She longed to rest today. Longed to go back to sleep here in this warm house, but it was time to get out. The school bus driver would wonder why Fudge Ripple hadn’t come out this morning when all the lights were on in the house. He’d tell somebody about it, and they’d wonder, too. Routines were the vital fabric of the Mindfuck State; when a routine was disrupted, like a missed stitch, all the little ants got stirred up. It was time to get out.
Drummer began to cry; Mary recognized it as his hungry cry, pitched a tone or two lower and less intense than his frightened cry. It was more of a nasal buzzing with a few pauses for the summoning of breath. She’d have to feed him and change his diaper before they left. A sense of urgency got her moving. First she changed her bandages, wincing as she peeled away the crusty cotton. She repacked the wounds and wrapped them tightly with fresh strips of torn sheet. Then she popped open her suitcase, put on fresh underwear, and got a pair of flannel socks from Rocky Road’s dresser. Her jeans were too constrictive at the thighs for her swollen leg, so she pulled on a pair of looser denims—again, courtesy of her departed host—and cinched them tight with one of her belts. She put on a gray workshirt, a maroon sweater she’d had since 1981, and she pinned the Smiley Face button on the front. Her scuffed boots went on last. In Rocky Road’s closet hung a tempting assortment of heavy coats and parkas. She took a brown corduroy coat with a fleece-lined collar off its hanger and laid it aside for later, and chose a green goosedown parka to zip Drummer up in as a makeshift bassinet. A pair of man-sized leather gloves were also set aside for later.
As Mary fed Drummer, she continually squeezed a tennis ball in her right hand to warm up the sinews. Her strength in that hand was about a third of what it normally was, her fingers cold and numb. Nerve damage, she thought. She could feel the twitching of the ravaged muscles down in the forearm wound; the damned dog had come close to gnawing an artery open, and if that had happened, she’d be dead by now. The thigh wound was the real bitch, though. It needed fifty or sixty stitches and a hell of a lot better antiseptic than what she’d found in Rocky Road’s bathroom. But just as long as it stayed crusted over, she could make herself keep going.
The telephone rang as she was changing Drummer’s diaper. It stopped after twelve rings, was quiet for five minutes, and then rang eight more times.
“Somebody’s curious,” she told Drummer as she swabbed him clean with a Handi Wipe. “Somebody wants to know why the boy didn’t come out to the school bus, or why Rocky Road’s not clocked in at work yet. Yes somebody does, yes him does!”
She started moving a little faster.
The telephone rang again at eight-forty as Mary was loading up the Cherokee in the garage. It went silent, and Mary continued the task. She loaded her suitcase and a garbage bag full of food from the kitchen: the rest of the sliced ham, a pack of bologna, a loaf of wheat bread, a jug of orange juice and a few apples, a box of oat bran cereal and a big bag of Fritos corn chips. She found a bottle each of mineral supplement tablets and vitamins that might’ve choked a horse. She swallowed two of both. When she was packed and ready to take Drummer out, she paused for a minute to make herself a bowl of Wheat Chex and drink down a Coke.
She was standing in the kitchen, finishing the cereal, when she glanced through a window and saw a pig car coming slowly up the drive.
It pulled up in front of the house, and a pig wearing a dark blue parka got out. The car had CEDAR COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT on its side. By the time the pig—who was maybe in his early twenties, just a kid—reached the front door and rang the buzzer, Mary had loaded one of the remaining rifles from the gun cabinet.
She stood around a corner from the door, waiting. The pig rang the buzzer again, then knocked with a gloved fist. “Hey, Mitch!” he called, his breath showing in the frosty air. “Where you at, boy?”
Go away, Mary thought. Her leg had started hurting her again, a deep biting ache.
“Mitch? You to home?”
The pig backed away from the door. He stood looking around for a minute, his hands on his hips, and then Mary watched him start to walk to the right. She went to another window, where she could track him. He walked to the back door and peered in, his breath fogging the glass. He knocked again, harder. “Emma? Anybody?”
Nobody here you want to meet, she thought.
The pig tried the back door’s knob. Worked it left and right. Then she watched him turn his head and look toward the barn.
He called “Mitch?” and then he began walking away from the house, his boots crunching in the icy snow on his way to where the bodies and the van were.
