Elmore Leonard - The Big Bounce

Bob Jr. said, “What do I care what you do?”

He was still sitting there when they left.

Neither of them spoke until they were down out of the woods and moving along the back road to the migrant camp. He could feel her watching him and finally he said, “You got what you wanted, didn’t you?”

“That wasn’t very nice, trying to blame me.” Nancy sat against her door, watching him. “How do you feel?”

“Like I’ve been hit in the face.”

“You don’t look so bad. Here.” She handed him her glass and watched him finish it, holding the wine in his mouth and letting it burn before swallowing it. His teeth felt sore and loose in his jaw; when he worked it, he could hear a clicking sound close to his ear. His hands hurt and they looked awful from hitting the guy in the face after he’d started bleeding. Nancy took the glass from him and he held the steering wheel low with one hand. Up ahead he saw a group of pickers coming out of the field, several of them walking along the side of the road and looking back as they heard the car coming.

“It settles one thing,” Ryan said.

“What?”

“I’m not going in that hunting lodge. I don’t care how much is in there.”

Nancy stared straight ahead through the windshield; she was in no hurry. Looking at Ryan finally, she said, “I knew you were going to say that. I didn’t know when or how you’d say it, but I knew you would.”

“Well, you’re smarter than I am,” Ryan said, “because I just found out.”

“No, you didn’t. You might have thought you were going to rob the place,” Nancy said, “but you never would. I thought you might change, but you haven’t. You’re a small-time breaking and entering man, Jackie. That’s all you are. You can dream about taking fifty thousand, but you’d never do it.”

“Look,” Ryan said, “he saw us up there. The police say to him, ‘Did you see anybody around the place the last few days?’ And right away he remembers us. He remembers me and he starts to put things together.”

“You’re a little upset,” Nancy said.

“You bet I am.”

“You’re mad because you think I provoked the fight.”

“That’s something else,” Ryan said.

“But the point is, Bob seeing us doesn’t prove anything.”

“I’m not going to give it a chance to,” Ryan said.

“We’ll talk about it later, after I’ve cleaned you up. How does that sound?”

“I don’t see there’s anything to talk about.”

They were coming up on the pickers now, who were edging back from the shoulder of the road to let the car pass. As they approached them Ryan said, “Put the glass on the floor.”

Frank Pizarro came into the light of the shed doorway after the car had passed and stood looking at the dust hanging in the air. Billy Ruiz was on the other side of the road; he had come out of the field, crossed the ditch and stood at the edge of the road gazing after the car; now he crossed over to the shed.

“That looked like Jack,” he said.

“Sure it was,” Pizarro said. “Showing us his car and his little chickie.”

“I wave to him,” Billy Ruiz said, “but he was already by me.”

“He saw you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“He saw you,” Pizarro said. “He saw all of us.”

“Then, why didn’t he wave?”

“He’s Mr. Jack Ryan in the car now.”

Billy Ruiz shook his head. “No, he didn’t see us. He would have waved.”

“Christ, shut up with the waving! He don’t care about you. He don’t see you anymore.”

Pizarro turned from the doorway into the darkness of the shed. He found a cigarette and lit it and then went down on his blanket to get away from Billy Ruiz and the rest of them so he could think about Ryan and the girl with no clothes on and get something straight in his mind.

All right, he had sold the beer case of wallets to the girl. Last night was something he couldn’t stop thinking about: the girl coming out of the swimming pool and drying herself in front of him, not trying to hide herself, while they discussed Jack Ryan and the wallets. She put on the blouse and the shorts and he told her again, five hundred, that was the price. Then the girl going in the house and coming out with eighty dollars, with her blouse still unbuttoned. He should have kept the beer case until she got more money, but there was the eighty; it wasn’t any five hundred, but she was offering it to him.

He should have sold her the wallets one at a time. Go back once a week and she would have to pay him without any clothes on.

He should have taken her in the house or put her down on the grass. She had been asking for it and it would be something to do it to her, Mr. Ritchie’s girl; but because she was Mr. Ritchie’s girl, he had not touched her, because he couldn’t believe it-the not having any clothes on-and because he had been afraid if he touched her, something would happen. He didn’t know what. Something.

All right, he should have done a lot of things it was too late to do. But he still had one thing left, if he could get it straight in his mind how to say it to her and make her believe it. He still knew about Ryan and he could still call the police and tell them it was Ryan that robbed the place Sunday.

So the idea was to go to her at night when Ryan wasn’t there and tell her how much it would cost for him not to call the police, sticking to the five hundred this time and not coming down to any lousy eighty bucks.

He began to put words together, the way he would say it to her. Like: “If you don’t have the money, have your boyfriend steal you some. I don’t care where you get it.”

The important words: “Get me five hundred or I call the police.”

But as he lay on his blanket smoking the cigarette, in this dim oven of a place with its tin-shed roof and smell of mold, Frank Pizarro said to himself, Wait. What are you talking about the police for? Why the police. Man, you see it? There’s somebody better than the police.

Tell her, she don’t pay, you write a letter to Mr. Ritchie.

AT FIRST, opening his eyes and moving, feeling the soreness in his shoulders, Ryan didn’t know where he was. Settling again, stretching his legs and moving his hands over the cool aluminum arms of the lounge chair, he had a good feeling from the soreness, a feeling of having worked and finished something. He was glad he had fought the guy and it was over. He was glad the guy had seen them.

Maybe he was never going in at all and it had been just talk. Maybe if Bob Jr. hadn’t showed up, he would have thought of some other excuse. Or maybe when the time came he would have taken off. He wasn’t sure.

Or maybe he was just tired. No, that wasn’t it. He was tired all right, and sore; but that didn’t have anything to do with it. It was something else.

It was a feeling of relief. He could come right out and say to himself, You don’t have to break into the place. You don’t have to take the money and go through all that. You don’t have to get involved and worry about her bragging about it to somebody. You don’t have to be waiting for something to happen. You don’t have to even think about it anymore.

He felt like a cigarette. He touched his shirt pocket; it was flat. He couldn’t see if there were cigarettes on the umbrella table; it was too dark over there. Turning to look at the table, he turned a little more to look at the house. The room off the patio was dark, though a faint light was coming from somewhere in the back part of the room. The upstairs windows were dark. He wondered if she had gone to bed. He didn’t know what time it was. After ten anyway. He must have slept about three hours. He thought about going for a swim to loosen up but decided it would be too much trouble and it wouldn’t help much. Tomorrow when he woke up, he’d be so stiff and sore it would hurt to move and there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He wondered why she hadn’t left a light on.