CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (17 page)

"I wanna thank you proper, man. That was a helluva nice thing you done."

Mark took his hand. Once he'd paid the bill and was outside the restaurant, the bum was gone. He was going to offer him a ride somewhere, slip a twenty to him. Too late.

Well, at least the guy was full and that was something.

He walked back to the motel, unlocked his car, and sat behind the steering wheel. Metro. Big green sign.

Maybe
she was there.

He wasted an hour hanging out at the biggest truck stop in El Paso. He showed Molly's picture to everyone he could. Waitresses, shopkeepers, counter persons, gas

jockeys. Came up empty. He even called the phone number for the tour service down into Juarez, asked if they'd taken a redheaded girl. Nope. Took a redheaded woman in her fifties, though, they said. She was a bottle redhead, pretty obvious too, but no kid.

By the time Mark packed it in and returned to his room at the Budget Inn all he wanted to do was crawl between the sheets and sleep until the Second Coming. The Metro Truck Stop had tired him more than his day's driving. All those people. All that commotion. It was like Grand Central back in its heyday. He didn't know how the truckers lived that frantic a life. He pitied them.

Tomorrow he'd hit the road again for New Mexico.

Maybe she was there.
God, let her be there.

THE FIFTH NIGHT

Cruise got up in the day twice to untie Molly to go to the bathroom. She whimpered some, but he'd warned her against too much noise. She wanted a gag, that was all right with him. She didn't. She was quiet while he slept.

When the sun set, Cruise woke for good with a raging headache. Moving around in the day did that to him. Gave him migraines that started in his sleep. He'd wake with a dull, heavy, bloated feeling in his right temple. Then before he could shower and dress the headache came out in the open, a dozen angry fists swinging a dozen sledgehammers against the inside of his skull.

He staggered around the room trying to get rid of the pain before he drove from town. He kept his right hand mashed into his right eye socket where the pain was the worst. He knew this didn't help it any, but it seemed to ease the pressure on his one eye.

"When are you going to let me go?" Molly asked, squirming in the ropes.

"Don't talk. My head hurts."

"Yeah, well, that's too bad. My hands hurt. My legs hurt. My butt hurts."

Cruise was across the room before she finished. He loomed over her, hand gone from his eye for the moment. His face looked carved from the wood of a hard, old tree.

Hickory. A gnarled oak.

"I
told
you my
head
hurts
. You talk again I might make
you
hurt. You understand that, Molly? You got that written down yet?"

She nodded, eyes downcast.

"Fine. Don't forget."

He went back to trying to walk out of the barrier of pain that fenced him in as surely as the wire around a penned dog. He stopped once to phone for room service. "Send up two Cokes, they're in those little bottles, right? Make it three Cokes then. And send someone to get me a decongestant. Hell, I don't care what kind. Sudafed. Dimetapp. Some goddamn thing for sinus, whatever the fuck you can find. And hurry."

Ten minutes later he was swallowing two little white tablets that he hoped were what he asked for. If it turned out to be some of Rodriguez's speed or other druggie shit, he'd kill the desk clerk, hang him from the lobby chandelier. He drank two of the small bottles of Cokes as chasers. He'd save the other bottle for when he felt some relief. Sometimes decongestants worked, sometimes not. If it was a sinus headache, they helped. If it was a true migraine, nothing helped short of suicide. He'd have to return to bed, cover his head with a pillow, and not move a muscle for hours until it stopped throbbing.

Now and then he glanced over at Molly. Damn shame about her. Too fucking smart. He ought to do her right now, here, get it over with. Pick up another witness somewhere else. Over in Arizona, maybe.

He stopped walking, stared at Molly from the one uncovered green eye like a cyclops considering eating her for a snack. Weighed everything in the balance. His time investment. The stories he'd told. The money he'd spent. The
effort.
It was this last that gave him pause. So much effort spent on this kid!

She stared back unabashedly. Fire there, smoldering like molten lead in her gray flinty eyes. He really liked that. She wasn't completely intimidated. She'd seen him kill

and could still look him in the face with defiance. Great little kid, now she really was.

