A World of Thieves

IV

The girls must’ve been in the kitchen and not heard us until my car door banged shut. They came running out with wide smiles that collapsed into fearful looks when they saw me helping Russell out of the roadster.

“Oh my God,” Charlie said. Russell had one arm over my shoulders and she put his other over hers. “Where’s Buck?”

“Hell, he’s all right,” Russell said. “He’s a guest of the state at the moment but not for long, believe you me.”

Belle put a hand on my arm. “You okay?”

I winked at her and she showed a quick weak smile.

As we made our way toward the porch, Charlie said, “How bad is it, baby?” Her eyes were brimming.

“If you gonna cry,” Russell said, gritting his teeth with every step, “you can go somewhere else to do it.”

“And you can go to hell,” she said. But it was all the admonition she needed to soldier up.

We had to take the porch steps slowly. Belle ran ahead of us into the house, moving chairs out of our way, opening their bedroom door, pulling down the bedcovers. I braced him up while Charlie took off his shirt. She bit her lip when she saw the bandage around his chest and the red stains at his back where the wounds had been seeping. She undid his belt and started tugging down his pants and he flinched and sucked a breath and said, “Easy, goddammit.” She gently lowered the trousers past the bandage on his thigh. I eased him to a sitting position on the edge of the bed and she removed his shoes and socks and then took off his pants.

Belle fetched a glass of water and I gave Russell a pill to wash down with it. We helped him to squirm further up onto the bed and accommodate himself on his side. He was asleep almost immediately but pouring sweat from heat and pain. We went out of the room and left the door open a crack so we could easily hear him if he should wake and call out.

In the kitchen I drank a full glass of iced tea without taking it from my mouth until it was drained, then asked Belle for a refill. Charlie wanted to use the car to go buy an electric fan to keep Russell cool during the day. I went out to the roadster with her and showed her how to connect the ignition wires.

“Nice new car and no key for it,” she said. “That’s a good one.” She gave me a look I couldn’t read and drove off.

Belle and I sat in the kitchen for a while, smoking cigarettes and sipping iced tea, not saying much. She offered to fix me something to eat but I was too tired. I’d been two days without sleep, and now that we were back at the house I felt exhausted. I snubbed the cigarette and finished off the tea, got up and went to the bedroom, stripping off my shirt. She came in behind me and watched me finish undressing and get into bed. She sat down beside me and brushed the hair out of my eyes and I was asleep before she took her hand away.

I woke in the dark, spooned up against her from behind, my face in her hair. The open window was moonless and the curtains hung lank, the air cool despite the lack of breeze. I fingered her nipples and she came awake and made a small sound of pleasure. She rubbed her bottom against me and felt my readiness and I squirmed down for a better angle and easily slipped into her slickness. She was breathing through her teeth.

When we were done, she turned her face to kiss me, to whisper, “I’m so glad it wasn’t you.”

For most of the following week Russell was asleep as often as not. Charlie fed him a pain pill every couple of hours. “It keeps him from hurting too much and it helps him sleep,” she said. “He needs all the sleep he can get.”

Because she wanted him to rest as comfortably as possible she let him have the bed to himself and she slept on a foldout army cot she’d bought somewhere. The electric fan stood on the dresser, humming and oscillating, keeping the heat off him. She was hardly ever out of his hailing distance, never further away than the kitchen. She spent much of every day in a chair at his bedside, leafing through magazines and listening to radio music at low volume. There was always a pot of warm broth on the stove, and whenever he woke she spooned some into him.

The first time he was awake when I looked in on him, he smiled weakly and said, “Hey kid, how you doing?”

“Better than you, I’d say.”

“Not for long,” he said. And was asleep again in a minute.

He was awake again that evening when I looked in. “Next time,” he said, “I’ll lead the way out and you or Buck can bring up the rear.”

“Anyway you want it, Uncle,” I said, grinning back at him. The way he said it, you’d have thought Buck was in the next room rather than in a Midland jail cell.

Whenever I checked to see how he was coming along over the next few days, Charlie would often as not be ministering to him—feeding him, bathing him, shaving him, changing the bandage around his upper torso and shoulder or the one on his leg. He had dark circles around his eyes and was uncommonly pale, but he said he was doing fine. “Be right as the rain in no time,” he said.

“Yeah, sure,” Charlie said. “Only it hardly ever rains around here, so don’t let’s get too far ahead of ourselves.”

We’d been back twelve days when the telegram came from Bubber: GOOD LAWYER BUT HARD JUDGE STOPTWOYEARS SANTA RITA STOP LM WELL STOP TRANSFERS TOMORROW STOP BV.

Charlie didn’t want me to wake him up just to read him the telegram but I did anyway. He listened to it and rubbed his face and scowled. “Two years. Bastards.”

“That’s not so bad, is it?” Charlie said. “He can get parole in, what, seven or eight months, right?”

Russell looked at her like she was trying to sell him something—then turned to me and said, “If only I was in better shape we could’ve sprung him when they were transferring him to the farm. That would’ve been the ticket.”

“What are you talking about?” Charlie said.

He ignored the question. “Send a telegram,” he said to me. “Tell Bubber we need everything he can give us on this Santa Rita joint. Once we have that we can figure how to—”

He had a sudden coughing fit. There’d been a hard wind for the past two days and the air was full of dust. He said it didn’t hurt his back wounds when he coughed but it looked to me like he was flinching despite his best effort not to. He tried to resume what he’d been saying but got caught up in coughing once again, this time the pain of it starkly evident on his face. He slumped back on the pillows, gasping.

“All right, that’s enough visiting now,” Charlie said sharply. “Come on, Sonny, let the man get his rest.” I let her steer me to the door.

“Send it now, Sonny,” Russell said in a tight rasp, then fell to coughing again. I said I was on my way. Then Charlie closed the door on me.

She’d been testy ever since our return, and I was pretty sure it had to do with our business. She’d never much cared for Russell’s being in the robbery trade, and now she seemed to get upset by any talk of it at all. I had the feeling they’d been arguing about it, but if that was the case, they were keeping it between themselves. We’d always shared confidences, Charlie and I, but just the day before, when I asked her what was wrong, she’d said, “Nothing” in a way that made clear she wasn’t going to bring me into it.

Belle didn’t know what was troubling Charlie, either. She’d gotten to know her at least as well as I did, maybe better, and she’d tried to feel her out a couple of times, but Charlie wasn’t confiding in anybody.

“I think she’s real scared he might get hurt worse,” Belle said. “But she’s just as scared to say anything to him about it. You know how he is when she complains about you all’s work.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “She’s always known what he does. She’s always known it’s a risky business.”

“Yeah, well. Being told something’s risky is a lot different from seeing what can happen.”

I figured she was probably right—Charlie was just scared. Russell’s blood was her first look at what can happen when the job goes bad. And I realized how different Belle was in that respect. She’d seen plenty of cases of risk gone bad. She’d seen what men looked like after falling off derricks, after getting their heads smashed by falling drill pipe. She’d seen men who’d been burned up so bad in field fires they looked, as she put it, like big charred dolls and gave off a smell you’d never forget. In the case of her own daddy, she’d seen what they looked like after being gassed to death. I doubted that Charlie had ever seen any such things or their like.

By the time we got the word about Buck, we had another problem—we were nearly broke. After the latest visit to the grocer’s and then to the Callaghan Street house to get some beer and hooch, I had less than ten dollars. I searched Buck’s room in case he might’ve stashed some money in there but all I found was sixty-three cents in a dresser drawer. Belle had about two dollars left of the grocery money I’d given her before I went to Odessa. Maybe Russell had enough money to cover our rent and groceries and booze and so forth until he was ready to work again, but I had a feeling he didn’t. He’d always let Buck take care of the money and only carried enough himself to pay for incidentals or to take Charlie out for a night on the town. Forget borrowing money from Bubber. I’d heard Buck say that Bubber never lent money to his holdup men—not because he didn’t trust them, but because the risk was too great that something would happen to them before they could repay him. Nobody faulted him for his caution.

That night in bed I explained our financial problem to Belle and told her if Russell was as flat as I was I’d have to go out on a job pretty soon.

At first she didn’t say anything, but although it was too dark to see her face, I could feel her eyes on me. Finally she said, “Who’d do it with you?”

“Nobody,” I said. “It won’t be that big a one.”

“It’s always better if somebody stays with the car and has it ready for the getaway.”

“Do tell,” I said. “What do you know about it?”

“I’ve heard you all talk, you know.”

I’d had no idea she’d listened so closely to any of our shop talk.

“Let me go with you, Sonny. I can drive for you, you know I can.”

Until a little over a week ago I hadn’t known she could drive a car at all, never mind drive as well as she did. For lack of anything else to do one afternoon, we’d gone for a long drive way out into the desert. We put the top up on the roadster to keep the dust off us and I sped us over an old truck trail that went winding every which way around outcrops and arroyos and came to an end at an abandoned oil camp. She loved it, yahooing along with me as the roadster went leaning through the turns, raising high rooster tails of dust behind us. I told her about the rough trails we’d had to drive on in doing the Blackpatch hijack, and she said she’d learned to drive on some pretty rough roads around Corsicana.

“I was fourteen when Daddy started teaching me in his Dodge,” she said. “He loved to speed around like you, and he’d always let me drive fast too. I don’t mean to brag on myself, but he said I was a regular Barney Oldfield. He taught me lots of stuff—how to fish, how to use tools. I was an only child, so he didn’t have anybody else to teach.”

“Want to show me what a hotshot driver you are?” I said.

“Think I’m lying, don’t you?”

We traded seats and she got us going, smoothly working the gearshift and clutch. At first she took it easy, rolling along at moderate speed, taking the turns slowly. But I could tell she was only getting the feel of the car. Then she began to accelerate. As we headed for the next curve she gave me a sidelong glance and said, “Hold on to your hat.”

She smoothly shifted down into second gear and gunned the motor and I fell against my door as she wheeled through a tight left turn. She took the next two curves just as nicely, and I whooped along with her.

But she got a little too cocky and took the next one too fast. We skidded off the trial and onto the softer sand and the car slogged to a stop and stalled before she could shove in the clutch. She started it up again and put it in low but the back wheels spun in the sand.

“Dammit!” she said. Her face was redly angry. “I’m sorry, Sonny.”

“Nice ride,” I said. “But now I’m going to have to sweat my ass off getting us unstuck.”

“No, you’re not.”

She got out of the car and ducked down out of sight for a minute by one of the rear wheels and then went around and squatted by the other one and then got back in the car. She put the car in gear and eased out the clutch and we slowly rolled forward and back onto the trail.

“What’d you do?” I said.

“Let a bunch of air out the back tires so they get a better grip in the sand. It’s an old trick Daddy taught me. We got to take it kind of easy getting back, though. Till we can fill them back up again.” She was smiling as we plodded along.

I said, “Stop the car a minute.”

She did, and looked at me in question. I leaned over and kissed her a good one.

“Whoo,” she said. “What’s that for?”

“Call it a yen. Any objections?”

“Oh no sir,” she said with a big grin. “Matter of fact I’m getting some yens of my own. Why don’t we hustle on back home and I’ll show you them?”

