Стивен Хантер - G-Man

“You, sir, you lead me into the vault and point out the cash drawers. No need to be a hero. Come on, now, git!” He gestured with his handgun. But he was good at this, and had not forgotten the president’s office, so instead of following the clerk into the vault, he stationed himself just beside the door to the office, figuring it would have required just this much time for the president to win the debate with himself over the requirements of Duty, and just as he emerged with a double-barreled gun, J.P. clunked him hard on the head, but at nowhere near killing power, and the gentleman went down, dropped the gun, and curled up in a fetal position, his hands flying to the gash in his head.

“Bet many’s the time you’ve wanted to do that,” J.P. said to the clerk, who’d obligingly pulled open a drawer with tens and twenties stacked within. “Now, fill it up!”

The clerk filled the bag.

“That too,” said J.P., pointing to an unsealed stack of clearly fresh-from-the-mint bills.

“Won’t do you no good,” said the clerk. “Them numbers is recorded. Use ’em and you get arrested.”

“Granddad, ’preciate the help, but you let me worry about the technical questions.”

“Hurry up there, Clyde,” yelled Bonnie. “These ladies can’t stand around much longer, they’ve got a tea to attend.”

She smiled, but the flinty Arkansas gals had no smiles for robbers and instead sniffed their noses imperiously. Snobs everywhere, even in Mavis!

Then Helen noticed through the window: that damned sheriff was back, right across the street.

Les studied on it. If the State boys were laying a trap for Helen and J.P., it occurred to him he had to act now. He saw it in a second: he could ease across the bridge, nice and smiley, waving, get up close, ask them something about the road to Dallas or somewhere, and then go to his gun fast. Close in, hardball, that should do it. Two pops a man, so close it would all be head shooting. Then he’d…

Then he’d what?

Wait for J.P. and Helen to show? Yeah, sit there waiting, lounging on the fender of a car, with two dead cops. Good idea. Meanwhile, what if Helen and J.P. didn’t show? What if, just as he fired, six more cop cars came around the bend? What if… A trickle of sweat jiggled down his forehead from under his hatband.

He did not like this at all. With action, it was all about now. This second, this instant. You were lucky or you weren’t. The bullet whacked you or it missed and hit the mom pushing the buggy. Too bad for her, but that’s the way it went.

This sitting, waiting stuff was for the birds. He found himself doing unmanly things, like a dame or a nancy, sitting there with a boob’s look on his mug, trying to guess how cops would act, trying to figure where he could run to, hoping he was lucky instead of making his own luck. But… he was no good at that stuff, never had been. He was the guy you want with the Thompson in hand, not bluffing and charming his way through touchy situations on savvy and intuition.

He found himself breathing hard, his focus scattered, the gases in his stomach really scorching and wasting his pipes, the sick, weak need to take a crap. It was as if his whole personality was falling apart — him, the famous, the legendary, the frightening BABY FACE NELSON, in whose presence all men trembled and all women got, even if they never admitted it, the tingle. Because everybody admired the fellow who took things and didn’t just sit there hoping someone would hand him something gratis.

He thought it through again. This time, the best way would be to avoid the bridge, wade across the river — but it looked pretty damned deep — and lay up just under the lip of the incline where the riverbank rose to meet the flats. That way, if the State cops netted Helen and J.P., he could move on them if he had to, as they’d be occupied, and it could still work out. And maybe he wouldn’t even have to pop the cops, could just disarm them, toss their pistolas in the Red, shoot out their tires, and go on. See, people got all agitated if you killed a cop, to say nothing about how angry the cops themselves got.

But even as he was sorting this out, he wasn’t moving. And doubts soon arrived that suggested the plan was a mess waiting to happen next. Maybe he couldn’t wade the river, got swept away, drowned. What a way to go! What if he’s down there and Helen and J.P. come by, don’t see him, figure he caught a ride into the next town, and rented a tourist camp cabin and—

No matter which way he figured it, it came to catastrophe. So he just sat there, torn between doom and desolation, grief and anguish, thinking this whole thing was a goddamned stupid idea and he was screwed for certain.

“Now, you people,” said J.P., “you had it easy, except for that clunk on the head of the president there. Don’t make us mad. No screaming, no yelling, no alarms, no nothing, you just hang cool as lemonade for three minutes till we clear town. You’ll have stories to tell your children for years. You’ll never pay for a drink in this town again!”

Nobody seemed inclined to disagree with him, though the three elderly women kept that prim, holier-than-thou look on their pinched and dried-out faces.

“Sister,” said Helen, “don’t see why you’re looking so put-out, nobody took a thing from you.”

“Well, Miss Parker, ’tain’t that. It’s that I have mah-jongg at four and this’ll make me so late.”

“Well, you apologize to the girls for me. Now, hold steady, everybody.”

She and J.P. backed out together, one looking forward, the other back. At the doorway, she pulled him close.

“That damned sheriff is sitting over there, big as life.”

“DAMN!” cursed J.P. “I’ll mosey over and try and get a shot into him through the windshield. You start the car and—”

“No, and the whole county’ll be out here with shotguns and rope in two seconds. YOU start the car, Mr. Barrow.”

Since she had conviction, and J.P. only experience, he yielded to her, put his head down, the gun low in one hand, the bag of swag pressed into his thigh, and beelined for the car. Meanwhile, Helen tucked her big .45 behind her purse and smilingly approached the man with the badge lounging sleepily behind the wheel of his big car.

He looked up.

“Oh, Sheriff,” she said, “sorry, but I’ve got to do some, you know, business, is there a public facility in this town?”

The sheriff blushed as if he’d just been shown a French postcard displaying unlikely anatomical positions, then got his wits about him and started to offer the use of the restroom in the jail to her, but by that time she’d laid the barrel of the big Colt revolver on the sill of the window, pointed straight into his vitals.

“Your gun, sir. Left hand, upside down, nothing fancy, as I would have no pause in doing what I must do. Be a dear, won’t you please?”

To emphasize her argument, she thumbed back the hammer of the revolver until it clicked locked. The sheriff, in his sixties, with many a mile on him, blinked, and his outsize Adam’s apple became spastically active as he swallowed hard and got nothing down but a gallon of dry air.

The firearm, an actual cowboy gun in silver with engraving, came over to her backwards.

“What a nice revolver,” she said. “I won’t even take it. I know you treasure it.”

She stepped back from the car, still smiling, turned and lobbed the gun up onto the porch roof of the ice-cream shop. Then she walked smartly around the car, stopped at first the left, then the right, front tire and fired a bullet square into each, the sound raising dust, chicken squawks, feathers, startlement, and confusion all along Main Street. She stepped across the street and climbed into the backseat of the Hudson, which J.P. had obligingly backed out of its space.