by Sophia Gray
Carter let out a growl as he trudged through the dead leaves and underbrush.
“Fine,” she continued. “You're pissed, you don't feel like talking, whatever. But we should probably change into our new clothes and use the clippers on our hair before we hit someplace with people.”
He stopped in his tracks and threw the bags down on the ground. Then he kicked off his boots and started yanking his clothes off angrily, rummaging in the bags for his new ones. Billie stood frozen, her eyes glued to Carter's body as he stripped down to his underwear.
Carter saw her watching and reached into the shopping bags again, tossing the sundress and hat at her.
“Are you going to stand there and watch the show, or are you going to put your fucking clothes on?” he snapped. “This was your goddamn idea.”
Billie picked up the sundress. “Hey, at least you're speaking to me again. Should I change behind some bushes, or...?”
Carter scowled at her.
“Okay, okay,” she said, taking her shirt off and wriggling out of her jeans. Before she put on the dress, she stole a glance over at him to see if he was peeking. But he was sitting on a stump with his back to her.
She felt a pang of disappointment. She knew he was attracted to her too, but if he was refusing to indulge that with even a quick look at her in her undies, she figured he was even more upset than he seemed.
Billie unwrapped the clippers. They came with a pair of batteries, and she snapped them in place, hitting the switch. The clippers buzzed and she walked over to Carter sheepishly.
“It's a shame to have to cut such beautiful long hair,” she said.
He didn't answer.
She used the clippers carefully, cutting his mane short and evening out the sides and back. When she was done, she shook out the excess strands of brown hair and handed the device to him. “You should probably run this over your face, too.”
Carter gave himself a quick shave. Now that he was short-haired and clean-faced, he almost looked like a different person. He was still handsome, but he looked a lot more tame, like some once-wild dude who'd since gone to AA and found Jesus or something.
“Your turn,” Carter grunted. He stood up and brushed the hair off the stump, gesturing for her to sit.
“Have you ever, uh, cut a woman's hair before?” Billie asked nervously as she sat down.
He ignored her again, and the clippers connected with her hair a moment later, shearing off her long locks until she could feel air on the back of her neck.
Well, no matter how I look, at least I'll look different, she told herself. And that's the whole point, right?
But it didn't dull the anxiety she felt, knowing that a very angry man was cutting her hair.
When he was finished, Billie looked down at her long auburn hair in heaps on the ground. “Thanks,” she said. “Are we still planning to find a motel for the night, or...?”
Carter snatched the bags from the ground and started walking again. Billie rolled her eyes and followed him.
After another hour, they came out the other side of the woods and a found a small area just off the highway with a handful of motels and cheap restaurants. Carter avoided all of the major chains in favor of a tiny, grubby-looking dump called The Dreamland Motor Lodge. The few letters still clinging to its sign boasted “A/C” and “Color TV,” and hookers hung out in the parking lot.
“Guess we don't have to worry about them asking for ID or a credit card, huh?” Billie asked.
Carter walked to the motel. Every surface in the lobby seemed brown and sticky, as though coated by years of tobacco smoke. The rough gray seats and couches were covered with stains, and on the blurry television in the corner, an aging D-list celebrity was advertising adult diapers.
The woman behind the counter looked like a huge moldering peach with frizzy red hair. A massive pair of kooky sunglasses hung around her neck. Her name tag said “Kandie.”
“Hour or night?” Kandie asked, looking them over.
“Night,” Carter said flatly.
“Lucky you,” she replied. She flopped a large binder onto the counter and opened it, pointing to the next blank space on a sheet of lined paper. “Fifty bucks. Plus another twenty-five deposit in case you get piss, shit, blood, or vomit on anything. Write a name there. Real, fake, I don't give a dog's asshole.”
Billie saw Carter scrawl “Robert & Marion Morrison.” She noticed that the rows above it were mostly filled with “Smith” and “Jones,” and that most of the first names were “John.”
Carter rooted around in his saddlebag and found the cash, tossing it onto the counter. With a puffy hand, Kandie handed over a key. Her nails were leopard-printed, and each one looked about six inches long. Billie wondered how she went to the bathroom.
“Room Twelve,” she said. “Check-out time's 11. You stay a minute past that, my husband comes in with his sawed-off and God only knows what happens next.”
Carter nodded and started toward the door of the lobby. As Billie followed, the TV switched from the commercial to an ad for the local news. The reporter at the desk was a woman in her thirties with a bouffant hairdo and far too much makeup.
“Don't forget to tune in at six,” the reporter said. “We'll have Marty Breck with the seven-day forecast, plus Coach Gardner from Texas A&M will be joining us to talk about the big game against the Ragin' Cajuns this weekend. We'll also have more hilarious footage from the foiled gas station robbery up near Odessa...”
