“
“I know,” Poke soothed him. “Bitch, ain’t it? I’m sorry, George, no shit. It ain’t a bit personal. Want you to ‘member that. Catch on his head, Lloyd.”
That was easier said than done. Gorgeous George was whipping his head wildly from side to side. He was sitting in the corner of his rumpus room and the walls were cinderblock and he kept rapping his head against them. Didn’t even seem to feel it.
“Catch him,” Poke said serenely, and ripped another piece of tape from the roll.
Lloyd at last got him by the hair and managed to hold him still long enough for Poke to slap the second strip of adhesive neatly across George’s nose, thereby sealing all of his tubes. George went purely crazy. He rolled out of the corner, bellywhopped, and then lay there, humping the floor and making muffled sounds which Lloyd supposed were supposed to be screams. Poor old fellow. It went on for almost five minutes before George was completely still. He bucked and scrabbled and thumped. His face got as red as the side of old Dad’s barn. The last thing he did was to lift both legs eight or ten inches straight up off the floor and bring them down with a crash. It reminded Lloyd of something he had seen in a Bugs Bunny cartoon or something, and he chuckled a little, feeling a bit cheered up. Up until then it had been sort of gruesome to see.
Poke squatted beside George and felt for his pulse.
“Well?” Lloyd said.
“Nothin tickin but his watch, ole buddy,” Poke said. “Speakin of which…” He lifted George’s meaty arm and looked at his wrist. “Naw, just a Timex. I was thinkin it might be a Casio, somethin like that.” He let George’s arm drop.
George’s car keys were in his front pants pocket. And in an upstairs cupboard they found a Skippy peanut butter jar half filled with dimes, and they took those, too. There was twenty dollars and sixty cents in dimes.
George’s car was a wheezy old Mustang with a four on the floor and lousy shocks and tires that were as bald as Telly Savalas. They left Vegas on US 93 and went southeast into Arizona. By noon of the next day, day before yesterday, they had skirted Phoenix on the back roads. Yesterday around nine they had stopped at a dusty old general store two miles beyond Sheldon on Arizona Highway 75. They knocked over the store and pokerized the proprietor, an elderly gentleman with mail-order false teeth. They got sixty-three dollars and the old dudemar’s pickup truck.
The pickup truck had blown two tires this morning. Two tires at the same time, and neither of them could find any tacks or nails on the road at all, although they spent nearly half an hour looking, swapping a bomber joint back and forth as they did so. Poke finally said it must have been a coincidence. Lloyd said he had heard of stranger things, by God. Then along came the white Connie, like an answer to their prayers. They had crossed the state line from Arizona into New Mexico earlier on, although neither of them knew it, and so they had become meat for the FBI.
The Connie’s driver had pulled over, leaned out, and said: “Need any help?”
“Sure do,” Poke had said, and pokerized the guy right on the spot. Got him dead-bang between the eyes with the .357 Mag. Poor sucker probably never even knew what had hit him.
“Why don’t you turn here?” Lloyd said, pointing to the junction coming up. He was pleasantly stoned.
“Sure could,” Poke said cheerfully. He let the Connie’s speed drop from eighty to sixty. Drifted it to the left, right wheels barely leaving the ground, and then a new piece of road was unrolling in front of them. Route 78, due west. And so, not knowing they had ever left it or that they were now the perpetrators of what the newspapers were calling a TRI-STATE KILL-SPREE, they reentered Arizona.
About an hour later a sign came up on their right: BURRACK 6.
“Burlap?” Lloyd said foggily.
“Burrack,” Poke said, and began twisting the Connie’s wheel so that the car made big graceful loops back and forth across the road. “Whoop! Whoop!”
“You want to stop there? I’m hungry, man.”
“You’re always hungry.”
“Fuck you. When I get stoned, I get the munchies.”
“You can munch my nine-inch hogleg, how’s that? Whoop! Whoop!”
“Seriously, Poke. Let’s stop.”
“Okay. Got to get some cash, too. We’ve thrown off enough fuckin pursuit for a while. We got to get some money and shag ass north. This desert shit makes no sense to me.”
“Okay,” Lloyd said. He didn’t know if it was the dope working on him or what, but all of a sudden he felt paranoid as hell, even worse than when they had been on the turnpike. Poke was right. Stop outside this Burrack and pull a score like they had outside of Sheldon. Get some money and some gas station maps, ditch this fuckin Connie for something that would blend into the scenery, then head north and east by the secondary roads. Get the fuck out of Arizona.
“I’ll tell you the truth, man,” Poke said. “All of a sudden I feel as nervous as a longtail cat in a room fulla rockin chairs.”
“I know what you mean, jellybean,” Lloyd said gravely, and then it hit them both funny and they broke up.
Burrack was a wide place in the road. They shot through it and on the other side was a combination cafe, store, and gas station. There was an old Ford wagon and a dust-streaked Olds with a horse trailer behind it in the dirt parking lot. The horse stared out at them as Poke wheeled the Connie in.
“This looks like just the ticket,” Lloyd said.
Poke agreed. He reached into the back for the .357 and checked the loads. “You ready?”
“I guess so,” Lloyd said, and took hold of the Schmeisser.
They walked across the baked parking lot. The police had known who they were for four days now; they had left their fingerprints all over Gorgeous George’s house, and in the store where the old man with the mail-order dentures had been pokerized. The old man’s pickup had been found within fifty feet of the bodies of the three people who belonged with the Continental, and it seemed reasonable to assume that the men who had killed Gorgeous George and the store owner had also killed these three. If they had been listening to the Connie’s radio instead of the tape-player, they would have known that Arizona and New Mexico police were coordinating the largest manhunt in forty years, all for a couple of small-time grifters who could not quite comprehend what they might have done to start such a fuss.
The gas was self-service; the clerk had to turn on the pump. So they went up the steps and inside. Three aisles of canned goods went up the room toward the counter. At the counter a man in cowboy clothes was paying for a pack of smokes and half a dozen Slim Jims. Halfway down the middle aisle a tired-looking woman with coarse black hair was trying to decide between two brands of spaghetti sauce. The place smelled of stale licorice and sun and tobacco and age. The proprietor was a freckled man in a gray shirt. He was wearing a company cap that said SHELL in red letters against a white field. He looked up as the screen door slapped shut and his eyes widened.
Lloyd put the wire stock of the Schmeisser against his shoulder and fired a burst at the ceiling. The two hanging lightbulbs shattered like bombs. The man in the cowboy clothes began to turn around.
“Just hold still and nobody’ll get hurt!” Lloyd shouted, and Poke immediately made him a liar by blowing a hole through the woman looking at the sauces. She flew out of her shoes.
“Holy gee, Poke!” Lloyd hollered. “You didn’t have to—”
“Pokerized her, ole buddy!” Poke yelled. “She’ll never watch Jerry Falwell again! Whoop! Whoop!”
The man in the cowboy clothes kept turning. He was holding his smokes in his left hand. The harsh light falling through the show window and the screen door pricked out bright stars on the dark lenses of his sunglasses. There was a .45 revolver tucked into his belt, and now he plucked it out unhurriedly as Lloyd and Poke were staring at the dead woman. He aimed, fired, and the left side of Poke’s face suddenly disappeared in a spray of blood and tissue and teeth.
“
Lloyd, stunned, fired more in reflex than in self-defense. The Schmeisser’s roar filled the room. Cans flew.
