“That might not be how you do business in the backwoods, but it’s how we do it in L.A.,” Pilate said. “I got contacts all over the movie business, we get top price—”
“Excuse me,” Malin said, looking around the RV. He was a bulky man with skinny legs. Cowboy boots poked out from under his boot-cut jeans. “I gotta say, this don’t exactly look like a big-time director’s place.”
“Hey! We’re good for the money. I got a reputation in L.A.—”
“Look out the window, you fuckin’ moron, you see any skyscrapers out there?” Malin asked. “Does that look like Rodeo Drive?”
He said Rowdee-oh Drive, and Kristen smirked over her pointed teeth and said, from behind him, “That’d be Rodeo Drive, dumbass. Row-Day-Oh.”
“Fuck a bunch of roads, I’m going,” Malin said. “If you actually get the cash, I’ll be in Chippewa. You got my number.”
Pilate put his hand up, toward Malin’s chest: “Wait a minute.”
“I ain’t waiting,” Malin said. He was wearing one of those loose Tommy Bahama Hawaiian shirts and now dropped his hand down to his side, slipped it under the shirt, dropped it again, now showing a compact revolver. “I’m going.”
“So now you’re showing a gun and we’re supposed to be business partners?” Pilate said. “That’s really fucked up, man.”
“Yeah, well . . .” Malin stepped toward Pilate, who didn’t step back.
“Get the fuck out of the way,” Malin said.
? ? ?
KRISTEN WAS STANDING BEHIND HIM, and she was such a thin woman that Malin ignored her, despite the filed teeth and all the apocalyptic-themed ink. As Malin pushed toward Pilate, she picked up a ten-inch Henckels chef knife that had been lying under a towel on a sideboard, and stuck it in his back.
Nothing tentative about it, she stuck it in him as hard as she could, with a hundred and ten pounds of weight behind it. The knife went through the peachy silk shirt, deflected off Malin’s spine, missed his heart to the right, took out a piece of lung, and emerged on the other side of his body, inside his right nipple.
Malin grunted, “Oh,” and with an astonished look on his face, turned to her, the gun momentarily forgotten in his hand. Kristen wrenched the knife free and stabbed him in the neck, the razor-sharp blade sliding off to the left, slicing neatly through Malin’s carotid artery.
He tried to scream but failed, turned to run from the flailing knife, blood pumping from his neck like water from a hose. He crashed into Pilate, almost fell, then threw an arm at Kristen: she fumbled the knife, flipping it up in the air, and it came down on her arm, between her elbow and hand, slicing it open. She tried to snatch at the blade and cut her hand, badly, through the palm, and Malin hit her in the face and she went down and he rumbled toward the back door, blood still pumping from his neck, his vision going gray like an Apple computer with a bad video card, and then black.
He missed the side door to the outside and crashed through a door at the end of the short hallway, into a bedroom where a young woman lay on the bed, wrapped in silver duct tape.
He never saw her, simply crashed on the bed, pushed himself up, and as Kristen followed him with the knife, blundered into Skye. Kristen stabbed him in the eye, and he managed to backhand her, then plowed all the way through the RV, almost to the front door, where Pilate whacked him with his scepter, and Malin finally went down, the flow of blood from his neck slowing to a gurgle.
Then everything stopped for a few seconds, and finally Pilate said, “Jesus H. Christ.”
Six quarts of Malin’s blood had painted the inside of the RV: the carpet, the couch, a bolster, an ottoman, the woodwork, towels, the mattress on the bed. The blood had painted all three people in the RV: Pilate, Kristen, and Skye, whom they’d picked up in Duluth.
Kristen spit on Malin’s body and said, “Suck on that, asshole.”
Pilate said, “Make sure that bitch is still taped up back there.” He felt Malin’s hip pocket, took out his wallet, extracted three hundred dollars in twenties and his credit cards, looked at a half-dozen other cards and slips of paper, and found one with four numbers: held the paper up to Kristen and said, “Does that look like an ATM code, or what?”
“I’m bleeding bad,” she said. She held her hand out, showing the bloody cut, and wrapped a towel around her forearm. “I need a hospital.”
“Not around here,” Pilate said. “Not with Malin all carved up like that.”
“I need a doc—”
“We’ll get you one,” Pilate said.
? ? ?
PILATE DROPPED THE WALLET on the floor and said, “We need to get his keys. Can you use the phone?”
“Yeah.”
“Call the guys, tell them we’re heading down to St. Paul. We’ll get you to a doc, tell them it was Saturday-night fights at the local parking lot, and some black dude cut on you. You don’t know who it was . . .”
As she called, Pilate rolled Malin’s body, dug in his pants pocket and came up with the truck keys. Didn’t notice Malin’s wallet disappearing under his butt. When Raleigh came up on Kristen’s phone, Pilate took it and said, “We got a situation. You need to go to a gas station, tell them your buddy ran out of gas, get a five-gallon can if they got one, or a couple of two-gallon cans, get over here to the campground. Gotta be fast: we’re heading down to St. Paul.”
He rang off and Kristen, who was wrapping a towel around her arm and hand, asked, “What are we doing?”
Pilate looked around the RV. “No way we can keep this—no way we can clean it up enough. There’ll always be blood in it, and if we ever get seriously pushed by the cops, they’ll find it. And in a couple days, it’s gonna stink real bad. We’re gonna drive it out in the woods and burn it. In the meantime, you lay towels on the floor so we can walk on something clean, and get in the shower and hose yourself off. I’m going out, I’ll be back in a minute.”
“My arm is really hurting—”
“Yeah, yeah, we’ll take care of it.”