Читать онлайн «Black Joint Point»

In shimmering heat, Jimmy Bird smoked a cigarette and paced off a rectangle of dirt. About the size of a grave, a little wider, a little longer. Jimmy wasn’t good at math – that algebra in high school where they mixed letters and numbers together had been his undoing – but he could eye a piece of ground and calculate how long it took to clear and dig to a certain depth. Ditches. Garden beds. Graves. The earth on Black Jack Point fed salt grass and waist-high bluestems and Jimmy pictured a hole six feet across, six feet down. He figured it would take him and his partners three hours of steady digging, being a little slower in the dark. Then an hour or so to sort through the loot, load the valuables on the truck, and good-bye poverty. In a few days he’d be poolside in the Caribbean, chatting up coffee-colored girls in bikinis, fishing in water bluer than blue, buying a boat and lazing on its warm deck and watching the world not go by.

But he felt uneasy even with millions in the dirt under his feet. What if somebody sees us? he’d asked this morning.

Then we take care of them, Jimmy, Alex had said.

What do you mean take care of them?

I mean just what you think. Alex said it with that odd half smile, caused by the little crescent-moon scar at the corner of his mouth. Like he was talking to a child.

I don’t want none of that, Jimmy Bird said, and as soon as he said it he knew he’d made a big mistake. It showed a lack of drive, a complaint he’d heard about himself from his wife, his mama, his daddy, even his little girl.

Alex had kept smiling like he hadn’t heard. That smile made Jimmy’s bladder feel loose.

I mean we shouldn’t leave a mess, Jimmy quickly amended. That’s all I meant.

Alex smiled, patted Jimmy’s back. No messes. I promise.

Jimmy Bird took a stake with a little flutter of fluorescent orange plastic ribbon topping it and drove it into the middle of the ground. Make it easier for them to see in the dark. He felt relief that old man Gilbert wasn’t going to be up at his house tonight. He couldn’t see the Gilbert place through the density of oaks, but that was for the best. No one to see them. No one to get hurt.

No messes. I promise.

Jimmy Bird didn’t like those four words the more he considered them – maybe he had gotten demoted to mess – and he patted the pistol wedged in the back of his work pants for reassurance. Patted the gun three times and he realized it was just the bop-be-bop rhythm of his little girl patting the top of her teddy bear’s head. He’d miss her most of all once he left the country. He’d send her some money later, anonymous like, for her schooling. She might get that math with the letters and numbers mixed together way better than he had.