Mary stood at the back door, the rifle in her hands. She decided to let him find Mitch and Emma.
The pig opened the barn’s door and walked inside.
She waited, her eyes glittering with a kind of lust.
It didn’t take long. The pig came running out. He staggered, stopped, bent over, and threw up onto the snow. Then he started running again, his long legs pumping and his face ghastly.
Mary unlocked the door and stepped out into the chill. The pig saw her, came to a skidding halt, and started reaching for his pistol. The holster’s flap was snapped down, and as the pig’s gloved fingers fumbled to unsnap it, Mary Terror flexed her numb hand, took aim, and shot him in the stomach at a range of thirty feet. He was knocked backward to the ground, the breath bursting white from his mouth and nostrils. As the pig rolled over and tried to struggle to his knees, Mary fired a second shot that took away a chunk of his left shoulder in a mist of steamy blood. The third bullet got him in the lower back as he was crawling across the crimson snow.
He jerked a few times, like a fish on a hook. And then he lay still, facedown, his arms splayed out in an attitude of crucifixion.
Mary breathed deeply of the cold air, savoring its sting in her lungs. Then she went back into the kitchen, set the rifle down, and finished the last two spoonfuls of Wheat Chex. She drank the milk, and followed it with the final swig of Coke. She limped to the bedroom, where she put on the corduroy coat and the gloves, then picked up Drummer in the folds of the goosedown parka. “Pretty boy, yes you are!” she said as she carried him to the kitchen. “Mama’s pretty little boy!” She kissed his cheek, a surge of love rising within her like a glowing radiance. She looked out the back door again, verifying that the pig had not moved. Then she put Drummer into the Cherokee, cranked open the garage door, and slid behind the wheel.
She pulled out of the garage, past the pig car and down the driveway. Then she turned right on the road that led back to I-80 and the route west. Her shoulder bag was on the floorboard, full of Pampers and formula and holding her Magnum and the new Smith & Wesson revolver to replace the lost Colt. She felt so much better this morning. Still weak, yes, but so much better. It must be the vitamins, she decided. Got some iron in her blood, and that made all the difference.
Or maybe it was the power of love, she thought as she glanced on the seat beside her at her beautiful baby.
The list of names and phone numbers was in her pocket, along with the bloodstained Sierra Club newsletter article. To the west the sky was a dark purple haze, the land white as a peace dove.
It was a morning rich with love.
The Cherokee went on, aimed toward California, freighted with firepower and madness.
2
Strip Naked
CHECKOUT TIME WAS NOON. At ten thirty-six the rust-eaten Cutlass with a Nebraska tag pulled out of the Liberty Motor Lodge’s parking lot. The red-haired woman behind the wheel turned right, onto the ramp that merged into the westbound lanes of I-80. The Cutlass’s passenger, a pallid woman with a bandaged hand and hellfire in her eyes, wore a dark gray sweater banded with green stripes. She kept an ice pack pressed against her left hand, and she chewed on her raw and swollen lower lip.
The miles clicked off. Snow flurries spun from the gloom, the headlights of cars on and their wipers going. The Cutlass’s wipers shrieked with a noise like a banshee party, and the car’s engine chugged like a b
oiler with spark plugs. In Des Moines, eighty miles farther west, Didi and Laura stopped at a Wendy’s and got the works: burgers, fries, salad bar, and coffee. As Laura ate with no thought of manners and an eye on the clock, Didi went to the pay phone and looked up pawnbrokers in the Yellow Pages. She tore the page out, rejoined Laura, and they finished their food.
The clerk at Honest Joe’s, on McKinley Avenue, examined the diamond through his loupe and asked to see some identification. They took the stone back and went on. The female clerk at Rossi’s Pawn on 9th Street wouldn’t talk to them without seeing proof of ownership. At the dismal, aptly named Junk ’n Stuff Pawnshop on Army Post Road, a man who made Laura think of John Carradine’s head stuck on Dom DeLuise’s body looked at the diamond and laughed like a chain saw. “Get real! It’s paste, lady!”
“Thank you.” Laura picked up the diamond and Didi followed her toward the door.
“Hey, hey, hey! Don’t go away mad! Hold up a sec!”
