He shook his head and took a deep breath of cold air. He was getting a little loopy. He’d been awake for – how long? He asked for nothing more, right now, than a soft bed and a few hours of sleep. And no girl bound and gagged in the trunk of the car he was driving. Yeah, that too, don’t forget.
He didn’t know what he was going to do about the girl. He supposed this was his punishment. For not listening to the old lady on the bus who told him to stay clean and free. For taking this job because it was the easy thing to do.
Shake checked the dashboard clock. He still had an hour before the meet with Dick Moby’s bag man. He’d find the motel, get a room, try to sort things out.
The Apache Motor Inn was on the corner of West Utah and South Las Vegas Boulevard, across from a strip club called The Jungle. It wasn’t the skankiest motel on this stretch of the Strip, but close enough. Shake turned in beneath a sign shaped like a wig-wam and parked in back, next to an empty pool half-filled with rust-streaked toilets and bathroom sinks.
The clerk at the desk gave him a room key. The key was attached to a hard red rubber bulb scored with teeth marks. Shake didn’t want to imagine the circumstances. He glanced around to make sure the parking lot was still empty, then unlocked the trunk. The girl’s face, the part not covered with electrical tape, was pale and dirty, streaked with the paler, less dirty tracks of dried tears.
“I’m not gonna hurt you,” Shake said. He unwound the cord from around her legs. She was wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, no shoes. Her hands were cuffed in front of her, so he looped her arms around his neck, grabbed her waist, and lifted her out of the trunk. Her legs cramped up the second her bare feet touched the ground and they both stumbled to the asphalt. Shake untangled himself and tried to help her stand, but it was like she was paralyzed from the waist down. Finally he just picked her up again. Her blonde hair, pressed against his nose, smelled strongly like tire rubber and faintly like peaches.
He carried the girl into the room, kicked the door shut behind them, and lowered her to the bed. He knelt in front of her.
“Thirsty? You want some water?”
She nodded.
He found a plastic cup in the bathroom and filled it with cold water. Then he turned the tap to warm and soaked a washcloth.
He looked at the reflection in the mirror above the sink.
“Any bright ideas?” he asked it.
The reflection shook its head, sadly. Nope.
Shake returned to the room with the cup of water.
“This is gonna hurt,” he said, “but it’ll probably hurt less if I just do it all at once.”
He found an edge that had come free and pulled the electrical tape off her mouth. The girl didn’t make a peep. She just closed her eyes and bit her bottom lip.
It was a nice lip, Shake noticed. Plump and rosy. He realized for the first time how pretty the girl was, dirty face and all. Eyes that seemed brown until you looked closer and saw the underwater green. Perfect cheekbones and an imperfect nose, a strong-minded nose, with a dusting of freckles across the bridge. The nose, the eyes, wholesome but not dull – the girl reminded Shake of a girl who could have been homecoming queen but had better things to do with her time.
Shake guessed she was a little younger than he’d first thought, probably around twenty-three or twenty-four.
So how did a girl like this end up in the trunk of a car, express delivery to bad bad dude like Dick Moby? Shake tried not to consider the possibilities.
She moistened her lips with her tongue.
“If you start to yell,” he warned her, “I’ll have to put the tape back on.”
She nodded and said something he couldn’t hear. He bent closer. Her voice was soft, hoarse.
“Water.”
He handed her the cup of water. Her cuffed hands trembled as she lifted it to her mouth and drank. He found the warm washcloth and gently wiped some of the grime from her face.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
Her big eyes couldn’t seem to make up their mind, if they were brown or green.
“Gina,” she said.
“Gina,” Shake said. “Tell me why you were in the trunk of that car.”
“Please, you have to help me.”
“I want to help you. But first –”
“I don’t know! I’m just a – I’m a mom! I have two little boys.”
She made a sound that was part cough, part sob. Shake brought her another cup of water, which she gulped down.
“Where am I?” she asked.
“Las Vegas.”
Surprised. “I live here!” she said.
“But you were in L.A.?”
“On vacation. With my husband. We left the boys with my mom and – we were supposed to go to Catalina Island? To have a picnic? But then Ronnie went out to buy a paper and didn’t come back.” The words tumbling out faster and faster, one over the other. “And the next day this man broke in the door and –”
“Slow down.”
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