“Let’s do that,” I said.

Her driving wasn’t the only surprise of the week. The next day we were out on another truck trail and she was barreling through the curves with even more skill and confidence than the day before—and then she unexpectedly hit the brakes in the middle of a long straight stretch. The sudden stop threw me hard against the dash and I bonked my head on the windshield. A cloud of raised dust rolled over us.

“Oh baby, I’m sorry—you all right?” She was all big-eyed. “But jeezo, did you see the size of it?”

“Of what?” I said, rubbing my forehead.

“Rattlesnake. In the road ahead. He’s probably gone now.”

We strained to see through the settling dust. “I don’t see it no more,” she said.

“There,” I said, and pointed.

It was a good-sized rattler, all right, about fifteen yards away and alongside the trail, coiled in front of a creosote shrub. It was nearly the same color as the sand and hard to spot. Except for the darker bush behind it I might not have seen it.

I took the Smith & Wesson six-inch out from under the seat and eased the door open and stepped out. I held the revolver in a two-hand grip and braced my arms on top of the windshield frame, then cocked the piece and took a bead and squeezed off the shot.

The bang was swallowed almost instantly in all that open space and the sand kicked up a little to the right and slightly behind the snake. It drew into a tighter coil.

“Almost,” Belle said.

“Almost only counts in horseshoes,” I said.

I hit it with the next one—knocking the rattler into a writhing tangle. I walked up to within a few feet of it and shot it twice more and it stopped moving. Belle came up beside me as I straightened it out some with my foot. It was close to five feet long, even bigger than I’d thought.

“Wow,” she said. “Look at it.”

“It’s one less hardcase in the world,” I said, and headed back to the car. I released the revolver’s cylinder and put my thumb over the two live rounds still in it and shook out the empty shells. I had a box of .38 cartridges under the driver’s seat and I got it out and reloaded.

She lingered over the snake a moment before coming back to the car. “Nice shooting, huh?” I was a little surprised to realize I’d been showing off, that I wanted to impress her.

“Yeah,” she said. “Nice.” There was something else on her mind.

“What?” I said.

“Sonny,” she said. It was the voice she used when she didn’t quite know how to broach a subject. She looked over at a bunch of prickly pear, then off at the mountains, then finally back at me. “Teach me?”

“What? You mean shoot?”

“Yeah.”

“You never fired a gun?”

“Daddy was always going to show me but never did get the chance.”

I took the bullets out of the .38 and passed it to her so she could get the feel of its heft and its fit in her grip. I showed her how to stand sidelong to the target to shoot with one hand and how to face it when you shoot with two and how to use the front sight. I showed her how to squeeze the trigger rather than jerk it. How to cock the hammer and uncock it again without firing. How to unlock the cylinder and how the ejector rod worked and how to load the chambers.

“I love the sounds of it,” she said. She spun the cylinder to hear its soft whirr. She cocked the hammer with its softly ratcheting double click and snapped it on an empty chamber. “It sounds so…I don’t know. Efficient.”

“That’s the word for it,” I said.

I gathered a few stones about the size of my fist and set them in a row on top of a waist-high mound of sand, then backed up about a dozen yards and reloaded the piece and handed it to her. I told her to shoot into the mound first, to get used to the report and the recoil.

She stood facing forward with a two-hand grip. Pop! She flinched hardly at all. She turned and looked at me and silently formed the word, “Wow!” Then stood sideways and fired two one-hand shots.

“Oh man!” she said. “I can do this. Watch the rock on the right.”

She took careful aim. Pop! Sand spurted an inch to the side of the rock.

“Hey girl, almost.” I was impressed.

“Almost is for horseshoes,” she said without looking at me, taking aim again, the tip of her tongue in the corner of her mouth. Missing again, this time by a slightly wider margin.

“Dammit!”

She drew another bead and held it. Then lowered the revolver to her waist and regarded the rock like she was seeing it in some different way. Then brought the gun up smoothly and fired and the rock went flying.

“Whooo!” I applauded. “Give em hell, Kitty Belle!”

She whirled around to me, wide-eyed. “Know how I did it? I didn’t think about it or even aim so much, I just sort of up and pointed at it, like with my finger. It felt, I don’t know, so natural.”

“I’ll be damn,” I said. “Fired six rounds in her life and already she’s giving lessons how to shoot.” I was smiling when I said it, but I was also flat amazed.

She opened the cylinder and shoved out the empty shells with the ejector rod. “More bullets, please,” she said.

I let her shoot up the whole box. She missed about as much as she hit but she always came close. It was damn good shooting, any way you looked at it. And you could see she loved it. It was in the brightness of her eyes, in the way she set herself to fire, in her eagerness to reload. By the time she’d used up the last of the cartridges she was as easy with a gun as she was behind the wheel of a car. It comes that naturally to some.

“Not bad, girl,” I said when she was done. “If you want, I’ll bring the .380 tomorrow and show you how to shoot that.”

She leaped into my arms, locking her legs around my waist and giving me an unintentional conk on the back of the head with the revolver in her hand.

“Oh I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said, and kissed my head—and then we were both laughing as I swung her around.

We stopped at the swimming hole to cool off before going home. There were a few kids there, swinging on the rope and splashing around, but they left pretty soon after we arrived, and we had the place to ourselves. We dogpaddled over to a shady spot under a dense overhang of tree branches where we could stand with the water up to our necks. We ran our hands all over each other under the water and she undid my pants and took hold of me and I slipped my hand up under her dress and underwear and we hugged close and gasped against each other’s neck as we used our hands on each other and a minute later both of us groaned with our climax. Then hugged and kissed and got into another laughing fit.

“You really think I’m good?” she said. “At shooting, I mean. You really?” She looked radiant. Her face had fully healed and every passing day I’d marveled even more at how truly lovely she was.

“Your daddy didn’t know the half of it,” I said. “You’re a regular Barney Oldfield and a regular Annie Oakley.”

And so, a week later, when I told her what I had in mind and she said she wanted to do the job with me, I said, “Well now, I don’t know about that. Let me think about it.”

The truth was, I’d been thinking about it for days.

The day after the arrival of Bubber’s telegram, we heard Russell and Charlie arguing in their room. He’d had her go into town that morning and buy a crutch—“To have ready for when I’m able,” he’d said. But when she got back with it he wanted to use it immediately. He said he needed to get up and walk around some before he went crazy from being on his ass day and night.

“I knew it!” she said. “What a dope I am! The doctor said to stay off that leg a month and you know it.”

“What the hell do doctors know? I’m turning into a goddam vegetable lying here all day.”

“If you put weight on the leg before it’s ready you might hurt it worse. It needs to mend more.”

“That’s what a crutch is for, to keep weight off it. Now quit arguing and hand it over here.”

“No. Quit acting like such a child!”

“Quit acting like my goddam mother!”

She stormed out of the room and slammed the door behind her and stomped into the kitchen to snatch up her cigarettes without a glance at me and Belle and headed out the back door, letting it bang shut on its spring. Belle gave me a look and then went after her.

I went to Russell’s door and opened it. He was sitting up on the edge of the bed looking gloomy.

“Jesus,” he said. “Bad enough without having to put up with her shit too.”

He gestured for the crutch leaning in the corner and I got it for him.

“Easy does it,” I said, helping him up and slipping the crutch under his arm.

“Beep beep,” he said to get me out of his way. He stepped off a few awkward paces, repositioned the crutch for a more comfortable fit, then slowly gimped out of the room and into the parlor and all around it and came back down the hall and into the kitchen. Bracing himself on his good leg, he eased down into a chair and let out a hard breath.

“Christ damn,” he said. “Feel like I run a mile.” His face shone with sweat.

I checked the bandages. The one on his back was still spotless, but there were a couple of rosy stains showing on the back of the one around his leg.

“Best keep off it yet for a while longer,” I said.

“Goddammit,” he muttered.

I offered to get him a cold soda pop but he said the hell with that, give him a beer. I got one for each of us and sat across from him and we clinked bottles in a silent toast and drank. Then I told him about our tight money situation and asked how much he had.

“Had about twenty bucks on me in Midland,” he said. “Charlie’s probably spent most of it by now.”

“Well,” I said, “there’s only one thing for it.”

“Hell kid, I’ll be ready to go in a few days. First we deliver Buck and then we get back to working Bubber’s jobs.”

“Bullshit, Russell. You’re still leaking, man. Be a couple of weeks, at least, before you can even get around on that crutch worth a damn.”

“Coupla weeks, my ass,” he said. He looked miserable.

He shook a Chesterfield out of an open pack on the table and I struck a match and lit it for him. He drew deep on it and exhaled slowly. We didn’t say anything for a minute as he thought things over.

“One score might be enough,” I said. “Might need two. Filling station, grocery. Enough to see us through till you’re okay.”

He took another deep drag, exhaled a long stream of smoke and nodded. “Yeah, I guess. But you can’t hit anyplace around here. Got to be out of the county, at least, and the further the better. If you do more than one, spread them way out.”

“I know it,” I said.

“And no lone wolfing,” he said. “Even with nickel-and-dime jobs, you can run into a world of trouble. You’ll need a guy at the wheel and ready for backup. I’ll give Bubber a call, see if he can get you—”

“I already got somebody in mind,” I said.

“Who’s that?”

“Belle.”

He looked at me like he thought I was pulling his leg.

I told him all about how well she could drive, how naturally she’d taken to handling a handgun. He listened with a smile.

“Well, that girl’s full of surprises, ain’t she?” he said. “All the same—”

“And,” I said, “a woman partner would be perfect. She can put her hair up under her hat, see, and wear a jacket to hide her tits. Unless somebody gets right up close to her, everybody’ll think she’s a man. Once we drive off, she ditches the hat and jacket and we’re a married couple on a car trip and the cops are looking for two guys.”

“Real clever,” he said. “But just because she was good at shooting rocks didn’t mean she’d be good at shooting at a real person, if it came to that—especially if the real person had a gun too and was shooting at her.

“It’s a whole different thing, Sonny, and you damn well know it. And speeding around in the desert ain’t like making a getaway through streets full of cars and people and with the cops maybe right on your tail. I don’t have to tell you this stuff.”

“No you don’t,” I said. “I’ve talked it over with her and told her how it can be. She thinks she can handle whatever comes up.”

“Oh she thinks so? What if she can’t and you get taken down because of it? Goddammit, I need you to help me with Buck.” He leaned back and let out a long breath. “I’d ruther we asked Bubber to get you somebody experienced.”

“Then we’d have to give them a piece of the take,” I said, “and the take’ll be awful small as it is. I wouldn’t think Bubber’d care to have anything to do with such smalltime jobs anyway. Look, man, she can do it. It’s only the driving.”

“Well hell, it’s your job, kid,” he said. “You got my advice for what it’s worth, take it or leave it.” But I could tell how mad he was by the way he gave his attention to the bandage on his leg and then to lighting a fresh cigarette, to anything that kept him from having to look me in the eye.

“I guess I’ll give her a try,” I said.

