Going Nowhere Fast (19 page)

"
The Grand Canyon?
I say to myself.
What the hell does he wanna go to the Grand Canyon for?
But I don't bother asking Bob that question, because I know he isn't going to know the answer. The jerk knows too much already, Bettis isn't gonna tell him all his business, right? So I just go out there. I hang up the phone, find me another car, and drive up to the Grand Canyon."

"And that's where you killed him."

"You have to understand, Mrs. Loudermilk. The little weasel was going to turn me over to my friends back in Baltimore. It was him or me, simple as that."

"But why did you have to do it in our trailer? Couldn't you have found a more appropriate place to… to…"

"Knock him off? Sure, I could have. And I wanted to. But he never gave me the chance. Less than an hour after I found him up there, he caught me in a restaurant giving him the eye and recognized me right away. Next thing I know, I'm chasing him into the trailer park, and watching him duck into your trailer. He didn't think I saw him, but I did.

"Well, I go in after him and find him sitting on the can, shaking like a leaf. I tell him, 'Pull your pants down, Geoffry, make yourself comfortable,' and start laughing like hell when he does like I say. Then I make him tell me what he's doing up there. He says he's got a meeting scheduled with somebody representing the Caprice brothers at one o'clock, they're gonna give him a half a million for the pictures he took of me, and for the address where they were taken. Only he hasn't got the pictures on him. And he refuses to tell me where they are." He shrugged. "So I shot him. He didn't think I would, but I did. I figured if
I
couldn't find the goddamn pictures, neither would the Caprice gorillas. Right? They're gonna travel all that way and have nothing to show for it but the memory of seeing some dead guy sitting on the toilet." He chuckled heartily, like a barfly recalling the punch line of a particularly funny joke. "So I just gave him a quick pat down and got the hell out of there. I didn't think he'd had time to stash anything in the trailer, so I figured maybe the stuff was in his car. Only his car was empty when I found it a few minutes later where he'd parked it—there was nothing in it but some junk in the glove compartment and some trash all over the floor and on the seats. I looked all over that car, then I just gave up and left. I must've been halfway back to Flagstaff when I realized I'd left the gun I used on Bettis under the goddamn passenger seat."

He shook his head to scold himself. "Fortunately, my prints weren't anywhere on it, so there was no real harm done."

"Except to the man they're holding in jail back in Flagstaff, you mean," I said, scowling.

"Oh, yeah. Him." Gottifucci eyed the Ford's speedometer critically. "Watch your speed there, Mrs. L. And keep your eyes on the road, please." I turned around and eased up on the gas, slowing our pace by about five miles an hour to an even sixty.

"Some loser, huh? He goes up to the Canyon to get himself a getaway car, and he takes Bettis's. The one car in the whole place that can pin a murder rap on him. Jesus." He shook his head again.

"So why are you still here?" I asked him. "You'd made a clean getaway. Why aren't you out in Florida, or Mexico, or maybe even up in Canada somewhere, by now?"

"Because," he said, "I can't. I
can't
. I wish to hell I could, but there's just no way. Without the Feds to protect me, I wouldn't last a week. Anywhere. I know it, and they know it."

"But you've committed a murder. A murder they didn't sanction. Surely they won't continue to protect you after
this
."

"You don't think so, huh? Wake up and smell the coffee, Mrs. Loudermilk. The FBI and I made a deal. And if there's one thing the fucking Feds are good for, it's holding up their end of a deal. Any deal. They're sort of like Boy Scouts in that respect. Very loyal. Very dependable." He turned to take a look at the road, and his eyes flew open like they'd seen a ghost: "
Look out!
"

Somebody had dropped the jagged remains of a rusted tail pipe in the middle of our lane, and I rolled right over it. I'd had my eyes on Gottifucci instead of where we were going, and I hadn't seen it coming. I tried to steer around it when he screamed, but I knew better than to try too hard; yank the wheel too fast with eight thousand pounds of trailer tied to your flank, and you'll both end up doing more flips across the highway than an Olympic gymnast might do during floor exercises. In the end, all I was able to do was spare Lucille; she straddled the serrated metal snake perfectly and was never touched. But our pickup had taken the twisted metal husk head-on, and lost; the sound of at least one of its tires blowing had been nearly deafening.

