Desperation

by Stephen King

  "... ot sure how far ... least, probably more ... RV pulled off the road ... ittle farther up ..."

  The heaviest blast of static yet, then something about cops. State cops and town cops.

  "What's--" the girl in the passenger seat began.

  'Shh! Not now!"

  From the phone: "... my bike ... into the desert ... wind ... mile or so east of the RV ..."

  And that was all. Steve yelled Johnny's name into the phone half a dozen times, but only silence came back. The connection had been broken. He used the NAME/MENU button to bring up J.M. in the display window, then pushed SEND. A recorded voice welcomed him to the Western Roaming Network, there was a pause, and then another recording told him that his call could not be completed at this time. The voice began to list all the reasons why this might be so. Steve pushed END and flipped the phone closed. "God damn it!"

  "It's bad, isn't it?" Cynthia asked. Her eyes were very wide again, but there was nothing cute about them now. "I can see it in your face."

  "Maybe," he said, then shook his head, impatient with himself. "Probably. That was my boss. He's up the line somewhere. Seventy miles'd be my best guess, but it might be as much as a hundred. He's riding a Harley. He--"

  "Big red-and-cream bike?" she asked, suddenly excited. "Does he have long gray hair, sort of like Jerry Garcia's?"

  He nodded.

  "I saw him this morning, way far east of here," she said. "He filled up at this little gas station-cafeteria place in Pretty Nice. You know that town, Pretty Nice?"

  He nodded.

  "I was eating breakfast and saw him out the window. I thought he looked familiar. Like I'd seen him on Oprah or maybe Ricki Lake."

  "He's a writer." Steve looked at the speedometer, saw he had the panel truck up to seventy, and decided he could let it out just a little more. The needle crept up toward seventy-five. Outside the windows, the desert ran backward a little faster. "He's crossing the country, getting material for a book. He's done some speaking, too, but mostly he just goes places and talks to people and makes notes. Anyway, he's had an accident. At least I think that's what's happened."

  "The connection was fucked, wasn't it?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Do you want to pull over? Let me out? Because it's no problem, if that's what you want."

  He thought it over carefully--now that the initial shock was receding, his mind seemed to be ticking away coldly and precisely, as it always had before in situations like this. No, he decided, he didn't want her out, not at all. He had a situation on his hands, one that had to be dealt with right away, but that didn't mean the future could be forgotten. Appleton might be okay even if Johnny Marinville had highsided his Harley and fucked himself up bigtime, he had looked like the sort of man who could (blazers and rep ties notwithstanding) accept the idea that sometimes things went wrong. Bill Harris, however, had struck Steve as a man who believed in playing Pin the Blame on the Donkey when things went wrong ... and jamming that pin as far up the donkey's ass as it would go.

  As the potential donkey, Steve decided what he would really like was a witness--one who had never set eyes on him before today.

  "No, I'd like you to ride along. But I have to be straight with you-I don't know what we're going to find. There could be blood."

  "I can deal with blood," she said.

  4

  She made no comment about how fast he was going, but when the rental truck hit eighty-five and the frame began to shake, she fastened her shoulder-harness. Steve squeezed the gas-pedal a little harder, and when the truck got up around ninety, the vibration eased. He kept both hands curled around the wheel, though; the wind was kicking up, and at these speeds a good hard gust could swerve you onto the shoulder. Then, if your tires sank in, you were in real trouble. Flipping-over trouble. The boss would have been even more vulnerable to windshear on his bike, Steve reflected. Maybe that was what had happened.

  By now he had told Cynthia the basic facts of his employ : he made reservations, checked routes, vetted sound-systems at the places where the boss was scheduled to speak, stayed out of the way so as not to conflict with the picture the boss was painting--Johnny Marinville, the thinking man's lone wolf, a politically correct Sam Peckinpah hero, a writer who hadn't forgotten how to hang tough and lay cool.

  The panel-truck, Steve told her, was empty except for some extra gear and a long wooden ramp, which Johnny could ride up if the weather got too foul to cycle in. Since this was midsummer, that wasn't very likely, but there was another reason for the ramp as well, and for the tiedowns Steve had installed on the floor of the van before setting out. This one was unspoken by either of them, but both had known it was there from the day they had set out from Westport, Connecticut. Johnny Marinville might wake up one morning and simply find himself unwilling to keep riding the Harley.

