Pleasure Island. The answer popped into his head. That was it. The island that bewitched boys and turned them into asses. He hoped Vegas hadn’t done the same to him. Initially the driver asked the passengers to stay seated and remain on the bus, but after a half hour of conferring with his supervisors, he informed the passengers that another bus was being sent to their location to take them to Los Angeles. The driver gave them an hour and reiterated that the journey would resume on the new bus at ten thirty, and to please be prompt so they wouldn’t be left behind. He gave them a quick tour-guide style run-down of the available restaurants and sites to see in Primm, including a huge Buffalo shaped pool at Buffalo Bills Hotel, and the roller coaster that Finn was suddenly determined to ride. But when the bus driver mentioned that the bullet riddled car of the infamous outlaws, Bonnie and Clyde, was on display at Whiskey Pete’s Hotel and Casino, he and Bonnie looked at each other in wide-eyed wonder.
Finn had started to laugh, almost choking on his disbelief.
“Now that, Infinity, is a sign,” Bonnie drawled, and immediately scowled. “William’s sign is still in Bear’s car. I’ve got to get it back. If I only come out of this trip with one souvenir, that’s the one I want. A cardboard sign and a big, blond husband. That’s all I ask.”
He and Bonnie waited as the seats emptied around them before they disembarked. Bonnie joked that they could tell the tabloids they had spent their honeymoon in Primm riding the roller coaster, but Finn was pretty sure that like him, her thoughts were narrowed in on the car. When they climbed off the bus, they headed, without a word, in the direction of Whiskey Pete’s and the “death car.”
It was a pale, yellowy-grey Ford V8—a color that only made the bullet holes more glaring—and it looked as if someone had driven it right off a gangster movie set. They couldn’t touch it or look inside. It was enclosed behind a glass wall on every side, just sitting on the plush carpeting outside the main cashier cage. A sign made to look like it was blood spattered and bullet riddled claimed that the car was “The Authentic Death Car of Bonnie and Clyde.”
“Those two don’t look much like Bonnie and Clyde,” Bonnie slipped her hand in his and nodded toward the two mannequins posed, gangster-style, beside the car inside the glass barricade. The mannequins were holding automatic weapons and looking very little like the two lovers from the pictures in the little book Bonnie had bought. The mannequins looked like they belonged on the streets of Chicago in the roaring twenties, not driving through the dust bowl during the Great Depression
“On May 23, 1934, law officers killed Bonnie and Clyde in a roadblock ambush, piercing their car with more than one hundred bullets,” Bonnie read from the plaque in front of the display. She knew all of that—they both did—but she still seemed awed by it—especially now that they were looking at the actual car where the two had died.
“It was almost eighty years ago,” Bonnie whispered, her gaze trained on the driver’s side door, which seemed to have the highest concentration of bullet holes.
The account he and Bonnie had read said there were fifty-four bullet holes in Bonnie Parker, and even one through her face. Finn didn’t like that. He also didn’t like how people had gathered to gawk at the bloody ambush site before the gun smoke had even left the air. And before the police could run them off, people were trying to claim souvenirs, cutting pieces from the clothing of the two lovers who had yet to be taken away and still sat, slumped and filled with lead, in the front seat of the Ford. One person had tried to cut off Clyde’s ear, another had wanted his finger. Someone had gotten away with locks of Bonnie’s hair and a piece of her blood-soaked dress.
Couldn’t they have just killed Clyde? Nobody could ever prove that Bonnie had hurt anyone. She was just in love with a piece of shit. They’d taken pictures of Bonnie Parker in the morgue, naked. He didn’t like that either, and felt a flash of outrage that in death, the world got to see her bare br**sts which were full and unmarked, youthful. No bullet holes to see, but they’d still taken pictures. People just loved pictures.
“Let’s get a picture,” Bonnie insisted, proving his point, and pulled out the disposable camera from their shotgun wedding.
“Bonnie Rae,” Finn warned, but she was already looking around for someone who could take their picture. An Asian couple strolled by, and Bonnie waved the camera in the man’s face, apparently the universal sign for “Can you take my picture?” The man instantly smiled and nodded agreeably, taking the camera from Bonnie’s hand, though Finn suspected he didn’t speak any English. Which was probably good. Safe.
Finn stood behind Bonnie, his arms folded around her, and he posed obediently for the picture. He was sure she was beaming, but he didn’t smile. The car behind him gave him the creeps, and he could only imagine what the tabloids would do if they ever got their hands on a picture like that. His unease rose another notch, and he hurried Bonnie out of the casino and back into the darkness, away from the ghosts of another couple who’d finally run out of luck.
It seemed only fitting that their roller coaster journey should include an actual roller coaster ride, and when Bonnie protested, telling him that she got a little motion sick, he promised her he would distract her. He wanted to distract himself. Not from what he’d just done or the promises he had made, but from the fear of what was to come. The roller coaster promised flight, speed, and a suspension of time. And he wanted all of those things. Her proximity would taunt him all the way to Los Angeles—sitting by her, his ring on her finger, lust in his veins, and not a damn thing he could do about it.