Desperation (5 page)

3

What Mary Jackson recalled, what
caused her to reach for the shotgun even though she had never actually held a gun—rifle or pistol—in her entire life, was the memory of the big cop mixing the words
I'm going to kill you
into the Miranda warning.

And he meant it. Oh God yes.

She swung around with the gun. The big blond cop was standing in the doorway, looking at her with his bright gray empty eyes.

“Shoot him, lady, shoot him!”
a man screamed. He was in the cell to Mary's right, standing next to a woman with an eye so black that the bruise had sent tendrils down her cheek, like ink injected beneath the skin. The man looked even worse; the left side of his face appeared to be covered with caked, half-dried blood.

The cop ran at her, his boots rattling on the hardwood floor. Mary stepped back, away from him and toward the big empty cell at the rear of the room, pulling back both of the shotgun's hammers with the side of her thumb as she retreated. Then she raised it to her shoulder. She had no intention of warning him. He had just killed her husband in cold blood, and she had no intention of warning him.

4

Ralph had pumped the brakes
and held the wheel with his elbows locked, letting it work back and forth a little in his hands but not too much. He could feel the RV trying to yaw. The secret to handling a high-speed blowout in an RV, he'd been told, was to
let
it yaw—a little, anyway. Although—bad news, folks—this didn't feel like just one blowout.

He glanced up into the rearview at Kirsten, who had stopped playing with Melissa Sweetheart and was now holding the doll against her chest. Kirstie knew something was going on, just not what.

“Kirsten, sit down!” he called. “Belt in!”

Except by then it was over. He wrestled the Wayfarer off the road, killed the engine, and wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. All in all he didn't think he'd done badly. Hadn't even toppled the vase of desert flowers standing on the table in back. Ellie and Kirstie had picked them behind the motel in Ely this morning, while he and David were first loading up and then checking out.

“Good driving, Dad,” David said in a matter-of-fact voice.

Ellie was sitting up now, looking around blearily. “Bathroom break?” she asked. “Why're we tilted this way, Ralph?”

“We had a—”

He broke off, looking into the outside mirror. A police-car was rushing toward them from behind, blue lights flashing. It came to a screaming stop about a hundred yards back, and the biggest cop Ralph had ever seen in his life almost
bounded
out. Ralph saw that the cop had his gun drawn, and felt adrenaline light up his nerves.

The cop stared right and left, his gun held up to shoulder height with the muzzle pointing at the cloudless morning sky. Then he actually turned in a circle. When he was facing the RV again, he looked directly into the outside rearview, seeming to meet Ralph's eyes. The cop raised both hands over his head, brought them down violently, then raised and brought them down again. The pantomime was impossible to misinterpret—
Stay inside, stay where you are.

“Ellie, lock the back doors.” Ralph banged down the button beside him as he spoke. David, who was watching him, did the same thing on his side of the car without having to be asked.

“What?” She looked at him uncertainly. “What's going on?”

“I don't know, but there's a cop back there and he looks excited.”
Back where I had the flat,
he thought, then amended that.
The flats.

The cop bent and picked something up off the surface of the road. It was a meshy strip with little twinkles of light bouncing off it the way light bounces off the sequins on a woman's evening dress. He carried it back to his car, dragging one end along the shoulder, his gun still in his other hand, still held up at a kind of port arms. He seemed to be trying to look in all directions at once.

Ellie locked the aft door and the main cabin door, then came forward again. “
What
in the samhill is going
on
?”

“I told you, I don't know. But that doesn't look, you know, real encouraging.” He pointed into the mirror outside the driver's window.

Ellie bent, planting her hands just above her knees and watching with Ralph as the cop dumped the meshy thing into the passenger seat, then backed around to the driver's side with his gun now held up in both hands. Later it would occur to Ralph just how carefully crafted this little silent movie had been.

Kirstie came up behind her mother and began to bop Melissa Sweetheart softly against her mother's stuck-out bottom. “Butt, butt, butt, butt,” she sang. “We love a great big motherbutt.”

“Don't, Kirstie.”

Ordinarily Kirstie would have needed two or three requests to cease and desist, but something in her mother's voice this time caused her to stop at once. She looked at her brother, who was staring as intently into his mirror as the grownups were into Daddy's. She went over to him and tried to get in his lap. David set her back on her feet gently but firmly. “Not now, Pie.”

