"Clean and sober."
"Damn straight. Now leave me the hell alone." She faced the road.
For a twitch of a second, he was annoyed with himself. Leave her be. She got her shit, you got yours. "Fallon's up next."
She nodded.
"Maybe we can stop, get some drinks or something." God, he was a kid on his first date, unsure of what to do or say next. Funny how women could do that to you. Women or cops. "Pretty ugly driving out here."
She smirked. "Compared to west Texas?"
Texas again…but more specific this time. With an eye cocked toward her, he asked, "How you know about Texas?" She had never answered the question. Slipped over it as smoothly as a cop sliding over evidence that didn't fit what he needed.
"Is that a joke? Like immaculate selection?"
"Ain't meant to be." Without signaling, he slid the Chevy around an elderly couple in a big-ass luxury boat of a car.
"Who doesn't know about Texas? By the time you stumbled through the door at The Cuchillo, everyone in town knew what you were looking for."
"Think so?"
She might not have known everything, but she seemed to know a good bunch. Hal was shocked. Obviously his discretion needed some work. He'd asked only the people whose names he'd been given and asked only in the places he'd been told about. He had never mentioned directly what he was looking for.
Talking bones, man. Pure as they ever were.
It was Theresa's phrase, talking bones, a grapevine where everyone knew everything all the time. A small town thing, she always told him. But in this case, size didn't matter. Big or small, everyone knew everything--so said Apple Valley--from here all the way back to Elk City where he'd started this jaunt.
Fallon slipped up on them like a back alley thug in the dead of night. A blink of an eye and there it was. Since getting out of town, he had kept the car just under the speed limit. Not too slow to be noticed but certainly not fast enough to be noticed. Now he slowed even more, obeying local limits, signaling as he turned into the parking lot of a convenience store, casting his eyes around to see if anyone was following them.
He left the car running but climbed out. "Everyone knew, huh?"
She got out and nodded. "Don't let this get stolen." She disappeared into the store.
Leaning on the car's hood, Hal pulled out his cell phone. Across from him, graffiti marred a battered pay phone. 'Julio' written in what looked like Liquid-Paper, 'Jenny's' name written across the cover of the phone book which hung by a thick wire, 'fuk me 2' written in black ink on the phone's silver housing, 'Bubba's' name in something rusty and brown that could have been dried blood. The number to Hanford's office sounded beneath his fingers and then rang until it became a vaguely lulling rhythm, something like a lullaby. Just when part of him wished it might never end, just the pleasant electronic buzzing to put him to sleep, someone answered.
"This is Natalie." Thin and faraway.
Why wasn't she more formal? 'This is Mr. Turnbull's office,' or some shit?
"It's Hal. He in?"
She covered the moment's hesitation pretty smooth, didn't she? As good a secretary as it gets. "He's not. If you can leave a contact number, I'll see he gets it."
Asked every time even though she knew ol' Hanford wasn't going to pay a return call. "Same number as always…you know, the one he never uses."
"I wouldn't know about that."
"Tell him I have the disk."
"And what disk would that be?" Her words were ice. Damn near froze him through the phone.
"He'll know."
"I'm sure he will."
And then there was a whole lot of nothing except the dial tone in his ear. With a pained nod, he snapped closed the phone as the store's door opened. Through it, Hal heard Apple Valley's laugh. Sweet and high, the color of a summer day near a soft lake. She waved to who the hell knew and each hand held a large soda. "You tell him you don't want it backdoor and if he keeps pushing, tell him he won't get any front door, either."
The cashier laughed. "We'll see how he likes that, huh?"
Seeing Hal, Apple Valley shook her head. "I don't think Dogwood will return your calls."
"Yeah, that's funny. Not as good as immaculate erection, but close."
With an amused shake of her head, she slid into the passenger seat and in minutes they were back on the road.
"We stay on 50, we get to drive The Loneliest Road. If we head south a little, we can drive the Extra Terrestrial Highway."
He snorted.
