$20 Lust

9

We left the car there in the morning. It was hot and we didn’t need it anymore. That wasn’t all we left behind. We left the twenties.

In ashes.

We burned them in the motel room, burned a few bills at a time in the john and flushed the ashes in the toilet. Have you ever watched close to fifty grand converted into smoke and ashes?

It’s quite a sight.

We saved a couple bills. Not many. Enough for food and hotel bills and bus fare to San Francisco. That was all we needed. Any more would have been taking chances.

We weren’t taking any chances.

We left the car and we left the motel and we left the ashes. We walked down the road to the nearest town. It had a bus stop. The bus made a few stops until it reached a town that had a little more to say.

The bus from that town went to Frisco. We were on it, tense and excited and a little scared. Not too scared. We were growing up, Cindy and I. It was going to take a lot to scare us. Parts of us were steel, tough and strong.

“It’s a chance,” she said.

“We’ve taken plenty of them. We’ve taken worse chances than this one. We’ve stuck our necks out in front of Reed and Baron. This is nothing next to that.”

“I know.”

“This is the only way,” I told her. “You can look at it mathematically. It’s an equation.”

“A human equation.”

“Maybe. Maybe two and two is four. Maybe something a lot more complex than that. But it adds up just the same. It adds up and makes sense.”

“I know, Ted.”

“The phony stuff. The fifty grand. It was worth plenty to Reed and Baron. Worth double its face value. But it was strictly a closed market, baby. A closed market is a buyer’s market. You didn’t have something you could turn around and sell to anybody else. Reed was the only customer. And he wasn’t buying. He was going to kill for it.”

I lit a cigarette. I wasn’t sure whether or not you could smoke on the bus. It was one of those hick bus lines, not Greyhound or anything, and for all I knew smoking wasn’t allowed. I didn’t really care. “So you played it the only way. Getting in touch with him, getting him to come down, then running when he showed. Didn’t make much sense, but then neither did anything else.”

“He was the only customer.”

“That’s just it,” I said. “This way it’s different. What Reed has is what’s valuable. Especially with the bad stuff gone. Now his plates and his paper can set somebody up for life. With no chance involved.”

“Somebody like us,” she breathed. It was a prayer. I hoped it would be answered.

“Somebody like us. Somebody very much like us, in fact. All we have to do is take it.”

“Sure,” she said. “That’s all.”

I put out the cigarette. “We can manage it,” I said. “Let’s go over it again. Casper’s the only one at the hangout?”

“As far as I know. Bunkie Craig may be there. If he’s out of the hospital.”

“Is that where he would go?” She nodded.

“He might be out. It’ll be just as well that way, come to think of it; get him out of the way. Nobody else knows about the deal?”

“Just the guy who fixed the plates.”

“What about him?”

“He won’t talk,” she said softly. “I read about him a few days ago. They found his body in a ditch. Reed doesn’t believe in letting people know too much. Not unless they’re with him all the way. The boy was hired, then fired, then dead. That’s how it goes with Reed.”

“Four left,” I said. “Reed and Baron, Casper and Craig. Lori and Musso are dead. Just the four of them.”

“Four,” she echoed.

“Four. Then you and me and the money. No set sum, Cindy. As much as we ever want. As much as we ever need.”

Thinking about the kid Reed had killed must have jarred her a little. It showed in her face. Not obviously, but I knew her well enough to see it.

“We could just get out of it,” she said. “We burned the money. They don’t have to chase us any more.”

“You really think so?”

She looked at me.

“They’ll chase us until we’re dead.” I said. “Because they don’t know we burned that money. Because we know more than they want us to know. We can’t beg out now. We either go through with it or run like rabbits.”

“You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry, Ted.”

“That’s okay.”

“I don’t think sometimes.”

“Forget it.”

I held her hand and lit two more cigarettes.

We were tired when we hit Frisco. Tired enough to sleep. Not because we wanted to sleep, not because we wanted to waste any time. Because we had to be rested, had to be fit when we laid it on the line.

And there were plans to make. I bought a box of shells for the gun, practiced with it empty so I would be able to aim it straight. Hitting Musso had been dumb luck. I’d have to be good this time.

Then we hit the sack. We stayed at a second-grade hotel — good enough so we wouldn’t draw stares, cheap enough so we could afford it.