"I oughta kill you for that," Gottifucci snapped as I brought the limping Ford and Lucille to a stop on the highway's shoulder. "I told you to keep an eye on the road!"

"It was an accident!" I said, watching and waiting for the gun in his hand to fire.

He didn't say anything for a long time, trying to decide what to do. Finally, he brushed a few wayward strands of hair from his face with his free hand and said, "All right, out. This way." He opened the door on his side to back slowly out of the truck, and I followed after him. Once outside, he pulled me close, stuck the gun up against my hip, and together we surveyed the damage: one flat and shredded tire, passenger side rear.

"Shit," Gottifucci said.

"What the hell happened?" Big Joe suddenly demanded. He had thrown Lucille's door open and jumped down out of the trailer, and now he was moving toward us. Bad Dog was right behind him, matching him step for step.

"Nothing! Get the hell back in there, now!" Gottifucci cried, turning me around so my husband could get a good look at the gun pressed hard against my side.

"I ran over something in the road and blew a tire, baby, that's all," I said.

"A tire? Where?"

"I thought I told you to get back inside!" Gottifucci screamed.

"On the truck," I said to Joe. "This one over here, in the rear."

''I'm gonna give you five seconds, Mr. Loudermilk," Gottifucci said. "One—"

"Okay, okay," Joe said, holding his hands up in a placating manner. "You don't want that tire changed, fine. State trooper'll be along in a minute or two, you can ask him to do it for you."

"To hell with that. Your wife'll change it."

"Oh no I won't," I said. "I can't!"

"What do you mean, you can't?"

"She means that in order to change a flat on the rear end of that truck, this trailer's gotta be unhitched first," Joe said. "And she doesn't know the first thing about doing that. Do you, baby?"

I shook my head.

"What about
him?
" Gottifucci asked, referring to Bad Dog.

Dog shook
his
head.

"Look. It's real simple," Joe said. "You want that tire changed, you're gonna have to let me unhitch this trailer. Fast. Otherwise, we're gonna be here awhile. Just asking for company. Is that what you want?"

Gottifucci fell silent, thinking. I could hear his breathing change rhythm as he watched the cars whiz by us on both sides of the highway—waiting, I supposed, for one of them to be the state trooper sedan that Joe had so deftly placed in his mind.

"Okay. Go ahead," Gottifucci said in time. "Do what you have to do, and get it over with. But remember one thing: You try anything smart, and your wife is dead. You hear me?"

Joe nodded his head solemnly. "I hear you."

As Joe went quickly to work, Bad Dog approached Gottifucci and asked, "Okay if I watch?" He sounded like a six-year-old asking his mother if he could lick the cake spoon.

"Knock yourself out," Gottifucci said.

And that was how it went, Joe laboring while the rest of us watched, four actors in a little sideshow playing along the southbound shoulder of Interstate 17. As Bad Dog knelt beside his father, Gottifucci and I stood nearby, dividing our attention between Joe and the flow of traffic that kept threatening to blow us off our feet. We were looking for state trooper patrol cars, though neither one of us wanted to see one—Gottifucci for obvious reasons, and me because I didn't think I'd care for Gottifucci's reaction to one. His gun, though invisible to anyone on the highway, was still being jammed firmly into my side, a constant reminder that death was only as far away as he chose to hold it.

Fifteen minutes crawled by, and Gottifucci was getting crazy. Big Joe had Lucille unhitched, but he was just now positioning the jack under the rear end of our pickup.

"Hurry it up!" Gottifucci snapped at him.

''I'm doing the best I can," Joe said.

And then we all heard it: the distinct sound of gravel popping. The four of us turned toward it just in time to see the red Chevy truck slide to a halt along the shoulder of the road, right behind Lucille.

"Oh my God," I said.

There was an Airstream trailer hitched to the rear of the Chevy; an old twenty-six-foot International, from the looks of it. Sunlight was flashing off its silver skin like white lightning.

"Friends of yours?" Gottifucci asked me, as the driver's side door of the Chevy swung open.

"I don't think so. But it's hard to tell from here."

"Doesn't matter." He glanced over at Joe and Dog as they stepped up alongside us to see who our visitor was. "You're gonna get rid of 'em. Whoever they are. Fast. Otherwise, it's shoot-'em-up time." He gave them a fresh but discreet look at the gun he had pressed to my back.

