The Friends of Eddie Coyle (11 page)

Jackie Brown put the shopping bag of sidearms in the cart. “You set now?” he said.

“Why’nt you put a couple loaves that bread on them,” the stocky man said. “Case anybody gets curious.”

Jackie Brown put two loaves of batter-whipped Sunbeam on top of the revolvers. “You got nine thirty-eights and one three-fifty-seven there,” he said. “Good stuff, too. I hope you appreciate what I did for you.”

“My friend,” the stocky man said, “your name is in that great golden book up in the sky. I’ll be in touch.”

Jackie Brown watched the stocky man push the cart down the parking lot, then disappear behind a truck. Jackie Brown shut the trunk of the Roadrunner and got into the car. He started the
engine. When he passed the truck, the stocky man was straightening up from the trunk of an old Cadillac. His legs hid the license plate. Jackie Brown waved. The stocky man made no sign of recognition. “I suppose I’ll hear about that,” Jackie Brown said. “I suppose I will.”

Eddie Coyle put his hands in his pockets and rested his back against the green metal post that supported the arcade of the shopping plaza above the telephone booths. Two women moved their lips as though deliberating over every single word of the hundreds they seemed to be uttering. A small man in a gold polo shirt stood with a receiver against his ear and a resigned expression on his face. From time to time he said something.

The man emerged first. “I’m sorry it took so long,” he said.

“Think nothing of it,” Eddie Coyle said. “Mine’s the same way.” The man grinned.

In the telephone booth, Eddie Coyle deposited a dime and dialed a Boston number. He said: “Foley there?” He paused for an instant. “No, I don’t care to give my name. Gimme Foley and quit horsing around.” He paused again. “Dave,” he said, “I caught you in. Good. Whaddaya mean, who is this. We got mutual friends up
in New Hampshire. This is Eddie. Yeah. Remember you wanted a strong reason? Yeah. Here it is: at four-thirty this afternoon, a kid in a metallic blue Roadrunner, Massachusetts registration number KX4-197, is going to meet some people at the 128 railroad station. He’s going to sell them five M-sixteen machine guns. The guns’re in the trunk of the Roadrunner.” Coyle paused again. “KX4-197,” he said, “Roadrunner, metallic blue. The kid’s about twenty-six. About a hundred and sixty. Black hair, fairly short. Sideburns. Suede jacket. Levi’s, blue Levi’s. Brown suede boots with fringe on them. Wears sunglasses a lot.” Coyle paused again. “I dunno who he’s going to sell them to. Perhaps if you was to go there, you could find out.” Coyle paused again. “I imagine so,” he said. “Now, you keep this in mind, okay? I came through.” Coyle paused again. “You’re welcome,” he said, “always a pleasure to do a favor for a friend with a good memory.”

Eddie Coyle replaced the handset in the receiver carefully. He opened the door of the booth and found a stout woman, about fifty, staring at him. “It took you long enough,” she said.

“I was calling my poor sick mother,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, her face immediately relaxing into an expression of sympathy. “I’m sorry. Has she been ill long?”

Eddie Coyle smiled. “Fuck you, lady,” he said, “
and
the horse you rode in on.”

Jackie Brown got caught in traffic in Watertown. He escaped briefly and got caught again in Newton. On 128, he eased the Roadrunner into a three-lane pack of first-shift electronics workers heading home, and settled down to an unobtrusive fifty miles per hour. There was a three-car accident in Needham, and he waited patiently in the center lane, surrounded by a thousand cars, while the sun declined and the evening began. At ten minutes past four he broke loose and resumed his fifty miles an hour. He took the ramp at the 128 railroad station at four-twenty-five. He proceeded at twenty miles an hour into the lot, looking for the tan Microbus. Not seeing it, he parked near the station. He opened the glove compartment and removed a cassette. He placed the cassette in the tape deck. Glen Campbell began to sing. Jackie Brown, his eyes red and puffed, slid down on the bucket seat and
closed his eyes. In twenty-four hours he had driven nearly three hundred miles on four hours’ sleep.

Dave Foley and Keith Moran sat in the green Charger, two parking lanes away. “We could take him now,” Moran said.

