HE CRAWLED BACKto the pickup with the plates, put them in the cab, pulled his hat down, walked to the lobby, paid his parking fee, and drove out of the garage to the boulevard and headed north. When he’d left Las Vegas behind, he reached into the backseat and pulled the money bag up to the passenger seat. He reached inside the bag, pulled out a banded stack of bills.
It was a half inch thick, all hundreds. He riffled the stack with his thumb, put it back in the bag, and attempted to tally the number of stacks in his head while driving. He knew the number he came up with wasn’t entirely accurate, but when he realized he was well past a hundred he was happy. He had the money, he was loose.
He would have whistled a happy tune if he’d known one.
—
EARLIER THAT MORNING, after Deese and Cole had left for Vegas, Cox sat on the couch, watching Ralph Deese slopping his way through an oversized bowl of Raisin Bran.
“Supposed to be good for my heart. That’s what the lady at the store said,” Deese told her, a white rim of milk on his mustache. His nose was virtually in the bowl. “Problem is, it makes me fart. Which I guess you’re gonna have to live with. Unless you go outside, which I don’t recommend. Even the lizards don’t go out in this heat.”
Cox looked out the window, over which Deese had put some self-stick reflective film to cut the glare. Still, it looked like a scene from hell out there. Yellow, like the world was on fire. Cox was a beach girl and had spent much of her life looking at the Pacific Ocean, the biggest body of water on the planet. If she went out the door and spit, she thought, that’d be the wettest place within fifteen miles.
She and Ralph mostly communicated in grunts. When he’d finished with his Raisin Bran, they exchanged a few grunts, from which she understood that he was going up the hill to “take a dump,” as he put it.
“The toilet doesn’t work?”
“This ain’t no hotel,” Ralph said. “You wanna take a shit, you’ll find a trench up the hill in the shade of the bluff. There’s a shovel there, you throw dirt on the turds. Wanna pee? Do that anywhere out there. I usually pee off the porch.”
Now she grunted. “Whatever...” And he went out, carrying his shotgun. She’d already peed once, behind a bush, because there’d been no door on the toilet, no privacy. That wouldn’t have bothered Ralph.
A moment later, Gloria Harrelson called from the bedroom: “Help me!”
Cox sat there for a moment, undecided, then finally got up and walked in and took a look. Harrelson had initially been bound with wire to the bed, but the wires had cut into her leg, so wire had been replaced with chain they hadn’t used at the Harrelsons’ house. It had been looped around an ankle and a wrist and padlocked, holding the woman on her back. Deese had the keys.
Both the ankle and wrist were chafed and red with still-drying blood. Purplish dried blood from a bloodied lip covered her chin, and a cut on her cheekbone had trickled blood down into her ear. She had a black eye, the eyebrow crusty with yet more blood. And the room was infused with the smell of urine. Harrelson was naked, her clothes strewn on the floor. She’d managed to partly cover herself with a tattered cotton blanket.
She looked up at Cox and pleaded again, weakly, “Help me... Please help me...”
“I can’t,” Cox said. “They’d kill me.”
Harrelson bit at her lip and started to weep, and then said, “Give me some water? Please give me some water...”
“That I can do,” Cox said.
She went back to the refrigerator and got out a bottle of Dasani, carried it back to the bedroom, and handed it to Harrelson, who grabbed it with her free hand and drank the entire thing in a half dozen long gulps.
Cox waited until she was done, but when Harrelson said, “You’ve gotta...” Cox shook her head and walked away.
Harrelson continued calling out from the bedroom, but Cox dropped back on the couch and put her fingers in her ears until the calls stopped.
—
COX THEN SPENTa few moments contemplating her future. Not a promising one, she concluded. Cole and Deese both could place her at home invasions they had orchestrated, and those two, plus Gloria Harrelson and Ralph Deese, could testify that she was involved in a brutal kidnapping that had involved an even more brutal rape.
Cole, she thought, would take care of her as far as he could, but what would happen if they were all caught and the police offered to cut a deal with Cole for implicating her? There was a major difference between ten to fifteen years in prison and life, especially when you were Cole’s age, in your early thirties. After ten to fifteen behind bars, he’d still have a shot at a life when he got out.
Would they get caught? She closed her eyes and thought about it. Probably, she concluded. There were too many people chasing them and those people were smart and there were a lot of them. Deese, the cannibal, was a big deal for the cops. They might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later they’d be cornered. Especially if they stayed on the run with Deese.
Her mother had told her that she’d have to take care of herself, that nobody else would. And nobody had taken care of her mother, that was for sure. The woman was drinking herself to death while dating men who invariably beat her, an ugly race between liver failure and homicide.
She could go out and get in the car and take off, Cox thought. She had Beauchamps’s money, plus a few thousand dollars of herown, a little sack of gems, three Rolexes—a grand total of sixty or seventy thousand. Tempting.
But then there was Ralph with his shotgun. He was not likely to let her walk. She could probably work her way around that.
Eventually, she decided that running alone wasn’t the ticket. She needed Cole and his connections. With Cole, she could find a fence for the jewelry. And Cole knew how to disappear. She’d have to wait for them to get back.
When they came back, would Deese really share the money? Or would he try to kill them? That seemed as likely as not. The logic of the situation seemed to point only in one direction if she was going to get out alive.
