and then Cole, and then Gloria Harrelson, and probably Ralph as well. Harrelson was driving her crazy. The goddamn woman shouldn’t fight it, she should go with it. Screaming didn’t help. Not with the Deeses.
Fuck it, she thought. The Deeses didn’t give a shit about anybody—not Cole, not her, probably not each other.
She reached beneath the couch cushion where she’d been sitting and pulled out Marion Beauchamps’s 9mm. The gun was loaded and cocked, and all she had to do was click the safety off and pull the trigger.
She clicked the safety off, tiptoed down the length of the Airsteam to just outside the bedroom door, where she could hear Harrelson’s sobs as Ralph’s flab slapped against Harrelson’s flat stomach. Then Ralph grunted, which, in Cox’s experience, meant that he was done. He’d lie on her a minute, resting. Then, if Cox knew men, he’d get up and look for his pants, unless he decided to bring his stupid cock out to show Cox.
Which is what he did.
* * *
—
COX WAS STANDING outside the bedroom door when Ralph stood up, turned from the bed, and saw Cox standing there. He grinned at her, the Deese family’s yellow teeth on full display, and said, “Hey there, you want some of this?”
Cox said, “I thought I’d give you some of this instead.”
She brought the gun around and shot Deese in the chest. The gun bucked hard against her hand and she almost dropped it. The muzzle blast was deafening, and she put her free hand up to an ear, which was ringing like an old-fashioned telephone. Deese took a wide-eyed step backwards, then toppled onto the bed, pinning Gloria Harrelson’s body beneath his suddenly dead bulk.
Harrelson cried, “Oh, thank God, thank God.”
Not quite, Cox thought, grimly.
She stepped over to the door, where Ralph had propped up his shotgun in the corner. When she pushed the safety, a little knob to one side of the trigger, it popped out on the other with a red ring around it. That meant it was ready to fire, she figured.
She stepped back to the bed and said, “I’m sorry,” and moved the muzzle of the gun to within an inch of Harrelson’s heart and pulled the trigger. It clicked, but nothing happened.
“What are you doing?” Harrelson shrieked. She shrank away, as far as she could with the chains. “What are you doing? What are you . . .”
Cox thought, Shit, and pulled hard on the shotgun’s forestock, popped an empty shell out of the chamber and new one in. She again aimed the gun at Harrelson’s heart, as the woman tried to push away from her, and this time when Cox pulled the trigger the shotgun bucked, the blast deafened her, and Harrelson died, a bloody red hole in her chest.
Cox rubbed her face and thought, Done.
Now, in this entire world, there were only two men left who knew what had happened on this long, horrid trip: Deese and Cole.
* * *
—
SHE REMEMBERED from somewhere—a movie, she thought—that the cops did tests on people’s hands and arms to see if they’d fired a gun. That could be a problem. She managed to prop open the small bedroom window, get the shotgun muzzle an inch or two outside, with Ralph Deese’s dead hand wrapped around the stock of the weapon, his face near it. She pulled the trigger with his dead finger and left the gun on the floor next to his body.
Now what? Her mind felt cold—or cool anyway. If she had been kidnapped and mistreated, if the gang hadn’t allowed her to leave . . .
Harrelson had been chained to the bed, but there were several feet left over. Cox crossed the bedroom, not worrying too much about the blood spattering the floor and walls, and got a length of the chain and wrapped it around her waist, then yanked it back and forth to bruise herself. She didn’t want fresh blood, just bruises, and a lot of them, from below her breasts to her hips.
The process hurt, but she kept it up, until the whole area between her breasts and hips were crossed with bruises and vividly reddened flesh. When she was satisfied, she put the chain down, went to the kitchen area, found a plastic bag, filled it with ice from the refrigerator, and wrapped that around her waist.
Done right and given time, she thought, the bruises would look old.