Miller Faulk made no trouble in the county lockup, not whenever any guard was in earshot. His fellows in the tank were mostly drunks and petty thieves and it had not proved difficult to make his point to them that he wished to be let alone. He passed his days in his rude bunk, brooding on the perfidy of women, the absurdity of love, the cruel nature of existence. A week into his sentence he received a visit from Weldon, who brought him cigarettes and tidings that Eula had departed for places unknown. This news came as no surprise to Faulk and saddened him but little until Weldon added that she’d departed in his yellow Pierce-Arrow—whereupon Faulk had with the fervor of a true believer supplicated the Lord Almighty to afflict her with cancer of the cunt. That, he told Weldon, would pretty much cover her from head to toe. Still and all, he comported himself as a model prisoner, and after twenty-one days behind bars he was granted a good-time release into the supposed free world.

And only a few hours later John Bones hears Faulk’s name, the sixth one of the thirteen names on the list of that day’s jail releases. But he says nothing until the man on the telephone has read them all. Then says, Thank you, detective, and hangs up.

The Closed sign faces out through the glass but the door is unlocked. He steps from the outer dark into the weak yellow light of the station’s office and a small bell jingles over the door. He slides the bolt lock home. The door to the garage is to his left and stands open. He goes to it and sees them within, staring at him, each man with a quart bottle of beer in hand, standing next to a new DeSoto with its engine exposed under the open hood. The garage bay doors are shut.

Sorry, mister, the bigger one says, his eyes narrowing. We already closed. There’s a filling station a few blocks down still open at this hour.

No, man, the Weldon one says, that’s the fella I was telling you wants to buy the place. Howdy, Mr. Cheval.

He nods at Weldon, sees that Faulk is not so obtuse as the mechanic, that the man has jailbird eyes and knows a policeman on sight.

That right, Mr. Cheval? Faulk says. You looking to buy this gold mine from me? He sets down his beer bottle and picks up a heavy crescent wrench.

He steps into the garage and shuts the office door behind him, draws a short-barreled .44 revolver from under his coat, withdraws the pincer contraption from his coat pocket to reveal the two sets of handcuffs dangling from it.

It requires artistry to mete pain in sufficient degree to make its recipient desire nothing on earth so much as its cessation, yet not to such extent as to grant him even the briefest respite of swoon. In this regard John Bones is an artist. He has known a few true hardcases in his time and Miller Faulk proves one of the most admirable of his experience—outdone only by a grizzled Cajun of years ago who withstood John Bones’ interrogation for more than two heroic hours before his heart abruptly failed, thus distinguishing himself as the only one ever to deny him the information he desired. Faulk lasts roughly half that long, yet is only the second to endure beyond an hour before finally—when John Bones again loosens his gag to permit him to speak—whispering in a nasal rasp: Bubber Vicente. Bigsby…Hotel…Odessa. That’s where…I swear.

That’s where, you swear, John Bones echoes with a smile. You’re a poet, sir.

Crouching beside Faulk, he studies the man’s remaining eye and reads the verity therein, knows that unlike previous names and places Faulk has cried out in the course of their fragmented colloquy, these are the truth. Knows too that Faulk’s surrender is to the only hope left to him—a sooner rather than later demise. Supine on a concrete floor amid smears of grease and oil and blood, hands over his head and cuffed to the DeSoto bumper, legs at awkward attitude for their hammer-shattered knees effected to keep him from kicking, pants down to his thighs and his manly parts in ruin, a few toes rawly absent from the bared feet…what can he hope for except a quick end to it all?

And Weldon? Lying close by. Facedown, hands cuffed behind him. Intact but for his pincered Adam’s apple and his drained blood gelling in a dark mat under his head. He would have done better to keep other company this evening.

John Bones takes up the ball peen hammer once again.

You did good, he tells Faulk. Nothing to be ashamed of.

The hammer describes a blurred arc and in the instant of bonecrack Faulk is forevermore delivered from pain.

He stands and unrolls his sleeves, so deft with the pincers he can rebutton a cuff as facilely as he undid it. Puts on his jacket, his hat. Sets the brim at his preferred angle. Goes out of the garage and out of the office and over to the Model T sedan parked in the shadows. He sets the throttle and ignition and goes to the front of the car and positions the handcrank and whirls it hard and the well-tuned motor rumbles into throaty combustion. He gets into the driver’s seat and readjusts the fuel flow and spark settings and his feet adeptly operate the planetary transmission pedals and he sets out for the westward highway. Bearing into the darker remnant of the night.

It was close to midnight when we pulled into a little filling station a mile south of Pecos. I chose it because the traffic at this hour wasn’t very heavy and there were no other cars at the pumps and only one parked alongside the building. A lamp on a high post glowed over the two pumps but we had the car top up and she had her hair bunched under her hat and wore a baggy windbreaker zipped up to her neck. A big bulge of chewing gum in her cheek the better to distort her face. It wasn’t likely anyone would take her for a woman even if they passed close to the car. She had the four-inch .38 beside her on the seat and covered with a fold of her skirt. I was wearing a hat too, and a paste-on mustache.

“Set?” I said.

She nodded, and revved the motor with a little goose of the gas pedal.

“Remember, if somebody pulls in—”

“I’ll tell them the guy’ll be right out and I’ll honk the klaxon. I’m okay, Sonny.”

I got out of the car as the attendant swung open the screen door and said, “Gas, mister?”

“A road map’s all,” I said, and followed him back inside.

There was another guy in there, sitting at a small table with a checkerboard on it and a game in progress. I drew the .380 from under my belt and let them see it, then held it in the side pocket of my coat and told the attendant to sit in the other chair at the table and for both of them to put their hands under their ass. I went around behind the counter and yanked out the telephone cord. I found a Colt six-inch in the shelf under the counter. I looked at the attendant and he said, “The owner’s.” I put it in my other coat pocket, then opened the register and took out all the bills and stuffed them in the same pocket with the Colt. I told them I’d shoot the first man to stick his head out the door. Then I slipped the .380 back in my pants and walked out to the roadster and got in and Belle drove us off, smoothly shifting through the gears and accelerating steadily. I watched out the back window but didn’t see either guy come to the door before we were out of sight. The whole thing didn’t take three minutes.

After we swung east at the highway intersection at Pecos, I quickly counted the take by the light of the lampposts—$375. More than it had looked like in the till, but awful puny compared to the hauls I was used to with Buck and Russell.

Belle was singing, “Ain’t We Got Fun?”

We checked into a motor camp more than twenty miles away, outside of a place called Pyote. The camp was well off the main highway, set back in a grove of scraggly mesquites and flanked by a high sand hill. I parked the car behind the cabin and we went inside and locked the door and laughed at each other in our comic rush to get our clothes off. I started to take off the mustache too but she stopped me and kissed me and said she’d never kissed anybody with a mustache before. It made me look like Douglas Fairbanks, she said. She stared down between us and said, “You even got a pirate sword and everything.”

She shrilled happily as I swept her up in my arms and said, “Prepare to be ravished, woman!” and slung her onto the bed and leaped in after her. She hurriedly guided me into her, already panting the way she did when she was close, and before we’d been at it a half-minute she was digging her fingers into my back and tightening her legs around me and letting out her long low cry of climax. I’d never known her to get there so fast.

After a while we sat up and lit cigarettes. I took off the mustache and she said, “Well hey there, Sonny LaSalle! Where you been? I just now had the best time with Douglas Fairbanks, you wouldn’t believe!”

I got out the pint of mash I’d brought along and took a long pull and then offered her the bottle. She took a small sip off it and arched her brows and smiled and took another.

Once she got started talking about the heist, she couldn’t stop. “In one way it was like you were taking so long in there I couldn’t stand it. But at the same time it was like I didn’t want it to be over with. Does that make any sense?”

I smiled at her.

She said she could hardly imagine how it must feel to rob a bank. The way she was carrying on made me laugh and remember my own happy babblings to Buck and Russell the first few times I went on jobs with them.

“I was scared,” she said, “but I felt so…I don’t know…so real. Does it ever make you feel like that too?”

“Only every time,” I said.

“Wow,” she said.

And then we were at it again.

We didn’t check out of the cabin until midmorning and we stopped at the first café we came to. We sat in a booth in back and ate like we hadn’t seen food in days, each of us putting away a platter of fried eggs, pork chops, and potatoes, with a side of open-face biscuits covered with sausage gravy. We lingered awhile over coffee and cigarettes and then hit the road again.

As we passed through various oil patches and the towns around them, she said it all reminded her of Corsicana. The landscape out here was different, but the derricks and pumps and storage tanks and trucks, the mule wagons and the crowded stores and cafés, the dirty streets teeming with oil workers, the constant racket and hazy air and awful stinks were the same as they’d been back home.

“It’s the same in every oil town I’ve seen,” I said, “and I’ve seen a few lately.”

We were in no rush, taking it slow and easy, stopping alongside the road once so I could help an old man change a flat tire on his truck, pulling up another time to watch a herd of pronghorns bounding over the grassy flats in the distance.

The sun was almost down when we arrived in Crane. As rough as Corsicana was she didn’t think it was as rough as this little town, or as loud. Pulling a job in such a place was unthinkable—you’d never get away through all the traffic. We finally emerged at the east end of town into the gathering twilight and the traffic began to thin. A mile farther on we passed an isolated grocery store where several men were loading large cardboard boxes onto the beds of a couple of red pickup trucks parked in front. A supply run for an oil camp kitchen, probably.

Neither of us spoke for the next minute or so as the road rolled under us. Then she looked at me and said, “That was a big bunch of groceries them boys bought.”

“Yes it was,” I said.

“They must’ve run up some bill,” she said. “I wonder has business been that good all day?”

“Turn it around,” I said.

As we drove back to the store I steered the car with my left hand for a moment while she put her hair up in her hat and zipped up the baggy windbreaker. The red pickups went past us in the other direction. We pulled into the lot and parked near the front door. It wasn’t a particularly large place, but through the front windows it looked jammed with goods. I figured it for a main supplier to a lot of the camps around there, and it must’ve recently received deliveries of new stock. There were a couple of other trucks in the lot, and one car, so there were at least three customers in there and who knew how many employees. Too many for one man to watch. It was a two-man job, but I didn’t want Belle out of the car. I was about to say forget it and tell her to get going again, but then a couple of guys came out, each with a boxful of groceries. As they were putting their goods in one of the trucks, another man came out with two big sacks and got in the car. A minute later both car and truck were gone.

I decided to wait a little longer. I took the paste-on mustache from my pocket and put it on, turned to Belle and said, “Okay?” She smiled and winked. She had a big wad of gum going in her mouth. I checked the .380 and put it back into my waistband against my side.

Five minutes later two more guys came out with groceries and got into the other truck and left. Ours was the only vehicle in the lot. I had her pull the car up directly in front of the entrance with the passenger side toward the door. Then I got out and went in, the screen door jingling a little bell hung atop the frame.

There were several aisles of shelves and a pair of men were replenishing them with canned goods from various open cartons. The younger guy was big, beefy, with a red face and curly hair, the other was grayhaired, shorter and leaner, but I could see a family resemblance. The younger one looked at me and I nodded a greeting. The elder said, “Help you, sir?”

“Need some cigarettes,” I said.

