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“A new day for us,” he’d whispered an hour before when he woke me up, but already it seemed like same old, same old to me.
When I climbed in beside him, I slammed the passenger-side door extra hard and heard a bolt come loose somewhere inside it.
“It figures,” I said, listening to it rattle down. The spring had immediately dug extra hard into my left rump.
Del didn’t answer. Just put the car in gear and drove ahead.
* * * *
When I first met Del, he was robbing the 7-Eleven over in Eagle Nest, where I worked at that time. This was about a year ago. I’d just been sitting behind the counter, reading one of the
Cosmo
s off the shelf, when in comes this fellow in jeans and a white T-shirt and a ski mask, pointing a pistol.
“I’m not gonna hurt you,” he said. “I’m not a bad man. I just need a little boost in my income.”
I laid the
Cosmo
facedown on the counter so that I wouldn’t lose my place. “You’re robbing me?” I said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
I bit my lip and shook my head—no no no—just slightly.
“I’m only twenty-four,” I said.
He looked over toward the Doritos display—not looking at it, but just pointing his head in that direction the way some people look into space whenever they’re thinking. He had a moustache and a beard. I could see the stray hairs poking out around the bottom of the ski mask and near the hole where his mouth was.
“Excuse me?” he said finally, turning back to face me. His eyes were green.
“I’m not a ma’am.”
He held up his free hand, the one without the pistol, and made to run it through his hair—another sign of thinking—but with the ski mask, it just slid across the wool. “Either way, could you hurry it up a little. I’m on a schedule.”
Many reasons for him to be frustrated, I knew. Not the least of which was having to wear wool in New Mexico in the summer.
He glanced outside. The gas pumps were empty. Nothing but darkness on the other side of the road. This time of night, we didn’t get much traffic. I shrugged, opened the cash register.
“You know,” I said, as I bent down for a bag to put his money in. “You have picked the one solitary hour that I’m alone in the store, between the time that Pete has to head home for his mom’s curfew and the time that our night manager strolls in for his midnight to six.”
“I know. I’ve been watching you.” Then there was a little nervous catch in his voice. “Not in a bad way, I mean. Not
voyeuristically,”
he said, enunciating the word, and then the next one too. “Just
surveillance,
you know. I’m not a pervert.”
