ladies?'
'Let's go,' Didi urged.
'You're undercover cops, right?' the man asked. 'Tryin' to sting my ass?' He snorted. 'Yeah, I can smell cops a mile off! Comin' in here with a phony southern accent! You people won't stop roustin' me, will you?'
'Let's go.' Didi grasped Laura's arm.
She almost turned away. Almost. But her hand was killing her and they were down to the last of their cash, a gloomier day she'd never seen, and Mary Terror was out there somewhere with David. She felt her frayed temper snap, and the next thing she felt was her hand reaching up under her sweater. She grasped the handle of the automatic in the waistband of her jeans, and she brought the gun up and pointed it at the man's horse teeth.
'I'll take a thousand dollars for my diamond,' Laura said. 'No dickering.'
The man's grin hung by a lip.
'Oh God!' Didi wailed. 'Don't kill him like you did that other one, Bonnie! Don't blow the brains out of his head!'
The man trembled and lifted his arms. He had on cuff links that looked like little gold nuggets.
'Open the cash register,' Laura told him. 'You just bought a diamond.'
He hustled to obey, and when the register was open he started counting out the cash. 'Bonnie gets crazy sometimes,' Didi said as she went to the front door and turned over the WE'RE OPEN sign to SORRY WE'RE CLOSED. There was nobody on the street anywhere, the wind and the snow keeping saner people indoors. 'She shot a guy through the head in Nebraska yesterday. Trigger crazy is what she is.'
'You want big bills?' the man gasped. 'You want hundreds?'
'Whatever,' Didi answered. 'Come on, hurry it up!'
'I've only… I've only got… got six hundred dollars in the register. Got some more in the safe. Back there.' He nodded toward a door with an OFFICE sign on it.
'Six hundred's enough,' Didi said. 'Take the money, Bonnie. Got to get us to Michigan, doesn't it?' She took the automatic from Laura as Didi pocketed the cash. 'Anybody else in here?'
'Wanda Jane's in the back. She's the bookkeeper.'
'Okay, go on through that door real nice and slow.'
The man started to walk, but Laura said, 'Wait. Take the diamond. You bought it.' Didi flashed her a glance of disapproval, and the scared clerk just stood there not knowing what to do. 'Take it,' Laura said, and at last he did.
In the office, a wizened woman with butch-cut gray hair was smoking a cigarette, sitting in a smoke haze and talking on the telephone as she watched a soap opera on a portable TV. Didi didn't have to speak; the man's face and the pistol did all the talking. Wanda Jane croaked, 'Jumpin' Jesus! Hal, I think we're bein' -' Didi put her hand down on the phone's prongs, cutting the connection.
'Wanda Jane, you keep your mouth shut,' Didi ordered. 'You two strip naked.'
'The hell I will!' Wanda Jane thundered, her face reddening to the roots of her hair.
'They've already killed somebody!' the clerk said. 'They're both crazy!' He was already unbuttoning his shirt. When he unbuckled his belt, his huge paunch flopped out like the nose of the Goodyear blimp.
Didi hurried them up. In a couple of minutes they were both nude and lying on their bellies on the concrete floor, and an uglier two moons Laura had never been so unfortunate to see. Didi tore the phone out of the wall and scooped their clothes up. 'You lie here for ten minutes. Bobby's watching the front door. If you come out before ten minutes are up, you're dead meat, because Bobby's even crazier than Bonnie. Hear me?'
Wanda Jane grunted like a bullfrog. The man with horse teeth gripped his new diamond in his fist and bleated, 'Yeah, we hear you! Just don't kill us, okay?'
'See you next time we come through,' Didi promised, and she pushed Laura out of the office in front of her.
Outside, Didi dumped the clothes in a trash can. Then she and Laura ran to the Cutlass, which was parked down the street a few doors from the pawnshop, and Didi took the wheel again. In five minutes they were heading back toward I-80, and in ten minutes they were on their way west again, six hundred dollars richer and minus a diamond that had become to Laura only a dead weight.