And close to the hideout.

The gang’s headquarters was a frame house on Grand Street, a clapboard affair that needed painting badly. I got a look at it from the cab. It looked like any other house on the block, no better, no worse — and certainly no more likely to hold a counterfeiting printing press and a gang of thieves. I caught my breath when I looked at it. I wondered who the neighbors were, what Reed did when door-to-door salesmen dropped by. Things like that.

And I could feel the excitement. We were close now, too close to turn back, ready to roll. I had a tough time sitting still. That’s how I react to tension. I get a surplus of nervous energy and there has to be a way to dissipate it. I felt like hitting somebody but there was nobody handy to hit. There would be. Later.

I wiggled my toes, snapped my fingers, felt silly doing it but couldn’t sit still otherwise. Cindy gave the cabby the hotel’s address and we went back there and sacked out.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Right?”

“Right. In the morning. A quick breakfast and we move. We can’t waste time.”

“Suppose Reed is back already?”

I shook my head. “He won’t be,” I said. “Not a chance in the world. He’ll be looking around for us, putting out feelers. He may have called, though.”

“Then Casper will be waiting for us.”

I shook my head. “Like hell he will. Nobody will figure us for a move like this. Casper’ll be sitting on his behind waiting for something to happen. Alone or with Craig — either way he won’t be a problem.”

“He knows me.”

“He doesn’t know me.”

“Craig does.”

I thought that one over, then shrugged. “That’s a chance,” I said. “One we can afford to take. I’m gambling that they won’t be ready for anything. If they are, it’s going to be harder.”

That was an understatement. We had one gun, the one I had taken away from Baron. They would have an arsenal. If all four of them were at the place we could throw in the sponge. But that wasn’t the way I figured it. Reed and Baron would show the next evening or the morning after, maybe later.

Maybe.

There were too many things to figure. Maybe nobody bothered to write down the method of bleaching ones and turning them into twenties. Maybe there was no ink around, maybe we wouldn’t be able to find the plates, a lot of maybes. I didn’t want to think about them.

I couldn’t afford to think about them.

I put them out of my mind.

There was still Cindy, nervous in spite of herself, nervous if not exactly scared. There was still me, alive with nervous energy, all that energy that had to be dissipated one way or another.

There was still the bed.

It was different that night. It was a frenetic passion, a passion used to chase away fear, passion born of tension and worry and gentle fear. It blazed and it sizzled and it burned like fire.

It was good because it had to be good, because we needed it so desperately, because it was, for the moment, the only thing in the world we could have.

And for another reason.

Because there might be no more chances. Because we might both be dead before we were together in bed again, because the next bed we shared might be a grave or a river bottom or a cold stone slab.

We were naked together, naked in the bed, and when I felt the sweet warm softness of her beside me my mind went blank and my brain started to swim. She made a little moaning sound deep in her throat; then she was in my arms. Her lips opened under mine and I tasted her mouth in a deep, long kiss.

Then our bodies were pressed taut together, straining, and I felt her firm breasts press hard against my chest. She writhed in my arms, and when I kissed her I tasted the salty tang of silent tears.

It all made sense to me now. We’d gone out on a limb, far out on a limb, and now we were going to saw the limb off and leave ourselves hanging in the middle of the air. We weren’t going to work deals now, and we weren’t going to keep on running, and we weren’t going to roll over and play dead like nice little doggies doing nice little tricks. We were taking the bull by the horns and the bit in our teeth, and we stood a damned good chance of winding up holding the tiger by the tail.

“Ted—”

She drew away from me and my hands found her breasts. I looked at her face. Her eyes were shining, glowing with a mixture of love and passion, and her mouth was curled in a sexy smile.

I reached out a finger and touched her lips. She kissed the finger. Then I ran that finger down over her chin and throat, down to her breast. I traced ever-diminishing concentric circles around her breast, with the circles getting smaller and smaller until I was touching her nipple and driving her wild.

The change in her was dramatic. Now she was a creature on fire, basic woman incarnate, a thrashing melody of hips and thighs and rampant breasts.

“Ted—”

We were on our way to the gang’s hideout, on our way to outfox the foxes. We were kiddies playing cops and robbers, with a big payoff for the winners and a shallow grave for the losers.

