No Man's Land

by G. M. Ford

  “I’ll buy you dinner. There’s a restaurant in the hotel named . . .”

  “Mary Elaine’s,” she finished. “Great joint.”

  Corso slid into the passenger seat and buckled up. She threw a sideways glance in his direction. “Good taste in restaurants too,” she said with a smile. “It’s a wonder some clever woman hasn’t snapped you up by now.”

  He turned her way. “Who says somebody hasn’t?”

  “Your reputation precedes you, Mr. Corso.”

  29

  “Nice your mom’s still writing you letters,” Kehoe said. As promised, they were heading north. Sliding along under a slate gray sky, radio playing one of those gloom-and-doom preachers you only find in the middle of nowhere. Out on the eastern horizon, a line of storm clouds dropped forks of silver lightning, probing the ground here and there, as if searching for sinners.

  “Lotta guys go down . . . you know the family hangs in there for a while . . . does the best they can . . . writes and visits and sends shit . . . but you know man, life goes on. People die. Others gotta get on with their lives. Can’t spend the rest of their days draggin’ some con along behind them like some old anchor. Somebody else comes along. Get a fresh start maybe. New names in a new place where people don’t look at ’em funny. Can’t hardly blame ’em for movin’ on.”

  He wasn’t expecting a response. Driver had been in nevernever land ever since they stopped for food and gas a couple of hours back. Kehoe pulled down the vanity mirror and looked at his new hairdo for something like the fiftieth time. For the first time, he heard thunder in the distance and turned G.M. Ford toward the sound. The storm was running them down from the east, coming hard along the prairie with a wavering curtain of rain leading the way. Another hour of daylight, tops. He was watching the approach of the storm out of the side window when, out of nowhere, Driver spoke. “My mother never gave up. Never will. As long as both of us live, I’ll always be her son, and she’ll always be on my side. Doesn’t matter what I may have done. She’ll find a way it wasn’t my fault. Find a way to blame somebody else. That’s part of being a mother as far as she’s concerned.”

  “Be nice to have somebody like that,” Kehoe said. “Hell, my family come apart before I ever even showed up. Long as I can remember I was getting sent from my mother to my father to my grandma Jean to my aunt Sophie. Whoever was out of jail at the time and had a roof.” Kehoe settled down in the seat and began to work his teeth with a toothpick. “My old man was one of those types believed a good beating was a cure for just about everything. Beat a little religion in ya. Beat the devil out.” He chuckled. “Tell you what though . . . you sure as hell didn’t want to come home from school and tell my old man anybody else beat your ass . . . no sirree . . . you either come home the winner or you best not drag your ass home at all.”

  “Where’s he now?”

  “Don’t nobody know,” Kehoe said. “Walked out of his favorite bar in Greenville, Mississippi, one night and ain’t never been seen since. I was twelve. I waited a few days until the peanut butter run out and called my aunt Sophie. She come down from Tennessee and picked me up.”

  “What about your mother?”

  Kehoe thought it over. “She had a bad heart. Just never had the strength it took to be raisin’ children.” he said. “Wore out way before her time. Sophie used to say Gladys was too good for this world. Always seemed to me like it was the other way around, like the world was just too much for her or something. No sooner would I get there and she’d be sending me back where I come from.” Kehoe shrugged and went back to his toothpick. Raindrops . . . those big silver tears that run along the edges of a storm began to hurl themselves against the sheet metal. Looked like liquid mercury bouncing off the hood, then a clap of thunder right overhead, a trident of lightning right in front of the car and the storm, pouring down out of the sky like a waterfall, swamping the wipers, reducing visibility to just about nothing.

  “Like a cow pissin’ on a flat rock,” Kehoe shouted above the din. Driver slowed the car to a crawl, inching along in the right lane, wipers slapping like crazy until, five minutes later, the deluge was gone, moved on off across the high desert, heading west at a hundred miles an hour.

  Kehoe worked his gum line with a toothpick. Dislodging a morsel, he gathered it with his lips and spit it down onto the carpet. “Had me a whole nother meal there,” he commented. When Driver failed to respond, he shot a quick glance in that direction. Driver had gone back to perusing whatever inner landscape his mind had invented to keep from going all the way crazy. “Hey,”

  Kehoe called. No response. “Hey,” again.

