Lester found the scraper and jumped out and left his door open while he went to work on the windshield. The red door of the Paradise Lounge opened and the waitress and the big blond bartender stood watching them. The bartender began to cross the lot and Lester faced him and said, “It’s all good, boss,” and the bartender abruptly stopped as if reaching the end of a tether.
“The police are coming,” he said. “I think you boys had best leave that girl here.”
“So do I,” said Lester. “But it ain’t my show.” He reached into his jacket pocket and the bartender took a step back. Lester underhanded the wad of keys through the air and the bartender caught them in his fist and looked at them.
“What’re these?”
“Keys.”
“No shit.”
“They go to that truck parked in the alley.”
He climbed back into the Chevy and the boy put the truck in gear and drove out of the lot. He turned onto the frontage road and got the Chevy up to speed in the snow.
Reed Lester looked at the boy, then at the girl. Her split bleeding chin and the wet dark ribbon tracing her bared neck, the small pool of blood in the pit of her throat and the dark ribbon running on, down over breastbone, down under a bridge of sweater and into shadow. As the cab warmed there was the smell of her perfume. Of alcohol and bile.
“I won’t ever tell,” he said.
“Tell what?” said the boy.
“About back there.”
The boy watched the road. He reached for his cigarettes but the fire in his throat stopped him.
“Where’s that gun?” he said.
“Put away. Why?”
He looked over and Lester looked up from what he’d been staring at, which was the girl’s bare upper thighs, the hiked hem of skirt. They held each other’s gaze. The wipers made their noise. The boy turned back to the road.
“Loaded?” he said.
“What?”
“The gun.”
“Not much good otherwise, boss.”
“You had it all along.”
“You never know what you might run into on the road.”
“Like a dog.”
“Sorry?”
The boy stared ahead. “You just stood there and watched me. With that hammer.”
Lester watched the boy’s profile for a long moment.
“Well, what if I’d whipped out a gun right there, boss? What would you have thought?”
The boy stared ahead into the diving flakes.
“Damn,” said Lester. “You’d think you’d be happy I pulled that gun when I did.”
The sound of sirens reached them from some uncertain direction. Lester looked around window to window until the sirens began to fade. His eyes fell again to the girl’s thighs. Pale flesh rolling slightly with the drift of the truck. The high black hemline of skirt.
“What are you doing?” said the boy.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t even think it.”
“I wasn’t thinking a damn thing, boss. Jesus. You think I’d do something like that?”
The boy got a cigarette in his lips and lit it and held the smoke in his mouth, fighting the instinct to inhale.
“On the other hand,” said Lester. “A person might wonder what you were doing back there in the first place, boss. What’d you go looking for that got you into that fix?”
Before the boy could respond there was a sudden blooming of red and blue, and the sirens wailed up again and the cruisers multiplied all around them and the boy pulled carefully to the shoulder under the highway overpass.
The cab was shot through with the white light of the cruisers’ spots, and in that brilliance the cab’s dome light when it came on made no impression at all, and so the boy didn’t know that a door had opened until he turned to tell Reed Lester not to say or do a goddam thing, and found him gone. The door still swaying on its hinges, men shouting out there in the lights. Engines raced and tires spun and some of the colored lights went strobing away down the road.
All around him, officers crouched behind their doors with guns drawn and they were shouting at him. He looked again at his open passenger’s door and saw the ice scraper where Lester had left it on the floorboard and, beside it, something else, half stowed under the seat and pulsing blue and red with the cruiser lights. He stared at it for a long moment. Then he looked straight ahead and raised his hands and spread his fingers, as if to designate the number 10. Up ahead, beyond the cruisers and their lights, less than a hundred yards from where he sat, there hung in the snowfall a lambent blue sign with the silvered words SISTERS OF MERCY.