at his watch. “You’ve been in here for fifteen minutes.” To Lucas: “Time to go. Get lucky.”
“Take it from me: luck won’t have anything to do with this,” Harrelson said.
Lucas pulled down the golf hat low and headed for the door.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
The last two miles of the trip north had been over dirt roads, out into the desert, the Lexus occasionally dragging bottom. The last leg took them up a steep rocky track until the headlights caught a silvery reflection below a south-facing bluff.
Cox: “This is it?”
From the backseat, Deese said, “Yeah, this is it. You think anybody’s gonna find us out here?”
“I don’t even know where I am myself,” Cole said.
They were looking at an old Airstream trailer, sitting up on concrete blocks. It looked like it’d been rolled and somebody had tried to fix it with a bumping hammer. There were lights at both ends of the trailer, but nothing moved until they popped the doors on the Lexus, and a corroded man’s voice said, “Hold it right there, motherfuckers, or you gonna die.”
A man wobbled around the end of the Airstream, carrying a pump shotgun. He might have been anything between forty and sixty, heavily bearded, and wore denim overalls over a T-shirt. A hole was ripped through one knee, like Cox had seen everywhere in West Hollywood, but this hole had nothing to do with fashion. “What do you want?”
“Place to bag out,” Deese said. “One night.” To the others he said, “Ralph’s a miner.”
“Whyn’t you go to a motel?” Ralph asked.
“Had trouble with the cops.”
“I hope to hell you didn’t go leadin’ ’em up here,” Ralph said.
“No, no, we’re clean,” Deese said.
“Well, shit. You might as well come in and tell me about it.”
* * *
—
DEESE HAD a heavy hold on one of Gloria Harrelson’s arms and he dragged her toward the Airstream and she started weeping again, and Ralph asked, “What’s wrong with her?”
“We had some trouble with a guy who owes us money. Lots of money. This is his wife. We took her as security.”
“How much money?”
“Two million,” Deese said.
“Holy shit,” Ralph said. “You’re gonna throw me a piece of that? Rent?”
“Yeah, yeah, we’ll take care of you,” Deese said.
They trailed behind him to the Airstream. The trailer seemed solid enough, when they climbed the steps. Cox could hear a chugging sound from outside, and when she asked Ralph told her that it was the diesel generator on the other side of the hill.
The inside of the Airstream was like the inside of a pill capsule—much of the original finishes had been ripped out, except a café-type table with couch-like seats on either side. A bed was visible in a room at the far end of the capsule, with an added real-house-type door for privacy. “I don’t got much to eat except frozen pizzas and some canned Boy-are-dee,” Ralph said.
“We’re okay,” Cole said.
“Exactly what kind of trouble you in?” Ralph asked Deese.
“Hard to explain,” Deese said.
“Deese ate some people back in Louisiana,” Cox said. “And tonight he killed a man.”
She was obviously serious, and Ralph laughed. “If somebody asked me, that’s what I would’ve guessed. How’d them people taste?”
“Okay,” Deese mumbled.
“You barbecue them?”
“Man . . .” Deese said.
“Love me some barbecue, like your daddy used to make,” Ralph said. “How’d you ever come to do that anyway?”
Deese, now exasperated, said, “Look. Remember when we’d all go deer hunting and haul them carcasses out of the woods? All that meat? I’d hauled some of these deadasses back to my place to bury them and carry them back there, behind the house, but it was just . . . meat. I got to thinking about it. And so one day . . .”
Cox: “Yuck! That’s disgusting. That’s probably why you smell.”
“What?”
“Let it go,” Cole said. “What are we doing?”
Deese shook his head and turned back to Ralph. “I want a place to sleep for a while and then we’ll get out of here. You still got that old green motorcycle?”
Cox said, “He shot a whole bunch of people in a mall down in Las Vegas. Then he kidnapped Gloria here.”
“Jesus Christ, Clay, you leave anything out?” Ralph asked.
“Hey . . .”
Ralph glanced at Cox with a teasing grin on his face. “Is there a reward for him?”
“Not as far as I know,” she said, still serious. “He was being chased by the FBI and the U.S. Marshals, and then the Los Angeles cops, and now the Vegas