  Driver turned his face Kehoe’s way. Watching Driver’s eyes return from never-never land was like watching a slot machine click to a stop. Three lemons.

  “Whatcha need?”

  “What I need is to take a leak. Sign back there says there’s a rest area a coupla miles ahead.”

  The last drops of rain, the rear guard of the storm, fell from the sky, then it was silent again. And then the sign . . . REST AREA 3⁄4 MILE . . . State of Utah, Route 191, little picture of a beehive. Busy busy, these Mormons.

  Driver lifted the turn signal lever and eased off the highway. A thicket of shrubbery separated the rest area from the highway. Wiry desert plants they didn’t have to water.

  Place wasn’t much and what there was was damn near deserted. A pair of concrete block bathrooms and four picnic tables. On the left, an elderly couple was repacking the back of a blue Volvo station wagon. On the right, an enormous Worldwide Moving van was angled across a bunch of parking spots. Driver backed the car into a slot and turned off the engine. “One at a time,” he said. “You go first.”

  Kehoe opened the glove box and pulled out the shiny Colt revolver.

  “Just in case,” he said with a wink, as he stuffed it into his belt and pulled his shirt down over it. “You never know who you’re gonna meet in these public shitters.”

  Driver got out with him. He stood next to the Mercedes stretching his arms and back, watching Kehoe cross the tarmac in that leg iron shuffle of his. The sound of an engine starting pulled Driver’s head around. The couple in the Volvo were loaded up and leaving. He watched the old man back up, wheel hard to the right, and creep off toward the highway entrance ramp. When he turned back, a guy in a white T-shirt and a gray Stetson hat was headed his way. One of those highway jockeys with a big gut and no ass, pushing a pair of spit-shined cowboy boots over to the side of the moving van, where he grabbed the long silver handle and pulled himself up into the driver’s seat. The howl of the starter split the gloom, then the engine burst into life, sending a dark pair of plumes rolling from the silver diesel pipes. Driver heard the hiss of the hydraulic clutch and the slip and shudder of the tires as the big rig began to roll. He watched as the yellow-and-white globe painted on the side of the truck passed before his eyes. Heard the driver make his first shift, then, in an instant, lost all interest in the truck, as the final set of wheels rolled by and he could now see what had been hidden by the moving van. His breathing became rapid and shallow. His body began to tingle.

  A Nevada State Police cruiser was nosed into the handicapped slot closest to the bathrooms, no more than twenty feet from where Driver stood. The last flattop hairdo in America sat behind the wheel. A young woman sat leaning forward in the backseat. The windows were down. He could hear her plain as day.

  “When it’s my turn, you gonna stand there and watch me pee? What kinda pervert are you anyway? They teach you how to be a pervert at cop school? Huh do they?”

  The cop threw an exasperated look at Driver and went back to staring straight ahead. Driver reached in through the open window of the Mercedes and unlocked all the doors, then pulled opened the rear door and pretended to busy himself with something inside. The girl was still running her mouth, but Driver had tuned her out. Suddenly, a loud bang forced Driver to look up. The door to the men’s room had been thrown back against the building. Another Nevada S
tate policeman was engaged in a spirited wrestling match with a guy in blue jeans and a black T-shirt. Connected at the wrist by a pair of handcuffs, they whirled and twirled and flailed about as both men sought to gain an advantage on the other.

  Flattop was out of the car in a flash. As he loped toward the melee, scratching at his holster, the wrestlers went down on the concrete sidewalk with a thud. The cop came out on top, but the other guy was quicker; he hooked a leg around the cop and jerked him down to the ground, where the grunting and cursing reached a crescendo as each man used his free hand in an attempt to deliver a crippling blow.

  From there on, like they say, timing was everything. The second cop arrived just as Kehoe stepped out of the men’s room door. Forty yards away, Driver saw it come down. He wanted to shout. To tell Kehoe to just keep walking. It happened too fast though. Way too fast. Confronted by a pair of cops and a life-anddeath struggle, Kehoe acted on instinct; he went for his gun.

