The Getaway Man (9 page)

That’s when
I first saw Daphne. And if I’d been a regular man, I would never have
known what she was doing.

She was a tall girl, kind of skinny, with
short yellow-blonde hair. She was wearing a shiny black dress and high heels.
She looked very classy, like one of those window dummies come to life.

When I first saw her, she had her pocketbook—a black, shiny one, just
like her dress and her shoes—open at the top. It was on a strap over her
shoulder, dangling down by her waist. She picked up a wristwatch from one of
the counter displays with her left hand. Then, quick as a flash, she cut
something off it with a little pair of scissors in her right hand, and dropped
the watch into her pocketbook.

She moved away from the counter, just
taking her time and looking around, like she couldn’t decide what to
buy.

By the time she was close to the escalator, she had put a few more
things in her bag. A lipstick, I saw for sure. And a little white jar of
something.

That’s when I saw the man watching her. He had on a
dark green sport coat, and a white shirt with no tie. He went everywhere the
girl did, but never all that close. A young guy, kind of pudgy, with a
bully’s look on his face.

At first I thought he was working up
his nerve to talk to her. But then he turned to look over his shoulder, and I
saw the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt.

I knew there wasn’t
much time. And I knew I was being stupid, but I still went over to the shelves
where the girl was looking at those little tiny computers you can put in your
pocket.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” I said.

She
looked up real quick. There were two dots of red on her face, one on each
cheek. Her eyes were very big. Her mouth was open a little bit.

“There’s a man been watching you. He’s been watching you
put stuff in your purse. I think he works for the store.”

She
turned her back on me and walked away, moving smart, like she was about
business. She marched right over to one of the registers, and started taking
stuff out of her pocketbook. A woman came over from behind the counter. I
couldn’t hear what they said to each other but, finally, the woman behind
the counter rang up all the stuff the girl had. The girl took out a credit
card.

The pudgy guy in the suit coat walked past me. He gave me one of
those “I’ll know you next time” looks, but he didn’t
say anything.

I
finally found where they sold the perfume. A nice
older lady with a pearl necklace sold me a tiny little bottle for more than
fifty bucks, so I knew it was really good stuff.

She asked me if it
was for Valentine’s Day. I could tell by the look on her face I should
say yes, so I did.

“Then you’ll want it wrapped,” she
said.

She put it in a little box that was just the right size. Then she
wrapped it in shiny silver paper, and put a thin red ribbon all around it, tied
in a bow.

B
y the time I left, it was the middle of
the afternoon. I was a little hungry, so I thought I’d look for a place
where they sold food. I never knew a mall that didn’t have them.

“Hey,” a woman’s voice said.

I turned around. It
was the girl from the store, the one in the black dress.

“That
was very chivalrous of you,” she said.

I didn’t know what
she meant, but I could tell from the way she said it that it was something
good.

“That’s all right,” I said.

“I’ve been waiting for you. The least I could do is buy my
rescuer a drink.”

She took hold of my arm and steered me down the
corridor. I thought we were going to a bar, but she kept going until we were in
the parking lot.

“Where’s your car?” she said.

“It’s in the shop,” I told her. Which was kind of the
truth.

“How did you get here, cab?”

“That’s right,” I said. Which wasn’t true, but I
didn’t want her to know I was staying so close by. Or the kind of place I
was staying in, either.

“Then we’ll take mine,” she
said, and started steering my arm again.

After we walked a little bit,
she reached in that pocketbook of hers and took out some keys. She had one of
those things that unlocks your car from a distance. When she pressed on it, I
heard a chirping sound. I looked in that direction. There was a big Lexus
sedan, plum-colored, with its lights blinking.

“That’s
mine,” she said. “Do you like it?”

“I never
drove one,” I told her.

“Then you should drive this
one,” she said, and handed me the keys.

I wanted to explain to
her that I didn’t mean I wanted to drive that car; I just couldn’t
say if I liked a car if I’d never driven that kind. But I didn’t
say anything.

