A patrolman in the back muttered, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Shit, I could get a load of those up at the Home Depot.”
They all turned to look at him. Not at all embarrassed, he added, “In a variety of decorator colors.”
Somebody laughed, which made the woman cry again, and then everybody felt bad, for a while.
—
THEY WEREstill milling around, checking periodically with the Highway Patrol for possible sightings of Dora Box, when O’Brien hurried out of the foundation office and said to Lucas and Rae, “We need to get over to the Stripes station.”
“What for?”
“A woman’s been stabbed, in the head. A sheriff’s deputy thinks she might be this Kort woman you’re looking for.”
They made it to the Stripes station in five minutes, where the two overworked EMTs were staring at a woman who was seated on the concrete next to a gas pump. They walked past a cop who was keeping rubberneckers away, and one of the EMTs said, “We called for the chopper again... I don’t know what we can do here.”
Lucas took a look. The woman was Kort, all right, sitting straight up, her eyes fixed and peering straight ahead, with a screwdriver handle sticking out from her forehead. Lucas asked, “Is she alive?”
“Yeah, she blinks every twenty seconds,” the EMT said. “We’ve tried to communicate with her, but nothing happens. We ask her to blink or move a finger if she hears us, but she doesn’t respond, she doesn’t blink on command. When we try to pick her up, her legs don’t work. We need the chopper and a neurosurgeon. This is not something you throw a bandage on.”
“Anybody know how she got here?” Rae asked.
The EMTs shrugged, and a sheriff’s deputy, who’d come over to listen in, said, “A tourist found her. He thought the station was openand pulled in, and saw her sitting by the pump. He thought she was a drug addict, until he saw the screwdriver handle. Nobody knows how long she was sitting here, or who dropped her off.”
O’Brien leaned down and waved his hands in front of Kort’s eyes. She didn’t blink. He took his hand away, and a few seconds later, she did blink. “Every twenty seconds,” the EMT said. “You could set your watch by it.”
An hour later, she was flown out of Marfa for El Paso, still blinking every twenty seconds.
—
THE NEXT MORNING,Lucas spoke to a doc in El Paso, who said that Kort had died an hour earlier during an operation to remove the screwdriver. “She had some brain function and the neuro guy had her coked to the gills with antiseizure medicine, but as soon as they removed the screwdriver, she had a massive seizure and died. She also has a recent bullet wound in her butt, and apparently self-treated that. Anyway, she’s gone.”
Lucas hung up and as he punched in Forte’s phone number to report Kort’s death, he thought,Coked to the gills?
When he told Rae about it, she said, “Ah, that’s just Texas.”
Later that day, Lucas and Rae went to El Paso to see Bob, who was looking good, given the fact that he’d been shot through both legs. “Biggest question now is whether I have vascular damage,” he said. “I can wiggle all my toes, and if somebody pinches my knees, it hurts, so no major nerves were killed off, as far as anyone can tell. Take a while to find all that out, but I won’t lose any legs. I could be back in a couple of months.”
“That’s good, because our boy Davenport wants us to work with him on his next big one,” Rae said.
“Business class, suites hotels?” Bob asked.
“Count on it,” Lucas said.
When they left Bob, they both went to the emergency room, where a nurse practitioner rewashed their not-very-bad wounds and pronounced them okay, although they should have gotten more comprehensive treatment about fifteen hours earlier. On the way back to Marfa, Lucas said to Rae, “Bob’s hurt worse than he lets on. He’ll be doing good if he’s back by next summer. He might even be able to cash his chips on a disability, if he wants that.”
“He won’t, he’ll be back.” Rae teared up. “I wish I could shoot that motherfucker Darling again.”
—
THAT SAME DAY,Rosie pulled the RV off the road near Gordon, Texas. There wasn’t anyone around, and they carefully and watchfully walked the interstate fence until they spotted the orange blouse. The three of them, Rosie and Annie and Dora, hauled the two black cases out of the weeds under the pine tree. Dora popped them open, and Annie said, “Ohhhh...” in what was nothing less than an orgasmic groan.
“Let’s get them back to the RV,” Dora said. “And let me get my blouse.”
She unknotted her blouse from the fence pole, and Annie came up from behind her, put one hand on the pole and the other on Box’s ass, and asked, “Little kiss?”
A guy going by in an eighteen-wheeler looked up and saw themand said to himself, “Ooo, no, no, no, no way. Oh, man, don’t do that to me, not ten days from home...”
—