The elder motioned to the younger and went back to his shelving. The younger left off what he was doing and went around behind the front counter where the register was. “What kind you want?” he said.

“Old Golds,” I said. “Two packs.” I stood sideways so I could watch his father too.

He set the smokes on the counter and I brought out the automatic. “Don’t even think about going for a gun,” I said.

For a second he looked at me like he wasn’t sure he’d heard me right—and then like I was some longtime enemy he recognized.

The old man stood up and said, “We ain’t got a gun here, mister. A shotgun in the house out back is all, I swear.”

“Give me every greenback in the till,” I said to the younger.

“Hell I will,” he said.

In all the jobs I’d done with Buck and Russell, in all the jobs they’d done without me, nobody, so far as I knew, had ever said no when they were under the gun.

“Want to get shot, asshole?”

“I ain’t scared of you.”

Well goddam, I thought.

“Justin,” the elder said. He had his hands half raised. “Take it easy, mister. The boy don’t mean it. You can have what we got.”

“Do so mean it,” the Justin one said.

The roadster’s klaxon sounded. Somebody was pulling in.

I kept the gun on the younger but spoke to the elder. “Listen, mister, somebody better open that register right goddam now and put all the bills in a sack. I don’t mean maybe.”

“Yessir,” the grayhead said. He hustled around the counter and pushed Justin aside and chinged open the drawer and started grabbing up handfuls of bills and sticking them in a paper bag. He shoved the bag across the counter at me and I snatched it up.

As I started backing toward the door the little bell tinkled and I lowered the gun to my waist to hide it. I turned to see a burly guy in oil-stained workclothes come walking in. The guy smiled and nodded at me and then looked past me and his eyes widened and his mouth fell open and I was already dropping to my haunches as I spun around to see the old man raising a shotgun.

The blast was loud as a cannon in those close quarters. My hat shifted on my head and I heard a crashing behind me and the oil guy started screaming.

It was a single-barrel breechloader so that was his only shot. I stood up slowly, my heart ramming against my ribs and my ears ringing. The old man was holding the smoking weapon like it was something he’d been caught stealing. The Justin one stood there with his mouth open.

“You son of a bitch,” I said to the elder. I put the .380 in his face and cocked it.

He said, “Oh, God”—and then the door banged open and I whirled and came within a hair of shooting Belle.

She held the six-inch straight out in front of her with both hands and her aspect was all readiness in spite of her bulging cheek.

“Okay?” she said in a muffled voice. The oil guy was still hollering on the floor, rolling from side to side and clutching his bloody shoulder.

“Yeah,” I said. I reached over the counter and took the shotgun from the elder. “Let’s go!”

I ran out behind her. She’d left the passenger door open and she dove in and slid up behind the wheel as smoothly as if she’d been doing it all her life. I tossed in the shotgun and was only partway in the car when it leaped forward and I almost fell out but caught hold of the doorjamb and pulled myself inside.

“Holy shit, girl!”

She made a tight left turn in the lot, slinging my door wide open as she wheeled us onto the highway, then floored the accelerator and the door swung back and slammed shut and we barreled off into the darkness.

Twenty minutes later we were on some truck road deep in a forest of derricks illuminated by field lights and flaring gas heads. She pulled over to the shoulder and stopped. The road lay empty in both directions, and there was no sign of anyone at any of the nearest derricks. There was only the steady pounding of the drills and the hiss of the flaring blue gas heads. I pitched the shotgun into a scrub patch.

Neither of us had said a word since tearing away from the store, and I thought maybe she was going to be sick. The roadster’s cab was dimly lit by the field lights and she was turned toward me, but I couldn’t see her face in the shadow of her hat brim. I hadn’t been aware of how much my hands were shaking until I lit a cigarette. I passed it to her and she spat her gum out the window and took a couple of deep drags and handed the cigarette back and I took one more pull and flicked it away. She took off her hat and let her hair fall to her nape and I saw the glitter of her eyes. She pressed against me and kissed me like she was trying to breathe me into herself. Then her hands were at my belt buckle and I raised my hips so she could tug my pants down to my thighs. She pulled up her skirt and straddled me on the seat, tugged aside the hem of her panties and mounted me. I bucked and bucked into her and we were kissing each other’s mouth and eyes and ears and I squeezed her breasts and she bit my neck and then both of us yelled and clutched each other harder….

When we got back on a main road I pulled into a diner parking lot and made fast work of swapping the roadster’s plates with those on a Plymouth. We then sped on to Rankin and checked into the Dustdevil Motor Inn. Not until after I’d counted the take—$650, a tidy sum for a grocery heist—did I discover the pellet holes in the crown of my hat.

I sat on the bed and wiggled a couple of fingers through the holes.

“Look here how close I came to getting my stupid head blown off,” I said.

She came and stood beside me, wearing only a towel around her hips after her showerbath. Her hair was still wet and her skin gleamed. She put her fingers in the holes.

“I felt it,” I said. “I didn’t realize what it was.”

“Feel this,” she said, and held my hand to her breast. Her heart was racing.

“It ain’t slowed down even a little,” she said. Nor had the brightness in her eyes reduced.

She let the towel slide from her hips.

We had more than enough now to cover our Fort Stockton expenses for a good while, but she thought we deserved to treat ourselves to a good time in some town of greater size than Fort Stockton.

“You know what I mean,” she said. “Someplace with a real nice dance club. I’ve always wanted to go to a fancy dance club. And with a nice dress shop where I can buy myself something fine and pretty to wear there.”

Midland was fifty miles up the road, but we weren’t about to visit there in a car I’d stolen from that town barely more than two weeks earlier. So we headed east, puttering along with the top down under a sky less hazy than usual, and three hours later we were in San Angelo.

Under the names of Mr. and Mrs. Mitch Russell we checked into the brandnew Riverside Hotel, which a streetcorner cop had advised us was the best in town. I asked the bellboy if there was someplace nearby where a man might get a bottle of labeled spirits, and he said, “Name your preference, pal.” I said bourbon would be vastly appreciated, and a couple of limes if he could manage it. Twenty minutes later he was back with a paper-sacked fifth of bourbon and a roller tray holding a bucket of ice, the limes, two seltzer bottles and two tumblers. I gave him a lavish tip.

Belle loved everything about the hotel. She said she’d never been in any place so fine. She went around the room, touching the flowers in the dresser vase, the furniture, the bedcovers, the towels and soaps and shampoos in the bath, as if making sure everything was real. I said if she thought this place was fancy she ought to see the hotels in New Orleans.

“Will you show me New Orleans one of these days?” she said.

“Sure,” I said. “I think you’d like it.”

She came into my arms and tucked her head under my chin. “I think I’d love it,” she said.

We went out and found a dress shop, but each dress she tried on she liked better than the one before, and after nearly two hours she still couldn’t decide between three of them. She and the salesgirl kept blabbing on and on about yokes and bratelles and peplums, hems and flounces and God-knows-what. I settled the matter by buying all three dresses for her. She gave me a kiss full on the mouth and smiled at the salesgirl and said, “Aren’t I the lucky one?”

The girl was goodlooking, with a deep Texas accent and thick honey hair, and she grinned and said, “He’s a regular sugar daddy, only lots younger and better-looking than most, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

Belle winked at her and said she didn’t mind at all. I would’ve been lying if I’d said I wasn’t enjoying myself.

From there we went to a Mexican restaurant for a lunch of guacamole and strips of roast kid in a red chile sauce, with flour tortillas so freshly hot they powdered and almost burned our fingers. Across the street was a lush green park with the Conchos River running through it, and when we were done eating we went for a long walk in the shade of the cottonwoods along the bank. Then back to the hotel and I fixed us each a glass of bourbon and Coke full of crushed ice and a touch of lime juice, something I’d learned from Russell. She took a careful sip and grinned and said she loved it. We filled the tub with bubble lotion and got in it together and sipped the drinks slowly. After a long soak we soaped each other up and then rinsed off and dried each other with thick towels and went to bed and made love and then napped until dark.

We took supper in a good steakhouse across the street—filets as thick as my wrist and heaped with finely sliced fried onion rings—then went back to the hotel and descended the wide staircase to the ballroom. Belle was wearing one of her new dresses, a little black number that hugged her hips and had a short fringed hem and a sort of halter top cut way low in the back. She was a knockout.

The dancefloor was crowded this Friday night and the big band up on the stand was damned good, finishing up an excellent rendition of “Stardust.” Then it started in on “Am I Blue?” and we took to the floor.

We’d just finished kicking up our heels to “Baby Face” and were applauding along with the other dancers when the brass section swung into the opening bars of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love.”

“Let’s sit this one out,” I said. “We can go outside for a minute if you want.”

She shook her head. “There’s no need. That song doesn’t bother me anymore, really it doesn’t.”

“Sure?”

“You know,” she said, “it’s funny, but everything from before feels…I don’t know…made up. Like it all happened to somebody else, somebody I hardly know anymore and I’m glad of it.”

She gave me a peck on the lips and a smile and asked if I’d be a real sweetie and get her a cold Coke while she went to powder her nose. “Meet you at the refreshment bar,” she said. “Then we’ll get back to showing these suckers how to dance.”

The lounges were on the other side of the room and down a hallway, and she drew a good bit of attention as she made her way around the edge of the dancefloor. I went to the bar and ordered two Cokes. There was a scattering of small tables along the walls to either side of the bar, all of them occupied, but then a couple got up to return to the floor and I was quick to take over their spot.

I was nearly done with my Coke when I caught sight of her emerging from the crowd. Her face was tight with excitement, a look I’d come to know well. She didn’t see me at the bar and scanned around and I waved to catch her attention. She spotted me and came over and sat down.

“What?” I said.

Her eyes had that peculiar light they took on when she was really wound up. She sucked a deep draft of her Coke through the straw, took a look back toward the dancing crowd, then leaned close to me. “Listen to this. When I came out of the ladies’ room just now? These two fellas come out of the gents’ and start talking to me. They’d been doing some drinking, you could tell, and I took them for just a couple of funny drunks. Then one of them says to me, ‘Look here,’ and steps over by this big potted plant and stands sort of half-turned so nobody but me and his buddy can see, and he takes a roll of bills out of his coat pocket and I mean to tell you, Sonny, it was this thick.” She held her thumb and forefinger three inches apart. “Looked bigger than a Coke bottle except fat at both ends. The top bill was a hundred, I swear. And the other one says real low in my ear, ‘Name your price, honey. One time around the world for each of us.’”

I stood up. “Come point them out.”

“Sonny, sit down. Please. Just listen a minute Okay?”

I sat. “I’ll kick their ass.” It was an effort to keep my voice down.

“I told them I had to make a phone call but I’d be right back. They’re waiting for me in the lounge hallway.”

I started to get up again but she flapped her hand at me to sit back down.

“Listen to me,” she said. “You want to get them? Let’s really get them. I had this idea—I mean it just bang came to me when that galoot said what they wanted.”

“What the hell are you—”

“What if you went up to the room right now and then I took them up there?”

Her expression was pure readiness, her green eyes sparking. She slid her hand across the table and gripped mine.

“What do you say?” she said.

Twenty minutes later I was in the bathroom, the door slightly ajar, the room in darkness, when I heard her key rattling in the lock and then their laughter as they came in.

