Elmore Leonard - Raylan

“I was told,” Floy said to his rearview mirror, “y’all take more than six minutes to come out, I take off. Delroy say to worry about my own young ass.” Floy turned in his seat to look right at the girls. “Nobody say what you doin’s easy but, come on, you walk in cool and walk out your shoppin bags full of green. Delroy told me hisself, you the best chicks robbin banks he ever had. The man loves you.”

Janie said, “That’s why he hits us?”

“You don’t listen to him, what you expect? Hey, but you get home he gives you all the Oxy you want, don’t he? You ladies of leisure aren’t you, between jobs?”

Cassie said, “We get picked up, you know who’s going down with us.”

Floy said, “Hey, all I am’s your driver.”

“Not you,” Cassie said, “Delroy. He never goes near the bank.”

“He tells us what it looks like inside,” Kim said, “and when there aren’t a lot of people.”

Cassie said, “Floy, what’s that worth?”

“A pat on the head,” Floy said, “the man’s tall enough. The man might go fifty bucks. He holds on to his dollar, let’s you do it for weed and pills.”

“And a few hundred,” Kim said, “each time.”

“He let you out to spend it?”

“Once in a while.”

“You his bank-job slaves.”

Janie said, “I go back to strippin I become a blow job slave. This ain’t so bad, we don’t ever get picked up.”

“We miss a job,” Cassie said, “we have to do one alone.”

“You ever did it you weren’t high,” Floy said, “you wouldn’t do it.”

He pulled up a half block from the bank and waited while they toked, put on shades, fixed their hats and cap down on their head good, and got out with their shopping bags.

Floy said, “Give you a full ten minutes to do your business. You cool with it? Be cool, I see y’all a little later.”

They weren’t listening.

He watched them get out and walk down the street to the bank.

T hey stopped at a glass-top table in the middle of the floor and used the backs of bank forms to write the notes they’d give the tellers. Cassie said, “I like, ‘Give me five grand or I’ll kill you.’ ” She looked at her note and added a word.

Kim said, “How do you spell withdrawal, with an a or an e?”

Janie said, “I ask for all hunnerts, the girl says she has to go get ’em. I say, ‘All right, a hunnert fifties.’ I end up taking what she gives me.”

Cassie said, “Tell her how much you want, for Christ sake.”

Kim said, “Why don’t we write the same thing three times?”

Cassie handed her note to Kim. “Here, write it the same way, all capitals. ‘GIVE ME FIVE GRAND OR I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU,’ with three exclamation marks, so she knows you mean it.”

Kim wrote the notes and they walked over to three different tellers.

In a few minutes Janie came away from the window first with her bag of bills. She felt awful, she had cramps. If they had to do another bank soon she’d stay in bed.

Now Cassie was coming.

“It works, doesn’t it? Where’s Kim?”

She was still at a window.

“Now she’s coming,” Janie said.

The bank chicks walked out and got in the BMW.

F loy listened to the girls on the way home, back to somemes (T1)moking weed now and talkative, relieved to be out of there.

Cassie saying, “We do that one before?”

Kim saying, “Banks all look alike to me.”

Cassie: “The teller goes, ‘This is my second robbery in the past month.’ Calm about it. I ask her if it was us. No, it was a guy that time. I asked how much he took. She said only a few hundred and split. Ran out the door.”

“Mine looks at the note and freaks,” Kim said. “Kept going on about having a child at home. I told her would she please empty her drawer? It wasn’t her money.”

“I told my girl,” Cassie said, “to keep a couple hundred for yourself. How’s the bank know we didn’t take it? You know what she said? ‘Really…?’ I bet she did too.”

Floy, looking at the rearview, said, “Y’all did all right, huh?” Watching Cassie count the take.

“Not bad,” Cassie said, touching Floy’s shoulder with a couple of hundred in her hand.

Floy took it saying, “Hey, I’ll boost a car for you ladies any time you want. But how come the cops aren’t on to y’all by now? Four banks already, in town or close by.”

“They think we’re working girls,” Kim said, “having fun on our lunch break.”

Floy thought they looked like weird females, walk in the bank out of sunshine in their raincoats. How come nobody seemed to notice them? He said to Janie, “Honey, you all right? You not joinin in.”

“She doesn’t feel much like doing banks,” Cassie said. “She’s got the curse.”

R aylan believed marshals were more like big-city cops than most kinds of federal agents. It’s why he walked in on the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police knowing he’d feel at home.

They met in a squad room, the detectives getting to know Raylan, asking about the transplant nurse who stole kidneys and tried to kill him. He told them about the mine-company woman who’d had a man shot in cold blood, Raylan saying he was still thinking about her. “I was to work here, her name would be up there on your board, Carol Conlan, not yet crossed out.” He told the detectives down a long table he wished he could stay here through the month, get to see Peyton Manning and the Colts at home. He might forget about this bookmaker he was looking for. “Reno Nevada?”

Buzz Hicks, the senior detective in the room, said, “Now we’re getting to it, arenng us"’t we? You’re lookin for Reno’s little girl, aren’t you? Jackie Nevada.”

Raylan said, “Isn’t Reno her stepdad?”

“That’s right,” Hicks said. “The name on her birth certificate’s Rachel Nevada, but Reno started callin her Jackie when she was a kid.”

One of the detectives down the table said, “Her mom was called Jackie. She got knocked up by some loser passin through and took up with Reno. She has the child and acts like a mother till she got tired of home life and hit the road. Was Reno named her Rachel, after his own mother, but started callin her Jackie before too long. Had a soft spot for the broad walked out on him.”

Hicks said, “Lloyd, how’d you come up with all that?”

“Talkin to her,” Lloyd said, “while we had her in custody.”

“So now,” Hicks said, “she’s raised by Reno, this suspected colored guy passin as Latino and runnin a sports book.”

“They musta got along,” Raylan said.

“Well, they lived in the same house,” Hicks said, “till she went to Butler. Listen to this, and paid her way through college playin poker at night. The only girl livin in a house with seven guys, all students. You know what they called her? ‘Mother.’ She had a poker table, cards and racks of chips. You wanted to play you had to bring your own chair or borrow one. We went over there and talked to ’em. They said you oughta see her shuffle cards.”

“I understand,” Raylan said, “she won twenty grand betting Duke over her school.”

“That’s right, but Reno says he covered her for ten, in case Butler managed to pull off a win. We asked Jackie”-Hicks turning to look down the table-“Lloyd, what’d she tell us?”

“That game,” Lloyd said, “Reno put up nada. He was too busy losin on the spread. Jackie said the students laid down twenty and that’s what she picked up.”

“You look into it?” Raylan said.

Hicks said, “What are we, the gaming commission? It was Duke minus seven, the spread BetUs Sportsbook was offerin online and Reno took a bath.”

“How’d Jackie take gettin busted?”