"Wouldn't be if you didn't drive so f**kin fast," Lloyd said. He took a sip of his third milkshake, gagged on it, powered down the window, and threw out all the leftover crap, including the three milkshakes neither of them had touched.
"Whoop! Whoop!" Poke cried. He began to goose the gas pedal. The Connie lurched forward, dropped back, lurched forward.
"Ride em cowboy!" Lloyd yelled.
"Whoop! Whoop!"
"You want to smoke?"
"Smoke em if you got em," Poke said. "Whoop! Whoop!"
There was a large green Hefty bag on the floor between Lloyd's feet. It held the sixteen pounds of marijuana. He reached in, got a handful, and began to roll a bomber joint.
"Whoop! Whoop!" The Connie cruised back and forth over the white line.
"Cut the shit!" Lloyd shouted. "I'm spillin it everywhere!"
"Plenty more where that came from... whoop!"
"Come on, we gotta deal this stuff, man. We gotta deal this stuff or we're gonna get caught and wind up in somebody's trunk."
"Okay, sport." Poke began to drive smoothly again, but his expression was sulky. "It was your idea, your f**kin idea."
"You thought it was a good idea."
"Yeah, but I didn't know we'd end up drivin all over f**kin Arizona. How we ever gonna get to New York this way?"
"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 f**kin 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 f**kin credit cards we don't dare use. What the f**k, 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 f**kin 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.