Desperation (2 page)

2

Mary still had hold of
him, and now, as Peter swung onto the shoulder, she began digging in again.

“What are you doing? Peter, what are you
doing?
”

“Stopping. He's got his flashers on and he's pulling me over.”

“I don't like it,” she said, looking nervously around. There was nothing to look at but desert, foothills, and leagues of blue sky. “What were we doing?”

“Speeding seems logical.” He was looking in the outside mirror. Above the words
CAUTION OBJECTS MAY BE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR
, he saw the dusty white driver's door of the cop-car swing open. A khaki leg swung out. It was prodigious. As the man it belonged to followed it out, swung the door of his cruiser closed, and settled his Smokey Bear hat on his head (he wouldn't have been wearing it in the car, Peter supposed; not enough clearance), Mary turned around to look. Her mouth dropped ajar.

“Holy God, he's the size of a football player!”

“At least,” Peter said. Doing a rough mental calculation that used the roof of the car as a steering-point—about five feet—he guessed that the cop approaching Deirdre's Acura had to be at least six-five. And over two hundred and fifty pounds. Probably over three hundred.

Mary let go of him and scooted over against her door as far as she could, away from the approaching giant. On one hip the cop wore a gun as big as the rest of him, but his hands were empty—no clipboard, no citation-book. Peter didn't like that. He didn't know what it meant, but he didn't like it. In his entire career as a driver, which had included four speeding tickets as a teenager and one OUI (after the faculty Christmas party three years ago), he had never been approached by an empty-handed cop, and he most definitely didn't like it. His heartbeat, already faster than normal, sped up a little more. His heart wasn't pounding, at least not yet, but he sensed it
could
pound. That it could pound very easily.

You're being stupid, you know that, don't you?
he asked himself.
It
's speeding, that's all, simple speeding. The posted limit is a joke and everyone knows it's a joke, but this guy's undoubtedly got a certain quota to meet. And when it comes to speeding tickets, out-of-staters are always best. You know that. So . . . what's that old Van Halen album title?
Eat Em and Smile?

The cop stopped beside Peter's window, the buckle of his Sam Browne belt on a level with Peter's eyes. He did not bend but raised one fist (to Peter it looked the size of a Daisy canned ham) and made cranking gestures.

Peter took off his round rimless glasses, tucked them into his pocket, and rolled his window down. He was very aware of Mary's quick breathing from the passenger bucket. She sounded as if she had been jumping rope, or perhaps making love.

The cop did a slow, smooth, deep kneebend, bringing his huge and noncommittal face into the Jacksons' field of vision. A band of shadow, cast by the stiff brim of his trooper-style hat, lay across his brow. His skin was an uncomfortable-looking pink, and Peter guessed that, for all his size, this man got along with the sun no better than Mary did. His eyes were bright gray, direct but with no emotion in them. None that Peter could read, anyway. He could smell something, though. He thought maybe Old Spice.

The cop gave him only a brief glance, then his gaze was moving around the Acura's cabin, checking Mary first (American Wife, Caucasian, pretty face, good figure, low mileage, no visible scars), then looking at the cameras and bags and road-litter in the back seat. Not much road-litter yet; they'd only left Oregon three days before, and that included the day and a half they'd spent with Gary and Marielle Soderson, listening to old records and talking about old times.

The cop's eyes lingered on the pulled-out ashtray. Peter guessed he was looking for roaches, sniffing for the lingering aroma of pot or hash, and felt relieved. He hadn't smoked a joint in nearly fifteen years, had never tried coke, and had pretty much quit drinking after the Christmas party OUI. Smelling a little cannabis at the occasional rock show was as close to a drug experience as he ever came these days, and Mary had never bothered with the stuff at all—she sometimes referred to herself as a “drug virgin.” There was nothing in the pulled-out ashtray but a couple of balled-up Juicy Fruit wrappers, and no discarded beer-cans or wine bottles in the back seat.

“Officer, I know I was going a little fast—”

“Had the hammer down, did you?” the cop asked pleasantly. “Gosh, now! Sir, could I see your driver's license and your registration?”

“Sure.” Peter took his wallet out of his back pocket. “The car's not mine, though. It's my sister's. We're driving it back to New York for her. From Oregon. She was at Reed. Reed College, in Portland?”

