into the house, and dug up another pistol. When I turned my head, Jimmy Fish was staggering down the steps, another shiny semi-automatic pistol in his hand, screaming, 'I don't even have a fucking wife!'
Maybe the divorce had gone through already. Maybe I should have hit him harder. His first shot glanced off the roof of the Checker. Before I could stop him, Red was out of the cab running toward Jimmy Fish, the big pistol wobbling in his hand, shouting, 'Shoot my ride, motherfucker!'
The two of them engaged in a serious firefight about ten or fifteen yards apart. How they missed each other I'll never know. Red blew a large chunk of plaster off the house with his first round. His second went through the open door and out the sliding glass door at the back of the house. The third hit something inside the house that exploded like a vacuum tube. At the same time Jimmy Fish gouged several rips in the fenders and doors of the Checker and punched a hole through the front window and out the back. They might have hurt each other, eventually, but I slammed the back door shut, leaned over the trunk as I unholstered the Glock, and put a round in the fat meat of Jimmy's thigh. He went down like a broken puppet and screamed like a wounded rabbit.
'Go!' I shouted at Red.
He looked at me wildly, then turned to the little fat man in a heap at the bottom of the steps, and raised his pistol. 'Don't fucking kill him! Let's just go!'
He slid behind the steering wheel as I dove into the back seat.
'Where?' he said as he rammed the Checker into gear.
But I didn't have an answer. I was too busy trying to stanch the blood pouring thickly down the side of the woman's face, cursing myself. 'Goddamn!' I felt as if I had been searching for this woman all my life, and now some fucking idiot had shot her in the head. 'Goddamn motherfucking son of a bitch!'
'What the hell's your problem, man? The asshole didn't put holes in your ride,' Red said as he bounced across the cattle guard and stopped so I could ignite the det cord. But when he turned to look at me, he saw the sheet of blood covering the side of the woman's face. 'Shit, man, what are we going to do?'
I jumped out, dove under the cattle guard, wrapped the Glock in the extra lengths of det cord, pulled the ignition string, then jumped back in, shouting, 'Drive like the wind, my friend.'
We fled into the dark, heading into the desert away from the bright lights, the big city, and the disaster of the night. Perhaps in the desert, like an ancient hermit, I could find the answers.
ELEVEN
Once again in the presence of Molly I was exhausted and realized that perhaps I hadn't planned too carefully. I had her but didn't know what to do with her. She was the sort of woman who had been designed to drive men mad. She would have been a trial for a saint. I felt trapped and confused, unable to think. Even after I dug my flashlight out of the pack to check her wound. When I got a good look at it, I sighed so loudly that it sounded like a shot. Either a glass or metal fragment had sliced as cleanly as a razor blade across her high cheekbone, then punched a tiny hole in her ear next to the skull. Lots of blood but no real damage. The bleeding stopped under pressure, and the slice could be closed with butterfly bandages when we got to Red's garage in North Las Vegas, which he had offered as a temporary lockup. When the bleeding stopped I jabbed an ampule of the 'twilight sleep' into her hip, then climbed into the front seat, as if just a little distance from her would clear my mind.
Maybe it did. We drifted all the way west and north to Pahrump, where we stopped behind a convenience store. We couldn't drive back to Vegas in a car with bullet holes in it. While Red took a ballpeen hammer and made the holes in the front and rear window look as if they had been made with rocks, I went inside to get two large coffees, a six-pack of beer, a pile of cardboard sandwiches, a spray bottle of cleanser, and rolls of clear strapping tape and paper towels. I cleaned up the blood while he called his Mom, then we hid the bullet holes as best we could, and headed up to Highway 95.1 stayed awake long enough to drink two beers, a sip of coffee, and half an egg salad sandwich before I drifted off. I fell into a dark hole of dreamless sleep so deep I might as well have given myself the shot instead of Molly.
