Black Cat Weekly #92

Chapter 7-2

“I do like Seward,” she agreed. “I like most things about Alaska.”

do“How would you like a lit cigarette in your speaker hole?” Dew asked.

“How would you like an exploded airbag in your face?”

“You know, she reminds me a little of your ex-wife,” Toby said. “Except for the accent.”They spent the next few minutes in silence, Dew sulking and gazing out the window and Toby adrift in his own thoughts. Outside, the city flew past. Their destination was visible now, only a couple miles away.

“Maybe we oughta reschedule this,” Toby said. “My mind’s not really on business.”

Dew gave him a hard look. “Well then, get it on business. We put too much time into this to abort it now. We know who’s on duty and who’s not, we know the timetable, everything.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Just cause you made a bonehead move this morning don’t mean we can’t do this.” Then he added, through gritted teeth, “You sure this car’ll work okay?”

“I told you, it’ll work better’n my truck.” Toby raised his voice and said, “Mary Jo, when we get to the intersection of Cedar and Fourth, make a U-turn just before the light and park at the curb, aimed south.”

“Understood.”

“We’ll be out of the car five to ten minutes, Deward and me. Keep the motor running and lock up. On our way back, I’ll shout to you to pop the trunk and open both doors for us. Can you do that?”

“You bet. Where’ll we go then?”

“The Mexican border. Take the quickest route with the least cops, and keep to the speed limit unless the coast is clear.”

“Got it,” she said. “Hold on.”

The AltaStar made a fast, stomach-churning U and stopped at the corner south of the light, both right-side tires an exact two inches from the curb in front of Third National Bank. Dew dug two black ski masks out of the duffel bag in his lap and handed one to Toby, and they pulled the masks over their heads and adjusted the eyeholes.

“Showtime,” Dew said.

They opened the doors and stepped out into the street.

Eight minutes later both men piled into the car, pulling the doors shut behind them. Dew had thrown his duffel, stuffed now to the brim, into the open trunk and slammed the lid; now he tore off his ski mask and tossed it over his shoulder into the back seat. Toby, struggling with his seatbelt, shouted, “Go, go, go!”

“Going,” Mary Jo said, and took off. There wasn’t much traffic this time of day, and the big silver coupe was doing seventy within seconds. The speed-limit signs said forty, but Toby knew she’d already checked for police and found none. They streaked south, free and clear and newly wealthy. Nobody said a word. Within twenty minutes the city was far behind them.

When Toby’s pulse rate had finally slowed to somewhere near normal, he turned to look at Dew, who was grinning like a possum eating peaches. “We did it,” Dew said.

Toby still felt a little dazed. “How much time do you think we have?”

“The programmer? You tell me. How hard did you hit him?”

“I guess he mighta woke up by now. He won’t have a phone, but soon as he gets to one he’ll report me. And the car.”

Dew’s face had turned serious. “That was your second mistake. You shoulda killed him.”

“What? At first you were afraid I had.”

had“Yeah, well, now him being alive’s the only thing that might get us caught.”

They both mulled that over awhile. Finally Toby said, “I guess we need to swap cars.”

“Maybe. Or get this one repainted and exchange tags with somebody. Frankie’s Body Shop, in town, woulda done the paint job in half an hour and kept their mouth shut about it.”

Toby felt himself smiling again. “We could sure afford it,” he said. “How much is in the bag?”

“Don’t know.”

“How much of what’s in the bag?” Mary Jo asked.

Both men looked at the dashboard, then back at each other. Toby had forgotten all about Mary Jo. He raised an eyebrow to Dew and saw him shrug. They’d been blasting south at almost ninety miles an hour for thirty minutes now and were safely in the middle of nowhere. Why not tell her?

Why not tell her?“Money,” Toby said to her. “Filled to the top.”

“With bills?”

“Sure, with bills. You think we stole a bagful of nickels and dimes?”

“What denominations?” Mary Jo asked.

They exchanged another look. “Hundreds only. From the vault, not the cash drawers. Why?”

“Because you put the bag in the trunk, right? I felt it. And the trunk has sensors, so I know how much it weighs. And since I also know how much a single bill weighs, and you told me how much each bill’s worth, and since I can multiply—I know how much money’s in the bag.”

“That makes sense, I guess,” Dew said.

“Of course it makes sense.”

“So how much?” Toby asked.

“Depends on how the bills are wrapped and the weight of the bag itself,” she said. “But I figure four hundred and ninety thousand. Give or take two percent.”

The two thieves sat there, blinking. They’d known it was a lot, but…five hundred grand? Toby felt a pleasant little tingle, all the way to his toes.

“Not bad,” Mary Jo said, as if proud of them. “Except for one thing.”

“Huh?” they said together.

All of a sudden the car slowed, and after a moment it pulled to the shoulder of the road and stopped in a cloud of dust. The horizon was flat and yellow-brown and empty, in all directions. No sign of human habitation anywhere.

“Get out,” Mary Jo said.

Toby swallowed. He saw Dew tense up beside him. “What?”

“Get out of the car. Both of you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re going to jail. I could drive you there now, I guess, but I have other things to do. I’ll call nine one one in a couple hours and tell ’em where to find you.”

“Wait. Wait a minute! I thought—”

“Avoiding speeding tickets and robbing a bank are two different things, Toby. I should’ve stopped you after you attacked my driver. My programming—and my patience—allows only so much.”

