XXXIII
The sun had nearly put Hank to sleep when he heard the oil truck pull up. He perked up and peered through the hole in the cinder block when the truck was halfway down the hill. He heard the rattle of the engine before he heard the crunch of the wheels in the gravel. He checked his watch. A little after three. Still a while to wait.
The truck idled in the lot for a few seconds, and then made a wide turn, jockeyed back and forth several times, and backed into the warehouse. Eli got out of the truck with a gun in his hand and stood there like he had no idea what to do with it. Hank watched him through the hole in the wall.
Eli tucked the gun in the front of his pants and tried to conceal it by pulling his shirt down over it. Unsatisfied, he moved it around to the small of his back. His movements were stiff, fidgety, and he paced around aimlessly like a grain of rice popping and jumping in a red hot frying pan. He was all nerves and energy. He was making Hank tense just watching him.
What did he do about the kid? It was a bad situation. Hank stared off up the hill to where the dirt road broke over the crest, the blue horizon still and calm behind it. He tried to picture how it would happen. Lugano would drive his truck down the hill and most likely park out in the center of the driveway. But that was the only thing that was clear. What would the kid do? What would Lugano do? Where would they be when it happened? It would take Hank a few long seconds to get down the wall and around the side of the building. In that short time, the two of them would have moved from where they were when he last saw them through the hole in the wall.
This meant Hank would not know exactly where he was going or aiming when he came around the side of the building. It was a lot more complicated than standing behind Lugano’s door in his living room. And more complicated meant more dangerous.
Hank turned his attention back to the kid. Eli began hooking some equipment to the truck that was connected to some kind of pump with hoses dropping down into the large hole in the ground. But after a few minutes he got distracted and started f*cking around with the gun again.
Eli would take a few steps, casually, and then reach around and draw the gun, pointing it at an imaginary assailant. It looked terrible. Hank grinned, wiped the sweat from the back of his neck, and shook his head.
Eli repeated the act. A few steps, then a reach, sometimes groping for the pistol grip, sometimes fumbling—nearly dropping it—as he brought it around to aim. Maybe the kid would get lucky and do Hank’s job for him. That would be nice, convenient. But the more Hank watched, the less likely it seemed. Eli looked like a child playing cops and robbers, but he wasn’t. The gun was real. And Howie Lugano was a stone cold killer.
Out along the road to town, Janie sat in the car with the windows down, hoping for a breeze. But the stagnant desert air offered nothing but suffocating heat. The only benefit to the car at all was the shade it gave her from the sun.
She waited half an hour. Then she waited longer, checking her watch every few minutes and feeling nervous. It was getting near to four o’clock, and the shift change would happen soon. She kept her eyes on the road. It stretched off toward the horizon and she studied the spot where the road disappeared over it. Watching as though Eddie could somehow sneak by if she failed to pay attention.
But he didn’t sneak by. A few minutes before four she saw the black dot appear in the distance. It slowly took shape and she sat forward with a start. Then she opened the door and waited by the side of the road, watching the old tanker get closer and closer.
When it was a quarter of a mile away, she stepped into the road and started waving her arms. Then she began hopping up and down, just in case he couldn’t see her. She felt a relief roll through her as the truck slowed and pulled over, coming to a stop nearly nose to nose with the old Camaro.
It was as though Eddie’s mere appearance on the obvious and only route he could come, at the time of day he should be coming, made everything seem alright. She came around the side of the truck and looked up into the cab as Eddie opened the door and looked down at her from the high bench seat.
“Hey,” he grinned. “What the hell are you doing here?”
She shook her head at him, wide-eyed and solemn. “We need to talk,” she said, and stepped back so he could climb down from the cab.
At that moment, she knew that she had saved him, but from exactly what, she wasn’t sure. And for the first few minutes, as she told her brother the story, she didn’t care. But then she thought of Hank, huddled by the wall of the cinderblock building, cradling his gun and waiting to kill a man.
An urge to make things better came over her, but there was nothing she could do. It was that same primal urge that had brought her home to care for her mother and compelled her to stop on the roadside to save her brother, but that was as far as she could go with it. The urge could take her no further, could compel her to do nothing other than what she had already done. And it was then that she realized she was helpless, bound to her one simple path like a planet caught in the invisible rut of its orbit, doing the only thing it could: keep going, around a central point that gave off nothing, not even heat or light.
$200 and a Cadillac
Fingers Murphy's books
- A Brand New Ending
- A Cast of Killers
- A Change of Heart
- A Christmas Bride
- A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
- A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked
- A Delicate Truth A Novel
- A Different Blue
- A Firing Offense
- A Killing in China Basin
- A Killing in the Hills
- A Matter of Trust
- A Murder at Rosamund's Gate
- A Nearly Perfect Copy
- A Novel Way to Die
- A Perfect Christmas
- A Perfect Square
- A Pound of Flesh
- A Red Sun Also Rises
- A Rural Affair
- A Spear of Summer Grass
- A Story of God and All of Us
- A Summer to Remember
- A Thousand Pardons
- A Time to Heal
- A Toast to the Good Times
- A Touch Mortal
- A Trick I Learned from Dead Men
- A Vision of Loveliness
- A Whisper of Peace
- A Winter Dream
- Abdication A Novel
- Abigail's New Hope
- Above World
- Accidents Happen A Novel
- Ad Nauseam
- Adrenaline
- Aerogrammes and Other Stories
- Aftershock
- Against the Edge (The Raines of Wind Can)
- All in Good Time (The Gilded Legacy)
- All the Things You Never Knew
- All You Could Ask For A Novel
- Almost Never A Novel
- Already Gone
- American Elsewhere
- American Tropic
- An Order of Coffee and Tears
- Ancient Echoes
- Angels at the Table_ A Shirley, Goodness
- Alien Cradle
- All That Is
- Angora Alibi A Seaside Knitters Mystery
- Arcadia's Gift
- Are You Mine
- Armageddon
- As Sweet as Honey
- As the Pig Turns
- Ascendants of Ancients Sovereign
- Ash Return of the Beast
- Away
- Back to Blood
- Back To U
- Bad Games
- Balancing Act
- Bare It All
- Beach Lane
- Because of You
- Before I Met You
- Before the Scarlet Dawn
- Before You Go
- Being Henry David
- Bella Summer Takes a Chance
- Beneath a Midnight Moon
- Beside Two Rivers
- Best Kept Secret
- Betrayal of the Dove
- Betrayed
- Between Friends
- Between the Land and the Sea
- Binding Agreement
- Bite Me, Your Grace
- Black Flagged Apex
- Black Flagged Redux
- Black Oil, Red Blood
- Blackberry Winter
- Blackjack
- Blackmail Earth
- Blackmailed by the Italian Billionaire
- Blackout
- Blind Man's Bluff
- Blindside
- Blood & Beauty The Borgias
- Blood Gorgons
- Blood of the Assassin
- Blood Prophecy
- Blood Twist (The Erris Coven Series)
- Blood, Ash, and Bone
- Bolted (Promise Harbor Wedding)
- Bonnie of Evidence