But now this didn’t matter. Not now.

Not for the time being.

Because now she was in my arms, soft and warm and willing, and now she was the only thing in the world that mattered. I was kissing her breasts now. She was churning spasmodically and the earth was in the grip of a cyclone that could pick us up and whirl us away to the land of Oz.

My lips bathed the silken skin. Then I moved lower, coaxing her into delicious peals of torment, kissing the smooth sleek satiny flatness of her body. She wound her fingers in my hair and I thought for a moment she was going to snatch me bald-headed.

I wouldn’t have noticed if she had. I was too busy.

We were going to be criminals, but crime and punishment were a million miles away by now. We were going to be thieves in the night, but now we were naked in the night and the night was a handful of stars in the palm of an angry goddess.

“Ted, I love you! Don’t stop, Ted. Don’t ever stop. Do it forever!”

She didn’t have to say a word. I was not going to stop, not now and not ever. I was giving her the ultimate kiss, the kiss that would seal all bargains until the end of time. Nothing else mattered.

Nothing at all.

And then I was giving her that kiss.

Her whole body was twitching and shaking and heaving, and the heat she was generating would have melted the polar ice cap and vaporized the ensuing water. The passion was a contagious sort of thing and the room was the scene of an epidemic in no time at all.

I needed her, had to have her, and now the kiss was not enough, just as nothing could be enough. It was time. And then it began.

I’ve already said it was good, and that’s about all I can say. It was the beginning and the end of the world. It was a pair of bodies drawn to one another like magnets, clutching and clinging, working rapidly and relentlessly, making moves and seeing stars and breaking records.

“Ted, I love it. Ted, I love it I love you I love everything!”

I loved everything, too.

And it got better and better and better, and it got faster and faster and faster, until it had to stop or it would almost certainly have killed us both.

Then the explosion came. The earth began to tremble and shake, and guns went off and rockets shot up and satellites went into orbit.

And so did we.

Then, after a fashion there was calmness. Then I was holding her in my arms saying meaningless things to her. And then I knew that we were going to go through with it, going to go through with everything, going to take on Reed and Baron and the rest of the mob and come out smelling like a rose.

Nothing could go wrong for us.

Not now.

Not after that.

We lay together, and we touched each other, and we spoke very few words because no words were needed. Finally we drifted into a lazy, desperate sleep.

Morning came too quickly. There should have been a slow period of awakening, a gentle touching of bodies drugged by sleep, of lovemaking that was all sweetness and animalism and warmth and love.

That’s not how it was. It was morning, and sunlight flooded the room, and we made the transference from sleep to consciousness in the shadow of an instant, woke up and blinked once and left the safety of our bed. “It’s time,” I said.

We dressed quickly. I shaved, we showered, we put on our clothes and checked out of the hotel. We had breakfast in a diner around the corner, a greasy spoon something like the place where I had slung hash in New York. Grace’s Lunch on Columbus Avenue. How long ago had that been? Days? Weeks? Years? It was hard to tell, impossible to believe. It was way back, buried somewhere, over and done with.

I don’t remember what I ate that morning. I don’t even remember that I ate, but I must have. Eggs, probably. But it’s only a guess. Whatever it was, I didn’t taste it. I got through with it and Cindy finished whatever in hell she had ordered, and we got out of there.

It was a cool gray sort of morning. The streets were relatively empty, the sky overcast, the temperature more than bearable. A good day for watching a football game, something like that.

I wondered whether it would be a good day for murder.

We walked around a corner, walked a block, turned another corner and kept going. I caught sight of the house, the big frame house where everything was going to happen. The money shop.

“That’s it, Ted.”

“I know.”

The gun was in the waistband of my trousers and the jacket hid it. But I could feel it. The metal was very cold, or felt that way.

“How, Ted?”

We’d been over it a dozen times. I spelled it out for her again anyhow.

“Ring the bell, he comes to the door, I push inside. I take care of him, you come in. That’s all.”

“If there’s two of them?”

“Then he recognizes me. Then I get the drop on them. Better give me a hand if I need it. But I won’t need it. It’ll be smooth as silk. Bunkie or no Bunkie there’s not a thing for you to worry about. It’s going to be silk-smooth.”

