talk and finally agreed that Deese would give them fifteen thousand each to be lookouts. While Deese and Cox were arguing about money, Cole turned on the television to see if they could get any news about the shooting. They couldn’t, and after a while they were watching Let’s Make a Deal, and Deese said, “Look at that guy. If I had to dress up like a fuckin’ cockroach to win a few bucks, I wouldn’t do it.”
“We could use the money,” Cox said. “You’d be doing us all a favor.”
“Not if I had to dress up like a fuckin’ cockroach,” Deese said. He pointed at the next contestant. “Look at this chick. What’s she supposed to be, a shrimp? She’d look better as the cockroach. I wouldn’t fuck her with your dick, Cole.”
After another half hour, during a talk show about the legalization of marijuana and the bad effects it was having on Vegas culture, Deese said, “I can’t stand this shit. I’m going down to the Circle K and get some beer and chips and salsa.”
“You’ll get us caught,” Cole said. “We agreed to stay inside.”
“I can’t sit here doing nothing. I need some beer. I got sunglasses and a beard and a hat, nobody will recognize me. I’ll be fifteen minutes.”
“No goddamn casinos,” Cole said. “They got facial recognition there. They can look right through your disguise. They look at the way you walk and the shape of your shoulders, and all that shit. I read about it.”
* * *
—
WHEN HE WAS GONE, Cox cracked the curtains at the front window and watched him rolling away. He’d taken the burner phone, but she had her own cold phone, and Cole agreed that nobody would have it.
“Let me see your arm,” she said.
“What are you going to do?”
“Listen and learn,” she said. She took her own phone out of her pocket and picked up Deese’s. Deese’s phone had no password protection and she brought up the last call made, and poked the number into her own phone.
* * *
—
LARRY BUCK answered, and Cox asked, “Is this the guy in New Orleans that the other guy called from Las Vegas?”
“Who is this?”
“This is the blonde who is with the other guy in Vegas.”
“One minute.”
Larry Buck covered his phone’s microphone, and Cox couldn’t hear what was being said. Then another voice: “This is the person the man in Las Vegas called.”
Cox asked, “Did you really send money?”
“Yes.”
“How bad do you want it back?” she asked.
“Depends on where else it might go,” Smith said.
“What if the man in Las Vegas fell down the stairs and broke his neck?”
“I could see that happening,” Smith said. “He’s a careless walker. Where is he now?”
“He’s out getting beer.”
“Well, if something happened to him . . . I wouldn’t get the money back anyway. So I wouldn’t care who got it.”
“If he somehow broke his neck . . . then this other guy who you sent here . . . why wouldn’t he keep it?” Cox asked.
“Because I’d tell him to give it to you, no questions asked.”
“Okay. We’ll think about this. Tell your friend to stay here in Vegas. I’ll need his phone number. If something happens to Dee—To, you know . . . We’ll set up the payment. But I’m telling you, he has told us all about you. One person will make the pickup, probably me. If anything happens to me, that other guy will come to New Orleans and kill you. Since you don’t know who we are, you’d never see it coming. We’ve done a lot of work in LA, and you probably know about that. We’re not afraid of hurting people.”
“Neither am I.”
“We totally believe that,” Cox said. “We’re scared of you. But you should be scared of us. The money smooths it all out. If the other guy—the guy you’re worried about—goes away, you should be happy with that.”
“Let me get you the phone number for the delivery.”
Cox wrote the number on the inside of her arm.
“Call me and tell me what happened,” Smith said. “It’s sort of like a soap opera, and I like soaps.”
“Yeah? We were just watching The Bold and the Beautiful,” Cox said.
“I caught that myself. We were probably watching at the same time,” Smith said. And, “Good-bye.”
When Cox hung up, Cole looked at her, chewing his lower lip, and when she asked, “What?” he said, “You know you’re talking about murder.”
“Not necessarily.”
“That’s what the New Orleans guy thought you meant,” Cole said.