Elmore Leonard - The Big Bounce

“Because you know I know and you wouldn’t sleep at night until you were arrested.”

“After we get it, then what? How do we get away?”

“We don’t,” Nancy said. “We hide the money.”

“Where?”

“In the beach house.”

“Come on.”

“Really. It’s the best place; right under Ray’s nose. You stay in Geneva Beach until Ray closes the place for the summer, then break in and get it. I’ll stay with him for about two weeks after we’re back in Detroit, then we’ll have a fight and I’ll leave him.”

“We meet in Detroit,” Ryan said. “Then what?”

Nancy smiled, hunching her shoulders like a little girl. “I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

“I think I’d want to rest awhile.”

“Or take a cruise. The kind I was telling you about?”

“I could get my own boat.”

“And a car and new clothes. Anything you want.”

Ryan nodded, thinking about it. “Just about anything.” He looked at her. “What about you? What do you want?”

Nancy took a sip of Cold Duck. “Do you really want to know?”

“Sure, tell me.”

“I might go out to Hollywood. I think twenty-five thousand would be just enough of a stake.”

“You mean it?”

“Why not? Hook myself a producer. A nice rich producer.”

“Just like that.”

“I think I could fake most of them out of their socks in about four minutes.”

“You mean out of their jocks.”

She shrugged. “I bet I could.”

“Do you know how to act?”

“Fake that too,” Nancy said. “That’s what acting is, isn’t it?”

“You’re not planning on us staying together, then.”

Nancy shrugged again. “I don’t know. Right now I don’t need a lover, Jackie, I need a breaking and entering man.”

Jackie again. He didn’t say anything.

“I want the money,” Nancy said. “If I have to justify wanting it, then it’s because I think Ray owes it to me. You can do it for whatever reason you like. I’m not your conscience.”

“All right, you want me to think about it?”

“If you can’t say yes or no right now.”

“You’ve been thinking about it awhile, I haven’t.”

“It’s fairly simple,” Nancy said. “You either want it or you don’t.”

“I have to look at the lodge first,” Ryan said. “Then I’ll let you know.”

“Tomorrow’s Wednesday. If they’re bringing the money Friday, you won’t have much time.”

“Maybe I can borrow this guy’s car I work for. Go over there sometime tomorrow. Tell him I got to get something in town.”

“Creepy Ray,” Nancy said. “He took my keys or you could use mine.”

Ryan nodded. “I heard you had a car.” He tried to picture her running the two guys off the road and he wanted to ask her about it, but he said, “What if I could start your car?”

“Without a key?”

“If you can get me some wire, it’s done.”

It was a friend of Ryan’s, Bud Long, who had taught him how to jump wires: how to short out the starter and run a wire from the battery to the coil making sure to hook it on the right side of the coil so it wouldn’t burn out the points. Bud Long worked for a loan company in Detroit, on Livernois, up among the miles of used car lots, and most of the paper the company carried was for car loans. When a customer got behind in his payments and wouldn’t acknowledge receiving the payment notices, Bud Long would go out at night and repossess the car with a jump wire. Sometimes Ryan and one or two others would go with him for something to do and Bud Long would let them jump the car. Usually they drove off and that was it. But a couple of times, when somebody saw them, they had to leave the car fast with the hood up and the wire hanging, cutting between houses to Bud Long’s car parked on the next street. Once they took a 16-gauge shotgun blast in the rear quarter panel, but they got away. (Bud Long said the son of a bitch probably owed money on the shotgun too.)

That was all right, jumping cars with Bud Long; it was legal, or at least it seemed legal, and Bud knew what he was doing. But then a couple of the other guys started jumping cars when they wanted to go somewhere and didn’t have a ride and it was dumb to get involved in that. Ryan rode with them a few times when they came by for him. They’d drive the car downtown or wherever they were going and leave it. But one time-two thirty in the morning on East Jefferson near the Uniroyal plant-the dumb son of a bitch he was with, Billy Morrison, threw an empty beer bottle out the window with a cop car a half block behind them. They were pulled over, checked, and taken to the station on Beaubien and charged with car theft. Ryan called the older of his two sisters, Marion, whose husband was a lawyer, and told him what happened, and his brother-in-law, Carl, a sweetheart, told him to stay in jail, maybe it would teach him a goddamn lesson. He was arraigned on the warrant the next day, pleading not guilty; his bond was set at $500. But because he couldn’t afford the bond without his brother-in-law’s help, he spent eight days in the Wayne County Jail. At the Examination, Carl talked to Billy Morrison’s lawyer, the two of them standing, nodding at each other with the briefcases under their arms, and before he knew it, he and Billy Morrison had copped a plea of guilty to the charge of Unlawfully Driving Away an Automobile, UDAA, and were sent to Morning Sessions Court. Because it was their first offense, they were both placed on a year’s probation and his brother-in-law took him out to lunch so they could “have a little talk.”

