by T. C. Boyle
“You are ready?” Natalia slid into the seat beside him. She was wearing a pink visor with a designer logo that had probably cost fifty bucks, fifty bucks at least. When she saw he was looking at it, she said, “For travel. For the sun. Is there not sun in Las Vegas?”
“Yeah,” he said, distracted, “yeah, there is. Good thinking.” He flicked the remote for the garage door and the pallid light flooded in. He was thinking of what they were leaving behind, of how everything, from his knives to his saucepans to the Viking convection oven and the new microwave, would occupy their niches until the place was sold and everything the new owners didn’t want or couldn’t use was dumped in the trash. No regrets, he told himself as he started up the car—one of the finest production cars in the world, in the history of the world—and backed out into the morning.
What he didn’t notice—what he failed to notice because he was still there, upstairs, roaming the uninhabited rooms of the condo, lingering in his mind over all the dispensable things they’d accumulated and left in their wake—was the black Jetta, pulling out behind him.
Three
HE’D FALLEN ASLEEP, couldn’t help himself, so exhausted he might as well have been drugged, and when he woke the side of his face was pressed up against the window of the car and Dana was clinging to him like a spare set of clothes, the rhythm of her breathing synchronized with his own. There was a faint gray infusion of light. Nothing moved. The yellow lamp at the end of the lot was a blur, perched somewhere in intermediate space, the fog wiping away everything else. His left arm had gone numb where he’d slept on it, and his shirt felt damp and gummy, the price of sleeping in the car. Which smelled stale, as if they’d been living in it for months and not just overnight, and he wondered about that, about the odors of confinement, and for a moment he closed his eyes and the car was a bathyscaphe dangling over an abyss in the dark canyons of the sea, the twisting shapes of the deep fish, the wolf fish and coelacanth, passing in review. Then he opened them again on nothing, on a seep of grayness, and thought to check his watch.
Slowly, with exaggerated care—no reason to wake her yet—he extricated his dead arm and brought his wrist into view. He wasn’t surprised particularly to see that it was just before six in the morning—a horrendous hour, an hour he encountered maybe two or three times a year when he lost his head partying with Deet-Deet or Pixel and fell into the old ineluctable videogame trance—but he did feel just the slightest tic of irritation with the fact that he wasn’t in a bed in a motel sleeping till noon, noon at least. He’d been the one for giving it up the night before—they had the wrong condo; the guy had moved or died or been jettisoned into outer space—but Dana had been insistent. Even as he was wheeling out of the lot, bent on finding a place to eat and a motel with cable, she was brandishing her worn file folder, inside of which were the affidavit from the San Roque courthouse and the faxes with the thief’s police record and photo. “This,” she said, spitting it out, “is all we need. Show this to the police and we’ve got him.”
“Right, but we have to find him first,” he’d said, exasperated, but still turning his face to her so she could see him form the words. “And when we find him, then what? Where are the cops? You think they’ll just happen to be driving by?”
“I dial 911. As soon as I see him. I dial 911 and say there’s a crime in progress, a—a burglary, okay? A crime in progress.”
“And then what?”
“Then I show them this”—the folder—“because isn’t this a crime? In progress? Isn’t it?”
They were out on the main road by then, the headlights of the oncoming cars illuminating her face in flashes, as if they were back under the strobe at Doge and he was seeing her for the first time. For a moment, he felt himself slipping into nostalgia, into tenderness—she’d never seemed more beautiful, her eyes struck with light, her lips parted with the onrush of her rhetoric, her face held aloft and glowing in the excelsior of her hair, like a gift in a box—but he resisted it. He was hungry, tired. He was looking for a place to eat, nothing fancy, a burger, anything. She was right, he knew it, but he wasn’t ready to admit that yet, not until he had something in his stomach, anyway.
“What are you doing?” she demanded then. “Giving up?”