“But what
is
it? What's the big deal?”

“Nothing, no big deal,” David said, never taking his eyes off the mirror.

The cop got into his cruiser and drove up the road to the Wayfarer. He got out again, his gun still out but now held along his leg with the muzzle pointed at the road. He looked right and left again, then walked over to Ralph's window. The driver's position in the Wayfarer was much higher than a car's seat would have been, but the cop was so tall—six-seven, at least—that he was still able to look down on Ralph as he sat behind the wheel in his captain's chair.

The cop made a cranking gesture with his empty hand. Ralph rolled his window halfway down. “What's the trouble, Officer?”

“How many are you?” the cop asked.

“What's wr—”

“Sir, how many are you?”

“Four,” Ralph said, beginning to feel really frightened now. “My wife, my two kids, me. We have a couple of flats—”

“No, sir,
all
your tires are flat. You ran over a piece of highway carpet.”

“I don't—”

“It's a strip of mesh embedded with hundreds of short nails,” the cop said. “We use it to stop speeders whenever we can—it beats the hell out of hot pursuit.”

“What was a thing like that doing in the road?” Ellie asked indignantly.

The cop said, “I'm going to open the rear door of my car, the one closest to your RV. When you see that, I want you to exit your vehicle and get into the back of mine. And quickly.”

He craned his neck, saw Kirsten—she was now holding onto her mother's leg and peering cautiously around it—and gave her a smile. “Hi, girly-o.”

Kirstie smiled back at him.

The cop shifted his eyes briefly to David. He nodded, and David nodded back noncommittally. “Who's out there, sir?” David asked.

“A bad guy,” the cop said. “That's all you need to know for now, son. A very bad guy.
Tak!
”

“Officer—” Ralph began.

“Sir, with all due respect, I feel like a clay pigeon in a shooting gallery. There's a dangerous man out here, he's good with a rifle, and that piece of highway carpet suggests he's nearby. Further discussion of the situation must wait until our position has been improved, do you understand?”

Tak?
Ralph wondered. Was that the bad guy's name? “Yes, but—”

“You first, sir. Carry your little girl. The boy next. Your wife last. You'll have to cram, but you can all fit into the car.”

Ralph unbelted and stood up. “Where are we going?” he asked.

“Desperation. Mining town. Eight miles or so from here.”

Ralph nodded, rolled up his window, then picked up Kirsten. She looked at him with troubled eyes that were not far from tears.

“Daddy, is it Mr. Big Boogeyman?” she asked. Mr. Big Boogeyman was a monster she had brought home from school one day. Ralph didn't know which of the kids had described this shadowy closet-dweller to his gentle seven-year-old daughter, but he thought if he could have found him (he simply assumed it was a boy, it seemed to him that the care and feeding of the monsters in the schoolyards of America always fell to the boys), he would have cheerfully strangled the bugger. It had taken two months to get Kirstie more or less soothed down about Mr. Big Boogeyman. Now this.

“No, not Mr. Big Boogeyman,” Ralph said. “Probably just a postal worker having a bad day.”

“Daddy,
you
work for the post office,” she said as he carried her back toward the door in the middle of the Wayfarer's cabin.

“Yup,” he said, aware that Ellie had put David in front of her and was walking with her hands on his shoulders. “It's sort of a joke, see?”

“Like a knock-knock without the knocking?”

“Yup,” he said again. He looked out the window in the RV's cabin door and saw the cop had opened the back door of the police cruiser. He also saw that when he opened the Wayfarer's door, it would overlap the car door, making a protective wall. That was good.

Sure. Unless the desert rat this guy's looking for is in back of us. Christ Almighty, why couldn't we have gone to Atlantic City?

“Dad?” That was David, his intelligent but slightly peculiar son who had started going to church last fall, after the thing that had happened to his friend Brian. Not Sunday school, not Thursday Night Youth Group, just church. And Sunday afternoons at the parsonage, talking with his new friend, the Rev. Who, by the way, was going to die slowly if he had been sharing anything with David but his thoughts. According to David it was all talk, and after the thing with Brian, Ralph supposed the kid
needed
someone to talk to. He only wished David had felt able to bring his questions to his mother and father instead of to some holy joe outsider who was married but still might—

“
Dad?
Is it all right?”

