Then, while the miles
spun under them, he kept silent, nursing his pain. Once, glancing up, he saw her sharp profile against running sky-line, green trees, bright gas stations. Her lips were full to stubbornness, and hard like the even teeth backing them up. The eyes were the startling part, like feral things plucked from a lusting cat animal and caught in her shocking white face. They didn’t belong. Not with all that flame on her head falling in loose, whipping fingers of color to her shoulders, tucked behind almost man-like ears.
After about five minutes she said, “We’ve lost them.” She held the speed high, through hot desert. “How much money?”
He counted it. “Seven hundred.”
“Chicken feed.” He saw her trim ankle muscles tauten, pressing out more mileage. Slowly, he touched the curve of her leg with his blue eyes, coming up along her brown woolen skirt to the small breasts and the open neck of her white blouse where the cords of her throat went stiffly, yet beautifully up.
“Stop the car,” he said, quietly.
She ignored him.
“Who in hell are you!” he demanded, hotly, “running me around! This was my job!”
“It’s ours, now.” She gave him her brief, metallic glance. “You’re no killer. I know. It’s not in your face. Your eyes are open too wide for killing.”
“Stop the car.”
Parked, she looked straight ahead. “I’m cutting myself in,” she said to the road. “I been outside a little while, but I’m coming back in.”
He twisted her from the wheel.
“You’re damn well in.”
He kissed her so it hurt them both. The world went away. A siren, if it had whined, would not have been heard, or a gun shooting. Only her cynically stubborn lips existed, moving under his.
She pulled back, eyes angry and yet—puzzled—a moment.
“Don’t do that again,” she let him know, evenly. She made the wheels roar again. “I’m the one who does that! Remember from now on, you!”
It was his turn to be puzzled. “Okay, okay,” he said.
Desert wind came in the windows, searing, burning them.
She parked the car for the night on a little dirt road equipped with stars, a moon, and ranch lights hanging on the foothills.
She slid from the car, shoes rustling in dry thatches of bramble.
He said, “Why’d you climb in my car today?”
She had her answer ready.
“You were headed for the morgue. I put you on a detour. You need training. The way you walk, talk, hold a gun. You looked like a kid waiting for a ticket in front of a dime movie, today.”
“Yeah—”
“Let me finish. Remember Ricky Wolfe?”
“God, yes.”
“I was with him,” she said, “for five years.”
The name of Ricky Wolfe was like a hammer striking. Ricky Wolfe, the big-time, all-around gangman. A guy nobody proved nothing on, with a capacity for gin and blood that was legendary.
She stood there and told him about it. “Six weeks ago they killed him. In Iowa. Threw his body in the river. Only way you could tell it was him, was his wallet. They never had a print of his fingers.” She breathed deeply. “So I came west again, here to California, covered up awhile working as a waitress—”
“Then I came along.”