"What do I have to do to make you behave?" he asked suddenly.

"What do you want with me, Cruise?"

"I just want you with me."

"It doesn't make sense," she said. "You don,t even know me. I'm a hitchhiker. you're just a ride."

"Not anymore. I'm living my life and you're my witness."

"Witness?"

"Exactly."

"To what?"

"My life. I just told you."

"Doesn't make any sense."

"Doesn't have to. It does to me, that's what counts. But now you're being a pain in the ass. I don't know if..."

"You expected me to be some kind of angel? Some kind of heartless monster like you?"

"Shut up." He grabbed the other side of his head and swayed on his feet. The pain.
The pain!
Trying to knock him off his feet. Trying to drop him to the floor with a roundhouse slam to his temples. He cried out, "Ahhhhh."

Stood absolutely still, held his breath, tried to center himself. If he could put himself into his stomach muscles, get out of his head, he could beat this thing.

He had to get to the bed. He stumbled over his own feet trying to reach the mattress. He felt Molly's eyes boring through him. Nothing mattered but to lick the pain. He couldn't stand up anymore. His knees hit the mattress; he fell forward onto his outstretched hands, eyes tightly closed. The jar from the fall thumped through his head like a galloping Clydesdale. He pulled himself onto the bed, groped for the pillows, found one, placed it carefully over the back of his head, buried his face in the sheets.

Oh, God. He didn't know if he'd live through it. And if Molly said another goddamn word, he'd cut her head from her body.

#

Molly watched him pace the room like a staggering drunk, clutching one eye and the side of his head. Migraine, she guessed. She couldn't summon an ounce of pity for him. She'd been tied upright in the white satin chair all night. She'd had plenty of hours to think over her situation while her hands and feet began to tingle, her butt turned to stone. Witness, hell. She was a hostage, pure and simple. She was trapped. If she struggled too much at the wrong time, if she said the wrong word, if she moved when she should be motionless, she thought Cruise might kill her. She didn't just think it, she knew it even though Cruise had not made a specific threat.

That didn't mean life was hopeless. It just meant she'd made her first and worst mistake on the road, on her own. She hadn't contracted a sexual disease, fallen under the power of a pimp, been gang-raped, or starved to death. She'd done far better for herself. She'd taken a ride with a maniac. Hopeless, no. Dangerous, yes. Life-threatening, assuredly.

She didn't know any of the rules. At first she thought Cruise was a regular kind of guy, like her father, but not as strict. Then with the stories and the truck stops she thought he wasn't much like her father at all, but a more exciting sort of man who knew about worlds she didn't know existed. She found the life attractive, the man exotic. Now she knew the truth, the shocking, mind-numbing truth, and she thought she shouldn't let it paralyze her or she was lost. If she gave herself over to fear she'd make the wrong move and she wouldn't survive the repercussion.

One time when she was a girl, must have been eight or nine years old, she came up on a tangle of coral snakes. They lived in Hollywood, Florida, just miles down the shoreline from Dania where her father lived now. She'd been running from her friends in a game of hide-and-seek, running down a worn path they took through a patch of trees between their houses. There was a giant magnolia tree with its limbs poised over the path. She remembered the double-fist-sized creamy white blooms hanging heavy and fragrant from the canopy of wide shiny deep green leaves.

The corals, Florida's deadliest snake, owned their piece of ground. It might have been a mother snake and her offspring, or corals mating, she didn't know why there were so many in one spot, but they were irrefutably there when she came racing like a tornado down upon them.

