I Don't Like Where This Is Going (22 page)

I said, “What is this, the bad guys' code of honor? You're all shithouse rats, and you know it. You tell me where they are, and I'll have an ambulance sent out here. Wherever the hell here is. And tonight you could be dreaming morphine dreams between freshly laundered sheets.”

I told him to stand. When he wouldn't, I fired a shot between his legs and into the metal chair. He stood then. I shoved him to the door, unlocked it, and pushed him across the yard to the side of the single-wide. There were a dozen jittery sheep enclosed in a foul-smelling pen. I had Creed sit on the ground by the gate. I started the pickup: full tank of gas and a staticky radio. I turned off the radio, turned on the headlights, and saw Creed lumbering through the sagebrush toward the mountains. I told him to stop. He kept going. I fired a warning shot in the air. He screamed in agony and fell. How bad a shot was I? I followed the sound of his howling and found him writhing on his back in agony. He'd stepped on a spring-loaded steel leg-hold trap, and its formidable jaws had clamped down on his bare foot from ankle to instep. He screamed for me to set him loose.

There are twenty-six bones, thirty-three joints, one hundred and seven ligaments, and nineteen muscles and tendons in the human foot, and I'd bet that most all of them in Creed's foot were broken, splintered, pulled, or torn. He pounded his fist in the dirt. One more time I offered him a bargain. He said what sounded like “Joyce Kilmer,” which I translated as “Just kill me.” I said, “Tell me where they are, and I will.” One more time he said nothing. “No water for you,” I said. “No knife to cut your leg off.” I told him if he were lucky he'd pass out soon from the pain. I left him crying, took a case of bottled water from the back porch, got in the truck,
and made my way along a dirt road to the highway, jackrabbits bounding in front of the truck all the way.

I drove to Pesadilla, hoping to find Patience alive and alone, or the red pickup, or even the bronze pickup. I drove by every one of the seventeen darkened houses in town and by the five businesses: the saloon, Tinker's garage, a shuttered general store, a rock shop, and Ray's Antiques and Treasures. I looked through the window of the Full Moon, saw Lacy at a slot machine and a man passed out at a table. The kidnappers had an uncooperative Patience with them and a man in need of hospitalization. Either they'd driven to one of their houses somewhere between here and Austin, I guessed, or they were on their way to the nearest hospital, which I figured would be in Fallon.

Creed's phone chimed. Text message from Grady:
he at rest?
I answered:
dead u mean.
Grady:
wtf
. Me:
u want dead
. I got no response. Now Grady knew something was out of whack at Creed Wackell's. He or Nacho or both would be coming to check on me or on what was left of me and to read Creed the riot act. I drove to the gravel road to Creed's, pulled off the two-lane blacktop opposite, drove fifty or so yards into the desert, turned the pickup to face the highway, shut off the lights, and waited. I didn't want to think about Patience. I turned on the radio and heard a talk-show host call for an open-minded exploration of the supernatural and then launch into a rant about the not-so-secret alien military outpost in Area 51 and the imminent launch of ghost bombs on the West Coast and the eventual subjugation of humanity under the leadership of Emperor Obama, who would reveal himself to be Ahkenaten, the once and future pharaoh of the Eighteenth Egyptian Dynasty. I turned the radio off.

Bay texted that he and the galvanic Open Mike were on their way. A five-hour drive. Give or take. I texted back that I was only
semi-vigilant and having a hard time staying awake. He promised to send a text every fifteen minutes just to rouse me. The cab of the pickup smelled like an infected sebaceous cyst. I opened both windows. No approaching lights on the highway. No sound except the trill of my own tinnitus. I opened the glove compartment: a pair of binoculars with badly scratched lenses, book matches from the Moonlight Motel, a nearly spent can of WD-40, assorted screws and fuses; no title, no registration, no proof of insurance.