  Or incapable of it.

  "I've heard of him," Cynthia said, "but I never read anything by him. I like Dean Koontz and Danielle Steel, mostly. I just read for pleasure. Nice bike, though. And the guy had great hair. Rock-and-roll hair, you know?"

  Steve nodded. He knew. Marinville did, too.

  "You really worried about him or just worried about what might happen to you?"

  He likely would have resented the question if someone else had asked it, but he sensed no implied criticism in Cynthia's tone. Only curiosity. "I'm worried about both," he said.

  She nodded. "How far have we come?"

  He glanced down at the odometer. "Forty-five miles since I lost him off the phone."

  "But you don't know exactly where he was calling from."

  "No."

  "You think he just fucked himself up, or someone else, too?"

  He looked over at her, surprised. That the boss might've fucked someone else up was exactly what he was afraid of, but he never would have said so out loud if she hadn't raised the possibility first.

  "Somebody else might be involved," he replied reluctantly. "He said something about state cops and town cops. It might've been 'Don't call the state cops, call the town cops.' I couldn't tell for sure."

  She pointed to his cellular, which was back on the dashboard.

  "No way," he said. "I'm not calling any cops until I see what kind of mess he's gotten himself into."

  "And I promise that won't be in my statement, if you promise not to call me cookie anymore."

  He smiled a little, although he didn't feel much like smiling. "Probably that's a good idea. You could always say--"

  "--that your phone wouldn't work anymore," she finished. "Everybody knows how finicky those things are."

  "You're okay, Cynthia."

  "You're not so bad yourself."

  At just under ninety, the miles melted away like spring snowfall. When they were sixty miles west of the point where Steve had lost contact, he began slowing the truck a couple of miles an hour for each mile travelled. No police-cars had passed them in either direction, and he supposed that was good. He said so, and Cynthia shook her head doubtfully.

  "It's weird, is what it is. If there's been an accident where your boss or maybe someone else got hurt, wouldn't you think a few cop-cars would've gone past us by now? Or an ambulance?"

  "Well, if they came from the other way, west--"

  "According to my map, the next town that way is Austin, and that's much farther ahead of us than Ely is behind us. Anything official--anything with sirens is what I mean--should be heading east to west. Catching up with us. Get it?"

  "I guess so, yeah."

  "So where are they?"

  "I don't know."

  "Me either."

  "Well, keep looking for ... well shit, who knows? Anything out of the ordinary."

  "I am. Slow down a little more."

  He glanced at his watch and saw it was quarter to six. The shadows had drawn long across the desert, but the day was still bright and hot. If Marinville was out there, they would see him.

  You bet we will, he thought. He's going to be sitting at the ed
ge of the road, probably with his head busted and half his pants torn off from when he spilled and rolled. And likely making notes on how it felt. Thank God he wears his helmet, at least. If he didn't--

  "I see something! Up there!" The girl's voice was excited but controlled. She was shading her eyes from the westering sun with her left hand and pointing with her right. "See? Could that ... aw, shit no. That's way too big to be a motorcycle. Looks like a motor home."

  "I think this is where he called from, though. Somewhere around here, anyway."

  "What makes you think so?"

  "He said there was an RV off the road a little farther up--I heard that part quite clearly. He said he was about a mile east of it, and that's about where we are now, so--"

  "Yeah, don't say it. I'm looking, I'm looking."

  He slowed the Ryder truck to thirty, then, as they approached the RV, to walking pace. Cynthia had unrolled the passenger window and was halfway out of it, her tank-top riding up to reveal the small of her back (the small small of her back, Steve thought) and the ridge of her spine.

  "Anything?" he asked her. "At all?"

  "Nope. I saw glint, but it was way out on the desert floor--a lot farther than he'da gone if he'd cracked up. Or if the wind pushed him off the road, you know?"

  "Probably the sun reflecting off the mica in the rocks."

  "Uh-huh, could have been."