Molly recognized the bright bands of color the second she spied them. But she was running too fast to stop. Had she tried, she would have landed right smack in the middle of venomous and instantaneous death. She hardly had time to formulate a plan. Instinct took over, the will to survive. She couldn't, and therefore didn't, slow her pace. She saw the tangle of snakes coming at her faster and faster although it was her moving in their direction instead of them moving at all except to squirm one on the other, a deadly circle of red, yellow, and black. Her bare feet made two easy targets. Then without thinking of what to do she was flying, literally airborne, rising into the air, taking wing, bounding from the spongy beaten-down grass high up over the corals, one short scream escaping her mouth as she sailed cleanly over the threat. She landed a few feet beyond them and as soon as her feet touched down she was gone from the scene, moving like wind, the thought of the corals just behind her supplying enough adrenaline to carry her straight down the path and out again into her friend's newly mowed backyard where she halted out of breath, her face white as a magnolia blossom, hands on her knees, hunched over, her head falling almost to the ground. She was whispering, "Thank you, God, thank you, God, thank you..."

She never told anyone about the close call. Her father wouldn't have let her play outside again for fear of her getting snake-bitten. Her friends wouldn't have really believed it. None of them at that time had ever seen a coral snake, though they had all been warned about them. That was Florida, after all, parents had to prepare their children for snakes, stinging scorpions, spiders, jellyfish and sharks at the beach.

She remembered what she'd done to save herself from the corals in the pathway. She let instinct take over. It had delivered her once from certain death. It could again if she would simply trust herself. Making plans was what she wanted to do, but everything she thought to do to extricate herself from Cruise was something she knew he'd know about before she even put the first steps into action.

He had had experience at this before.

He had had
witnesses
before.

What had become of
them
?

She frightened herself so badly with that one question her hands trembled where they were tied together in her lap.

She thought she knew what became of Cruise's witness victims.

The same thing that happened to the Mexican man in the street the night before.

The same thing that would have happened to her had she panicked and landed in the midst of the coral snakes when she was a kid.

She thought she could already feel the torture of fangs sinking into delicate skin, the slow burning sensation of poison seeping into her bloodstream.

She must learn to fly once more in order to save her life. She must grow invisible wings and perform a miraculous flight above the danger lying in wait on earth.

#

Cruise didn't sleep, but he dozed as the pain subsided in his temples. When he felt he could move his head without crying out, he pushed off the pillow and rose from bed. He tested himself by walking to the bath counter to wash his face. It seemed he would live.

He noticed Molly hadn't said a word to him. She tracked his movements, her eyes following him, but she didn't speak.

"We'll be on our way now," he said, coming to untie her. He knelt to the side of her feet as he undid the ropes. He repressed an urge to run his hand up the back of her calf to the shadowed warm spot behind her knee. When she was completely free, she rubbed both her wrists and ankles before trying to stand.

"Are you all right?"

"I'll be okay."

"Grab your bag. Follow me to my room so I can get my stuff."

Molly did as she was told. She walked with a temporary limp. He glanced behind him as they moved down the hall to the next door. Inside he had her stand in the middle of the room while he gathered his things. "Hungry?"

"Yeah, a little."

"You haven't eaten all day. I bet you're starved." When she didn't reply, he shrugged and led her to the elevator. They hadn't seen other residents in the hotel and didn't on this trip to the lobby. Cruise waved good-bye to the desk clerk, called out, "Tell Adolpho I'll see him again soon." The clerk had handed him an envelope from the drug king earlier. The money was good.

The night was full dark by the time they reached the Chrysler. Cruise had brought along the last bottled Coke he had ordered from room service. He drank it down before starting the car. "Warm Coke. Just what the doctor ordered. I'll get you something to eat in Juarez. Think you can hold out?"

Molly nodded.

He wanted to act cool. Courteous. His moods kept changing faster than the weather in Texas, but he was trying with all his might to court Molly's favor. She didn't have to be a prisoner if she'd just shape up.

"So you're not going to talk to me, huh?"

"Are witnesses supposed to talk?"

She sounded as if she just wanted to know. She didn't say it with any sarcasm.

"You don't have to. I'm not particular."

"Good."

Great. She was in her hard-ass mode. She fidgeted and fussed with the collar of her blouse. Miss Rebel without a cause. He could live with that, actually preferred it.

Once they were outside of town and in the desert land that lay between Adolpho's city and Juarez, Cruise felt like telling a story.