came up with one Rolex (good for 5k cash anywhere in the world), six hundred and fifty dollars in greenbacks and an LA phone number. The Cadillac was registered to a corporation in Vegas. I was fairly sure the VIN numbers didn’t match any records on this planet so I put a match to the registration card, grinding the ashes out with my boots. I clicked the Cadillac into neutral and stepping out I let it roll over the edge, crashing through the brush, burying its nose in the river. With any luck it would rust away undetected. Even if they found it, I was sure I could trust the folks at The Eagle’s Nest to keep their mouths shut.
Cass sat up out of the water on the trunk of the Crown Vic, her body was vibrating but her eyes locked solid on me. In the dirt I set out a clean handkerchief and field stripped my.45. Wiping the barrel clean of any prints I tossed it and the firing pin out into the water. From my gun bag I got a spare barrel and firing pin and re-assembled the gun. It was a clean gun duly registered to Johnny Stahl, ballistics can trace a barrel but not the gun. So now I had a clean piece again. A blind ex-hitman had taught me that trick in the joint, amazing what you learn if you’re willing to shut your yap hole and listen once in a while.
“This registered to you?” I said, taking Cass’ 9 mm. She looked at me like I must be joking. I stripped it and wiped it clean and then scattered the parts into the flowing water.
“Hey, that was mine. Are you nuts?” she called.
“Just keeping you out of jail. You mind?”
“No, but you owe me a pistol,” she said with a cute smile that let me know she forgave me. In the beam of a flashlight I policed up the spent shells and after wiping them, they too went into the drink. There was nothing left to tie us to the crime scene. That was a joke, there is always something, you just do the best you can and hope for some O.J. style, a sloppy cop fucked up the key evidence type of luck. Cass kept watching me, she looked half afraid of what I might do next, half excited. Popping the trunk on the Crown Vic I pulled out an army surplus GI jungle machete.
“You planning to kill me with that?” Cass said.
“Not unless you really piss me off. Or you lie to me, that’s probably a killing offense at this point.”
I turned toward the bank and found a small tree with limbs about two inches around. Hacking away I soon had wood chips in my hair, and stuck to the stubble covering my face. At my feet was a small stack of five foot long staffs. The river water was icy cold, my legs and hands started to sting then go numb as I dug the front end of the Crown Vic out of the river bed. Giving it a more or less level launching pad I moved to the rear tires. In the fight for traction they had buried themselves in deep sandy grooves. Kneeling in the cold, bone chilling goddamn water, I worked the tree limbs down under the tires, one by one building a ramp up out of the grooves. The hope was to get enough speed by the end of the limb ramp that we wouldn’t get bogged down, otherwise I was back in the water laying logs.
“Ease the gas down, one fluid motion all the way to the floor and keep the wheel dead straight. Ok?” I said to Cass as she slid in behind the wheel.
“No sweat, chief,” she said, realizing I’m sure that if she screwed up it wasn’t her going back under the car in the icy river. Placing myself at the center of the trunk, I hunkered down, my shoulder against the steel, one hand on either side. Knees bent I started to push, applying tension before she hit the gas, wanting to be sure of my footing. “Now,” I yelled. The engine roared as the RPM’s climbed the scale. The rear tires started to spin, then caught traction and the Crown Vic shot up out of her hole like a rocket set free. With no car to push against I fell face down into the river. In a spray of water and sand the Crown Vic bounced across the river. It must have been doing forty when it hit the other bank, with one powerful leap it was up and out of sight. Pulling my soggy ass up the embankment it occurred to me that I was taking it on faith that Cass would be there waiting for me. It wasn’t like I’d really been her good luck charm so far or anything. And the truth was, push come to shove most people split. Apparently push hadn’t come to shove yet or she still figured she needed me because when I cleared the rim of the river bank there was Cass, leaning against the Crown Vic with a shit eating grin on her face.
“That was fun, daddy, can we do it again, can we huh? Can we?” she said.
“Get in the goddamn car.”
“What crawled up your ass?” she said, her smile gone to stone.
“Who the fuck were those suits I just put in a ditch?”
“I don’t know, they came with you, so maybe you could tell me.” Her eyes had gone hard, her armor in place.
