“What do you think, boys?” he asked. “Feel like watching her bleed?”
20
Letty walked alone down the dirt road away from the ghost town, back toward the highway.
Isaiah, Stu, and Jerrod had gone ahead.
She couldn’t see them anymore.
The sun crested a range of barren hills.
The desert went supernova.
She walked on, shoes scraping dirt.
Buzzards circled.
With each step, she became more thirsty, more exhausted, more humiliated.
Occasionally, blinding silver specks would streak across the far horizon. It was the highway, still miles away.
# # #
The sun was high by the time she reached the pavement, beating down with a kind of angry purpose.
There was no sign of Isaiah and the boys.
Sweat poured out of her.
She walked twenty feet down the road and then her legs failed.
She dropped.
Sat down in the dirt.
Stunned/crushed/confused/enraged.
Still trying to process what had happened.
If she wasn’t mistaken, it was four or five miles back to Beatty, the last town they’d passed through. But she was in no condition to make the trek. She’d left her purse and iPhone in Ize’s Tundra. Had a twenty dollar bill shoved down one of her socks, but not another penny, credit card, or form of identification to her name.
There was nothing coming in either direction.
The heat wafting off the blacktop like a furnace.
Scorpions watching her from the shade.
She couched her face between her knees and shut her eyes.
# # #
The sound of an approaching car brought her head up.
For a moment, she didn’t know where she was.
She hoisted her arm into the air and raised her thumb.
A Prius screamed past, kept going.
# # #
The sun bore down from directly overhead, and she could feel herself beginning to come apart.
You have to get up.
You have to walk to town.
You cannot just sit here and wait for a good Samaritan to stop.
Because they don’t exist anymore.
# # #
She walked up the shoulder of the highway, swatting at the swarm of flies and gnats that had been attracted by her salt-tinged sweat.
In the distance, the mini-roar of an engine.
She looked up.
Couldn’t see anything through the brutal glare.
Just blinding chrome and glass.
Thinking, If I took my top off, would they stop?
Could you handle that rejection if they didn’t?
She raised her arm, held out her thumb, but didn’t slow her pace.
Kept walking as she shielded her eyes.
The car streaked past.
She traded her thumb for a middle finger.
But something was different with this one.
The pitch of its engine had dropped.
She stopped, made a slow, staggering turn.
Damn.
Somebody had actually pulled over.
She stumbled toward the vehicle, moving as fast as she could manage, some part of her fearing that as she drew near it would turn into a mirage.
But the image held.
A burgundy Chevy Astro with deeply tinted windows.
She sidled up to the van’s front passenger door, yanked it open, climbed up into the seat. The air-conditioning was crisp and roaring out of the vents.
She looked over at the driver, her head spinning, unwieldy.
Said, “I can’t thank you e—”
At first, she thought she was hallucinating.
A symptom of heatstroke and exhaustion.
But when he spoke, the voice matched the face.
Christian said, “Shut the door, would you? You’re letting all the cold out.”
When she didn’t respond, he reached across her lap and pulled the door closed himself.
The desert raced by.
Christian reached down, grabbed a bottled water from between the seats, dropped it into her lap.
“Glad you were still here,” he said. “I swapped out Isaiah’s car as fast as I could, but it took longer than I’d planned.”
She unscrewed the water and sucked it down.
Still cold enough to trigger a brief, blinding headache, but she didn’t care. The thirst-quench was orgasmic.
“There’s a whole case,” he said. “Help yourself.”
She killed two more, leaned back in her seat.
They were speeding along on a descending grade.
The temperature readout passing the 110 mark.
The desert looking more hostile and unforgiving with each passing mile.
Like a lifeless planet. Like that painting in Christian’s office.
The hydration and the AC were going a long way toward clearing her head.
She looked over at Christian. He’d changed. Maybe others wouldn’t have noticed, but to her, a student of body language, it was like riding with a completely different man. He sat straighter. His shoulders implied confidence and ability. And there was a hardness in his face that hadn’t ever been there before.
He said, “Your pride is wounded. As it should be. But you should know something.”
“What’s that?”
“I am the very best in the world at what I do. The game was over before it ever started. It was like a middle school kid trying to compete in the PGA Championship.”
“Are you even a therapist?”
“Read a couple books. But it wouldn’t be fair to say I had a practice. Or a diploma. You were my only client.”
“How the hell did you do this? And why?”
“You first fell on my radar while you were still in prison. Friend mentioned you to me. Your work with Javier Estrada and Jack Fitch in the Keys was very impressive. Even then, I wanted to work with you, but I worried about your self-destructive tendencies.”
Beyond the windows, the vegetation was shrinking, browning.
He said, “When you turned up in Charleston, I went to Charleston.”
“But I came to you.”
“Think back to how you first heard about me.”
“One of the girls in the halfway house recommended you. She told me you’d changed her life. Gave me your card.”
“Her name was Samantha and I paid her five thousand dollars to steer you to me.”
“Jesus. You’ve been running this grift on me for half a year. But you helped me. You actually helped me.”
“I’m glad. Although that wasn’t really the purpose.”
“I told you everything about me. Things nobody else knew.”
“I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I’ve never taken an interest in anyone with such intensity. I had to know you inside and out, Letty. Your secrets and fears. I needed to see your naked soul.”
“It was a violation.”
“Yes, but a necessary one.”
“You were planning Vegas from the beginning?”
“No, that fell in my lap last month. Vegas was never the end goal.”
“So what was?”
“You. Meeting you. Vetting you. Learning everything about you.”
“I left Charleston and came west on my own. That was my decision.”
“Was it really? Let’s think back to the day you decided to leave. What happened?”
“A customer harassed me. I fought back. My boss fired me.”
“Because I paid them to. I wanted you to leave town. You’d been talking about it already. You just needed a push.”
“You sent me to Isaiah?”
“In a back channel sort of way. I knew he was planning to rip me off. You might even say I was so unreasonable in my terms that I encouraged it. Isaiah’s ambitious and fearless. But he’s lucky I didn’t leave him in the desert. I figured if he wanted to do the hard work, let him. I had Javier recommend you to him.”
“So I could get on the inside and you could manipulate me.”
“So I could manipulate everyone. It’s what I do. I took down a casino, kept one hundred percent of the haul, and all I did was drive. And I didn’t even have to do that, but I wanted to see you under pressure.”