Very Bad Deaths

by Spider Robinson

  I nodded. “Rich people on vacation don’t really have much else to do but note each other’s comings and goings. That’s why nobody’s coming to pump your gas: they can’t believe you aren’t about to bounce out and do it yourself, so everyone driving past will know you’re in town. My money’s on somewhere behind us, too.”

  “But the trouble is…” she began, and trailed off.

  “The damned parks,” I finished. “They bother me, too.”

  “Yeah.” I gave her some cash, and she got out and pumped the gas.

  Seven large provincial parks lie between Squamish and Whistler, and the majority of them as well as the largest of them are on the right-hand side of the road, the one we were interested in. They extend deep into the wilderness, and offer the usual variety of wilderness attractions—camping, hiking, walking, standing and staring, sitting and staring, boating, fishing, swimming, floating, picnicking, portapotties—and taken together they provide just enough action to support the occasional general store, burger stand, or gas station. There just weren’t enough, or long enough, stretches of the kind of total, foolproof isolation we were looking for. Hikers are liable to hear a child screaming a long way. I had documented over thirty approaches to NO PASSING signs—but there were only four or five I had any real hopes for.

  “Look,” I said, when Nika finished paying for the gas and got back in, “it seems to me we have a manageable number of serious candidates. If we turn around now, we’ll have enough time to drive a little ways up each of those gravel roads and see what we see.”

  She frowned and shook her head. “Negative. I changed my mind: I want to go on a ways. It gets emptier from here on. And I keep thinking about this Allen. From Zudie’s description, he’s so twisted I can picture him driving all day, if it gets him to a nice perfect playground.”

  “With four drugged vics in the vehicle?”

  “No reason he couldn’t stop and shoot them all up again, every hundred klicks or so.”

  “Still, that’s a long exposure time.”

  She shrugged. “No cops. No cross streets. No small-town traffic lights or speed traps. Pretty safe exposure. I want to go another twenty or thirty klicks.”

  I gave up. “Okay, but let’s at least eat first.”

  “Done.”

  We were able to find a place in Whistler that was willing to overlook our shabby attire long enough to charge us a grotesque amount of money for a gratifyingly small portion of horrible food. The view through the big windows was so eye-watering, I let the waiter live.

  Nika was right: when she pulled over onto the shoulder another forty klicks or so further up the road, we had doubled our number of serious candidates. By now, however, we were a little over four hours from Vancouver, and running out of steam.

  She said, “I think we’ve gone far enough. We should just boot it back home, and trust that Zandor can spot the right one from the tape. We go driving up a dozen gravel roads into the wilderness, and sooner or later I’m going to tear your muffler off or crack an axle.”

  “Or even just blow a tire or two,” I agreed, and reached out and shut off the ignition.

  “Hey!” she said, indignantly. “What are you doing?”

  “Not sitting in a car,” I said, and got out.

  “We’ve got to get back,” she said, getting out herself.

  I left my door open. I put my hands on my hips and arched my back a few times, tried to touch my toes and managed my knees, walked like a stork for a few steps, cracked my neck a few times. At that point I realized my groaning was beginning to sound like I was fucking, so I made myself stop—a few seconds too late, from her expression.

  “We’ve got a long drive ahead of us,” she insisted.

  “Think it through,” I suggested. “If we leave right now, and make good time, we’ll run right into the very worst of the rush hour.”

  “Oh.” Vancouver has, incredibly, nearly as much to be ashamed of as it has to be proud of, and one of its worst disgraces after its police department is its road system. Incredibly, it’s all what Californians call “surface streets”—no freeways, no loop road around the city, no fast way anywhere, and a criminally inadequate number of bridges, a setup guaranteeing universal gridlock twice a day in the best of conditions. It would make for a perfectly rotten ending to a whole day of driving. We’d be bucking the flood tide of commuters trying to pour out of the city. The crucial Lion’s Gate Bridge from North Van to Stanley Park is, unforgivably, a three-lane bridge: in evening rush hour, inbound traffic would get only one.

