ELMORE
LEONARD
OUT OF SIGHT
for Michael and Kelly
Contents
The Extras
Chapters:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
About the Author
Books by Elmore Leonard
Copyright
About the Publisher
ONE
* * *
FOLEY HAD NEVER SEEN A PRISON WHERE YOU COULD WALK right up to the fence without getting shot. He mentioned it to the guard they called Pup, making conversation: convict and guard standing in a strip of shade between the chapel and a gun tower, red-brick structures in a red-brick prison, both men looking toward the athletic field. Several hundred inmates along the fence out there were watching the game of football played without pads, both sides wearing the same correctional blue, on every play trying to pound each other into the ground.
“You know what they’re doing,” Foley said, “don’t you? I mean besides working off their aggressions.”
Pup said, “The hell you talking about?”
This was about the dumbest hack Foley had ever met in his three falls, two state time, one federal, plus a half-dozen stays in county lockups.
“They’re playing in the Super Bowl,” Foley said, “pretending they’re out at Sun Devil Stadium next Sunday. Both sides thinking they’re the Dallas Cowboys.”
Pup said, “They ain’t worth shit, none of ’em.”
Foley turned enough to look at the guard’s profile, the peak of his cap curved around his sunglasses. Tan shirt with dark-brown epaulets that matched his pants, radio and flashlight hooked to his belt; no weapon. Foley looked at his size, head-to-head with the Pup at six-one, but from there, where Foley went pretty much straight up and down in his prison blues, the Pup had about forty pounds on him, most of it around the guard’s middle, his tan shirt fitting him like skin on a sausage. Foley turned back to the game.
He watched a shifty colored guy come out for a pass and get clotheslined going for the ball, cut down by another shifty colored guy on defense. The few white guys, bikers who had the nerve and the size, played in the line and used their fists on each other, every down. No Latins in the game. They stood along the fence watching, except for two guys doing laps side by side around the field: counterclockwise, the way inmates always circled a yard here and in every prison Foley had ever heard of. The same two ran ten miles a day every day of the week. Coming to this end of the field now, getting closer, breaking stride now, walking:
José Chirino and Luis Linares, Chino and Lulu, husband and wife, both little guys, both doing a mandatory twenty-five for murder. Walking. They hadn’t done anywhere near their ten miles. While they circled this end of the field and started up the side, past the cons watching the football game, they had Foley’s full attention.
A minute or so passed before he said, “Some people are going out of here. What if I told you where and when?”
The Pup would be staring at him now, eyes half closed to slits behind his shades, the way he judged if a con was telling the truth or giving him a bunch of shit.
“Who we talking about?”
Foley said, “Nothing’s free, Pup,” still not looking at him.
“I get your liquor for you.”
“And you make a good buck. No, what I need,” Foley said, turning to look at him now, “is some peace of mind. This is the most fucked-up joint I’ve ever been in, take my word. Medium security and, most of the cons here are violent offenders.”
Pup said, “You being one of ’em.”
“If I was I’ve slowed up. Look at those boys out there, that’s a vicious breed of convict. Myself, it’s not so much I’m violent as habitual, liable to pick up on the outside where I left off, so they’ll keep me here till I’m an old man.”
The Pup kept giving him his squint.
“So you turn fink?”
“It’s okay,” Foley said, “if you do it to insure your future. I give you the chance to stop a prison break, you make points, advance your career as a hack. I get peace of mind. I’d expect you to look out for me as long as you’re here. Let me run my business, keep me off work details . . .”
The Pup was still squinting.
“How many going out?”
“I hear six.”
“When?”
“Looks like tonight.”
“You know who they are?”
“I do, but I won’t tell you just yet. Meet me in the chapel going on five-thirty, right before evening count.”
Foley waited, staring back at those slitty eyes trying to read him.
“Come on, Pup, you want to be a hero or not?”
• • •
NOON DINNER, FOLEY TOOK HIS PORK BUTTS AND YAMS down the center aisle looking for Chino among all the white T-shirts and dark hair. There he was, at a table of his little-guy countrymen eating macaroni and cheese, a dish Foley has passed on in the chow line. Jesus, eating a pile of it. The guy across from Chino giving him more, scraping macaroni from his tray on to Chino’s. The man’s gaze raised to Foley, dark eyes beneath lumps of scar tissue, all he had to show for his career as a welterweight before age and killing a man put him out of business. Chino was close to fifty but in shape; Foley had watched him do thirty pull-ups on a bar without kicking his legs, trying to climb through the air. Chino gave him a nod but didn’t make room, tell any of his people at the table to get up. Lulu sat next to him with a neat tray of macaroni and Jell-O and a cup of milk they gave inmates under twenty-one years of age to build strong, healthy bodies.
