"I had a few words with her in the ladies room. As I was going out and she was coming in. I didn't mean to upset her, but..."
"No! Tell me you didn't!"
"All I said was that she should leave him. That she should find a way to get away from him, that's all."
"Aw, Jeez Loweez, Dottie! You went and stirred the poor child up! Two to one, she went back out to that man's truck and gave 'im some lip! Either got herself stranded back there, or...or worse!"
He was right, of course. I could see it all happen exactly that way in my mind.
"We have to go back, Joe," I said. "We've got to make sure she's all right."
"What?"
"Don't. Don't argue with me about this. Just turn this truck around right now and go!"
* * * *
It took us a little over fifteen minutes to reach the reststop again, and it looked the same way now as it had when we'd last seen it: dark, desolate, and as creepy as a fog-enshrouded moor. There were still a few sixteen-wheelers parked in the darkest corner of the lot, but ours was now the only passenger vehicle around. Apparently, if this had been a hot dog stand rather than a reststop, its owners would have been forced into bankruptcy long ago.
There was no sign of Corrine anywhere.
Predictably, Joe stepped out of the truck and told me to stay put. The thought of being left there alone to imagine I could see all kinds of horrible things lurking in the shadows was unnerving, but I was too tired to join him, even if I had wanted to. I'd been awake now for over nineteen hours and at the tender age of sixty-one, adrenaline can only take a girl so far. Nodding my head and watching Joe start off toward the ladies room with only one of two eyes open was the absolute best I could do at this point.
"Hello! Anybody home?" Joe called out, standing just outside the door of the women's restroom in the same way Corrine's cowboy had done earlier. Receiving no response, Joe called again, and still no one answered back. My eyes drifted closed for a moment. I caught myself and sat up abruptly, just caught sight of my husband disappearing inside the bathroom.
I watched and waited for him to exit again.
And waited.
And waited.
How much time went by, I'll never really know. My guess now is that it wasn't much more than three or four minutes. But that was all the time my poor eyes needed to grow bored, flutter closed again—and stay that way.
The next thing I knew I was snoring. Head tilted back, mouth agape, body propped up against the passenger-side door. Had I not snorted myself awake, I might still be asleep today.
"Oh, my Lord, Dottie," I said.
I scanned my surroundings desperately, searching for Big Joe, but he was nowhere to be found. I was sure I had only been out for a minute or two, but the damage had been done. Four parking spaces to my right sat the cowboy named Sandy's blue Dodge pickup, its passenger cab as empty as the truck bed behind it.
He'd come back while I was dozing.
I leapt from the truck and started running as fast as I could toward the ladies room, giving no thought whatsoever to slamming the truck's door closed behind me.
"Joe!"
I entered the bathroom and found myself alone; neither Joe nor the cowboy was there. I went to the men's room next, just bolted straight in without warning, but again, the room was vacant. All the stalls were empty and silent.
I was now completely terrified.
I sprinted outside, spun around like a top looking for some sign of my husband, but there was no such sign to see. It was as if he had vanished into thin air.
"Joe! Where are you?!"
And then I realized where he had to be: out there in the black void behind the reststop's boundaries, where Corrine's cowboy would have surely chosen to take her if, as Joe and I had feared, she'd said or done something, thanks to me, to finally make a murderer out of him.
I went around to the back of the two mortar block buildings and studied the black, irregular horizon. They were next to impossible to see, but they were there: one human figure advancing on another, the latter a good fifty yards away. The one in motion was wearing a cowboy hat; the other, whose silhouette was almost certainly that of my husband, was not.
And the one with the hat was carrying a rifle.
"Joe! Look out!" I screamed.
I started running even though I knew it was hopeless. I would never reach him in time on this old woman's legs. As I closed in on the pair, I could see that a body lay in the brush at Joe's feet. "Dottie, no!" Joe called back.
But it was too late. The cowboy with the rifle turned toward me just as I lost my footing and fell, slammed to the cold, hard earth like someone who was already dead. I heard the crunch of footsteps as they rapidly approached, looked up to see what I was certain would be the last human face I would ever gaze upon.
"Hey, are you all right?" the woman named Corrine asked.
* * * *
"I swear, woman, I don't know how you do it," Joe said several hours later. He was almost laughing, but not quite.
"What?"
"Bring us both so close to death without actually killing either one of us. If the kids knew what you keep puttin' me through out here..."
We were Salt Lake City bound again, Joe back at the wheel, me fighting sleep right beside him. Corrine was in a Utah jail cell somewhere and the boyfriend named Sandy she'd coldcocked to land herself there was in the hospital, trying to remember the serial number on the rifle butt he'd been clobbered with. Which shouldn't have been too difficult, I thought, considering the fact it had been attached to his own rifle.
The state troopers who had cleaned up the mess at the reststop afterward thought it was funny, how Corrine had not only brained the abusive cowboy she'd finally—and somewhat "mysteriously"—had her fill of, but taken everything he owned as well, right down to the coat off his back and the hat on his head. They even got a laugh or two out of the cold feet that had brought her scrambling back to the scene of the crime. But myself, I couldn't find much humor in the situation at all, and neither could Big Joe. Mistaking the similarly built Corrine for her beloved cowboy after she'd fled the scene of his assault had, afterall, cost my husband and I a great deal of grief. And maybe a few years off the ends of our already well-advanced lives, abject terror having that alleged effect on people.
But, hey. No harm was really done in the end. Corrine learned to stand up for herself and I learned to save my advice for women who ask for it.
And Big Joe and I have yet another great story to worry our five children with.
We look forward to collecting many more.
GAR ANTHONY HAYWOOD is the Shamus and Anthony Award-winning author of twelve crime novels. Haywood's first of six mysteries featuring African-American private investigator Aaron Gunner, FEAR OF THE DARK, won the Private Eye Writers of America's Shamus award for Best First Novel of 1989, and his short fiction has been included in the Best American Mystery Stories anthologies. Booklist has called him "a writer who has always belonged in the upper echelon of American crime fiction."
Nowhere to Go and All Day to Get There (The Joe & Dottie Loudermilk Mystery Series) Page 3
