Some of the wallets were hard to extract from the shooters’ bodies. Jolene struggled to gather them along with the Uzi and two more 9 mm’s.
After tucking them in the bag, she went back up the road. She was still weak. No cars in either direction. A bad place to die, she thought.
Jolene got in the bus, raked the old transmission into drive, tugged the wheel into the lane and headed north.
The deputy who normally patrolled the road was asleep in his car under a Mesquite grove as she passed. His head was tilted back, mouth open.
He was not asleep. She could not see the bullet holes in his chest, put there by the men she had just killed.
50 miles away from the bodies, Jolene pulled into a closed gas station parking lot. In all of the wallets, she counted $1,863.
With a half tank of gas in the bus, she could get to a motel, clean up and get some food and bandages and ditch the bus, maybe hitch a ride.
Truckers drove east on I-10 every day. Perhaps her instincts would lead her to a decent driver and a peaceful ride to the Florida Panhandle.
Up ahead, a sail cat lay flattened on the roasting asphalt under a sign that read: HOUSTON 82 MILES.
Instead of running over the cat like everyone else had done, Jolene braked and maneuvered around it. She knew how a sail cat felt.