Running Scared

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Chapter 47

  Las Vegas

  November 4

  Evening

  Cherelle pumped another quarter into the slot machine and hit the button. Reels spun, colors flashed, and her quarter disappeared forever.

  “Shit.”

  “Not your lucky night?”

  The man who had asked the question was sitting two slot machines down and would never see the young side of sixty again. While smoke drifted from the cigarette stuck in the corner of his grin, he gave her an allover look that said he could guess her price within a dollar. The whiskey in his voice was like sandpaper on cement.

  If you only knew, asshole, just how much the stuff I have is worth, she thought savagely.

  But all that gold wouldn’t buy her a place to stay tonight, unless it was a jail cell. She could sleep in her car or she could take the senior citizen up on the business proposition that would likely be the next thing out of his mouth.

  Not yet, damn it. Not until I’m dead fucking broke.

  She stuck another quarter in, then another. The machine climaxed and gushed a nice pile of quarters. It wasn’t a big ol’ bell-ringer, but it was enough for a safe place to sleep and maybe even a few beers. She scooped the quarters into the plastic coin tub and headed for the cashier without looking back to see if the sandpaper man was disappointed or relieved.

  Ten minutes later she had checked in to one of the cheap motels that lined the highway from the interstate to the razzle-dazzle of downtown Vegas. She dragged Risa’s luggage into the room, locked the door, and turned on the TV. The only channel that came in was the all-news station. With a disgusted sound she threw the remote control on the bed and started to unzip her suitcase. She left the TV sound on, because she was tired of being alone. The talking lamp wasn’t much for two-way conversation, but it was smarter than most people she met.

  “It’s the second murder of a small-business person in as many days,” said the earnest female newsreader. “Police have asked anyone who was in the area and saw something suspicious to call the number at the bottom of your screen.”

  “Oh, yeah, that’ll help,” Cherelle said. “Some old granny that can’t find her own skinny ass with a magnifying glass is gonna look out the window and come up with a murderer. Jesus, there really is one born every minute.”

  From the corner of her eye she watched the TV. A part of Vegas rolled by on the screen that looked familiar. Frowning, she turned and stared at the TV.

  “Hey, that’s close to Tim’s house.”

  The news station ran the clip of its reporter interviewing a detective while a gurney rattled by in the background with a body bag strapped down tight. The same clip had run every half hour since yesterday.

  Cherelle bit the inside of her mouth. She had a bad feeling that she was watching what was left of Socks’s fence. She turned up the sound. Socks wasn’t mentioned, but the second bloody spot on the floor was.

  “Oh, man. Oh, shit. Is that what happened to Tim?”

  She listened. All she heard was what the cops didn’t know.

  The solemn newsreader picked up as soon as the tape ran out. “Since then the police have found a bloody trail down the alley and across the street. Then the trail vanished. No knife or gunshot wounds have been reported at local hospitals. None of the people nearby have been able to help the police.”

  “Yeah, ain’t it just a bitch how no one wants to help the cops do their job,” Cherelle said.

  She flipped back the suitcase top and hesitated. Part of her wanted to unwrap the gold, to be sure it was all there, to hold it and know that her dreams were finally going to come true.

  And part of her went clammy at the thought of touching any of the artifacts.

  “That gold creeps me out,” she told the TV.

  The TV tried to sell her a time-share condo in Hawaii.

  Cherelle kept talking. “I’ll be glad to see the last of it, and that’s a fact. All I have to do is figure out how to sell it off without attracting the cops. Or Socks. That ol’ boy has a streak of mean in him that makes a cottonmouth look cuddly.”

  “The crime wave in Las Vegas heats up. A gunman ran rampant through the Golden Fleece this morning.”

  At the mention of the familiar casino, Cherelle spun to face the TV. Her mouth dropped open as she saw Risa sprinting down rows of gambling machines, her skirt hiked up to her butt, her long legs flashing as she ducked, spun, leaped, and rolled across tables, scattering chips and patrons in all directions.

  “Christ Jesus,” Cherelle said. “What—”

  Socks came into view, his eyes flat, his hand steady as he tried to bring Risa down. The contrast between his deadly intent and his cheerful Hawaiian shirt was shocking.

  “Acting on standing orders from the management, the casino guards didn’t return fire, as that would have endangered innocent bystanders. The gunman fled out the front doors and vanished into the crowd.”

  A freeze-frame close-up of Socks filled the screen. His eyes were narrowed, his lips thinned, and his teeth showed in a snarl.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s Socks. Whoooo-eee! He’s riding a big ol’ mean.” Cherelle grinned and flexed her right hand like a cat. “Bet his dick still hurts.”

  “Anyone having information leading to the arrest and conviction of this man will receive a fifteen-thousand-dollar reward from the Golden Fleece. Call the number at the bottom of your screen if you have information.

  “Next up, the Santa Claus bikini contest draws crowds to the Blue Mare. If you know a portly”—sound of off-screen snickers—”jolly old gentleman who would like to enter, there’s still time.”

