B009XDDVN8 EBOK (4 page)

“You’re a marvel, Selma,” I said. “Frank had good taste.”

“He was the goddamn chairman of the board, honey.” She let go of her cane and gave the shotgun a pump. “Now get.”

I kissed her on the forehead and I got.

I expected shouts and roars, I expected the bullets would be whizzing about my head like bumblebees. But as I hustled to the rental car from Selma’s front door there was only the hot, quiet Vegas afternoon, where the sun seemed to knock senseless everything in its path with billy-club force.

I didn’t look around—what could I gain by looking around except for a bullet in the neck? I simply slipped into the car, started the engine, attached my seat belt, pulled carefully out of Selma’s driveway, and turned to head deeper into the development. By now the killers might have spied the phone at the bottom of the pool, the gun that had slipped from my belt, they might have surmised my exit route over Selma’s wall and through Selma’s yard. They might at that very moment be hopping the wall to search for me. I certainly hoped not, I had never intended to get Selma involved in my mess, but then whenever did my good intentions matter one whit?

I kept my speed low and my eye on the rearview. I can’t say I saw nothing suspicious because everything I saw was suspicious: that parked truck, that dog on a rope. But I kept on driving, well within the speed limit, giving every stop sign more respect than it deserved.

Where Selma’s road ended I turned left and smoothed my way around the park, past the ball field and the basketball courts, the unbroken line of backyard walls to my right. This wasn’t an unfamiliar route, I had practiced my departure in earlier visits, but I had never had to drive it when I wasn’t playacting and so this felt completely different. This felt like tiptoeing on eggshells filled with razor blades.

Still I felt a surge of relief roll through me as I approached the end of the park. I checked my rearview again. Nothing chasing, nothing firing bullets into the air. The development’s exit—and my escape—was just down the curving road, and I sped toward it like a horse heading toward the barn, when I spotted something coming at me from the left, charging right at me like a demon from hell.

T
HE DARK BLUE
car shot through the stop sign, accelerated as if it were leaping, slammed bang into my side.

My hands flew off the wheel as my car flew off the road. Air bags and glass exploded around me, something smashed into my head as the seat belt dug into my neck and the noise of the collision splintered my ears. The car spun and flipped at the same time, spun and flipped and spun…when some son of a bitch slammed into me from the exact other side.

I might have blacked out for a moment, or maybe just closed my eyes as glass and plastic flew all about me, but when I came to, or came to my senses, my car was shockingly upright. To my left was the street and beyond it the park. Directly to my right, peering in through a shattered window, was one of those backyard walls that lined even the interior streets of the development. It was the wall that had kept me from flipping fully over, that wonderful wall. In front of me was the curving road that led to the development’s exit. Behind me was the dark blue car, a stolid sedan, its face now accordioned into the selfsame wall.

Something was stinging my eye and when I wiped at it my hand came away slick and red. Something was ringing in my ear and I couldn’t hear anything else but the ringing. Something was pinching my shoulder and I realized the whole left side of the car had been caved in. Even as I wondered how my luck could be so
rotten as to get into an accident while trying to get away from a pack of murderers, I noticed a movement behind me.

My neck screamed in pain as I twisted around and saw a man climb out of the blue car. And reach beneath his loose print shirt. And there was no good intention in his eyes. And like a dolt, I figured out only then that it wasn’t an accident.

The man might have been saying something, too, it seemed like he was, but I couldn’t hear a thing except for the damn ringing.

I pressed the gas to get out of there. Nothing happened, I had stalled. Crap.

I grappled for the keys, found them, tried to turn the ignition. No turn, locked tight. Crap, crap.

In the rearview mirror the man was closer, a gun now magically in his hand. Crap, crap, crap.

I slammed the gear into park, tried the ignition again. Locked still, still, wait, no. I pressed the brake and the key spun and I felt the sweet vibration of the engine turning over.

I eyed the development’s exit, pulled the gearshift down, jammed the gas as hard as I could, and felt my head jerk forward as the car jumped. Backward. A thump and then a smash. The wheels spun uselessly as the car ground further into the car behind me.

I pressed the brakes, put the gear in drive, shot forward. I could feel a scraping from the rear of the car even as I shuddered down the street toward the exit. I expected something to come at me from the side and slam me into another wall. I expected something to rip through my rear windshield. I expected the worst, as if that hadn’t already happened. I tried to check the side-view mirror, but it was gone.

In the rearview mirror I could see something ugly and shapeless smashed up against the smashed-up car. Before I could make any sense of the shape, I hit Flamingo Road.

I barely slowed to make the turn. There was no traffic light, just six lanes directly perpendicular to me, with enough cars
whizzing by that there was no way I was hopping across three lanes to take a left. I spun my wheel to the right and somehow the traffic parted for a moment, as if I were the Moses of Flamingo Road, and I slipped right into its stream. The first light I hit was green and when I passed that intersection I let out a breath I had been holding since the collision.

I didn’t drive evasively. I stayed in my lane, let faster cars pass, kept my eye out for anything chasing me, stopped at the lights when I had to, kept driving, driving. That was my getaway strategy. To just keep driving, until I could figure out what to do when I stopped driving. I certainly wasn’t going to stop right there on Flamingo and check out the car; the thing still ran, that was enough, though the going was neither smooth nor speedy. As the ringing in my ears weakened, I could hear the rackety noise of my car bouncing off the walls that bounded the street, the whistles and scrapes, the strange bellyaching roars. People stared at me as if I were atop a parade float as they passed me on the left. I wiped more blood off my face, tried to look like it was an everyday thing for me to drive such a wreck.

