The Stand:BOOK I(27)

"We're throwin off pursuit, man," Lloyd said. In his mind he saw police garage doors opening and thousands of 1940s radio cars issuing forth into the night. Spotlights crawling over brick walls. Come on out, Canarsie, we know you're in there.

"Good fuckin luck," Poke said, still sulking. "We're doin a helluva job. You know what we got, besides that dope and the guns? We got sixteen bucks and three hundred fuckin credit cards we don't dare use. What the fuck, we don't even have enough cash to fill this hog's gas tank."

"God will provide," Lloyd said, and spit-sealed the bomber. He lit it with the Connie's dashboard lighter. "Happy fuckin days."

"And if you want to sell it, what are we doing smokin it?" Poke went on, not much mollified by the thought of God providing.

"So we sell a few short ounces. Come on, Poke. Have a smoke."

This never failed to break Poke up. He brayed laughter and took the joint. Between them, standing on its wire stock, was the Schmeisser, fully loaded. The Connie blazed on up the road, its gas gauge standing at an eighth.

Poke and Lloyd had met a year before in the Brownsville Minimum Security Station, a Nevada work farm. Brownsville was ninety acres of irrigated farmland and a prison compound of Quonset huts about sixty miles north of Tonopah and eighty northeast of Gabbs. It was a mean place to do short time. Although Brownsville Station was supposed to be a farm, nothing much grew there. Carrots and lettuce got one taste of that blaring sun, chuckled weakly, and died. Legumes-and weeds would grow, and the state legislature was fanatically dedicated to the idea that someday soybeans would grow. But the kindest thing that could be said about Brownsville's ostensible purpose was that the desert was taking a Christless long time to bloom. The warden (who preferred to be called "the boss") prided himself on being a hardass, and he hired only men he considered to be fellow hardasses. And, as he was fond of telling the new fish, Brownsville was mostly minimum security because when it came to escape, it was like the song said: noplace to run to, baby, noplace to hide. Some gave it a shot anyway, but most were brought back in two or three days, sunburned, glareblind, and eager to sell the boss their shriveled raisin souls for a drink of water. Some of them cackled madly, and one young man who was out for three days claimed he saw a large castle some miles south of Gabbs, a castle with a moat. The moat, he said, was guarded by trolls riding big black horses. Some months later when a Colorado revival preacher did a show at Brownsville, this same young man got Jesus in a big way.

Andrew "Poke" Freeman, in for simple assault, was released in April 1989. He had occupied a bed next to Lloyd Henreid, and had told him that if Lloyd was interested in a big score, he knew about something interesting in Vegas. Lloyd was willing.

Lloyd was released on June 1. His crime, committed in Reno, had been attempted rape. The lady was a showgirl on her way home, and she had shot a load of teargas into Lloyd's eyes. He felt lucky to get only two to four, plus time served, plus time off for good behavior. At Brownsville it was just too fuckin hot to misbehave.

He caught a bus to Las Vegas, and Poke met him at the terminal: This is the deal, Poke told him. He knew this guy, "one-time business associate" might describe him best, and this guy was known in certain circles as Gorgeous George. He did some piecework for a group of people with mostly Italian and Sicilian names. George was strictly part-time help. What he did mostly for these Sicilian-type people was to take things and bring things. Sometimes he took things from Vegas to L.A.; sometimes he brought other things from L.A. to Vegas. Small-time dope mostly, freebies for big-time customers. Sometimes guns. The guns were always a bring, never a take. As Poke understood it (and Poke's understanding never got much beyond what the movie people call "soft focus"), these Sicilian-type people sometimes sold iron to independent thieves. Well, Poke said, Gorgeous George was willing to tell them the time and place when a fairly good haul of these items would be in the offing. George was asking twenty-five percent of what they realized. Poke and Lloyd would crash in on George, tie him and gag him, take the stuff, and maybe give him a couple of biffs and baffs for good measure. It had to look good, George had cautioned, because these Sicilian-type people were no one to fool around with.

"Well," Lloyd said, "it sounds good."

The next day Poke and Lloyd went to see Gorgeous George, a mild-mannered six-footer with a small head which sat incongruously above his roofbeam shoulders on a neck which did not seem to exist. He had a full head of waved blond hair, which made him look a bit like the famed wrestler.

Lloyd had had second thoughts about the deal, but Poke had changed his mind again. Poke was good at that. George told them to come around to his house the following Friday evening around six. "Wear masks, for God's sake," he said. "And you bloody my nose and black my eye, too. Jesus, I wish I'd never gotten into this."

