He closed his eyes on that thought and massaged the back of his neck, much like Dan Torres had done the day Chuck blew up the frat-house toilets.
The bartender shoved another beer at him, and Chuck blinked at it. “Thanks,” he said, meeting the guy’s eyes for the first time.
Ooh—not bad. A little older, thirties maybe, and a little paunchy, but he had a good-natured face. The kind of face you could trust, really.
“You thought it up yet?” the guy said, friendly-like.
“Thought what up?”
“That thing you been thinkin’ since you got here.”
Chuck grunted. “Not so much. World’s oldest dilemma. How do you get money quick without ending up in prison even quicker.”
The guy gave a brief nod. “See those guys over there?”
Chuck looked over his shoulder to where a bunch of guys who practically had Criminal spray-painted across their black windbreakers sat, huddled over a table with intense, angry faces.
“Yeah. They got money?”
Guy shook his head. “No. They got a plan, though—and they’re short a driver. You know how to drive?”
Chuck made a low rumbling sound that passed for a chuckle. “Little bit.”
Guy nodded. “Thought so. You may want to hit them up.”
Chuck wasn’t stupid. He knew that if someone needed a driver for something, it was usually an illegal sort of something. And he’d learned his lesson from blowing up those toilets. If you were going to do something that could get you removed from the entire free world for a while, it was a good idea to get your sex in now, while you could.
“You sure I can’t hit you up instead?” he asked the bartender appraisingly.
The bartender gave him a heavy-lidded smile. “I get off in an hour,” he said, voice low. “They got three days before they do their thing.”
Chuck grinned. “Perfect,” he said. “I’ll be back here to walk you out in an hour.”
And then he turned to where the “criminals” all sat, arguing with each other. He pulled up a cheap wooden chair and straddled it, leaning on the back, amused when all the guys in black windbreakers and balaclavas turned toward him in a panic.
“No worries, guys,” he drawled. “Word on the street is, you fellas need some transportation. Believe it or not, this is your lucky day.”
Four years later
TEXAS—CHUCK had lived there as a kid, but it seemed hotter and sweatier now.
God, the worst thing about hanging out with criminals wasn’t the dishonesty—although that seemed inherent in the breed, at least in the bank robbers Chuck seemed to end up with. But he’d sort of taken it upon himself to steer them toward honesty, at least as thieves. It just made everything so much less bloody by the end.
He thought he’d been doing an okay job of being an ethical thief until the quiet corner of the garage where Carmichael Carmody was giving Chuck the blowjob for once, was suddenly not so quiet.
The corner itself—a sort of makeshift office with barriers to make a cubicle and a door, as well as a couple of fans—was in the back of the garage itself, and anybody entering, either from the bay door or the smaller door to the side of the shop, could be heard before they were seen. And that was exactly why Chuck and Carmichael were in that little corner.
Besides the fact that they were in Texas—and not the gay-friendly part of Texas—and what they were doing could probably get the shit beat out of them, Carmichael had a wife and three kids whom he adored, mostly, but he’d admitted shyly to Chuck that the only way he’d fathered three kids was to think about NASCAR racers in the nude. Chuck had been exchanging blowjobs with him ever since—it felt like a service to the needy, really, and Carmichael certainly was sweet and appreciative.
Of course the rest of Carmichael’s family was so awful, living in the closet was practically a relief for the poor guy. Besides his brothers and their friends being a part of the he-man-gaybie-haters club, they were also bank robbers.
Dumb ones.
Chuck had been drafted from another group—he had a reputation by now, after eluding the police a couple of times and helping plan a few jobs that otherwise might have gotten sticky. He wouldn’t have gone in with them—he didn’t like Wilber Forth, Klamath Jones, or Angus and Scooter Carmody at all, not from the first moment Wilber had grabbed his arm with fingers trying to bruise and practically told him he’d be driving for them because that was his job, wasn’t it? No, Chuck hadn’t liked getting treated like a piece of meat—but as he’d been about to pound Wilber into a mound of plasma, he’d seen Carmichael in the corner of the bar, shying away from the forward waitress and looking miserable as fuck.
“Who’s that?” he asked, interrupting Wilber’s diatribe about why Chuck absolutely had to work for him.
“That’s Car-Car.” Wilber had laughed rudely. “He’s gonna tune your ride, man, but he doesn’t have the nerves for anything else.”
And that had decided Chuck, really. This kid needed a Chuck in his life—even if it was just to give him a reason to come out of the closet and pay his wife alimony from anywhere but Erstwhile, Texas.
Of course, the more Chuck had gotten sucked into Carmichael’s life, the more he realized that Car-Car couldn’t desert his wife or his kids, and getting on a plane out of Texas would leave him without a support system—or a pot to piss in, because his shop was mortgaged to the hilt as it was.
The kid was well and truly trapped, Chuck figured. The best he could do was give him a little bit of kindness and some happy moments, and maybe a few more years of not getting the shit kicked out of him because he turned those big brown eyes on the wrong guy.
That was what they were doing in the back of the closed garage, the night breeze coming in through a skylight overhead, Carmichael’s mouth sweet and hard, exactly the way Chuck liked it. Nothing like a good-luck blowjob to make sure a job came off right.
Right then, Wilber and Klamath came barging in.
“Sh!” Klamath whispered. “You’re going to get us caught!”
“No,” Wilber said, laughing rudely, “I’m gonna get those Carmody kids caught. You and me, I’m gonna get off scot-free!”
With that, he snagged a set of keys from a pegboard by the door and moved to the car, a basic model SUV, a little scuffed and very unremarkable, the kind of thing a soccer mom would haul her kids in. Chuck and Carmichael had long since pulled up Chuck’s pants and dropped down behind the counter of the office. But even from their precarious hiding place, they could still hear Wilber and Klamath talking.
“What are you doing there?” Klamath asked urgently.
“Sabotaging the gas line,” Wilber told him. “It’ll take a while. We’ll get there okay, but while Chuck’s got it in idle, the car’ll just die. Then you and me can take off in the burner car we’ve got parked around back, and everyone else’ll get caught.”
“Man, why would they give us all the cash?” Klamath demanded. “Your plan don’t make no sense at all.”
Wilber sucked in a breath. “Well, I guess it’ll make sense if they’re dead, won’t it?”
Chuck met Carmichael’s eyes under the counter, and he read the dreadful truth there.