Foley ate his noon dinner at a table of outlaw bikers, cons who bought half-pint bottles of rum Foley sold for three times what he paid Pup to sneak the stuff in. He sat there listening to the outlaws having fun, comparing his rum to piss and running with it, enjoying their use of the word, speculating on what kind it was, dog piss, cat piss, how about alligator piss? They liked that one. Foley saw it had to be an uncommon kind of piss, said, “How about chicken piss?” and the table showed him bad teeth and the food they were chewing with grins and grunts of appreciation. Foley worked through his dinner and went outside to smoke a cigarette and wait for Chino.
Lulu tagging along when he came, Lulu cute as a bug with his girlish eyelashes and pouty way of looking at you. Chino had had to punch out many a suitor to keep Lulu for his own. He had told Foley Lulu wasn’t a homosexual before entering this life, but had become one and was good at it. Confiding things like that after Foley told Chino he was the most aggressive welterweight he had ever seen fight. Saw him lose to Mauricio Bravo in L.A. when Foley was doing banks out there. Saw him lose to the Mexican kid, Palomino, at the Grand in Las Vegas—tough break, the TKO in the sixth when Chino’s right eye closed and they stopped the fight. Foley said, “I never saw a fighter take as many shots as you did and keep coming back—outside of Rocky Balboa.” Chino’s record was 22 and 17, not good if you were the fighter, not bad if you admired him for staying with it as long as he did. Foley was the only Anglo the Cuban allowed to get close.
He had his arm around Lulu’s shoulder as they approached, then let it slip down to hook his thumb in Lu
lu’s belt, the next thing to having him on a leash.
Foley said, “Today’s the day, huh? You excited?”
The man was cool, no expression. “I told you, man, Super Bowl Sunday.”
“Yeah, but I see you moved it up.”
Now a glint showed in his eyes. “Why you think is today?”
“You were out running this morning, sticking to your routine, anybody happened to notice. But you only did a couple of miles, saving yourself for the main event. Then I see you eating about ten pounds of macaroni. Carbohydrates for endurance.”
“You want,” Chino said, “I tole you you can come.”
“I would, but I can’t stand to get dirty.”
“Is finish. All we do now is go out.”
“You sure you’re past the fence?”
“Fifteen and a half meters, one to spare.”
From the covered crawl space beneath the prison chapel to the grass just beyond the razor wire perimeter fence. They had been digging since before Christmas with their hands and a broken shovel, using scrap lumber from the construction site of a new wing being added to the chapel to shore up the walls of the tunnel. It was Christmas Day Foley happened to see Chino and Lulu come out of the ficus bushes in front of the chapel, their faces streaked with black dirt, muck, but wearing clean blues. What were they doing, making out in the bushes? That wasn’t Chino’s style, so Foley the fight fan said, “Don’t tell me about it ‘less you want to.” And Chino said that time to his Anglo friend, “You want to go with us?”
Foley said he didn’t want any part of it—only three feet of crawl space underneath the chapel, pitch-dark in there, maybe run into fucking mole rats face-to-face. No thanks. He’d said to Chino, “Don’t you know you’re digging through Everglades muck? I’ve talked to people. They say it’s wet and’ll cave in on you.” Chino said, yeah, that’s what people thought, but the tunnel only caved in once. If they were careful, took their time, the muck stuck together and became dry and was okay. He told Foley they had dug down four feet and then out toward the fence, the tunnel a meter wide and a meter high. One man at a time dug and the muck was passed back and spread around the crawl space under there, so nobody was going to see it. They worked two at a time in dirty clothes they kept there and put on clean ones before coming out.
Foley said to Chino that Christmas Day, “If I caught on, how come none of the hacks have?”
Chino said, “I think they believe like you no one can dig a tunnel in muck. Or they don’t want to crawl in there and find out. They see us dirty they think we work construction.”
It was that day Chino said they were going out Super Bowl Sunday, when everyone would be watching the game, six o’clock.
But now they were going out five days early.
“You finish ahead of schedule?”
Chino looked toward the fence along the front of the yard, between the administration building and the gun tower close to the chapel. “You see what they doing, those posts out there? Putting up another fence, five meters on the other side of the one that’s there. We wait until Super Bowl Sunday they could have the second fence built and we have to dig another nine ten days. So we going soon as it’s dark.”
“During the count.”
“Sure, and when they get the wrong count,” Chino said, “they have to start over. It give us some more time to get out of here. You want—I mean it—you can still come.”
“I didn’t help dig.”
“If I say you can come, you can come.”
“I appreciate the offer,” Foley said, looking toward the fence and the visitors’ parking area just the other side, a few cars in the front row facing this way, not twenty yards from the fence. “And it’s tempting. But, man, it’s a long run to civilization, a hundred miles to Miami? I’m too old to start acting crazy, try a stunt like that.”
“You no older than I am.”
“Yeah, but you’re in shape, you and little Lulu.” Foley winked at the queer and got a dirty look for no reason. “I ever make it out it won’t be in state clothes or no idea where I’m going. Shit, I’m fairly new here, still feeling my way through the system.”
Chino said, “You do okay, man. I’m not going to worry about you.”
Foley put his hand on the little guy’s shoulder. “I wish you luck, partner. You make it out, send me a postcard.”