“
Y
ou drive very … carefully,” she
said, after we’d gone a few blocks.

“I’m getting
the feel of it,” I told her. “You have to do that a little bit at a
time.”

“Oh. Are you a professional driver?”

I
liked the way that sounded in her mouth. “That’s right,” I
said. “Driving is what I do.”

“Do you race
cars?”

I liked her for saying that. I was afraid she was going to
think I drove a cab, or something like that.

“No, not that kind
of driving,” I said.

“Well, do you like the car
now
?” she asked me.

“I still don’t know yet.
You really can’t tell about a car unless you put it through its
paces.”

“Like a horse?”

“I …
guess so. I don’t know anything about horses.”

“Like
a test drive,” she said. “Only a hard one, yes?”

“Yeah. That’s it.”

“All right,” she
said. “I know where you can do that. Turn left at the next
light.”

W
e ended up on a farm. Not a farm where people grow
things, just a place with a lot of land. I know it belonged to someone rich,
because there was a gate to get in. She pushed a button on a box she had
clamped to the sun visor, like one of those garage door lifters, and the gate
opened right up.

“Is this yours?” I asked her.

“My father’s.”

“It’s a big
place.”

“Not so big,” she said. “If you know
what I mean.”

I didn’t know what she meant, so I just
nodded. That satisfies most people.

“Is this a good spot?”
she said, after a little while.

It was a single strip of blacktop, laid
down like a runway for an airplane. Grass on one side of it, dirt on the
other.

“Does it curve at all?”

“Up ahead it
does.”

“Okay,” I said, and stomped the gas.

The car was faster than I would have thought, big as it was. Got around
turns pretty decent, too, although it heeled over a bit. At the end of the
stretch, I slammed on the brakes. The car didn’t skid at all, just
scrubbed off speed in a straight line. Just as I got it stopped, I flipped the
lever into reverse and floored the pedal. We went flying backwards. I spun the
wheel all the way to the right and slammed it down into drive as I gave it the
gun and cranked over to the left. We went steaming on back the way we
came.

“Wow!” she said. “What was that?”

“It’s called a bootlegger’s turn,” I said.
“In case you have to reverse yourself real quick.”

“Do it again!”

I thought she wanted to see how I did
it, so she could do it herself, but no matter how many times I showed her, she
never asked to try.

It worked even better on the dirt road.

“
P
ull over there,” she said, after a while. “I never smoke in
the car.”

I could tell
somebody
smoked in that car,
but I didn’t say anything.

She got out and sat on the front
fender, crossing her legs like she was on a couch. I stood next to her and gave
her a cigarette.

“So
that’s
the kind of driving
you do,” she said. “Executive protection.”

“I
guess you could say that,” I said, although I wasn’t real sure what
she meant.

“What kind of gun do you carry?” she asked
me.

“I don’t carry a gun,” I said. “I’m a
driver.”

“Oh. What’s your name?”

I told
her. That’s when she said her name was Daphne. I never knew a girl with
that name before.

W
e drove off the farm. I followed her directions
to a big apartment house.

The garage was in the basement. She had a
different box to open the door.

“That’s my space,”
she said. It had little walls on each side, I guess so other cars
wouldn’t bang into it when they opened their doors.

I backed the
car in.

“You did that in case you had to get out quickly?”
she asked me.

“Sure,” I said. “I always park like
that.”

“Come on,” she told me.

There was a
little elevator in the basement. It only went to the lobby. We got out there. A
guy in a uniform and a hat said “Good afternoon” to her, and called
her by her name, with a “Miz” in front of it, like she was his
boss.

We got in the elevator. She touched PH on the pad. I watched the
numbers as we went up—PH was the top floor.

The room we walked
into was bigger than a lot of houses I’d been in. It was all black and
white, except for slashes of red in different spots—across the back of
one of the chairs, on the seat of the couch, cutting across a lampshade. Even
the floor was black and white, in squares. It kind of looked like a fancy
bathroom, with a red rug.