Silence. Now we were in front of the house. Time to go in and no sense standing around outside, being seen. Easy to say. Harder to do. She was holding my hand, holding it tight, and maybe the fear she was feeling doubled my own strength. I don’t know.

“Ted—”

“Let’s go, honey.”

“Ted, no killing—”

Half-statement, half-question. She wanted to know and she didn’t want to know. I told her no killing. Hell, that was what she wanted to hear. I could always fight with her later, or just go ahead.

Or whatever.

“And no shooting. The neighbors might hear.”

“Sure,” I said. “Come on, baby.”

There was a side door, which was a break. That was the one we picked. I made her stand out of sight while I leaned on the bell. I gave a hell of a lean. If I had things figured right, Casper was still sacked out after a hard night watching the late late show on television and pouring some beer down his throat. If I could get him out of bed it wouldn’t hurt the cause any. An opponent with his eyes still closed is the best kind in the world.

“Ted—”

“He’ll be coming. Relax.”

Relax? Sure.

I heard footsteps outside, spun around and watched the mailman walk past. No mail for the unofficial bureau of engraving and printing. That was good.

Then footsteps from inside. Footsteps coming toward the door. I yanked the gun out of the waistband of my pants and flicked off the safety catch. A voice, thin as a rail, came through the door.

“Who is it?”

“Telegram.” What the hell. That’s how they always did it in the movies. I wondered what I’d do if he told me to stick it under the door. Probably tell him he had to sign for it. The movies are a great educational institution.

But he didn’t play games. He opened the door, his eyes blurry with sleep, and I put the gun in his face. That made the eyes open up some. They went wide with shock and opaque with pure terror.

“Who—”

Casper. He looked like Casper the friendly ghost. His hair was straggly and magnificently uncombed, his face said that a lot of beer went with the late show. He was a mess. A badly shaken mess.

He was wearing pajamas, a pretty simple-looking print with green predominating, and his body showed through. The bones showed. I wondered how different he would look if he were the one with the gun. Then the scared eyes would be killer’s eyes and the mouth would foam like a mad dog.

It was good, thinking that way. It kept me from feeling sorry for him.

I shoved him inside, moved in after him. I tried to decide whether to knock him out now or later. Then I remembered Craig. I had to find out if he was around.

“Be cool,” I told Casper. “This isn’t for you. It’s for Bunkie Craig. He around?”

He shook his head but his eyes said yes.

“You better play it straight,” I advised him. “Or I kill you by mistake.”

“In the bedroom.”

“Upstairs or down?”

“Upstairs.”

That was fine with me.

“Look, Mac,” he whined. “You get Bunkie, huh? Then you let me alone. I’m a right guy. I won’t get in your way.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“Huh?”

I spoke to her without looking at him. I told her to come on in and she did. It took him three looks at her before he figured it out, remembered who she was, knew all at once that Craig was not the sole reason for our presence.

He became very frightened.

“Turn around, Casper.”

He didn’t want to. There’s something about putting your back to a loaded gun that is most unpleasant no matter who you are and sheer horror if you are a gutless wonder like Casper. But he made it finally, and I hit him.

With the gun. On the side of the head just over the ear. Not hard enough to crack the skull, not so gentle that he could stay awake. He fell soundlessly, doubled up and pitched forward on his face. I figured he’d be out for half an hour but I was taking no chances.

“Watch him,” I told her. “If he moves so much as an eyelash, belt him one.”

“With what?”

I looked at her. “Your shoe,” I said. “Take it off right now.”

She was a good kid and she didn’t ask questions. She took off her shoe. It had a spike heel that you could drive a tent-stake with. It was better than a sap.

“Now sit down next to him,” I said. “And hold the shoe by the toe. If he moves, hit him in the head. Not too hard but hard enough.”

Maybe it was melodrama, kneeling next to an unconscious man and all ready to hit him if he groaned. Melodrama is better than dying. We were taking enough chances to begin with. I left her with Casper and started looking for Craig.

The downstairs was a cyclone’s aftermath. Casper was a lousy housekeeper. There were beer cans all over the floor, paper plates on the tables with uneaten food still on them, general disorder throughout. I wondered how different the place must have looked when Cindy and Lori were living there. Then I thought about Lori, who was dead now. And about Cindy, who had been shacked up with Reed. Those were things I didn’t want to think about. Not now.