The throbbing pain in my cheekbone was now radiating across my face like an electrical charge. I knew Patience would not have gone gently and that her scrap and resistance might not work in her favor. I thought maybe there was a clue to where they'd gone on Creed's phone. I checked his contacts.
Grady
was there and so was
Sheriff's Dept.
Someone named
Dill, feedstore
,
Tinker B.
,
Dr T
,
AceHdwre
,
and Angels,
plural, although Creed struck me as one of those inattentive writers who make their plurals with apostrophes and their possessives without. So this entry was, I figured, Angel Ramos Gonzalez: the incapacitated Chili. There were phone numbers, but no addresses. If Chili really was a deputy, then calling the sheriff might only make matters worse. I called anyway. The bored baritone who answered said, “What's up, Creed?”

I said, “All good.”

“Chili's off today.”

“There's been an accident.”

“Who is this?”

I hung up and then dialed 911 and ignored the call back from the sheriff. A woman answered. “Creed?”

“Yes.”

“You dialed emergency. You got one?”

“Little one.”

And then she asked me to hold, which I knew was not 911 protocol,
so I hung up before they could trace my location. If they dispatched a chopper, I was toast. I had to hope that, sometime before dawn, Grady would arrive to find out what had gone so wrong with Creed. I couldn't hide on a desolate salt flat in broad daylight. I cleaned the lenses of the binoculars with my breath and the hem of my shirt. I fixed my eye on the trailer and could see the lights of the kitchen and the porch. If Grady showed, he'd have three choices: A. Shoot Creed and put him out of his misery; B. Release Creed from the leg trap; C. Do nothing and leave. When he pulled back onto the road and headed north or south, I'd follow him.

Why did I suddenly think I was an action hero? I was a therapist. Until fairly recently the worst trouble in my life had been dealing with insurance payments from Blue Cross and Red Tape of Florida, Inc. But I did have a gun, and I did have the cavalry on its way: Bay, the trickster, and Open Mike, the berserker, the bedlamite of chaos. Bay once saw Mike conduct an enhanced interrogation of a police union thug by hanging the fellow, an Everglades County deputy, out the window of a speeding Lexus on 95 until the guy's shoes were gone, as were the legs of his uniform slacks and most of the skin on his legs below the knees. The petrified man talked a blue streak when Mike hauled him back inside. Having Mike around would neutralize Grady and company, I figured. I wouldn't do anything till they arrived, except to follow. At a safe distance.

13

I
WAS RIPPED
out of dreamland by the jolting chime of Bay's rousing text message on Creed's phone. When my heart finally stilled, and I could once again feel the throbbing and radiating pain from my swollen eye and the crushing ache in my head, I realized that the only way I would overcome the fear and anxiety was to act. The sitting, the waiting, the not doing anything, was making me crazy. It was time to bait the hook.

I had to find Grady in order to find Patience before I lost the cover of darkness. It was going on three; Bay and Mike were still a good two and a half hours away. I drove back to Creed's and parked the car facing the empty highway. I checked on Creed and found him to be mercifully unconscious. Or else he was dead, but I preferred to think not. I took a photo of the acerebral thug in all his indignity on his phone. I let the sheep out of their pen and shooed them off into the desert. They seemed reluctant to leave. I went inside the trailer and found what I was looking for in the medicine cabinet—Advil—to reduce, I hoped, the swelling in my eye. Creed had a rusting can of Colgate tooth powder in the cabinet, but no toothbrush. I'll spare you the repugnant details of the commode. I
gathered all the clothing and threadbare linens I could find in the house and carried them outside to the fire pit. I did the same with the newspapers and magazines (
Nevada Rancher
and
Outdoor Life
). I grabbed a cold can of beer and held it to my eye. I found the circuit breaker panel and turned off the electricity. I turned on the gas stove but did not light the pilot.

In the metal shed out back I found three two-gallon cans of Coleman's fuel, a half-full can of brushing lacquer, a quart of paint thinner, a jug of kerosene, and a plastic bottle of turpentine. I piled the cloth and paper kindling beside the half cord of wood against the trailer and poured the accelerants on the pile. I lit the fire with Creed's motel matches and watched the flames leap to life. I wondered with whom, if anyone, Creed had spent his night at the Moonlight Motel in Jackpot, Nevada, and why any woman or man would spread his or her legs around Creed's mephitic loins. I found myself briefly hypnotized by the flames. I texted Creed's photo to Grady, got in the truck, and drove back to my hiding place.