There was the click of a lamp switch—but the bathroom was situated in such a way that all I could see through the cracked door was a narrow portion of the back wall and part of the window.

The room door shut. The guys laughed louder. Sloppy kissing sounds, murmurings, chucklings. One of them said something I didn’t catch except for “Molly, honey.” I felt my pulse in my eardrums.

“Whoa now, boys, hold your horses!” Belle said loudly, her laughter sort of tinny. “Lookee there the good bourbon I got. Why don’t we pour us a…now, behave yourself, you rascal, we got all night! Why don’t we all have us a little drink and—”

I didn’t catch the rest of it for the sudden blaring of a big band playing “Always.” One of them had turned on the radio on the bedside table.

We hadn’t counted on that. The signal we’d arranged was “Here’s to wicked times,” which she’d say when she had them standing together by the chest of drawers, where the bourbon was. I’d come out and get the drop on them and she’d snatch up her own gun from under the pillow. But with the radio up so loud I couldn’t make out what anybody was saying, only the guys’ harsh laughter.

Damn the signal. I was about to pull the door open when it swung in hard and hit me in the forehead and knocked me back against the sink and my feet went out from under me. A large man was in the doorway with his hand at his fly—and quick as a cat he was all over me before I could raise the gun. He gripped my gun wrist with one hand and started punching with the other, cussing a blue streak. He must’ve had thirty pounds on me and was damn strong. I tried to cover up with my free arm but still caught some on the face and neck and then I tucked my chin down and took the next ones on top of the head. They hurt like hell but then he yowled and I knew he’d busted his hand. I grabbed him by the hair and lunged sideways and rammed his head hard against the rim of the bathtub. He groaned and lost his hold on me and I got better leverage and banged his head again and this one knocked him cold.

I got untangled from him and scrambled to my feet and rushed into the other room and there was Belle—standing beside the bed and holding the cocked Colt in the other guys’ face. One of her straps was broken and her top hung down and exposed a breast. The guy sat on the edge of the bed looking terrified, hands way up. “Always” was still blasting.

“Belle!” I said.

She didn’t even look at me. She jabbed the guy in the forehead with the muzzle of the gun and he fell on his back and said, “Jesus, lady…please!”

She held the gun to his eye. “Want to tear my dress some more, highroller? Want another grab up under my skirt?”

“No, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” He shut his eyes and gritted his teeth.

She tapped his teeth with the muzzle and said, “Open up.” Then slid a good portion of the barrel into his mouth—and now his eyes couldn’t get any bigger.

The telephone rang. She looked at it and then at me, her face blank. It rang again. I went over and turned down the radio and picked up the receiver.

The front desk. They’d received a complaint from the room next door about the loud music. Could we please be more considerate? I saw myself in the mirror, my nose bleeding, a dark swelling over one eye and on one cheek. The knots on my scalp hurt but didn’t show. “Certainly,” I said. “My apologies.”

I hung up. Belle still had the pistol barrel in the guy’s mouth.

“The desk clerk wonders if you’d be kind enough not to shoot that asshole,” I said. “They’re afraid the noise might disturb some of the guests.”

She held the blank look on me a moment longer—and then grinned wide and beautifully.

We bound their hands behind them with their own belts and gagged them with towels. It wouldn’t take much effort to get free of the belts, but that’s how I wanted it. The guy on the bathroom floor had a concussion for sure, maybe a skull fracture, and the sooner he made it to a hospital the better. At least he was breathing and it looked to me like he’d stay that way. He’d been the one to flash the roll of money at Belle—$3, 500, by my hasty count before I stuck the wad in my coat. The other guy was carrying a little more than a grand, and that roll went into my coat too. They’d told Belle they were drilling contractors just back from setting up a new field in Mexico and about to start a job outside San Angelo.

Belle hurriedly changed dresses, and because I didn’t want to raise any curiosity about my bruises, I sent her down to the desk to check us out while I finished putting our stuff in the valises. I told the guy on the bed he ought to be more careful about the women he took up. He nodded like he meant it. When she telephoned me from the lobby to say we were set to go, I pulled my hat low and grabbed our bags and took the elevator down.

I went out the front door and a moment later she pulled up in the roadster. She slid over to the passenger side and I got behind the wheel.

Before we’d gone two blocks she was hugging my neck and kissing me, running her hand inside my shirt. It was all I could do to steer.

“Jesus, girl—you’re gonna make us wreck!”

“Did you see how scared he was, baby? Did you see? I had him crying. I could’ve made that bullying bastard do anything, he was so scared of me.”

“A gun in the mouth can do that, all right.”

Then we were past the city limit sign and she placed my right hand up under her dress and panties so I could feel how wet she was. She fondled me through my trousers. I was suddenly aware of being so hard it hurt. She unbuttoned me and hunched down and took me in her mouth. She’d never done that before. In bed one time I’d made it obvious I wanted that, but she’d pulled away and said no, that her Corsicana boyfriend had practically forced her to do it once, and once was enough. So I’d let the matter drop. Now here she was, doing it to me in the car as we barreled along the dark highway. I had to pull over to the shoulder to avoid a collision. I sat there gripping the wheel while she kept at me below the sweep of passing headlights. When I shot off—rocking back and forth and banging my fist on the wheel—some of my fellow motorists must’ve thought I was having a fit.

We checked into a motor camp outside of Big Lake and frolicked into the wee hours. We did it every which way—sideways, dog style, standing, sitting, name it. Having seen the lunatic delight I’d taken from her special treat in the car, she was avid to pleasure me that way. And even though she’d previously been as shy of receiving my mouth on her as of putting hers to me, this time she didn’t resist as I kissed my way down her belly. When I used my tongue on her she dug her fingers into the back of my head and arched herself against my mouth and climaxed with such a shriek I hoped the neighboring cabin was unoccupied or somebody might call the cops to report a murder taking place.

For a minute afterward, she lay open-mouthed, breathing deeply, an arm over her eyes. Then let out a long sigh and said, “My God. I’d heard things, but I never imagined it could be soooooo fine.” She lowered her arm and looked at me. “Who taught you to do that, the devil?”

Actually, Brenda Marie Matson had given me the best instruction I ever received on oral sexual technique, but I didn’t think Belle would want to hear about her, so I simply grinned and waggled my eyebrows. I told her that at Gulliver we used to refer to the clitoris as the “little man in the boat,” and we’d spend hours discussing the best ways to get him up on tiptoes. She laughed so hard she got the hiccups.

I’d brought along the remaining bourbon and we sat up in bed and had a drink and a cigarette, but both of us were so tired we didn’t even finish the smokes before snuffing them out and spooning up, her ass snug against me.

I was almost asleep when her voice came to me from what seemed very far away…. “What’s it feel like to shoot somebody?”

I wanted to say, “Not sure I ever did,” but only managed a low mumble.

I thought I heard her say, “Must be something,” but I wasn’t certain. And then I was asleep.

We got back in the middle of the afternoon. Russell met us at the front door, leaning on his crutch, returning Belle’s hug with his free arm.

“Perfect timing with them reinforcements,” he said, nodding at the sackful of booze and beer I was carrying. I’d made a stop at the Callaghan Street house as soon as we rolled into town. “I’m about down to my last swallow,” he said. His breath smelled of drink and his eyes were red.

“You run out of pills?” I said as we headed for the kitchen.

“That’s all right,” he said. “Don’t need them.”

“Not if you’re using Dr. Barleycorn’s prescription, I guess.”

“You mind your health, kid, I’ll mind mine,” he said. “Tell me how-all you did.”

I’d expected to see Charlie in the kitchen but she wasn’t there. Belle stepped across the hall to peek into their bedroom, then started for the sideporch door.

“She’s down the park,” Russell said, grimacing slightly as he gingerly accommodated himself in a chair at the table, positioning his leg out in front of him. There was a nearly empty bottle and a tumbler on the table, together with some kind of map and what looked like a letter. “She’s been spending lots of time down there.” He waved his hand in indication that the matter was something he didn’t fully understand or care to discuss. Things between them didn’t look to have improved much while we’d been away.

He looked from Belle to me and then at her again. “I’m sure she’ll be glad to know you’re back.”

Belle got the hint. “I’ll just go and see how she’s doing,” she said. She fluttered her fingers at me and went out the back door.

He poured the last of his bottle into the tumbler. I got another glass down from the cabinet and opened one of the new bottles and built up his drink and poured myself one. We touched glasses and took a sip.

“So?” he said.

I opened my valise and reached in and took out two big handfuls of currency and dropped them on the table. Russell smiled and picked up a few bills and spread them in his hand like oversized playing cards.

“That new money won’t never feel as real as these,” he said. The federal government was replacing all paper money with bills only about half the present size, and lots of people felt about it the way he did—the smaller money didn’t look or feel as real. “Don’t tell me you hit a bank,” he said.

He put the money back in the valise and I gave him a quick rundown on the jobs, focusing on the lucrative San Angelo caper.

“She made him suck the piece?” he said.

“Guy thought his days were done. I think he pissed his pants.”

“And it was her idea to take them down?”

“Forty-five-hundred-dollar idea,” I said.

“Ain’t no end to her surprises,” he said. “Here’s to her.” We clinked glasses.

“It’s more than enough here to pay off Bubber for the lawyer and Gustafson too,” I said. “I’d say we’re sitting pretty.”

“Pretty much,” Russell said. “Only we owe Bubber for something else too.” He gestured at the map and note in front of him.

I pulled my chair around beside his. It was an oil map of Reagan County, showing various oil field sites, each with a lot of numbers and hieroglyphics around it, and the truck trails that connected them to the main roads. The only town shown was Big Lake, where the east-west and north-south highways intersected. A few other county roads were on the map too. Under a penciled arrow pointing west from Big Lake was written “Rankin, 30 mi.” A large penciled X indicated as being five miles east of the western county line and twenty miles north of the highway to Rankin was labeled “S.R.R.C.” There was a smaller X below and southeast of the larger one and “6 mi” scribbled alongside the arrow between them. A squiggly pencil line ran west from the small X to the north-south highway, and the distance between them was noted as half a mile.

“What’s all this?” I said.

“From Bubber,” he said. “He didn’t waste any time after he got your telegram.”

The map and the letter had arrived yesterday morning, hand-delivered by a guy who’d shown up at the door and told Charlie he’d been instructed to give the material to no one but Russell or me. Russell heard her arguing with him and came out on his crutch. The guy gladly accepted his offer of a glass of beer before heading off. Russell didn’t say whether Charlie had joined them in the beer, but my guess was she hadn’t.

The letter was actually a long note, addressing no one in particular and unsigned. It was written in pencil in an awkward hand—by some inside man, Russell figured, maybe a Santa Rita inmate but more likely by a hack. It described the prison’s daily routine and recent work assignments, including Loomis Mitchum’s. Every day the prison sent out a half-dozen work crews to various kinds of jobs. Mitchum was assigned to a crew of eleven other cons overseen by three guards, including the driver, every guard armed with a pump shotgun. The big X showed the location of the Santa Rita camp, and the little one below it was where Mitchum’s crew had been working at clearing a new drilling site for an oil company. The squiggly line was a truck trail joining the site to the north-south Big Lake highway. Although Mitchum’s crew was scheduled to work at this site for another few weeks, the note said, labor assignments were subject to change at any time, so there was no certainty of how much longer Mitchum would actually be at that site. Wherever they were assigned, however, each crew always went out on the same truck, and each truck carried an identifying number on the doors. Mitchum’s crew was transported on truck 526.

