A World of Thieves

barely more than two weeks earlier. So we headed east, puttering along with the top down under a sky less hazy than usual, and three hours later we were in San Angelo.

Under the names of Mr. and Mrs. Mitch Russell we checked into the brandnew Riverside Hotel, which a streetcorner cop had advised us was the best in town. I asked the bellboy if there was someplace nearby where a man might get a bottle of labeled spirits, and he said, “Name your preference, pal.” I said bourbon would be vastly appreciated, and a couple of limes if he could manage it. Twenty minutes later he was back with a paper-sacked fifth of bourbon and a roller tray holding a bucket of ice, the limes, two seltzer bottles and two tumblers. I gave him a lavish tip.

Belle loved everything about the hotel. She said she’d never been in any place so fine. She went around the room, touching the flowers in the dresser vase, the furniture, the bedcovers, the towels and soaps and shampoos in the bath, as if making sure everything was real. I said if she thought this place was fancy she ought to see the hotels in New Orleans.

“Will you show me New Orleans one of these days?” she said.

“Sure,” I said. “I think you’d like it.”

She came into my arms and tucked her head under my chin. “I think I’d love it,” she said.

We went out and found a dress shop, but each dress she tried on she liked better than the one before, and after nearly two hours she still couldn’t decide between three of them. She and the salesgirl kept blabbing on and on about yokes and bratelles and peplums, hems and flounces and God-knows-what. I settled the matter by buying all three dresses for her. She gave me a kiss full on the mouth and smiled at the salesgirl and said, “Aren’t I the lucky one?”

The girl was goodlooking, with a deep Texas accent and thick honey hair, and she grinned and said, “He’s a regular sugar daddy, only lots younger and better-looking than most, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

Belle winked at her and said she didn’t mind at all. I would’ve been lying if I’d said I wasn’t enjoying myself.

From there we went to a Mexican restaurant for a lunch of guacamole and strips of roast kid in a red chile sauce, with flour tortillas so freshly hot they powdered and almost burned our fingers. Across the street was a lush green park with the Conchos River running through it, and when we were done eating we went for a long walk in the shade of the cottonwoods along the bank. Then back to the hotel and I fixed us each a glass of bourbon and Coke full of crushed ice and a touch of lime juice, something I’d learned from Russell. She took a careful sip and grinned and said she loved it. We filled the tub with bubble lotion and got in it together and sipped the drinks slowly. After a long soak we soaped each other up and then rinsed off and dried each other with thick towels and went to bed and made love and then napped until dark.

We took supper in a good steakhouse across the street—filets as thick as my wrist and heaped with finely sliced fried onion rings—then went back to the hotel and descended the wide staircase to the ballroom. Belle was wearing one of her new dresses, a little black number that hugged her hips and had a short fringed hem and a sort of halter top cut way low in the back. She was a knockout.

The dancefloor was crowded this Friday night and the big band up on the stand was damned good, finishing up an excellent rendition of “Stardust.” Then it started in on “Am I Blue?” and we took to the floor.

We’d just finished kicking up our heels to “Baby Face” and were applauding along with the other dancers when the brass section swung into the opening bars of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love.”

“Let’s sit this one out,” I said. “We can go outside for a minute if you want.”

She shook her head. “There’s no need. That song doesn’t bother me anymore, really it doesn’t.”

“Sure?”

“You know,” she said, “it’s funny, but everything from before feels…I don’t know…made up. Like it all happened to somebody else, somebody I hardly know anymore and I’m glad of it.”

She gave me a peck on the lips and a smile and asked if I’d be a real sweetie and get her a cold Coke while she went to powder her nose. “Meet you at the refreshment bar,” she said. “Then we’ll get back to showing these suckers how to dance.”

The lounges were on the other side of the room and down a hallway, and she drew a good bit of attention as she made her way around the edge of the dancefloor. I went to the bar and ordered two Cokes. There was a scattering of small tables along the walls to either side of the bar, all of them occupied, but then a couple got up to return to the floor and I was quick to take over their spot.

I was nearly done with my Coke when I caught sight of her emerging from the crowd. Her face was tight with excitement, a look I’d come to know well. She didn’t see me at the bar and scanned around and I waved to catch her attention. She spotted me and came over and sat down.

“What?” I said.

Her eyes had that peculiar light they took on when she was really wound up. She sucked a deep draft of her Coke through the straw, took a look back toward the dancing crowd, then leaned close to me. “Listen to this. When I came out of the ladies’ room just now? These two fellas come out of the gents’ and start talking to me. They’d been doing some drinking, you could tell, and I took them for just a couple of funny drunks. Then one of them says to me, ‘Look here,’ and steps over by this big potted plant and stands sort of half-turned so nobody but me and his buddy can see, and he takes a roll of bills out of his coat pocket and I mean to tell you, Sonny, it was this thick.” She held her thumb and forefinger three inches apart. “Looked bigger than a Coke bottle except fat at both ends. The top bill was a hundred, I swear. And the other one says real low in my ear, ‘Name your price, honey. One time around the world for each of us.’”

I stood up. “Come point them out.”

“Sonny, sit down. Please. Just listen a minute Okay?”

I sat. “I’ll kick their ass.” It was an effort to keep my voice down.

“I told them I had to make a phone call but I’d be right back. They’re waiting for me in the lounge hallway.”

I started to get up again but she flapped her hand at me to sit back down.

“Listen to me,” she said. “You want to get them? Let’s really get them. I had this idea—I mean it just bang came to me when that galoot said what they wanted.”

“What the hell are you—”

“What if you went up to the room right now and then I took them up there?”

Her expression was pure readiness, her green eyes sparking. She slid her hand across the table and gripped mine.

“What do you say?” she said.

Twenty minutes later I was in the bathroom, the door slightly ajar, the room in darkness, when I heard her key rattling in the lock and then their laughter as they came in.

There was the click of a lamp switch—but the bathroom was situated in such a way that all I could see through the cracked door was a narrow portion of the back wall and part of the window.

The room door shut. The guys laughed louder. Sloppy kissing sounds, murmurings, chucklings. One of them said something I didn’t catch except for “Molly, honey.” I felt my pulse in my eardrums.

“Whoa now, boys, hold your horses!” Belle said loudly, her laughter sort of tinny. “Lookee there the good bourbon I got. Why don’t we pour us a…now, behave yourself, you rascal, we got all night! Why don’t we all have us a little drink and—”

I didn’t catch the rest of it for the sudden blaring of a big band playing “Always.” One of them had turned on the radio on the bedside table.

We hadn’t counted on that. The signal we’d arranged was “Here’s to wicked times,” which she’d say when she had them standing together by the chest of drawers, where the bourbon was. I’d come out and get the drop on them and she’d snatch up her own gun from under the pillow. But with the radio up so loud I couldn’t make out what anybody was saying, only the guys’ harsh laughter.

Damn the signal. I was about to pull the door open when it swung in hard and hit me in the forehead and knocked me back against the sink and my feet went out from under me. A large man was in the doorway with his hand at his fly—and quick as a cat he was all over me before I could raise the gun. He gripped my gun wrist with one hand and started punching with the other, cussing a blue streak. He must’ve had thirty pounds on me and was damn strong. I tried to cover up with my free arm but still caught some on the face and neck and then I tucked my