I found the stairs and took them as quickly and silently as I could. One of them was creaky and I cursed it silently, then kept right on going. The gun in my hand didn’t feel cold anymore. It was warm now, warm and alive and ready. I hoped I wouldn’t have to use it.

I tried two doors before I found Bunkie’s bedroom. It was sort of nerve-wracking, believe me. I screwed up my courage, opened a door, and the room was empty. But when I found him I had no worries.

He was asleep.

I must have given him a bad time in New York. He was still wearing bandages and he needed a few new teeth. But on him the bandages looked good.

I stood there waiting for something, God knows what. I suppose I was waiting for him to wake up. It would be easier with him awake, easier and harder at the same time. But I couldn’t let him wake up. It wasn’t the bright thing to do, and now I had to do the bright thing all alone. Or else Cindy and I could throw in the sponge.

It was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. At first I froze completely and couldn’t do it at all. Then I thought about Reed and Baron, and I thought about Musso and Lori, and I thought about what they all would have done to us. That didn’t make it a hell of a lot easier but by then I was through thinking and ready to act.

I hit him with the butt of the gun.

Not gently, like Casper, but hard. Not over the ear, like Casper, but on the bridge of the nose. Not to knock him out, like Casper. To kill him.

It wasn’t too easy. I don’t think I could have hit him a second time, not the way I felt just then. But I didn’t have to. Once was enough. I felt bone give under the heavy gun butt and when I picked the gun up I found out that the shape of his skull wasn’t the same. There was a slight depression over his nose.

You can kill a man that way with your bare hands if you know how. It’s a kill chop, and properly executed you break off a piece of the frontal bone and drive it back into the brain, killing instantly.

It’s tough with your bare hand. You have to be good. But when you use the butt of a gun there is nothing to it at all. It’s a snap.

I took a breath, let it out, then stuck the gun back in the waistband of my trousers and reached for his pulse. It wasn’t a hellishly huge surprise not to find any pulse.

Bunkie Craig was dead.

I stood there for a few minutes and stared at him. I should have felt something — hatred for the corpse, pity, self-disgust, anything. Musso had been different — then he had a gun and so did I, and I had to shoot him to stay alive. Bunkie Craig had been a wounded man asleep and I had made sure he would sleep until Judgment Day.

But I felt nothing, nothing at all. I was a machine, a well-oiled properly primed machine with one goal in mind. I had no tears for Bunkie Craig. They were all for myself if we failed. Then I could cry. Not now.

I turned away from death and left the bedroom, found the stairs again and followed them to the bottom. I walked away from Craig and found Cindy and Casper, my girl watching him like a hawk, my prisoner still out. She looked at me and asked me with her eyes.

“Everything’s fine,” I said. And wondered if it was or not.

I didn’t kill Casper. He had things to tell us, things we had to know. I let him sleep for a few minutes, then dumped a glass of water over his face. It did the trick. He came up sputtering and shaking all at once. It made a pretty picture. When a weak man is helpless it makes him look much less like a crook. I couldn’t help wondering how a fish like Casper had gotten involved with hard guys like Reed and Baron. I had a hunch that all I had to do to find out was hand him my gun.

“What do you want?”

“Information,” I said. “Some questions.”

“Go ahead.”

“For a starter,” I said, “where’s the press?”

“Basement.”

“Take us to it.”

He got up and led the way. The basement stairs were rickety and the railing shook a little. I kept the gun pointed at the top of his spine every step of the way. He didn’t try anything.

“This way.”

We followed him to a little room off the main floor. It was pretty impressive. It didn’t look like any quick turnover operation. It was professional.

There was an automatic-feed rotary on a workbench, a stack of bleached paper, a few bills. The bills were nice new twenties hot off the presses. Just a few of them, just enough so that Reed could be sure the boy had done his job properly on the plates before he removed him from the picture.

The plates were also there. Plus a whole case of inks, all the inks necessary to print the bills. It was an amazing setup. The press would ink automatically, feed automatically, dispense bills automatically. All you had to do was hook it up and plug it in and watch it roll.

It was lovely.

