Chapter 10 Chapter nine

That Thursday night, Louis walked into a tavern on the Southern Highway near Lake Worth.People are drinking vodka imported from Russia, Poland, and Sweden, and each bottle costs between 15 and 20 yuan.They might have been drinking it before Louis spent those forty-six months in prison, but Louis couldn't remember meeting any of them.He always drank the cheaper cheap wine. Those days will never happen again. An elderly guy came up to him from behind the counter and said, "What do you want?" He was older than Louis, but taller, with gray hair cut short.The man looked like an alcoholic; he hadn't shaved in days and was wearing a God Bless America T-shirt, a style that was in fashion during the Persian Gulf War.The guy's stomach is sticking out, and the word "America" ​​on the T-shirt is crooked.

Louis said, "Give me two bottles of Authentic." The guy reached down and took two bottles off the shelf, and Louis reached into the pocket of his dark blue suit jacket with his right hand, which he found in the closet, and put it on casually, with a white t-shirt underneath and a It's khaki pants.The man turned around with the bottles, Gu put them on the counter, and Louis said, "Take all your money out of that little drawer behind the counter." The man stared at Louis, who lifted his coat pocket at him.He didn't seem surprised by this.Rubbing his hand back and forth over the short gray beard on his chin, he said, "While I'm going to get the gun, why don't you take your finger out of there and stick it up your asshole?" Walking behind, shaking his head.Louis came out.

His new beginning was over. This morning he drove to Max Cherry's office, opened the door with the key he got from Max's desk, and walked in.He had a sense of excitement about action.What he must do now is to concentrate and think seriously.Ordell was right, he had nothing to lose.Louis went out to the car and took the tire skid bar from the trunk. This afternoon he has been driving along South Miami Beach for a full two and a half hours, and arrived at "Santa Marta" near Route 60, which is next to Ocean Boulevard.It was a Colombian restaurant and there were some people at the bar outside the lobby.Louis walked in and saw four guys in the bar, one guy showing the dance moves to another guy, shoulders hunched, hips wiggling to the screeching of Latin music from invisible speakers.They looked up at Louis, and then went back to the dancer.That's all.Louis could put on a smile and walk over to them, handing Max Cherry his bail bondman's business card. ... He finally understood that he was right, but he couldn't pretend to be serious with these people.

What can he do?He turned and walked down the street, which was flanked by colorfully decorated hotels.He walked from Miami's red-light district to Cordozo, then sat at a sidewalk table drinking vodka with catonin water.To Louis, it was just a Colombian hotel with better windows: all women's blouses and a hundred-dollar pair of basketball shoes that looked good.Luis had lived in this area ten years ago, when retirees from New York sat on hotel porches, hats and white-painted noses, and Cubans arriving by boat crowded the streets.Things started to change five years ago when he came back to rob a bank that was next to Wolfe's Deli less than ten blocks from here.These days, in South Florida, it's the hippest place to go.Guy with sunglasses tucked into his hair takes a picture of a gorgeous girl posing on the beach.There is no longer any place to park on Ocean Boulevard.Louis drank another shot of vodka with tonic water.He saw a dark-swept-haired woman in a bodysuit and high heels, smug, approaching the sidewalk, and was just about to reach out to ask if she would like a drink when he realized "she "It's a guy with makeup and fake boobs.This is trending right now.What is he doing here?He's not a salesman handing out a bail bondsman's business card.If anyone asked him what he did, he would have to say he was robbing banks, although the last one was almost five years ago.

What if he stopped again at the bank on Collins Street in this area?It was in that bank that the lady at the counter handed him a packet of paint. Louis drank another shot of vodka with tonic water and wrote a note on a cocktail paper.This is a robbery.Don't panic. ...he used another sheet of lunch paper and wrote don't press the button...he knew he had to write smaller to fit or I'll blow your head off and something about money and just wanted a Hundred and fifty dollar bills.He picked up another clean napkin, opened it, and wrote down what he wanted to say.awesome. But by the time he paid, walked the few blocks to his car, and drove up Collins Street to the bank, it was closed.

