God Is a Bullet (36 page)

Bob grabs Lena. “Hold on. Case … Let’s cuff this fuckin’ bitch up in here, split, and call the cops. Tell ’em what we have. I know people we can …”

Case presses her hand against Bob’s. “Bob, please …”

He feels her voice so filled with defeat that he lets Lena go. Case opens the door. Lena is trembling as she looks back
toward the lifeline of smack left behind. Case pushes her again, this time out the door.

“Case,” cries Lena.

Case shoves her again. Lena crumples a bit. Boots haunting steps on gravel. Case shoves her past the truck and into the moonlight of the courtyard.

“Case …”

Case turns. Lena is left fumbling for a few pathetic moments to try to buy something back of her life.

Bob watches from the doorway. Lena runs back to Case. Takes her by the arm. They speak a few moments. The dark outline of the overhanging balcony makes it impossible for him to see their faces. When they’re done, Case nods.

She walks back into the room. Looks at Lena one last time and closes the door.

“Well?”

“Nothing.”

“What did she say? I saw you nodding at something.”

Case slumps down on the bed. “Nothing that could help us now.”

Arthur sits on the couch for hours staring at John Lee’s body. He watches the tiny tricklets of blood fall in slow order on the wood flooring around the bar.

Maureen sits on the bathroom floor in the dark by the toilet. Her spirit has collapsed under the long charge of adrenaline. Her gun hand rests on the side of the porcelain bowl. Its coolness soothes her. She is covered with the dark brandy of John Lee’s blood. She wants the robe off, the blood away. But it is too much to even move.

Emerging through the dark is Arthur. He slides down beside her.

“I don’t think anyone heard the shot.”

“I guess by now they’d have …”

“But you can never know.”

“Would they believe it was …”

“With all that shit behind us?”

“Oh God, Arthur.”

She looks away from him and to the spots of blood up and across her hand, then out and along her arm. Marks that trace the blastline from where she held the gun against his flesh and fired.

“You need to know something,” Arthur says.

She is too weak to respond.

“It wasn’t Cyrus who fuckin’ killed that old lady in the desert. He’d shot her alright. ’Cause she wouldn’t sell her property to us. John Lee had extorted the kid, even promised him a cut. He was a junkie, see, and John Lee fed him with smack from busts, but he went ballistic when she said no.

“We went into the trailer.” His voice wheezes. “She was alive. Barely. John Lee—he put the finishing touches to her. Made it look like … seem like a cult …” He chokes on the word.

Maureen does not look at him. She does not want to know how much is a lie. She doesn’t care. She knows the truth is soundly somewhere between what he has said and what really was slammed home with a bullet.

“What do we do?” she asks.

“We try to survive.”

They wrap the body in a tarp. A shroud stained with lavender from when Maureen sponge-painted a kitchen wall. They carry John Lee through the darkened house. Past windows where the neighbors’ houses twinkle in small framed
presses of moonlight. Arthur at the chest, she at the legs. He walks backward with straddling steps toward the inside door of the garage. She follows hunched over like some miserably tired charwoman, breathing hard behind the train of a sagging corpse.

Bob and Case sit at a table in the motel room. They fill small plastic bags with sugar and flour. They bind them up in gray tape. The table is stacked with the gray bricks, two overnight bags’ worth. The price of a score, or a takedown.

“Gettin’ in will be easy,” says Case. “They’ll frisk us pretty hard. Of course, when Errol sees it’s us he may pop a load. Gettin’ fuckin’ gun-crazy aggro on us. Or he might be cool. But either way, gettin’ out with money after they see this shit will be no friggin’ snack. Especially if we ain’t packin’.”

Bob sits there with his elbow resting on the table and the thumb of his upturned arm pressing against his teeth.

“They’ll chill after they frisk us,” she says. “But then what? I could slide my knife up my cunt but I’d have a fuck of a time gettin’ it out.”

Bob is staring hypnotically at the dead space on the table between them.

“I was makin’ some black fuckin’ humor here,” she says.

His eyes deeply creased, he looks up without acknowledging what she said. “He’s got ex-cops working for him, right?”

“Yeah,” she says. “He did, anyway.”

“Cops have a system for frisking. Systems have weaknesses. We have to create for that weakness.”

