“Let’s sit this one out,” I said. “We can go outside for a minute if you want.”
She shook her head. “There’s no need. That song doesn’t bother me anymore, really it doesn’t.”
“Sure?”
“You know,” she said, “it’s funny, but everything from before feels…I don’t know…made up. Like it all happened to somebody else, somebody I hardly know anymore and I’m glad of it.”
She gave me a peck on the lips and a smile and asked if I’d be a real sweetie and get her a cold Coke while she went to powder her nose. “Meet you at the refreshment bar,” she said. “Then we’ll get back to showing these suckers how to dance.”
The lounges were on the other side of the room and down a hallway, and she drew a good bit of attention as she made her way around the edge of the dancefloor. I went to the bar and ordered two Cokes. There was a scattering of small tables along the walls to either side of the bar, all of them occupied, but then a couple got up to return to the floor and I was quick to take over their spot.
I was nearly done with my Coke when I caught sight of her emerging from the crowd. Her face was tight with excitement, a look I’d come to know well. She didn’t see me at the bar and scanned around and I waved to catch her attention. She spotted me and came over and sat down.
“What?” I said.
Her eyes had that peculiar light they took on when she was really wound up. She sucked a deep draft of her Coke through the straw, took a look back toward the dancing crowd, then leaned close to me. “Listen to this. When I came out of the ladies’ room just now? These two fellas come out of the gents’ and start talking to me. They’d been doing some drinking, you could tell, and I took them for just a couple of funny drunks. Then one of them says to me, ‘Look here,’ and steps over by this big potted plant and stands sort of half-turned so nobody but me and his buddy can see, and he takes a roll of bills out of his coat pocket and I mean to tell you, Sonny, it was this thick.” She held her thumb and forefinger three inches apart. “Looked bigger than a Coke bottle except fat at both ends. The top bill was a hundred, I swear. And the other one says real low in my ear, ‘Name your price, honey. One time around the world for each of us.’”
I stood up. “Come point them out.”
“Sonny, sit down. Please. Just listen a minute Okay?”
I sat. “I’ll kick their ass.” It was an effort to keep my voice down.
“I told them I had to make a phone call but I’d be right back. They’re waiting for me in the lounge hallway.”
I started to get up again but she flapped her hand at me to sit back down.
“Listen to me,” she said. “You want to get them? Let’s really get them. I had this idea—I mean it just bang came to me when that galoot said what they wanted.”
“What the hell are you—”
“What if you went up to the room right now and then I took them up there?”
Her expression was pure readiness, her green eyes sparking. She slid her hand across the table and gripped mine.
“What do you say?” she said.
Twenty minutes later I was in the bathroom, the door slightly ajar, the room in darkness, when I heard her key rattling in the lock and then their laughter as they came in.
There was the click of a lamp switch—but the bathroom was situated in such a way that all I could see through the cracked door was a narrow portion of the back wall and part of the window.
The room door shut. The guys laughed louder. Sloppy kissing sounds, murmurings, chucklings. One of them said something I didn’t catch except for “Molly, honey.” I felt my pulse in my eardrums.
“Whoa now, boys, hold your horses!” Belle said loudly, her laughter sort of tinny. “Lookee there the good bourbon I got. Why don’t we pour us a…now, behave yourself, you rascal, we got all night! Why don’t we all have us a little drink and—”
I didn’t catch the rest of it for the sudden blaring of a big band playing “Always.” One of them had turned on the radio on the bedside table.
We hadn’t counted on that. The signal we’d arranged was “Here’s to wicked times,” which she’d say when she had them standing together by the chest of drawers, where the bourbon was. I’d come out and get the drop on them and she’d snatch up her own gun from under the pillow. But with the radio up so loud I couldn’t make out what anybody was saying, only the guys’ harsh laughter.
Damn the signal. I was about to pull the door open when it swung in hard and hit me in the forehead and knocked me back against the sink and my feet went out from under me. A large man was in the doorway with his hand at his fly—and quick as a cat he was all over me before I could raise the gun. He gripped my gun wrist with one hand and started punching with the other, cussing a blue streak. He must’ve had thirty pounds on me and was damn strong. I tried to cover up with my free arm but still caught some on the face and neck and then I tucked my chin down and took the next ones on top of the head. They hurt like hell but then he yowled and I knew he’d busted his hand. I grabbed him by the hair and lunged sideways and rammed his head hard against the rim of the bathtub. He groaned and lost his hold on me and I got better leverage and banged his head again and this one knocked him cold.
I got untangled from him and scrambled to my feet and rushed into the other room and there was Belle—standing beside the bed and holding the cocked Colt in the other guys’ face. One of her straps was broken and her top hung down and exposed a breast. The guy sat on the edge of the bed looking terrified, hands way up. “Always” was still blasting.
“Belle!” I said.
She didn’t even look at me. She jabbed the guy in the forehead with the muzzle of the gun and he fell on his back and said, “Jesus, lady…please!”
She held the gun to his eye. “Want to tear my dress some more, highroller? Want another grab up under my skirt?”
“No, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” He shut his eyes and gritted his teeth.
She tapped his teeth with the muzzle and said, “Open up.” Then slid a good portion of the barrel into his mouth—and now his eyes couldn’t get any bigger.
The telephone rang. She looked at it and then at me, her face blank. It rang again. I went over and turned down the radio and picked up the receiver.
The front desk. They’d received a complaint from the room next door about the loud music. Could we please be more considerate? I saw myself in the mirror, my nose bleeding, a dark swelling over one eye and on one cheek. The knots on my scalp hurt but didn’t show. “Certainly,” I said. “My apologies.”
I hung up. Belle still had the pistol barrel in the guy’s mouth.
“The desk clerk wonders if you’d be kind enough not to shoot that asshole,” I said. “They’re afraid the noise might disturb some of the guests.”
She held the blank look on me a moment longer—and then grinned wide and beautifully.
We bound their hands behind them with their own belts and gagged them with towels. It wouldn’t take much effort to get free of the belts, but that’s how I wanted it. The guy on the bathroom floor had a concussion for sure, maybe a skull fracture, and the sooner he made it to a hospital the better. At least he was breathing and it looked to me like he’d stay that way. He’d been the one to flash the roll of money at Belle—$3, 500, by my hasty count before I stuck the wad in my coat. The other guy was carrying a little more than a grand, and that roll went into my coat too. They’d told Belle they were drilling contractors just back from setting up a new field in Mexico and about to start a job outside San Angelo.