“Rosie sort of likes thatthang,too,” Annie said. “Every once in a while, anyway. I’m perfectly good without it.”
“That’s all so wrong,” Kort said. “None of you ever read the Bible?”
They all looked at her, the torturer, and then at each other, and finally Rosie said, “Well, no.”
—
TIME PASSED.
The RV’s bathroom was tiny and Box had made no move to get away, had given no hint that she might be thinking about it, so they let her in there by herself. As she sat on the toilet, she pulled out four built-in drawers, quietly as she could, to see what she might find that would help in an escape attempt, if she decided to make one. The first thing she found was a metal nail file, but it was so thin that she suspected it might break if she tried to stab someone with it.
The bottom drawer had a selection of simple household tools, including an eight-inch-long Sears Craftsman screwdriver, with a nice Phillips point on it. Box didn’t think about it for long—she pushed it down into one of her socks, pulled up her pants, and flushed the toilet.
Annie was riding shotgun, with Rosie driving, and when Kort went back to the bathroom, Box eased the screwdriver out of her sock and shoved it beneath the bottom pillow of the pull-out couch.
With Kort in the bathroom, she asked quietly, “You girls know about what Charlene does to people?”
“We’ve heard some things,” Rosie said.
“You’re driving around with a complete monster,” Box said. “She hacks up people while they’re still alive. She likes it. That’s what I’ve heard. She cut Gar’s mother into little pieces with a power saw... and here she’s talking about the Bible. She’s nuts.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Annie said. “She shot her own partner to death. I can’t even imagine that.” She reached out and patted Rosie’s thigh.
“Thanks, sweetie,” Rosie said. “I agree that she’s kinda mean...”
“Kinda mean? For God’s sakes—” Box began.
Rosie interrupted: “If we get the money back, we’ll drop her off somewhere. She can go be a monster on somebody else’s bus.”
Kort came out of the bathroom and said to Box, who was sitting in the middle of the small couch, “Get off, I want to sit there.”
“Sit somewhere else,” Box said. “I have—”
Kort hit Box with the flat of her hand, nearly knocking her off the couch, and Annie was up between them screaming, “Hey, hey, hey...”
Kort said, “She’s a fuckin’ prisoner, not a guest, and I want to sit there.”
Box was covering her ear with one hand and looked up and said, “Youbetterkill me, ’cause if you don’t, I’m going to kill you.”
Kort opened her mouth to reply, but when she met the icy snake-eyed stare from Box, she shut her mouth: she’d seen the same look in Soto’s eyes.
Rosie said to Box, “You sit on one end, and, Charlene, you sit on the other, and knock this shit off. You’re acting like children. We got enough trouble without you two adding to it.”
The four women in the RV were south of Odessa when Poole called from Fort Stockton. He explained that he and Darling thought that Box’s phone might have been used to track them, that the phone was now riding in the back of an RV, and that they were headed for Presidio. After some back-and-forth, they agreed to meet in El Paso if Poole and Darling made it back across the border.
Later, the women were rolling down I-20 when they saw the clutter of police light bars at the junction with I-10. They had no troublemerging west on I-10, and looking back, could see a traffic jam. I-10 had been closed off just before the merger.
“Gar was right,” Box said. “They were tracking them with the phone. If they’d kept going, the cops would have them trapped.”
—
AT THAT MOMENT,Poole and Darling could see the first signs of Marfa, as a scrum of white dots on the horizon.
“Town’s about the size of your dick,” Poole said.
“That big? I thought you said it was nothing.”
“Nothing we need to stop for, anyway,” Poole said. “Couple more hours, and we’re home free.”
