Desperation (10 page)

“I can't. I really—”

The gunshot was deafening, the ricochet of the slug off the road a monstrous wasp-whine, and Johnny was on his feet even before he was a hundred per cent sure he wasn't dead. He stood with one foot in the eastbound lane and one in the westbound, drunk-swaying back and forth. The lower half of his face was covered with blood. Sand had stuck in it, making little curls and commas on his lips and cheeks and chin.

“Hey bigshot, you wet your pants,” the cop said.

Johnny looked down and saw he had.
No matter how much you jump and dance,
he thought. His left thigh throbbed like an infected tooth. His ass was still mostly numb—it felt like a frozen slab of meat. He supposed he should be grateful, all things considered. If the cop had kicked him a little higher that second time, he might have paralyzed him.

“You're a sorry excuse for a writer, and you're a sorry excuse for a man,” the cop said. He was holding a huge revolver in one hand. He looked down at the Baggie of pot, which he still held in the other, and shook his head disgustedly. “I know that not just by what you say, but by the mouth you say it out of. In fact, if I looked at your loose-lipped and self-indulgent mouth for too long at a stretch, I'd kill you right here. I wouldn't be able to help myself.”

Coyotes howled in the distance,
wh-wh-
WHOOOO
,
like something that belonged in the soundtrack of an old John Wayne movie.

“You did enough,” Johnny said in a foggy, stuffy voice.

“Not yet,” the cop said, and smiled. “But the nose is a start. It actually improves your looks. Not much, but a little.” He opened the back door of his cruiser. As he did, Johnny wondered how long this little comedy had taken. He had absolutely no idea, but not one car or truck had passed while it was going on. Not one. “Get in, bigshot.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“Where do you
think
I'd take a self-indulgent pinko-pothead asshole like you? To the old
calabozo.
Now get in the car.”

Johnny got in the car. As he did, he touched the right breast pocket of his motorcycle jacket.

The cellular phone was in there.

5

He couldn't sit on his
bottom, it hurt too much, so he leaned over on his right thigh, one hand cupped loosely over his throbbing nose. It felt like something alive and malevolent, something that was sinking deep, poisonous stingers into his flesh, but for the time being he was able to ignore it.
Let the cellular work,
he prayed, speaking to a God he had made fun of for most of his creative life, most recently in a story called “Heaven-Sent Weather,” which had been published in
Harper's
magazine to generally favorable comment.
Please let the damned phone work, God, and please let Steve have his ears on.
Then, realizing all of that was getting the cart quite a bit ahead of the horse, he added a third request:
Please give me a chance to use the phone in the first place, okay?

As if in answer to this part of his prayer, the big cop passed the driver's door of his cruiser without even looking at it and walked to Johnny's motorcycle. He put Johnny's helmet on his own head, then swung one leg over the seat—he was very tall, so it was actually more of a step than a swing—and a moment later the Harley's engine exploded into life. The cop stood astride the seat, unbuckled helmet straps hanging, seeming to dwarf the Harley with his own less lovely bulk. He twisted the throttle four or five times, gunning the motor as if he liked the sound. Then he rocked the Harley upright, kicked back the center-stand, and toed the gearshift down into first. Moving cautiously to start with, reminding Johnny a little of himself when he had taken the bike out of storage and ridden it in traffic for the first time in three years, the cop descended the side of the road. He used the hand-brake and paddled along with his feet, watching intently for hazards and obstacles. Once he was on the desert floor he accelerated, changing rapidly up through the gears and weaving around clumps of sagebrush.

Run into a gopher-hole, you sadistic fuck,
Johnny thought, sniffing gingerly through his plugged and throbbing nose.
Hit something hard. Crash and burn.

“Don't waste your time on him,” he mumbled, and used his thumb to pop the snap over the right breast pocket of his motorcycle jacket. He took out the Motorola cellular phone (the cellulars had been Bill Harris's idea, maybe the only good idea his agent had had in the last four years) and flipped it open. He stared down at the display, breath held, now praying for an
S
and two bars.
Come on, God, please,
he thought, sweat trickling down his cheeks, blood still leaking out of his swollen, leaning nose.
Got to be an
S
and two bars, anything less and I might as well use this thing for a suppository.

The phone beeped. What came up in the window on the left side of the display was an
S,
which stood for “service,” and one bar.

Just one.

“No, please,” he moaned. “Please, don't do this to me, just one more, one more
please
!”

He shook the phone in frustration . . . and saw he had neglected to pull up the antenna. He did, and a second bar appeared above the first. It flickered, went out, then reappeared, still flickery but
there.

