Swag by Elmore Leonard Read Free Book Online Page B

moved into the apartment building where nearly half the occupants were single young ladies. Frank liked to strike his pose at the bar and say, “Well, here we are.”
    During the first few weeks, when they were still in the small, one-bedroom place, he’d say, “You believe it?” He’d finish laying out the stacks of bills on the coffee table, look up at Stick, and say, “You believe it? They’re sitting out there waiting for us. Like they want to get held up, dying for it.” Going in, Frank had told himself over and over it would be easy—if they observed the rules and didn’t take chances—but he never thought it would be this easy.
    After the first few weeks he began to take it in stride. They were pros, that’s why it was easy. They knew exactly what they were doing. Look at the record: twenty-five armed robberies, twenty-five stolen cars, more money coming in than they could spend, and they had yet to get on a police sheet, even as suspects.
    Frank would say, “Partner, what do you want? Come on, anything. You want it, buy it.”
    Frank didn’t waste any time getting five new suits, a couple of sport outfits, slacks, shirts, and a safari jacket. Stick bought a suit, a sport coat, and three pairs of off-the-shelf pants for sixteen dollars each, studied the pants in the mirror—clown pants, they looked like—and had the store cut off the big bell-bottom cuffs before he’d buy them. They traded the Duster in on a white ’75 Thunderbird with white velour upholstery, air, power everything, and went looking for a bigger apartment.
    The third place they looked at was the Villa Monterey, out in Troy: a cream-colored stucco building with dark wood trim, a dark wood railing along the second-floor walk, a Spanish tile roof, and a balcony with each apartment overlooking the backyard where shrubbery and a stockade fence enclosed the patio and swimming pool. There was also an ice machine back there, a good sign.
    Stick said he thought it looked like a motel. Frank said no, it was authentic California. He told the manager, the lady who showed them the apartment, okay, gave her the deposit and three months in advance to get out of signing a lease, and that was it. They got two bedrooms, bath, bar in the living room with bamboo stools, orange-and-yellow draperies, off-white shag carpeting, off-white walls with chrome-framed graphics, chrome gooseneck lamps, chrome-and-canvas chairs, an off-white Naugahyde sectional sofa, and three dying plants for four and a half a month, furnished. Stick didn’t tell Frank but he thought the place looked like a beauty parlor.
    The first Saturday they were in, Frank went out on the balcony. He looked down at the swimming pool and said, “Holy shit.” He said it again, reverently, “Holy shit. Come here and look.”
    There were five of them lying around the pool in their skimpy little two-piece outfits. Nice-looking girls, none of them likely to be offered a screen test—except one, who turned out to be a photographer’s model—but all of them better than average, and they were right there, handy. Frank and Stick went to the pool just about every afternoon they weren’t working—Frank in a tank suit with his stomach sucked in, and Stick in a new pair of bright blue trunks—and got to know the regulars pretty well. Frank called them the career ladies.
    There was a nurse, Mary Kay something, an RN who worked nights on the psychiatric floor at Beaumont Hospital. Dark hair, very clean looking. Also very skinny, but with wide hips. A generous pelvic region, Frank said. Mary Kay was a possible. Stick said, Maybe, if you looked sincere and told her you loved her.
    There was a redheaded girl, frizzy red hair and bright brown eyes, who wore beads and seven rings with her bikini. Arlene. She was a little wacky and laughed at almost everything they said, whether it was supposed to be funny or not.