The Sundown Speech (15 page)

I laughed.

She swung back my way. “I said something funny?”

“Yeah, but that wasn't why I laughed. When I was six, I asked my mother what my father did for a living. She said, ‘He makes money.' So that's what I thought he did, printing bills on a press.”

She faced front. “I wish I knew what you were talking about half the time.”

“I'm an enigma,” I said, “wrapped in a mystery, with a chewy caramel center.”

“Shi-i-it!” She laughed then.

Orange barrels ganged up on us near the I-94 interchange. I got out of that lane. So did the blue Ford. I accelerated and changed again, passing traffic on the right. The Ford changed too. With the barricade coming up I closed in again on the outside lane. A green Corvette sped up to shut me out, braked when our fenders kissed: Steel trumps fiberglass. Brakes screeched behind. I got into the space and stopped to avoid rear-ending a truck. I still hear the screech late at night. The green Corvette's horn blasted. The blue Ford halted short of the barricade.

My pet cop was still waiting for a break when the pace began to pick up. When a semi in the other lane lagged back to downshift I used the square inch of space and pushed the pedal to the floor. The four-barrel carburetor kicked in with an atomic blast. We hit ninety with a whump. I rolled up my window against the booming wind. Holly did the same, and we were sealed in silence with a gray blur on either side. There was no sign of the Ford when I made the interchange, floating on air two inches under both right tires. My knuckles swelled white on the wheel.

I braked, slewing onto the shoulder and spraying gravel. As we powered down, Holly pried her fingers from the dash. “Where'd you learn to drive?” It came from two inches below her larynx.

“The Phnom Penh highway. It's less interesting without land mines.” I leveled off at seventy, with cars passing me. It felt like I could open the door and step out for air. “He'll go on to the airport and look for us there.”

“I think I'll take that cigarette now.”

I lit one off the dash lighter and handed it over. She took two shallow puffs, opened her window a crack, let it free, and sucked in air from outside. “Where to now?”

“Rest stop.”

“I don't have to.”

“Me neither.”

I turned off into a roadside oasis with a faux-fieldstone building advertising toilets, refreshments, and tourist brochures. Barry Stackpole was waiting for us in the parking lot, leaning on a yellow Land Rover with black trim, like a flashlight. He was my age, but looked as if he'd been packed away in dry ice after extra work in
Rebel Without a Cause.
In those days he still camouflaged his missing fingers in a flesh-colored cotton glove. The artificial leg and aluminum patch on his scalp concealed more subtly.

“Nice ride.” I shook his good hand. “What's rhinoceros taste like?”

“It's a loaner. I got a Central American drug dealer off Death Row. Good family man, loves his kids. He's letting me use it while he serves three consecutive life sentences in Huntsville. Uses more fuel than the
Exxon Valdez.
” He smiled at Holly. “Anyone ever tell you you look like Jamie Lee Curtis?”

“I thought the same thing,” I said.

“Tony Curtis' daughter.” She smiled at my reaction. “I saw
True Lies,
and I've got Turner Classic Movies on a pirate hook-up.
The Black Shield of Falworth
rocks.”

“Barry Stackpole, Holly Zacharias,” I said. “Proper introductions later. Get in.” I swung open the door on the passenger's side of the Land Rover.

She climbed up onto the seat. I put her duffel in the back, gave Barry an envelope with train fare and the clipping with Jerry Marcus' picture. “Michigan Central Station. If you see him, holler for security.”

“Too slow.” He made his youthful face and showed me a walnut handle in an underarm clip. I hadn't known he owned a firearm.

Holly said, “Hey.”

I smiled at her. “Tell your dad he can bill me for the airline ticket. I'll charge it to expenses.”

She shook her head. Without a face full of metal she had a brilliant smile. “You represent—for a Boomer dude.”

I waved as they pulled away. Her I'd miss. She was better company when she wasn't trying to make people disapprove of her.

 

TWENTY

I was a fugitive, but only so long as it took Lieutenant Karyl's detail to find out I hadn't taken Holly Zacharias to the airport, check back with Ann Arbor, and track me down at my office in Detroit or my house outside Hamtramck.

