Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
— Shakespeare
Claire held the gun in her left hand, the blood in her right.
“You ready?” Arson wanted to know.
She just sat there. Arson was always like that. Impatient. He never stopped moving. Like now his fingers tap-tap-tapping against the steering wheel of the Ford Roadster he’d stolen up in Bakersfield, gun-oil gleaming on fingernails that danced in the afternoon sunlight.
Arson’s fingers were scarred. He wasn’t worried about any blood. As far as he was concerned, any blood spilled today would belong to someone else.
And that seemed more than a likely possibility. They’d stopped to talk about the job one last time before they pulled it. There was a little town up ahead called Fiddler, and in that town was a bank that Arson had cased a couple days ago. He said it would be easy pickings, because the town didn’t have any law worth worrying about.
But Claire wasn’t worried about the law.
She was worried about something else.
Something that was worth worrying about. Something red, and wet, and hot. Something she couldn’t seem to stop, no matter how many times she snaked the needle through her flesh, no matter how tight she drew the stitches —
“Claire?” Arson said. “You ready, hon?”
The idling Ford purred like a kitten. A cricket sang among the withered cornstalks. But Claire didn’t say a word.
In the backseat, Arson’s brother and sister-in-law picked up the slack.
“I don’t think she’s ready at all,” Hank said.
“Yeah,” Pearl chimed in. “If you ask me, we oughta left her behind. She ain’t up to snuff.”
‘You two shut up,” Arson said, and he didn’t have to tell them twice.
Arson’s right hand closed over Claire’s left. She thought about that. The gun in her left hand, and Arson’s strong scarred fingers wrapped around both. It felt so good, so safe.
“That’s better.” Arson gave Claire’s gun hand a gentle squeeze. “I promise you, hon — it’ll be a piece of cake.”
Claire’s eyes found his. “It’ll be okay?”
‘Yeah.”
“You’ll be with me?”
“Every step of the way.”
“Always?”
Arson’s gaze was sharp, unflinching.
“Until they put one of us in the ground,” he said.
Claire’s breath caught in her throat. She clenched her right hand, fingers closing around the gash. Every muscle, every tendon, every bone ached.
If only the her skin would scab over, and scar, everything would be okay —
The stitches popped one by one, threads slipping through the tiny holes the needle had made. A thin trickle of blood snaked between her fingers. It was quiet in the car, so quiet that she was sure she’d hear the first red drop as it rolled off her knuckles and pattered against the leather upholstery.
She prayed that Arson wouldn’t notice the blood.
He didn’t. He gave her other hand a pat as he let it go. “That’s my girl,” he said, and his voice was warm as summer sunshine.
And then Claire heard that first drop of blood fall, pattering the leather upholstery like a tear raining down on the cold face of a corpse.
She shivered. She couldn’t help it. Another drop of blood welled up in her palm and traveled the trench of her lifeline. Another drop of blood rolled across her knuckles. Another drop, and then another.
Claire almost started crying.
Instead, she bolted from the car.
Into the cornfield.
Thunderheads bumped around up in the mountains, threatening rain. Officer Tate Winters sure enough wished the clouds would blow his way. Without them there was only the unbearably muggy heat, sandwiched between the parched summer earth and the unblinking sun above.
Tate sat on his motorbike. As far as he was concerned, it was too hot to be sitting on a motorbike. Too hot to be wearing a highway patrolman’s uniform, too. Too hot to be doing anything that didn’t involve a tall glass of cold lemonade.
Besides that, Tate should have been off an hour ago. But the couple had flagged him down, and then the boy started talking, and now Tate was stuck.
Stuck under the California sun, in a uniform, on a hot and muggy afternoon.
The couple, they weren’t quite so hot. That was because they were damn near naked. The boy didn’t have any pants. And the girl wasn’t wearing nothing but a little bit of a slip. It was black and it was silk. Hell, the girls Tate knew wouldn’t wear anything like that, not even under their clothes where other folks couldn’t see it.
The boy wasn’t at all embarrassed, though. His name was John Wallace Johnson. Pants or no pants, he was obviously the type of young man who felt that accompanying a girl in a black slip reflected well on his manhood.
Which, truth be told, wasn’t much to reflect on at all.
But reflection seemed to be John Wallace Johnson’s game. Meaning the kid was a talker, even on a hot afternoon devoid of lemonade. The kid talked in a voice that pinched like a fat man’s shoe. Without prompting, he started telling Tate the story for the third time, how he and his girl had been down by Fiddler Creek having a little picnic when these folks came out of nowhere toting guns like they were ready to take on a phalanx of G-men or something, and then the bandits made John Wallace Johnson and his girl strip damn near naked, and pretty soon John Wallace Johnson and his girl were standing there watching his Ford Roadster disappear down Old Howard Road without John Wallace Johnson behind the wheel.
If it was crisp cool February instead of cotton-mouthed July, Tate might have worked up some sarcasm, asked why in the world a bandit gang would want to steal a fellow’s pants along with his car. But it was too damn hot for sarcasm. Tate didn’t have to ask any such questions anyhow. He knew what kind of picnic these two were having down by the creek. He wasn’t
Yeah, he knew, all right. Hell, any idiot would know. What had happened was that the boy had left his pants in the back seat of the car. Him with his damn Clark Gable moustache and his ten dollar mouthful of a name. He’d left his pants in the back seat because that was where the girl pulled them off. And her with that black slip… who the hell knew what had happened to her dress. Could be it was flying from the flagpole in the town square, for all Tate knew.
Why, if this gal wasn’t a flapper then Tate Winters had never seen the like. Still, he kind of liked the way she looked at him. He’d never had a woman look at him quite that way, especially not a woman in a black slip. He didn’t know what the look was, exactly, but he knew it was the kind of look that made a man stand tall on a hot day when he really wanted to crawl under the porch and catch a nap with old Rover.
It was the kind of look that made a man look right back, and the same way, too.
All of a sudden, Tate Winters wasn’t thinking about lemonade at all.
The girl batted her eyelids in some kind of semaphore signal that Tate wished he could read. “Can you help
