Desperation (14 page)

She picked the cards up, looked at them, then put them back and turned slowly all the way around, her face solemn and shiny with sweat. He was sweating himself, and plenty. He could feel it running down his body like a light, sticky oil. “Where did they
go?
”

“Nearest town, to get help,” he said. “Probably someone gave them a lift. Do you remember from your map what's around here?”

“No. There is a town, I think, but I don't recall the name. But if that's what they did, why didn't they lock up their place when they left? I mean, all their shit is here.” She waved one hand toward the cabin. “Know what's back there by the studio couch?”

“Nope.”

“The wife's jewelry caddy. A ceramic frog. You put your rings and earrings in the frog's mouth.”

“
That
sounds tasteful.” He wanted to get out of here, and not just because it was so nasty-hot or because he had to track down the boss. He wanted to get out because the RV
was
like the fucking
Mary Celeste.
It was too easy to imagine vampires hidden away in the closets, vampires in Bermuda shorts and tee-shirts saying things like
I SURVIVED HIGHWAY 50, THE LONELIEST HIGHWAY IN AMERICA
!

“It's actually cute,” she said, “but that's not the point. There's two sets of earrings and a finger-ring in it. Not
real
expensive, but not junk, either. The ring's a tourmaline, I think. So why didn't they—”

She saw something in the map-holder, something that had been revealed when he stirred the crammed-in papers, and plucked out a dollar-sign moneyclip that looked like real silver. There were bills folded into it. She fanned them quickly with the tip of a finger, then tossed the moneyclip back into the map-holder as if it were hot.

“How much?” he asked.

“Forty or so,” she said. “The clip itself's probably worth three or four times that much. Tell you what, pilgrim—this smells bad.”

Another gust of wind splashed sand against the northern side of the RV, this one hard enough to rock it a little on its flat tires. The two of them looked at each other out of their sweat-shiny faces. Steve met the doll's blank blue gaze.
What happened, here, honey? What did
you
see?

He turned for the door.

“Time for the cops?” Cynthia asked.

“Soon. First I want to walk a mile of backtrail, see if I can spot any sign of my boss.”

“In this wind? Man, that's really dumb!”

He looked at her for a moment, not saying anything, then pushed past her and went down the steps.

She caught up with him at the foot of them. “Hey, let's call it even, okay? You made fun of my grammar, I made fun of your whatever.”

“Intuition.”

“Intuition, is that what you call it? Well, fine. Call it even? Say yeah. Please. I'm too spooked to want to piss in the catbox.”

He smiled at her, a little touched by the anxiety on her face. “Okay, yeah,” he said. “Even as even can be.”

“You want me to drive the truck back? I can do a mile by the odometer, give you a finishing line to shoot for.”

“Can you turn it around without—” A semi with
KLEENEX SOFTENS THE BLOW
written on the side blasted past at seventy, headed east. Cynthia flinched back from it, shielding her eyes from flying sand with one Kate Moss arm. Steve put his own arm around her scant shoulders, steadying her for a moment or two. “—without getting stuck?” he finished.

She gave him an annoyed look and stepped out from under his arm. “Course.”

“Well . . . mile and a half, okay? Just to be on the safe side.”

“Okay.” She started toward the Ryder truck, then turned back to him. “I just remembered the name of the little town that's close to here,” she said, and pointed east. “It's up that way, south of the highway. Cute name. You're gonna love it, Lubbock.”

“What?”

“Desperation.” She grinned and climbed up into the cab of the truck.

5

He walked slowly east along
the shoulder of the westbound lane, raising his hand in a wave but not looking up as the Ryder truck, with Cynthia behind the wheel, rumbled slowly past. “I don't have the slightest
idea
what you're looking for!” she called down to him.

She was gone before he had any chance to reply, which was just as well; he didn't have any idea, either. Tracks? A ridiculous idea, given the wind. Blood? Bits of chrome or taillight glass? He supposed that was actually the most likely. He only knew two things for sure: that his instincts had not just asked him to do this but
demanded
it, and that he couldn't get the doll's glazey blue stare out of his mind. Some little girl's favorite doll . . . only the little girl had left Alice Blue Gown lying face-down in the dirt by the side of the road. Mom had left her jewelry, Dad had left his moneyclip, and son David had left his autographed baseball cards.

Why?

Up ahead, Cynthia swung wide, then turned the bright yellow truck so it was facing back west again. She did this with an economy Steve wasn't sure he could have matched himself, needing to back and fill just a single time. She got out, started walking toward him at a good clip, hardly looking down at all, and he had time, even then, to be moderately pissed that she should have found what his instinct had sent him out here to look for. “Hey!” she said. She bent over, picked something up, and shook sand off it.

