Blacktop Wasteland(22)

“Hey, we on. You wanna come by tonight and celebrate?” he asked. All he heard was the hum of the open line.

“Celebrate what? Planning a robbery? I don’t know, maybe we should call the whole thing off,” Jenny said. He could see her in his mind. Sprawled out across her futon in that efficiency apartment over in Taylor’s Corner. Her red hair fanning out around her head like a wreath made of fire.

“Come on now, baby girl. We done talked about this. Nobody gonna get hurt. Nobody is gonna get caught. I got it all planned out. Don’t back out on me now. I need you. None of this works without you, baby girl,” he cooed. He had known Jenny since high school. They’d been on-again off-again for decades. Whenever she got on her feet, they were off. Whenever she found herself adrift, they were back on. They usually made each other feel good for a few weeks. That was a better ratio than some supposedly monogamous couples.

“I only been working there for a few months, Ronnie. Don’t you think they gonna be all up in my face if the place gets robbed?” she said.

“Not if you play it cool. Sit on your cut for a few months. Then slip away. We can go down South. Florida. Maybe even the Bahamas. If there’s as much as you say, we can be farting through silk the rest of our lives,” Ronnie said. He couldn’t let her back out now. The thirty days were almost up. The guy in DC who was going to pay them for the stones was waiting. He had gotten Beauregard on board. He would sweet-talk her until she had Type 2 diabetes if he had to, but he couldn’t let her back out.

More silence.

“This is what I do, Jenny. You know that. I been doing this since I had hair on my nuts. This is what I do, and I’ve only taken one fall and that was because of a fucking snitch,” he said. That was partly true. He had gotten five years for robbery for stealing a gold-plated cupola from a vacation house out in Stingray Point. But he hadn’t gotten caught because of a snitch. He had gotten caught because Reggie hadn’t fixed the tail lights on his old truck. When the cops had pulled them over he had taken the whole fall. Reggie wasn’t built for doing time. He couldn’t be in tight spaces. He freaked out in elevators. He lost his shit in revolving doors. If you yelled at him, he would shut down like a robot who had gotten his plug pulled. So he took the weight. Those three years taught him two things. One: Prison food tasted like wet, piss-soaked cardboard. Two: He was never going back.

“I can’t come down tonight. I gotta work today from noon till close. Then tomorrow I open,” Jenny said.

Ronnie smiled. She was still in. He could hear her letting herself be talked into it.

“Alright, well, things gonna start moving fast,” he said.

“I’ll call you when I get off. Maybe you can come by,” she said. Ronnie thought she was thinking about white sand beaches and margaritas the size of washtubs.

“No doubt,” he said.

“Okay. I gotta go take a shower,” she said.

“Thanks for that nice mental image. I’ll be filing that away for later,” he said.

“Nasty,” she said. He could hear the smile on her face.

“Talk to you later, baby girl,” he said. They hung up and Ronnie lay back down. He let his boots hang over the arm of the sofa. This was it. The big one. This was the one that you had wet dreams about. This wasn’t some stupid-ass sickly horse or some roof trinket. This was the one that let you write your “fuck you” list. He’d told Beauregard there was five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds.

That wasn’t exactly true either. Lying in her bed after bumping uglies, Jenny told him it was three times that much. Even after taking a hit from the fence and giving Beauregard his cut plus his goddamn $3,800 and paying off Chuly, he would still be able to use ten-dollar bills for toilet paper. If everything worked out, people would be waiting on him from now on. If he was superstitious like his Mama had been, he might have worried about things falling into place so easily. Getting in the hole one week, then having this jewelry store drop in his lap the next. Things didn’t usually work like that for the Sessions family. He didn’t let it shake him. He didn’t believe in superstitions or religion. His Mama had spent her life watching Sunday morning televangelists and throwing enough salt over her shoulder to season a full-grown hog. She still died broke and lonely on the bathroom floor of a bingo hall in Richmond. That wasn’t how he was going out. Not now. He started humming “Money Honey.” It was one of the King’s lesser-known hits, but it was one of Ronnie’s favorites. Because everyone knew in the end it always came down to money, honey.





SIX



Beauregard pulled down the first bay door and locked it while Kelvin shut off the air compressors and the overhead lights. The sun had finally set over Red Hill County, but the heat hadn’t subsided at all. A few lightning bugs performed aerial acrobatics near the motion lights. They didn’t have enough mass to set off the sensors. Beauregard paused and watched them for a second before closing the other two doors. They reminded him of summers gone by when he would sit on his grandparents’ porch playing checkers with his granddad. The old man was a checkers savant. The day Beauregard finally beat him was the day he knew his grandfather was slipping away.

“You wanna go over to Danny’s Bar and play some pool? I got a few hours to kill before Sandra gets off work,” Kelvin asked.