Raylan_ A Novel - Elmore Leonard [58]
Cassie said, “We get picked up, you know who’s going down with us.”
Floy said, “Hey, all I am’s your driver.”
“Not you,” Cassie said, “Delroy. He never goes near the bank.”
“He tells us what it looks like inside,” Kim said, “and when there aren’t a lot of people.”
Cassie said, “Floy, what’s that worth?”
“A pat on the head,” Floy said, “the man’s tall enough. The man might go fifty bucks. He holds on to his dollar, let’s you do it for weed and pills.”
“And a few hundred,” Kim said, “each time.”
“He let you out to spend it?”
“Once in a while.”
“You his bank-job slaves.”
Janie said, “I go back to strippin I become a blow job slave. This ain’t so bad, we don’t ever get picked up.”
“We miss a job,” Cassie said, “we have to do one alone.”
“You ever did it you weren’t high,” Floy said, “you wouldn’t do it.”
He pulled up a half block from the bank and waited while they toked, put on shades, fixed their hats and cap down on their head good, and got out with their shopping bags.
Floy said, “Give you a full ten minutes to do your business. You cool with it? Be cool, I see y’all a little later.”
They weren’t listening.
He watched them get out and walk down the street to the bank.
They stopped at a glass-top table in the middle of the floor and used the backs of bank forms to write the notes they’d give the tellers. Cassie said, “I like, ‘Give me five grand or I’ll kill you.’ ” She looked at her note and added a word.
Kim said, “How do you spell withdrawal, with an a or an e?”
Janie said, “I ask for all hunnerts, the girl says she has to go get ’em. I say, ‘All right, a hunnert fifties.’ I end up taking what she gives me.”
Cassie said, “Tell her how much you want, for Christ sake.”
Kim said, “Why don’t we write the same thing three times?”
Cassie handed her note to Kim. “Here, write it the same way, all capitals. ‘GIVE ME FIVE GRAND OR I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU,’ with three exclamation marks, so she knows you mean it.”
Kim wrote the notes and they walked over to three different tellers.
In a few minutes Janie came away from the window first with her bag of bills. She felt awful, she had cramps. If they had to do another bank soon she’d stay in bed.
Now Cassie was coming.
“It works, doesn’t it? Where’s Kim?”
She was still at a window.
“Now she’s coming,” Janie said.
The bank chicks walked out and got in the BMW.
Floy listened to the girls on the way home, back to smoking weed now and talkative, relieved to be out of there.
Cassie saying, “We do that one before?”
Kim saying, “Banks all look alike to me.”
Cassie: “The teller goes, ‘This is my second robbery in the past month.’ Calm about it. I ask her if it was us. No, it was a guy that time. I asked how much he took. She said only a few hundred and split. Ran out the door.”
“Mine looks at the note and freaks,” Kim said. “Kept going on about having a child at home. I told her would she please empty her drawer? It wasn’t her money.”
“I told my girl,” Cassie said, “to keep a couple hundred for yourself. How’s the bank know we didn’t take it? You know what she said? ‘Really . . . ?’ I bet she did too.”
Floy, looking at the rearview, said, “Y’all did all right, huh?” Watching Cassie count the take.
“Not bad,” Cassie said, touching Floy’s shoulder with a couple of hundred in her hand.
Floy took it saying, “Hey, I’ll boost a car for you ladies any time you want. But how come the cops aren’t on to y’all by now? Four banks already, in town or close by.”
“They think we’re working girls,” Kim said, “having fun on our lunch break.”
Floy thought they looked like weird females, walk in the bank out of sunshine in their raincoats. How come nobody seemed to notice them? He said to Janie, “Honey, you all right? You not joinin in.”
“She doesn’t feel much like doing banks,” Cassie said. “She’s got the curse.”
Raylan believed marshals were more like big-city cops than most kinds of federal agents. It’s why he walked in