Bull Mountain(34)

“I do, but you can’t use my phone. If you call the police, or if they send an ambulance here, you’ll need to explain yourself, and then someone is going to get killed.”

“Someone needs to get killed.” Angel propped herself up against the rail as best she could and dabbed the edge of the towel under her bloody nose. Val held a finger to his lips.

“Keep your voice down and listen to me. I won’t call the police, or an ambulance, but I will call you a taxicab. You can get dressed and wait down by the street. I’ll tell them where to pick you up.”

Angel looked around on the ground until she spotted the twenties she had spit out lying on a steel grate next to her.

“Don’t worry about the money,” Val said. “I’ll take care of it. Just wait for the cab and get yourself to a hospital.”

Angel fidgeted under the towel, trying to pull her panties on with her free hand. Val averted his eyes. He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a thousand dollars in hundreds, and held it up for her to see. “Can you do that?” he said. “Can you go wait down by the street and then get yourself some help?”

Angel nodded.

“I’m serious, girl. If you send the police or anyone else here looking for the man in that room, things will not end well for you. Things will not end well for me, either. Do you understand?”

She nodded again.

“Say the words.”

“I’ll go to a hospital and I won’t call the police.”

“Or anyone else.”

“Or anyone else.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise. Just let me put my clothes on before the rest of the world sees me like this.”

“Of course,” Val said. He helped the girl to her feet, trying to hold the towel in place to save what little dignity she had left, but it was useless. She gave up on the panties, kicking them off her leg, and tried to slip back into the black dress she’d thought she looked so pretty in a few hours ago. She started to cry again.

“Can you help me?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Val helped her slide the dress up and over her shoulders, and it enveloped her like a shadow. She turned and lifted her hair, and Val secured the straps behind her neck. When she turned around to face him, she looked up and took the rag from her face.

“How bad do I look?” she said.

Val wiped the tears from the undamaged side of her face. “You are a beautiful girl,” he said, and tucked the fold of cash into the girl’s hand. She lowered her eyes and pressed the rag back to her face.

“You’re not a very good liar,” she said, and still holding her shoes, limped her way toward the stairs. She knew she would never be beautiful again.





CHAPTER





12




BRACKEN LEEK

2015

1.

“Can I bum a smoke?”

“Can I bang your wife?”

Moe thought about that and tugged on the soul patch sprouting under his bottom lip. “If I say yes, then can I bum a smoke?”

Tilmon reached back into the stash under the steering wheel, grabbed his pack of Camel Lights, and shook one out for his partner. Moe lit up and went back to studying their route on a laminated map. The piece-of-shit GPS never worked this far out in the sticks. Tilmon watched Moe smoke from the corner of his eye. “How long we been doing this?” he said.

Moe looked up from the map and took a drag, tapping his ashes on the floorboard. “Doing what? Riding Highway 27?” He looked at his watch. “About two hours.”

“No, I mean, how long we been riding together?”

Moe looked at his watch again, as if he’d set a timer at the beginning of their partnership. “Shit, man. I don’t know. Almost two years, I think.”

“Almost two years.”

“Yeah, about that. Why?”

“I’m just curious.”

Moe smoked his cigarette down to the filter and tossed the butt out the window. They burned up another mile of interstate before he bit. “Curious about what? The map? I like looking at the map.”

“You can look at the map all you want. That doesn’t bother me.”

“Then what’s up with the cryptic line of questioning?”

“What line? I asked you one thing.”

Moe’s ears started to burn. “For real, why?”

Tilmon slid his sunglasses up his forehead and pinched the oil off his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll tell you. Two years we been riding together and in all that time I can’t think of one time you brought enough smokes to make the trip.”

Moe stared at him blankly. “Are you being serious right now?”

“Yeah, I’m being serious. Can you think of one time in two years you didn’t have to bum off me sometime during the route? Just name one time.”

“Go f*ck yourself, Tilmon.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t get all shitty about it. I’m just pointing something out. We both patched in about the same time, so I know we make about the same money, but not really, ’cause I got to carry your habit as well as my own. That shit adds up, man. If you think about it, it’s kind of a shitty thing to do to a partner of almost two years.”