“How do you know?”
“Wallet’s missing.”
“With his cut?”
“Wait…” he reached into one pocket and emerged with a crumpled $5 bill. “Son of a bitch! It was a hot shot.”
“A what?”
“A hot shot. It’s when you rip someone off by giving them a high dose. They leave behind a bill to make it look like it was accidental. Look around the room, will you? Maybe they left something behind…”
And as Samantha left the bathroom, Dez knelt down to rest his face on Charlie’s naked thighs with his hands outstretched. The tears came fast and bitter, and blessed the silent flesh.
*****
It was shortly past 2 a.m. when the Trans Am snaked cautiously down I-35. Only the occasional sight of a diesel truck broke the mute spell. Otherwise, the expanses of the two-lane highway were taciturn and distant, almost hostile in its sparseness and indifference. The car pulled off at an exit and rolled until it reached the hamlet of a lake. Despite RVs and campers across the shores, all seemed still and uninhabited, as if frozen in some distant prehistoric time. Not even a light seemed to glow; only the drunken stars in their orbit guided its way through the hickory trees. Not a soul saw the pale and ragged young man get out of the car. Not a soul saw him drag the leaden body out of the rolled up carpet in the back. Not a soul saw him give a tear-stained sign of the cross before kissing its blue lips, rolling it gently down a narrow cliff where it returned to the womb of the sea.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Come on baby… get real,” Samantha said for the ninth time that evening. “At least try to get some rest before you do anything so fucking risky…”
“I don’t… We don’t… have any choice,” Dez slurred, his voice belligerent by bourbon and stubbornness. “We only… How much did you say… we had left?” He took another pull from the bottle.
“$147. That’s more than enough to get us to Vegas…”
“Oh yeah? And once we get there… then what?”
“We’ll figure out something. We always do. I can get another job waitressing while you look around for work.”
“We got… We gotta think ahead.”
“I am, baby. You’re drunk. Like always. It’s too risky. Wait until morning. Come back to bed, baby. Like the old days. You can do whatever you want to me. Just wait until morning before—”
“Bullshit! Tonight’s the night… Can’t wait ‘til tomorrow. That’s when they deliver it…”
“Not every gas station follows the same schedule.”
“Even if… Even if… We only get $50… That’s enough for gas and then some, ain’t it?”
The pair was just outside of Lubbock, where they had been staying for the past three weeks. It was a blistering night in early June, and even the caricatures of cowboys in the motel room paintings seemed apprehensive. Dez had been steadily drinking away through his cut from their last big score since Charlie’s death. Daily. Nightly. Hourly. His skin had taken on the jaundiced hue of a cancer patient, and his eyes seemed like dead oysters shriveled up by the High Plains heat. The endlessly circular tone of his cryptic utterances now took on an incoherent and largely nonsensical accent, and more often than not he found himself screaming at Samantha over the slightest difference of opinion. She knew she had to let him fight his own internal war, and that she had no choice but to stand by her man, to quote the ubiquitous song that seemed to come out of every transistor radio in the High Plains that summer. She knew things would change once they arrived in Vegas. Dez could lay off the booze for a little bit, get his act together and they could both move on with their lives. At least, she hoped they could. But Dez had changed so frequently, and so drastically, over the past two months that she began to wonder if they could ever truly be side by side. Was their relationship merely the sum total of a series of last meetings?
“It’s not like these are some backwater hicks, Dez. This is the High Plains, you know? Real guns. Real cowboys. Real sheriffs.”
“How many times… I got to tell you. A simple knock-off - just a simple knock-off. You don’t wanna do it? Fine… I’ll do it alone. But if you think… I’m gonna give you any of the cut…”
“I don’t even want any of the cut. I just want you to go to bed. We can try something out in New Mexico. Or Arizona. I have a bad feeling. Let’s just get out of Texas first.”
“Look, are you on the fuckin’ bus or what, bitch?”
“Bitch. That’s just… That’s just rich coming from you. No, Dez. This time, I’m not on the fucking bus.”
*****
It was shortly after 1 am when the Trans Am swerved into the parking lot of the Gulp & Go station in East Lubbock. Samantha sat in the passenger seat, her lips pursed and fuming in a marbled sneer.