The big night came. Poke and Lloyd took a bus to the corner of George's street and put on ski-masks at the foot of his walk. The door was locked, but as George had promised, not too tightly locked. There was a rumpus room downstairs, and there was George, standing in front of a Hefty bag full of pot. The Ping-Pong table was loaded down with guns. George was scared.

"Jesus, oh Jesus, I wish I'd never gotten into this," he kept saying as Lloyd tied his feet with clothesrope and Poke bound his hands with Scotch brand filament tape.

Then Lloyd biffed George in the nose, bloodying it, and Poke baffed him in the eye, blacking it as per request.

"Jeez!" George cried. "Did you have to do it so hard?"

"You were the one wanted to make sure it looked good," Lloyd pointed out. Poke plastered a piece of adhesive tape across George's mouth. The two of them had begun to gather up the swag.

"You know something, old buddy?" Poke said, pausing.

"Nope," Lloyd said, giggling nervously. "Not a thing."

"I wonder if ole George there can keep a secret."

For Lloyd, this was a brand-new consideration. He stared thoughtfully at Gorgeous George for a long hard minute. George's eyes bugged back at him in sudden terror.

Then Lloyd said, "Sure. It's his ass too." But he sounded as uneasy as he felt. When certain seeds are planted, they nearly always grow.

Poke smiled. "Oh, he could just say, ‘Hey guys. I met this old friend and his buddy. We shot the shit for a while, had a few beers, and what do you think, the sonsofbitches came over to the house and took me off. Sure hope you catch em. Lemme tell you what they look like.'"

George was shaking his head wildly, his eyes capital Os of terror.

The guns were by then in a heavy canvas laundry sack they had found in the downstairs bathroom. Now Lloyd hefted the bag nervously and said, "Well, what do you think we ought to do?"

"I think we ought to pokerize him, ole buddy," Poke said regretfully. "Only thing we can do."

Lloyd said, "That seems awful hard, after he put us onto this."

"Hard old world, buddy."

"Yeah," Lloyd sighed, and they walked over to George.

"Mph," George said, shaking his head wildly. "Mmmmmnh! Mmmmph! "

"I know," Poke soothed him. "Bitch, ain't it? I'm sorry, George, no shit. It ain't a bit personal. Want you to ‘member that. Catch on his head, Lloyd."

That was easier said than done. Gorgeous George was whipping his head wildly from side to side. He was sitting in the corner of his rumpus room and the walls were cinderblock and he kept rapping his head against them. Didn't even seem to feel it.

"Catch him," Poke said serenely, and ripped another piece of tape from the roll.

Lloyd at last got him by the hair and managed to hold him still long enough for Poke to slap the second strip of adhesive neatly across George's nose, thereby sealing all of his tubes. George went purely crazy. He rolled out of the corner, bellywhopped, and then lay there, humping the floor and making muffled sounds which Lloyd supposed were supposed to be screams. Poor old fellow. It went on for almost five minutes before George was completely still. He bucked and scrabbled and thumped. His face got as red as the side of old Dad's barn. The last thing he did was to lift both legs eight or ten inches straight up off the floor and bring them down with a crash. It reminded Lloyd of something he had seen in a Bugs Bunny cartoon or something, and he chuckled a little, feeling a bit cheered up. Up until then it had been sort of gruesome to see.

Poke squatted beside George and felt for his pulse.

"Well?" Lloyd said.

"Nothin tickin but his watch, ole buddy," Poke said. "Speakin of which … " He lifted George's meaty arm and looked at his wrist. "Naw, just a Timex. I was thinkin it might be a Casio, somethin like that." He let George's arm drop.

George's car keys were in his front pants pocket. And in an upstairs cupboard they found a Skippy peanut butter jar half filled with dimes, and they took those, too. There was twenty dollars and sixty cents in dimes.

George's car was a wheezy old Mustang with a four on the floor and lousy shocks and tires that were as bald as Telly Savalas. They left Vegas on US 93 and went southeast into Arizona. By noon of the next day, day before yesterday, they had skirted Phoenix on the back roads. Yesterday around nine they had stopped at a dusty old general store two miles beyond Sheldon on Arizona Highway 75. They knocked over the store and pokerized the proprietor, an elderly gentleman with mail-order false teeth. They got sixty-three dollars and the old dudemar's pickup truck.