  Cherelle barely listened. She was still looking at the number on the bottom of her screen. She couldn’t collect the reward, but she didn’t want to pass up a chance to send some bad luck Socks’s way. As long as he was running around loose, she would be smart to hide. But she didn’t want to hide. She wanted to sell that gold and spend the rest of her life living like the Hollywood star she should have been.

  For that she could wait a while, until they nailed Socks.

  Smiling, jiggling a handful of quarters, she went out to the pay phone down the hall by the Coke machine. Within minutes she was telling a recorder all about the make, model, and license plate of Socks’s screaming purple baby.

  She didn’t leave a callback number.

  Chapter 48

  Las Vegas

  November 4

  Evening

  Dry-eyed, Miranda watched while the nurse wheeled the crash cart out of Tim’s room. The cart hadn’t helped. Nothing had.

  The light and joy of her life was dead.

  Feeling brittle and very old, she picked up the phone, punched in a number, and waited. Very quickly she heard the familiar voice.

  “He’s dead,” she said. “Now there’s only one thing I want from you. You do to Socks what Socks did to him. I mean it. You understand?”

  He didn’t like it, but he understood. He had been planning to do it anyway. He just didn’t want to be rushed. Too many mistakes that way.

  “I understand,” he said. “Are you going home?”

  “I don’t have a home anymore. Timmy’s dead. Don’t you understand? He’s dead.”

  “A car will come for you at the clinic. He’ll take you to another place. Stay there.”

  Before Miranda could agree or disagree, he hung up.

  Chapter 49

  Sedona

  November 4

  Night

  Shane missed the rural mailbox the first time. It was easy to miss, because the “road” that led off toward the hills and cliffs was dirt, rocks, and weeds.

  “Maybe the last address on that box was wrong,” Risa said as they bumped off the paved road and into Virgil O’Conner’s “driveway.”

  “You have a better idea of where we should look for the gold?”

  “No.” Nothing valuable had been left in the dump that was Cherelle’s last address.

  Sycamore trees with
pale bark and branches twisted and shimmered like ghosts in the moonlight. Risa had more time than she wanted to admire the trees’ eerie beauty, because Shane was driving the rental truck over the miserable excuse for a road. She winced as a rock leaped out and attacked the right front tire.

  “Sure you don’t want me to drive?” she asked.

  “You think you could do better?”

  She started to say yes, then held her tongue when she saw the pile of rocks he had avoided by swerving over to the right. “No, but then I’d have the steering wheel to hang on to.”

  Shane grinned like a raider.

  After she checked over her shoulder—stars, moon, no headlights—she said, “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you.”

  It was more of an accusation than a question, but he answered anyway. “Yeah. I’d forgotten how much I enjoy the backcountry.”

  “Speaks someone who never lived in East Bumblefart.”

  “I thought you were from Arkansas.”

  “Same difference.”

  “Hey, I happen to know that there are some grand places in—”

  “I never saw them,” she cut in. Then she blew out a rushing breath. “Oh, hell. You’re right. The countryside is beautiful, all shimmery with heat and secrets. It was my life that sucked.”

  “Yeah, funny how that sours you on a place.” He checked the rear and side mirrors. Nothing but night. “I’d have to be bound, gagged, and drugged to go back to Renton.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Washington. State, not D.C. Between Seattle’s sprawl and the trackless Cascades. Lots of green because there’s lots of rain.”

  “You sure got all the way out,” she said.

  “Meaning?”

  “Green and rain are the last words I’d think of to describe ‘Lost Wages,’ Nevada.”

  “Love at first sight,” he agreed. “How about you?”

  “The same. All the distance. The space. The emptiness. It was alien as hell, and I loved it instantly. Watch the—!”

  Shane swerved to avoid a skunk and cursed when something on the undercarriage scraped on a rock.

  “Whew,” Risa said, fanning the air in front of her face. “I’d forgotten what they smell like. Did you miss it?”

  He checked the rearview mirror and saw a black-and-silver shape waddle toward the creek bed.

  “Yeah.” The bottom scraped again over a combination of a pothole and a rut. He swore. “Can you tell me what the hell point there is in putting four-wheel drive on a baby pickup truck that has the same clearance as the average minivan?”

  “Gee, let me see,” she said. “I’m guessing that minivans have a low dick quotient.”

  “Never thought of it that way.”

  “You’re a man,” she said, turning to look back over the road.

  “You noticed.”

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah, I did.”

  Her smile made Shane wish they were on the dirt road for no other reason than to find a quiet place to steam up the windows and each other. But they weren’t.

  “See anything?” he asked.

  “Stars, moon, black cliffs, sycamores like ghosts . . .”

  “And the back of your neck itches,” he finished.

  “And the back of my neck itches,” she agreed. “Yours?”

  “Like fire.”

  “Well, hell. You were supposed to go all dick quotient on me and say how it’s my hormones or something.”

  “ ‘Or something’ has my vote.”

  “I sure don’t see anything back there but a whole lot of nothing.” She gave up and half turned in the seat to make checking over her shoulder easier. “But the moon is bright enough for someone to run without headlights.”

  “Is that a suggestion?”

  “No. I gave up that kind of midnight tag when I was fifteen.”

  “What kind of tag?”

