“You son of a bitch,” I said to the elder. I put the .380 in his face and cocked it.
He said, “Oh, God”—and then the door banged open and I whirled and came within a hair of shooting Belle.
She held the six-inch straight out in front of her with both hands and her aspect was all readiness in spite of her bulging cheek.
“Okay?” she said in a muffled voice. The oil guy was still hollering on the floor, rolling from side to side and clutching his bloody shoulder.
“Yeah,” I said. I reached over the counter and took the shotgun from the elder. “Let’s go!”
I ran out behind her. She’d left the passenger door open and she dove in and slid up behind the wheel as smoothly as if she’d been doing it all her life. I tossed in the shotgun and was only partway in the car when it leaped forward and I almost fell out but caught hold of the doorjamb and pulled myself inside.
“Holy shit, girl!”
She made a tight left turn in the lot, slinging my door wide open as she wheeled us onto the highway, then floored the accelerator and the door swung back and slammed shut and we barreled off into the darkness.
Twenty minutes later we were on some truck road deep in a forest of derricks illuminated by field lights and flaring gas heads. She pulled over to the shoulder and stopped. The road lay empty in both directions, and there was no sign of anyone at any of the nearest derricks. There was only the steady pounding of the drills and the hiss of the flaring blue gas heads. I pitched the shotgun into a scrub patch.
Neither of us had said a word since tearing away from the store, and I thought maybe she was going to be sick. The roadster’s cab was dimly lit by the field lights and she was turned toward me, but I couldn’t see her face in the shadow of her hat brim. I hadn’t been aware of how much my hands were shaking until I lit a cigarette. I passed it to her and she spat her gum out the window and took a couple of deep drags and handed the cigarette back and I took one more pull and flicked it away. She took off her hat and let her hair fall to her nape and I saw the glitter of her eyes. She pressed against me and kissed me like she was trying to breathe me into herself. Then her hands were at my belt buckle and I raised my hips so she could tug my pants down to my thighs. She pulled up her skirt and straddled me on the seat, tugged aside the hem of her panties and mounted me. I bucked and bucked into her and we were kissing each other’s mouth and eyes and ears and I squeezed her breasts and she bit my neck and then both of us yelled and clutched each other harder….
When we got back on a main road I pulled into a diner parking lot and made fast work of swapping the roadster’s plates with those on a Plymouth. We then sped on to Rankin and checked into the Dustdevil Motor Inn. Not until after I’d counted the take—$650, a tidy sum for a grocery heist—did I discover the pellet holes in the crown of my hat.
I sat on the bed and wiggled a couple of fingers through the holes.
“Look here how close I came to getting my stupid head blown off,” I said.
She came and stood beside me, wearing only a towel around her hips after her showerbath. Her hair was still wet and her skin gleamed. She put her fingers in the holes.
“I felt it,” I said. “I didn’t realize what it was.”
“Feel this,” she said, and held my hand to her breast. Her heart was racing.
“It ain’t slowed down even a little,” she said. Nor had the brightness in her eyes reduced.
She let the towel slide from her hips.
We had more than enough now to cover our Fort Stockton expenses for a good while, but she thought we deserved to treat ourselves to a good time in some town of greater size than Fort Stockton.
“You know what I mean,” she said. “Someplace with a real nice dance club. I’ve always wanted to go to a fancy dance club. And with a nice dress shop where I can buy myself something fine and pretty to wear there.”
Midland was fifty miles up the road, but we weren’t about to visit there in a car I’d stolen from that town barely more than two weeks earlier. So we headed east, puttering along with the top down under a sky less hazy than usual, and three hours later we were in San Angelo.
Under the names of Mr. and Mrs. Mitch Russell we checked into the brandnew Riverside Hotel, which a streetcorner cop had advised us was the best in town. I asked the bellboy if there was someplace nearby where a man might get a bottle of labeled spirits, and he said, “Name your preference, pal.” I said bourbon would be vastly appreciated, and a couple of limes if he could manage it. Twenty minutes later he was back with a paper-sacked fifth of bourbon and a roller tray holding a bucket of ice, the limes, two seltzer bottles and two tumblers. I gave him a lavish tip.
Belle loved everything about the hotel. She said she’d never been in any place so fine. She went around the room, touching the flowers in the dresser vase, the furniture, the bedcovers, the towels and soaps and shampoos in the bath, as if making sure everything was real. I said if she thought this place was fancy she ought to see the hotels in New Orleans.
“Will you show me New Orleans one of these days?” she said.
“Sure,” I said. “I think you’d like it.”
She came into my arms and tucked her head under my chin. “I think I’d love it,” she said.
We went out and found a dress shop, but each dress she tried on she liked better than the one before, and after nearly two hours she still couldn’t decide between three of them. She and the salesgirl kept blabbing on and on about yokes and bratelles and peplums, hems and flounces and God-knows-what. I settled the matter by buying all three dresses for her. She gave me a kiss full on the mouth and smiled at the salesgirl and said, “Aren’t I the lucky one?”
The girl was goodlooking, with a deep Texas accent and thick honey hair, and she grinned and said, “He’s a regular sugar daddy, only lots younger and better-looking than most, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
Belle winked at her and said she didn’t mind at all. I would’ve been lying if I’d said I wasn’t enjoying myself.
From there we went to a Mexican restaurant for a lunch of guacamole and strips of roast kid in a red chile sauce, with flour tortillas so freshly hot they powdered and almost burned our fingers. Across the street was a lush green park with the Conchos River running through it, and when we were done eating we went for a long walk in the shade of the cottonwoods along the bank. Then back to the hotel and I fixed us each a glass of bourbon and Coke full of crushed ice and a touch of lime juice, something I’d learned from Russell. She took a careful sip and grinned and said she loved it. We filled the tub with bubble lotion and got in it together and sipped the drinks slowly. After a long soak we soaped each other up and then rinsed off and dried each other with thick towels and went to bed and made love and then napped until dark.
We took supper in a good steakhouse across the street—filets as thick as my wrist and heaped with finely sliced fried onion rings—then went back to the hotel and descended the wide staircase to the ballroom. Belle was wearing one of her new dresses, a little black number that hugged her hips and had a short fringed hem and a sort of halter top cut way low in the back. She was a knockout.
The dancefloor was crowded this Friday night and the big band up on the stand was damned good, finishing up an excellent rendition of “Stardust.” Then it started in on “Am I Blue?” and we took to the floor.
We’d just finished kicking up our heels to “Baby Face” and were applauding along with the other dancers when the brass section swung into the opening bars of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love.”