“Yes!” Johnny whispered.
“Yesss!”
He jerked his head up and stared out the window. His sweat-circled eyes peered through a tangle of long gray hair—there was blood in it now—like the eyes of some hunted animal peering out of its hole. The cop had brought the Softail to a stop about three hundred yards out in the scree. He stepped off and then stepped away, letting the bike fall over. The engine died. Even in this situation, Johnny felt a twinge of outrage. The Harley had brought him all the way across the country without a single missed stroke of its sweet American engine, and it hurt to see it treated with such absent disdain.

“You crazy shit,” he whispered. He snuffled back half-congealed blood, spat a jellied wad of it onto the cruiser's paper-littered floor, and looked down at the telephone again. On the row of buttons at the bottom, second from the right, was one which read
NAME
/
MENU
. Steve had programmed this function for him just before they had set out. Johnny punched the button, and his agent's first name appeared in the window:
BILL
. Pushed it again and
TERRY
appeared. Pushed it again and
JACK
appeared—Jack Appleton, his editor at FS&G. Dear God, why had he put all these people ahead of Steve Ames? Steve was his
lifeline.

Down on the desert floor three hundred yards away, the insane cop had taken off the helmet and was kicking sand over Johnny's '86 Harley drag. At this distance he looked like a kid pulling a tantrum. That was fine. If he intended to cover the whole thing, Johnny would have plenty of time to make his call . . . if the phone cooperated, that was. The
ROAM
light was flashing, and that was a good sign, but the second transmission-bar was still flickering.

“Come on, come on,” Johnny said to the cellular phone in his shaking, blood-grimy hands. “
Please,
sweetheart, okay?
Please.
” He punched the
NAME
/
MENU
button again and
STEVE
appeared. He dropped his thumb onto the
SEND
button and squeezed it. Then he held the phone to his ear, bending over even farther to the right and peering out of the bottom of the window as he did so. The cop was still kicking sand over the Harley's engine-block.

The phone began to ring in Johnny's ear, but he knew he wasn't home free yet. He had tapped into the Roamer network, that was all. He was still a step away from Steve Ames. A long step.

“Come on, come on, come on . . .” A drop of sweat ran into his eye. He used a knuckle to wipe it away.

The phone stopped ringing. There was a click. “Welcome to the Western Roaming Network!” a cheery robot voice said. “Your call is being routed! Thank you for your patience and have a nice day!”

“Never mind the seventies shit, just hurry the fuck up,” Johnny whispered.

Silence from the phone. In the desert, the cop stepped back from the bike, looking at it as if trying to decide if he had done enough in the way of camouflage. In the dirty, paper-choked back seat of the cruiser, Johnny Marinville began to cry. He couldn't help it. In a bizarre way it was like wetting his pants again, only upside down. “No,” he whispered. “No, not yet, you're not done yet, not with the wind blowing like it is, you better do a little more, please do a little more.”

The cop stood there looking down at the bike, his shadow now seeming to stretch out across half a mile of desert, and Johnny peered at him through the bottom of the window with his clotted hair in his eyes and the phone mashed against his right ear. He let out a long, shaky sigh of relief as the cop stepped forward and began to kick sand again, this time spraying it over the Harley's handlebars.

In his ear the telephone began to ring, and this time the sound was scratchy and distant. If the signal was going through—and the quality of this ring seemed to indicate that it was—another Motorola telephone, this one on the dashboard of a Ryder truck somewhere between fifty and two hundred and fifty miles east of John Edward Marinville's current position, was now ringing.

Down in the desert, the cop went on kicking and kicking, burying the handlebars of Johnny's scoot.

Two rings . . . three rings . . . four . . .

He had one more, two at the most, before another robot voice came on the line and told him that the customer he was calling was either out of range or had left the vehicle. Johnny, still crying, closed his eyes. In the throbbing, red-tinged darkness behind his lids he saw the Ryder truck parked in front of a roadside gas station/general store just west of the Utah–Nevada state line. Steve was inside, buying a pack of his damned cigars and goofing with the counter girl, while outside, on the Ryder's dashboard, the cellular phone—Steve's half of the com-link Johnny's agent had insisted upon—rang in the empty cab.

Five rings . . .

And then, distant, almost lost in static but sounding like the voice of an angel bent down from heaven all the same, he heard Steve's flat West Texas drawl: “Hello . . . you . . . boss?”