• • •
SOME OF THE NEWER WHITE BOYS DOING TIME FOR DRUGS called home just about every day after noon chow. There they were lined up by the phone outside the captain’s office. Foley went in to put his name on the list, came out and went to the head of the line saying, “Fellas, I got an emergency call I have to make. Y’all don’t have a problem with that, do you?”
He got hard looks but no argument. These boys were fish and Foley was a celebrity hard-timer who’d robbed more banks than they’d been in to cash a check. He gave talks at AA meetings on self-respect, how to stay alive in here without taking too much shit. If you saw it coming, hit first with something heavy. Foley’s choice, a foot or so of lead pipe, never a shank, a shank was crude, sneaky, it put you in the same class as the thugs and hogs. No, what you wanted to do was lay the pipe across the guy’s jaw, and if you had time break his hands with it. If you didn’t see the guy coming you were fucked, so keep your eyes open. It was about all you could tell these fish.
A woman’s voice accepted the charge, Foley’s ex-wife now living in Miami Beach. He said, “Hey, Adele, how you doing?”
She said, “Now what?” Not with any kind of attitude, asking a simple question.
Adele had divorced him while he was doing seven years at Lompoc in California and moved to Florida. Foley never once held it against her. They’d met in Vegas where she was working as a cocktail waitress in a skimpy sequined outfit, cut low on top and high up her legs from the crotch, got married one night when they were both feeling good, and it was less than a year later he went up to Lompoc. They hadn’t even kept house, so to speak. A few months after he got out, Foley came to Florida and they seemed to pick up where they’d left off, drinking, going to bed . . . Adele telling him she still loved him, but please don’t talk about marriage again, okay? It made Foley feel guilty that he hadn’t been able to support her while in prison, and it was this feeling that got him sent up again. He robbed a Barnett bank in Lake Worth, intending to give Adele the entire proceeds—show her his heart was in the right place—but was caught and ended up at Glades doing thirty to life. It meant, the way sentencing worked now, he’d be here at least twenty-four years before he was eligible for parole. All on account of wanting to be a good guy.
He said to Adele, “You know that Super Bowl party? They changed the date. It’s on tonight, six o’clock.”
There was a silence on the line before Adele said, “Didn’t you tell me one time calls aren’t monitored?”
“I said not as a rule.”
“So why don’t you come right out and tell me what you’re talking about?”
“Listen to Miss Smarty Mouth,” Foley said, “out there in the free world.”
“What’s free about it? I’m looking for work.”
“What happened to Mandrake the Magician?”
“Emil the Amazing. The kraut son of a bitch fired me and hired another girl, a blonde.”
“He must be crazy, want to trade you in.”
“Emil says I’m too old.”
“To do what, watch pigeons fly out of a hat? You have that cute, amazed look down cold, in your little assistant magician outfit. You’ll hook up with another one before you know it. Run an ad. Anyway, not to change the subject,” Foley said, “but the reason I called . . .”
“I’m listening.”
“It’s today instead of Sunday. About six, like only a few hours from now. So you’ll have to get hold of Buddy, whatever he might be doing . . .”
Adele said, “And the one driving the other car.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Buddy wants to use
two cars.”
“You said he might.”
“Well, he’s going to, so he got this guy you know from Lompoc. Glenn Michaels?”
Foley didn’t say anything, picturing a young guy who wore sunglasses all the time, even watching movies.
“Cute but seedy,” Adele said, “has real long hair.”
But none on his body. Foley remembered the guy in the yard always working on his tan. Glenn Michaels. The guy stole expensive cars on special order and delivered them all over, even Mexico. Acted hip and told stories about women coming on to him, even movie stars, but none Foley or Buddy had ever heard of. They called him Studs.
“You met him?”
“Buddy thought I should, just in case.”
“In case of what?”
“I don’t know, ask him. Glenn said he thought you were real cool.”
“He did, huh. Tell Buddy I see this guy wearing sunglasses I’ll step on ’em. I might not even take ’em off him first.”
“You’re still weird,” Adele said.
“A quarter to six the latest. But don’t call him on your phone.”
“You tell me that every time,” Adele said. “Will you be careful, please? And don’t get shot?”
• • •
FIVE-TWENTY, FOLEY FOUND A CHILD MOLESTER THEY CALLED the Elf alone in the chapel with the lights off: a skinny white kid sitting round-shouldered by the windows, a stack of pamphlets in the pew with him. Foley turned the lights on and the kid hunched around to look at him, no doubt afraid he was about to get beat up again, the fate of guys with short eyes among a population that felt superior.
“You’re gonna ruin your eyes,” Foley said, “trying to read that inspirational shit in the dark. Leave, okay? I need to speak to my Redeemer in private.”
Once the Elf was out the door Foley turned the lights off and went along the row of windows pulling old brown-stained shades down halfway, keeping it just light enough in here to see the shapes of the pews. He walked around to the other side of the chapel now and stepped through an opening to the wing they were adding on, the structure framed in and smelling of new wood, big open spaces where windows would be hung.