• • •

The moon is already halfway around the dark seam of the night when they climb into the balmy foothills just southwest of Rancho Mirage. A long spindly road past the rare gated estate.

On the seat between them is the smaller of the two cases with their phony kilos. This one is shaped like a duffel with curved handles. Its bottom is made of a hard Masonite-like board. It sits on four silver nubs, and what Bob discovered was that there is just enough of a channelway along the underbelly to tape Case’s semiautomatic to it and let the duffel still sit flat.

He double-checks the tape and the gun.

Case lets go of the steering wheel with one arm, shakes out the tension. “From here on up, there’s no more houses,” she says.

They start the last half-mile climb. Their headlights flooding the wild brush. At each rocky turnout a great sprinkling of lights crosses the desert floor. Jeweled buoys on a be-darkened sea.

“Pull over,” he says.

She slows and sides the road in a soft gravelly whoosh.

He sits looking back.

“Are you alright?”

“He’s made us his whores, hasn’t he?”

“I don’t get what you mean.”

“What we’re doing? We’re the catch dogs tonight.”

She sits back. Folds her arms across the chest of her buckskin coat. Her violet eye shadow gives her the sleek dark look of a hawk on the come.

“I was looking back down there and flashed on the house on Via Princessa. It was up on a hill like this. But not so high. Gabi would watch the road at night. I’d drive by. Pull over. Run my flashers. That was my good night to her.”

He leans his head forward. Rests it on the dashboard. “You got nothin’ to say, huh?”

“Sure. You know what I think?” she says. “Somebody throws you a lifeline and you toss it away ’cause you don’t like the color of the rope. I don’t think what we’re doing is anything more than—as Cyrus calls it—crowd control.”

The house is concrete and glass. A fragile container designed as stark low contemporary. With long sliding-glass-door views of Coachella Valley.

They pull up. Shut off the headlights. In a picture window, Case spots the two well-lubed drumheads from the bar.

She takes the heavier satchel from the bed of the pickup. Bob takes the duffel with the gun taped underneath. This high up, the wind blows pretty hard and everything crackles.

As they start along the pestled walkway they can see the drumheads cross the living room toward the door.

The chrome-fronted door is behind a gated open-air portico. Case presses the buzzer. The gate automatically opens. She and Bob glance at each other.

“Time to get swallowed,” she whispers.

They enter and the gate glides shut behind them. They stand in the locked-off alcove of ten-foot-high walls. A half-moon cup of cement where two pink floodlights flank the door and give the man-made stone its showroom look.

They wait. The dry air, the silence, their raggle-tag selves. And all in that pink designer light.

From behind them a polite voice requests, “Put the bags down, please. And put your hands up.”

Bob and Case turn to find they’re staring at the thoughtful presence of a .41-caliber Blackhawk.

They do as they are told. The drumhead at the gate calls to his partner. The door opens and he makes a gentlemanly approach behind the tight grip of his side arm.

The frisking begins. The two drumheads work clean and
fast. They even find Case’s knife hidden down in the arch of her boot. One accidentally kicks the duffel bag and it grates along the walkway. Neither Bob nor Case even glances at the bag for fear of giving themselves away.

Then the drumheads go about the business of opening the bag and the duffel to make sure there are no little surprises. It all goes down clean and easy. They close the bag and duffel back up.

Case and Bob are made to wait at gunpoint while the one at the front door disappears inside the cool white-tiled foyer and calls to Errol. He comes back and with a mute crook of a finger ushers them in. Bob and Case turn and reach for their respective bags. The drumhead behind them has already got his hand on Case’s bag, but he’s a second late for the duffel.

“Let it go,” says the drumhead.

Bob does not let go.

“You haven’t paid for it yet, Slick,” says Case.

He starts to back them off with his pistol. “How ‘bout I pay for it right now?”

“Forget it, Case,” warns Bob.

She looks over at him. His jaw tightens all the way down to his throatskin. “It’s okay.”

He slips a look downward. Her eyes follow. He passes the duffel to the drumhead. She watches his foreplay as he gives the bag a half turn so the gun taped underneath, which was at the rear end, is now at the front and, possibly, still within reach.

The drumhead at the doorway orders them in. Case starts their little march by cutting off any view he might have of the bag. Then, with one drumhead in front and the other swagging up the rear, they begin their procession Indian file into the house.