He was babbling, he knew it, but wasn't sure he could stop it. It was weird how cops could get you running off at the mouth like this, as if you had a dismembered body or a kidnapped child in the trunk. He remembered doing the same thing when the cop had pulled him over on the Long Island Expressway after the Christmas party, just talking and talking, yattata-yattata-yattata, while all the time the cop said nothing, only went methodically on with his own business, checking first his paperwork and then the contents of his little blue plastic Breathalyzer kit.

“Mare? Would you get the registration out of the glove compartment? It's in a little plastic envelope, along with Dee's insurance papers.”

At first she didn't move. He could see her out of the corner of his eye, just sitting still, as he opened his wallet and began hunting for his driver's license. It should have been right there, in one of the windowed compartments in the front of the billfold, big as life, but it wasn't.

“Mare?” he asked again, a little impatient now, and a little frightened all over again. What if he'd lost his goddam driver's license somewhere? Dropped it on the floor at Gary's, maybe, while he'd been transferring his crap (you always seemed to carry so much
more
crap in your pockets while you were travelling) from one pair of jeans to the next? He hadn't, of course, but wouldn't it just be
typical
if—

“Little help, Mare? Get the damned registration?
Please?
”

“Oh. Sure, okay.”

She bent forward like some old, rusty piece of machinery goosed into life by a sudden jolt of electricity, and opened the glove compartment. She began to root through it, lifting some stuff out (a half-finished bag of Smartfood, a Bonnie Raitt tape that had suffered a miscarriage in Deirdre's dashboard player, a map of California) so she could get at the stuff behind it. Peter could see small beads of perspiration at her left temple. Feathers of her short black hair were damp with it, although the air-conditioning vent on that side was blowing cool air directly into her face.

“I don't—” she started, and then, with unmistakable relief: “Oh, here it is.”

At the same moment Peter looked in the compartment where he kept business cards and saw his license. He couldn't remember putting it in there—why in the name of God would he have?—but there it was. In the photograph he looked not like an assistant professor of English at NYU but an unemployed petty laborer (and possible serial killer). Yet it was him, recognizably
him,
and he felt his spirits lift. They had their papers, God was in his heaven, all was right with the world.

Besides,
he thought, handing the cop his license,
this isn't Albania, you know. It may not be in our zone of perception, but it's definitely not Albania.

“Peter?”

He turned, took the envelope she was holding out, and gave her a wink. She tried to smile an acknowledgement, but it didn't work very well. Outside, a gust of wind threw sand against the side of the car. Tiny grains of it stung Peter's face and he slitted his eyes against it. Suddenly he wanted to be at least two thousand miles from Nevada, in any direction.

He took Deirdre's registration and held it out to the cop, but the cop was still looking at his license.

“I see you're an organ donor,” the cop said, without looking up. “Do you really think that's wise?”

Peter was nonplussed. “Well, I . . .”

“Is that the vehicle registration, sir?” the cop asked crisply. He was now looking at the canary-yellow sheet of paper.

“Yes.”

“Hand it to me, please.”

Peter handed it out the window. Now the cop, still squatting Indian-fashion in the sunlight, had Peter's driver's license in one hand and Deirdre's registration in the other. He looked back and forth between them for what seemed a very long time. Peter felt light pressure on his thigh and jumped a little before realizing it was Mary's hand. He took it and felt her fingers wrap around his at once.

“Your sister?” the cop said finally. He looked up at them with his bright gray eyes.

“Yes—”

“Her name is Finney. Yours is Jackson.”

“Deirdre was married for a year, between high school and college,” Mary said. Her voice was firm, pleasant, unafraid. Peter would have believed it completely if not for the clutch of her fingers. “She kept her husband's name. That's all it is.”

“A year, hmmm? Between high school and college. Married.
Tak!
”

His head remained down over the documents. Peter could see the peak of his Smokey Bear hat ticking back and forth as he fell to examining them again.

Peter's sense of relief was slipping away.

“Between high school and college,” the cop repeated, head down, big face hidden, and in his head Peter heard him say:
I see you're an organ donor. Do you really think that's wise? Tak!

The cop looked up. “Would you step out of the car, please, Mr. Jackson?”