He could have quit last week, why wait until today; he's going to take action.He looked very stupid in front of the tavern guy, but he wouldn't back down.It told him, damn it, it was the right thing to do.Taverns, he knew, would never be as easy to come by as banks. Louis used the tire ford to pry open Max's weapons drawer in the anteroom where the mini-fridge and coffee pot were located.Inside were four pistols and the nickel-plated Mossberg 500, the pistol-grip musket with the repeating laser sight.Louis got serious, feeling that his image had changed, and picked out the chrome-plated "Colt Python" pistol, which he knew was Winston's, a .350 with an eight-inch barrel. A Type 7 automatic pistol, big and eye-catching.This one was fine, and he picked up another two or three boxes.But then again, if he's using it as a bluff, he might as well take that Mossberg 500.Even with the laser sight, the musket could fit under the jacket he used as a sport coat.When it was buttoned up, the jacket was warm on the body, with the largest lapels Louis had ever seen. All of JJ's clothes looked new, but the styles were outdated, hanging in closets or stacked in boxes during the twenty-odd years that JJ had been in and out of prison.Ordell would not have glanced at this kind of clothing.Tomorrow he'd go to Bourdin's or Macy's to buy a new outfit.He doesn't want something too bright, like Ordell's yellow sports jacket, he doesn't want something so eye-catching.Light blue pours well.

The second time Louis walked into the bar, the guy with the "God Bless America" ​​T-shirt rubbed his chin with his hand and said, "Jesus Christ, don't tell me you're back again." "Give me two bottles of the 'real' brand," Lewis said, reaching into his coat this time and pulling out the Mossberg from his left armpit, the nickel-plated metal gleaming in the overhead light. , as he gripped the handle of the gun, the red dot in the laser sight fell on the bottle. The tavern guy said, "Are you scaring kids with that toy pistol?" Louis said, "See that red dot?" He shifted the muzzle of the gun away from the bottle of "Authentic" and squeezed the trigger, smashing three rows of cheap wine."It's true," Louis said. God, his ears were buzzing. "Give me those two bottles of 'Authentic', and take out all the money in your drawer, and what's in your hip pocket."

He was happy driving down the Southern Highway, drank some vodka from the bottle, looking for a motel, never staying at JJ's, never hanging out at the bail bondsman's office . ... Then it suddenly dawned on him, God, he had to go back there right away.Putting the keys in Max's desk makes it look like someone broke in, otherwise Max would have guessed it was him.If only he had taken all the guns away.Max could still figure it out.He's been locked up for four years and his brain is rusted, that's all.But at least he knows what to do, and sticks to it, making a name for himself.Once done, there is no way to stop or go back.Isn't that what Ordell said?

Just do it. Ordell wanted to teach his buddies how to use a universal paintspoon, or "rake," with a retractable probe—a gadget no more than five inches long that would fit nicely in a pocket. - Open the door lock of the house.did you see it?As long as you are proficient, you will have such a master key.No, brethren like to break and enter.They like to break windows or break locks with guns.Their trick is to drive a stolen truck through the front door of a pawn shop or hardware store: pull in the truck with the company name emblazoned on the side of the stolen car, fill it up, and drive away.There was another iron gate on the cement wall outside the gun store, so it was impossible to drive in.Their approach is to walk in when the gun store is open, pull out their guns, and grab their favorite assault weapon.It doesn't matter if they get shot themselves while trying to grab the gun, they are all a bunch of crazy desperadoes.Ordell no longer taught them the clever way of sliding doors and picking locks.He took out his tools only when he wanted to go out himself.

Just like this night, when he entered Jackie's apartment, that's what he did. Max drove home and saw her sitting across the table in the light of the bar room, Jackie still looking at him with her green eyes, and she glanced at the piano and said he shouldn't have had that one played. "Light my fire".He said, "Great," and told her, in his dry voice, that she might be in prison for a year and a day.She said she didn't believe him at first, and said "you're as good at joking as a cop." But soon she believed him, and he could feel the two of them getting closer, like they were in the same boat and she needed him .It's not a bad feeling.He kept looking into her eyes to gauge her emotions.Seeing her smoking, he wanted to smoke one for the first time in the past two or three years.Before they left that cocktail bar, he knew something could happen between them if he wanted to.