A fast-food place loomed up on the left and he flicked on the blinker and hit the gas to spin into the lot ahead of the oncoming traffic. All in one motion he nosed into a parking space, jammed the lever into park and swung round to face her. “No,” he said, “I’m not giving up. I’m just hungry, that’s all. It’s been a long day, don’t you think? Can’t we just sit here for half an hour and have a Big Mac and a Filet o’ Fish—no, no, forget the calories, forget the cholesterol and trans fats, let’s just gorge for once—and think things out? Because we’re close, I know it, you’re right, and we can nail this bastard, absolutely, but let’s just take a minute to regroup, okay? And eat?”
He didn’t know how much of that she got—he never did know with her, but he was always conscious of his lips and his tongue and he liked to think they were communicating. That was the case now. They sat there a moment under the yellow-and-red glare of the big M and he watched her flip the hair away from her face with a quick thrust of her chin. Her eyes narrowed. Her voice went low, so low it was as if she’d just been punched in the stomach. “She was lying, you know.”
And so here they were.
They’d stocked up on grease and nitrates and sugar, Dana so anxious she was lifting right out of her shoes while he ordered and paid and then she looked at him as if he were a pedophile when he told her he had to use the men’s—What if we miss him? she signed. What if he’s coming in right now? Right this minute? In the car, the brown bag in her lap, her fish sandwich as yet untouched, she kept saying, “You know he’s in there, you know it—or wherever he is, he’ll be back—and what we need to do is just sit there all night, all day tomorrow, all week if necessary, and keep the binoculars on those windows till we see him for sure. Positive identification, isn’t that what they call it? And that’s it. We see him, he’s”—one of her favorite expressions—“dead meat.”
But they hadn’t seen him. The curtains were closed when they got back—they hadn’t been gone more than half an hour, forty-five minutes—and the curtains stayed closed all night long, though the lights had burned late, very late. So late they were the last thing Bridger remembered, seared into his consciousness like the afterimage of a whole raft of flashbulbs going off simultaneously. He glanced up now. The fog bellied, drifted, pressed and released. The cars were dark humps, the trees erased. Above and beyond him, cutting perfect rectangles out of the shadow of something larger, were the windows—Frank Calabrese’s windows—still lit.
When finally the garage door became visible beneath the glow of the windows and finally—suddenly, abruptly—it began to rise in silent levitation to reveal the rear lights of the car glowing there like a visual affront, he thought he was dreaming. It was like a trompe l’oeil, the flat plane of the door there one minute and effaced the next. Was he seeing things? But no, there was the back end of the car, a Mercedes, dealer plates, the exhaust leaching from the tailpipe to vanish in the fog, and now the double punch of the brake lights—and the thing was moving, backing out. He shoved Dana, hard. Pushed her from him and took hold of her face in both his hands, working the swivel of her delicately jointed neck as if it were some instrument he’d found and calibrated, as if it were his: Look, he was saying, look.
Her hair, her eyes, the sourness of sleep on her breath—none of it mattered. She was there instantaneously, up out of the depths, with him. Her body tensed and she was sitting upright, staring into the mist, her mouth gone slack in concentration. And then, instinctively, she sank down in the seat—and her hands were on him, pulling him down too, her voice blunted and featureless, forced into use before she was ready: “It’s him.”
The Mercedes had pulled out now, the rear wheels swinging to the left as the driver brought the car around, and ther
e was a figure at the wheel, indistinct behind the windshield and the tatters of the fog, and was it a man? Was it him? Bridger was transfixed. He was sunk so low in the seat his chin was on a level with the armrest, adrenaline surging, hide-and-seek, and then the car righted its course and sliced up the drive in the silence of dreamtime and there he was—unmistakable—the thief, the son of a bitch, his chin cocked, eyes fixed on the road ahead, and the woman, the liar, beside him. For a moment Bridger was frozen there, watching the taillights lift and dip over the speed bumps, and then Dana’s hand was on his wrist and her voice was hammering at him in all its weird unmodulated hyperventilating urgency: “Start-the-car-start-the-car!”