  "Don't fall out that window, girl."

  "I'm fine," she said, then winced her eyes shut as the wind, which was becoming steadily more grumpy, threw grit in her face.

  "If this is the RV he was talking about, we're already past where he called from."

  She nodded. "Yeah, but keep going. If there's somebody home in there, they might have saw him."

  He snorted. "'Might have saw him.' Did you learn that reading Dean Koontz and Danielle Steel?"

  She pulled in long enough to give him a haughty look ... but he thought he saw hurt beneath it. "Sorry," he said. "I was only teasing."

  "Oh?" she said coolly. "Tell me something, Mr. Big Texas Roadie--have you read anything your boss has written?"

  "Well, he gave me a copy of Harper's with a story of his in it. 'Heaven-Sent Weather,' it was called. I read that, sure did. Ever' word."

  "Did you understand ever' word?"

  "Uh, no. Look, what I said was snotty. I do apologize. Sincerely."

  "Okay," she said, but her tone suggested that he was going to be on probation, at least for awhile.

  He opened his mouth to say something that might be funny if he was lucky, something that would get her to smile (she had a nice one), and then he got a really good look at the RV. "Oh hey, what's this?" he asked, speaking more to himself than to the girl.

  "What's what?" She turned her head to look out through the windshield as Steve coasted the Ryder truck to a stop on the shoulder, just behind the RV. It was one of the middle-sized ones, bigger than Lassie but smaller than the Godzillas he'd been seeing ever since Colorado.

  "Guy must have run over some nails in the road, or something," Steve said. "Tires look like they're all flat."

  "Yeah. So how come yours aren't?"

  By the time it occurred to him that the people in the RV might have been public-spirited enough to pick up the nails, the girl with the punky tu-tone hair was out of the cab and walking up to the RV, hallooing.

  Well, she knows a good exit-line when she gets one off, give her that, he thought, and got out on his side. Wind struck him in the face hard enough to rock him back on his heels. And it was hot, like air blown over the top of an incinerator.

  "Steve?" Her voice was different. The prickly pertness, which he thought might have been the girl's way of flirting, was gone. "Come over here. I don't like this."

  She was standing by the side door of the RV. It was unlatched, banging back and forth in the wind a little even though this was the lee side, and the steps were down. It wasn't the door or the steps she was looking at, though. At the foot of the stairs, half-buried in sand that the wind had blown beneath the RV, was a doll with blond hair and a bright blue dress. It lay face-down and abandoned. Steve didn't care for the look of this much, either. Dolls with no little girls around to mind them were sort of creepy under any conditions, that was his opinion, at least, and to come upon one abandoned by the roadside, half-buried in blowing sand--

  He opened the unlatched door and poked his head into the RV. It was brutally hot, at least a hundred and ten degrees. "Hello? Anybody?"

  But he knew better. If they'd been here, the people who owned this RV, they would have been running the engine for the air conditioning.

  "Don't bother." Cynthia had picked up the doll and was brushing sand from its hair and the folds of its dress. "This is no dimestore dolly. Not huge bucks, but expensive. And someone cared about her. Look." She pulled out the skirt with her fingers so he could see where a small, neat patch had been sewn over a rip. It matched the dress almost exactly in color. "If the girl who owned this doll was around, it wouldn't have been out lying in the dirt, I practically guarantee you that. The question is, why didn't she take it with her when she and her folks left? Or at least put it back inside?" She opened the door, hesitated, went up one of the two steps, hesitated again, looked back at him. "Come on."

  "I can't. I have to find the boss."

  "In a minute, okay? I don't want to go in here by myself. It's like the Andrea Doria, or something."

  "You mean the Mary Celeste. The Andrea Doria sank."

  "Okay, smarty-britches, whatever. Come on, it won't take long. Besides ..." She hesitated.

  "Besides, it might have something to do with my boss? Is that what you're thinking?"

  Cynthia nodded. "It's not that big a reach. I mean, they're both gone, aren't they?"

  He didn't want to accept that, though--it felt like a complication he didn't deserve. She saw some of that on his face (maybe even all of it; she sure wasn't dumb) and tossed up her hands. "Oh shit, I'll look around myself."