He hadn't had such feelings for a long time, and he had never had such thoughts about a defendant. During these two years of living alone, he once wanted to tell a woman that he loved her.It was a waitress named Cricket with a Georgia accent.That night, when he was lying in bed with her, the light from the window softened her withered cheeks and made her small breasts look white, and that scene aroused his tenderness for a moment.But the light was from a street lamp outside the window, not the moonlight in the lyrics of "The Moonlight Became You" and "That Old Monster Moon," and he knew that, if not the feeling, that light would have made him let go.Crickett posed for those Reba McEntire songs.She gave him a look after that old Tammy Whitnet song, "Divorce," and said, "Hint, hint." Cricket made him feel good, the problem was that he couldn't find anything to say.It's the same with Renee, after so many years, there is nothing to talk about.When they were first married, he had tried to read poetry to her.After he had finished reading, if she had said anything, it would have been, "What does that mean?" He hadn't told Renee he loved her for ten years.Instead, he told her several times when he knew he didn't love her, and then they separated.What is the problem?She never told him.Even when he spoke to her at first, she didn't say much, and she didn't speak because he spoke.She was small and pretty as a beetle, and he wanted to swallow her.She never said anything during sex.She was afraid of getting pregnant; she said a doctor told her she was too small to be pregnant, or that her uterus was oblique, or that she was afraid of hydrogen bombs; put your dick away.It didn't matter if she didn't understand what he read to her, it wasn't romantic poetry anyway, he read mostly Ginsberg and Corso and the like.Although in those days he had to face the marchers with a riot baton and was called a pig in the street, he still liked their poems.He was like, Wait a minute, what am I doing here?This was before he became a detective. He really liked the poem "Killing" and would rather die where it was written.Once he finished a poem and Renee said, "You don't even look at yourself." Meaning a police officer in a dark green uniform recited the poem, but she missed the point completely, it was "Beat Generation" poem. He recalled a poem entitled "To Terri Moore" written not long ago by a man named Gifford, whose concluding lines read: He remembered this because he had a crush on Terri Moore in the fifties, after he fell in love with Jane Greer and before he fell in love with Diana Baker.For a year now his affections had been transferred to Leigh Jude Foster, simply because he was old enough to be her father, and he was in love with Annette Bening.He didn't care how old Annette was. Jackie reminded him of the poem dedicated to Terri Moore, especially the last line "Are your lovers tender?"As he drove her to where she parked, Jackie was telling him that she had been flying for nearly twenty years and had been married twice.Once to an airplane pilot, "who went to jail for a habit of spending two hundred dollars a day on drugs." Another time, to an Englishman in Freeport who worked as a croupier in a hotel-casino, "one night He thinks it's time for him to die." That's all she said about her two ex-husbands.He thought of that poem because he could picture those guys lying on top of her as a matter of course, before marriage, between marriages, maybe at three thousand feet. As they drove to the airport, she asked him in the car if he was married.He told her it was over, and how long it had been over, and she said, "Twenty-seven years?" She almost cried, he remembered.How unimaginable it was to survive that long. “Looks like it’s even longer,” he said, trying to explain his situation in the night, his eyes on the light from his car’s headlights. "When we started, I was already working for the Justice Department, but Renee didn't like being married to a policeman. She said she was in constant fear of what was going to happen to me. She also said that I always put my work first. The first one." "Are you serious?" "You had to. So I resigned. She didn't like being married to a policeman—and she annoyed marrying a bail bondsman even more. For nineteen years she'd been telling people I sold insurance." "You don't look like a bail bondman," Jackie said. He felt that what she said was serious and she wanted to praise him.She did not say what she thought a bail bondsman should look like.He guessed she was referring to a scruffy look, a goofy little person in a wrinkled suit and a cigar in his mouth.This is the impression in many people's minds. “Renee moved out of that house. She opened a gallery and had a bunch of people who looked like they were gay and drug addicted and kept hanging around her. We’ve had two separations before .It's been almost two years this time." Jackie said, "Why aren't you divorced yet?" "I'm seriously considering this matter." "I mean before this time. Since you are at odds." "There always seems to be a lot of trouble." It was less of a hassle now, driving home with Jackie Burke in his head.It's the kind of light in her eyes, she looks like she's saying, we can have a lot of fun. Unless she is evaluating and judging him with that kind of eyes, which means, I can use you. Maybe.In either case, it's a green light. Max drove the car to the property that he and Renee had bought twenty-two years earlier, when she had moved out of her decoupage period and into lacework, or vice versa.The house, an old Florida frame bungalow, was being eaten away by termites and was barely visible from the street because of palm and banana trees.Renee had moved to an apartment on Garden Drive, Palm Coast, not far from Jackie—the address on her arrest report.He parked the car in the driveway and entered the house, planning to return to the office later.He wondered that his BB button didn't click when he was with Jackie.The busiest hours for bail bondsmen are six to nine. He opened the glove box in the car to get his 0.38 Gas Heavy short-barreled pistol.Whenever he hadn't touched the gun for a while, he checked it; especially tonight, to see if it was his own that the sentinel at the jail had returned to him.He reached out and groped inside for a while, then leaned over to look again.The gun is not there.No one touched the car while they were in the hotel café, or the sirens would go off.When they were out of the hotel, he opened the car door for Jackie.She got into the car, and he closed the door and walked around to get in the other side. ... Maybe that look said, I can take care of myself.