Mary's fingers bore down, her nails biting into the back of Peter's hand, but the burning sensation was far away. Suddenly his balls and the pit of his stomach were crawling with dismay, and he felt like a child again, a confused child who only knows for sure that he has done something bad.

“What—” he began.

The cop from the Desperation cruiser stood. It was like watching a freight elevator go up. The head disappeared, then the open-collared shirt with its gleaming badge, then the diagonal strap of the Sam Browne belt. Then Peter was looking at the heavy beltbuckle again, the gun, and the khaki fold of cloth over the man's fly.

This time what came from above the top of the window wasn't a question. “Get out of the car, Mr. Jackson.”

3

Peter pulled the handle and
the cop stood back so he could swing the door open. The cop's head was cut off by the roof of the Acura. Mary squeezed Peter's hand more violently than ever and Peter turned back to look at her. The sunburned places on her cheeks and brow were even clearer now, because her face had gone almost ashy. Her eyes were very wide.

Don't get out of the car,
she mouthed.

I have to,
he mouthed back, and swung a leg out onto the asphalt of U.S. 50. For a moment Mary clung to him, her hand entwined in his, and then Peter pulled loose and got the rest of the way out, standing on legs that felt queerly distant. The cop was looking down at him.
Six-seven,
Peter thought.
Got to be.
And he suddenly saw a quick sequence of events, like a filmclip run at super speed: the huge cop drawing his gun and pulling the trigger, spraying Peter Jackson's educated brains across the roof of the Acura in a slimy fan, then yanking Mary out of the car, driving her face-first into the lid of the closed trunk, bending her over, then raping her right out here beside the highway in the searing desert sunshine, his Smokey Bear hat still planted squarely on his head, screaming
You want a donated organ, lady? Here you go! Here you go!
as he rocked and thrust.

“What's this about, Officer?” Peter asked, his mouth and throat suddenly dry. “I think I have a right to know.”

“Step around to the rear of the car, Mr. Jackson.”

The cop turned and walked toward the back of the Acura without bothering to see if Peter was going to obey. Peter
did
obey, walking on legs that still felt as if they were relaying their sensory input by some form of telecommunications.

The cop stopped beside the trunk. When Peter joined him, he pointed with one big finger. Peter followed it and saw there was no license plate on the back of Deirdre's car—just a marginally cleaner rectangle where it had been.

“Ah,
shit!
” Peter said, and his irritation and dismay were real enough, but so was the relief beneath them. All this had had a point after all. Thank God. He turned toward the front of the car and wasn't exactly surprised to see the driver's door was now closed. Mary had closed it. He had been so far into this . . . event . . . occurrence . . . this whatever it was . . . that he hadn't even heard the thump.

“Mare! Hey, Mare!”

She poked her sunburned, strained face out of his window and looked back at him.

“Our damned license plate fell off!” he called, almost laughing.

“What?”

“No, it didn't,” the Desperation cop said. He squatted again—that calm, slow, lithe movement—and reached beneath the bumper. He fumbled there, on the other side of the place where the plate went, for a moment or two, his gray eyes gazing off toward the horizon. Pete was invaded by an eerie sense of familiarity: he and his wife had been pulled over by the Marlboro Man.

“Ah!” the cop said. He stood up again. The hand he had been investigating with was clenched into a loose fist. He held it out to Peter and opened it. Lying on his palm (and looking very small in that vast pinkness) was a road-dirty piece of screw. It was bright in only one place, where it had been sheared off.

Peter looked at it, then up at the cop. “I don't get it.”

“Did you stop in Fallon?”

“No—”

There was a creak as Mary's door opened, a clunk as she shut it behind her, then the scuff of her sneakers on the sandy shoulder as she walked toward the back of the car.

“Sure we did,” she said. She looked at the fragment of metal in the big hand (Deirdre's registration and Peter's driver's license were still in the cop's other one), then up at the cop's face. She didn't seem scared now—not
as
scared, anyway—and Peter was glad. He was already calling himself nine kinds of paranoid idiot, but you had to admit that this particular close encounter of the cop kind had had its

(do you really think that's wise)

peculiar aspects.

