John Connolly - Bad Men

“Well?” he said to Braun. “Look at it.”

“Looks good to me,” said Braun. Dexter had run out of movies to watch on his DVD player, and had turned on the TV. Braun couldn’t concentrate on his book with the movie playing, so he had resigned himself to watching the screen. There was nothing else for them to do anyway, not until Scarfe contacted them.

“Nah. I ain’t saying she ain’t pretty or nothing. Hell, I’d fuck her for free. But her mouth…I don’t know, it’s just too big for her face. Who is she, anyway?”

“Penelope Cruz.”

“She married to him or something?”

“No, Cruz with a z . I hear he’s dating her, though.”

“Fucking Tom Cruise. You think it’s true about him?”

“What? That he’s-”

“Yeah.”

“No. You think he could be going out with her if he was?”

“It might be a front.”

“Hell of a front. Hell of an ass too.”

“Yeah, but that mouth. It just looks wrong… ”

Tell and Shepherd were sitting in the IHOP beside the Days Inn, eating pancakes with lots of sugar and butter and cinnamon on top. Shepherd was listening to Tell. Tell was full of shit sometimes, but it was kind of interesting shit.

Like, there they were in the IHOP, and this guy had rolled by in his wheelchair. He was wearing khakis and one of those black POW/ MIA T-shirts. His legs were gone from the knees down, and his trousers were pinned up. His arms were huge. Shepherd figured the guy must be pushing himself up the side of mountains to get arms that big. Then Tell said: “You know my brother was a cripple?”

“No shit?”

“Lost a leg in Vietnam, couple of months before Tet.”

“Which leg?”

“Right leg.”

“No shit?”

“Came home on crutches with one trouser leg pinned up, just like that guy, except he still had one leg. He was real upset.”

“Man had a right to be upset, he lost a leg.”

“Sure. Terrible thing, losing a limb. He stayed in his room, drinking, sleeping in his own filth. Wasn’t nobody could get through to him. Then he got this phone call. Ed Sullivan-you remember Ed Sullivan?”

“Yeah, he was a strange-looking guy. Head and body didn’t look like they matched.”

“He had short arms, was what it was. Anyway, Ed was a big supporter of the war, and he wanted he should do his part, so he invited some vets on to the show and my brother was one of them. He loved Ed Sullivan.”

“So he went to the show?”

“Hell, yeah, he went. He and his buddies were flown in, driven to the studio in big limousines, given front-row seats, the whole deal. They’d all lost limbs in Vietnam-arms and legs and shit. Ed insisted that all the guys should be cripples, otherwise they could be just anybody, you know? Anyhow, during the dress rehearsal for the show, Ed calls for the lights and cameras to be pointed at them, and he starts making a big fuss, and the audience starts whooping and hollering. So Ed looks at the boys, and smiles that big smile he had, and tells them to take a bow. I mean, it’s Ed Sullivan, telling them to take a bow. So my brother and his buddies, they stand up to take their bow.”

“Yeah? So they stand up…?”

“And my brother fell over. He only had one leg. He stood up, kind of wavered for a second, then went sideways. Banged his head. Most of the other guys who’d lost legs managed to stay upright by supporting themselves on their seats, although they all looked kind of unsteady. Not my brother, though. He was gonna stand up straight and take a bow if Ed Sullivan told him to. He loved Ed Sullivan.”

“A man’s got to love another man to try to stand straight on one leg just because he told him to do it. Your brother must have been kind of pissed at Ed, though.”

“No, he wasn’t pissed at all. Fact was, he said he kind of appreciated someone treating him like he still had both legs. So after that my brother got himself a false leg. He wanted to be able to stand upright next time someone important told him to. He used to take it off to sleep, though. That’s how he died. There was a fire in his apartment block, and when the alarms went off there was smoke and shit, and he died trying to find his false leg. He didn’t want to be no cripple hobbling out. He wanted to preserve his dignity. The Ed Sullivan Show taught him that. He loved Ed Sullivan.”

“No shit.”

“No shit.”

Shepherd thought that was kind of interesting. That was what he meant about Tell.

“We did a bank job once, over in Pensacola,” said Shepherd, not wanting to be outdone in the storytelling stakes. “Spent two weeks casing the bank. This was in the old days, before all them new security systems, and lasers and shit.”

“It was a different time. Man needs a degree to take down a bank now.”

“Yeah, they do make it hard for a man these days, and no mistake. Anyway, we get to the bank, morning of the job. Manager goes in, his staff after him, and we come in behind them before they got a chance to close the door.”

“And?”

“And there’s two guys with masks already in there, waiting to hold up the bank. They’d come in through the roof during the night, and they were standing in there when the manager arrived.”

“No shit?”

“Well, we were kind of perturbed, you know? We must have been casing the same bank during that same two weeks, and we never saw each other.”

“Can happen.”

“Surely can. So we got this moment, right, where we’re looking at them wearing their masks, and they’re looking at us wearing our masks, and the manager and his people are looking at all of us. So I say, ‘The fuck are you doing? This is our bank.’ And this other guy says: ‘The fuck it is. We spent a month on this job.’ ”

“Bullshit.”

“No, I don’t think so. Coming in through the roof, that takes some planning.”

Tell relented. “I guess.”

“So there’s a standoff, until I say, ‘Well, why don’t we split the take?’ and the two guys look at each other and kind of shrug, and say, ‘Okay.’ ”

“So you split the take?”

“Fifty-fifty, seeing as how they’d had to come in through the roof and all.”

“That was damn Christian of y’all.”

“Yep, mighty white. Like you said, it was a different time. That happened now, there’d be a bloodbath. But people had principles then. They had standards.”

“So y’all went away happy?”

“Kind of. The two guys got to their car and we held them up, took their share of the cash.”

“Survival of the fittest.”

“Absolutely. We didn’t kill them, though.”

“Course not. You had standards.”

“Damn straight. It was a different time.”

“You said it. A different time. More pancakes?”

“Sure,” said Shepherd. “Why not?”

Willard stood in the parking lot of the Days Inn, smoking a cigarette. There was the IHOP maybe one hundred feet away, where Shepherd and Tell were eating. Willard could see them at the window. They hadn’t asked him to come along with them. They were probably talking about him at this very minute, plotting how to get him out of the way. Willard wasn’t too worried about Tell, but Shepherd and Dexter were real threats, maybe Braun too.

Willard hated Shepherd, Dexter, and Braun.

He pulled the baseball cap lower on his head and looked at himself in the side mirror of the van. With his blond hair covered, and a thin growth of beard, he didn’t look too much like the picture of him that they were showing on TV. Moloch had warned him against going out, but Willard wanted some air.

He started walking and had almost finished his cigarette by the time he reached the sidewalk. He took a last long drag on the butt and watched the woman approach. She stood at the entrance to the theater parking lot. Willard registered the disappointment on her face.