“Yes. Fine.” He didn't know if it was or not, didn't really know what they were dealing with here, but that was what you said to your kids, wasn't it? Yes, fine, all right. He thought that if he were on a plane with David and the engines quit, he'd put his arm around the boy and tell him everything was fine all the way down.

He opened the door, and it banged against the inside of the cruiser door.

“Quick, come on, let's see some hustle,” the cop said, looking nervously around.

Ralph went down the steps with Kirstie sitting in the crook of his left arm. As he stepped down, she dropped her doll.

“Melissa!” she cried. “I dropped Melissa Sweetheart, get her, Daddy!”

“No, get in the car, get in the car!” the cop shouted. “I'll get the doll!”

Ralph slid in, putting his hand on the top of Kirstie's head and helping her duck. David followed him, then Ellie. The back seat of the car was filled with papers, and the front seat had been warped into a bell-shape by the oversized cop's weight. The moment Ellie pulled her right leg in, the cop slammed the door shut and went racing around the back of the cruiser.

“ 'Lissa!” Kirstie cried in tones of real agony. “He forgot 'Lissa!”

Ellie reached for the doorhandle, meaning to lean out and get Melissa Sweetheart—surely no psycho with a rifle could pick her off in the time it would take to grab up a little girl's doll—then looked back at Ralph. “Where're the handles?” she asked.

The driver's-side door of the cruiser opened, and the cop dropped into it like a bomb. The seat crunched back against Ralph's knees and he winced, glad that Kirstie's legs were hanging down between his. Not that Kirstie was still. She wriggled and twisted on his lap, hands held out to her mother.

“My doll, Mummy, my
doll
! Melissa!”

“Officer—” Ellie began.

“No time,” the cop said. “Can't.
Tak!
” He U-turned across the road and headed east in a spew of dust. The rear end of the car fishtailed briefly. As it steadied again, it occurred to Ralph how fast this had happened—not ten minutes ago they'd been in their RV, headed down the road. He'd been about to ask David to play Twenty Questions, not because he really wanted to but because he had been bored.

He sure wasn't bored now.

“Melissa
Sweeeeeeetheart!
” Kirstie screamed, and then began to weep.

“Take it easy, Pie,” David said. It was his pet name for his baby sister. Like so many other things about David, neither of his parents knew what it meant or where it had come from. Ellie thought it was short for sweetie-pie, but when she had asked him one night, David had just shrugged and grinned his appealing, slanted little grin. “Nah, she's just a pie,” he had said. “Just a pie, that's all.”

“But 'Lissa's in the dirty old
dirt,
” Kirstie said, looking at her brother with swimming eyes.

“We'll come back and get her and clean her all up,” David said.

“Promise?”

“Uh-huh. I'll even help you wash her hair.”

“With Prell?”

“Uh-huh.” He put a quick kiss on her cheek.

“What if the bad man comes?” Kirstie asked. “The bad man like Mr. Big Boogeyman? What if he dollnaps Melissa Sweetheart?”

David covered his mouth with his hand to hide the ghost of a grin. “He won't.” The boy glanced up into the rearview mirror, trying to make eye contact with the cop. “Will he?”

“No,” the cop said. “The man we're looking for is not a dollnapper.” There was no facetiousness Ralph could detect in his voice; he sounded like Joe Friday. Just the facts, ma'am.

He slowed briefly as they passed a sign which read
DESPERATION
, then accelerated as he turned right. Ralph hung on, praying that the guy knew what he was doing, that he wouldn't roll them. The car seemed to lift slightly, then settled back. They were now heading south. On the horizon, a huge bulwark of earth, its tan side cut with cracks and zigzag trenches like black scars, loomed against the sky.

“What
is
he, then?” Ellie asked. “What
is
this guy? And how did he get hold of the stuff you use to stop speeders? The watchamacallit?”

“Highway carpet, Mom,” David said. He ran a finger up and down the metal mesh between the front and back seats, his face intent and thoughtful and troubled. Not even a ghost of a smile there now.

“Same way he got the guns he's toting and the car he's driving,” the man behind the wheel said. Now they were passing the Rattlesnake Trailer Park, now the headquarters of the Desperation Mining Corporation. Up ahead was a huddle of business buildings. A blinker-light flashed yellow under a hundred thousand miles of blue-denim sky. “He's a cop. And I'll tell you one thing, Carvers: when you've got a nutty cop on your hands, you've got a situation.”