“Would you like a drink?” she
said.

I didn’t know the names of the kind of drinks she probably
was thinking of, and I didn’t want to ask her for a beer, so I just said,
“No thanks.”

She went over to the bar to mix herself
something. I looked out the window. It was easy—one whole wall was glass.
I could see there was some kind of a terrace out there, but I couldn’t
see how you could get to it.

She came back with two glasses. “Ice
water,” she said, handing one to me.

“Thanks.”

“You’re a wonderful driver, Eddie. Did you have to go to a
special school to learn all those tricks?”

“No,” I
said. “I just pick things up on my own.” I wanted to tell her that
what I showed her wasn’t tricks, but I couldn’t really do that
without telling her what it was used for.

She asked me a lot of
questions. And she talked a lot, too. I guess I got lost in the sound of her
voice. The sky outside got dull, then it turned dark. I didn’t
care—there was nothing for me to do until at least the next day. Nobody
was waiting for me.

“Is this all yours?” I asked her.

“This apartment?”

“Yeah.”

“All mine. Would you like to see the rest of it?”

“No, I was just … wondering.”

“If I was
married?”

“No. How come you … ?”

“What, Eddie?”

“You have this place. And that
car. And you dress so good. You’ve got a great job, right?”

“I don’t have any job,” she said. “What I have is a
trust fund.”

“A trust fund?”

“Money
that was left to me. I can’t spend it all, but I can spend a
lot.”

“You don’t have to work?”

“No,” she laughed. “I never have to work. What difference
does that make?”

“It doesn’t, I guess. Only, with all
this, how come you … ?”

“What?” she said
again. Only she sounded annoyed that time.

“How come you boost
stuff?”

“Boost? Oh, you mean … in the department
store.”

“Yeah. What you took, it couldn’t have cost
that much.”

“What
did
I take?” she said.
“Let’s see.”

She got up and went over to where she
had tossed her pocketbook. She brought it back, opened the top, and spilled it
all out on the couch.

“Hmmm.…” she said.
“You’re right. This is all very tacky.”

“Daphne.…”

She came over and sat real close to
me. “Want to hear a secret,” she said, very soft.

“If
you want to—”

“Ssshhh,” she said. She slid into
me. I put my arm around her. “Don’t look at me,” she
said.

It was real dark in there by then, but I still closed my
eyes.

Her voice was soft, but I could hear every word. “When
I’m in a store … not all the time, but only sometimes …
when I’m in a store, sometimes, I get … excited. It’s like
there’s this pressure inside me. Stronger and stronger. I get very
anxious. Tense. I don’t think about anything else. I know, as soon as I
take something, it will be like a … release. All the tension will be
gone.

“But, after I leave the store, I never want what I take.
Just looking at it makes me feel bad. Guilty.

“I wish I could pay
for what I take,” she said. “Not with money. I could just buy
things, if I wanted them. Before, when you told me I was being watched, I felt
like I wanted to die. I don’t know what I would do if I was ever
caught.

“I mean, I
have
been caught, but not
caught-caught. Once, a detective stopped me, but I was still inside the store,
and I told him I was going to pay on my way out. They couldn’t do
anything. And once a store girl was watching me in the changing room. They had
a little camera in there, can you imagine that? She saw me cutting the security
tag off a dress and putting it in my bag. She knocked on the door of the
changing room. I let her in, and she told me what she saw me do. All in
whispers.

“But she let me go. All she wanted was a kiss. That
kiss, kissing her, it felt like a punishment to me. And that made me feel
… good. Because I deserved it.

“I had this dream, once. I
was in a store, and a man caught me. He took me back in his office, called me a
spoiled brat, and gave me a spanking. I was crying. He made me promise to never
do it again. But I knew I would. I knew I would come back to that very same
store.”

She was quiet for a minute, like she was waiting for me
to say something. I do what I always do when I can’t figure out the right
thing to say.