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decent clothes, make herself useful, and cook.”
    Rick chuckled. “If he can get her to stand up that long.”
    Sammy said, “She thinks I’m going to leave my wife and kids to take care of her and her kid.”
    I said, “You’re joking, right?”
    Rick said, “Sammy, tell Dmytryk about her big scheme.”
    “She’s planning on kidnapping her kid and hiding out in South America. I’ll help her get her kid, then I’m done. I worked for five years and saved enough to pay a coyote ten thousand to get me out of South America when I was seventeen, and going back would defeat the purpose of spending ten grand and walking across three deserts and sleeping in the wilderness for three months so I could get bussed up from San Diego and work in sweatshops and cut yards and build houses and wash dishes and cook and labor and send money back to bring up my brothers and sister and educate myself and get a better life than the one I had when I was a kid.”
    I said, “Sammy, you and those long, run-on sentences.”
    He went on. “I know how it would go and I’m not stupid. She’d get knocked up and I’d be trading problems for problems, end up having to support two households. So yeah, I’ll take her out tonight. Sure, we’ll have fun, then go balls to the walls. But at the end of the day, I’m a married man with a family.”
    Rick interrupted. “Okay, boys, adjust your panties and let’s go make some money.”
    Sammy said, “Two twenty. I’m betting we’re in and out in two minutes and twenty seconds.”
    Rick said, “Two minutes. This feels like a two-minute job.”
    “Put your money where your mouth is.” Sammy yawned. “Dmytryk, what’s your bet?”
    “I’m betting on two minutes thirty seconds.”
    Rick said, “You’re on. Five hundred a bet as usual and winner takes all. Anything over three minutes goes back in the pot. I’ll have both of you ladies’ monies before we eat breakfast.”
    Then we left together, three men in suits and wearing the same brand of shoes—the Johnston & Murphy Bandits—and stepped out into the din and early-morning pandemonium. It was an area that had over three hundred forty thousand registered people in less than five square miles. Might have been close to a half million when the illegal immigrants were added in.
    Sammy said, “ Mad Men. We look like those cats in the TV show Mad Men. ”
    Rick said, “People trust men in suits. Especially women. It puts them at ease.”
    Sammy said, “Makes their legs open like doors.”
    Rick nodded. “That too.”
     
     
     
     
    A stolen four-door Chevy was waiting on us. The car was ten years old. The type of car no one would look at twice. I walked around the car like I was inspecting a private plane before takeoff. The tires were good, the lights worked, the engine ran smoothly, and we had gas.
    My personal automobile was parked half a block away. I owned a Buick Wildcat. It had been my father’s car. Like my father, I kept the car’s exterior looking top-shelf. I’d used money from the first two jobs and made the Wildcat look the way it had looked when my father drove it off of the lot in Michigan. Only a fool would drive his own car to go rob a bank.
    After I finished looking over the stolen Chevy, I climbed inside and took to the wheel while Rick took the backseat. Sammy always rode up front with me. He had that Mexican switchblade in his hand. He kept opening and closing it, made the blade click out, that sound like the click of death.
    From Koreatown, across Wilshire Boulevard and over to Crenshaw Boulevard, the radio was off. My ears were tuned in to the scanner. It was almost Christmastime, and during morning rush hour in Los Angeles people wore Lakers baseball caps and scarves and drove around with the tops dropped on their convertibles. Back east and in the Midwest everyone was shoveling snow and bundled like Eskimos, but out here the people stood at bus stops dressed in T-shirts and gloves. A few women were dressed