Read Online Strip by Thomas Perry - Free Book Online Page A

her feel especially romantic. In fact, it seemed to have the opposite effect. After Jeff had completed an hour and a half of surveillance on her, he got distracted by one of the acts for a minute, and Lila caught him.
    She told him that if he thought she was going to work her ass off so he could sit in the bar wasting money paying other women to show him theirs, he was out of his mind. She was pretty mean about it. She followed him all the way to the front door, yapping at him like a little dog until he escaped.
    Afterward, while he was walking across the parking lot to the back, where he had hidden his Trans Am, he happened to see a man he figured was Lila’s boss, Mr. Kapak. He was coming out the kitchen door at the back of the building carrying a maroon canvas bag with a zipper on it. It was the kind of bag he’d seen store owners holding in the business teller’s line at the bank. The man got into a Mercedes and drove off.
    Jeff started his car and followed him. It was a dark, quiet summer night, and he drove with his window open, listening to the silence. He realized he knew exactly what to do. He parked his car on a residential street that was out of range of the cameras mounted on the bank. He took his gun from under the seat, pocketed the ski mask he’d used to rob a liquor store in Arizona, and ran up the alley between the commercial buildings along Ventura Boulevard and the Los Angeles River’s concrete channel. All he did was come up behind the older man beside the bank’s night deposit, stick the gun in his face, and take the bag away from him. He stepped back into the alley behind the building, ran for the car a street away, and drove back to Lila’s apartment.
    She came in an hour later, reminded him that he was stupid, went into her bedroom, and locked the door. He hid the money in his car and slept on the couch. When he had time to look at his money, he discovered that he had a lot. He didn’t count it, any more than he would have stopped to count the potato chips in a bag. The meaningful measures were a lot, a little, and none. He put the money and the gun in the laundry bag in Lila’s closet and spent the money happily over a period of about a month.
    During the month he took Lila to restaurants and clubs, and on a couple of shopping trips. Her mood improved and she let him leave the couch to Eldon and join her in the bedroom. But Lila worked nights, so he could hardly be blamed if he went out by himself while she was gone. He had discovered that one of the best things about having money was not having to count. Every night he would reach into the money bag, take out bills, and make a roll of hundreds and fifties of a size that felt good in his hand. The next night most of it would be gone and he would make another. It was a life without worries—almost without thought.
    Eldon and Jeff went around the block and returned to Lila’s apartment just as the twilight reached its best moment, with the last rays of the sun tinting the clouds above the western horizon bright orange, leaving the sky in the east a deep, luminous purple about to turn to black. Jeff took Eldon inside, refilled his water dish, and poured some more kibble into his bowl. “There, dude,” he said. “That should hold you until she gets back. Got to go.”
    He went out, got into his old Trans Am, fired it up, and listened to its low, throaty growl. He had bought a new muffler while he still had money, and new tires, and had the oil changed. After nine years he could tell from the sound that the engine was okay. He had driven it here from Arizona only a couple of months ago, and he had decided the night when he had begun his new career that a new muffler was a good idea. He drove out to the Valley, stopped at a Mobil station to fill up his tank, and paid in cash. When he went into the little store to pay, he was at the end of a line of four men, all about twenty to thirty, all six feet to six-two and thin, all wearing denim and