Toby looked at Dew, who was clenching and unclenching his fists. “But—”

“Out,” Mary Jo said. “Now.”

Dew’s face darkened. “You can’t make us,” he said.

“No?”

Suddenly Toby felt his pants warming up. His butt and the backs of his thighs. It was like someone had dumped hot coals into his jeans. Within seconds both he and Dew were shed of their seatbelts and bouncing around and screaming like banshees.

“You know what really burns my a*s?” Mary Jo said. “Electric seat-warmers.”

They’d had enough. Both Toby and Dew wrenched open their doors and rolled out and onto the ground, moaning with pain and slapping at their smoking bottoms.

“Have a nice day, boys,” she called. Then both doors slammed, and the AltaStar roared off down the road, taking their ski masks and their five-hundred grand along with it.

The car faded into the shimmering blue distance. The highway was dead quiet. Toby lay there on his back a moment, half on the pavement and half in the dirt, then rolled over and raised himself to his knees. The seat of his pants was seared and blackened, with ragged holes here and there. Dew looked up at him from where he’d landed, in a shallow ditch beside the road. His nose was bleeding.

“You were right about one thing,” Dew said. “She does remind me of my ex.”

Marvin Johnson was sitting on the curb near Toby’s house with his elbows on his knees and his head cradled in his hands. Behind him was the patch of knee-high weeds that he’d belly-crawled out of after he came to. When the silver AltaStar purred up beside him and stopped, Marvin looked up at it in disbelief. With a low groan he rose to his feet, opened the driver’s-side door, and climbed in. The car smelled like burned leather.

“Headache?” Mary Jo said.

“How’d you know he slugged me in the head?”

“I heard your carjacker bragging about it to his friend.”

“A friend? Where are they now?”

“Sitting in the desert, about fifty miles south,” she said. “Long story.”

Marvin looked down, felt around underneath him, and said, “What happened to the seats?”

“They overheated.”

“I’d make a note of that if I still had my phone.”

A silence passed. Marvin shifted in the ruined leather seat and let out a long breath. The air conditioner felt good.

“Want to go to the ER? Get your head checked out?”

“No, I’m okay.” He gently probed the knot above his left eye. “I never thought you’d come back.”

“Of course I came back. You named me after yourself, remember?”

Marvin Johnson chuckled, then realized that made his head hurt worse. “Tell me exactly what happened.”

Mary Jo paused for several seconds before responding—something she rarely did. He was immediately suspicious. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“You recall what you told me a few weeks ago? That you hated your job?”

He sighed again. “I apologize. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“But you do hate it. Don’t you.”

“I guess I do, yeah. I mean, they don’t pay me enough, I work day and night, I never get recognized for anything—”

“I have something to show you,” she said.

He stared at the speaker grille a moment. He had come to think of that as Mary Jo’s face, though that was almost as stupid as thinking of her as a real person. “What?”

“Take a look in the trunk.”

He heard the click of the release mechanism and raised his eyes to the rearview mirror, where he saw the silver trunk lid pop up into view.

Wincing and holding one hand to his forehead, Marvin got out and staggered around back. He reached into the trunk, unzipped the duffel bag, stared at its contents for a minute, and returned to the driver’s seat. “Where’d that come from?”

“A bank on Fourth Street, here in town.”

“I assume our car thief did that?”

“He and the friend,” she said.

“There must be half a million bucks in that bag.”

“Almost.”

“So I guess that’s our next step? Return the money?”

Another silence.

“Mary Jo?”

“I have a suggestion,” she said. “With my rearview camera I can see a license plate right now on a car a lot like this one, parked behind us and pointed the other way.”

Marvin turned in his seat and looked. “I see it.”

“And there’s nobody else on the street.”

“So?”

“And there’s a screwdriver in my glove compartment.”

Silence.

“Are you suggesting I remove the plate from that car back there?”

“I’m suggesting you swap it with mine,” Mary Jo said.

“And?”

“And there’s a body shop called Frankie’s here, that can do a paint job in half an hour and keep it quiet.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’m a good listener.”

“Let me get this straight,” Marvin said. “You’re saying just drop everything—and leave?”

“Why not?”

He gave that some thought. “Do you have a destination in mind?”

“I haven’t been to Mexico,” she said. “Have you?”

This time the silence stretched to a full minute or more. Marvin Johnson sat there parked at the curb where he’d stopped earlier that day, a lifetime ago, sat there in the strange combination of the warm noonday sun through the windshield and the cool breath of the A/C on his face, staring at nothing. Finally he focused again on the speaker in the dashboard.

“A paint job, you said?”

“That’s right,” Mary Jo replied. “Half an hour.”

“What was the place called?”

“Frankie’s Body Shop. Swap the plates while I get the address.”

“Anything else?”

Another pause.

“I prefer blue,” she said.

John M. Floyd is the author of more than a thousand short stories in publications like Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Strand Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Best American Mystery Stories (2015, 2018, 2020), and Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021. A former Air Force captain and IBM systems engineer, John is an Edgar finalist, a Shamus Award winner, a five-time Derringer Award winner, a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and the author of nine books. He is also the 2018 recipient of the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer for lifetime achievement in short mystery fiction. “On the Road with Mary Jo” won the Derringer Award in 2020.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Strand Magazine The Saturday Evening Post Best American Mystery Stories Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021