He jogged to where she was standing. “What? What is it?”

“Little notebook,” she said, and held it out. “I guess he was here, all right.
J. Marinville,
printed right on the front. See?”

He took the small wirebound notepad with the bent cover and paged through it quickly. Directions, maps Steve had drawn himself, and jotted notes in the boss's topheavy scrawl, most of them about the scheduled receptions. Under the heading
St. Louis,
Marinville had scribbled,
Patricia Franklin. Redhead, big boobs.
DON'T CALL HER PAT OR PATTY!
Name of org. is
FRIENDS OF OPEN LIBES
. Bill sez P.F. also active in animal-rights stuff. Veggie.”
On the last page which had been used, a single word had been scrawled in an even more flamboyant version of the boss's handwriting:

That was all. As if he had started to write an autograph for someone and then never finished.

He looked up at Cynthia and saw her cross her arms beneath her scant bosom and begin rubbing the points of her elbows. “Bruh,” she said. “It's impossible to be cold out here, but I am just the same. This keeps getting spookier and spookier.”

“How come this didn't just fly away in the breeze?”

“Pure luck. It blew against a big rock and then sand covered the bottom half. Like with the doll. If he'd dropped it six inches to the right or left, it'd prob'ly be halfway to Mexico by now.”

“What makes you think he dropped it?”

“Don't
you
?” she asked.

He opened his mouth to say he really didn't think anything, at least not yet, and then forgot all about it. He was seeing a glint out in the desert, probably the same one Cynthia had seen while they were coming up on the RV, only they weren't moving now, so the glint was staying steady. And it wasn't just mica chips embedded in rock, he would bet on that. For the first time he was really, painfully afraid. He was running out into the desert, running toward the glint, before he was even aware he meant to do it.

“Hey, don't go so fast!” She sounded startled. “Wait up!”

“No, stay there!” he called back.

He sprinted the first hundred yards, keeping that star-point of sun directly in front of him (except now the star-point had begun to spread to take on a shape he found dreadfully familiar), and then a wave of dizziness hit and stopped him. He bent over with his hands grasping his legs just above the knees, convinced that every cigar he had smoked in the last eighteen years had come back to haunt him.

When the vertigo passed a little and the padded-jackhammer sound of his heartbeat began to diminish in his ears, he heard a distinct but somehow ladylike puffing from behind him. He turned and saw Cynthia approaching at a jog, sweating hard but otherwise fine and dandy. Her gaudy curls had flattened a little, that was all.

“You stick . . . like a booger on . . . the end of a finger,” he panted as she pulled up beside him.

“I think that's the sweetest thing a guy ever said to me. Put it in your fucking haiku book, why don't you? And don't have a heart attack. How old are you, anyway?”

He straightened up with an effort. “Too old to be interested in
your
giblets, Chicken Little, and I'm fine. Thanks for your concern.” On the highway a car blipped by without slowing. They both looked. Out here, each passing car was a noticed event.

“Well, can I suggest we walk the rest of the way? Whatever that thing is, it's not going anywhere.”

“I know what it is,” he said, and trotted the last twenty yards. He knelt before it like a primitive tribesman before an effigy. The boss's Harley had been hurriedly and indifferently buried. The wind had already freed one handlebar and part of another.

The girl's shadow fell over him and he looked up at her, wanting to say something that would make her believe he wasn't completely freaked out by this, but nothing came. He wasn't sure she would have heard him, anyway. Her eyes were wide and scared, riveted on the bike. She fell to her knees beside him, held out her hands as if measuring, then dug a little distance to the right of the handlebars. The first thing she found was the boss's helmet. She pulled it free, poured the sand out of it, and set it aside. Then she brushed delicately beneath where it had been. Steve watched her. He wasn't sure his legs would support him if he wanted to get up. He kept thinking of the stories you saw in the paper from time to time, stories about bodies being discovered in gravel pits and pulled out of the ever-popular shallow grave.

Along the scooped declivity she had made, he now saw painted metal bright against the gray-brown sand. The colors were red and cream. And letters.
HARL
.

“That's it,” she said. Her words were indistinct, because she was rubbing one hand compulsively back and forth across her mouth. “That's the one I saw, all right.”

