They had the guns in their pockets and the money. Not the map, not the pink flyer, not the blanket, not the water, not their clothes, not the gloves, not Walter’s directions in his inscrutable scratch. Not the heat.
No need for paint now. East ditched it in the back of a truck.
“Pick a direction,” East said. “I’m with you.”
The lot was studded with stones, protuberant like eyes, like once they’d been moored in concrete but the concrete had worn away. East and Walter left it and crossed a storm ditch, slick with frost. He stole a glance: now he couldn’t see the van or cops. Just flashing. Just the store. Now no longer the store.
“Quit looking back,” Walter said.
They reached the highway’s shoulder. “Cross here?”
“Down there.” Walter indicated the next intersection.
East checked the stoplights. “Got cameras on the lights down there.”
Walter waved his hands, helpless. “All right, let’s go here.”
They sighted a hole between cars and took it. Across the street, the buildings were smaller, squashed between the highway and a running ten-foot fence. Hemmed in. Gas stations, doughnut shops: people and big windows everywhere.
Walter breathed his chugging breath. A little fire truck, a pumper with lights on, roared behind them. Going up the left-turn lane toward Denny’s. Ought to be burned. Soaked in gas and burned, Ty had said.
A stitch pierced East’s side. Walter was panting already, his eyes worried like a dog’s.
The first gas station. East evaluated the one truck parked at a pump: nondescript but old, tires knobby. Tough but slow. They hurried on. Next, a sort of post office. Closed as yet. Then a Laundromat. A beauty shop. Closed. Then a row of drive-throughs. East looked again to his left at the wire fence. Barbed on top, flecked with trash. Behind it, nothing.
There was nowhere to walk to, no hiding place. It was going to have to be here.
East closed his eyes and gave Walter a moment to catch up.
“We got to go gunning, right?”
“We could call,” said Walter, wheezing.
“And say what?” said East. “Ask for some Superman shit?”
“You’re right,” said Walter. “Calling’s no good.”
“We got to go gunning.”
“Yes,” Walter agreed.
—
The time. In flight you used it. The space. Like a gunner checking a house. They examined the drive-throughs. The first was burgers. Hopping: two lanes in the drive-through, each one backed up. Nice, fast cars there: a sport Lexus. But any move you made, there’d be ten people watching.
The next was doughnuts. They studied the building, ugly and square, a little box of concrete with painted-on stripes. One asphalt snake around the back and up to the window. And a brawny green hedge five feet high all around.
“Let’s look,” East said.
They cut along the outside of the hedge until they stood across it from the black-eyed window. There was a gap a foot or two wide where the lane drained into a steel grate in the pavement.
“Come right through there,” East said. “Wait till it thins out and a car comes. One of us blocks, one talks. Climb in and go. But time it right.”
“Did you ever carjack before?”
“Never done it,” East said. “I’m a yard man.”
“And a proud one,” said Walter. “How we keep the girl in the window from seeing?”
“Get it before the window, maybe,” said East. “In the back.”
“What about the driver?”
“What do you mean?”
“Take them or leave them? Ty was gonna put that dude in the trunk. What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know,” East said. “I guess I don’t know.”
Glumly they examined the hedge. “It ain’t perfect,” Walter decided.
“Keep looking?”
“I don’t know,” said Walter. “We ain’t gonna find anything perfect. Not on this side. We can’t go shooting no matter what. It’s gotta be quiet.”
“If we have to,” East began.
“East. We ain’t in the woods anymore. There’s a hundred cops right over there. And the longer we stay here, the blacker we get.” He gave East a worried look.
“All right,” East said. “What? You think I’m trigger happy?”
“You shot your brother,” Walter said bleakly.
“He was losing his shit.”
“When we shot that judge, what, six hours ago, I didn’t think we were going to jail. Now I do. For a while, everything that got in our way, we were on top of. But now it’s a losing streak. And we ain’t got your lucky brother to fall back on.”
“He ain’t lucky.”
Walter said, “You can say that again.”
—
They took up spots behind the hedge. Through the gap, they could watch the cars coming, look without being looked at.
Two cars came at once. First a van, tinted out, green, heavy, anonymous. Ideal, East thought, but impossible, for right behind it was a little Suzuki or Isuzu or something, a woman at the wheel, some sort of earring glinting near her ear. Right up smack behind the van, a witness. She missed seeing them entirely. But her child, a stout little thing with red on its chin, stared them through.