A cop approached from the other direction and I maneuvered so that I was hidden from his view by a white van to my left. I didn’t want to have to explain what happened to the car, to Augie, why I left the scene of an accident, who I was or why the hell I was in Vegas. At one point a guy pulled up beside me in a battered Dodge, his windows covered with plastic and the paint mismatched on his doors. He stared over at me. I gave him a thumbs-up, like we were just two guys with bad wheels in the middle of a recession. He smiled back, showing off a bright gap-toothed grin.

When Flamingo Road finally reached the highway, I slid into the left lane and, at the light, took the entrance and headed east. It was a snap decision, I didn’t think it out. I saw the sign for 215 and I chose east because east was where my home was and, like a base runner rounding third as the throw came in from the
outfield, home was where I wanted to go. How to get there was the problem.

At highway speed the car shook like a milkshake mixer. I realized I was heading to the airport, and for a moment I felt the calm respite of actually having a plan. Return the car—ignoring the startled stare of the check-in guy when I left the battered Impala in the rental-car line—take the shuttle, check in at a kiosk, find an airport bar, and down a row of something, anything, mixed with vodka while waiting for my plane. It was a plan, sure, sit at the bar like a sitting duck, waiting for a bullheaded man in a loose print shirt to knock-knock on my skull.

A few miles down the highway I saw the signs for the airport exit and I passed them by.

I kept driving, and thinking what to do, what to do, letting my panic get the best of me for a longer time than I’d like to admit. For a few moments I considered skipping airports entirely and driving all the way home. I was more than tempted; it seemed both a lame-brained and romantic notion. Road trip, baby. Twenty-five hundred miles, nothing to it, really. And then I came to my senses. The car would never make it in the shape it was in. And how sweet a target would I be in a wrecked car they could so easily identify?

As I drove through a long stretch of desert I thought maybe I should just ditch the car completely and make my way on foot, hitching rides, keeping completely off the grid. No calls, no credit cards. It would take me a week or so to get home, more maybe, but I’d be completely lost, unreachable by everyone. Including my family. But what if the guy on the phone went after them, how then could I help? And wouldn’t I be flinching at every car that passed, expecting the worst?

My mind was reeling as I headed down toward some sort of bridge. I desperately needed a place to sort it all out. And then I realized with a start that this thing I was crossing was not just any bridge but the goddamn Hoover Dam. On my left was The
Narrows of Lake Mead, with the art deco intake towers rising out of the water like some evil design by Dr. No. On my right was the huge cement arch.

And in my car, as traffic slowly moved across the narrow rim, I could feel the great dam heave and roll beneath me from the unimaginable pressure of all that water. And I sympathized with the concrete beast. How long had it been holding back the river? As long, it seemed, as I’d been running, not just this one day from Augie’s killers, but for years, for decades, running from my past. Wasn’t the dam tired? Wasn’t it ready just to give it up and let the whole Colorado wash through it?

And where was it coming from, all that water, where was the root of that pressure? The Grand Canyon, of course, which was pretty much right on the way. And I knew then, immediately, that’s where I was headed, too. I was in a hole, the deepest of my life. I needed a place to disappear and figure things out. Where the hell else would I go?

I
NEVER MADE
it.

It was dark already when I hit Route 40 at Kingman, and the car’s temperature had spiked precipitously. The Impala and I both needed to cool down. So, instead of the awesome spectacle of the Grand Canyon, I settled for a Motel 6, which, when I came to think on it, considering my situation, was a place far more apt.

I parked what was left of the car in the lot behind the wide, low motel so that it was hidden from the main street. I sat there for a long moment with the engine running and then pulled back, shining my brights on the asphalt. A small puddle of something viscous and dark. My rental car wasn’t going very much farther. I pulled forward again, killed the motor, dragged my briefcase into the motel office, and paid cash for the room. When the clerk asked for identification, I showed him my Nevada license. I didn’t make chitchat with the guy, but when his back was turned to get my key, I snatched a copy of the bus schedule that was in the rack along with pamphlets for the rest of Kingman’s wonderful attractions.

There is little more impersonal in this world than a motel room off the interstate. There is no past, no future, and the present is skeevy enough that you don’t want to look too closely at the bedsheets. My life writ small, with dusty curtains and a sign over the toilet, S
ANITIZED FOR
Y
OUR
P
ROTECTION
.

Once in the room, I showered off the last few hours. In the fluorescent bathroom lights I looked green and ill and beyond hideous, but the bleeding wound was above my hairline, which was good. With the cut covered, I could fake normalcy; I had been doing that anyway for the last twenty-five years.

Wrapped now in a towel, I started pacing the room, rubbing my sore neck and trying to come to grips with what just had happened to my life. All the deepest fears that I had been carrying for a quarter of a century had suddenly blossomed true; the past was hunting me, I was on the run, and there was no safe refuge. If I didn’t play it smart, the rest of my life would be an endless stream of foul motel rooms just like this, one after the other. The cheap TVs with remotes that didn’t work, the scent of ammonia and urine, the stained sheets, the stridor of illicit sex banging through the thin walls. I felt bone tired, I felt deep terror, and yet also, quite strangely, I felt the lift of happiness.