“It’s practically the same setup as when I busted him out of Sugarland,” Russell said.

“Except like this guy says, no telling when they’ll put Buck on some other job. Maybe he’ll still be on this job when your leg’s all better, maybe he won’t. We’ll have to see how—”

“That’s why we’ll do it tomorrow,” Russell said. “They could take him off the road anytime. They could transfer him to some other joint, a tighter one. You never know. All I know is it ain’t likely to get no easier than Santa Rita. So we get him tomorrow.”

I saw that he was absolutely serious. “Russell,” I said, “we haven’t even had a look at the place. And we need a third man. And you can hardly walk, for Christ’s sake.”

“I ain’t got to walk. I can cover you and the girl from the car. Truth to tell, I think we can do it just us two if we have to, but if she’s as cool as you say, she’ll be good for third man.”

It took me a moment to understand he was talking about Belle.

“You should see your face, kid,” he said. “What? Were you bullshitting me about how good she is?”

I was seized by some misgiving I couldn’t name. “No, man, she did fine,” I said. “It’s only that, well, this is a whole different thing….”

“It ain’t that different. If she could handle herself on the road like you said, she can handle this.” He gave me a narrow look. “Ah shit, Sonny, don’t tell me you’ve gone goofy for the broad. Is that it? She your main lookout now, and the hell with your partners? Hell with old Uncle Buck?”

“Hell no, man,” I said. And thought, Hell no.

“I hope not, kid. Last thing we need’s a partner with his head up his ass over some chippy.”

The crack stung but I took it. If he saw it made me sore he’d think he’d hit a nerve, that he was right that I’d gone sappy—and he wasn’t right, goddammit. He wasn’t.

“It’s just that she might not want to be in on something like this,” I said. It sounded lame even to me.

“Well, I know one way to find out real fast,” he said. “We’ll ask her.”

What could I say? “Okay by me.”

“But listen, kid, yea or nay, with or without her, you and me go get him tomorrow. Right?”

“Hell yeah, man.”

He grinned. He knew as well as I did what she was going to say.

We’d do it like he and Jimmyboy had done it at Sugarland. Russell was sure he could cover at least two of the guards from the roadster’s rumble seat, but in any case he could cover at least one of them. I’d be the one to get out and disarm the hacks and disable the prison truck. If we needed a backup outside the car, Belle would do it.

We had just finished roughing out the plan when the girls came in. Charlie had obviously been crying. She went to the cabinet over the sink and got a fresh pack of cigarettes and busied herself opening it. Belle got a bottle of Coke from the Frigidaire and pried off the cap with the opener attached to the end of the counter and then went and sat on a stool by the stove. Charlie lit a smoke and took a few deep drags and stared at Russell, who stared right back.

“So?” she said. “You make up your mind?”

“There was nothing to make up about it,” he said.

“You’re going to do it, then?”

“What’s it look like?” he said.

“Goddammit, Russell, can’t you for once give me a straight answer? Are you going to do it?”

“What’s it look like?”

She ran her eyes over the papers and maps, her face a mix of anger and despair. I glanced at Belle but she was staring down at her soda pop.

“I can’t do this anymore,” Charlie said. “I can’t always be waiting around to see if you’ve been…to see if you come back in one piece.”

Russell sighed and looked bored. A man who’d heard all this too many times.

“You make me feel like one of those fools in the romance magazines,” she said. “But you don’t give a damn, do you? It doesn’t matter one bit that I love you, does it? Well, I’ll tell you something, Russell, you’re going to…ah, the hell with it.” She stubbed the cigarette in an ashtray and left it crumpled and smoldering.

“Only be a minute,” she said to Belle, and went to the bedroom.

“There’s a bus coming through in a half hour,” Belle said softly. “Stops at the hotel on Main, she already checked. I said I’d drive her over. It’ll take her to San Antone and she can catch a train to New Orleans from there.”

Russell reached into the valise and took out a handful of bills and swiftly counted out about a thousand. He handed Belle the money. “Give it to her when she’s getting on the bus. Don’t let her give it back. If you can sneak it in her bag, do it that way.”

Belle nodded and put the money in her pocket.

Russell poured me another drink and one for himself. We sat there, not saying anything, hearing her working the drawers in the bedroom, hearing her footsteps on the wooden floor as she went into the bathroom, hearing them come out again. A minute later she set her bag down at the kitchen door and came over to me and I got up and we hugged and she gave me a peck on the cheek.

“Take care of yourself, Sonny,” she said low in my ear. “Her too.”

She stepped over to Russell and bent down and kissed him on the mouth. “Bye, baby.”

“Bon voyage, girl,” he said, looking her in the eye.

She went out and Belle followed and we heard the front door open and close. Then the car doors. Then the roadster motor fire up. Then the car driving away.

A sweltering summer afternoon no different from most in West Texas but for the low reef of dark clouds on the eastern horizon. People on the streets joke about the vague possibility of rain, of an actual storm perhaps, which would be an even more uncommon turn of weather.

The Bigsby desk clerk directs him to Earl’s Café. He goes to the café in shirtsleeves, the pincers hidden under his draped jacket. A waitress guides him to Earl Cue in the rear-room speakeasy. Earl still wearing the jaw wires but much improved in his enunciation for all his practice. When he insists on knowing the lean gray man’s business with Bubber, the man says it’s a business proposition which he is not at liberty to discuss with anyone else.

Well sir, Earl tells him, I happen to be Mr. Vicente’s business partner, so any business deal you have for him is gonna have me in it too.

Very well then, the gray man says, why don’t we go see Mr. Vicente and the three of us discuss it?

No can do, Earl says. Mr. Vicente is out of town right now and no telling when he’ll be back. Could be another week, maybe two, no telling.

I see, the gray man says. And where might Mr. Vicente be, then?

He might be someplace that’s none of your business, grandpa, Earl Cue says, nettled by this old goat’s obvious supposition that Bubber’s the main man of the partners.

The gray man smiles and says, Yes, of course. Tell you what, Mr. Cue, why don’t I explain my proposition to you? After all, if it doesn’t interest you, what chance do I have of winning over Mr. Vicente?

Well now, Earl Cue thinks, that is way more like it. He makes a show of checking his watch. I guess I got the time to hear it.

Actually, the gray man says, it’ll be better if you see it. He tells Earl of two hundred cases of prime Scotch whisky he has stored in an old warehouse outside of town. He has to move the stuff immediately, he says, and whispers a price that is half the going rate. Would Mr. Cue care to see the goods for himself, maybe taste a sample to assure himself of their authenticity?

Well hell, Mr. Cue says, why not?

It takes much longer to drive out to the isolated warehouse than it does to gain the information he desires. No witnesses but jackrabbits in the brush and horned lizards in the rocks, a pair of buzzards wheeling in the white sky—and no auditors but them to the screams that shortly ensue.

Fifteen minutes after entering the dilapidated building, John Bones emerges from its dim confines, brushing dust and smears of cobweb from his hat and coat sleeves. Earl Cue will not come out again for another five weeks, when his remains are removed by authorities after being discovered by a pair of roving boys in search of a day’s adventure.

“It’s them,” Russell said, squinting into the high-power binoculars against the glare of the sun. “Truck number 526.” He moved the glasses in a slow pan and then held on something. “Yowsa—there’s old Buckaroo. Looking over here, all sneaky like. Ten to one he knows it’s us.” His voice was tight, the way it got when he was up for it. I remembered when he’d bought the binoculars for Charlie at some roadside café in the middle of nowhere. It seemed a long time ago.

We were on the crest of a sand hill, the roadster idling on the narrow trail of crushed rock. I was behind the wheel, Belle next to me, Russell in the rumble seat. The surrounding country was shaped of rolling sand mounds and rocky outcrops, cactus and scrub brush. We had the top down and Belle’s bare shoulders in her sundress were pink with sunburn. Russell and I were in rolled shirtsleeves. We all wore sunglasses and hats. The sky was clear except behind us, where a darkly purple bank of thunderheads had risen high in the east and was slowly heading our way. We’d yet to see rain in West Texas.

The site was about 250 yards away. To the naked eye the truck was a dark shape on the far side of the site, the men of the work party only speck figures. Then Russell passed the glasses up to me, and I spotted two of the guards by their uniforms. One was on this side of the site, the other way over on the other, standing at the truck with one foot up on the running board like he was talking to somebody in the cab, probably the third guard. Both of the guards in view carried shotguns. The convicts wore prison whites and were scattered around the area, which had already been cleared of brush. They were busting up the rocky outcrops with sledgehammers and picks and clearing away the broken stone, laboring in a dusty yellow haze, lifting and toting the larger chunks, scooping the smaller ones into wheelbarrows, dumping all of it outside the perimeter of the site. But even with the field glasses, at this distance it was hard for me to tell one convict from another. It didn’t surprise me that Russell could—his hawkeye was why they’d made him a sniper in the war.

“See him?” Russell said. I could hear the smile in his voice.

“No.”

“Look at the two cons closest to the near guard.”

I sighted in on the guard, then the convicts a few yards from him. They were loading rocks by hand into a wheelbarrow. Now one of them started away with a barrowload and the other looked our way and for a minute I wasn’t sure, and then I was.

“Got him,” I said.

“Like he knew we were coming today,” Russell said.

“The guard’s looking over,” I said.

“Wondering who the hell we are,” Russell said. “Let’s get on down there. Off with the hat, girl.”

Belle took off her hat and shook her hair out, and I put the roadster in gear and got us moving again. When we got down there she would turn on the smile. We figured the sight of a woman in our bunch would ease their wariness. Except for that advantage, Russell figured to do it just like he had at Sugarland. He would call out to the guard that we were looking for the Burchard Oil drill site but had obviously taken a wrong turn, and could he give us directions. When the guard got close to the car he’d put a gun in his face and I’d jump out and relieve him of the shotgun and put it to his head and he’d tell the other two guards to come on over to us with their hands up and empty. Russell would cover them from the car and Buck would grab up their weapons while I disabled the truck and Belle got in the rumble seat with Russell. Then Buck and I would hop in the car and I’d wheel it around and barrel us out of there.

The night before, after Russell had gone over the plan with us, Belle had whispered to me in bed, “Will it really be that simple, one-two-three?” I said the plan had worked well for them once before and left it at that. I could feel her wanting to say something else but she didn’t. For a minute I felt like some kind of liar for not admitting my doubts to her—then told myself there was no reason to think the thing wouldn’t go as well this time.

But of course you never know. Even from the crest of the sand hill, parts of the trail between us and the work site had been hidden from view behind other mounds. We were within forty yards of the site when we came around a rise and saw a pair of large rocks that had been placed in the trail to block it. They were too big for the car to clear, and if we tried driving around them we’d get stuck in the sand for sure. And the trail was too narrow to turn the car around on it.

