Mama Rose barely made it to the stove in time to save the bacon from burning. “Sweet Jesus forbid you should get up from the fucking table,” she muttered to Carson as she set the plate down in front of him.
“One of these days, woman…. “He made a fist, brandished it threateningly.
“You and what army?” she replied, sliding into the chair across from him. Both threat and response were pro forma-he’d only struck her in anger one time, when they were newlyweds. She’d bided her time, then whacked him across the back of the head with a shovel. Concussion, no fracture. Lesson taken.
“That gimp Lyssy, he look familiar to you?” she asked Carson.
“Kinda.”
“I could swear I’ve seen him before someplace.”
“I know what you mean. You get his last name? — we could Google him.”
“He wasn’t very talkative.”
“And she didn’t tell you who or what they were on the lam from?”
“Whoever owned that Rover, I’m guessing.” Mama Rose pushed herself back from the table. “Listen babe, I’m beat, I’m gonna turn in. Just leave the dishes in the sink, I’ll take care of ’em later.”
A cavernous yawn from Carson, a phony-looking, ham-actor stretch. “I think maybe I’ll join you-I’m getting too old for these fucking all-nighters.”
In addition to running the chop shop to which the Rover had been removed, the Redding Menace were mid-level players in the new triangle trade-drugs, firearms, and cash. All night long, on any given evening, dealers and couriers came and went, arriving with large quantities of one of the aforementioned substances, and departing with (ideally) smaller quantities of another.
It was often a complicated dance: player A might have to be hooked up with players B and C, while B had to be kept apart from C, with D waiting in the wings, and so on; meanwhile all the players had to be entertained, plied with weed or coke or brandy, topped up with coffee.
So the exhausted hosts had been on their way to bed when their last two visitors arrived unexpectedly. And now Carson, who hadn’t approached his wife with amorous intent for ages, wanted to make love. Mama Rose was no fool: she knew what was up, and why it was up-he’d had a letch for Lilith ever since Sturgis-but reminded herself that it didn’t matter where a man worked up his appetite, so long as he ate at home.
She grabbed a quick shower and changed into her sexiest nightgown, making only one concession to jealousy: If Carson even closed his eyes, much less called out Lilith’s name, Rose would have his nuts for earrings.
When Mama Rose emerged from the bathroom, Carson was at the computer. Like many another twenty-first-century wife, her first thought was that he was surfing for porn. Not that she minded-that appetite thing again.
“Hey babe, look at this.”
Mama Rose crossed the room, and standing behind him, resting her right breast on his left shoulder, she saw a picture of their new houseguest plastered across the front page of the cyber edition of the Oregonian. “Looks like we have a celebrity in our midst.”
She read past the headline to learn that the infamous serial killer Ulysses Maxwell had escaped from an asylum, leaving four dead bodies behind; a fellow patient, a minor, name withheld, was either a hostage or an accessory. “Got any bright ideas?”
“Fuckin’ A.” Carson leaned back in his chair, laced his hands behind his head. “Way I figure it, if there ain’t a reward for him yet, there will be; if there is, it’ll get bigger. So we find somebody we can trust, somebody with a clean record, that somebody takes Maxwell…shit, I don’t care, someplace far enough away from here, blows him away, makes up a good story for the cops, we split the reward. What do you think?”
“It might work,” said Mama Rose. “But what about the girl?”
“What do you think?” Same four words, but this time they chilled Mama Rose to the marrow.