The Best American Mystery Stories 2002
- Автор: Грейди Джеймс, Камински Стюарт Мелвин
- Год: 2002
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-12494-7
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Mystery Stories 2002». Краткое содержание книги:
“A few thousand, huh?” Lewis smirked.
“That’s what I said, smart guy. A few. What, did you think you and your friends were going to get rich here today?”
“Four suitcases full of money,” Lewis pointed out. “A week’s take from all of Cicero Charley’s parlors—”
“That’s not parlor money,” Ralph said evenly. “That’s football-game parlay-card money from all the cigar stores and candy stores and bars. Ninety-five percent of it is minimum bets. You’ve got yourself four bags of mostly dollar bills, Lewis. Maybe twenty, twenty-five thousand, maximum.” Ralph pointed a stiff finger at him. “But you got a million bucks’ worth of grief from Cicero Charley.”
A stunned look on his face, Lewis guided his friend into the closet and closed the door. Turning, he found Hoxie and Potts staring at him with sick expressions. Stepping over to Potts, he took the suitcase keys out of his hand.
“Do the door,” he said to Hoxie.
The black man shoved the revolver into a coat pocket, drew a ball-peen hammer from under his belt, and from another pocket got out a handful of four-inch carpenter nails. As he proceeded to nail the closet door shut, Lewis knelt and unlocked one of the suitcases. It was filled with sheaves of cash held together by rubber bands. Checking half a dozen of them, he found that Ralph had been telling him the truth: there were occasional fives and tens mixed in the currency, but the vast majority of the bills were singles.
“We done stepped in something soft now,” Hoxie said, looking down from his hammering.
“What the hell we gonna do?” Potts asked, his voice breaking as he stood there incongruously with a large automatic pistol in each hand.
“For now, we’re gonna follow the plan and get out of here,” Lewis said. He bobbed his chin at Hoxie. “Finish the door.” To Potts, “Get the car.” He himself tore all the phone wires out of the wall, including the hotline.
Moments later, Potts pulled up in a rented Buick and opened the trunk. Lewis and Hoxie carried the suitcases out one at a time and loaded them. Then they all crowded into the front seat and Potts drove off.
“We got two decisions to make,” Lewis said tensely. “One: Do we follow our plan to spring the kid — or do the three of us make a run for it now? Two: If we do spring him, do we give him part of the money or just cut him loose?”
“Making a run from here ain’t gonna give us much of a head start,” Potts reasoned. “We started this because we were sorry for the kid. If we don’t go ahead with that part of it, we’ll really feel like fools. I think we ought to spring him.”
“Me too,” Hoxie agreed. “But I don’t think we ought to split the dough with him. We gon’ need it a lot worse’n him. I mean, Cicero Charley ain’t gon’ be after him. I say give him the clothes we bought him and a few hundred bucks. Let him take his chances.”
Lewis thought it over for a few moments, then concurred. “Sounds fair to me. Head for the hospital.”
They parked in the visitors’ lot of the Cook County Hospital complex and unobtrusively made their way to the Radiology Building. When they got upstairs to Outpatient Radiology, they entered and signed in as usual, then took separate seats in the familiar waiting room as they always did. From past experience, Lewis had already calculated that the odds were five to four that they wouldn’t have to wait more than fifteen minutes. He was right; they only had to wait eleven.
When the two prison guards walked in with Alan Lampley between them, they proceeded, as usual, directly to the treatment room door. As they were about to enter, Lewis nodded to Potts and the lanky Southerner jumped to his feet and drew one of the guns taken from the money couriers.
“Don’t shoot or I’ll move!” he ordered. The guards, Alan Lampley, Lewis, and Hoxie all looked at him with mixed expressions. Potts swallowed and said, “I mean, don’t m-m-move or I’ll shoot!”
“Take it easy, mister,” one of the guards said. “Nobody’s moving.”
Hoxie quickly stepped up behind the guards and disarmed them. “We gon’ be able to open a gun shop pretty soon,” he muttered.
Just then, the door to the treatment room opened and the radiology technician came out. Potts turned the gun on him. “Hand it! Put your holds up! Damn it, I mean hold it and put your hands up!”
The technician froze. Alan Lampley looked around incredulously. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“You’ll find out in a minute,” Lewis told him. “All right, everybody into the treatment room. Move it!”
In the treatment room, Lewis searched the guards, found keys, and unlocked Alan Lampley’s cuffs and waist chain. “Get out of that jumpsuit,” he said. To the technician, he said, “Take off that lab coat and your pants. Hurry up!”
In less than five minutes, Lewis and the others had the two guards and the technician, in his underwear, handcuffed and chained to the floor-mounted Cobalt-6o X-ray machine in the treatment room.
“You won’t get away with this,” one of the guards warned.
“Five to two you’re right,” Lewis agreed. He turned to his cohorts and their liberated prisoner. “Okay, let’s go. Straight down to the fire stairs at the end of the hall.”
Six minutes later, they were in the rented Buick, driving off the parking lot.
From the rear seat, where he sat with Hoxie, Alan Lampley said, “You guys are crazy. You just got yourselves in a hell of a lot of trouble.”
“We thought you’d consider it a favor,” Lewis said wryly. “So you wouldn’t have to spend your last six months or so in prison.”
“I don’t have six months,” Alan said. “They figure three at the most.”
“Well, three, then,” Potts said, glancing back over his shoulder from the driver’s seat. “Wouldn’t you rather be out than in?”
“Sure, I would,” Alan admitted. “But not for the trouble you guys are into now. I mean, why’d you do it? You don’t even know me, or anything about me—”
“Yeah, we do, son,” said Hoxie. “We know why you’re in jail; about your sister and that drug dealer an’ all.”
“Anyway,” said Lewis, “we’re doing it for ourselves, too. We pulled a stickup this morning to get enough dough so we could all live out what time we got left in a little style. On’y thing is, we didn’t get as much as we figured. But we can still give you enough dough to get out of town, maybe go out to Las Vegas or L.A. or someplace and at least die a free man.”
“Canada,” Alan said. “I want to go to Canada.”
Lewis grimaced. “What the hell for? It’s cold up there. Don’t you wanna go someplace warm?”
“I’ve got an uncle in Canada,” Alan explained. “He went up there years ago to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War. He’s got a little badger ranch up near Moose Jaw, that’s in Saskatchewan. Raises badgers and harvests their hair like people shear sheep for their wool. They use the hair to make expensive shaving brushes. If I could get up to my uncle’s ranch, I know he’d let me stay there and look after me for the time I’ve got left.”
“Wouldn’t work,” Lewis said, shaking his head. “You couldn’t get there without no ID of any kind: no driver’s license, no passport, nothing. You’d never get in.”
“I’d get in, all right,” Alan promised. “I’ve been up there and gone on fishing trips with my uncle. There’s places in the Grasslands National Park on the Montana border where you can just walk into Canada like you were crossing the street. You just get me a Greyhound bus ticket to Shelby, Montana. I’ll take it from there.”
Lewis and Potts exchanged looks, and Hoxie nodded to them in the rearview mirror. “You got a deal, kid,” Lewis said.