Creel started laughing.
“We parked the Mustang in back here, in the garage, and took the bag of money in and plopped it on the kitchen table. She and I sat and played with the money and laughed. Then we went upstairs to the bedroom and, sweet Jesus, I fucked her. Three times, and it was... nothing like it, ever. We was in bed together, and I drifted off to sleep, thinking it was a dream, a crazy dream. I woke up a couple hours later, handcuffed to the bed. Alone in the house.”
Creel sat there, swinging.
“You believe she’s dead?” Nolan asked.
“If she isn’t, I’d like to kill her.” He laughed. “Or fuck her.” Then he just sat there blankly. Swinging.
“We never had this conversation,” Nolan said.
“Right,” Creel said.
And Nolan and Jon went back to Iowa City and forgot about it.
Now, a year later, Jon was in the back seat of a car, handcuffed like that dumb asshole Creel, while Julie and some dyke named Ron talked about whether or not to kill him.
Right now Julie was still talking to that sandy-haired guy. If only they’d go into that warehouse for a while, maybe he could do something...
The car he was in was an old souped-up Ford, with tuck’n’roll upholstery, four-on-the-floor, stereo speakers on the back ledge. He was locked in, of course, but maybe...
On the other side of the car, the one facing away from Julie and Ron and the Hulk, Jon bit the tip of the locking knob on the door. He pulled up his with teeth. It clicked.
He glanced over to see if the figures out in the parking lot had heard it. It had sounded incredibly loud to him. But they still stood there, Julie and the guy, talking, Ron doing her James Dean slouch.
With his back to the door, he used this cuffed hands to grasp the door handle. He pulled. The latch gave, but he didn’t open the door. He was still watching the people in the lot. To see if they’d heard the sound — which seemed to him to echo across the world like a shout in the Grand Canyon. But they didn’t seem to. Ron glanced over, but just momentarily.
He waited a minute or so.
Then he pushed the door open a bit, hoping the dome light wouldn’t go on. It didn’t. One small break. He edged it open and slipped down out of the car onto the gravel and eased the door shut.
On his belly, he looked under the car, toward Julie and the Hulk and Ron. He saw their legs; they hadn’t moved.
He looked off, in the opposite direction. Another twenty feet of parking lot, then trees. If he could make it to the trees, and perhaps hide, then eventually work the ropes off his ankles, and find a highway...
He crawled on his belly. The gravel was rough; it scraped him. He was only in T-shirt and jeans. His mouth, already tasting like an old gym sock, took in dust.
He could hear them talking. They hadn’t noticed him. Trees ahead, a few yards.
Then a voice. Ron’s.
“Hey!”
Feet ran on gravel.
He tried to get on his feet; maybe he could hop faster than he could crawl.
He never found out.
A foot was on his back, and then he heard Ron say, “You ain’t goin’ no place,” and she grabbed him by his bound ankles and dragged him, face down, back to her car.
10
HAROLD TOOK off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He was sitting behind the metal desk in the small paneled office at the rear of his and Julie’s club, the Paddlewheel. He was waiting for the phone to ring.
The Paddlewheel was a big place, an old converted warehouse near the banks of the Mississippi, in Gulf Port, Illinois; it contained a restaurant, several bars, several dance floors with stages, and a casino. But Harold’s office was small.
Harold, of course, was big, a big man who felt uncomfortable in his small office, physically uncomfortable, psychologically uncomfortable. This small office was just another unspoken insult in his life with Julie. But he loved her. He loved her. And if she didn’t love him back, well, she didn’t love anybody else, either. Except Julie, of course.
Julie had a large office upstairs, with a huge wood-topped desk, bulky old-fashioned safe, file cabinets, chairs, bar, television, stereo, a couch where she slept sometimes. Almost an apartment, and she did use it as a place to go, to stay, even overnight — when she wanted to get away from him for a while, Harold knew.
They lived together in a big white house with pillars, a near-mansion built ten years before by a wealthy farmer for a beloved wife who divorced him a year later. The place was several miles outside Gulf Port, in the midst of rich farmland that Julie now owned, one of several investments she’d made with the money they were earning from the Paddlewheel. It was a four-bedroom home that required a housekeeper to come in three times a week, filled with antiques Julie picked up (her only hobby); they slept in separate bedrooms, though he was allowed to join her in her bed for love-making a few times a week.
As for his small office on the basement level, she claimed it was a ploy of sorts; it was obviously necessary to keep considerable cash on hand for the casino and, she said, she wanted a certain amount beyond that in case the day came that they should need to leave in a hurry. So the big old safe in her office, in which a few thousand was kept, was a decoy; the safe containing over $100,000 was in the floor of Harold’s small office, a little vault in the corner, under the carpet.
It had been a long and disturbing evening. What it should have been was a pleasant night out — dinner at the Barn, followed by scouting the band there for possible fill-in at the Paddlewheel. But then this Jon kid turned up out of Julie’s past.
Julie had taken the money from that bank job and turned it into the Paddlewheel, from which had come land holdings and a sporting goods store in Burlington and... and Jon and Logan would want their share, now that they knew she was alive. Julie claimed they’d want even more — revenge, she said. But Harold didn’t really buy that. He knew Julie well enough to know that if there was one thing Julie loved besides Julie, it was money; that was the only fever in her, and she wouldn’t do the smart thing, the right thing, and call this Logan and the kid Jon in and admit her deceptions and cut them in for a share. No way in hell. She’d do anything but that. Harold knew that only too well. He knew only too well what Julie was capable of, for money.
He sat rubbing his eyes, waiting for the phone to ring. It was almost two in the morning, and he was exhausted. He wanted to go to his room at the house and sleep. Just sleep.
But he had to wait till the phone rang.
Those two guys Julie had contacted, the ones her Chicago connection put her onto, should have called by now.
He didn’t like being part of this. He didn’t like being any part of killing. It wasn’t the first time she’d got him into being part of something that was directly opposed to everything he’d ever been taught, that he’d ever believed in. He didn’t understand it, how he could have come to believe in one thing, live for one thing: Julie. The few nights a week in her bed, doled out like a child’s allowance; the occasional tender look; those few times a week she’d squeeze his arm and smile, or touch his face. He lived for those. He didn’t believe any of them, but he wanted to. And he took what he could get.