“You get in back.”
“Huh? That seat’s built for little kids and dogs. Midgets.”
“Sit sideways,” he said. “Or would you rather I left you here to starve?”
Billie Jean’s eyes shifted toward Terry and back. “You cooked up something with her?”
He opened the little door. “Get in.”
“There’s something you two know that I don’t know.”
“Yeah,” he said. “We’re going after the money. You want some of it, don’t you?”
“You mean going after Floyd?” she said, incredulous.
“Why not?” He tried to sound casual. “Half a million bucks, Billie Jean. Some of it’s ours.”
“What about her?”
“She’s going with us. She can’t talk to anybody if she’s with us.”
“Why not leave her here?” Billie Jean said with quiet cunning. “Nobody for her to talk to here.” Her eyelids fluttered and she rolled her body humidly toward him with an invitation that had all the subtlety of an elephant’s mating trumpet.
He said, “I won’t argue with you. Get in or stay here, it’s all the same to me. More money for me if you don’t come along to split with.” With cavalier indifference he nodded gravely to Terry, watched her get into the right-hand bucket seat and went around the car to climb into the driver’s seat. He slammed the door, gunned the engine and shifted into gear.
With a disgusted grunt Billie Jean climbed over the back and plumped herself down sideways with her knees up near her chin. She was still squirming to get comfortable when Mitch winked at Terry and shot the clutch. The little car bolted forward; Billie Jean shouted, “Hey!”
He left town fast on the dirt road, trailing a swirling funnel of pale dust. He kept his right hand on the knob of the floor stick-shift and became aware that Terry’s hand was timidly creeping toward his. He had not been able to figure her out; his feelings about her were contradictory but he was no longer able to ignore the way she was constantly in his mind, raging like a fever. He glanced at her and saw that she was watching him, her hair blowing wildly in the wind.
He felt better on the move. The wind roared around the speeding open car; he had its power in his hands, he felt more in control of things. It was the first time in days when he had enjoyed any sense of self-confidence at all. Fleetingly he even entertained the heady thought that perhaps he could best Floyd Rymer after all. He would have to figure out the way to do it.
They reached the paved county road and turned west toward the Nogales highway. So far they hadn’t seen another car. The posted speed limit was sixty; at seventy the state police would give chase — if they detected the speeding car, and if they were in a mood for it; Mitch, with his attention whipping frequently to the rear-view mirror, was doing eighty-five. At that speed the little car bounced hard on its spartan springs; the wind flailed his face and he had to concentrate on keeping the car on the road, alert for chuck-holes and loose drifts of sand. Terry’s warm palm rested on the back of his hand; she sat at ease, not worried by his driving, and her confidence in him gave him lift. In the mirror he could see Billie Jean press her palms to her temples to keep her hair from lashing her face; her eyes were shut against the wind and she was smiling with her mouth open in sensual enjoyment. He wondered what was going on inside her head; he knew very little about Billie Jean, really — partly because he knew very little about the facts of her background, but mainly because it was impossible to make assumptions about her. She was, perhaps, as simple as she seemed — but her simplicity was shaped by a different pattern from the ones he was accustomed to. He had never known anyone as freely immoral, as innocent of conscience: she was capable of extreme brutality but somehow it was utterly without malice. In that respect she was eerily like Floyd. Neither of them would have any compunctions at all about killing a fly — or a man — but at the same time neither of them would trouble to commit the necessary violence unless the fly, or the man, happened to be annoying them; and even when they did commit violence they would do it with an almost apathetic insouciance, uncolored by even the faintest shading of animus or relish or anxiety. Back there this morning Billie Jean had been perfectly willing to kill Terry — had tried to, on the porch — but only because she had felt there was a practical reason for it: she had, or at least she displayed, no personal feelings whatever toward Terry as a human being.
When they approached the main-traveled road he eased the speed to sixty-five. Cars began to appear — station wagons and dusty Cadillacs and rattletrap pickup trucks. He averted his face as they passed. He took the left turn into the wide highway, enjoyed the way the little car cornered, and was taken by surprise — because he wasn’t used to small-car driving — when an onrushing Greyhound bus went by in the opposite direction and rocked the sports car in its wake of hissing wind.
Approaching Nogales he obeyed the speed-limit signs, which brought him down to fifty, then thirty-five; driving the high hillside bend with rocks above on the right and the Santa Cruz river below on his left, he said to Terry, “Have you got any money in your bag?”
“I did. Unless somebody went through it while we were back there.”
He was hoping nobody had. She pawed through her handbag, took out a red leather purse-wallet and snapped it open. “It’s still here. What do you know.”
“How much?”
“More than you might think,” she said with a small grin. “My daddy got me in the habit of carrying a lot of cash. Just in case of emergency, he always says — or in case you see something you want to buy and they don’t take credit cards.”
He swung right into a side street that angled between gas stations and warehouses. “How much?”
She was counting, frowning, moving her lips. He glimpsed the edges of twenty-dollar bills. She gave a nervous little laugh and said, “I almost hate to admit it. Almost three hundred dollars.”
“Don’t apologize,” he said grimly.
He bought a $235 Ford from a used-car lot and drove it back to the quiet street where they had parked the little red car. He took everything out of the trunk and packed it away in the Ford. Terry helped him put up the canvas top of the sports car; they couldn’t lock it because they didn’t have a key. There were no No-Parking signs in sight; he judged it would be quite some time before the parked car would draw attention. He shooed Billie Jean and Terry into the Ford and they drove down through town, had to wait ten minutes in the queue of cars at the bottleneck, and went on through the international border with a nod and a smile at the Mexican guards who waved them through, as they waved all cars through. Mitch said, “That part was easy. The rough stuff comes down below. They’ll let anybody into the border towns. It’s when you get out of town on the highway that you’ve got to show your tourist permit. Which we haven’t got.”
Terry said, “I’ve got my passport with me. They’ll accept that.”
“Not for all three of us.”
Thinking on it, he drove on slowly through thick horsefly-crowds of pedestrians — tourists and peddlers. They went past Canal Street, which climbed steeply to the right, a row of whorehouses with girls sitting on the shaded porches. He said uncomfortably, “This is as far as I’ve ever been. Where do we go from here, to get out of town?”
“Down past the bull ring — keep going.” Terry gave him a wry look.
The Ford was an oil-burner. Its radio didn’t work. It needed springs and shock-absorbers and he hesitated to think what else. But at least it ran — and it was clean, for the moment. It would take the cops a long time to trace them through the car. Not that they couldn’t do it, eventually. But eventually, he thought. Eventually... Who the hell knows? He looked at Terry, on the far side of the seat trying to comb the tangles out of her hair. He said, “Where’s the entry station where they check your papers?”