Already the brake lights were vanishing in the fog. His hand trembled at the ignition. Once, twice, then the engine turned over and he slammed the thing into reverse, lurched out of the spot and forced it into drive even as he jerked at the wheel and reached for the lights—but her hand was there, her face looming into his field of vision: “No, no—no lights, no lights!”
There wasn’t any traffic, and that was a good thing, because he was so intent on the taillights ahead of him he didn’t even give a glance as he swung out of the drive and onto the blacktop road. He hit the gas. The wheels spun and grabbed with a chirp, and there was that familiar feeling of the headlong rush, the g-forces, the sudden heaviness in the flesh. Two red spots. He was chasing two red spots. The fog parted, jumped and swayed and gave up its substance, and then it closed in again, and he was having trouble gauging where the road gave way to the shoulder, to the ditch running alongside it, and that would be something, wouldn’t it, to veer off the road and blow a tire, break an axle, ram a tree—a whole forest? She was saying something, the words garbled with her excitement, and her hands were moving in frantic semaphore, but it was all he could do to keep going, no lights, no lights, the two red spots his only means of orientation.
The road swept round to the right, then a hairpin to the left, and the lights vanished and came back again. “Stay back!” Dana was saying. That was what it was: “Stay back!”
His own voice was strangled with the tension, and his tone—the abruptness of it, the quick snap and release—startled him. “I am, for shit’s sake. What do you think I’m doing?” And then, the wheel riding through the clench of his fingers: “I can’t see. Shit. Fuck. You want to wind up in a ditch?”
But then the taillights dilated suddenly, right there, right there ahead of him, and his foot slammed at the brake—it was a stop sign, a stop sign emerging fuzzily from the mist, and the man in the Mercedes was observing the law, full stop, though there wasn’t another car on the road—and here was Dana, unbelted and lurching forward like a loose sack of groceries. The sound of her head striking the windshield was like a thunderclap, an explosion. He heard himself curse even as the wheels locked on the fog-slick pavement and the car spun across the road, the taillights of the Mercedes moving away now, dwindling, and he wanted to say “Are you all right?” but she wouldn’t have heard him, anyway.
The car was running. They were on the road—in the wrong lane, maybe, but on the road. His eyes swiped at her and he saw the blood there, just beneath her hairline, a fresh wet shock of it, but his foot was on the accelerator—he couldn’t help himself—and she, clapping both palms to her head so he couldn’t see anything of her eyes or the wound either, let her voice jerk free: “Just go!”
There were other cars now, dragged forward on chains of light, moving like submarines in a reconfigured sea. The wheel felt heavy in his hands. There was the muffled hiss of the tires, his heart in high gear still, a pair of yellow fog lights glowing in the rearview, the Mercedes just ahead. He must have asked Dana twenty times if she was all right—did she need a doctor, should he take her to the hospital—but she wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were fixed straight ahead, on the back end of the Mercedes. She was belted in now and she’d dug a T-shirt out of her bag and pressed it to the wound at her hairline; when he glanced at her, all he could see was that shirt, and it wasn’t white any longer. On the inside of the windshield, where her head had hit, a crystal star had formed, a thin tracery of lines radiating from its center in rays of prismatic light. He took one hand from the wheel and tugged at her knee till she turned her face to him. “You’re bleeding,” he said. “The shirt is full of blood.”
Her voice wafted to him as if from a great distance, the tires hissing, the wipers beating time: “It’s nothing. A bump, that’s all.”
“A bump? Didn’t you hear me? You’re bleeding.”
“We can’t stop now,” she said, turning away from him, and that was that. Discussion over. For a moment they went on in silence, cars emerging out of the gloom, a Safeway truck humping along in the opposite lane, its hazard lights flashing. And then suddenly she was doing something with her hands, something manic, and the shirt dropped away from the wound, a raw spot there, a slit like a mouth, red and raw. “But look, look,” she was saying, and his eyes jerked back to the road, “his blinker. He’s heading for the freeway.”
