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“I need to use the rest room,” she said.
“There’s time for that later,” Marvin said.
She heard a clunking sound in the trunk. She clicked on the radio.
“I’m worried about this storm,” she said.
He turned the radio off. “Don’t do that,” he said.
“Do what?”
He took a ragged breath of air and looked hard at the side of her face, his eyes narrowing. Then, for no apparent reason, he reached across the seat and fastened his fingers on the back of her neck, sinking them deep into the tendons.
“You make me mad,” he said.
He lifted his fingers from her neck and touched her hair. Then he put both his hands and the Beretta between his legs and sat very still, his chest rising and falling.
“Marvin, no one meant to hurt you.”
“Don’t talk down to me. Not ever again. ’Cause that’s what you been doing since the beginning. I don’t like that.”
“Then maybe you should get a life and stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
Too late, she knew it was the wrong thing to say. She heard him make a grinding sound in his throat, then he struck her across the mouth with the back of his hand.
He grabbed the wheel and hit her again.
“Now, you steer the car and don’t make me do what I’m thinking,” he said, his voice starting to break.
Her hand was trembling when she touched the cut on her mouth.
“My uncle is Joe Zeroski. Can that fit in your head? What do you think he’s going to do when he gets his hands on you, you nasty little pissant?” she said.
She thought he was about to hit her again. But he was hunched forward once more, looking at the road in the headlights, listening.
“Pull over,” he said.
“What for?”
“Don’t ask,” he said.
She took her foot off the accelerator and felt the weight of the Cadillac slow, a tire touch on the shoulder of the road. She heard Clete kick solidly against the hatch. Marvin waited until a pickup truck passed, then flung open the door and walked to the rear of the vehicle.
“Shut up in there!” he said.
Through the backseat she heard Clete’s voice: “Tell you what, pinhead. Pop the hatch and I’ll take you in without scrubbing out the toilet with your face, the way Frankie Dogs did.”
“Suck on this,” Marvin said, and stepped back from the vehicle and fired a round into the hatch, the muzzle flash sparking into the darkness.
His hat was peaked in the crown, and rain slid off the brim when he got back in the front seat and pulled the door shut behind him. It was quiet in the back of the Cadillac.
“You motherfucker,” she said.
Marvin’s eyes closed, then opened, as though he were experiencing a sexual moment. “Drive the car, Zerelda,” he said.
He rested the Beretta on the edge of his scrotum, the butterfly safety off, the red firing dot exposed. Minutes later Zerelda glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a vehicle click on its lights and pull out behind them, keeping a respectful distance in the rain. Was that the pickup truck that had just passed them? she asked herself.
Legion Guidry watched the Cadillac float into the curves ahead of him, the rain blowing in a vapor off the rear wheels. He put a fresh cigarette in his mouth and removed the lighter from the dashboard and pressed the red coils against the tobacco. He could hear the crisp sound of the paper burning as he inhaled. The smell of something burning on hot metal gave him a vague sense of satisfaction, one he could not quite define, but it traveled pleasantly down into his loins. He smiled to himself when the rear end of the Cadillac swung heavily on its springs as it went into the curves, and he wondered what that smart-ass Purcel was feeling now, his head bashed with a pipe, trussed like a three-hundred-pound hog in the trunk of his own car. He hadn’t figured out the connection between the kid in the cowboy hat and Purcel and the woman yet. He had seen the kid clearly in his binoculars for perhaps thirty seconds, just enough to recognize him as the salesman who drug a suitcase on a roller skate through black neighborhoods in St. Mary Parish. He had never gotten his binoculars adequately on the woman, but he knew she had to be that slut Barbara Shanahan, who walked around town with a pissed-off look on her face, like her shit didn’t stink, whom he’d watched through her window while she mounted Purcel and stroked his sex like a whore before she put it inside her.