The plates had number gadgets hooked up, set to turn over each time a bill was printed. No problem of the same serial number on every bill. No switching it by hand between each impression. It was perfect. All I could do was stare at it.

Then I remembered something.

“The paper,” I said. “You got the formula for bleaching the paper?”

His eyes got crafty.

“The formula,” I said. “Give.”

“If I don’t?”

“Then you die.”

He shrugged. He had a card to play now and he was making the most of it. “I die anyway,” he said, guessing rather accurately. “You killed Bunkie. You’ll kill me. Why should I make it easy for you?”

“Make it easy for yourself.”

“Huh?”

“Think,” I said. “Think what happens to you if you don’t talk. Think about matches up and down the soles of your feet. Think about thumbs popping your eyes out. Think about taking three days to die.”

I hardly recognized my voice. Evidently he did a little thinking, because his face turned a few unpleasant colors and when he spoke his voice wasn’t much more than a whisper. “You’d find it anyway,” he croaked. “The drawer.”

I found the drawer he was talking about and opened it. A slip of paper, a batch of fairly complex directions, a few bottles of chemicals. That had to be it. But I had to be sure it would work.

“Cindy,” I said. “You hold the gun. I want to tie him up while I check this out.”

I used his belt on him, then let her hold the gun while I carried out the directions. When the brew was ready I took one of the nice fresh twenties and did what I was supposed to do with it. It didn’t take long. The bill came out white and pure, not a trace of ink on it.

“It works,” I said reverently. Cindy nodded.

I turned to Casper. “More information,” I said. “Reed and Baron. You hear from them?”

He hesitated and I glared at him. “A call,” he said finally. “Last night.”

“What did they say?”

“Not much.”

He shrugged again. “They said expect them tonight. Around ten, maybe later.”

“Nothing about me or Cindy?”

“Nothing. Just that they hadn’t gotten the schlock but that they were going to roll anyway. Reed said he was through chasing wild geese. Something like that.”

That was fine. Cindy and I exchanged glances, pleased with the news. The sooner Reed was coming back, the better for us. We didn’t want to hang around any longer than we had to. Enough is enough. And Reed and Baron wouldn’t be ready for us. They would be fish in a barrel, which was fine with me. It had been hard enough. Plenty hard. Anything that made it easier was fine with both of us.

“I got a favor to ask.”

I looked at him.

“Look,” Casper went on, “you can do me a big favor. Fair enough?”

“Go ahead.”

“Kill me,” he said. “Now. I don’t want to die but I don’t want to wait either. You’re not going to let me live. You as much as said so. Get it over with right away, will you? Waiting makes my skin crawl.”

There was nothing more he could tell us, nothing I didn’t know. He was scum but he deserved that much.

“You sure you want it?”

“I’m sure.”

Cindy’s hand was on my arm. Killing in a fight was one thing, she was saying silently. Killing Reed and Baron was one thing. But killing a trussed-up man was another thing. She didn’t like it a bit. Well, hell, neither did I. But if there was another way open I couldn’t see it. If he lived we were done. There were only three of them now, three who knew the score. Reed and Baron and Casper.

They all had to go.

“How do you want it?”

“A bullet.”

I shook my head, hating myself. “I don’t want to risk the noise.”

“Muffle it with a pillow.”

I thought about that. Then I remembered Musso, and the slug in him. Same gun. Ballistics. A connection between the two killings.

I shook my head.

“Then hit me,” he said. “Knock me out. Then any way you want. Just quick and easy, that’s all.”

“Ted—”

Cindy didn’t like it, didn’t like it at all. But I couldn’t help it. Casper had had enough already. At least I could make it quick for him.

“Close your eyes.”

He closed them. I took the gun from Cindy, reversed it, gave him the butt across the front of the skull. It didn’t kill him but it knocked him cold. He slumped in the chair.

“Don’t kill him,” she said. “Not murder. Please, Ted. We can get away anyway. He’s small. He won’t chase us.”

It was a very simple equation and I spelled it out for her. “If I kill him we have a chance,” I said. “If I let him live we die. Any connection is enough to do it. Anything tying us to the rest of them, any witness left alive — that’s all we need. Then we’re dead. Murder one. The gas chamber in California. You want the gas chamber?”

She didn’t.

Neither did I.

I swung the gun again and smashed Casper’s head for him.