Casualties by Elizabeth Marro

Author:Elizabeth Marro
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-01-03T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 26

They were two hours out of Las Vegas when Casey conceded that Lenny had been right. He should have slept one more night in Cactus Gardens and gotten a fresh start in the morning. He squinted in the glare of an oncoming semi, unconsciously easing off the gas and veering away from it.

“Are you all right?” Ruth had said little since she’d agreed to get in the car, but more than once she’d reached for the dashboard as if to brace herself.

“Fine.”

“You don’t seem fine.” Her voice was stronger now. She no longer sounded like she was scratching out each word on sandpaper. She had been sipping constantly on a bottle of water and had even nibbled some crackers he’d picked up at the gas station in Vegas.

“Okay, time for some ground rules. First, lay off the backseat driving.”

“I didn’t say anything about your driving.”

“Next, you don’t get to hold the keys until I get my money.”

“Don’t you think you’ll get tired?”

Now she was pissing him off. Casey gripped the wheel and glared through the windshield. A sign popped up out of nowhere: Cedar City, fifteen miles ahead.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Ruth said.

Casey said nothing.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Ruth said. “You’re not even going to stop for that?”

He glanced at her but she was looking straight ahead, her chin thrust out, foot tapping angrily. Good. Let her be mad. At least she shut up.

Twenty minutes later, Casey guided the Jaguar off the highway and into a parking lot shared by a gas station, an all-night hamburger place, and a motel. “See what a good guy I am?” he said.

Ruth shoved open the door before he switched off the ignition and slammed it behind her. Casey watched her take three steps and then stop, flat-footed in the huge sneakers. The crowd at this hour was small. He looked around and saw only a pickup at the gas pumps, and a row of semis sleeping farther back, engines idling.

When Ruth had shuffled into the restroom, Casey pushed open the driver’s door, got out, and stretched. His back pinched, and his right leg cramped when he moved. He hadn’t driven a car for this long a stretch since he arrived in Nevada a decade ago. The farthest he was used to going was Vegas, where he went once or twice a month for a change of scene and some female company. He had an arrangement with a married cocktail waitress who liked the stump. Casey steadied himself against the Jaguar and reached down to scratch the skin around the edge of the socket. Maybe the waitress would miss him, maybe not. She had other boyfriends.

He stared west but the road beyond the gas pumps was lost in the blackness. He’d landed in Vegas a week after kissing his sleeping daughter good-bye. Emily was five going on six then; he was twenty-five going somewhere, anywhere, where he wouldn’t screw up her life the way he’d screwed up her mother’s and his own.

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