Laura paused. The fat man with the thin, wrinkled prune of a face motioned her back with a ring-studded paw. “Come on, let’s dicker a little bit.”
“I don’t have time for that.”
“What, you’re in a hurry?” He frowned, looking at her bandaged hand. “I think you’re bleedin’, lady.”
Spots of red had seeped through the bandages. Laura said, “I cut myself.” She drew up her spine straight and tall and walked back to the counter. “My husband paid over three thousand dollars for this diamond eight years ago. I’ve got the certification. I know it’s not paste, so don’t give me that crap.”
“Yeah?” He grinned. No horse had bigger or yellower teeth. “So let’s see the certification, then.”
Laura didn’t move. She didn’t speak either.
“Uh-huh. So let’s see a driver’s license.”
“My purse was stolen,” Laura said.
“Oh, yeah!” He nodded, drumming his fingers on the countertop. “Where’d you steal the rock from, ladies?”
“Let’s go,” Didi urged.
“You’re undercover cops, right?” the man asked. “Tryin’ to sting my ass?” He snorted. “Yeah, I can smell cops a mile off! Comin’ in here with a phony southern accent! You people won’t stop roustin’ me, will you?”
“Let’s go.” Didi grasped Laura’s arm.
She almost turned away. Almost. But her hand was killing her and they were down to the last of their cash, a gloomier day she’d never seen, and Mary Terror was out there somewhere with David. She felt her frayed temper snap, and the next thing she felt was her hand reaching up under her sweater. She grasped the handle of the automatic in the waistband of her jeans, and she brought the gun up and pointed it at the man’s horse teeth.
“I’ll take a thousand dollars for my diamond,” Laura said. “No dickering.”
The man’s grin hung by a lip.
“Oh God!” Didi wailed. “Don’t kill him like you did that other one, Bonnie! Don’t blow the brains out of his head!”
The man trembled and lifted his arms. He had on cuff links that looked like little gold nuggets.
“Open the cash register,” Laura told him. “You just bought a diamond.”
He hustled to obey, and when the register was open he started counting out the cash. “Bonnie gets crazy sometimes,” Didi said as she went to the front door and turned over the WE’RE OPEN sign to SORRY WE’RE CLOSED. There was nobody on the street anywhere, the wind and the snow keeping saner people indoors. “She shot a guy through the head in Nebraska yesterday. Trigger crazy is what she is.”
“You want big bills?” the man gasped. “You want hundreds?”
“Whatever,” Didi answered. “Come on, hurry it up!”
“I’ve only…I’ve only got…got six hundred dollars in the register. Got some more in the safe. Back there.” He nodded toward a door with an OFFICE sign on it.
“Six hundred’s enough,” Didi said. “Take the money, Bonnie. Got to get us to Michigan, doesn’t it?” She took the automatic from Laura as Didi pocketed the cash. “Anybody else in here?”
“Wanda Jane’s in the back. She’s the bookkeeper.”
“Okay, go on through that door real nice and slow.”
The man started to walk, but Laura said, “Wait. Take the diamond. You bought it.” Didi flashed her a glance of disapproval, and the scared clerk just stood there not knowing what to do. “Take it,” Laura said, and at last he did.
In the office, a wizened woman with butch-cut gray hair was smoking a cigarette, sitting in a smoke haze and talking on the telephone as she watched a soap opera on a portable TV. Didi didn’t have to speak; the man’s face and the pistol did all the talking. Wanda Jane croaked, “Jumpin’ Jesus! Hal, I think we’re bein’—” Didi put her hand down on the phone’s prongs, cutting the connection.
“Wanda Jane, you keep your mouth shut,” Didi ordered. “You two strip naked.”
“The hell I will!” Wanda Jane thundered, her face reddening to the roots of her hair.
“They’ve already killed somebody!” the clerk said. “They’re both crazy!” He was already unbuttoning his shirt. When he unbuckled his belt, his huge paunch flopped out like the nose of the Goodyear blimp.
Didi hurried them up. In a couple of minutes they were both nude and lying on their bellies on the concrete floor, and an uglier two moons Laura had never been so unfortunate to see. Didi tore the phone out of the wall and scooped their clothes up. “You lie here for ten minutes. Bobby’s watching the front door. If you come out before ten minutes are up, you’re dead meat, because Bobby’s even crazier than Bonnie. Hear me?”