“Fuck a duck,” Russell said. “The inside guy didn’t say anything about this.” His right hand was down out of sight and I knew he had the revolver in it.

The near guard came out to the trail and started toward us, the butt of his shotgun braced on his hip. The other guard was coming at a brisk stride from the far side of the site. Prisoners were looking our way even as they went on wielding their tools.

“What do we do?” Belle said.

Buck decided it. He grabbed a big rock and scurried up behind the guard, his arm cocked to brain him. The guy must’ve heard him coming—he spun around and halfway ducked and took the blow on the shoulder. They started grappling for the shotgun.

“Help him out!” Russell shouted, bringing up the long-barreled .38 and bracing his shooting arm on the front seat. I jumped out and ran toward them, slipping the .380 out of my pants.

The other guard was coming on the run. I heard men shouting in the distance and the pop…pop…pop…pop of Russell’s .38 behind me and the running guard went down and his hat rolled off. He rose to all fours and Russell’s revolver popped twice more and the guard’s head jerked and he fell over.

I was almost to them when Buck wrested the shotgun from the guard and hooked him on the side of the head with the stock, staggering him backward. Belle’s pistol popped behind me and the guard grabbed at his side. Then Buck shot him from a span of six feet and he lofted rearward, arms and legs flung wide and portions of his midsection spraying red.

Buck whirled toward me and hollered, “Let’s go get a beer, kid!” He was grinning like a lunatic and I was astonished to hear myself laugh.

Belle was between us and the car, the .38 up and ready. We ran toward her and Buck yelled, “Move that pretty ass!”

She turned and ran, with me on her heels and Buck right behind me.

Then a rifleshot sounded—and Russell hollered, “Nooo!”

I turned and saw Buck sprawled facedown…the back of his head bright red…the ground before him smeared with what must’ve been his brains.

The rifle cracked again and Belle cried out.

She was sitting, clutching her bloody arm, her pistol in the dirt.

“Buck!” Russell shouted. “Get Buck, goddammit!”

I stuck the .380 in my pants and ran to her and scooped her up and lumbered to the car, hearing another rifleshot and the tick of a sudden hole in the windshield.

“Damn you, God damn you!” Russell hollered. He was trying to get out of the rumble seat, hampered by his bad leg. I heaved Belle into the car and slammed the door and ran around to the driver’s side, shouting for Russell to get down—just as the rifle fired again and he jerked and grunted and fell back in the seat.

I rammed the gearshift into reverse and twisted around to see behind me and floored the accelerator. The roadster went tearing backward over the narrow trail, fishtailing and raising a plume of rock dust, the motor whining so high I couldn’t hear anything else. I drove in reverse all the way back to the highway and then wheeled out onto it backward and barely missed getting clobbered by an oil carrier that swerved past with a long angry blare of its horn.

I ground the gears with every shift and sped about a mile down the highway and then pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped.

The sun was low and deeply orange and the dust we’d raised was red. I was pouring sweat. My tongue kept sticking to the roof of my mouth.

Belle was hunkered against the door, holding to her wound, her eyes huge on me. Russell groaned. I hadn’t known if he was dead or alive. I put the gearshift in neutral and squirmed around up on my knees to see how he was doing.

He was slumped down low and looking at me and holding the .38 at his hip, cocked and pointed at my face. The right side of his shirt was sopped with blood.

“You left him,” he said. His voice was wet.

“He was dead,” I said.

“As dead as last time? He’s your partner, Sonny, you bastard! He’s your blood!”

“Point that somewhere else, man.”

Belle sat up and said, “He is dead, I saw him. His head was all—”

“Nobody’s asking you, you—”

In the instant he shifted his eyes to her I grabbed his gun and pushed it away, the hammer snapping on an empty chamber, and arched up and drilled him with a straight right that took his eyes out of focus. Then gave him another shot, right under the ear, and this one put his lights out.

Another oil truck coming. I opened a road map and spread it over his chest to hide the blood and pulled his hatbrim over his eyes, then slid down behind the wheel and put his pistol under the seat. The truck went clattering by.

I got out the flask and took a pull, then offered it to Belle, but she shook her head. “How bad are you?” I said.

“Not too, I don’t think. It hurts.” She cut a look toward the rumble seat. “Jesus, Sonny. Is he gone crazy?”

“Let’s see,” I said, leaning for a better look at her wound.

She took her hand away. The bullet had cut through the flesh of her inner arm just above the elbow. She was lucky it hadn’t hit bone.

“Just hold tight to it,” I said, and then knelt up on the seat again to tend to Russell. I ripped his shirt open to examine the wound and was relieved to see the blood was oozing, not pumping. I got his coat off the rumble seat floor and formed it into a thick pad, packed it against the wound and tied it firmly in place with his shirttails. His jaw was swelling up bad. I’d probably busted it.

No traffic in sight in either direction.

I rinsed her wound with booze and bandaged it with my handkerchief. She flinched and sucked hard breaths between her teeth but didn’t cry out.

“That’ll have to do for now,” I said.

“He was gonna shoot you, Sonny!”

I blew out a long breath.

“He was,” she said.

“That’s his brother dead back there, for Christ’s sake!”

“I know that,” she said softly. “It’s no reason.”

I stared out at the empty road ahead. I thought of saying, Of course it is—except I wasn’t sure what that meant. How could I explain to her what I couldn’t explain to myself? It couldn’t be explained. You knew it or you didn’t.

I forced myself to think clearly. Odessa was at least seventy-five miles away. And we’d have to go through Midland to get there—which would slow us down even more. But Bubber said Gustafson had an office in Blackpatch. A nurse there even when Gustafson wasn’t around. And there was that shortcut he’d mentioned—running from an old water tower on the Rankin highway. Fifteen rough miles, he’d said, but it was a hell of a lot closer than Odessa.

I put the roadster in gear and got us going, heading for the Rankin road.

“He gonna live?” Belle said.

“If I get him to a doctor fast enough, maybe.”

“Think he’s gonna feel any different if he does?”

I didn’t know how to even try to answer that. And I wasn’t aware of my tears until she reached over and wiped at them.

The sun was almost out of sight behind the distant mountains when I finally spotted the water tower and then found the junction of the old wagon trace on the other side of the rail tracks. The route was as rough as Bubber had said. We’d gone about seven miles and were into the last of the twilight when the right rear tire blew.

By the time I finished putting on the spare, the sky had clouded over and swallowed the crescent moon and stars and we were in full darkness. Russell’s coat bandage had darkened with blood. I couldn’t make out his face but I could hear his ragged breathing. I would’ve preferred to have him in the cab but the handling necessary to move him would only have worsened his bleeding. Belle got in the rumble seat with him and held him close to cushion him against the jarring of the car and keep the bandage pressed tight against the wound.

“You never been shot, have you?” she said.

“Not yet,” I said. Sometimes I had no idea at all of what was going on in her head.

We pushed on. The wind picked up and a low rumble of thunder came out of the east. A few miles farther on the left rear tire blew. There was nothing to do but keep riding on it, the roadster at a sag. I could’ve jogged almost as fast as we were moving now, but we had to take it easy or risk losing a wheel or breaking an axle.

Russell now and then muttered unintelligibly but never really came awake. It wasn’t the sock on the jaw holding him down now, it was pain and loss of blood. When we finally spied the lights of Blackpatch up ahead we’d blown the left front tire too and the car was listing like a foundering boat. The storm was closing in behind us, the rolling thunder growing louder—and the only thing we knew for sure about Russell’s condition was that he was still alive.

The nearest spot to the Wildcat Dance Club I could find to park the car was in an alley a block away. The first rush of raindrops spattered on the ragtop. Lightning was showing in the east, thunderclaps following a few seconds behind every flash. I put my coat on and slid the .380 under my belt. Belle was still holding Russell’s bandage in place but the wound had been seeping steadily and the coat was sopped with blood. I told her I’d be right back and went down the alley and across the street and up to the back door of the Wildcat.

I was hoping the door wasn’t locked and it wasn’t, but when I stepped inside I nearly bumped into a big galoot sitting on a stool and leafing through a movie magazine in the weak hallway light. He stood up like he meant to throw me out and I put my hand to the .380—and then we recognized each other from the time I’d been to the club before. He was one of Mona’s bouncers, a Swede named Max. I said I had to see Mona right away and he said she’d gone into her office with Bubber and they probably didn’t want to be disturbed. I said I’d take the chance and he shrugged and said, “Your funeral.”

Mona’s office was near the end of the hallway, which formed a corner junction with a shorter hall to the left that contained the stairway and, a few feet further on, opened onto the main parlor. Muted music and laughter came from around the corner, the faint smell of cigarette smoke and booze and perfume. I tried the door but it was locked, so I banged on it with the heel of my fist. I looked back at Max and saw him shake his head—and heard Bubber say from behind the door, “This place better be on fire!”

The lock clacked and the door swung open. “What the hell you think—” Bubber said, his face hard as a fist, and then he recognized me and his aspect eased. He was in his undershirt and holding up his unbelted and unbuttoned pants. “Sonny! What the hell…?” Behind him Mona Holiday was sitting on the edge of a bed, looking at me and hugging her removed blouse to her breasts.

He ushered me into the room and did up his pants while I gave him a fast rundown of the break attempt. Mona stood up and turned her back and put her blouse on. Rain was clattering against the panes of the curtained window. When I told them Buck was dead, Bubber’s face creased up and he muttered, “Ah, shit,” and slumped against the dresser and rubbed his face like he was suddenly exhausted. Mona came over and put an arm around him. But they got a move on when I told about Belle and Russell. Mona ran off to alert Doc Gustafson, and Bubber put his shirt on and followed me down the hall.

He said we were lucky the doc was still in town. “He come to give the girls their checkups,” he said, “but there’s a rumor been going around the Rangers are about to make a raid. Gus figured maybe he oughta get back to Odessa ruther than risk any of that. Then we seen this storm brewing and, hell, ain’t gonna be no raid on a night like this. He’s up there with a girl.”

He told Max to come with us and we went out into a hard rain blowing sideways. Max was the only one wearing a hat and he lost it to the wind as we ran across the street. A bright branch of lightning was followed two seconds later by a prolonged crackle of thunder.

In the rumble seat of the tilted roadster Russell and Belle looked like castaways. Russell was still unconscious. I helped Belle down from the rumble seat and then swung up into it and lugged Russell upright and eased him down to Bubber and Max. They carried him to the Wildcat through the blowing rain with Belle and me right behind them. We followed them through the back door and down the hall, but as they took Russell around to the stairway I steered her into Mona’s office. I inspected the handkerchief bandage on her arm and saw that it was holding all right, then told her to stay put and hurried out to the stairs.

The second-floor landing was at the end of a long hall lined with rooms to either side. Bubber and Max were coming out of a room at the far end, followed by Mona and another woman. The woman carried a small black bag and shut the door behind her. Some of the girls were peeking out of their rooms and Mona ordered them to mind their own business and get back to work. There was some muttered cursing and laughter but as Mona came down the hall they all ducked back inside with a staccato of door slams.

