“Now what?” Box asked.
Annie shook her head. “I’ll tell you what, Dora, this really isn’t good. I’m not really up for finishing her off.” She scratched the side of her face, peering at Kort, who still hadn’t moved, except to blink.
“What are we going to do?” Rosie asked Annie.
“Well... I guess we could drop her off somewhere,” Annie said. “Wouldn’t make much difference to her, wherever we left her. Wouldn’t want anybody to see us doing it.”
“She could identify us,” Box said.
“If she could find us—but we’re not from around here, and she doesn’t know our last names or anything,” Annie said.
“I say we stir that screwdriver handle around a little,” Box said. Kort blinked. “We won’t have to worry about her identifying anything.”
“I got a feeling she won’t be doing that anyway,” Annie said.
Rosie stood up. “Okay. Let’s go.”
—
THEY WENTlooking for a place, and as they did, Box cleaned her fingerprints off the screwdriver handle with a hand wipe. Theyeventually found a closed Stripes convenience store and dropped Kort off between a couple of gas pumps. Kort sat between the pumps like an oversized lump of modeling clay, still staring straight ahead, blinked once. As they pulled away, Rosie asked the other two, “Think she’ll be all right there?”
Annie shook her head and said, “No, I don’t think so.”
—
TEN MINUTESbehind them, a tourist pulled into the Stripes, hoping that it might still be open. It wasn’t, but he saw the figure sitting between the gas pumps, and though he didn’t want to, stepped over and took a look.
His wife called from the car, “Larry—come back. Leave her to sleep it off.”
Larry walked around the car and said, “I think we should call the police.”
“She’s probably a drug addict.”
“She could be,” Larry said. “Her bigger problem seems to be that she’s got a screwdriver stuck into her brain.”
—
ANNIE, ROSIE, AND BOXdrove north out of Marfa. They’d grown silent after the Kort incident and were thirty miles up the road before Rosie asked Annie, “What do we do about the Dora problem?”
Box spoke up before Annie could answer. “Listen, the three of us could get along. Now, I need to tell you something and I need to ask you something. You talk about this Boss, and how he sort of cheapskates you on the money.”
“Yeah, but we don’t mention it to his face,” Rosie said.
“Well, the Boss is going to find out that the money is gone, right? That the feds got it,” Box said. “It’ll be in the newspapers. The cops will be showing off. Nothing you could do about that. You did your best.”
“He won’t be happy, but he won’t take it out on us,” Rosie said. “He’s pretty rational.”
Box nodded. “Okay. Good. He’s rational. Now, what if I told you I know where there’s almost a million and a half dollars, more or less, in cash and gold, a few hours from here. Nobody knows about it but me.Nobody knows.”
Rosie and Annie glanced at each other, and then Annie asked Rosie, “What’s that movie line you like? From the famous movie?”
“I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,”Rosie said.
Annie pointed a finger at her: “That’s the one.”
29
A DEEP AND SULLEN SILENCEseemed to drape the town of Marfa after the firefight in the fields beside the highway. The Border Patrol kept people away from the buildings where the shooting took place, except for a couple of employees of the Chinati Foundation, which ran the place.