Wanda Jane grunted like a bullfrog. The man with horse teeth gripped his new diamond in his fist and bleated, “Yeah, we hear you! Just don’t kill us, okay?”
“See you next time we come through,” Didi promised, and she pushed Laura out of the office in front of her.
Outside, Didi dumped the clothes in a trash can. Then she and Laura ran to the Cutlass, which was parked down the street a few doors from the pawnshop, and Didi took the wheel again. In five minutes they were heading back toward I-80, and in ten minutes they were on their way west again, six hundred dollars richer and minus a diamond that had become to Laura only a dead weight.
Didi kept checking the rearview mirror. No flashing lights, no sirens. Yet. The speedometer’s needle showed a little over sixty, and Didi left it there. “From shoplifting to armed robbery in less than a day,” Didi said, and she couldn’t hold back a wicked grin. “You’re a natural.”
“A natural what?”
“Outlaw.”
“I didn’t steal anything. I left him the diamond.”
“That’s right, you did. But didn’t it feel good, making him look at that gun and bust a gut?”
Laura watched the wipers fight the spits of snow. It had been thrilling, in a way. It had been so alien to her normal sense of propriety that it had seemed like someone else holding the gun, wearing her skin, and speaking in her voice. She wondered what Doug might think of it, or her mother and father. One thing she realized was true, and it filled her with gritty pride: she might not be an outlaw, but she was a survivor. “ ‘Strip naked,’” she said, and she gave a hard note of laughter. “How’d you think of that?”
“Just buying time. I couldn’t think of any other way to keep them in that office for a while.”
“Why’d you keep calling me Bonnie? And you said we were on our way to Michigan?”
Didi shrugged. “Pigs’ll be looking for two women on their way to Michigan. One of them has a southern accent and is named Bonnie. They may be traveling with a male accomplice named Bobby. Anyway, the pigs’ll look in the opposite direction from where we’re going. They won’t know what to make of somebody trading a three-thousand-dollar diamond for six hundred bucks at gunpoint.” She smiled faintly. “Did you hear what I said? ‘Pigs.’ I haven’t said that and meant it in a long time.” Her laughter bubbled up, too. “Did you see Wanda Jane’s face when I told
them to strip? I thought she was going to drop a fig!”
“And when that guy’s belly came out I thought it was going to flop right to the floor! I thought Des Moines was about to have an earthquake!”
“Guy needed a girdle! Hell, he couldn’t find a girdle big enough!”
They were both laughing, the laughter taking some of the edge off what they’d just done. As Laura laughed, she forgot for a precious moment the pain in her hand and in her heart, and that was mercy indeed.
“He needed a whale girdle!” Didi went on. “And did you see the butts on those two!”
“Butt and Jeff!” Laura said, tears in her eyes.
“The Honeymooners!”
“Two moons over Des Moines!”
“I swear to God, I’ve seen bowls of Jell-O with better—” Muscle tone, she was about to say, but she did not because of the flashing blue light that had suddenly appeared in the rear windshield. The scream of a siren came into the car, and the hair stood up on the back of Laura’s neck.
“Christ!” Didi shouted as she jerked the Cutlass over into the right lane. The patrol car was roaring up in the left lane, and Didi’s heart hammered as she waited for it to swerve on their tail. But it kept going, sweeping past them in a siren blare and dazzling blue lights, and it sped away into the murk of swirling sleet and snow.
Neither woman could speak. Didi’s hands had clamped into claws around the steering wheel, her eyes wide with shock, and Laura sat there with her stomach cramping and her bandaged hand pressed against her chest.
Four miles farther west, they passed a car that had skidded off the highway into the guardrail. The patrol car was parked nearby, the Smokey talking to a young man in a sweatshirt with SKI WYOMING across the front. Traffic had slowed, the afternoon had darkened to a plum violet, and the pavement glistened. Didi touched her window. “Getting colder,” she said. The Cutlass was a laboring, gas-guzzling beast, but its heater was first rate. She cut their speed back to fifty-five, grainy snow flying before the headlights.
“I can drive if you want to take a nap,” Laura offered.