Carter didn't stop walking, but his pace slowed deliberately as he listened. “Don't look,” he whispered.
Billie kept her eyes forward.
“...as a grandfather in his sixties and his ten-year-old grandson showed a pair of would-be desperadoes why it's not a good idea to mess with Texas. The identity of the Unmasked Marauder is still unknown, but authorities say we should have that information for you by tonight.”
Behind them, Kandie let out a wheezing laugh. “'The Unmasked Marauder! That's a good one. I hope they find 'em and string 'em up with dunce caps on 'em.”
Carter growled, shoving the lobby door open.
Chapter 30
Billie
Carter slammed the bags down on the bed. Billie followed him into the room, shutting the door behind them and wondering when he'd stop acting so fucking cranky.
The room was filthy, with strange scrapes and smears on the walls at odd intervals. The corners were filled with dust and ghostly tangles of hair. The green carpet was the color of baby puke and looked like it hadn't been vacuumed since the '80s. A dead roach was on its back in front of the television set.
Maybe it laughed itself to death watching our little fuck-up on TV, Billie thought sourly.
Carter went into the bathroom and left the door open. Billie saw him looking in the mirror, running his fingers through what was left of his hair and groaning. She followed him in and took a look at herself.
It was...not quite a pixie cut, though it was certainly short enough. It was kind of uneven and spiky in places, and there was one area near her left temple where she saw that he'd gone a little too far with the clippers and almost exposed her scalp. Still, at least it wasn't totally grotesque, and she definitely looked different.
“Not bad for a first attempt,” she said, brushing at it with her fingers and trying to get the unruly strands to stay down. “I wouldn't register you for cosmetology school yet, but all in all…”
Carter shot her a dirty look and pushed past her into the room.
Billie followed, her resentment finally boiling over. “You know what? I'm done with the silent treatment. I already acknowledged that I fucked up bad, and I apologized for it. If you want more apologies, just give me the number that'll satisfy you and I'll say them. I'm not a mind reader and I don't know what the hell else you want from me, so you're just going to have to use your words like a big boy. You want to keep me around? I'm here. You want to cut me loose? Fine, I'm gone. But unless you're planning to give me a fucking spanking, I
'm sick of this whole 'disappointed daddy' routine you're so high on right now.”
“Is that what you want?” Carter exploded. His teeth were bared like a cornered animal, and his eyes burned with fury. “You want a fucking spanking?”
“If that'll put this bullshit to rest, then yeah, you're goddamn right I do!” she shot back.
Carter's powerful arms snaked out, grabbing Billie before she even had time to blink. He jerked her toward him and sat down on the edge of the bed, putting her over his knees.
Jesus, is he really going to do this? she thought.
He yanked her dress up and pulled down her panties, and a moment later, she heard a sharp crack as his palm connected with her backside. The pain came a split-second after, sizzling across her skin like butter in a skillet. She grit her teeth, refusing to cry out.
“I had a fucking plan,” he snarled loudly, raising his arm again.
Crack. The pain erupted again, sharper this time.
“Because that's what I fucking do.”
Crack. Another jolt, the other buttock this time, almost like an electric shock that sent spasms up into the small of her back.
“That's why they ride with me, why they depend on me—because I make plans, and backup plans, and backup plans for those.”
Crack, crack, crack. The sensation had pushed her to the point where her ass felt strangely numb and glassy under his hand, the pain seeming to come to her from a great distance, like the light from the stars.
“And every plan I've made, you've fucked up. Just by being in the fucking bar, by yelling to us from outside the bank, by looking like you look and acting like you fucking act so I can't...”
Crack.
“...just...”
Crack.
“...let...”
Crack.
“...you...”
Crack.
“...go!”
The last smack was the cruelest and Billie did cry out this time—not because of the pain, not because no one had ever done this to her before, but because a door of understanding suddenly sprung open in her mind and she finally saw how Carter truly felt about her.
His surly behavior hadn't come from his anger at her for messing up at the gas station. It came from his rage and confusion at his own actions leading up to this, his real reasons for keeping her with him.
He'd made plans on top of plans, and she'd sat next to him and watched him throw them away one by one, all because of her. Because he wanted her.
In that moment, she fell in love with him.
Carter stopped, breathing heavily. Billie rolled her body over to face him and put her arms around his neck, pulling him down to her. She kissed him deeply for several seconds, their tongues reaching for each other like long-lost lovers embracing.
Then he wrapped his arms around her thighs and lifted her onto the motel desk, making hard and dirty love to her as the coyote howled and howled outside.
Chapter 31
Panzer
The clock on the wall ticked past 6:00 PM as Panzer watched Harbaugh pace back and forth across the blue-carpeted floor of the Cactus Hollow Sheriff's Office.
Specifically, he kept an eye on Harbaugh's left shoe.