“Pit-stop, Peter, don't you remember? We didn't need gas, you said we could do that in Ely, but we got sodas so we wouldn't feel guilty about asking to use the restrooms.” She looked at the cop and tried on a smile. She had to crane back to see his face. To Peter she looked like a little girl trying to coax a smile out of Daddy after Daddy had gotten home from a bad day at the office. “The restrooms were very clean.”

He nodded. “Was that Fill More Fast or Berk's Conoco you stopped at?”

She glanced uncertainly at Peter. He turned his hands up at shoulder level. “I don't remember,” he said. “Hell, I barely remember stopping.”

The cop tossed the useless chunk of screw back over his shoulder and into the desert, where it would lie undisturbed for a million years, unless it caught some inquisitive bird's eye. “But I bet you remember the kids hanging around outside. Older kids, mostly. One or two maybe too old to actually be kids at all. The younger ones with skateboards or on Rollerblades.”

Peter nodded. He thought of Mary asking him why the people were here—why they came and why they stayed.

“That was the Fill More Fast.” Peter looked to see if the cop was wearing a nametag on one of his shirt pockets, but he wasn't. So for now, at least, he'd have to stay just the cop. The one who looked like the Marlboro Man in the magazine ads. “Alfie Berk won't have em around anymore. Kicked em the hell out. They're a dastardly bunch.”

Mary cocked her head at that, and for a moment Peter could see the ghost of a smile at the corners of her mouth.

“Are they a gang?” Peter asked. He still didn't see where this was going.

“Close as you'd get in a place as small as Fallon,” the cop said. He raised Peter's license to his face, looked at it, looked at Peter, lowered it again. But he did not offer to give it back. “Dropouts, for the most part. And one of their hobbies is kifing out-of-state license plates. It's like a dare thing. I imagine they got yours while you were in buying your cold drinks or using the facilities.”

“You know this and they still do it?” Mary asked.

“Fallon's not my town. I rarely go there. Their ways are not my ways.”

“What should we do about the missing plate?” Peter asked. “I mean, this is a mess. The car's registered in Oregon, but my sister has gone back to New York to live. She hated Reed—”

“Did she?” the cop asked. “Gosh, now!”

Peter could feel Mary's eyes shift to him, probably wanting him to share her moment of amusement, but that didn't seem like a good idea to him. Not at all.

“She said going to school there was like trying to go to school in the middle of a Grateful Dead concert,” he said. “Anyway, she flew back to New York. My wife and I thought it would be fun to go out and get the car for her, bring it back to New York. Deirdre packed a bunch of her stuff in the trunk . . . clothes, mostly . . .”

He was babbling again, and he made himself stop.

“So what do I do? We can't very well drive all the way across the country with no license plate on the back of the car, can we?”

The cop walked toward the front of the Acura, moving very deliberately. He still had Peter's license and Deirdre's canary-yellow registration slip in one hand. His Sam Browne belt creaked. When he reached the front of the car he put his hands behind his back and stood frowning down at something. To Peter he looked like an interested patron in an art gallery. Dastardly, he'd said. A dastardly bunch. Peter didn't think he had ever actually heard that word used in conversation.

The cop walked back toward them. Mary moved next to Peter, but her fright seemed gone. She was looking at the big man with interest, that was all.

“The front plate's okay,” the cop said. “Put that one on the back. You won't have any problem getting to New York on that basis.”

“Oh,” Peter said. “Okay. Good idea.”

“Do you have a wrench and screwdriver? I think all my tools're back sitting on a bench in the town garage.” The cop grinned. It lit his whole face, informed his eyes, turned him into a different man. “Oh. These're yours.” He held out the license and registration.

“There's a little toolkit in the trunk, I think,” Mary said. She sounded giddy, and that was how Peter felt. Pure relief, he supposed. “I saw it while I was putting in my makeup case. Between the spare tire and the side.”

“Officer, I want to thank you,” Peter said.

The big cop nodded. He wasn't looking at Peter, though; his gray eyes were apparently fixed on the mountains off to his left. “Just doing my job.”

Peter walked to the driver's door of the car, wondering why he and Mary had been so afraid in the first place.