That wouldn't take long; he'd have followed up on us both the moment the officers he'd put on Holly reported she'd given them the slip. I wouldn't have wanted to be on their end of that conversation; when a callow coed outsmarts months of training and years of experience, all his Hungarian ancestry would come out, going back to Vlad the Impaler.

Better he burn himself out on them than on me. I'd committed one felony, possibly more, and made a significant contribution to road rage, Michigan's chief export and a commodity that is never in short supply.

I drove home with one eye on the speedometer and the other on the rearview mirror, looking for prowl cars and unmarked blue Fords. Those twelve unconscious hours came in handy, also the inadequacy of my breakfast. The sardines and milk were long digested, leaving the blood flow entirely to the brain, where I most needed it.

Nevertheless I exited at the first sign of a pair of golden arches and dropped blazing hot coffee on top of a double cheeseburger. While I was waiting for my order, a siren yelped in the same block. When I climbed back down from the headliner, the kid at the window shook his head. “Happens all the time; except last month, when somebody stuck up the place. Took 'em twenty minutes to get here, and the station's just around the corner.” He grinned. “Bet if we was a Dunkin' Donuts—”

I snatched the sack and cup out of his hands and drove off.

At the restaurant exit I passed a couple of opportunities to turn into the street while a set of flashing red-and-blue lights swung onto the ramp of the expressway a block and a half beyond. A polite tap on a horn behind me sent me on my way.

In a situation like that it sometimes helps to remind oneself of one's pressing responsibilities. Staying out of jail topped the list. But then it did so often it had become almost an abstract concept, like breathing and smoking tobacco.

Drawing a murderer's attention from Holly, an eyewitness who could put Jerry Marcus in state housing for life, came next. It meant setting myself up as a decoy; he had to shift his concentration to me, strong enough to rearrange his own priorities.

That meant finding him first, which was the job I'd hired on for at the beginning, back when it was a simple case of possible fraud.

There were so many things wrong with that it made me tired all over again. I tossed the cheeseburger half-eaten back into the sack and deep-broiled my tongue with nuclear-grade coffee. Something was wrong with it. I looked at the plastic lid. The little blister they push in with a thumb to identify the contents told me I was drinking decaf.

I woke up from a beautiful dream, where it was always summer, with fireflies blinking on and off like tiny neon lights and brooks jabbering like old men on a park bench and my parents alive and in good health—and tore the steering wheel left, away from the rumble strips leading to a bridge abutment. A helpful truck driver whomped his air horn at me as he swept past, walloping the Cutlass in his wake. You can't store up sleep. Wherever they keep the account books, some bean counter is measuring half a day's rest against thirty-four hours awake and recording it in red ink.

I needed to get wheels out from under me, if only for a couple of hours. Michigan Avenue was coming up. It's the main drag through Ypsilanti, a community built on the World War II Willow Run Ford aircraft plant, since grafted on to Ann Arbor to the west with no seams in between: Some still call it Ypsi-tucky, after the Southerners who'd swarmed up US-23 to work for top wages building B-25 bombers.

I passed up a Holiday Inn, a Ramada, and a Comfort Suites as too accessible to a preliminary investigation. In an open area just past a truss barn called the Da-Glo Massage, with fraternity insignia plastered on the glass front door, I pulled around behind two stories of Korean War construction called the Wagon Wheel Motel. A pair of whitewashed tires flanked the driveway, half-sunk in concrete. They hadn't even bothered to score real wagon wheels. I wondered how Michelin had managed to miss the place.

There was a package-liquor store across the alley; there would be. I dumped the disposable cup still steaming in a bullet-shaped trash can by the store entrance and commissioned a fifth of Old Smuggler from the unsmiling Arab behind the counter. They throw them in with the fixtures.

I entered the hotel through a side door and followed a dim prefab hallway to a foyer adjacent to a gaggle of tables and chairs and a stainless-steel serve-yourself counter. It was deserted in late afternoon except for a lazy fly practicing its stalls under the glass cover of a warming tray.

A clerk who waxed his handlebars extolled the virtues of the free continental breakfast from behind the registration desk, but all I heard was directions to the elevators. His moustache didn't twitch when I paid cash, but he did look to see I had bags; the fact that one was a paper sack meant as much to him as Austrian edelweiss. The halls smelled of disinfectant with a spearmint base.

