“Let’s just get the Ice and the money first, huh?” Chrissie drummed her fingers on the dash and looked out the rear window. “Then we’ll figure it out.”

Chrissie had arrived in town one month before, on a one-way bus ticket from Shreveport, vague about her past except it involved a crazy ex with a mean right hook. She’d just gotten a job at the local vet’s clinic when Tom had brought the dog in for a bath.

The attraction was instantaneous and electric, beginning with furtive glances and then an accidental brush of their hands when Tom handed over a check. A volley of double entendres ended up with Tom asking her to lunch. To his horror and amazement, she said yes.

He’d persuaded the vet to keep the dog for the remainder of the weekend. He then called his wife and told her an old college friend had gotten thrown in jail in Waco and he was going to bail him out. He’d be home in time for dinner. Probably. It was early Saturday afternoon, and he could tell by her voice she had started on the second bottle of white zinfandel and only really cared about number three.

They went to a barbecue joint one county over and then on to a room at the Shangri-la Motel on Highway Six. The first time they did it, right as he started to come, Chrissie grabbed his balls and gave ’em a good squeeze. Tom had never felt anything as intense and pleasurable and thought he never would again.

That was before they met the next weekend and Chrissie brought a foil package of Ice, the greatest substance known to mankind.

Thirty days later, Tom was in a stolen squad car driving toward a tar-paper juke joint called Jolie’s, looking to score enough meth and money to get them to Costa Rica and a new life. Tom took a deep breath and smiled. This is living, man.

The squad car slid to a stop in the gravel parking lot of the bar. Midafternoon on a Wednesday and there were only a couple of other vehicles present. A smidgen of the drug remained in the bowl. Chrissie and Tom split it, sucking on the pipestem until their lungs hurt. They hopped out of the auto and pushed their way into the neon gloom of Bijoux Watson’s only legitimate business enterprise.

The place was empty except for an old man in overalls at the bar, drinking a sixteen-ounce can of Schlitz Malt Liquor, and the mulatto bartender, an ex-pimp named Teabag Johnson. The jukebox in the corner played Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing.”

Tom felt the meth track through his body and thought about how appropriate that song was to the situation at hand and how he sure would like to take Chrissie back into Bijoux’s office and nail her on the desk, right next to the safe, which reportedly held enough dope to get half of Texas strung out.

Teabag wiped a glass dry and looked at the door behind them as if expecting the owner to arrive.

Tom and Chrissie sat at the bar. Tom ordered two Miller Lites and two shots of Jose Cuervo Gold.

“Where’s Bijoux?” The bartender set the drinks down. “Ya’ll give him the shit you supposed to?”

“He’s been…delayed.” Tom downed the tequila in one gulp. “Said for me to get some stuff from his office.”

“He told you to get something out a his office?” Teabag frowned and leaned against the bar.

“Yeah.” Tom took a sip of beer to cool the fire in his mouth. He nodded toward Chrissie. “Ask her. She was there.”

The bartender looked at Chrissie.

“I always thought you were pretty cute, Teabag.” She ran her tongue around the rim of the shot glass. “Bet you know how to treat a lady right.”

Tom spluttered on a mouthful of beer.

Teabag kept his face impassive.

“I don’t truck with no whores no more. The preacher says that’s the road to hell.” Teabag reached under the bar. “Y’all is way messed up, been smoking too much crack or sumshit.”

Tom’s vision blurred with anger; the man called his baby a whore. He reached into the waistband of his slacks and pulled out the Glock.

Teabag’s hand came out from under the bar with a sawed-off shotgun.

Tom yanked the trigger and missed, from three feet away.

Chrissie threw her beer bottle at Teabag and connected, a solid blow to the forehead.

The bartender raised a hand to his face and pulled the trigger on the shotgun.

The weapon was pointed about a foot to the right of Tom, away from Chrissie, and only a small portion of the quarter-inch-diameter pellets hit their intended target.

The noise was enormous, like a thunderclap in a cave, and Tom felt a chunk of lead tear into his left bicep and another hit the fleshy part of his side, just above the hip.

He jerked the trigger on the Glock as fast as he could. About half the bullets hit Teabag in the chest and head, the remainder colliding with the bottles of liquor on the shelf behind the bar. For one brief, surreal moment the area where Teabag stood was a virtual waterfall of liquid, a mist of blood and booze, eerily illuminated by the neon beer signs on the wall.

The Glock clicked empty.

Teabag coughed once and fell to the floor, dead.

Tom placed his gun on the bar and clamped a hand over the oozing hole in his arm. He felt no pain, only a mild sensation of pressure deep inside the muscle. The old man drinking beer was nowhere to be seen.

“He shot me, baby.” Tom grabbed a bar rag and wrapped it around his arm.

“It’ll be all right.” Chrissie helped him tie the makeshift bandage. “We get in the office, I’ll give you dose of medicine, okay?”

Tom grabbed the gun, stuck it in his waistband and picked up the bottle of Cuervo from the bar. Together they headed to the office in the back.

Two weeks after their first encounter at the motel, Bijoux Watson, resplendent in a pink warm-up suit and enough gold chains to outfit an entire rap band, showed up in his office at the bank. He talked his way past the secretary and told Tom he needed five grand or the whole county would know about his little split tail and their love shack over at the Shangri-la.

Tom, on the downside of a two-day bender, put the bank’s chairman of the board on hold, in midcomplaint about his president’s increasingly erratic behavior, and said, “Who the hell are you?”

Bijoux leaned back and put his Reeboks on top of Tom’s desk. “I’m one of those niggas you don’t never see, lest we cleaning up your house or serving you a drink at the country club.”

Tom hung up on the director.

“I don’t know anything about a motel.”

“Your gal’s name is Chrissie.” The man in the garish warm-up suit pulled a piece of gum out of his pocket and stuck it in his mouth. He dropped the wrapper on the floor. “That shit y’all been smokin’. Comes from me.”

Tom started to reply but the man held up his hand.

“My place out by the lake. Jolie’s.” Bijoux stood up. “You be there tomorrow. Noon. With five large in cash.”

That had been two weeks and two hundred thousand dollars ago. Money was missing from the bank and people were starting to ask questions. Three days before, they’d hatched a plan to kill Bijoux. Surprisingly, he had fallen for their story, that they had stumbled on some heroin and wanted to use it in lieu of a payment. Tom had said he’d foreclosed on a property and he’d found it when he inspected the place. The rest of it, the blasting caps and the remote-control device…well, it’s amazing how resourceful one could be when one had a couple of grams of pharmaceutical-grade meth surfing through one’s body.

Now they were in the inner sanctum, Bijoux’s office, a place of utter depression for Tom on his five prior visits. They stood by the door for a moment. There was a battered metal desk in the center. On one wall was a set of bookshelves filled with grimy three-ring binders. Another wall was dominated by a big-screen television set. In the corner sat a large, metallic-gray safe. Tom took a swig of tequila.

The safe had a complicated-looking combination lock. It also had a small key sticking out of the middle of the dial. Tom’s brother had a gun safe similar to this one. The key was to hold the handle of the safe in the open or closed position. Not nearly as secure as using the combo but, without using the dial, a lot easier to access the interior. Tom twisted the key, then the spoke handle and tugged.