The Getaway Man by Andrew Vachss Read Free Book Online Page B

car.”
    “By
    ‘weapons,’ do you mean firearms, officer? Or are you referring to
    weapons of any kind, such as a knife or a club?”
    “Weapons
    of any kind.”
    “I see. And did you search the trunk of the
    car as well?”
    “Yes.”
    “With the same
    result?”
    “No weapons were found in the trunk of the
    vehicle,” the cop said. His jaw was clenched so tight you could see a
    knot in his cheek.
    “Were any weapons found on the person of the
    defendant?” my lawyer asked him.
    “On … ?”
    “On
my
client, officer. The young man sitting right over
    there, at the counsel table. You see him, the one with all the
    bandages?”
    “No.”
    “No, you don’t
    see my client? Or, no, you didn’t find any weapons on my client after you
    shot him?”
    “Your
honor
!” the DA said.
    The judge stared hard at my lawyer, but anyone could see he didn’t
    scare him any.
    There was a lot of stuff like that, but I didn’t
    see what the point of it was. I saw a couple of people on the jury looking at
    me, but I couldn’t tell what they were thinking.
    W hen they
    called Tim’s name, it was like a shock wave hit the place. I guess nobody
    expected him to get on the witness stand and talk for himself. I know my lawyer
    told me he wouldn’t let
me
do it.
    But Tim
    didn’t act like himself up there. Tim was a man with a lot of charm.
    That’s what Merleen, Tim’s girl, told me once. I wasn’t sure
    exactly what it meant, although I knew it was true.
    On the stand that
    day, you would never know Tim had any charm at all. It was like he was sneering
    at everyone. Like they were all nothing but bugs.
    He said him and
    Virgil were professional robbers. They’d robbed dozens of places and
    nobody ever got hurt. “And if that punk manager hadn’t tried to be
    a hero, nobody would have gotten hurt this time, either,” Tim said.
    “The little asskisser was trying to show what a good boy he was, save the
    boss’s money. He shot my brother in the back, like the weasel coward he
    was. I wish I could kill him again.”
    A woman started crying, real
    loud. I guessed maybe she was the wife of the man Tim had shot. The judge had
    to bang his hammer hard a few times to get people to quiet down.
    Tim
    told them that, after Virgil got shot, he wasn’t able to move, and Tim
    couldn’t carry him and keep his gun on everyone at the same time, so he
    just dug in and waited for the cops, so they could get Virgil an
    ambulance.
    “My brother was still alive when they took him out of
    there,” Tim said. “I figure the cops took their time getting him to
    the hospital.”
    His lawyer tried to clean that one up.
    “You’re not saying the police are responsible for your
    co-defendant’s death?” he said.
    “Between them and
    that little weasel in the bank, they got it done,” Tim said.
    “Look at his eyes!” someone whispered behind me.
    “He’s a psycho.”
    The judge slammed his hammer again,
    until people stopped making noise.
    Tim and his lawyer were staring at
    each other like a pair of pit bulls on the scratch line. Finally, the lawyer
    shrugged his shoulders, like there was nothing he could do about things. He
    stepped back, away from Tim, and said, “You know a man was arrested
    outside the bank, don’t you?”
    “You mean Eddie?”
    Tim answered him. “Yeah, I knew that.”
    “Was he your
    accomplice?”
    “Accomplice?
Eddie?
Be serious.
    Virgil and I always do things the same way. We plan out a job, then we find
    some dummy to drive us. They usually never know what’s going on, unless
    someone starts chasing us.
    “Eddie, he’s not real swift in
    the head. All we told him was, if he’d drive us to the bank, wait for us,
    and then drive us back home, we’d pay him a couple hundred bucks. Hell,
    we didn’t even tell him the car was stolen.”
    “He went
    too far with that one,” my lawyer whispered. “Now he’s opened
    the door.”
    W hen it was the DA’s turn at Tim, he
    practically jumped out of