No Man's Land

by G. M. Ford

  “Don’t worry,” Ray shouted over the rising din. “She’ll make it. She always does.”

  The guy shot him an uncertain smile and braced himself harder. Ray Lofton liked to talk, which was why he picked up hitchhikers whenever he got the chance. Just to have somebody to talk to. But this guy . . . this guy spent words the way other people spent money. He’d known that an hour ago, he wouldn’t have picked him up.

  He’d felt bad for the guy, standing out there in the wind trying to thumb a ride in the middle of the night on a road nobody drove this time of year, so he’d picked him up. Guy hadn’t even told him his name. Just threw his gym bags down on the floor at his feet and thanked Ray for the ride. Hadn’t uttered a peep since. Just sat there staring out the front window.

  So . . . it was no great sorrow for Ray when, halfway to the summit, the guy suddenly threw himself forward in the seat, scanned the roadside like it was full of naked cheerleaders, and said, “Stop.”

  Ray, who likewise had been lost in his own thoughts, didn’t react right away.

  “What?”

  “Stop,” the guy said again.

  Ray eased the rig off the road and into the deserted parking lot of the Sierra Motor Inn. Maybe two dozen detached cabins spread out among a little grove of pine trees. Place was closed for the winter.

  Ray kept his foot jammed on the brake and turned to the guy.

  “You never did say exactly where you was going. I never figured you was . . . you know . . . Jenner Peak.”

  But by then it was too late. The guy was already out of the seat and down onto the ground, bags and all. “Thanks,” he said again and closed the door.

  Ray watched him in the mirror as he crossed the highway with a black Nike bag in each hand and made his way over to the Ski Chalet motel across the street. When the guy disappeared behind a big old motor home parked along the edge of their lot, Ray lost interest. He took his foot off the brake, checked in both directions and gave the old girl all the gas he dared. Sounded like maracas.

  39

  The knocking was tentative at first . . . one knuckle. Corso groaned and rolled over. It went away. Corso kept his eyes closed, trying to convince himself the noise was part of his dream. Then it returned. Louder this time. The flat of a hand smacking against the door. He opened an eye. The noise had also awakened Melanie Harris. She was naked, wound around him like a vine, half-in, half-out of the bedclothes, propped up now bleary-eyed on one elbow.

  “Don’t answer it,” she whispered.

  Corso rolled onto his back and closed his eyes. The knocking started again, more insistent this time. “Yeah,” Corso yelled.

  “It’s Marty,” the voice came through the door. Corso rolled over and threw his arms around Melanie. He drew her close. She kissed him on the ear. “We can’t just leave him out there,” she whispered.

  “Just a minute,” Corso yelled over his shoulder. He kissed her between the eyes, then on the mouth. “You want me to let him in?”

  “You got a better idea?”

  “You want to hide in the bathroom or something?”

  She considered the matter. “Seems a bit Gothic,” she said.

  “Besides . . . Marty’s nobody to talk.”

  Corso smiled. He got to his feet, rummaged through the pile of covers at the foot of the bed, found his shirt and jeans and put them on.

  Corso opened the door a crack. Martin Wells looked like the wrath of God. His smooth brown Hollywood face had recovered every year his plastic surgeon had so carefully removed. He had lines in his face deep enough to hide a quarter. He wore the same striped dress shirt he’s worn the night before. The front of the shirt was stained with dirt and spittle, and somewhere along the way he’d lost the second button.

  “What’s up?” Corso asked.

  “I can’t find Melanie. I tried the . . .”

  “She’s okay,” Corso assured him.

  From behind Corso came Melanie’s voice. “Let him in.”

  Corso stepped aside. Marty hesitated for a moment, then crossed the threshold. He sent an amused glance bouncing from Melanie to Corso and back again. “So . . . ,” he said with a smile, “. . . what do we have here?”

  Melanie looked embarrassed. “Don’t start, Marty. You’re nobody to talk.” She turned her head toward Corso. “Marty here even cheats on his mistress,” she said.

  Marty looked hurt. “A man in my position needs his comforts.”

  Corso looked the little guy over. “You’ve got two mistresses?”

  “Stephanie . . . that’s my wife . . . she found out about Janice.”

