Bandits (1987) by Elmore Leonard Read Free Book Online Page B

quite an attractive girl he ' d helped into the body bag, not like any leper he had ever seen in pictures. He had touched her zipping up the bag, making sure the zipper didn ' t get snagged in her flowery shirt. He hadn ' t noticed any brown spots on her face or arms. He gave Sister Lucy another look before strolling up to the driver ' s side of the hearse and getting in. By the time he ' d started the engine and revved it a couple of times the passenger side door opened and Sister Lucy got in.
    I don ' t mean to rush you, but Amelita ' s back there in a plastic bag.
    Oh, my God. She turned in the seat.
    Not yet. Wait ' ll we ' re out.
    Can she breathe?
    Enough, I imagine.
    A car came from the drive in front of the infirmary and fell in behind them. There were three cars in line by the time they passed through the gate. Jack watched them in his outside mirror.
    Okay. Now.
    Sister Lucy turned to slide open the glass partition, then got all the way around, up on her knees.
    Can you reach it?
    Barely.
    Pull the cot toward you.
    She said, There. Then began speaking in Spanish to Amelita, hunched over the seat back, her linen jacket pulled up and the curve of her hip in the tight jeans right there next to him. This was different, all right. He glanced at her hip, the neat round shape, without really looking. She was the toucher what would she do if he touched her? There was touching and there was touching. He could touch the girls he knew bent over the seat and not one of them would think anything of it. They might say, Hey, but they wouldn ' t be surprised. It wouldn ' t mean anything. An affectionate pat. Maybe a little squeeze.
    He kept his eyes on the road and began to think about the two movies he had seen on TV in just the past week. In one of them Richard Burton and two other guys are on a life raft with Joan Collins after the ship they were on is torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. She seems to go for Richard, but holds him off when he makes the moves and Richard can ' t figure out why this girl in the strange-looking playsuit would turn him down. It ' s not till the end of the picture you find out that Joan Collins is a nun and the strange-looking white outfit she has on is probably nun underwear. Joan Collins was pretty young then. The other movie was the one where Deborah Kerr, in a pure white nun ' s habit framing her face, her nice nose, is with Robert Mitchum, a U . S . marine, on an island in the South Pacific during the war. Most of the time they ' re hiding from the Japs in a cave, Deborah and Robert Mitchum alone, looking at each other. You know sooner or later he ' s going to make the moves on her, but you don ' t know what she ' s going to do. Both movies about guys and nuns in intimate situations facing danger together. Something else occurred to Jack while he was thinking about it. He remembered from the TV listings that both movies first came out in 1957. He wasn ' t sure why he remembered it, though he did notice that kind of thing. And in 1957, when he was twelve years old, he was in love with his seventh-grade teacher, Sister Mary Lucille. Lucille? Lucy? Take it another step. Ten years or so later he fell sort of in love with Sally Field, with her cute little nose, who happened to be in that television series The Flying Nun and wore that gull-winged wimple, the head covering, that was not unlike the one the Daughters of Charity used to wear, the same Daughters of Charity that were at Carville.
    For whatever that was worth.
    There were girls he knew who loved to speculate about signs. Helene would say, Hey, spooky, if he told her about it. Especially if they were smoking a little dope.
    The leggy Calvins came around on the seat.
    Amelita has to go to the bathroom.
    We just left the place.
    Does that mean you won ' t stop?
    They weren ' t even to St. Gabriel. It was there ahead of them, a block of storefronts and a few cars, the town half dead on a Sunday afternoon. He crept through the main intersection and