Steve grabbed the handlebars and tugged. Nothing. He wasn't surprised; it was a pretty feeble tug. He suddenly realized something that was interesting, in a horrible sort of way. It wasn't just the boss he was worried about anymore. Nosir. His concerns had widened, it seemed. And he had this feeling, this weird feeling, as if—

“Steve, my nice new friend,” Cynthia said in a little voice, looking up at him from the little bit of fuel nacelle she had uncovered, “you're probably going to think this is
primo
stupid, the sort of thing dumb broads are always saying in lousy movies, but I feel like we're being watched.”

“I don't think you're being stupid,” he said, and scooped a little more sand away from the nacelle. No blood. Thank God for that. Which wasn't to say that there wasn't blood on the damned thing somewhere. Or a body buried beneath it. “I feel that way, too.”

“Can we get out of here?” she asked—almost pleaded. She wiped sweat off her brow with one arm. “Please?”

He stood up and they started back. When she stuck her hand out, he was glad to take it.

“God, the feeling's strong,” she said. “Is it strong for you?”

“Yeah. I don't think it means anything but being really scared, but yeah—it's strong. Like—”

A howl rose in the distance, wavering. Cynthia's grip on his hand tightened enough for Steve to be grateful that she bit her nails.

“What's that?” she whimpered. “Oh my God, what is it?”

“Coyote,” he said. “Just like in the Western movies. They won't hurt us. Let up a little, Cynthia, you're killin me.”

She started to, then clamped down again when a second howl came, wrapping itself lazily around the first like a good barbershop tenor doing harmony.

“They're nowhere close,” he said, now having to work in order to keep himself from pulling his hand out of hers. She was a lot stronger than she looked, and she was hurting. “Really, kiddo, they're probably in the next county—relax.”

She eased up on his hand, but when she turned her shiny face to him, it was almost pitifully frightened. “Okay, they're nowhere close, they're probably in the next county, they're probably phonin it in from across the California state line, in fact, but I don't like things that bite. I'm
scared
of things that bite. Can we get back to your truck?”

“Yes.”

She walked with her hip brushing his, but when the next howl came, she didn't squeeze his hand quite so hard—that one clearly was at some distance, and it wasn't immediately repeated. They reached the truck. Cynthia got in on the passenger side, giving him one quick, nervous smile over her shoulder as she hauled herself up. Steve walked around the truck's hood, realizing as he went that the sensation of being watched had slipped away. He was still scared, but now it was primarily for the boss again—if John Edward Marinville was dead, the headlines would be worldwide, and Steven Ames would undoubtedly be part of the story. Not a good part. Steven Ames would be the fail-safe that failed, the safety net that hadn't been there when Big Daddy finally fell off the trapeze.

“That feeling of being watched . . . probably it was the coyotes,” she said. “You think?”

“Maybe.”

“What now?” Cynthia asked.

He took a deep breath and reached for the cellular phone. “Time for the cops,” he said, and dialled 911.

What he heard in his ear was what he had pretty much expected: one of those cell-net recorded voices telling him it was sorry, but his call could not be completed at this time. The boss had gotten through—briefly, anyway—but that had been a fluke. Steve snapped the mouthpiece closed with a savage flick of his wrist, threw the phone back onto the dash, and started the Ryder's engine. He was dismayed to see that the desert floor had taken on a distinctly purplish cast. Shit. They'd spent more time in the deserted RV and kneeling in front of the boss's half-buried scoot than he had thought.

“No, huh?” She was looking at him sympathetically.

“No. Let's find this town you mentioned. What was it?”

“Desperation. It's east of here.”

He dropped the gearshift lever into Drive. “Navigate for me, will you?”

“Sure,” she said, and then touched his arm. “We'll get help. Even in a town that small, there's got to be at least
one
cop.”

He drove up to the abandoned RV before turning east again, and saw the door was still flapping. Neither of them had thought to latch it. He stopped the truck, ran the transmission up into Park, and opened his own door.

Cynthia grabbed his shoulder before he could swing more than one leg out. “Hey, where you going?” Not panicked, but not exactly serene, either.

“Easy, girl. Just give me a sec.”

He got out and latched the door of the RV, which was something called a Wayfarer, according to the chrome on its flank. Then he came back to the idling Ryder truck.

“What are you, one of those type-A guys?” she asked.

“Not usually. I just didn't like that thing bangin in the breeze.” He paused, one foot on the running board, looking up at her, thinking. Then he shrugged. “It was like looking at a shutter on a haunted house.”

“Okay,” she said, and then more howls rose in the distance—maybe south of them, maybe east, with the wind it was hard to tell, but this time it sounded like at least half a dozen voices. This time it sounded like a pack. Steve got up in the cab and slammed the door.

“Come on,” he said, pulling the transmission lever down into Drive again. “Let's turn this rig around and find us some law.”