  Right here, a car went by maybe once a minute or so.

  “Stretch your legs, Nika,” I urged. “Throttle back to idle. Smoke if you got ’em. Listen to the stillness. Contemplate nature’s wonder in the heart of summer. That funny smell is called ‘fresh air.’ The forest surrounds and enfolds us. Right now, animals are browsing you with their eyes, like shoppers, judging whether they can afford you. Grok the fullness.”

  She left her own door open like mine and came around behind the car. She put one foot up on the rear bumper and leaned forward to stretch her thigh, repeated with the other leg. “I guess you have a point. It is good to be out of the city. I keep thinking about taking a drive out into the country, but I keep not doing it.” She looked around her, too quickly at first, and then more slowly, letting her eye be caught here or there by this or that, the way you do in nature. “It is peaceful here. This is just what I was—Jesus Christ, Russell!”

  “What?”

  “God damn it, is that what I think it is?”

  “Texada Timewarp,” I said. “Why, you want a toke?”

  She advanced on me. “You son of a bitch, put that fucking thing out. Right now!”

  I made myself stand my ground, refused myself permission to turn my fear into anger, kept my voice calm and low as I said, “The Supreme Court of Canada says this is legal to possess.”

  “Federally, maybe,” she conceded, dropping her own volume down closer to mine. “For now, anyway. But the Chief says it’s still against the law in Vancouver—thank God!”

  I nodded. “Then I better be sure and destroy all the evidence before we get back to Vancouver,” I said, and took a long deep toke.

  She turned bright red, but within two seconds I knew she was going to let me get away with it. By the time I exhaled, so did she.

  “You’re out of your jurisdiction,” I said. “The best you could do would be to place me under citizen’s arrest and take me to the nearest RCMP detachment. Who would want to know why you’re spending your off-duty hours chauffeuring a Boomer pothead with a camcorder through the Interior. Not to mention why you’re wasting their time and yours on a possession bust for a single joint, which is not a federal crime. Are you sure you don’t want a hit?”

  “Get that out of my face!”

  “Sorry. But you don’t know what you’re missing.” I took another toke—but when I saw her expression, I had to exhale it to say, “Are you telling me you’ve never smoked dope? Never? Seriously? Not even before you were a cop?”

  “That’s right,” she said.

  I shook my head briefly like a fighter throwing off a punch. “Holy shit!”

  She turned on her heel, went and got back in the car and slammed her door. The engine started, and revved. I was tempted to stay where I was and finish the joint. But a couple of hits of Timewarp is plenty. The world was sparkling as I got back in the car.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said as I was strapping my seat belt. “I was just going to ask you if you wanted to drive the return leg.”

  “I’d be glad to,” I said.

  “No thanks.”

  I reached down and caught her hand just as she was about to put the car in gear. She let me. “Back in college,” I told her, “back on the east coast, I did a lot of what was called work-study. I did odd jobs for the administration, and got a break on my tuition. One week I typed up the raw results of a study by the state Narcotics Addiction Control Commission, compar
ing the effects of alcohol and marijuana on driving. They’d had volunteers drive an obstacle course over and over, first sober, then at five successive stages of drunkenness, and finally at five levels of stonedness. Experienced users, mind you, not beginners.”

  She nodded. “So you know the facts.”

  I nodded right back. “But you don’t. Only a handful of us do—because the state never published that study after all, and it was never replicated. The results were too clear. With alcohol, a driver’s performance started to degrade right at level one, and bottomed out by level four. With pot, the first three levels improved driving performance.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “Reaction time speeded up. Peripheral vision expanded. Subjects became mildly paranoid, looked further ahead for trouble, made conservative choices. And they tended to find the world interesting enough to keep them alert at the wheel. By level four, they were back to baseline, and at level five, totally blasted on several spliffs of the finest hydroponic sinsemilla sativa buds, their performance resembled that of a man with a couple of beers in him.”