“If that’s how you wanna play it, then get in the goddamn car. Or walk out of here, I really don’t give a rat’s ass anymore.” Climbing behind the wheel I powered up the beast and fought the shivers that were hitting hard. Cass slid into the passenger seat, pointedly looking out the window away from me. She was a piece of work, but at this point I was too battle fatigued to even begin to try and figure her out. Survival was what mattered now. Run and gun and make sure we don’t get caught, stumble you die or wind up back in the joint which is worse. It wasn’t pretty but at least it was a game I was raised to play and I knew rule one, learned it at birth…Trust no one.
With a sliver of a moon and stars above, we drove out into the rock-strewn landscape. Wind whistled through the hole in the windshield, in the distance a lonely train wailed out into the night, but we were silent, each alone in our own private battlements. Working my way through a series of dirt roads, I finally rejoined Highway 80 as the sun splashed golden light out over the land. An hour later we were in Reno. I got us a room in Sugar’s Motor Lodge. It was a small court of quaint bungalows on the outskirts of town. I paid cash and the rummy clerk didn’t ask any questions when I signed in as Shane MacGowan. He spent more time checking the twenties for counterfeits than looking at my face.
The room was last decorated in the fifties in hunting lodge style, the dark wood paneling held decades of grime. Prints of grizzlies and mountain men hung on the walls. A wagon wheel lamp lit the room, dimly, which was a good thing, the cleaning crew appeared to have lost interest in their jobs sometime around when LBJ left office. In the maroon and white checkerboard tiled bathroom, I assessed the damage. I stripped off my shirt, my trip into the river had washed me clean of dirt and blood, making it easy to spot several new bruises from rolling around in the brush. The shotgun blast through the windshield ripped my neck up pretty good, embedding chunks of safety glass under the skin. They hurt like hell and when I tried to dig at them with my fingers, a little blood oozed out of the holes. I pulled the buck knife out of my pocket, as I snapped the lock open I heard Cass laughing. Tilting the mirror I found her watching me leaning in the bathroom door jam, one hip cocked out.
“You planning to slit your throat?” she said.
“Seems like it would save a lot of people the trouble of killing me.”
“Yeah, but a knife to the neck? Real messy. Then I got to clean it, and to speak the truth, I am bone tired, so why don’t you let me fix you up?”
“Go to it little girl,” I said, handing her the buck knife. She cocked an eyebrow and took a pair of tweezers out of her bag. She reached up on her tiptoes to get to my neck.
“Ok, we have established you’re a real tall guy, now sit down so I can fix your goddamn neck and get some sleep,” she said. I sat on the tub and she started to dig the tweezers into my wounds. My jaw locked as the pain burned up to my head. Hiding the pain I looked stone faced up at her eyes. She showed no more emotion than if she was carving a steak. She noticed the fresh tattoo image of her sister on my shoulder, tracing a finger over the healing skin without comment. Her eyes followed the scars running up into my scalp and down to the ragged bullet scar in my chest. “This ain’t your first time at the rodeo,” she said with a little admiration, and went back to digging. To keep my mind away from the pain I let my eyes roam, down her neck, down to the lace and satin, and creamy soft skin spilling over it. What is it about cleavage that makes me lose my mind? Makes me want to get lost in those soft curves and never return to my life. One, two, three, she popped the chunks of glass out of my flesh. Noticing where I had been looking, she didn’t chastise me or feign modesty, she just gave me a slight smile. She dabbed a washcloth in vodka from a flask in her purse and cleaned the wounds. Man she knew how to travel, never leave home without a flask, an automatic, and a medical-grade pair of tweezers. She was my kind of girl.
“You’ll need to get some bandages, but I don’t think you’ll die, not from this at least,” she said, taking a short snort off the flask. I left her with the shotgun and instructions not to open the door. After a quick stop at a small drug store for bandages and extra strength aspirin, I went searching for a junkyard. Bullet holes tend to attract attention from the law dogs. At Trading Post Bob’s Junkyard, I found an old Crown Vic, it was rusted and dented, the engine was gone, but the glass was in useable condition. It also had a pitted but serviceable side-view mirror. Taking my toolbox out of the trunk I worked to remove the windshield and side window. With sun came heat. I took off my shirt, enjoying the sweat as it ran down my back. It was simple work, no moral judgments to make, no instant life changing decisions. Removing the chrome trim, I used a screwdriver to pop the rubber gasket
