with the self-parking option. He drove into the garage, cruised along for a few minute looking for a specific car. He found it and parked in the first empty space closest to it, which was three down.
There was nobody around and he just sat there for a couple of minutes more, then got the screwdriver he’d brought with him, crawled from his car to the next one over and unscrewed its front license plate, which was from California, then crawled along to the next car with California plates and unscrewed its front plate. He then crawled to the car he’d spotted when he drove in, which also had California plates, replaced first the front plate and then, nervously, because he was more visible, the back.
He’d heard on the burglar/car theft hotline that nobody really knew what their license plate number was; people hardly ever looked unless there was something radically different, like a Kansas plate replacing one from Nevada. Stealing the plates from a Lexus and replacing them with other California plates, the owner probably wouldn’t notice.
And stealing the front plates from cars that were parked nose in, the owners likely wouldn’t know they were gone until they’d parked elsewhere, maybe not until they’d driven several other places. They wouldn’t know when or where the plates were taken and not be looking for them at the Wynn.
He’d put the stolen plates on the Harrelsons’ Lexus. A routine check by the Highway Patrol would show that the plates on the dark gray Lexus were current. Ralph’s crappy old pickup wasn’t going to get him to Miami, but the Harrelsons’ Lexus would—in comfort.
* * *
—
HE CRAWLED BACK to 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