to the group, but then thought better of it. As it was, it looked as though they had been here, just the two of them, trying to make the nightly deposit, unarmed. The crazy robbers had shot at them and taken the money. If there were only two of them, then there would have been nobody to get rid of any guns.

  He walked to the other side of the street and went the other way. He walked a couple of blocks west and dialed his phone.

  After seven rings he heard his brother Jimmy’s voice. “Yeah?”

  “It’s me. Jerry.”

  “What the fuck do you want? It’s after three A.M., boy.”

  “We got robbed making the night deposit from Siren. Guzman got shot, but that son of a bitch Corona played dead, so I had to stand up alone, dodge the bullets, and go after them. Now the cops have my car, so I need a ride home.”

  “Where you at?” Jerry could hear the jingle of Jimmy’s belt buckle, so he knew Jerry was pulling on his pants while he held the phone under his chin.

  “Just about to Ventura and Coldwater. I’m going to head north on Coldwater, so I should be just about to Riverside by the time you
get your dead ass in gear.”

  “Right. See you.” He hung up.

  Jerry Gaffney punched in Manco Kapak’s cell phone number, but then decided not to complete the call. He dialed Kapak’s home number, rang it, and heard Spence’s voice. “Mr. Kapak’s residence.”

  “Spence. It’s Jerry Gaffney.”

  “What’s up?”

  “We got ambushed at the bank—me, Guzman, and Corona. Guzman took a round in the left leg. He’s in an ambulance, and Corona’s with the cops.”

  “How did you happen to be the one not shot or arrested? Just lucky?”

  “Don’t pull that on me. Guzman was down, Corona was playing dead, so I took all three guns and went after the bastards alone. After that the cops arrived. If they’d found guns on those two, they’d have been in trouble.”

  “What do you need—a ride home?”

  “No, Jimmy’s got that. I want you to tell Manco what happened.”

  “Too busy to call? Low phone battery?”

  “Jesus, I called to ask you for a favor. If you won’t do it, just tell me.”

  “No, just savoring the peculiarity of the situation. He’s not home yet, but I’ll tell him what happened. How many were there?”

  “Two. I suppose the one must have been Joe Carver and the other was a girl.”

  “A girl.”

  “Yes, a girl. The guy wore a ski mask. He said to give him the money. I told him he had to be kidding. But the girl was behind us. She didn’t wait for the rest of the discussion, just opened up. She was crazy, probably on drugs. She didn’t even do a good job of cover, just shot Guzman and stood there in the open jerking the trigger, so shots went all over the place.”

  “That’s enough to tell Kapak for now. I’ll call him.” Spence hung up.

  Jerry kept walking along the dark street. Coldwater was all apartment buildings from Ventura to Moorpark. As he walked, he looked into the windows that were still lighted at 3:00 A.M., wishing he were behind one of them. Even at this hour, a few cars were out, and every time he heard an engine and saw the sidewalk ahead begin to glow and pick up his walking shadow, he felt tense. It could be his brother, Jimmy, coming to end his ordeal, or one of the cop cars that must be fanning out farther and farther by now, searching for the guy and the girl.

  Jerry was beginning to have an uneasy feeling about Kapak. There were certain guys who had fate on their side, and others who didn’t. He had always believed that Manco Kapak had it, but now he wasn’t so sure.

  There were lots of times when a leader lost his luck. When he did, everybody around him was in for a rough time. Everything they tried to do was five minutes late, one man short. He and Jimmy had been working with Calvin Sturgess in the hijacking business when the universe turned its back on him. They stopped a big semi late at night in North Carolina. There had been one guy who was supposed to jump into the cab of the truck and drive it another fourteen miles to a particular stretch of the woods where it could be unloaded. Instead of getting out to let him do it, the truck driver pulled out a gun and shot him in the chest, and then ran into the woods by the side of the road.

  The truck driver was out there somewhere in the dark with a gun. The truck was stalled on the side of the highway, and none of the three able-bodied crew had any idea how to move an eighteen-wheeler anywhere. They managed to get about thirty cases of single malt Scotch out of the truck and into their cars before they needed to leave. They left at least a hundred in the truck, wrecked the springs of two cars, and had to abandon one of them outside the next town after their own driver bled out in the back seat. That night was when the Gaffneys decided to make their new start in California. Later, he heard Sturgess and the others all got caught within a month.

  Jerry heard the familiar engine of his brother’s six-year-old Ford, turned, and saw it pulling up. He got in and Jimmy drove him away. “We’d better get you up to Kapak’s house right away, don’t you think?”

  “No, I don’t,” said Jerry. “It’s after three, half the people out are cops, and I’m tired. Why should I go see him?”

  “Because he expects it, and he’s paying us every week whether we do anything useful or not.”

  “I called Spence and he agreed to tell him what happened.”

  Jimmy looked at Jerry, concerned. “Spence is too fucking smart to trust. If he feels like it, he could really screw you.”