"Instead, we'll do 95 south and go to Vegas. Sun and fun and endless buffets standing next to old people who smell like Old Spice and lilacs."
Hal shook his head. "Got somewhere to be." He might well go through Vegas, but he wasn't stopping, not even for a quick hand at the blackjack table. Texas called and truth be told, he was a little surprised Apple Valley wanted to stop. Something seemed to be pushing her as hard as it was him.
They drove for a long while in silence and it reminded him of being a kid on vacation with Hanford and Mama. From west Texas to just north of Oklahoma City and it was always silent in that car except for their goddamned music. Classical, both of them conducting like they were standing in front of the fucking New York Philharmonic. And him sitting in the back seat of the Buick Electra 225 Limited--another big ass boat of a car--just watching. Not his kind of music--you don't conduct Texas rockabilly like a long-haired symphony man--so on that score, he was out in the cold, a third wheel.
Eventually, the silence between Hal and Apple Valley drove him nuts and he popped on the radio. A preacher spoke. He had a great long drawl and pulled each word into a thousand syllables. "Gaaaaaawwwwwwd luuhhhvvess youuuuuu." His voice filled the Chevy. "Did'cha know that? You betcha he does. He's got enough luuuuhhhhvvv to see us all through but you know what? It don't matter 'cause you're going to hell."
"Ain't we there already?" Hal asked. It sounded nihilistic and self-involved the moment he said it.
He flicked the dial. Enough of talk radio bullcrap, where were the tunes? After running the band twice, a crackly signal came in, weak as an old lady.
Disco.
"Shit," Hal said.
"What was it that Preacher Man said about being in hell?"
***
Nearly 140 miles later, when the yellow line in the middle of the road was directly beneath the car, his phone rang. The buzz jarred him back into his lane. He grabbed it from his pocket, punched it to life. "Yeah?"
"The perfect vacation is within your reach. All you have to do is agree to a free, four hour course on selling real estate and you can claim an all-expense paid trip to Cancun, where the sun and beach and women are warm and welcoming. Can I sign you up, sir?"
Without a word, Hal hung up.
Eventually, he quit looking at the towns they drove through. Schurz. Walker Lake. Hawthorne. Carbon copies of the last town and a preview of the next. They all had a grocery/convenience store, a post office, a bar or two. Who knew what they had hidden a few streets back, maybe nothing, maybe something, but from where he sat each one was as empty as the next one.
But really, how different were they from Barefield? Or from the other little towns in Zachary County? They were all empty and desolate. So was Nueva Rosita. Just as small, just as empty and yet didn't it hold something for him? Sure as crap did. Everything, all these small towns he was passing, was just to get back to Nueva Rosita. The disk in his pants and the shot up car he'd left behind (paid for with a week of night work he would never tell Theresa about because she valued spiritual purity) and the constant calls to his brother were all to get him back to just such a small town.
"It's a different town," he said quietly.
"You know, you don't have to carry the conversational load yourself." Apple Valley nodded as though they had discovered some great fundamental truth about the universe. "You could talk to me and it would be grand fun, wouldn't it?"
"Ever done something you were ashamed of?" he asked.
> Didn't see that coming. Out and full-voiced before he knew it. He immediately stared out the window at the passing scrub. It was a shit-brown-streaked desert. Looked like the sewage plant. Each cactus was a lonely cowboy standing in the middle of all that shit-brown.
We're all standing shit deep, ain't we?
He shook his head. A little less projecting and self-pitying and a little more getting on down the road, if you please.
"Something I was ashamed of? Sure as rain, my friend. Not quite every day, but close." She paused. "You got something on your mind?"
Rest of my life, he almost said. "No, forget it."
"Already forgotten."
They rolled into, and just as quickly out of, Coaldale. As it became a memory, Hal cleared his throat. "Ever'body knows, huh? Wanna tell me how?"
She crunched some of the remaining ice in her soda cup. "Not that many people come to town asking to buy a disk and waving twenty grand--stolen or not--to buy it."
He shrugged. "A fair point."
"Want to tell me what's on that disk?"