An eastbound semi blew by outside, rocking the cruiser in its backwash. Johnny barely noticed, and made no attempt to flag the driver. He probably wouldn't have done even if his attention hadn't been focused on the telephone and Steve's tenuous voice. The rig was doing seventy at least. What the hell was the driver going to see in the two-tenths of a second it would take him to pass the parked cruiser, especially through the thick dust matted on the windows?

He drew in breath through his nose and hawked back blood, ignoring the pain, wanting to clear his voice as much as he could.

“Steve! Steve, I'm in trouble. I'm in
bad
trouble!”

There was a heavy crackle of static in his ear and he was sure he'd lost Steve, but when it cleared he heard: “. . . up, boss? Say again!”

“Steve, it's Johnny!
Do you hear me?
”

“. . . hear you . . . What's . . .” Another crackle. It almost completely buried the next word, but Johnny thought it might have been “trouble.”
I hear you, what's the trouble?

God, let that not just be wishful thinking. Please God.

The cop had stopped kicking sand again. He stepped away for another critical look at his handiwork, then turned and began to plod back toward the road, head down, hatbrim shading his face, hands plunged deep into his pockets. And then, with a sense of mounting horror, Johnny realized he had no idea what to tell Steve. All his attention had been focused on making the call, ramming it through by sheer willpower, if that was what it took.

Now what?

He had no clear idea of where he was, only that—

“I'm west of Ely on Highway 50,” he said. More sweat ran into his eyes, stinging. “I'm not sure how far west—forty miles at least, probably more. There's an RV pulled off the road a little farther up from me. There's a cop . . . not a state cop, a townie, I think, but I don't know which town . . . I didn't see it on the door . . . I don't even know his name . . .” He was talking faster and faster as the cop got closer and closer; soon he would be babbling.

Take it easy, he's still a hundred yards away, you've got plenty of time. For the love of God, just do what comes naturally—do what they pay you for, do what you've been doing all your life. Communicate, for Christ's sake!

But he had never had to do it
for
his life. To make money, to be known in the right circles, to occasionally raise his voice in the roar of the brave old lion, yes, all those things, but never for his literal
life.
And if the cop looked up out of his head-down plod and saw him . . . he was crouched down but the phone's antenna was sticking up, of course, it
had
to be sticking up . . .

“He took my bike, Steve. He took my bike and drove it out into the desert. He covered it up with sand, but the way the wind's blowing . . . it's out in the desert a mile or so east of the RV I told you about and north of the road. You might see it, if the sun's still up.”

He swallowed.

“Call the cops—the
state
cops. Tell them I've been grabbed by a cop who's blond and huge—I mean, this guy's a fucking
giant.
Have you got that?”

Nothing from the phone but windy silence with an occasional burst of static knifing through it.

“Steve! Steve, are you there?”

No. He wasn't.

There was only one transmission-bar showing in the phone's display window now, and no one was there. He had lost the connection, and he'd been concentrating so hard on what he was saying that he had no idea when it had happened, or how much Steve might have heard.

Johnny, are you sure you got through to him at all?

That was Terry's voice, a voice he sometimes loved and sometimes hated. Now he hated it. Hated it worse than any voice he had ever heard in his life, it seemed. Hated it even worse for the sympathy he heard in it.

Are you sure you didn't just imagine the whole thing?

“No, he was there, he was there, sonofabitch was there,” Johnny said. He heard the pleading quality in his own voice and hated that, too. “He
was,
you bitch. For a few seconds, at least.”

Now the cop was only fifty yards away. Johnny shoved the antenna down with the heel of his left hand, flipped the mouthpiece closed, and tried to drop the phone back into his right pocket. The flap was closed. The phone fell into his lap, then bounced to the floor. He felt around frantically for it, at first finding nothing but crumpled papers—
DARE
anti-drug handouts, for the most part—and hamburger wrappers coated with ancient grease. His fingers closed on something narrow, not what he wanted, but even the brief glance he gave it before tossing it away chilled him. It was a little girl's plastic barrette.

Never mind it, you've got no time to think about what a kid might've been doing in the back of his car. Find your damn phone, he must almost be here—

Yes. Almost. He could hear the crunch-scuffle of the big cop's boots even over the wind, which had now grown strong enough to rock the cruiser on its springs when it gusted.

Johnny's hand found a nest of styrofoam coffee cups, and, amid them, his phone. He seized it, dropped it in his jacket pocket, and pushed the snap closed. When he sat up again, the cop was coming around the front of the car, bent over at the waist so he could peer through the windshield. His face was more sunburned than ever, almost blistered in places. In fact, his lower lip actually
was
blistered, Johnny saw, and there was another blistery spot at his right temple.