  She went inside, still holding the doll. Steve looked thoughtfully after her for a moment, then followed. Cynthia glanced back at him, nodded, then put the doll down in one of the captain's chairs. She fanned her tank-top at her neck. "Hot," she said. "I mean boogery."

  She walked into the RV's cabin. Steve went the other way, into the driver's area, ducking his head so as not to bump it. On the dashboard in front of the passenger seat were three packs of baseball cards, neatly sorted into teams-Cleveland Indians, Cincinnati Reds, Pittsburgh Pirates. He thumbed through them and saw that about half were signed, and maybe half of the signed ones were personalized. Across the bottom of Albert Belle's card was this: "To David--Keep sluggin'! Albert Belle." And another, from the Pittsburgh pile: "See the ball before you swing, Dave--Your friend, Andy Van Slyke."

  "There was a boy, too," Cynthia called. "Unless the girl was into G.I. Joe and Judge Dredd and the MotoKops as well as dollies in blue dresses. One of the side-carriers back here is full of comic books."

  "Yeah, there's a boy," Steve said, putting Albert Belle and Andy Van Slyke back into their respective decks. He just brought the ones that were really important to him, he thought, smiling a little. The ones he absolutely could not bear to leave home. "His name is David."

  Startled: "How in the hell do you know that?"

  "Learned it all watching X-Files." He picked up a gas credit-card receipt from the wad of papers jammed into the dashboard map-receptacle, and smoothed it out. The name on it was Ralph Carver, the address somewhere in Ohio. The carbon had blurred across the town name, but it might have been Wentworth.

  "I don't suppose you know anything else about him, do you?" she asked. "Last name? Where he came from?"

  "David Carver," he said, the smile widening into a grin. "Dad's Ralph Carver. They hail from Wentworth, Ohio. Nice town. Next door to Columbus. I was in Columbus with South-side Johnny in '86."

  She came forward, the doll curled against one mosquito-bump breast. Outside the wind gusted again, throwing sa
nd against the RV. It sounded like hard rain. "You're making that up!"

  "No'm," he said, and held out the gas receipt. "Here's the Carver part. David I got from the kid's baseball cards. He's got some high-priced ink, tell you that."

  She picked the cards up, looked at them, then put them back and turned slowly all the way around, her face solemn and shiny with sweat. He was sweating himself, and plenty. He could feel it running down his body like a light, sticky oil. "Where did they go?"

  "Nearest town, to get help," he said. "Probably someone gave them a lift. Do you remember from your map what's around here?"

  "No. There is a town, I think, but I don't recall the name. But if that's what they did, why didn't they lock up their place when they left? I mean, all their shit is here." She waved one hand toward the cabin. "Know what's back there by the studio couch?"

  "Nope."

  "The wife's jewelry caddy. A ceramic frog. You put your rings and earrings in the frog's mouth."

  "That sounds tasteful." He wanted to get out of here, and not just because it was so nasty-hot or because he had to track down the boss. He wanted to get out because the RV was like the fucking Mary Celeste. It was too easy to imagine vampires hidden away in the closets, vampires in Bermuda shorts and tee-shirts saying things like I SURVIVED HIGHWAY 50, THE LONELIEST HIGHWAY IN AMERICA!

  "It's actually cute," she said, "but that's not the point. There's two sets of earrings and a finger-ring in it. Not real expensive, but not junk, either. The ring's a tourmaline, I think. So why didn't they- "

  She saw something in the map-holder, something that had been revealed when he stirred the crammed-in papers, and plucked out a dollar-sign moneyclip that looked like real silver. There were bills folded into it. She fanned them quickly with the tip of a finger, then tossed the moneyclip back into the map-holder as if it were hot.

  "How much?" he asked.

  "Forty or so," she said. "The clip itself's probably worth three or four times that much. Tell you what, pilgrim--this smells bad."

  Another gust of wind splashed sand against the northern side of the RV, this one hard enough to rock it a little on its flat tires. The two of them looked at each other out of their sweat-shiny faces. Steve met the doll's blank blue gaze. What happened, here, honey? What did you see?

  He turned for the door.