They clear the foyer, pass down an entranceway of mauve wallpaper with original Indian headdresses. Pass a black-rock waterfall from floor to ceiling with colored spots of
subtle lighting. Pass into a sunken living room of gray leather and Indian objets d’art.

The whole walk Bob is making sure he is not an arm’s length away from the gun. The whole while Case is watching, looking for something within reach to grab and use as a weapon. The whole while they’re both waiting for the moment when they got to make a show of it before any chance is completely gone.

Case looks back at Bob. There ain’t no mystery nor sentiment there.

The moment it may be completely out of reach comes on down and dirty as Errol rises from the soft gray comfort of his couch, turns, and sees it’s Case and Bob.

It’s a blowout. Bad news squared by ten. Errol is humping up those red clay steps from the living room with his bathrobe flowing outward, exposing long tanned muscled legs, yelling he’ll kill them both. Then thanks to fuckin’ God, thinks Bob, Errol slips.

In that perfectly human moment when the drumhead in front reaches out to keep his meal ticket from doing a nosedive into the fancy Italian tile, Bob jumps back and grabs the duffel. The other drumhead, in a moment of self-defense, lifts up the duffel and pushes it out to try to slow the charge. Bob’s hands scramble across the bottom of the bag, his fingers like the manic legs of a millipede looking for the trigger.

He scores it.

Fires.

The shot blows through the man’s pelvis and pings a tiny hole of dust into the far wall, with just a touch of blood. The duffel comes loose from his grasp and Bob wields it around, one hand on the gun, the other on the curved handle.

Case hears him yell, “Get out of the way!”

She slamdives to the floor.

The other drumhead is just looking up when a shot sends him toppling back, one arm waggling, one leg pitcher stiff,
a head jerked weirdly down into the chin. He falls, his spine hitting flush on the couch, his skull on the coffee table. The glass shatters into shark-teeth fragments.

Bob comes around, tearing the gun loose from the duffel’s underbelly. The guard behind him is lying on the floor, motionless.

Errol is splayed out on the tile, his robe spread open. He is exposed. Case stands, moves back. Errol does not move at all.

“Alright, alright.” Errol shivers. “Alright.” His hand starts pressing at the air. “Alright, take the money.” His back sinking as if he can avoid the bullet that will come. “Take the money, take it …”

“Cross him over,” says Case.

Bob looks at her with bald shock.

“Snuff him,” she screams.

Errol pleads for his life. Bob steps forward and raises his gun. Errol, without realizing it, begins to urinate.

For a moment Bob stares at the puddle spreading out across the tiles and through the silky damask of the robe.

There is a puzzle at work and the pieces are being taken away one at a time until the empty slot, the implacable void, is forever in play.

The thin paper of color is coming back to the sky. Restless light. Case and Bob set out to the north. Driving hard with satchels of money against time. With the past to the east, the future to the west. With the radio spewing news as they wait for reports of the murder.

Through the reaches of a Christian Mojave are billboards framed in fieldstone built by born-agains that spread Bible wisdoms, black on white, against the pink of a coming sun:
WITH KNOWLEDGE COMES PAIN … ACT AS IF YOU HAD FAITH AND FAITH WILL BE GIVEN TO YOU … HUMBLE YOURSELF AND I WILL HEAL THE LAND
.

These pass along the highway. Still and sure and stately. Yet there is only one truth, and they, Case and Bob, are heading toward it. Like Ahab, like Lincoln, with a fierce bigotry of purpose.

She is watching the road in silence. Intent on the haunting pockets of blue that border the as yet empty highway.

“What are you thinking?” he asks.

Without turning to him, and laboring through her words, she says, “I’m thinking about Gabi. I’m thinking about me. What she’s been through. What I’ve been through. I’m thinking about you. From where you’ve come to have all that sorrow. And what you’ll be. I’m thinking about the hole in the center of my heart, which is the hole at the center of my universe, the universe, all our universes. I’m thinking about
Lena and Errol and … I’m thinking about him. And all those veins lost through all those years. And I’m thinking about those two sisters—meaning and madness. Coming out of the night sky like I seen in a painting. Those two sisters. Chasing some asshole rube down the road in his red robe.”