Free The Devil Walks in Mattingly by Billy Coffey Page B

Charlie?” Taylor asked.
    Charlie kept counting. He reached the end of the roll and counted again. He looked confused. “What’d you say?”
    “I woke that boy,” Taylor said.
    “That what you call it?” Charlie asked. “’Cause I guarantee you he was more awake five minutes ago than he is right now. You dint say that was the plan, Taylor. We all in now. Robbin’s one thing, but butchery’s another. They catch us, we’ll ride the lightning up’n Greenville for sure. I tole you you’d snap.” He waved the cash drawer’s haul in Taylor’s eyes. “Fifteen dollars. You believe that? What kinda business that codger have when all’s he got’s fifteen lousy dollars in the kitty? That won’t even pay for gas. ”
    Taylor’s bloody hands shook. His mind roiled in what sounded like a chorus of shouts. It was Andy’s voice that rose to the top.
    I’m so glad you came.
    There’s a Texaco down the road a-ways.
    Just trying to help you out.
    “Let’s go get you some more money, Charlie,” he said. “Fella said there’s another fill-’em-up station down the way. But you let me play it. You screw this up, Charlie Givens, you’ll bleed after.”
    Taylor thought the idea of getting more money was one Charlie Givens liked fine. He also thought that when it came to the slumbering, the only motivator greater than greed was fear. Charlie tore out of the parking lot and left a thick layer of rubber on the empty road.
    Taylor leaned forward. He took the book from his back pocket and found the pencil he’d stashed inside. The blood onhis fingers stained the pages. He was about to ask his question again— You think I’m a good man, Charly?— but then remembered Charlie had not answered the first time.
    He decided not to ask again.

1
    I t would be so easy.
    Lucy didn’t know if she’d said those words orthought them. Some part of her believed it had been neither—that this was the one time her mother had spoken and Lucy had heard. Impossible, maybe, but Lucy was nearly convinced that impossible didn’t matter because none of this was really happening. She was imagining it all, maybe, or maybe this was all a nightmare. Yes. She closed her eyes in front of the bathroom mirror, even eased her heels slowly together and apart three times, but there was only the steady hum of the fan in the ceiling and the feeling of tears drying on her cheeks and the absolute certainty that it really would be so easy.
    She laid the scissors down, clunking them against the phone beside the sink. There was a kind of cosmic significance that Lucy’s downward spiral had reached its end with a phone call to Johnny; Johnny, after all, was where that spiral had begun—right after he walked out and Kate Barnett walked in. Had Timmy Griffith’s sister stayed away, Lucy was sure things would have been different. She would have taken her timecleaning up and surely picked up what her father had found. Everything would have been okay. Not great (Lucy thought things between herself and her father had never been great and likely never would be), but okay. It didn’t seem fair that the course of one’s life could be forever altered by the random actions of another.
    There was no doubt her father would make good on his promise. That Lucy was eighteen and the school year was almost over didn’t matter, he would send her away. He would hold his money over her head and use any trick, would maybe even talk it over with The Boys. It would be Glendale in Charlottesville or Lipscomb in Stanley, private schools just for girls like her that boasted locked doors and totalitarian rules with an aim not to educate the mind but break the will. He would do so, Lucy thought, because in the end all her father would be getting rid of was the daughter who reminded him of his dead wife.
    Lucy raised the scissors and held them to the light. The florescent glow played along the blades. From downstairs came nine faint bongs of the grandfather clock.
    She’d called