It was the one that had accidentally stepped in horse shit at Old Man Tiller's horse farm the evening before, and even though Harbaugh had scraped it off and tried to clean it—unleashing a steady stream of obscenities while he did so—Panzer could still see a few dried, crusty bits clinging to the edges, and the smell was still awful. He did his best to breathe through his mouth and tried not to consider the unpleasant task of shampooing the carpet once Harbaugh was gone.
Harbaugh had been up all night, and his eyes were bloodshot and baggy. Once he'd confirmed that two horses had been stolen from Tiller, he rode over the desert in a helicopter, expecting to find Billie and the biker dead in the sand with their animals next to them.
When he didn't see them, he went to Caddo Corners and questioned Samantha for almost three hours about whether Billie had been there. Panzer tried to tell him that it wouldn't make any sense for a hostage to lead her captor to her loved ones, but Harbaugh sneered, calling Panzer more names and telling him to “go find a plate of grits to eat while the adults are talking.”
That just left the wooded area nearby to search. But when he ordered agents to do it, Harbaugh came up against the Texas office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which claimed that the woods were disputed Taysha territory and refused to permit access. They briefly liaised with the reservation's leaders, who insisted that no outsiders had been seen there in several days.
Needless to say, Harbaugh wasn't happy.
“Injuns,” Harbaugh muttered, shaking his head angrily. “Unbelievable. I chase these bank-robbing cocksuckers across five states, interview dozens of witnesses, spend hours reviewing forensic evidence and get within a few fucking miles of the bastards...only to have all my hard work flushed down the crapper by a bunch of goddamn backwards-ass Injuns.”
“Actually, I'm pretty sure you ain't s'posed to call 'em 'Injuns' no more?” Broyles commented, picking his teeth with a corner of an envelope from the day's mail. “The proper term was, uh, Native American for a while? 'Cept now I think the more politically-correct word is 'indigenous,' though some tribes are still fine with Native Indian? Always seemed weird to me, though, now that we know they was never really from India to start with...”
“Shut your corn-muncher, you useless nimrod,” Harbaugh roared. “I can't even hear myself think.”
Broyles shrugged. “You just stressed, is all. Bad for yer blood pressure an' the like. You oughtta take a minute or two out of the day to relax, maybe watch somethin' that'll make you laugh. Hey, like that video that's been makin' the rounds online, with them two stupid people who tried to rob the gas station earlier today? Had me laughin' fit to spit.”
“Broyles, maybe we should just leave Agent Harbaugh alone,” Panzer suggested. He enjoyed watching Broyles piss off Harbaugh, but he'd already heard enough of the man's insults for the day.
“Naw, he'll get a kick out of it fer sure,” Broyles said, switching on the TV in the office. “It's a real hoot. They said they was gonna have more of it on the news.”
Panzer sighed. If Broyles was so eager to get cussed out again, he reckoned there was nothing he could do about it.
Broyles flipped to the local news as a reporter addressed the audience. “Shortly after two o'clock this afternoon, two people—a man and a woman—entered the Gas-4-U filling station near Odessa and attempted to rob it. But even though they came in wearing masks, the identity of the male robber didn't remain secret for long.”
Panzer watched the screen as a young boy snuck up behind the man in the bandana, yanking it off his face. When Panzer saw the thief's comically surprised expression, he chuckled.
Suddenly, Harbaugh's bony hand clamped down on Panzer's shoulder.
“The woman in the ski mask,” Harbaugh said. “Her height, weight, clothes...they all match our description for Ms. Rosewood.”
Panzer looked at the television again, frowning. “I guess so. Still, could be anybody. Lots of gals are that size, and lots of 'em have that same outfit.”
“Look at the man, though, numbnuts,” Harbaugh insisted. “Study his face carefully, and turn whatever crank it takes to get your brain working. Could that be the biker you saw at the bar, with the long brown hair?”
Panzer looked at the screen more closely and sighed. “Yeah. I reckon it could.”
“She isn't looking much like a hostage these days, is she?” Harbaugh sneered. “Not with the way she's shooting off that gun.”
“That still don't mean she's an accomplice,” Panzer countered. “She could be under duress, or we could be dealin' with brainwashing, some kinda Stockholm Syndrome like that Patty Hearst lady...”
“Save it,” Harbaugh spat, turning to give orders to his other agents. “Get on the phone to the Lubbock PD and the state police barracks. Find out if they have a
n ID on that man, and get me everything we can dig up on him, especially his known associates. Meanwhile, start circulating his photo in that area along with the woman's, and include variations with different haircuts and styles—if they know they made the news, they've probably already tried to change their appearance.”
He glared up at the TV, which showed a freeze-frame of the unmasked robber.
“I'll have you yet, you slippery son of a bitch,” Harbaugh said.
Chapter 32