“I’m not going in. I’ll wait in the car for you, but I am not going in.”
“The hell you won’t,” Dez replied, grabbing her arm. “You’re the bait—”
“Is that what I am to you? Bait, you asshole?”
“I don’t mean it… Don’t mean it like that… But in this instance… Yeah…”
“And you wonder why I didn’t want to come along tonight.”
“Got… got no choice…”
“I’m not going in.”
“Get in there—”
“I said I’m not going in.”
Twelve minutes later, Samantha Linder was walking through the aisles of the desolate gas stop, absentmindedly picking up a carton of tampons and some trash bags. She sauntered up to the counter.
“Excuse me, but do you mind telling me which way is the quickest to—”
At that precise moment, Dez Cawley came stumbling through the glass-paneled door. He was one minute too early. A rash decision to bolt out of the car meant that there was no time for Samantha to flirt and occupy the clerk’s attention. The brown panty hose feebly stretched across his face made him look like nothing more than a drunken rooster. He was one minute too early. Even the clerk—all 280 pounds of unflinching bulk and permanently glowering pique—had no choice but to chuckle as Dez waved the .38 around unsteadily. Dez was one minute too early.
“OK motherfucker… I want everything… Everything in the register,” he growled hoarsely, his trembling body pacing back and forth.
“Everything?” replied the clerk lazily, almost disinterestedly.
“Everything, motherfucker…. Come on…. Come on!” he whipped the brown paper bag across the counter, attempting to shoot out the pane of the door for emphasis. It simply ricocheted and landed in the wall opposite him.
The clerk began stuffing the bag full of bills. “Everything, you say?”
“Are you fucking deaf? Everything…”
Samantha sprinted several inches away from Dez’s frantically pacing frame. If her nerves were normally laconic, tonight they turned enraged, razor sharp beneath the thin coat of her pensive skin. A sense of urgency grew within her, reaching a feline intensity, until she was filled with a certainty that seemed without will or bias but stemmed from the deepest, most primal region of her brain.
“I got some more underneath the counter… Don’t want no trouble,” replied the clerk.
Dez didn’t even have a chance to hear himself cry out as the rounds from the .44 entered his heart. He didn’t have a chance to see the blinding flash or hear the click of the barrel. He didn’t even have a chance to see the twenty-nine years of rage and bitterness waft from his body like mists of cold smoke. He was thrown back from the impact against racks of magazines and tabloid newspapers, landing in a crumpled heap.
In the blink of an eye, Samantha knew what she had to do. There was no mute shock, no wailing and gnashing of teeth. There was no fear, no guilt and no grief in her body. She didn’t even register the sound of the magnum reloading. She didn’t register the bullets ricocheting at her feet as she bolted from the gas stop at lightning speed, her hands tightly grasping the paper bag as she fled east. She simply ran. Past the streetlights and the inter
sections. Past the flickering neon lights and the wailing ambulances. She ran. She ran past the hopped up truck drivers and their lot lizards. Past the cinema and the all-night diners. Past the pickup trucks and the red brick ranch houses. She ran into the very edge of the night.
*****
It was shortly after dawn when the Greyhound bus pulled into the depot; it’s engine sputtering and wheezing crudely in the New Mexico sun. Samantha Linder stretched out, stifling a tremendous yawn. She had been asleep for the better part of ten hours and she still felt drunk on the sensation. She sauntered off the bus groggily and took in the surroundings. She could see the sun playfully hiding behind the crests of the Cristo Mountains, their shadows casting refuge across the white sands. A winding road led off in the distance to a center of town undisclosed. She had always wanted to see the desert, and had a half-hearted wish that Dez was there beside her to take in the sunrise. She glanced at the one memento she still had of him; a cheap claddagh ring he had picked up from a street stall while they were in St. Louis. She held it up to the sun, and examined it closely. Her sneakers dug a shallow hole in the dust. She kissed the ring before letting it fall, burying it underneath a loose mound of sand. She walked through the sand towards the throughway and stuck her thumb out. It was 7:30 in the morning. She wanted steak and eggs. She walked towards the center of town. It was 7:30 in the morning and she had always hated being on a bus, anyways.
THE END
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