  “Bullshit,” she said again.

  “I typed the results. The numbers were clear. I typed the conclusions: I didn’t make them up.”

  “I don’t believe it. Prove it.”

  “Prove it to yourself,” I said. “Look it up.”

  She pounced. “Aha. How am I supposed to look up a study that didn’t get published?”

  “By listening to what the dog didn’t do in the night,” I said.

  By God, she wasn’t completely illiterate. She got the reference, I could see it in her face. She just didn’t see how it applied.

  “Do a Google search,” I told her. “You’ll find that every year of its existence, that Narcotics Addiction Control Commission produced something—a study, a paper, a conference, a brochure, something. All state commissions do, just like provincial commissions up here. They have to: it’s how they pretend to have earned their salaries. In 1968 and 1969 that commission produced nothing, as far as the record shows. Yet they still got their funding for 1970, uncut. You figure it out. Check it out.”

  She glared at me and hunted for a good comeback and came up empty. “I will,” she said, and snapped her gaze forward. Her hand moved abruptly under mine, putting the car in gear, and she stomped on the gas.

  There was no time. No time to yell, no time to point, no time at all. As I moved, I was thinking that what I was doing was wrong, but fortunately my hand didn’t care what my brain thought: it grabbed the gearshift as her hand came off it, thumbed in the button, and slammed it all the way forward into park. The transmission howled. We stopped abruptly enough to have deployed the airbags, if Hondas that old had airbags, and both banged our heads, she on the steering wheel and me on the dashboard. Everything but the left front wheel was still on the gravel shoulder. She had time to draw in breath, select an obscenity, and turn toward me to deliver it before the huge Peterbilt and trailer w-w-w-WHUFF!ed by and punched a large shiny hole through the space we had been just about to occupy. The wind of its passage rocked the car as much as the panic stop had. A second too late, its mighty airhorn blared, and dopplered away into the distance like Homer Simpson being told he couldn’t have a donut. We sat in the sudden silence and blinked at each other.

  “Peripheral vision,” I said. “Reaction time.”

  She groped for rebuttal. “You probably screwed up your transmission.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s gonna cost you money.”

  “Not as much as dying. I priced it recently.”

  She made a face. I waited. Finally she forced the words out. “Thank you, Russell. Why don’t you drive for a while?”

  “All right. Until Squamish, anyway. You’re a lot better at the rollercoaster stuff.” I kept my face straight and my voice neutral. I could tell how much the concession had cost her, and I admired her for it. In her place I might have tried to take refuge in a smoke-screen tantrum.

  We changed places and headed for home.

  A few klicks down the road, I said, “What are you doing?”

  She said, “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  “Taping.”

  “Bingo. Slow down a little.”

  “Why? Are you taping.”

  “There’s a No Passing sign coming.”

  “Yeah, but it’s on the wrong side of the road.” Nonetheless I eased off on the gas a bit. “Zudie was very clear: Allen’s mental image of the turnoff was on the right. I mean, it’s not the kind of thing you’re liable to remember wrong, is it?”

  “Maybe not.” She kept taping until we were past, then turned round and faced forward again.

  “So then…?”

  “Maybe it’s on the right after you’ve driven past it and then turned around at the next convenient place—so you won’t attract so much attention pulling off into it. Maybe it’s on the right after you’ve landed your plane in a lake north of it and then driven south.”

  “How likely is that? He’d have to keep a car up there in the country just for that purpose.”

  She set her jaw stubbornly. “There’s nothing wrong with having suspenders and belt. It doesn’t cost us anything to be thorough.”

  I decided to let it go. She was right on both counts, when you came down to it. And she had let me have the last one. “Okay,” I said.

  “I’ve been trained to cover all the bases, assume nothing, and believe nothing I’m told until I’ve confirmed it.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “Did anybody ever tell you you’ve got a slightly rigid mind-set?”

