but she couldn’t. Speed relieved her tension a little; if she stayed
even close to the fiftY-five-mile-an-hour limit, she was pretty sure
that she would start to scream before they were past Burbank.
A Benny Goodman tape was on the stereo. The exuberant melodies and
syncopated rhythms seemed in time and sympathy with the headlong rush of
the car; and if they had been in a movie, Goodman’s sounds would have
been perfect background music to the tenebrous panorama of
light-speckled night hills through which they passed from city to city,
suburb to suburb.
She knew why she was so tense. In a way she could never have
anticipated, The Dream was within their grasp they could lose everything
as they reached for it. Everything. Hope.
Each other. Their lives.
Sitting in the seat beside her, Bobby trusted her so implicitly that he
could doze at more than eighty miles an hour, even though he knew that
she, too, had slept only three hours last night. From time to time she
glanced at him, just because it felt good to have him there.
He did not yet understand why they were going north to check out the
Pollard family, stretching their obligation to the client beyond reason,
but his bafflement sprang from the fact that he was nearly as good a man
as he appeared to be. He sometimes bent the rules and broke the laws on
behalf of their clients, but he was more scrupulous in his personal life
than anyone Julie had ever known. She had been with him once when a
newspaper-vending machine gave him a copy of the Sunday Los Angeles
Times, then malfunctioned and returned three of his four quarters to
him, whereupon he had repaid all three into the coin slot, even though
that same machine had malfunctioned to his disadvantage on other
occasions over the years and was into him for a couple of bucks.
“Yeah, well,” he’d said, blushing when she had laughed at his
goody-goody deed,
“maybe the machine can be crooked and still live with itself, but I
can’t.” Julie could have told him that they were hanging with the
Pollard case because they saw a once-in-a-lifetime shot at really big
bucks, the Main Chance for which every hustler in the world was looking
and which most of them would never find.
Frank had shown them all that cash the From the moment of flight bag and
told them about the second cache back at the motel, they were locked in
like rats in a maze, drawn forward by the smell of cheese, even though
each of them had taken a turn at protesting any interest in the game.
When Frank came back to that hospital room from God-knew_where, with
another three hundred thousand, neither she nor Bobby even 7 I raised
the issue of illegality, though it was by that time longer possible to
pretend that Frank was entirely an innocent By then the smell of cheese
was too strong to be resisted a all. They were plunging ahead because
they saw the chance to use Frank to cash out of the rat race and buy
into The Dream sooner than they had expected. They were willing to use
dirty money and questionable means to get to their desire end, more
willing than they could admit to each other, though Julie supposed it
could be said in their favor that they were not yet so greedy that they
could simply steal the money an the diamonds from Frank and abandon him
to the mercy of his psychotic brother; or maybe even their sense of duty
t their client was a lie now, a virtue they could point to late when
they tried to justify, to themselves, their other less-than noble acts
and impulses.
She could have told him all that, but she didn’t, because she did not
want to argue with him. She had to let him figure i out at his own
pace, accept it in his own way. If she tried to tell him before he was
able to understand it, he’d deny what she said. Even if he admitted to
a fraction of the truth, he’ trot out an argument about the rightness of