The wheel was concrete, it was lead, it weighed more than the car itself, but Bridger managed to crank it round and follow the Mercedes up the ramp and onto 101, headed north, the roadway opening up across its lanes to a jerking unsteady convoy of trucks and the sleek shot arrows of pickups and cars homing in on some unseen target in the distance. “Eureka,” she said, her voice charged with excitement. “He’s going to Eureka. Or Oregon.”
He said, “Yeah, maybe,” and fell back to allow a battered blue pickup to insert itself between him and the Mercedes.
“He’s leaving town. He’s running.”
Was he? Had they got to him? Had they put a scare in him?
Suddenly he felt exhilarated, felt as if he could do anything—he was The Kade and this guy, this bad guy, was an extra in a lizard mask, a walk-on, nothing. He gritted his teeth, bore down on the wheel. This time, brother, he said to himself, you’re the one going to jail, and we’ll just see how you like it. But then what was the plan? Should they call 911? His mind was racing. What would they say? That there was a criminal loose, that he’d stolen someone’s identity—Dana’s identity, a young woman’s, a deaf woman’s—and he was right ahead of them on 101 in a red Mercedes with dealer plates? That he was running. That he was getting away. But where was the proof? They would have to be there when he was pulled over, because if they weren’t the cops would just let him go—he wasn’t even speeding. This guy—and Bridger could just make him out in silhouette through the back window of the pickup and the intervening lenses of the pickup’s windshield and the slanted rear window of the Mercedes—was driving as if he was on his way to church. And maybe he was. Maybe he’d pull off the freeway and amble up to some big glass and stucco cathedral and they’d roll in behind him and have the cops nail him right there when he was down on his knees cleansing his soul. Wouldn’t that be ironic? Because that was him, definitely him, and as long as they stayed with him there was no way he was going to get out of this.
“Yeah,” he said, but he was saying it to himself because she wasn’t looking, “maybe.”
Before he could think, before he could put together two consecutive thoughts, the Mercedes swung onto Sir Francis Drake and merged onto the 580, heading for the Richmond Bridge. The blue pickup veered off and Bridger fell back as the fog began to dissipate and the Mercedes picked up speed. “Call the cops,” Dana said, “call the cops,” but he flicked his turn signal and moved out a lane, accelerating to keep pace and yet careful not to attract notice—if it came to it the Mercedes would leave them in the dust. “Not yet,” he said. “We have to see where he’s going, we have to be there.”
It was only after they’d followed him onto I-80, going east toward Sacramento, that Bridger thought to glance down at the fuel gauge—there it was, right there in front of him, a simple continuum from empty to full, from go to no-go, and at first it didn’t register on him. He was dull, he was unfocused, he wasn’t thinking of gas—gas was a given.
And so it took him a moment, his adrenaline surging, to understand that the needle was pinned all the way to the left; even as he watched, the warning light blinked to life. Empty. He was incredulous. Outraged. And his first thought was to blame someone, to blame her—Who’d been driving last? Out of gas? He never let his car dip below half a tank, never—but he put his foot down instead, his heart rattling, and heard himself say, “Quick, give me your phone!”
They shot up on the Mercedes before he let off on the gas, and he saw the back of the thief’s head quite clearly, an average head, oblivious beneath its Mr. Hipster haircut, and the thief’s shoulders and the long swaying fringe of the thief’s wife’s hair as she leaned forward to adjust the radio, and he had to make a snatch for Dana’s arm because she wasn’t hearing him. “The phone! Quick, the phone!” He was one lane out, falling back now, drifting, allowing a silver Toyota to interpose itself between him and the Mercedes, the warning light on the fuel gauge burning a hole in the dash. Then the phone was in his hand and he punched in 911.
It picked up on the first ring and a woman’s voice said, “Nine-one-one, can you hold, please?”
“No!” he shouted, but the connection gave back static and the needle held fast and the thief cruised along in the inside lane as if it had been funded, surveyed, poured and striped for his exclusive use. There was an exit coming up fast on the right, gas, food and lodging, a Chevron station showing its badge, and he didn’t know what to do. Dana was watching him, her eyes wide with excitement, a thin red furrow of blood leaching out of the black slit at her hairline. “What do they say?”
