Читать книгу The Broken Souls - J. Kerley A. - Страница 8

Lucas crouched in shadow beside the fast-food restaurant’s stinking dumpster, wadding cold French fries in his fist and jamming them into his mouth. Untouched fries were safest, he figured. The cast-off sandwiches all had bite marks.

Lucas pushed sodden, foot-long black hair from his eyes, brushed French-fry salt from his thick beard. He leaned out into the light. There was a bank beside the restaurant, a small branch office with an ATM in the drive-through. Getting money was critical to Lucas’s plan. Money breeds money, hadn’t he heard that a thousand times? Like a mantra: Money breeds money.

In the half-hour he’d been waiting, over a dozen cars had slipped to the ATM, drivers making transactions, zooming away. Two of the drivers had pulled to the side, close to the rear of the restaurant. Lucas had watched as the drivers turned on their interior light and fiddled with banking paperwork.

The door at the back of the restaurant slammed open. Lucas froze in the shadows and stench.

“You there, you,” a voice yelled, angry. Lucas felt his muscles tighten, his hands ball into hard fists.

“Me?” said someone inside the place.

“You – Darryl, is it?”

“Daniel,” a voice grunted.

“I got soft-drink canisters out here. Get ’em inside.”

“I still got to finish mopping the –”

“Now.”

The door banged shut. Lucas slithered beneath the wheeled trash bin. His heart sank when he saw he’d forgotten his purse. Made of cheap white vinyl, it lay past the dumpster, almost in the cone of light from the restaurant. The door reopened and feet appeared. Canisters were hefted in the door.

The door shut. Lucas squirmed from beneath the dumpster, pavement grease now added to his shirt and pants, pulled from a donations pile outside a Goodwill store. He’d left his institutional clothing with the other cast-offs.

Lucas clutched the purse to his chest and turned his eyes back to the ATM. Women afforded the best opportunities. But he’d take whatever fate provided and work with it.

He waited twenty minutes, only one vehicle stopping at the ATM in that time, a pickup truck with dual tracks and a stars’n’bars decal on the window. A good ol’ boy, Lucas thought. The type to keep a pipe under the seat. Or a gun.

Not worth the risk.

Minutes later a compact car entered the bank lot: a woman, driving slow. Lucas gathered the purse in his hand and threw it into the shadowy corner of the bank lot, twenty feet away. It landed as the car’s headlights washed over the pavement. The lights hit the purse, passed by, angled toward the ATM.

Slowed.

Stopped a dozen feet short of the ATM. Lucas held his breath.

Take the bait.

The car began backing up. Lucas raised to a crouch. Tensed his muscles. The car parked beside the purse. He heard the door locks snap off.

Lucas was up and running.