Bubber said Gustafson was doing all he could for Russell and didn’t want anybody in there and getting in his way. He introduced the woman with the bag as Nurse Rose. She was longfaced and bony and sharp-eyed, and she came downstairs with us to tend to Belle.

He drives into Blackpatch on the junction road, the Model T lurching with every gust of wind, the tires sucking through mud, the windshield wiper sweeping vainly against the hard crosswind rain. In the shimmering casts of lightning the surrounding derricks look like a spectral forest. He passes through a dense collection of tent residences, some of them broken free of portions of their moorings and flapping wildly in the wind, their drenched inhabitants flailing and tumbling about in their efforts to catch the loose flaps, to prevent still more of their possessions from sailing away into the night.

Now the junction road becomes the town’s main street and the bright lights are a wavering glare on the watery windshield. He has to strain to read the signs on the slowly passing establishments—the Miscue Pool Emporium, the Monkeyboard Game Palace, the Pipeline Café, the Yellow Rose Ballroom…one after another.

Despite the wind and the closed car windows, the stink and tumult of the town carry into the Model T. He breathes the pestilential exhalations, hears muted shrieks and bellows from within each place he passes, raucous laughter, a squalling welter of music. He has looked upon many oil towns and despises them all as dens of rank iniquity. He abhors the worthless sorts who inhabit them—drifters and grifters, whores and gamblers and cons, thieves of every persuasion. It seems fitting to him that the brute he hunts after should find his way here, down to this foul pit.

And then—in the next smeary swipe of the wiper, as another crack of thunder tremors the car and a snake-tongue of lightning illuminates the entire street in an eerie violet light almost bright as day—he sees the sign he seeks. The Wildcat Dance Club….

She was skilled at her calling, Nurse Rose. In fifteen minutes she had Belle’s wound cleaned out and bandaged, and she gave her some pills to take against the pain. The flashes of lightning had increased in frequency, the window curtain brightening with every flare, the sash rattling with every thunderclap. Max had gone back to his post in the hallway. Mona poured drinks for us all, but Nurse Rose politely declined. She closed up her bag and headed for the door, saying she should get back upstairs to assist the doctor.

Bubber said it would likely be a while before Gustafson could tell us anything about Russell’s condition, and what I ought to do in the meantime was get our bags out of the roadster before somebody else did.

“In case you ain’t never heard,” he said with a tired smile, “the world’s full of damn thieves. A man can’t be too careful.”

We did need dry clothes, and I wanted to retrieve Russell’s revolver from under the car seat. And I had three hundred dollars in my valise. Back at the house, Russell had put the rest of the money in an envelope and taped it behind the water tank over the toilet. Belle asked if it wouldn’t be safer in a bank and Russell said, “You kidding? With so many damn bank robbers on the loose?” It was an argument Buck had always used against putting money in a bank.

Bubber took a key ring from his pocket and detached two keys and handed them to me. “The skinny one’s an extry to my Chrysler,” he said. “It’s down the street a couple of blocks, over by ragtown, front of a pool joint. I let a buddy borrow it to carry some of Mona’s hooch over there. You can use it to fetch your goods to the Hightower without getting them all wet. The other key’s to the room. You all can sleep there tonight.”

He kept a permanent room at the Hightower Hotel, with a private parking spot in back. He and Mona usually stayed there when he was in town because it was farther removed from the oil field and not as noisy as the Wellhead, where she lived.

Mona thought we should wait till the storm passed. “You’ll be soaked to the skin before you take two steps out there.”

Belle laughed and said she didn’t think she could get any wetter than she already was. And I thought Bubber was right—no telling how long the storm would keep up, and the sooner we got our bags out of the stolen roadster the better.

“I’ll ring you at the hotel soon as we know about Russell,” he said.

Belle gave me a look. I hadn’t told Bubber about Russell calling me a bastard and holding a gun on me. About punching him out. About having no idea what his inclination toward me would be if he pulled through.

The car was parked in front of the Miscue Pool Emporium, right where the junction road came into town. We were sodden by the time we reached it and got in out of the slinging sheets of rain.

“Whooo!” Belle said, laughing, swiping water off her face with her hand.

An explosion of thunder made us both flinch—and we busted out laughing. She leaned into me and put her hand to my face and kissed me.

Then came the brightest flashes yet, three or four in rapid sequence and accompanied by a barrage of thunderclaps that shook the Chrysler. I looked out the rear window just as a jagged lightning fork hit the holding tank on the hilltop.

For an arrested moment the entire tank was encased in an incandescent blue light and shedding sparks like a welding torch—and then its roof burst into fire.

Belle turned to look, and her mouth came open.

A tower of orange flames rose from the tank roof and swirled in the gusting wind, casting the street in a quavering light. The handful of people out in the storm began hollering and running to the nearest doors to give warning.

The lightning strike had also undone some of the tank’s welds—streams of burning oil were running down the tank sides. Running into the gullies. Riding the flow of rainwater down the hill and toward the town.

Belle grabbed my arm. “My God, Sonny…let’s go!”

Her expression was as resolute as fearful. I followed her gaze out to the road in front of us. It ran past the ragtown and lay clear of traffic, thanks to the storm. Straight ahead and we’d be free as birds. Just a quick swing through Fort Stockton to get the money from the house.

In that moment, looking out at the road, I envisioned us at our ease at an iron lacework table in a courtyard of stone fountains and deep green shade, sipping bourbon sprigged with mint, myself suited like a dandy, she in a sleek black dress cut low, wearing pearls, her hair grown long and woven in a braid, our conversation soft and teasing as we discussed how best to take our pleasure in the evening ahead, the days to come, the years.

Men were scrambling out of bloated wind-whipped tents, clutching their hats to their heads, gaping in the glowing orange rain at the flaming tank behind us. I cranked up the engine and put the car in gear, everything in me saying Go.

The clamor of alarm was swelling as people swarmed into the street. The rearview mirror shone with firelight. I looked back at the burning oil snaking down the gullies to the foot of the hill and spreading into a widening tide of fire coming steadily on. Cars slewing into the street. People running. Abandoning everything but what they carried with them.

I put the gearshift into neutral and got out of the car.

She slid across the seat and grabbed my coatsleeve as I shut the door. “Sonny, no!”

“Meet you at the house tomorrow,” I said. “Go on.”

“Sonny, please—you’ll burn up!” Her grip twisted in my sleeve.

“Go on, I said!”

“He’s probably dead. He’ll kill you if he’s not. He’s crazy.”

I pulled free of her and backed away from the car. I half expected her to refuse to go, was already telling myself I didn’t have time to argue about it. Her face at the window was golden.

Men came racing past us, yelling, cursing, wearing lunatic looks of panic, of jubilation. The first of the getaway cars swung around the Chrysler with engines racing and klaxons blaring. Another minute and the junction road would be jammed.

Maybe she was crying, maybe it was only the rain. I couldn’t hear what she said for the surrounding pandemonium, but her lips were easy to read.

I love you too, Sonny.

And she drove off in the firelit rain.

I ran down the muddy street, dodging vehicles, shouldering through the throng rushing in the other direction. Men clambering into the beds of passing trucks, hopping onto running boards and bumpers, the stronger shoving aside the weaker. The advancing flow of fire had arrived at the far end of the street and several buildings were already in flame. And still the rain fell and lightning blazed and thunder kept crashing.

There was a tangle of cars in front of the Wildcat, some with a star on their doors. A transport truck with a star too. Men in big hats and gunbelts. Rangers. The rumored raid come true. The lawmen hustling now to rescue those they’d come to arrest. A crush of people at the Wildcat’s front door.

I ran down the alley to the rear of the building and went in by the back way, thinking to get Max’s help in getting Russell downstairs.

He wasn’t at his post. The hallway was dark and hot, smelling of smoke. From the parlor side of the wall came frightened female cries and rough male voices shouting things I couldn’t make out.

The door to Mona’s office was open and I rushed to it, hoping Bubber was still there.

He was. On his back in the middle of the room. On a carpet of blood from his ripped throat. Max beside him, an ear to the floor, a small stained hole in the back of his jacket over the spot where his heart would be.

The room seemed suddenly to lack air.

Mona sat in a corner, knees up to her breasts, hand to her mouth, terrified eyes on Bubber. Then another shuddering crash of thunder and she put her face in her hands and wailed.

Whatever happened here, Russell was upstairs.

I bolted from the room and around to the stairway just as Nurse Rose came swooping down to the landing, face wrenched in terror—and she ran headlong into a beefy Ranger coming from the parlor.

“Whoa, Nellie!” he said, catching her by the shoulders, but she twisted from his grasp and fled around the corner.

As he turned toward me I drew the .380 and swung it backhand and caught him with the barrel just over the ear. His head slung sideways and his big hat tumbled from his redhaired head and he did a couple of shaky sidesteps and his knees buckled and he went down in a heap.

I took the steps two at a time to the landing and ran down the hall to the last door on the right. The heat much greater now, the smell of smoke stronger.

I yanked open the door and it banged against the wall—and all in an instant saw a man whirl around from looming over Russell, saw the cords standing on Russell’s neck and his mouth open wide in rasping screams almost inaudible in the din from outside, saw that the man’s hand at Russell’s bloody crotch was no hand at all but a bright metal contraption. Saw John Bones grinning fiercely…and the yellow spark of his pistol.

I caromed off the doorjamb and staggered breathless along the wall and heard another gunshot and the room tilted and the floor hit me in the face.

Pain boiling in my gut, wrenching at my knee. The .380 four feet away. Gustafson prone and glass-eyed at the foot of the bed.

Hard gruntings. John Bones arching backward, his neck clenched in Russell’s forearm, his gunhand in Russell’s grip, the pincers somehow wedged behind him.

Crawling to the .380, feeling my belly smearing. The air hazed pink, the floor steaming.

John Bones’ revolver thunks the floor at his booted feet.

Russell screaming—the pincers seized on his forearm, broken bones jutting.

John Bones wresting himself around, clamping the pincers to Russell’s throat. Blood jumps and Russell spasms and falls still.

The .380 in my hand. Cocking.

John Bones crouching, hand closing on his gun.

The .380 kicks and he flings back against the wall and sits hard, legs splaying, gun arm dropping limp under a bloody shoulder, pistol unhanded. His eyes bright on me, pincers on his lap, opening and closing.

Boots stomping hard to the door.

My pistol on John Bones’ great white grin.

Somebody shrieking, “Drop it or die!”

I shoot.

She finds the back door jimmied, every drawer emptied on the floor, every closet rummaged, every mattress upended. The place ransacked by someone practiced. The envelope gone from behind the toilet tank. The best hiding place for it, they’d said, but what some thieves know, so do others. She takes lunch in a local diner where all the talk is of Blackpatch. The fire reported to be still burning on this following noon. Sixty-three dead and counting. Not a building left standing. Gonna have to call it Blacker patch, some wiseguy snickers, and gets more hard looks than laughs. She waits three days before admitting to herself what she has known from the moment he got out of the car. Then fuels the Chrysler and heads east, in the direction of New Orleans. She has a total of two dollars and forty cents, which meager stake might have been worrisome but for her discovery of a fully loaded .44 under the car seat. It is all she will need, she knows, to make her way in this world.