Didi kept checking the rearview mirror. No flashing lights, no sirens. Yet the speedometer's needle showed a little over sixty, and Didi left it there. 'From shoplifting to armed robbery in less than a day,' Didi said, and she couldn't hold back a wicked grin. 'You're a natural.'
'A natural what?'
'Outlaw.'
'I didn't steal anything. I left him the diamond.'
'That's right, you did. But didn't it feel good, making him look at that gun and bust a gut?'
Laura watched the wipers fight the spits of snow. It had been thrilling, in a way. It had been so alien to her normal sense of propriety that it had seemed like someone else holding the gun, wearing her skin, and speaking in her voice. She wondered what Doug might think of it, or her mother and father. One thing she realized was true, and it filled her with gritty pride: she might not be an outlaw, but she was a survivor. ' 'Strip naked,'' she said, and she gave a hard note of laughter. 'How'd you think of that?'
'Just buying time. I couldn't think of any other way to keep them in that office for a while.'
'Why'd you keep calling me Bonnie? And you said we were on our way to Michigan?'
Didi shrugged. 'Pigs'll be looking for two women on their way to Michigan. One of them has a southern accent and is named Bonnie. They may be traveling with a male accomplice named Bobby. Anyway, the pigs'll look in the opposite direction from where we're going. They won't know what to make of somebody trading a three- thousand-dollar diamond for six hundred bucks at gunpoint.' She smiled faintly. 'Did you hear what I said? 'Pigs.' I haven't said that and meant it in a long time.' Her laughter bubbled up, too. 'Did you see Wanda Jane's face when I told them to strip? I thought she was going to drop a fig!'
'And when that guy's belly came out I thought it was going to flop right to the floor! I thought Des Moines was about to have an earthquake!'
'Guy needed a girdle! Hell, he couldn't find a girdle big enough!'
They were both laughing, the laughter taking some of the edge off what they'd just done. As Laura laughed, she forgot for a precious moment the pain in her hand and in her heart, and that was mercy indeed.
'He needed a whale girdle!' Didi went on. 'And did you see the butts on those two!'
'Butt and Jeff!' Laura said, tears in her eyes.
'The Honeymooners!'
'Two moons over Des Moines!'
'I swear to God, I've seen bowls of Jell-O with better -' Muscle tone, she was about to say, but she did not because of the flashing blue light that had suddenly appeared in the rear windshield. The scream of a siren came into the car, and the hair stood up on the back of Laura's neck.
'Christ!' Didi shouted as she jerked the Cutlass over into the right lane. The patrol car was roaring up in the left lane, and Didi's heart hammered as she waited for it to swerve on their tail. But it kept going, sweeping past them in a siren blare and dazzling blue lights, and it sped away into the murk of swirling sleet and snow.
Neither woman could speak. Didi's hands had clamped into claws around the steering wheel, her eyes wide with shock, and Laura sat there with her stomach cramping and her bandaged hand pressed against her chest.
Four miles farther west, they passed a car that had skidded off the highway into the guardrail. The patrol car was parked nearby, the Smokey talking to a young man in a sweatshirt with SKI WYOMING across the front. Traffic had slowed, the afternoon had darkened to a plum violet, and the pavement glistened. Didi touched her window. 'Getting colder,' she said. The Cutlass was a laboring, gas-guzzling beast, but its heater was first rate. She cut their speed back to fifty-five, grainy snow flying before the headlights.
'I can drive if you want to take a nap,' Laura offered.
'No, I'm fine. Let your hand rest. How're you doing?'
'Okay. Hurting some.'
'If you want to stop somewhere, let me know.'
Laura shook her head. 'No. I want to keep going.'
'Six hundred dollars would buy us airline tickets,' Didi said. 'We could catch a flight to San Francisco from Omaha and rent a car to Freestone.'