“Smoking or non?” he'd asked.

“Smoking.”

He glanced at an electric clock. “We've got just the one. It isn't ready yet.”

I looked at the clock: 6:22. “When's checkout?”

“Eleven; but the housekeeper had trouble rousing the guest. The young lady he checked in with—” He moved a shoulder. We were men of the world. I must have looked even more worn-out than I felt.

“Yeah. I don't know why they bother to steal the pants when the wallet's all they want.”

He looked pained; and I look like Brad Pitt. “If you want to go out for a bite while you're waiting, I can recommend—”

I'd seen all the restaurants within walking distance: Aunt Emma's, The Chicken Palace, Steaks-'n'-More, an all-you-can-eat buffet without a single car in its parking lot. Steaks-'n'-More had a fiberglass cow on its flat roof, so the filet would be from Secretariat out of Dream Queen. The chain places were just the same thing with a national advertising campaign.

“What've you got in nonsmoking?”

He slid a key card through his thingamajig and presented it with a flourish. “Two twenty-six. Second floor.”

The ice machine made a noise like a Cape buffalo hacking up a tourist and spat three cubes into the plastic bucket I got from the clerk. I left them there, bucket and all, and carried my bottle with me into the room.

It was long and narrow, with blackout curtains that drenched it in early Castle Dracula. I switched on the overhead light, inspected the bathroom for bushwhackers: a couple of cracked tiles, rust stains in the tub, a water bug the size of a grape clinging insolently to the wall above the mirror, which had been wiped down with an oil rag. There was a chute next to the light switch for disposing the kind of razor blades they haven't made since
Dragnet.

Everything straight out of the catalogue:
Nihilism for Dummies.

The TV, at least, was a modern flat-screen, but the remote didn't work. Fourteen typewritten pages in a loose-leaf notebook encouraged me to slide a credit card into the phone and watch Midnight Cinema twenty-four/seven.
Prongs of New York
caught my eye.

The window looked out on the parking lot, and a rail-thin party in a hoodie peering through car windows looking for keys left in the ignition. He slouched past my car without pausing. I keep it battered and unwashed for a reason.

The lock on the window was broken. I'd have been disappointed otherwise. I laid the remainder of my store of quarters in the track so it couldn't slide open any more than to admit a man's head, unless he put some shoulder into it. I unshipped the Chief's Special from my belt clip and laid it on the nightstand on the side of the bed opposite the window, massaged the dent it had made next to my kidney.

I'd spent my life in that room; the place might have belonged to a chain, each one sprung up simultaneously, unaware of all the others, like toadstools exposed to the same conditions. You know them by their shared features: The radiator/air conditioner under the windows that blasts sopping heat in July, Little America cold in January; the toilet that runs like Pimlico and the sink that drains like the Colorado River carving the Grand Canyon, centimeter by centimeter, eons at a time; the damp spot in the carpet that never dries; the plastic fingernail on the floor behind the headboard, five years out of fashion; the fat phone book that opens automatically to the section on escort agencies (“Discreet Services—Charge Shows up as Entertainment”); the remote you handle with a wad of tissues if you handle it at all—if the tissues in the dispenser have been replaced; three squares of toilet paper left on the roll; the maids who bang on your door at 7:00
A.M.
, and when you're gone for the day never come in to clean and change the towels; Handi Wipes pretending to be washcloths; that self-righteous little tent on the bed asking you to throw any linen you want changed on the floor, otherwise Let's Protect Our Precious Water Supply (and also our city bill); the double lock that makes a satisfying clunk when you turn it, but when you tug on the knob the door opens without resistance, halted only by a thin metal chain designed for a charm bracelet; the wake-up call that never comes, unless it comes two hours early; the little pack of five-dollar cashews in the minibar; the forty-watt bulb over the mirror in the bathroom; the shower that goes from lukewarm to scalding in half a second, and a half-second later to icicles. The Gideon Bible in the nightstand drawer, stuck fast to whatever someone had spilled inside while watching
Seinfeld.
The call to the front desk that rings and rings and rings. The wag who sets the electric alarm clock for 3:00
A.M.
just before he checks out, as a raspberry to the stranger who succeeds him. And all night long, adolescent feet pounding the hallway outside in their size fourteen Crocs.