Out of Sight

"So we're fairly sure it's you," Buddy said, "not some cop sitting in an unmarked car with a radar gun. And don't wear your sunglasses."

Glenn argued about that, too, and Buddy told him, "Boy, do as I say and you'll get by."

Buddy had to hurry to pick up a car himself, a white one Foley would spot without looking all over the parking lot, then drive most of three hours to get here from the Miami area.

As minutes passed he wondered if the woman in the Chevy was sitting there waiting for Cubans to come crawling out of a hole. He knew Latins liked Chevys and this woman could be Latina herself with dyed hair. Buddy turned his head this way and that looking around, wondering if there were other cars here waiting to pick up convicts.

Like a commuter station, wives come to pick up their hubbies.

The blonde was in the right spot. Foley had told Adele the second fence post from the gun tower by the chapel, that was where they'd come out.

Buddy hated gun towers, even from outside the fence, the idea of a man up there with a high-powered rifle watching every minute you're in the yard. Foley would look up at a tower and say, "Imagine hoping to see a man on the fence so you can shoot him off it. Praying for the chance.

What kind of a man is that?" Buddy would say your common, garden variety hack, mean and stupid.

This was when they first met, found they'd both been doing the same kind of work and became friends for life at USP Lompoc: five miles from the Pacific Ocean and full of big-time California dopers, con men, swindlers… Foley would say, "Buddy, what're a couple of pros like us doing in this dog pound, associating with misfits, snitches and dysfunctional assholes?"

They got their release three months apart.

Buddy, out first, stayed in L.A. with his older sister, Regina Mary, an ex-nun who lived on welfare, drank sherry wine and went to Mass every day to pray for Buddy and the poor souls in Purgatory. When Buddy was on the road doing banks he'd call her every week and send money. In the joint all he could do was write, since Regina wouldn't accept charges if he phoned.

Foley came out with his fifty dollars gate money and took a bus to L.A. where Buddy was waiting for him in a car he'd boosted for the occasion.

That same afternoon they hit a bank in Pomona-the first time either one had worked with a partner cleared a total of fifty-six hundred from two different tellers at the same time, and drove to Las Vegas where they got laid and lost what was left of their fifty-six hundred. So they went back to L.A. and worked southern California a few months as a team: two tellers at the same time, seeing who could score more than the other without setting off alarms. Buddy sure missed his partner.

When Foley first called him about this business, Buddy was still out in California staying with his sister. He said, "For Jesus sake, what're you doing back in the can?"

"Looking for a way out," Foley said.

"A judge with bugs up his ass gave me thirty years and I don't deserve to be here. It's full of morons and misfits but only medium security, if you get my drift." The reason he was in Florida, he said, he'd come to see Adele.

"Remember how she wrote the whole time we're at Lompoc?"

"After she divorced you."

"Well, I was never much of a husband. Never helped her out with expenses or paid alimony."

"How could you, making twenty cents an hour?"

"I know, but I felt I owed her something."

"So you did a bank in Florida," Buddy said.

"It reminded me of the time in Pasadena, I come out and the goddamn car wouldn't start."

"You talked about it for seven years," Buddy said, "wondering why you didn't leave the engine running. Don't tell me the same thing happened in Florida."

"No, but it was like that. Like my two biggest falls were on account of cars, for Christ sake."

"You got in an accident?"

Foley said, "I'll tell you about it when I see you."

From then on it was Adele who called, always from a pay phone, to speak about this business with the Cubans.

By the time a date was set, Buddy had motored out from California and rented a one-bedroom unit in the Shalamar Apartments in Hallandale. It was on the ocean, just north of Miami.