“We could,” Foley said. “We could also do what we’re supposed to do, which is wait and see who comes up to buy the stuff. And that is what we are going to do.”

At the entrance of the station, Ernie Sauter and Deke Ferris of the Massachusetts State Police, wearing sport coats and slacks, conversed casually. Ferris had his back to the Roadrunner. “What do you say?” he said. “We could take him out right now.”

“Yes,” Sauter said, “and then Foley’d shoot us and he’d be right. Calm the fuck down, will you?”

Six cars up the lane from Jackie Brown, a blue Skylark convertible arrived and pulled in. The driver was Tobin Ames. The passenger was Donald Morrissey. “Foley here yet?” Morrissey said.

“I think that’s him over there,” Ames said. “The green Charger. That him?”

“That’s him,” Morrissey said.

“Just keep an eye on him,” Ames said. “I’ll watch the Road-runner. When Foley moves, tell me.”

The dusk was heavy at four-thirty-eight when the tan Micro-bus came into the lot from the northbound lane of 128. It turned up the first lane and came down the second lane at perhaps ten miles per hour, jerking along when the engine needed revs, speeding up and then slowing down again. The curtains shifted in the windows as the bus proceeded. It slowed momentarily behind the Roadrunner, then moved along to the next row. The driver found a space and swung the bus in. He got out of the lefthand
door, a young man with long hair and a puffy face. He wore a blue flannel shirt and a tan corduroy sport coat and blue bib overalls and black boots. From the other door emerged a thin girl, about twenty-two, with wispy blonde hair cut short. She wore Levi’s and a blue denim shirt.

The two of them paused to talk behind the bus. Then they walked toward the Roadrunner.

“Them ain’t niggers,” Tobin Ames said. “Them ain’t niggers at all. Them’s white folks.”

“Oh shut up, Tobin,” Morrissey said. “You bastards can’t expect to have a man in every office.” Morrissey’s voice was somewhat choked. He had twisted his body in order to pick up two Remington short barrelled, twelve-gauge pump guns from the floor in the back. From his jacket, he took ten red double-O buckshot shells and started feeding them into the magazines.

In the Charger, Foley said: “Recognize them?”

“No, I don’t,” Moran said. “They look like student radicals, but then there’s a whole mess of people that look like student radicals, that aren’t, and another whole mess of people that don’t look like radicals, but they sure are.”

“These cats’re after machine guns, remember,” Foley said.

“That oughta qualify them,” Moran said, “but I sure don’t recognize them from anywhere. Bastards all look alike anyway.” He and Foley sat with their shotguns cradled in their laps.

On the station platform, Ernie Sauter stood and watched the young man and the girl over Ferris’ shoulder. “A couple of god-damned punks,” he said. “Militants. You know, Deke, some-body’s nuts. I don’t know whether it’s me or them, but somebody is definitely nuts. I just wished I knew, so I’d know, you know?”

The young man leaned over and knocked his knuckles
against the window of the Roadrunner. Jackie Brown opened his left eye. Without any indication of haste, he cranked the window down.

“Yeah?” he said.

“Look,” the young man said, “I hate like hell to bother you and all, but didn’t we have some arrangement or something, we’re supposed to meet here?”

“Yeah,” Jackie Brown said.

“Well?” the young man said.

“Well, what?” Jackie Brown said.

“Are we going to do something?” the young man said.

“Sure,” Jackie Brown said, “look around.”

“Quit playing fucking games,” the girl said. “What the hell is going on here? Why the hell did you bring us into a whole goddamn mob of people to sell machine guns? Is this some kind of a joke or something?”

“I’m a very cautious man,” Jackie Brown said. “I plan to sit here for about two hours and maybe I’ll nap a little. In the meantime, if every car I saw when I come in here doesn’t leave, I’ll know it. Around six-thirty, I’ll know if you’re trying to tip me in. If I know you’re not, then I’ll tell you something, and we’ll go some place, and I’ll give you some machine guns and you’ll give me some money, and that’ll be that.”

“Did you drag us all the way out here for decoys?” the girl said.