I could open my left eye very gently with my thumb and forefinger, and I hoped if I kept doing it, I could teach the eye to open by itself. I saw the beams of light approach on the highway, and the two pickup trucks slow and take the right onto Creed's gravel road. Hard to tell in the dark, with one good eye, and with fuzzy binoculars, but one truck looked like Grady's red Chevy; the other may have been blue. I saw two men park about twenty yards from the trailer. They left their headlights on and stepped out of their trucks holding rifles. One of the pair, the one I thought was Grady, walked to the back in the stream of light, to check on Creed or on the fire, which I could now see as an orange glow over the trailer's roof. The second man, Nacho, I guessed, kicked in the trailer's front door. He got a whiff of the leaked gas, covered his face with an arm, and walked inside. And that's when the whole enchilada
exploded. I saw what looked like a brilliant flash of sheet lightning before I heard the blast. The trailer flew apart like a sledgehammered melon. And then I felt the concussion of the explosion in the truck, and the hula girl air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror swayed.

And then it was very quiet. And I waited. I listened for the approaching sirens of the county fire department or the sheriff's department or whatever emergency services they had here in the world of the damned. I watched for any movement at Creed's. I did see one of the liberated sheep trotting toward the highway. The fire was out, there being nothing left to burn. The trucks were there, but their windows had been shattered, it looked like. And that's when I thought for the first time that Patience might have been in one of the trucks and what an idiot I had been. I had acted but not planned, and now I would have to deal with the consequences. What if Grady and Nacho were dead? How would I find Patience? But then I saw the one I was calling Grady limp back to his truck without his rifle. He turned the truck around and headed for the highway without headlights. When he made the left turn, I waited till he was almost out of sight and followed his single taillight. And now I was thinking, Great plan, Wylie. It worked! Grady's pickup swerved and he stopped. And so did I, my lights still off. I hadn't yet reached pavement. Grady got out of the car with a handgun and shot what I would see in a minute was the sheep he had collided with. He dragged the animal to the shoulder.

I took the same left that Grady had taken at Quarry Road, a single lane of gravel alongside what might once have been tram tracks, heading west into the mountains, and drove about a half mile with the lights off. I pulled over, parked, and walked. I could still see the taillight of Grady's truck rising up a slight incline to a dead end a hundred yards ahead. An enormous owl flew by at eye
level and vanished into the desert night. I never heard a sound. I had Creed's pistol in one hand and his binoculars in the other. I'd turned off the volume on his phone. I could now see a cloudy bit out of the left eye. I walked past stone foundations of what must have been houses or businesses and past old septic tank pits. I saw the window lights of a building ahead.

I crept to within fifty feet of what might have been an old hotel or rooming house and lay in the dirt. It was two stories, wooden, hipped roof with side gables, an exterior chimney, and a covered front porch. Grady got out of the pickup and walked to the front door of the building. The upstairs windows were dark, but the first-floor windows were bright, and I could now see Grady speaking with someone, and when that someone stood, I saw it was Tinker Beaty, our incompetent mechanic. Was this a dream, then, where all of the people from the recent past came together to contrive some improbable narrative? And I felt a momentary flush of relief when I thought that must be the case, but then the front door to the building opened and a potbellied fellow stepped out, and I was back into the nightmare.

The man slipped his arms into his suit jacket and shrugged it on. He took a bottle of sanitizer from his pocket and washed his hands. He walked to his car, leaning forward like he might stumble with each step. He spritzed his mouth with breath freshener. He drove past me, and when he did, I could read the magnetized sign on the car's door:
KALE CHIPS—VEGAN, DEHYDRATED, ORGANIC
$
5 SM
$
10 LG.
What distant planet had this guy arrived from? Kale chips in Pesadilla?