  He shrugged. “Took all the fun out of it.” He looked them over again. “So?”

  Melanie changed the subject. “So what happened with last night’s feed?”

  Marty’s turn to wince. “A bit more than we had in mind eh?”

  “Frank said it was all over.”

  “Apparently so was Frank.”

  “Stop it!” She tried to sound angry but didn’t manage.

  “A hundred fifty-five channels domestically. We’re getting a lot of calls and e-mails. They’re running about two to one outraged.”

  “What’s the network saying?”

  “Publicly, they’re distancing themselves from us. Behind closed doors they’re gloating over the ratings.”

  “At least they’re predictable.”

  “I’ve got a budget meeting with Larry at six tonight,” Marty said. “You gonna be able to get the trailer home?”

  “It’s an RV, Marty . . . an RV.”

  “You gonna be able to get it home? I could send—”

  “I got it this far,” she interrupted. “I’ll get it back to the lot.”

  “Okay then,” Marty said. “I’m going to jump in the shower and head back home. You need anything, you give me a jingle.”

  He pointed over at Melanie. “You know, dearie, you got a certain blush this morning . . .”

  “Shut up, Marty,” she said. “Go take your shower.”

  Martin Wells laughed, said his good-byes and disappeared.

  “Howsabout breakfast?” Corso asked. “The café across the street must be open by now.”

  Melanie sat up and surveyed herself in the mirror. She made a disgusted face. “Long as you don’t mind waiting for an hour or so.”

  “Howsabout I go get it and bring it back.”

  She gave him a wicked look. “Thus fortified . . . do you suppose we might . . . ?”

  “I do indeed,” he said. “What do you want?”

  “For breakfast?”

  “Let’s start there.”

  She told him.

  He found his shoes and jacket, stuffed a room key into his pocket and headed out.

  The Timberman’s Café was a quarter mile downhill on the other side of the highway. The clock over the counter read eightten when he settled onto the stool.

  “Be right with ya,” a voice called from the back. Corso looked around. Standard-issue rural café. Half a dozen tables replete with brightly patterned table covers, ten stools along the counter, restrooms on the uphill end, cute little sign Scotch-taped to the back of the cash register: PRICES WERE BORN HERE AND RAISED ELSEWHERE.

  A guy in his early sixties slipped his shoulders out through the double swinging doors. He was as pale and skinny as the toothpick hanging out the side of his mouth. “What can I get for you?”

  he wanted to know.

  Corso told him. He wrote it down.

  “Gonna take a little longer than usual,” the guy said. “My weekend waitress called in with the flu.” He made a disgusted face. “Something about Friday nights seems to do that to her.”

  “Someplace I can get a newspaper around here?” Corso asked.

  “Not this time of year,” the guy shouted.

  Corso spent the next five minutes ruminating on the joys of women. How his hand hadn’t bothered him a bit last night. About how he liked to think of himself as a thoughtful, professional person who generally approa
ched things in an organized manner . . . and how all of that went completely out the window whenever he found himself confronted with a naked woman. How countless generations of social and religious admonitions fell by the wayside in an instant, as, all these centuries later, the primal need to spread one’s genes upon the waters still ran rampant in the blood, leaving him little more than a gussied-up and shaved version of his feral forbearers.

  He’d worked up a smile when the little bell over the door tinkled. Before he could turn and appraise his fellow diners, a familiar voice pulled his attention back to the here and now.

  “You’re a long way from the Phoenician, Mr. Corso. Might have been better for all concerned if you’d stayed there.”

  Corso knew the voice, but peeked back over his shoulder just to be sure. Special Agent Rosen with Westerman in tow, the pair of them just as neat and unwrinkled as could be. Corso turned away, focusing instead on the promising smells of toasting bread and frying bacon.

  They took the stools on either side of him. “Might have been better if you’d been straight with us,” Rosen said.

  “I was straight with you,” Corso said.

  “You knew where to find his mother.”

  “You didn’t ask me that.”

  “You knew that’s where Driver would be headed.”

  “So did you. You catch him yet?”

  Their collective silence answered the question. “In retrospect, it seems like that little piece of information wasn’t of much use, now was it?” Corso said “No telling what might have happened if you and that Harris woman had kept out of it and let us do our jobs.”