"You don't know what these people are like," I said. "They see another Airstreamer in trouble—"

It was all I had time to say, for the Chevy's driver, a red-bearded bear of a man in a green plaid shirt and faded denim pants, was suddenly upon us. He didn't look the least bit familiar to me, but he was smiling at all four of us as if we were old friends.

"Howdy, folks. Havin' a little trouble, are you?"

I waited to see if Gottifucci wanted to answer that, but he didn't, so I said, "We just had a flat. My husband's taking care of it."

"I see." He turned to Joe. "Anything I can do to help? The wife an' I are always ready to lend a hand, we see another Airstreamer pulled up lame."

"No thanks," Joe said, stone-faced and emotionless.

"You sure? Anything you need, we'd be glad to help. How about some cold drinks for the ladies here? We've got plenty in the truck." He was looking right at Gottifucci and me now, trying to be charming. If he could see through Gottifucci's disguise, his face didn't betray it; if anything, in fact, he looked rather enamored of him.

"Thank you, no," I said.

"All right. My name's Rick Glanville, by the way. But my friends call me Rusty." He held out his hand for Joe to shake, and my husband took it grudgingly. "That's my wife, Kitty, in the truck back there. I don't know if you can see her too well from here, though."

"Look, Mr. Glanville—" I started to say.

"So. How do you like your Excella? Or is that a stupid question?" Glanville was giving Lucille the once-over, his lust for her written all over his face.

"It's a load of crap," Big Joe said sharply, and my eyes nearly rolled up into my head.

"How's that again?" Glanville asked, turning.

"I said, it's a load of crap. A pile of junk. Worst excuse for a trailer on the road."

"You mean you got a lemon?"

"I mean that I should've bought a Winnebago. That's what I mean."

"A
Winnebago?
"

"You heard me. I wouldn't buy another Airstream if my life depended on it."

Glanville couldn't believe his ears. "Now, waitaminute, partner…" he said.

"Waitaminute, nothin'. They're junk, all of 'em, and anybody dumb enough to own one deserves all the grief they get. Now, if you don't mind, we've got work to do, like my wife said. But thanks for stoppin' by."

Glanville was furious; not a trace of his down-home good humor was left to be seen on his face. "Okay," he said to Joe, nodding his head up and down. "I don't know what your problem is, buddy, but if that's how you want it, I'm gone. But you better know one little thing before go—" He pointed an angry finger directly at my husband's nose. 'The Wally Byam Caravan Club is gonna hear about this, and when they do, you folks better never,
ever
let anybody catch you at one of our rallies. You got that?"

Calm as you please, Joe took three giant steps forward to bring himself within an inch of Glanville's freckled face. "Wally Byam was a
punk
," he said, poking his right index finger into the large man's chest to accentuate the word "punk."

Then he ducked.

The punch Glanville threw with his right hand hit Gottifucci flush on the nose, hard, and Gottifucci had never for a moment seen it coming. Joe had positioned himself perfectly to ensure that he wouldn't. I heard the blow connect, and afterward felt, more than saw, the oddly dressed man behind me crumple to the ground, falling as if someone had tossed him a medicine ball before cutting him down at the knees. Somewhere on the way down, he and his wig parted ways, so that Glanville had a big surprise coming when he peered down at the body to assess the damage he had done.

"Aw, hell," was all he said.

12

"We let things get out of control. I'm sorry," Agent Medavoy said.

It wasn't the first time he had said it. Ever since his arrival at the tiny sheriff's office in Bumble Bee, Arizona, where we had all been taken to issue our statements, he had been offering the same apology. To me, to Joe, even to Bad Dog. It seemed genuine enough, but that didn't mean it was worth anything; maybe a cup of coffee, at the most.

Gottifucci had implied that the FBI was committed to covering for him, no matter how many bodies he piled up in the interests of "self-preservation," but Medavoy denied it. He said the Bureau would have stepped in themselves to save us from Gottifucci had they only known where to find him. I wanted to believe that, but I wasn't sure I could.

"We could have been killed," I'd say to Medavoy.

"Yes ma'am," he'd say to me. "But if you'd been honest with us…"