"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.
"No, I'm fine. Let your hand rest. How're you doing?"
"Okay. Hurting some."
"If you want to stop somewhere, let me know."
Laura shook her head. "No. I want to keep going."
"Six hundred dollars would buy us airline tickets," Didi said. "We could catch a flight to San Francisco from Omaha and rent a car to Freestone."
"We couldn't rent a car without a driver's license. Anyway, we'd have to give up the gun to board a plane."
Didi drove on a few more miles before she spoke again, bringing up a subject that had been needling her since the incident at the lumberyard. "What good is a gun going to be, anyway? I mean… how are you going to get David back, Laura? Mary's not going to give him up. Shell die first. Even with a gun, how're you going to get David back alive?" She emphasized the last word.
"I don't know," Laura answered.
"If Mary finds Jack Gardiner… well, who knows what she'll do? Who knows what he'll do? If she shows up at his door after all these years, he might flip out." She glanced quickly at the other woman and then away, because the pain had crept back onto Laura's face and latched there in the lines. "Jack was a dangerous man. He could talk other people into doing his killing for him, but he did his share of murders, too. He was the mind behind the Storm Front. The whole thing was his idea."
"And you really think that's him? In Freestone?"
"I think that's him in the photo, yeah. Whether he's in Freestone now or not, I don't know. But when Mary gets to him with David as some kind of a… love offering, God only knows how he'll react."
"So we've got to find Jack Gardiner first," Laura said.
"There's no telling how far Mary is ahead of us. She'll get to Freestone before us if we don't go by plane."
"She can't be that far ahead. She's hurt, too, maybe worse than I am. The weather's going to slow her down. If she gets off the interstate, it'll just slow her down more."
"Okay," Didi said. "Even if we do find Jack first, what then?"
"We wait for Mary. She'll give the baby to Jack. That's why she's going to Freestone." Laura gently touched her bandaged hand. It was hot enough to sizzle, and throbbed with a deep, agonizing pulse. She would have to stand the pain, because she had no choice. "When my baby is out of Mary's hands… that's why I might need the gun."
"You're not a killer. You're tough as old leather, yeah. But not a killer."