  “She was just doing hers,” Corso said.

  “The public’s right to know and all that,” Westerman threw in.

  “Don’t you forget it,” Corso snapped.

  The cook backed into the room. His hands were filled with plastic bags jam-packed with an assortment of Styrofoam food containers. He set the bags on the counter in front of Corso and read through the order. “Two large coffees. One cream and sugar. One black,” he said finally. Corso nodded his agreement.

  “Sixteen dollars and twelve cents,” the guy announced. Corso dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the counter, picked up the bags and started for the door. Rosen and Westerman followed along in his wake.

  “Sounds a lot like breakfast for two,” Westerman commented.

  Corso looked at Rosen. “Not much gets by her, does it?”

  He went out the door backward, turning around in time to step over the molded concrete curb, stretching his long legs, making it difficult for anyone shorter than himself to keep pace. Turned out the effort was wasted. Rosen and Westerman followed no farther than the dark blue Lincoln Town Car in the parking lot.

  Corso had covered half the distance back to his room when the Lincoln came rolling by, headed west toward the top of the hill at a stately ten miles an hour. Perhaps because his attention was diverted by the car, he got all the way to the door to his room before noticing something was amiss. A “what’s wrong with this picture?” kind of feeling in the pit of his stomach. He looked around but couldn’t quite place what was bothering him. Wasn’t until his eyes swept over the downhill end of the parking lot for the second time that things began to click into place and his stomach took the elevator ride down to his shoe tops. He blinked twice, thinking he must be wrong, then looked uphill toward Marty’s rental car and the motel office. No doubt about it. The RV was gone.

  40

  Ray Lofton stood on the front bumper and fanned the steaming radiator with his hat. On the ground behind him, a white plastic bucket held five gallons of water, a stash he kept in the back of the truck for just such an occasion, but, for the time being at least, the radiator was way too hot to take a chance on removing the cap. He’d made that mistake once before. Lost his patience and tried to open her up with nothing but his shirttail between his hand and the radiator cap. Damn thing went off like Mount St. Helens, burned the living bejesus out of him. He’d spent the next month covered in salve. Folks at work took to calling him “greazy Ray.” Assholes, all of ’em.

  Problem today was the old girl lost her momentum when he stopped to let Silent Bob out back in Jenner Peak. The idea was to get her in third gear down on the flats and keep it there all the way to the top. Long as you kept her cruising along at about thirty in third, she was happy as a clam. This time, however, what with stopping right in the middle of the steepest part of the grade, he wasn’t able to muster enough revs to get out of second gear and so had spent the past half hour doing maybe twenty miles an hour No Man’s Land and watching the temperature gauge inch its way toward the red zone, until it got so bad he’d had no choice but to pull into a turn out and shut her down.

  Ray climbed down off the bumper and stuck the hat back on his head. He felt a curse coming on. It was going to be at least and hour before he could fire her up and get on his way. Not only that but he had to make a stop way the hell out at the Lodge at White Lake. They’d hosted wedding receptions the past two weekends and needed a trash run. By itself, the Lodge was an extra hour each way. By the time he got back to the yard, the shank of the day was going to be history. He kicked a piece of loose gravel and watched as it rolled under the guardrail and over the edge of the embankment. The vista beyond stopped him in his tracks. The easterly wind had prevented L.A.’s airborne sludge from working its way up the canyons today. The air was crisp and clean. From where he stood he could see the southern edge of the Sierra Nevada, the knobby spine that ran damn near the whole length of the state. From there, it wasn’t hard to imagine the North American and Pacific Plates grinding on each other, shoving the Pacific Plate down into the bowels of the earth, down into the ocean of molten magma that covers the sphere, uplifting the North American Plate and tilting it westward. Ray smiled and sat down on the guardrail. “Who could get mad on a day like this?”

  he asked himself.

  Corso set the breakfast bags on the concrete sidewalk to the right of the door. The smell of fresh coffee called to his nostrils as he reached into his pocket. His hand trembled as he fished out the room key and fit it into the opening. He stood to one side as he swung the door open and peeked into the room.