  “Yeah,” she said, “I hear it from potheads and junkies all the time.”

  10.

  We drove several klicks in a silence thick enough to hold thumbtacks. I wondered what I was doing here, how I had gotten myself into this, what had ever possessed me to enter into a criminal conspiracy to hunt a monster with such an implausible pair as a goofball hermit with ESP and a macho nonlesbian cop with a nightstick up her ass.

  Finally I spoke up. “You know why Zudie needs me?”

  She reacted as if I had tried to pull her gun: physically flinched away from me and yelled, “Jesus Christ, don’t DO that!”

  Her volume frightened me. The car swerved slightly. “Don’t do what, for fuck’s sake?” I yelled back.

  She stared hard at me for a while, then visibly relaxed a little and turned away. “I was just about to ask you what Zandor needs you for.”

  I gaped at her for a second…and then cracked up.

  She didn’t join me, so I stopped soon. “Trust me, that was coincidence,” I told her. “I’m not telepathic—thank God.”

  She nodded. “I hadn’t thought you were, until just then. Okay, my question stands: why are you even here? Why couldn’t Zandor have just come to me directly? What have…” She let the last sentence trail away unfinished.

  “What have I got that you haven’t got?” I hazarded softly. She reddened. “Sorry, that was another lucky hit.”

  “Look,” she said, “I’m not a complete idiot. I understand that he wants to keep his identity and location secret. It’s pretty obvious why. If the RCMP knew what he can do, even his power wouldn’t be enough to keep them from enslaving him.”

  “For the fifteen minutes it would take the NSA to come up here from the States and take him away from the horsemen,” I agreed. “For all the good it’d do any of the bastards: he’d be dead in a week.”

  “Okay, so it’s smart for him to work through a cutout. But Russell, why you?” She shook her head. “No offense, but a doper, class clown and half an invalid is not what I’d be looking for in a coconspirator.” She snuck a glance at me to see how I took it.

  I was nodding in agreement. “And that’s pretty much what Zudie was looking for.”

  She stared ahead at the road and shook her head. “I don’t get it.”

  We passed the Peterbilt that had nearly creamed us. “It’s pretty simple, Nika. He can stand to be
near me.”

  She opened her mouth to answer, and left it open.

  After half a klick or so of silence, I said, “Look, all of us who aren’t telepaths have at least one folly in common. We all have an ego, a personality, a viewpoint, and each and every one of us is convinced that our viewpoint is the absolute truth, that we are the one and only reliable observer of reality. We suffer from the delusion that we know what we’re talking about. Daniel Dennet says we sell ourselves the delusion that we’re conscious. Are you with me?”

  “I guess.”

  “Okay. We each think our viewpoint is truth. The more certain of it we are, the stronger our personality is, the louder our ego broadcast becomes. A telepath knows better. He has sampled hundreds of viewpoints and knows perfectly well that they’re all full of shit, including his own. In a sense it’s the one thing he does know for sure—and every single thing you think at him tries to tell him he’s wrong. You in particular, I mean now. You’ve got a viewpoint so rigid and defended and angle-braced and fail-safed, even at a thousand meters you must seem to Zudie like you’re bellowing through a megaphone—trying to obliterate his worldview with your own, to bludgeon him into seeing everything as you do: correctly.”

  I glanced over to see if I was putting it across, but her face was unreadable.

  “Now me, I still can’t even make up my mind which Beatle I like best. I’m always open to the heretical opinion, ready to root for the underdog, uncommitted to any party, willing to listen to anyone with manners, prepared to abandon a cherished belief the moment I’m shown persuasive evidence to the contrary. Maybe the Big Bang theory is bullshit. Maybe Lee Oswald acted alone. None of what I said before about driving on pot applies to neophytes, and maybe none of it’s true at all: I have no way of knowing if that study was accurate. It was done by government scientists, after all. I’ve been full of shit so many times it doesn’t even embarrass me any more.”