She ran her fingernails up through my hair. Then, as though conceding that her words would never be enough to argue against the rage and violence and thirst for alcohol that burned inside me, she exhaled and hit her fists on the mattress.
“Don’t be like that,” I said.
“Nothing I do helps. Nothing, nothing, nothing.” She pulled up her gown and spread her knees on my thighs, pressing my head into her breasts, her desperation and her own secret despair and need perhaps greater than mine. But if a momentary erotic impulse was driving her, she hid it well. She hit me again and again in the back, refusing to show me her face, her breath coming in angry gasps.
THE NEXT MORNING Candace Sweeney and Troyce Nix ate breakfast downtown, then returned to the motel and saw the red message light blinking on their telephone. Candace called the front desk. She wrote down a number and a name on a notepad and replaced the receiver in the cradle.
“Who was it?” Troyce asked.
“That cop, that guy Purcel,” she replied.
“He’s a PI, not a cop. Most PIs are guys who got thrown off the force, usually for drinking or ’cause they were on a pad.”
“What do you think he wants?”
“To do his job, whatever it is. Most of those guys are bums and liars, so nothing they say means anything anyway. Tear up his number.” Then his face brightened. “I cain’t get over that line you used on him. ‘Change your deodorant.’ You’re a beaut.”
“I want to leave, Troyce. To eighty-six this crap and go ahead with our plans. Just a few hours’ drive, and we can start a whole new life.”
“I know,
darlin’, but I cain’t have Jimmy Dale sneaking up on us when we’re in the Cascades, blindsiding us, maybe hurting you ’cause he cain’t get at me.”
“The cops or the FBI will catch up with him sooner or later.”
“Maybe they will. But ‘later’ ain’t much help when you’re dead.”
Troyce was combing his hair in the door mirror. The early-morning hours had been cold, and he had put on a long-sleeved gray shirt with white snap buttons, and his shoulders and arms looked huge inside the heavy fabric. He saw the disappointment in her face and stopped combing his hair.
“Jimmy Dale’s got an edge,” he said. “He ain’t a criminal. He’s committed crimes, but that don’t make him a criminal. He don’t think like and act like one. Cops don’t catch his kind. Maybe his kind catch themselves, but cops don’t do it. When you have trouble with a guy like Jimmy Dale, I’m talking about a breed with a resentment, you got to take him off at the neck, ’cause he’ll fix you if he has to spend the rest of his life doing it.”
“There’s something you never told me, Troyce.”
“What’s that?” he said, looking at his reflection again.
“If he’s not a criminal, why’d he cut you up? Why’s he hate you so much?”
“You got to ask that of a smarter man than me,” he replied. He turned away from her and brushed his teeth in the lavatory, although she was almost sure he had brushed them only a few minutes earlier.
Just after lunch, when Troyce went to buy a new battery for his cell phone, Candace punched in the number Clete Purcel had left with the front desk. “This is Candace Sweeney,” she said. “What do you want?”
“Where’s your boyfriend?” Clete asked.
“Troyce isn’t here.”
“When he is there, tell him to call me.”
“Why are you bothering us, fatso?”
“I think you’re insulting the wrong person. The last time I saw you, I prevented a peckerwood asswipe by the name of Quince Whitley from putting a bullet in you. You paid back the favor by telling the sheriff you didn’t see Whitley with a gun.”
“I told the sheriff the truth.”
“Glad to hear you’re keeping the standards up. In the meantime, I’m being looked at for a possible homicide beef. Tell Nix I got a message for him from Jamie Sue Wellstone. Also tell him I checked him out. He has a BCD from the army for his activities at Abu Ghraib. He seems not to have overcome his problems at that contract prison he worked at in Texas, either.”
“What message?” she said, her face burning. But she didn’t wait for Clete to reply. “You listen, you bucket of whale sperm, you couldn’t carry Troyce’s jockstrap.”
“I tell you what, here’s the message. Tell Mr. Nix he doesn’t need to call me back. Neither do you. Jamie Sue Wellstone says Jimmy Dale Greenwood thought your friend was going to take him out. Jimmy Dale tried to cap your friend first. Except he couldn’t go through with it. Why is that? you ask. Because as probably anyone with more than two brain cells could realize, Jimmy Dale Greenwood is not a killer. This is the message: Why don’t you leave the poor fuck alone? This is Clete Purcel signing off. You and your boyfriend have a great life, and please stay out of mine.”