  From that vantage point everything looked more or less like he’d left it. Except that Melanie was gone. He came into the room slowly, looking for any sign of haste or desperation. The air inside the room smelled of her. Of perfume and body lotion and whatever other oils and unguents she used. Her coat lay on the floor, so wherever she’d gone to, she’d gone naked. He pushed open the bathroom door. Empty. He couldn’t decide whether to be relieved or terrified.

  And then he suddenly felt foolish and melodramatic. Standing there like a bird dog on point. Maybe . . . there’d been a . . . maybe she’d . . . but, no matter how he tried, he couldn’t finish the sentence. The tingle of fear began to inch up again. He strode quickly out of the room, turned right and began to hurry toward Marty’s room and the motel office. The door to unit seven was ajar. Corso could hear the shower running. He stepped inside and called Marty’s name, then again, louder this time. Corso hustled to the back of the room and pushed open the bathroom door. The shower was going full blast, but the stall was empty. Corso reached in and turned off the water. The floor was awash in soapy water.

  He moved quickly now. Back across the room, toward the door. A quick glance to his left sent another shiver down his spine. The little table next to the window held Marty’s cell phone, a handful of pocket change, the room key and the keys to the rental car. Marty’s jacket was thrown over the seat of the chair because the chair back was already holding his shirt and trousers. Corso’s head was spinning, trying desperately to come up with a scenario to fit the situation and failing miserably. He walked over and picked up the cell phone and the car keys. He stashed them in his jacket pockets and began to pat himself down, looking for the business card he’d stuck in one of his pockets the day before. He found it in the back pocket of his jeans, pulled
out the cell phone and began to dial the number. Nothing. No bars. No service. He cursed and scooped the change from the tabletop. He jogged to the phone booth, braced the receiver between his shoulder and his ear and dialed the number. An electronic voice informed him the call would cost a dollar ninety-five for three minutes. He dumped the handful of coins on the burnished metal shelf beneath the phone and used his forefinger to sort out two bucks’ worth of quarters.

  As he lifted the first coin toward the slot a flash of white among the weeds caught his attention. He palmed the coin and hung up the receiver. His body tingled, his legs were heavy and sluggish as he covered the twenty feet.

  He stood looking down for a moment and then dropped to one knee. Towels. Two of them. White unmarked towels, nappy and rough like you get back from a commercial laundry. He picked one up. Brought it to his face and sniffed. He winced. No doubt about it. They smelled of sweat . . . sweat and gun oil. He grabbed the other towel and got to his feet. Ten seconds later, he was dropping quarters into the slot as fast as he was able.

  41

  Martin Wells wore nothing but his shoes. He sat with his back to the bathroom door, with his legs curled tightly against his chest. He kept his mouth shut and face buried in his kneecaps, hoping to avoid another swipe of the gun butt, a casual motion of the arms, which had lifted a bloody flap of skin from his scalp and reduced his will to resist to slightly less than zero. Nakedness was a state unlike any other. More honest. More to the point. A state in which one had to come to grips with oneself. Had to swim down into the waters of self-esteem as it were, hoping like hell what you had always imagined as a River of Resolve was not, in reality, a Sump of Self-Doubt.

  As he cowered there in the back of the RV, Marty realized he was more concerned about being seen in the nude than he was about being killed. Sixty-three-year-old TV producers were never intended to be seen naked in public. That he went to the gym three times a week and was probably in better shape than the majority of his peers held no solace whatsoever. The experience of having had a shotgun jammed in his face and subsequently being clubbed to his knees had sent his privates squealing for sanctuary. Shriveled his dick up like a roll of dimes, as it were. No Man’s Land The blood from his head wound dripped steadily onto his thigh. The frothy smell of soap mixed uneasily with the acrid odor of adrenaline, creating the incongruous atmosphere of freshscrubbed fear. In the best of times, Marty was modest. At his club, he always kept his towel in place, telling himself it was a matter of class and taste, rather than any misgivings he might have possessed regarding his own shortcomings. Guys like Barry Levin . . . always parading around . . . swinging it in everybody’s face . . . they disgusted him. Martin Wells shivered in the cold. He peeked between his knees but could not see his tormenter. Only Melanie’s bare back, her muscles rippling slightly as she worked the steering wheel.