“I do business by staying out of prison,” Jackie Brown said. “I got five lifetimes in that trunk. I do anything I need to in order to stay out of prison. Within reason, of course. Now you just settle down. I been up all night and I can use a nap.”

“We just stay here and sit?” the young man said.

“Look,” Jackie Brown said, “I don’t
care
what you do. I intend to stay here and take a nap, and wake up now and then. I’m not in the habit of swapping machine guns around in plain sight of everybody in the world. But it’s a nice way to see if you got company, other people interested. You can stay or you can go. At six-thirty I’m leaving here and going some place else. You can wait around too, or you can go some place else now and come back around six-thirty, and if everything’s kosher, I’ll tell you where we meet.”

“Shit,” the young man said.

“No,” the girl said, “no, he’s right. He’s very right. I agree with him.”

“Well, what the hell am I supposed to do?” the young man said, “sit here and get goddamned faint?”

“You could go get something to eat,” Jackie Brown said. “There’s a Ho-Jo about six miles back.”

“Okay,” the young man said, “so we eat. And then we come back. What happens then?”

“Right now, I don’t know,” Jackie Brown said. “If everybody that was here waiting for trains when I came in, isn’t waiting for trains when you come back, we go some place and I sell you some machine guns. If there’s somebody here then that was here when I came in, maybe we don’t. If we do, we go out there and get into the traffic and you go south, or maybe north, and I go the other way, and we meet some place I haven’t decided on yet, and you get some machine guns and I get some money.”

“And some ammo,” the girl said, “we get some ammo too.”

“No you don’t,” Jackie Brown said. “I haven’t got any ammo.”

“You bastard,” the girl said.

“I’m not going into that,” Jackie Brown said. “I got you
machine guns on short notice. I didn’t get no ammo. If I can get ammo, I will. I’m trying. But I haven’t got any ammo right now. I’m working on it.”

“Where’re we going to get ammo?” the young man said.

“If I knew where you were going to get ammo,” Jackie Brown said, “I’d get the ammo there myself and I’d have it for you now. I tell you I’m getting ammo for you. You can get it faster yourself, go get it. You want me to get it, you leave me alone to get it. I frankly don’t give a rat’s ass.”

“This is a trick,” the girl said.

“If you think it’s a trick,” Jackie Brown said, “you just go ahead and get in your goddamned bus and get the fuck out of here, no questions asked. You don’t hurt me any. I got five machine guns and at least fifty people want to buy machine guns. You do what you like, you won’t hurt my feelings. Around six-thirty I’m going to go some place else. You want to go there and get some machine guns, you come back here. Go think it over.”

“The money,” the young man said, “give us the money back.”

“Fuck you,” Jackie Brown said. “You made a deal. I’m still ready to go through with it. You want to back out, back out. No refunds.”

“You cocksucker,” the young man said.

“Leave it, Peter,” the girl said. “Let’s go and have something to eat. We can talk.”

“Very sensible,” Jackie Brown said. He cranked the window up and put his head back on the rest.

The young man and woman straightened up and walked away from the Roadrunner. They walked close together, talking. They returned to the Microbus and got inside. The brake lights came
on and some blue smoke issued from the exhaust pipe. The bus pulled out of its parking place and started up the parking lane.

“Motherfucker,” Foley said.

“Don’t be so eager,” Moran said. “Maybe they’re coming down in back of his car.”

The Microbus continued up the parking lane. It turned right at the top of the lane and headed toward the northbound ramp out of the station area.

“
Motherfucker,
” Foley said.

“Think quick,” Moran said, “before they get into that traffic. Is there
any
thing we can bust them on?”

“No,” Foley said, “not a goddamned thing.”

“All right,” Moran said. “So we got two possibilities. He’s still here. He looks like he’s settling in. So we can wait until he leaves and bust him then.”

“If he doesn’t get into the traffic,” Foley said.

“Right,” Moran said. “Or we can wait and get lucky and they’ll come back and we’ll bust the whole bunch of them.”

“Or they’ll come back and they’ll all go some place and we’ll lose them in traffic,” Foley said.