  “The kind where you shut off your headlights and play bumper cars on country lanes until you’re the last idiot on the road.”

  Shane whistled. “Sounds like fun. Why’d you give it up?”

  Risa started to duck the question, then shrugged. “Because the guy driving pulled off the road and tried to rape me. He probably would have, if Cherelle hadn’t come over the backseat and shoved his balls up his ass with her knee while she screamed that just because she did it for money didn’t mean her friend did for free.”

  Shane’s hands flexed on the wheel until his knuckles were pale as bone. “That’s one I owe her.”

  “I think ten thousand dollars is adequate repayment,” Risa said dryly. “A little later Cherelle left town with a traveling drug salesman. All kinds of drugs, apparently, but that’s not why she left. The kid she’d kneed was the son of the county sheriff. Maybe if that hadn’t happened, maybe she would have steadied down and . . .” Risa’s voice died.

  For a time there was only the thump and grate of tires over a rough dirt road.

  “Do you really blame yourself for the choices Cherelle is making now?” Shane asked finally.

  “My mind doesn’t. My emotions . . .” Risa shrugged slightly and tried to explain what she rarely thought about. “She was my mother and my sister and my friend all in one.”

  “Is she the same girl now that you remember from fifteen years ago?” he asked.

  Risa wanted to say yes. She couldn’t. “Sometimes. Just sometimes.”

  “And those are the times that really hurt.”

  She closed her eyes for an instant. “How did you know?”

  “I have my share of fifteen-year-old regrets. And they don’t change a damn thing about the world today.”

  “Your father?”

  “And my mother. I wanted them to love me as much as I loved them, but I gave up on my father before I was ten. It took me longer to see what my mother was and wasn’t.”

  Even now the words stuck in Shane’s throat, in his mind. Until a few years ago he had blamed his father for everything, a blanket condemnation born of a boy’s helplessness and rage. “She never stood up for her own child against him, even when I was way too young to do it myself. Especially then. She’d just wring her hands and make cupcakes. Jesus. To this day I can’t stand the sight of cupcakes.”

  Risa ached for the boy he had been. “Did your father beat you?”

  “That would have been too crude. Bastard Merit isn’t a crude man. He simply, systematically, stripped me of every thread of self-respect. Nothing personal. He does it to everyone who hangs around him long enough.”

  She let out a long breath. “And here I thought he just got bad press.”

  Shane smiled. “The man gives more than two billion dollars a year to various tear-jerking causes. It improved his press to no end. Mother’s idea, by the way. It hurt her that her husband had a reputation as the biggest shit-heel since Nero.”

  “What a pair we are,” Risa said. “I always wanted a real family, and you always wanted to get the hell away from yours.”

  “Like I said, I’m no good at the relationship thing.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Mother tells me every time we talk and I refuse to ‘get along with’ my sweet old man.”

  “Well, that clinches it. You’re hopeless. Your mother ought to know, seeing as she’s such a howling expert on healthy relationships.”

  Silence, then a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I never looked at it that way,” Shane admitted.

  “As an adult?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If it helps, I avoid looking at Cherelle that way every chance I get.”

  He hesitated. “That could be dangerous.”

  “I figured that out about the time I was playing hurdles in the casino. But . . .”

  “But Cherelle still saved your ass when you were fifteen.”

  “Yes.”

  Shane could picture it all too well, including the part that Risa didn’t talk about. “Did you ever think your ass wouldn’t have needed saving if Cherelle hadn’t been having sex in
the backseat while the sheriff’s son raced through the night drinking beer and listening to all the grunts and moans?”

  Risa didn’t answer, which told Shane that his assumption had been right.

  “Someday,” he said, “you might think about the fact that you and Cherelle ended up in different places because you started out different in the same place.”

  “Then I have nothing left of my childhood but lies.”

  “No, you have a child’s memory in an adult mind. Not the same thing at all. Your love for your friend was true.”

  “And yours for your mother, your father?” Risa challenged.

  “Inevitable. Hell, part of me still loves them. I just don’t like them worth a damn.”

  Risa was still wrestling with that when the road bent to the right and ended in the dusty front yard of a clapboard house.

  Chapter 50

  Las Vegas

  November 4

  Night

  John Firenze sat in his gleaming private office and wanted to kill something. Not just anything. One thing in particular. His fucking stupid nephew Cesar, whose fucking stupid face was plastered on every TV screen in Vegas.

  It was just a matter of time before someone phoned an ID to the cops. Then Firenze would be answering questions before the Nevada Gaming Control Board. He would have to up his contributions to every politician in sight before this mess went away.

  The intercom buzzed, telling him that his executive assistant was still on duty. He approached the switch the way he would a coiled rattlesnake. “Yes?”

  “Your nephew called from a pay phone.” The voice was quiet, cultured, and female.

  “Did you tell him to give himself up to the police?” Firenze said.

  “As you requested, yes, I did.”

  “And?”

  “He declined. Vigorously.”

  Firenze could imagine. At the best of times Socks had a vicious temper. This wasn’t the best of times. He closed his eyes and tried to find a way out. There wasn’t one.