The next day-and this, Ryan figured, must be the world’s record for poor timing-he was back in Morning Sessions sitting on the bench in the fenced-off section with the stew bums and colored hookers waiting to go before the same judge. Not Billy Morrison and Jack Ryan this time. Just Jack Ryan.

It was poor timing and it was also dirty rotten luck of the worst kind because it should never have happened.

He had gone to lunch with Carl for the little talk; he had gone to a movie and then home. He had to go home sometime, so he went home.

They were still living in the apartment in Highland Park: he and his mother and, for the past seven months, his other sister, Peggy, and her husband, Frank, who worked at a bakery on the night shift. Ryan was sleeping on the studio couch in the dining room again. The three of them were there when he got home. His mother told him how worried she had been and how Carl had told her not to visit him in jail or go to the court hearing. He remembered they had already eaten. (They ate at 5:30 because Frank had to leave for work by quarter to seven and he liked to sit and watch TV and let his dinner digest.) But they hadn’t saved anything because they didn’t know Jack was coming home. He remembered his mother looking in her purse, then asking Frank didn’t she loan him five dollars last week?-asking him twice because he was watching TV, sitting in his T-shirt with his stringy neck and his dark hair combed in a high roll, his sister Peggy sitting next to Frank, sitting straight with bobby pins in her mouth, putting her hair up, and Frank finally saying he had already paid her back. Ryan said he had money and he remembered his mother saying don’t go to Major’s, go down to Safeway, the hamburger was three pounds for a dollar ten this week. He remembered her saying that pork roasts were on sale, too, and if he saw a nice one and had enough extra money, they could have it for Sunday; Frank was bringing home a pie. He remembered her saying she wished there was an A&P in the neighborhood and he remembered, going out the door, his sister saying yes, A&P was all right, but you didn’t get any stamps there.

He didn’t go to Safeway. He went to a bar on Woodward up near Seven Mile and drank beer. Maybe they were still talking about the A&P. The way it was before and the way he would always remember it, his father would be in the dining room playing solitaire and his mother would be in the living room with the radio on, the thin, slick-haired man and the lady beginning to get fat. They hardly ever spoke to each other. His mother would bring up the worn carpeting or that she had seen a nice-looking graduation dress for Peggy and his dad would say, “Uh-huh, all right. Fine.” With the cigarette smoke curling up past his eyes, squinting down at the cards. Ryan had wondered if they ever made love. The slick-haired man with his hair combed and his teeth brushed and the beginning-to-get-fat lady lying there wondering if they should trade the Bendix washer in or try to get another year out of it. The man would be smoking a cigarette after and the lady would finally say, “You know, we’ve had that Bendix nine years.” Ryan couldn’t picture them first meeting or dating or the way they were before he was born. But something must have happened. Something, and he would bet anything it was because of money. Counting pennies to buy hamburger. Maybe that tightens you up and once it does, you stay tightened. His dad was different sometimes when they were alone. He would seem to know about things. He would say ask me a capital and Ryan would ask it and his dad would know it. Even Central America. He would know all about places like Guadalcanal and Tarawa and tell about times men had lost their lives because the brass had screwed up, miscalculated, though he had not been in the war himself. He would tell what was wrong with the DSR, how they didn’t have enough buses and how the jigs were getting all the good runs because the big shots were afraid of the racial situation. (Later, when Ryan was working with Leon Woody, he wondered what his dad would have thought of it. He wondered if he would have started breaking into houses if his dad hadn’t died. And then he would think: Why? What’s that got to do with the price of anything? And he would think about something else.)