Elmore Leonard: Bandits

“Sister Teresa Victor spoke to Mr. Mullen…” But now she didn’t seem too sure about it. “At least she said she did.”

“She told Leo the whole story?”

“Maybe not all the details.”

“Maybe not any of ’em. What you’re talking about here, don’t you think is illegal?”

She said, “A man has vowed to kill an innocent young girl and you want to argue the legality-if I understand you right-of placing a death notice in the paper?”

He liked that, the deadpan delivery. Jack said, “Well, I guess it’s not something you could go to jail over.”

“Who would know?”

He nodded at that. “You’re right.”

She said, “What else can I tell you?”

He thought a moment and said deadpan, giving it back to her, “If you saw the colonel right now, would you touch him?”

With just the barest trace of a smile she said, “You’re having a good time, aren’t you?”

“It’s different,” Jack said, with the same hint of a smile. “What’s the guy’s name, the colonel?”

“Dagoberto Godoy.”

“Is he kinda fat and has a little thin mustache?”

“He has a mustache, but he’s trim, you might say good-looking.”

Jack said, “Oh.”

He brought Amelita Sosa out in a plastic body bag on a wheeled mortuary cot, past empty cars parked along the back of the infirmary building, to the hearse standing in the sun, its rear door open. With the cot touching the step plate he squeezed the handles to collapse the front legs first, then the rear legs as he slipped the cot into the hearse, pushed down the lock button on the door, and closed it firmly.

Jack glanced over at Sister Lucy in her Calvins and heels talking to the doctor who had been in Nicaragua and two Daughters of Charity, the little bowlegged one Sister Teresa Victor, who had been here about fifty years. Jack stood for several moments looking off, hands clasped behind his dark suit in a patient funeral director’s pose, thinking that was quite an attractive girl he’d helped into the body bag, not like any leper he had ever seen in pictures. He had touched her zipping up the bag, making sure the zipper didn’t get snagged in her flowery shirt. He hadn’t noticed any brown spots on her face or arms. He gave Sister Lucy another look before strolling up to the driver’s side of the hearse and getting in. By the time he’d started the engine and revved it a couple of times the passenger side door opened and Sister Lucy got in.

“I don’t mean to rush you, but Amelita’s back there in a plastic bag.”

“Oh, my God.” She turned in the seat.

“Not yet. Wait’ll we’re out.”

“Can she breathe?”

“Enough, I imagine.”

A car came from the drive in front of the infirmary and fell in behind them. There were three cars in line by the time they passed through the gate. Jack watched them in his outside mirror.

“Okay. Now.”

Sister Lucy turned to slide open the glass partition, then got all the way around, up on her knees.

“Can you reach it?”

“Barely.”

“Pull the cot toward you.”

She said, “There.” Then began speaking in Spanish to Amelita, hunched over the seat back, her linen jacket pulled up and the curve of her hip in the tight jeans right there next to him. This was different, all right. He glanced at her hip, the neat round shape, without really looking. She was the toucher-what would she do if he touched her? There was touching and there was touching. He could touch the girls he knew bent over the seat and not one of them would think anything of it. They might say, “Hey,” but they wouldn’t be surprised. It wouldn’t mean anything. An affectionate pat. Maybe a little squeeze.

He kept his eyes on the road and began to think about the two movies he had seen on TV in just the past week. In one of them Richard Burton and two other guys are on a life raft with Joan Collins after the ship they were on is torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. She seems to go for Richard, but holds him off when he makes the moves and Richard can’t figure out why this girl in the strange-looking playsuit would turn him down. It’s not till the end of the picture you find out that Joan Collins is a nun and the strange-looking white outfit she has on is probably nun underwear. Joan Collins was pretty young then. The other movie was the one where Deborah Kerr, in a pure white nun’s habit framing her face, her nice nose, is with Robert Mitchum, a U.S. marine, on an island in the South Pacific during the war. Most of the time they’re hiding from the Japs in a cave, Deborah and Robert Mitchum alone, looking at each other. You know sooner or later he’s going to make the moves on her, but you don’t know what she’s going to do. Both movies about guys and nuns in intimate situations facing danger together. Something else occurred to Jack while he was thinking about it. He remembered from the TV listings that both movies first came out in 1957. He wasn’t sure why he remembered it, though he did notice that kind of thing. And in 1957, when he was twelve years old, he was in love with his seventh-grade teacher, Sister Mary Lucille. Lucille? Lucy? Take it another step. Ten years or so later he fell sort of in love with Sally Field, with her cute little nose, who happened to be in that television series “The Flying Nun” and wore that gull-winged wimple, the head covering, that was not unlike the one the Daughters of Charity used to wear, the same Daughters of Charity that were at Carville.

For whatever that was worth.

There were girls he knew who loved to speculate about signs. Helene would say, “Hey, spooky,” if he told her about it. Especially if they were smoking a little dope.

The leggy Calvins came around on the seat.

“Amelita has to go to the bathroom.”

“We just left the place.”

“Does that mean you won’t stop?”

They weren’t even to St. Gabriel. It was there ahead of them, a block of storefronts and a few cars, the town half dead on a Sunday afternoon. He crept through the main intersection and kept going until he saw the Exxon station on the right, no cars at the pumps, and rolled toward the shade of the canopy. Restrooms would be on the other side of the station. He’d pull around and back in, like he was getting air for the rear tires and sneak Amelita into the Women’s.

There was a café across the road, four young guys between a car and a pickup truck, hanging out, looking this way now. He could give St. Gabriel something to talk about all week. This girl, honest to God, gets out of the back end of a hearse …

“I don’t think it’s open.”

He braked to a sudden stop near the row of gas pumps and Sister Lucy reached out to the dashboard.

“You see anyone around?”

No, he didn’t and the service doors were down. He should’ve noticed that, no business, nobody home. They’d left a light on inside the station. He could see it through the big spring tire special painted on the window. There were credit card emblems on the glass door and another decal he knew something about: VAS, black letters on a gold field, vidette alarm systems guarding the place against breaking and entering. The place looked old, run-down, not the kind you’d bother with.

Now what? There was the café across the road, the farm boys still looking this way. He glanced at the outside mirror and his gaze held on a car parked directly behind them even with the gas pumps.

A black Chrysler sedan. One of the cars that had followed them out of the center. A guy in a tan suit came out from behind the wheel. Now another guy joined him at the front of the car. Dark-haired guys, Latinos. Now they were out of sight, behind the hearse.

“Tell Amelita to play dead and lock your door. Right now. Quick.”