“It’s come to this,” thought Shelby Jean, as she stared into the muzzle of Lenny Pitts’ snub nosed thirty-eight. Nothing had ever been said about the give-or-get-out-of-the-car moment she had shared with Lenny last winter, but now she couldn’t help but think that if she had let him cop a feel, or at least concealed her revulsion a little better, Lenny wouldn’t be in this particular convenience store, during her shift, cleaning out the register. In fact she knew that the Shell station out by the Mesilla Valley mall I-25 on-ramp always had more in the till after midnight than she ever did. If Lenny was truly on his way down to Paraguay like he claimed, he could have made a bigger score out that way and been half-way to El Paso (which she assumed would be the jumping off point for his big Latin American adventure).
“You sure you’re on your way to Paraguay?” she asked.
“Paraguay,” he affirmed. “They’re very kind to robbers from the USA down that way. They like Americans.”
Though she had a reputation as quite a smart-mouth, Shelby Jean kept it zipped about everyone in this hemisphere being an American anyway. She didn’t know if Lenny was really up to doing any damage with that stubby gun of his, but why find out just now?
“Paraguay is pretty far from Las Cruces,” she said.
“About five thousand miles as the crow flies, but this crow will be flying low and slow,” Lenny smiled at the fanciful metaphor he himself had just drawn out of that fertile brain of his. “I made that up,” he said.
“So it ain’t five thousand miles?”
“No it’s five thousand miles alright… where do you keep the big bills?” Lenny had scooped out all the fives tens and singles and dumped the change in a canvas sack he swiped from under the register. He was looking a little frantic, wondering if a hundred forty-seven dollars and a bag of change was even going to get him of the country.
“Got a safe with a slot in the top. It’s in the office, but I don’t have the combination. And it’s bolted to the floor.”
“Shit!” What had started out as a simple stop-and-steal was turning into a major project, and Shelby Jean was no more impressed with him now than she was last winter on their ‘date.’ In fact, now that he had a little time to think it out, she’d probably phone the cops as soon as he got back on the road. Women: You can’t live with them, and you can’t get them to dress up in a skimpy little Nazi costume and beat you with a warm squash or something. Okay, that was pretty funny but it wasn’t original. He tried it out on Shelby Jean…
“Emo Philips,” she drawled laconically.
“Some mornings it just doesn’t seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps,” he said.
“Well, Lenny. You’ve got a sense of humor even if you ain’t too original.”
____
(Tune in tomorrow to find out if Shelby Jean will ditch the job at the convenience store, and her Las Cruces studio apartment above the all night laundromat and taco stand, and strike out for the wilds of Paraguay with Lenny. Tune in too, to find out if the map Lenny got from Neil Bush in the poker game in Juarez is real, or if it is some odd bit of Unification Church bait and switch strategy. Will Shelby Jean and Lenny get to Paraguay and find they’ve been lured into one of those soccer stadium weddings with about 4000 other couples, or will Lenny get a lucrative job on the trans-Brasil agua pipeline dumping the fresh and cool onto freighters bound for Dubai?)
[tags]true story ain’t it[/tags]
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