That's nonsense,
he told himself as he pulled the keys out of the ignition switch. They were on a smile-face keychain, which was pretty much par for the course—Deirdre's course, anyway. Mr. Smiley-Smile (her name for him) was his sister's trademark. She put happy yellow ones on the flaps of most of her letters, the occasional green one with a downturned mouth and a blah tongue stuck out if she happened to be having a bad day.
I wasn't afraid, not really. Neither was Mary.

Boink, a lie. He
had
been afraid, and Mary . . . well, Mary had been damned close to terrified.

Okay, maybe we were a little freaked,
he thought, picking out the trunk key as he walked to the back of the car again.
So sue us.
The sight of Mary standing next to the big cop was like some sort of optical illusion; the top of her head barely came up to the bottom of his ribcage.

Peter opened the trunk. On the left, neatly packed (and covered with Hefty bags to keep the road dust off them), were Deirdre's clothes. In the center, Mary's makeup case and their two suitcases—his n hers—were wedged in between the green bundles and the spare tire. Although “tire” was much too grand a word for it, Peter thought. It was one of those blow-up doughnuts, good for a run to the nearest service station. If you were lucky.

He looked between the doughnut and the trunk's sidewall. There was nothing there.

“Mare, I don't see—”

“There.” She pointed. “That gray thing? That's it. It's worked its way in back of the spare, that's all.”

He could have snaked his arm into the gap, but it seemed easier just to lift the uninflated rubber doughnut out of the way. He was leaning it against the back bumper when he heard Mary's sudden intake of breath. It sounded as if she had been pinched or poked.

“Oh hey,” the big cop said mildly. “What's this?”

Mary and the cop were looking into the trunk. The cop looked interested and slightly bemused. Mary's eyes were bulging, horrified. Her lips were trembling. Peter turned, looking into the trunk again, following their gaze. There was something in the spare-tire well. It had been under the doughnut. For a moment he either didn't know what it was or didn't
want
to know what it was, and then that crawling sensation started in his lower belly again. This time there was also a sense of his sphincter's not loosening but
dropping,
as if the muscles which ordinarily held it up where it belonged had dozed off. He became aware that he was squeezing his buttocks together, but even that was far away, in another time zone. He felt an all-too-brief certainty that this was a dream,
had
to be.

The big cop gave him a look, those bright gray eyes still peculiarly empty, then reached into the spare-tire well and brought out a Baggie, a big one, a gallon-size, and stuffed full of greenish-brown herbal matter. The flap had been sealed with strapping tape. Plastered on the front was a round yellow sticker. Mr. Smiley-Smile. The perfect emblem for potheads like his sister, whose adventures in life could have been titled
Through Darkest America with Bong and Roach-Clip.
She had gotten pregnant while stoned, had undoubtedly decided to marry Roger Finney while stoned, and Peter knew for a fact that she had left Reed (carrying a one-point-forget-it grade average) because there was too much dope floating around and she just couldn't say no to it. She'd been up front about that part, at least, and he had actually looked through the Acura for stashes—it would be stuff she'd forgotten about rather than stuff she'd actually hidden, most likely—before they left Portland. He'd looked under the Hefty bags her clothes were stored in, and Mary had thumbed through the clothes themselves (neither admitting out loud what they were looking for, both knowing), but neither of them had thought to look under the doughnut.

The goddam doughnut.

The cop squeezed the Baggie with one oversized thumb as if it were a tomato. He reached into his pocket and produced a Swiss Army knife. He plucked out the smallest blade.

“Officer,” Peter said in a weak voice. “Officer, I don't know how that—”

“Shhh,” the big cop said, and cut a tiny slit in the Baggie.

Peter felt Mary's hand tugging at his sleeve. He took her hand, this time folding his fingers over hers. All at once he could see Deirdre's pale, pretty face floating just behind his eyes. Her blond hair, which still fell to her shoulders in natural Stevie Nicks ringlets. Her eyes, which were always a bit confused.

You stupid little bitch,
he thought.
You ought to be very grateful that you're not where I can get my hands on you right now.

“Officer—” Mary tried.

The cop raised his hand to her, palm out, then put the tiny slit in the Baggie against his nose and sniffed. His eyes drifted closed. After a moment he opened them again and lowered the Baggie. He held out his other hand, palm up. “Give me your keys, sir,” he said.

“Officer, I can explain this—”