4 ideas
Doc McCoy, paroled with help from his wife Carol, robs a bank with partners, shoots his confederate Rudy Torrento, and runs with Carol across the Southwest toward Mexico. Rudy survives and pursues them, while the McCoys endure grotesque concealment on the way to the border, where they are smuggled out. They reach El Rey, a criminal sanctuary where their getaway ends not in freedom but in a slow, expensive damnation.
El Rey protects fugitives from extradition, but it charges prices high enough to drain even a large haul, then pushes the broke down into ever more squalid settlements. The refuge's safety is exactly what traps its residents, since they cannot leave without facing the law they fled. It is a place where escape succeeds and becomes the punishment.
The readiness to double-cross that makes a criminal effective does not stay aimed at outsiders; once the external threat is gone, it is aimed at the closest ally. The McCoys survive the chase by relying on each other, but in El Rey each comes to calculate the other's betrayal and plots to strike first. A partnership built on ruthlessness holds together only while it has an enemy.
The novel reads the crime genre's getaway not as an escape from pursuit but as a descent. Each stage of the flight strips the fugitives of dignity and humanity. The last section drops realism for an allegorical hellscape, which shows that the real pursuer was the consequence of what they had become.