  “He has no reason to.”

  “There’s a good argument. Now I feel better. Jerry, when you’re guarding money and it doesn’t get to the bank, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to think you took it. Kapak might be thinking that already. If Spence nods his head—”

  “Haven’t you maybe begun to feel the wind change a little bit?”

  “What are you talking about? Who pays attention to the wind in California?”

  “Not the wind out there, the one in here.” He pointed to his head. “First Kapak gets himself robbed of the day’s take right in front of a bank on a major street. Then we all spend a month looking for the thief. When we finally find him, he batters the shit out of two Hummers with a crane and makes us glad to get out alive. The guy then walks into Kapak’s house for a visit, and the next day Kapak is having a doctor picking bits of glass out of his privates. I haven’t heard there was any damage to Joe Carver. Now there’s tonight. We were carrying over thirty-eight thousand in that bag, right into an ambush. We’re in a crossfire between Carver and a crazy woman.”

  “So the wind has changed.” Jimmy shivered involuntarily. He hoped his brother hadn’t seen it. To prevent it happening again, he closed his window and fiddled with the car’s air conditioning. The truth was that he held his brother at an uneasy distance, because Jerry was the one who had inherited their mother’s gift—if it was a gift. Seeing flashes of the future had never revealed anything to her but more drudgery and disappointment, but she was unerringly accurate. Jimmy said, “All of those things are annoying, but I don’t know if it’s a big deal.”

  “If you had been there tonight watching that madwoman fire a gun into Guzman, I think it might seem bigger to you.”

  “I suppose I would, but that wouldn’t mean it was. Seeing somebody shot gives most people the creeps.”

  “It’s more than that. It’s the sense of doom that builds up when a man’s lost it. This is deeper than logic. Human beings have spent ten thousand years working to deny and ignore and get rid of their pure animal instincts and senses. But we still haven’t entirely defeated ourselves, because we can’t help sensing things about people.”

  Jimmy was feeling more and more uneasy. “Like what?”

  “Things that mean danger. Look at Stacy Grenier. She’s the most beautiful girl anybody has seen working in a strip club in a hundred years. Every inch of her isn’t just perfect, it starts at perfect and extends beyond there to be something your poor imagination couldn’t invent or wish for, so every time you look at her, you’re amazed all over again.”

  “She’s a goddess.”

  “But nobody wants to go out with her.”

  “I went out with her.”

  “You did? Why?”

  “What you just said. She’s beautiful. And she seemed to be nice. It didn’t work out so well. I took her to a nice dinner at that restaurant down by the concert hall. Everybody was really dressed, the women were attractive, but nothing like her, of course. So afterward, we’re standing outside waiting for the valet to bring my car around. She lights a cigarette, takes a couple of puffs, and then leans really close to me—and puts it out on my hand.”

  “There,” said Jerry. “That’s what I mean. People take one look at her—or maybe two—and they sense that something bad is going on behind the eyes.”

  “After the burn, she behaved normal for a while.”

  “So why isn’t she my sister-in-law?”

  “After we slept together, she got abnormal again. She told me she had AIDS and that she only had sex with men to get back at all of us for being such assholes. She wante
d to kill all of us.”

  “Was it true?”

  “Her having AIDS? No. The hating and killing? I think so.”

  “As anybody other than you can tell after a minute. But forget her. Manco Kapak is the one I’m thinking about. He’s beginning to give off a bad vibe.”

  “You think so?”

  Jerry nodded. “I do. In fact, I think you’re right about going to his house to tell him everything in person. I think we better take a close look at him and see whether we ought to do something about what we see.”

  “We can’t leave, or it would convince him you stole his money yourself. By the way, do you still have a gun?”

  “No. I threw mine away with Guzman’s and Corona’s. You got one?”

  “No. I was asleep, and you asked me for a ride. I don’t sleep with a gun.”

  “Maybe you ought to start. Maybe we both ought to.”

  11

  JORGE GUZMAN WAS in pain. He had endured nearly two hours of being wheeled from one place to another in the hospital—x-rays, a surgical area that seemed to be on the same floor as the emergency room where they doped him and cut and stitched, and then a regular patient room.

  Corona had been with him for part of the time because the first doctor had the idea that Guzman couldn’t speak English, but one of the nurses was Mexican and could tell Corona wasn’t translating, just talking. She made Corona leave.

  The cops had arrived while he was still lying in the little examining room bleeding. They asked him the same questions Corona told him he’d already answered. Then one of the cops took a picture of his face and another one of the tattoo on his neck, and left.

  The final move was to bring him up here to the third floor. Now he had a real bed, not as hard or narrow as the thing he’d been on. But he felt his left shin all the time, throbbing with each heartbeat. He couldn’t look at it because it was in a hard bandage like a cast, but it felt as though the bone was exposed. A nurse walked past his door and he shouted, “Hey!”

  She took one step into the doorway. “Use the button. You’ll wake everybody up.”