Michael Connelly - Murder in Vegas

“So,” the tone growing a little more impatient, “what are we gonna do?”

“Stay ahead of them. At least for a while.”

“How long a while?”

“Until sunset.”

“Uh-unh, no way, Honey.”

“What the fuck do you mean, no way?”

“I gotta pee.”

“So, do it in your clothes, like you did last night.”

“That’s not funny.”

Jesus Christ. “Okay. Around this next bend, then.”

“No. I want a real bathroom, not…” Brandi with a fucking “I” waving her hand “… some spot behind a bush in the desert where a snake could get me.”

“The desert, or your clothes. You decide how you want to feel, the next hundred miles to Vegas.”

“God, I hate you, you know that?”

Checking the rearview again, Ed was beginning to get that impression, yeah.

Brandi Willette, who’d looked forward so much to enjoying this trip to Vegas, now found she’d run out of tissues.

God, she thought, shaking herself dry as best she could before pulling up her panties. I can’t wait for this to be over.

Straightening from behind the bush, she looked over to the convertible. Dickhead was slouched in the driver’s seat, headback, eyes closed, still wearing that ugly sports jacket to “hide” his gun.

Well, girl, look on the bright side: He doesn’t suspect a thing, and that’ll make it all the sweeter, once it happens.

“No,” said Brandi, out loud but softly as she picked her way back to the car. “When it happens.”

Having slowed to fifty-five about twenty minutes before-just after he put the top down to enjoy the clear, crisp night air of the desert-Ed Krause kept one eye on the rearview and the other on the highway in front of him, figuring he didn’t have to worry about Brandi trying anything until they came to a stop.

She said, “Is it dark enough yet?”

Right on cue. “Dark enough for what?”

Brandi blew out a breath in the passenger seat next to him, like he noticed she did a lot of times-even during sex-to get the hair out of her face.

Why wouldn’t you just get a different ’do, the hair thing bothered you so much?

Brandi said, “Dark… enough… for whatever you’re planning?”

Another thing Ed didn’t like about the little bitch: the way she kept hitting her words hard-even just parts of words, like he was some kind of idiot who couldn’t get her points otherwise.

Shaking his head, Ed checked the odometer. Thirty miles from Vegas, give or take, its lights just blushing on the horizon. “Yeah, it’s dark enough for that.”

The Suburban had appeared and disappeared a couple times over the prior two hours, not taking advantage of at least three desolate spots where it could have roared up from behind, tried to force him off the road. Which made Ed pretty sure they were waiting for him to make the first move.

Or, like Brandi, the first “stop.”

“Okay,” Ed abruptly pulling off the road and onto the sandy shoulder. “Here.”

“Honey?”

Ed turned to her. Brandi was leveling a nickel-finish semiautomaticat him in her right hand, a Raven.25 caliber he’d seen only once before.

Brandi Willette had thought long and hard about how to phrase it to him-even rehearsed some, with the teddy bear as Ed-but decided in the end that less was more. And so she was kind of disappointed that Dickhead didn’t look shocked when she said just the one word, and he saw what Brandi had in her hand.

But that was okay. The asshole thought he was so smart, and so macho, and now Ed finds himself trapped and beaten by a girl, one whose luck had finally changed.

“Just what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he said.

Funny, Dickhead didn’t sound scared, either, like Brandi also expected. “I’m taking the money. Honey.”

Now it seemed like Ed almost laughed, even though she’d worked on that line, too. Make it kind of poignant, even.

“Brandi, Brandi, after all we’ve meant to each other?”

Okay, now she really didn’t get it. “You’re going to open the trunk and take out the case with all the money. Then you’re going to leave it with me and just drive off.”

Brandi saw Dickhead’s eyes go to the rearview mirror again, and she thought she caught just a flash of headlights behind them along with the sudden silence of an engine turning off, though Brandi didn’t dare look away from Ed, what with that big gun over his right hip.

No problem, though. Her luck was both changing and holding, just like it would in Vegas, when she hit the slots and the tables, or even the-

Dickhead said, “Your friends are here.”

That stopped Brandi. “My… friends?”

“When we got back to the room at the lodge, after our little talk about the Tahoe caretaker? While you were in the shower, I went through your totebag there and found that gun. I’d done the same thing at the Inn back in Healdsburg, and it wasn’t there then. So, I figure the only time you were out of my sight long enough to come up with a piece was when I was inside the chalet, and those Mayans were working in the yard next door.”

Mayans? “I thought they were Eskimos?”

Now Ed did laugh, hard. “No, you stupid fucking bitch. The fat broad in the chalet-Natalya-told me they were her neighbor’s crew, but I’m guessing they were hers instead, and one of them passed you that gun.”

Oh, yeah? “Well, smart guy, that wasn’t all he passed me.”

“Some kind of instructions, too, right? Like, wait till the courier stops, at night, near Vegas?”

Brandi was beginning to think she hadn’t torn up the note in the envelope, though she clearly remembered doing it. Then Brandi let her luck speak for her. “You’re the one who’s stupid, Honey, you know that? The Eskimo or whatever told me you’d never think to look for the little thingy he put under your bumper.”

No laughing now. Just a squint, the eyes going left-right-left.

Good. Finally, Brandi gets her man. The way it hurts him.

Your luck has changed for sure, girl.

Dickhead said, “A homing device, probably based on GPS.”

Brandi got the first part, at least. “So they could keep track of us, they lost sight of the car.”

“Christ, you dense little shit. Don’t you understand the deal yet?”

“The deal is that I get ten percent of all the money in the trunk. Because I’m making it easier for them to take it from you.”

“No, Brandi.” A tired breath. “The deal is that as soon as they see me get out of this vehicle, they’re going to charge up here, kill both of us, and take a hundred percent of the money.”

“No, that’s not what the note said.” Brandi kind of used the gun for emphasis. “What it said was, if you don’t get out of this car now, I’m supposed to shoot you.”

Ed’s chin dipped toward his chest. “Good trick, seeing as how I unloaded your little purse piece there.”

As Brandi Willette couldn’t help looking down at her gun, she felt Dickhead’s hand strike like a rattlesnake at her throat, clamping on so tight and yanking her toward him so hard, she barely could register the silver thing-like a Pez dispenser?-in the fingers of his other-

“Christ!” Ed Krause yelled, as Brandi’s head exploded next to his, the round carrying enough punch to spiderweb the windshield after it came out her right temple, leaving an exit wound like a rotten peach, blood and brains spattered over the dashboard and that fucking teddy bear. Ed ducked as a second round shattered the driver’s portion of the windshield, a sound like somebody whistling through water trailing after the impact.

Ed shoved Brandi’s rag-doll corpse against the passenger door, then yanked the floorshift back to DRIVE and took off. A second later, he thought the Mustang might be in the clear based on acceleration alone when he first heard and then felt the blowout of his right rear tire, the convertible wanting to pivot on that wheel rim, send him off the pavement.