"Not particularly."
"I do admire how you were broke when you got to town but then suddenly had the money." She laughed, a booming sound that wasn't harsh or belittling, just pleasant. "I will never, as long as I live, forget the look on his face when Dogwood realized you'd snookered him. God, that was priceless."
After a second, he chuckled. "Glad I could help."
"Was it hard?"
"What?"
"Jacking his dough."
"Oh, yeah," he said sarcastically. "Terribly difficult. I was brilliant in how I conceived my revolutionary plan."
She brushed a strand of hair out of her face and he found it oddly endearing. Not like the whores in Elk City or Denver or Salt Lake City. When they did it, they reminded him of a punky street kid racking the slide on his stolen Sig Sauer trying to look veteran. When a whore did it, maybe the john had thought it was an innocent school-girl thing. Dumbshits never realized the hair thing was just as lethal as the punk with the Sig. Their weapon was different but would leave them just as dead if they let it.
But here, with Apple Valley, it was just a regular woman taking care of her hair. No whore, no money, nothing illegal, just a normal person.
"Brilliant? Conceived? Nice ten dollar words. What about the execution? Was it equally brilliant?"
Damned harsh word. Execution. As harsh as somebody dragged along hundreds of miles of highways, sniffing for blood and scuffing his alligator boots in the piss-stained roadhouses. As harsh as nights spent in the company of thugs and wannabe gangsters.
"Hal? You okay?"
He glanced at her and saw some serious concern in her green eyes. He had finally gotten to see behind the slate wall that had been in them since she jumped in his car. Holy shit, she just gave me something. Something deep and personal. I don't know why and I'm not sure she'll ever do it again but at this moment, in this stolen car, she made a gesture.
He opened his mouth, on the edge of telling her everything. Instead, he shrugged and said, "It's harder to roll bums."
Confusion registered on her face. "What?"
"Harder to roll bums…than robbing Dogwood. He was as easy as…uh…as a lonely housewife."
A grin toyed at the edges of her lips. A small giggle slipped out. "Easy as a housewife, huh? He'd be glad to know that."
"Whatever I can do to support him."
"Yeah, you and me both. Maybe we can send flowers to the funeral home."
For an intensely comfortable moment, it was as though the miles had scraped away most of their fear and distrust. It was still there and they were so beat-up it probably always would be, but it didn't seem to matter much now. Or maybe it still mattered but they were just able to ignore it for a few minutes.
They passed a sign for Tonopah.
"After that is the gunnery range," she said.
"The what?"
"Nellis Air Force Base Bombing and Gunnery Range. You'd think they'd be shooting all the damn time. But it's pretty desolate. Nothing much going on, sort of like back there. Two hundred miles past is Vegas."
Hal swallowed. " You want to tell me about the picnic and camera bullshit?"
"Not particularly."
"Talking to that cop pretty good. You and him have some special secret or something?"
She tossed her soda cup into the backseat. "We do."
His bowels tightened again. "Great, just great. Wanna tell me what it is?"
She shrugged. "We fucked for a while."
"Of course you did." For whatever reason, it hadn't been much of a shock. A surprise but not really a shock.
"He knew who you were, you know," she said. "He knew exactly who you were."
"He has no idea who I am," Hal said. And the warrant doesn't explain dick, he thought. "Just a guess, but probably he didn't move on me because your friend might or might not have pictures of you and him taking the skin boat to tuna land?"
"The pictures do exist, he's seen them."
Only dimly aware he did it, Hal glanced in the rear view mirror. No cops back there and that was surprising enough given recent luck.
She pointed to a highway sign. "Take 6 east. It's also 95. It'll get us to Tonopah. Ninety-five south from there."
"What about the other guy? Captain Brooks. You fucking him, too?"
"Kind of hard not to, being married and all."
1,849 Miles
He knew it was a vision. From the moment it started. How the hell else does someone just appear hanging in midair or sitting on a telephone pole? Come on, that's not something that happens just every day.
