Read Online The Getaway Man by Andrew Vachss - Free Book Online Page A

have all pretty much closed down. Lots of empty
    buildings, all the windows broke out.
    Nobody on the job ever goes right
    back to where he lives, either. J.C. rents places where we all stay for a
    while. That way, no neighbor sees you leave just before a job, or come back
    right after one. Those are the kinds of things cops look for.
    Everybody
    wears gloves, so we can just walk away from the getaway car when we switch. But
    they can find out stuff from blood, too. One time, J.C. got hit. It
    wasn’t bad, but he was bleeding a lot. So, that time, we couldn’t
    just dump the getaway car. I dropped J.C. and the other guys off; they took the
    switch car, and I went back out.
    I drove the getaway car until I got it
    way back on a dirt road I knew about. I siphoned a five-gallon can of gas out
    of the tank, and I poured it all over the backseat, where J.C. had been
    bleeding. Then I wadded up a rag into an empty soda bottle and poured a few
    drops of the gas over the top. I lit the rag. As soon as it got going a little
    bit, I tossed the bottle underhand through the back window. Flames shot right
    up, and I knew there wouldn’t be a trace of J.C.’s blood left.
    I walked back through the woods to a main road, where I knew there would be
    phones. I figured it would take a few hours, and it would be dark by then.
    I’d only gone a little distance when I heard a big air-sucking noise.
    I looked back, but the woods were thick, and I couldn’t see
    anything.
    A ll the jobs I did with J.C., I was
    always the driver. But I wasn’t a getaway man all the time. Sometimes, I
    would take the bus to a big city up north. When I got there, I would go to
    wherever J.C. said. I could never take a cab to those places; J.C. says that
    cabdrivers have to keep records, and we never wanted to be on anybody’s
    records.
    “The perfect driver would be an invisible man,”
    J.C. told me. “Driving an invisible car.”
    When I would get
    to the places I was supposed to, I would ask for a particular person. Most of
    the time, it was a man, but once it was a woman. They would give me a car to
    drive.
    That was all I had to do, then. Drive the car. A long distance,
    it always was. When I got to where the car was supposed to be, I would just
    drop it off. The people I dropped it off with would make me wait while they
    checked to see if everything was all right. It was always all right.
    Then they would take me to a bus station, and I would go back to wherever I
    was living.
    I asked J.C. once, if I got stopped by the police, should I
    try to get away from them.
    “No, Eddie,” he said.
    “Remember, you were hired to transport a car from one place to another,
    that’s all. You’re getting paid by the mile. Lots of guys do that
    kind of work. If you ever get busted, you make sure they give you a
    polygraph.”
    “A lie detector?”
    “Right.
    Because the only question they’re going to care about is whether you knew
    what was in the trunk. And you’re going to pass, understand?”
    J.C. knows how to plan things out. He told me, on those drives, I should
    always carry a decent amount of cash, but never a gun.
    All the times I
    drove those cars, there was always a spare tire—one of those little ones
    that will take you far enough to buy a new tire—and a jack, on the floor
    of the backseat. Never once did I ever have to open the trunk.
    None of
    these people paid me. They paid J.C., and he would give me my share whenever I
    got back.
    S ometimes, I had to lay over a day or two after I dropped
    a car off, in case they had another one for me to take out.
    One
    time, the place where I was staying was near a mall. A huge one, with a lot of
    real classy stores in it. Usually, whenever I had time on my hands, I would go
    to the movies. But that day, I remembered something I had been wanting to do,
    so I walked over to the mall.
    I wanted to get something for Bonnie. She
    wasn’t my girlfriend, exactly—I had just met her a few weeks
    before—but