  Driver watched as Kehoe beat the cop to the draw, getting off a single round, catching the cop square in the chest, forcing the air from his lungs and sending him staggering backward, as if he’d been hit in the sternum by a sledgehammer. The officer was whooping for breath and kneading his chest with both hands as he reeled across the pavement toward the police cruiser. Soon as Kehoe figured out the cop was wearing a vest and wasn’t going to be dead anytime soon, he sent a couple of rounds after the staggering lawman and started running toward the Mercedes at full speed. Driver reached under the towels and came out with the Mossberg twelve-gauge. He grabbed a handful of shells and covered the distance between the Mercedes and the State Police cruiser in a dozen quick strides, arriving just as the wheezing policeman threw himself into the driver’s seat and grabbed the radio.

  In the instant before his thumb engaged the TALK button, some primal instinct told the cop to take a quick glance to his right. Must have looked like a sewer pipe, that enormous, gaping mouth of a shotgun pointed at the side of his head in the split second before the powder expanded and the roar and the flame followed the plastic wads out the barrel into the air. His eyes were big as quarters. He was reaching for his gun and calling for his savior when the thirty or so lead pellets packed inside the shotgun shell blew his head to mist, sending a mass of hair-covered detritus rocketing out the side window like a scalded cat. The girl was screaming now, low down in her vocal range, almost like a roar. Nothing you could make sense of, but not in terror either. Something like excitement accompanied her cries into the darkening sky, but Driver had no time to listen. Up at the restroom, the cop had gained the upper hand and was now kneeling on his prisoner’s back as he exchanged gunfire with Kehoe, who had flattened himself on the ground and was using one hand to steady the other as he squeezed off high powered rounds, several of which had plowed irregular holes through the bathroom’s concrete-block wall.

  Fighting for his life, the cop was so focused on Kehoe he lost track of Driver. Let him get within forty feet before the boom of the shotgun tore him apart. Last thing he saw was Driver pulling the trigger at every stride aiming at whatever the Kevlar vest didn’t cover. The cop fell over backward in a heap, twitched a couple of times and was still.

  By the time Driver got there, the cop was dead and the guy pinned beneath him was squirming like a fish on a riverbank, trying to get out from under the corpse. Driver grabbed the dead cop by the front of his shirt and pulled him over to the side. The guy rolled over a half turn and got to his feet.

  He was young, under twenty-five, with fine almost girlish features and a pompadour worthy of Elvis himself. Wasn’t till he reached up to run a hand through his fancy hair . . . wasn’t till then he saw the handcuffs were still connected to both his right arm and to the left arm of the cop, except that arm wasn’t connected to the cop’s body anymore.

  “Holy shit,” he said, lifting the severed limb from the ground. He stared down at the arm swinging from his wrist, turned pale and for a moment looked like he might puke. He started to bring his right hand to his face, thought better of it and used his left to wipe his brow.

  At that moment the girl in the cruiser began to holler.

  “Harry,” she yelled. “Get me outta here, Harry.”

  For his part, Harry was in something of a quandary. While his heart was clearly with the young woman in the patrol car, his arm was still attached to the cop’s. He took a step toward the cruiser, decided he didn’t want to arrive with an extra appendage and instead dropped to his knees, using his unencumbered hand to go through the cop’s pants pockets, patting here and feeling there until he came out with a small ring of keys. Took him three tries to find the right one, but he finally managed to get himself separated from the long arm of the law, just about the time both Kehoe and Driver had reunited and reloaded their weapons.

  “I’m comin’, honey,” he shouted into the gathering darkness. Kehoe and Driver hurried along in his wake, scanning the deserted rest area as the love birds staged a tearful reunion in the backseat of the patrol car.

  “I saw them on TV,” Driver said as they hustled along.

  “Doin’ what?”

  Driver filled him in on the details. The rebuffed Harry putting one in her father’s ear. The crime spree across Texas and Oklahoma. Extradition back to Texas. Everything he could remember from Vegas.

  Kehoe gave a low whistle. “Texas ain’t no damn place to be killin’ people, Captainman. Those crackers’ll drop the pellets on you in a heartbeat.”