Hal didn't see them for a while because he was paying attention to the highway, to the scrub and brush and miles and miles of nothing. He could have been standing on the beach and staring at the sea. This sea was brown, yeah, but it gave him the same completely overwhelmed feeling.
It was just so goddamned big.
Even bigger, if that were friggin' possible, than all the vultures touching and then lifting from the highway, snatching bugs and roadkill remains off the asphalt. Reminded him of the vultures at the bus station in Los Angeles. Kids climbed off the bus, tired, strung out from days on the road with nothing but the hum of big wheels in their ears and got sucked up in the claws of those freaks.
Exactly how Missy had been snatched up.
"Are you thinking about me?" Missy asked.
He heard it as a sweet, innocent voice even though he'd never actually heard it. Not completely innocent, obviously, otherwise she'd never have been there, but a whole heaping lot more innocent than his own voice.
Truth was, brutal and shitty as it was, Hal tried not to think of Missy. When he did, those were the nights he couldn't sleep. The days he did were the days when he couldn't concentrate on the task at hand. Those were the times he wanted to forget the whole thing, boogie his ass to Mexico, and drown as quick as he could in a bottomless tub of Corona.
"Yeah, Missy, I think about you."
He said it softly but still Apple Valley looked at him. He ignored her.
"Think about me at all, bubba?"
Tyler, sure as shit. Should'a known he was going to come along, too. Sitting on top of that phone poll, a low-county king surveying his desert realm.
"That's why I'm coming back," Hal said.
"That's bull and we both know it." Tyler shook his head and licked his teeth with a wet sloosh. "You're coming back for Hanford."
"What do you care why? Long as you get what you need?"
Tyler smiled and nodded. "Too right there. Long as I get what I need." He tapped his watch. "Clock ticking, though, man. Whoever you doing it for, better get yo' ass moving."
Hal tapped his own watch and pushed the car a bit faster.
"Whoa," Apple Valley said. "Don't lose control, Hal."
"That boat already sailed."
Then, as easily as they had come, the visions of Missy and Tyler were gone. The pole was just a pole and there was no face
floating in front of his windshield.
1,664 Miles
Three hours later, the glitz came and he didn't even see it. Lights flashing, barkers coaxing and cajoling tourists into the casinos, musicians and buskers on the street and on the make. But really, he didn't see much of it.
His brain was a million miles away. Or a couple thousand anyway. His brain was sitting in the reception area of Hanford's office, hoping Natalie would show him in rather than call the cops. In his head, he sat in his best suit, the one Theresa had bought him when they were still in Barefield; the dark pin-striped job. He was wearing his best boots, too, the beautiful gray ones she spent $250 on. Natalie called him Mr. Turnbull and asked him if he wanted any coffee, or perhaps some green tea. Yes, tea, please, thank you very much. I hear the entire affair has been vacated, Natalie would say. Why yes it has, Hal would answer. In his head, showing Hanford the DVD and getting the rest of the shit vacated happened in a single, fluid, dreamlike moment.
That was the biggest clue he was in his head again. Nothing ever happened that way, with the bad shit suddenly gone and good shit suddenly in its place. It hardly ever happened at all and when it did it took months.
"That way," Apple Valley said.
"To what?"
"I have to use the bathroom."
"You gotta piss? Didn't you go back at the store?"
"That was a while back, Hal. Christ, you sound like my Daddy."
Hal followed her directions and moved the car whichever way her finger pointed. Outside the car, the streets darkened from the bright, shiny streets of Vegas. Less neon, less glass and chrome, fewer tourists, more street people. Hal ground his teeth. Then the flashing lights were gone. The disappearance of civilization was a siren call, "get your ass back to civilization where we can take your money legally." 'Cause out here, on streets that became rougher and darker, among buildings that were boarded up and broken down, you'd lose that money illegally. Whores, gambling, a knife to the throat.
"Been there," Hal said.
"What?"
He said nothing but he rubbed the scar. Damn thing itched like fucking crabs.
2,000 Miles to Open Road (Barefield) Page 4