We were both dead until Red pulled into his garage tucked under the Interstate in North Las Vegas. Mrs. McCravey was waiting with first-aid supplies, a clean pair of sweats, and a sheet spread across one of the workbenches. I placed Molly on the sheet. Mrs. McCravey scissored Molly out of her bloody sweats, and we began to clean the dried blood out of her hair and off her body. Mrs. McCravey, her palms as golden as old ivory, her fingers as supple as a professional card dealer's, did most of the work. She even took the scissors from me and cut perfect little winged bandages.
Afterward, even swaddled in a new pair of loose sweats and with butterfly bandages marching across her high cheekbones like tiny insects, Molly McBride or Molineaux or whatever the hell her name was still a strikingly attractive woman.
'What are you going to do with her?' Mrs. McCravey said.
'Take her back to Texas,' I said, without really thinking about it, 'and lock her in a corn crib until she comes up with the answers to some questions.' Maybe nobody would think to look for her in the same place twice.
'Sounds like a frightful chore.'
'What makes a girl as beautiful as this sell herself?' I asked stupidly.
'Who knows?' Mrs. McCravey said. 'Drugs, sexual abuse, revenge, money – all I know is that most whores are stone lazy sluts at heart. They'd rather fuck than work.'
'Revenge?'
'They're like junkies – if they aren't junkies – all their failures are the fault of the world around them,' she said quietly, then she added, 'and maybe this one is trying to shed the guilt of passing.'
'Passing?' I said.
'This lady doesn't have just a good tan, Mr. Milodragovitch,' she said as she stroked Molly's forehead with a damp cloth. 'She's as black as I am.
Without a flicker of an eyelid to warn us that she was conscious, Molly suddenly grabbed Mrs. McCravey's wrist, hissing, 'You watch your mouth, you fuckin' old nigger bitch.'
Without a moment's hesitation, Mrs. McCravey slapped Molly's face. Then the fight was on. It was like two drunks trying to put a monkey into a sack: it simply has more appendages than they do.
The struggle was silent, serious, and still in doubt when Red stepped in. He lay on her legs, and I leaned on her chest, but she bucked her hips so wildly that Mrs. McCravey didn't have a chance to plunge the needle into her hip. Exasperated, Mrs. McCravey stood back, picked up a wrench, and said, 'Honey, if you don't hold still, I'm gonna knock out your front teeth with this Crescent wrench.'
As Molly paused to consider this, Mrs. McCravey managed to pop her in her shapely buttock with the dose. Molly calmed down, a bit, but I could still feel her fighting the drugs. So we stayed on her until her buttocks relaxed. Weak as she was, the straitjacket was still a struggle. Once she was trussed, I got the badge out of my back pocket.
'Okay, Miss whatever-the-fuck-your-name-is,' I said, still breathing hard, 'I've got a warrant for your arrest as a material witness in a homicide case in Gatlin County, Texas, and you're going back with me. Either in a straitjacket and a diaper, or like a civilized person.'
'Why don't you just shoot me now? Get it over with,' she said, her words softly slurred, her dusky eyelids fluttering closed. 'Just put one right between my fuckin' eyes,' she muttered as she drifted under again.
Red and his mother sat down on rolling mechanics' stools, sighing. Red popped the last beer, but his mother took it away from him before he got it to his lips. 'A frightful chore,' she said after a long pull, then handed it back to him.
'Shit, man,' Red said, 'I can find you a dozen hookers prettier than this one. And they might fight back, if you pay 'em enough. But they'll fight fair.' He giggled weakly, handed the beer to me, then sat back down as worn as the seat of a cheap suit.
I shackled Molly's ankle to the vise at the end of the bench, then asked the McCraveys to watch her while I checked out of the hotel, retrieved my goods from the gun locker, and picked up some burgers and beers. On the way, I called Betty and caught her just before she crossed the Nevada line. Her hangover was too bad for her to argue about the change of plans. For a change.