  Out on the highway, an eighteen-wheeler backed down on its gears, sounding for all the world like it was going to pull into the rest area, before shifting up again and continuing on into the darkness. “We better make tracks,” Kehoe said. Harry had extricated his beloved from the backseat by then and was assuring her that everything was going to be alright. Heidi Anne was a high-strung-looking girl in a pair of tortoiseshell glasses and matching hairband. While by no means classically beautiful, Heidi Anne’s vapid blue eyes and voluptuous contours held sufficient promise to explain a murder or two on her behalf. By the time she was inclined to take Harry’s word for the viability of their situation, Driver and Kehoe were approaching the Mercedes. They came sprinting over hand in hand. Stood there like waifs at a bakery window.

  “We gotta get out of here,” Harry said. “Me and Heidi, we . . .”

  “I saw you on TV. I know who you are,” Driver said.

  “Then you know why we gotta get outta here.”

  “Texas is a very unforgiving state.”

  Kid bobbed his hairdo up and down. “So howsabout it?”

  Driver shrugged. “Take the cruiser.”

  “We won’t get ten miles in that thing.”

  “Not your problem,” Driver said evenly. “Should have thought of that before you wasted her father.”

  “That old fuck got exactly what he deserved.”

  “Sure of that, are you?”

  “Damn right I am.”

  Over the kid’s left shoulder, Kehoe had moved in close to Heidi Anne and was looking her over like a lunch menu.

  “What do you say, Cutter? We give ’em a ride or not?”

  Kehoe gave it some consideration. “They was wanted anyplace but Texas, I’d say leave ’em,” he said with mock sincerity.

  “But . . . Texas . . . you know . . .”

  “Honor among thieves and all that?”

  “Whatever you say,” Kehoe said.

  Driver laughed. “I’ll take that as a yes,” he said. With his laughter still in the air and the smile lingering on his lips, Driver put the barrel of the twelve-gauge right between Harry Gibbs’s eyes. “I’d stay real still if I was you, boy,” Driver whispered. Kehoe picked up on the sudden tension and tore himself away from the lovely Heidi. “Problem, Captainman?” he asked.

  “Pat our young friend here down for me will you, Cutter? Last I saw that cop in the car over there, he had a piece. Seems it’s gone missing.”

  They found it in Harry’s boot, a nice compact little Browning ni
ne-millimeter.

  “You’ll excuse me now, boy, if maybe you’re not the type I want sitting behind me with a nine in his shoe.”

  The kid was smart enough to keep his mouth shut.

  “Her too, Cutter,” Driver said. “Make sure she’s clean.”

  Kehoe reckoned it was a filthy job, but he was willing to take it on. For the sake of modesty, he walked her around to the far side of the Mercedes. Harry surely wanted to bend over and look through the cars windows, but the shotgun on his forehead kept him at rigid attention. Took four minutes and a series of giggles before Kehoe came up with the dead officer’s Mace canister. Heidi assured everyone it was strictly for protection. Harry told her to shut up.

  30

  The attendant scanned the car rental agreement with his little handheld computer. A moment later, a tongue of paper emerged from the mouth of the machine. The guy tore it off and handed it to Special Agent Rosen, who carefully folded it and slid it into his wallet.

  Special Agent Westerman stood nearby holding her briefcase in one hand and Rosen’s in the other. The roar of jet engines hovered in the night air. She turned her head in time to see a Southwest Airlines passenger jet rising from the runway. They were on the roof of the parking garage at Phoenix International Airport. Rain was in the air, one of those desert soakers that fills the arroyos in a heartbeat. Everyone could feel it.

  “Thank you for choosing Hertz,” the attendant said as he closed the trunk with a bang, but by that time, Rosen and Westerman were halfway to the elevator.

  “So?” Rosen said.

  “So we pinpointed the information leak, sir.”

  “Where?”

  “The warden’s personal secretary. A woman named Iris Cruz.”

  Rosen said he remembered her. The elevator car arrived; they G.M. Ford stepped in and rode it to the bottom floor. Food and gifts. Rosen checked his watch. “Let’s get some coffee,” he suggested. They found a table over by the Burger King franchise, did their little dance about who was going to Starbucks for coffee, then, when Westerman returned, settled in.