Bad Signs

by R.J. Ellory

  “You’re going to have to come and live with me in Scottsdale.”

  Her eyes widened slightly, almost unnoticed, and then she looked toward the window. “Okay,” she said, and in her tone was such matter-of-factness that Frank wondered if she’d ever been given the chance to make a decision all her own.

  “I’ll have to go on working, and you can finish school, and then you’re going to have to work too,” he explained.

  She looked at him with patience and tolerance and a seeming lack of connection between his words and the reality they predicted.

  “It will be fine,” he said. “Everything’s going to be just fine.”

  She didn’t say a word in response.

  “You have to try and believe that something good can happen any time at all, but you should never expect it too much. If you expect it, well, it won’t come. Like snow at Christmas.”

  “I ain’t never seen snow,” Bailey replied.

  “Maybe that’s because you wanted it too much.”

  She seemed perplexed. A frown punctuated her brow like a comma. “So the way to get something is not to want it?”

  “No, you gotta want it, but you only gotta want it but once or twice, not all the time, and then you hide that thought somewhere in the back of your mind and let it do the work without you.”

  Bailey Redman—quiet for a while, staring flat-eyed and curious through the motel cabin window—said, “I had a fish one time.”

  “A fish?”

  “Sure. A gold-colored fish.”

  “Where d’you get a fish like that?”

  “County fair or some such,” she replied. She turned and looked at Frank with the same curious expression. She had the knack of making you feel like you should say something even when it was her turn to talk. “Loved that fish. Loved it a whole bunch. Fed it and fed it and fed it, wanted it to be big and strong and happy and everything.” She shook her head resignedly. “Fed the thing to death.”

  She turned back toward the outside world, the world beyond the window, and Frank Jacobs sat in silence and wondered why she’d told the fish story. You could love something too much? You could kill something with love? He didn’t know what it meant, and he made no comment, and he believed that the door he had opened by taking on this teenage girl was a door that would now never close.

  In the same moment he could not have been more wrong, nor more right.

  They left before eight. The reception guy eyed them suspiciously. Frank wanted to say, She’s my daughter, you fucking asshole, but he did not. It was no one’s business who she was, or why they were together. The world could take the time to find out, or they could stay ignorant.

  They headed along the I-10, would take a route through Marana, Eloy, Casa Grande, on up past Chandler to Scottsdale. Somewhere over a hundred miles. An hour and a half, perhaps two if they stopped to take in the scenery.

  Frank had a ’57 Oldsmobile Super 88, a good, solid car that had nevertheless seen better days. Seventeen feet in length, four and a half thousand pounds in weight, and sometimes it ran like a coach pulling six horses. Hydramatic transmission, power steering and brakes, tinted glass, the Wonderbar radio, six-way power seats and whitewall tires—these were the things that the salesman had sold him, and never mentioned the sluggardly start, the fuel consumption, the top speed of one hundred and eight miles an hour that made the thing sound like it was wrenching its own guts out along the highway.

  Bailey thought it was a beaut. She flicked on the radio, found some station out of Phoenix playing rockabilly and R&B. Frank didn’t much listen to the radio, seemed to find nothing but gospel music and testimonial stations. Bailey leaned back in the passenger seat, put her heels on the dash. He wanted to tell her to get her feet down in the well where they belonged, but didn’t think that reprimanding her for something unimportant was the best way to start this new thing they had.

  Three miles away from the motel Frank commented on the heat. The vent on the driver’s side was busted.

  “We’ve lived in trailers,” Bailey said. “You wanna know real heat you gotta live in a trailer with a metal roof. Days like that you gotta spend all your time just thinking about a cool breeze.”

  “What good would that do?”

  “Think it strong enough and you can feel it.”

  Frank smiled. “That’s crazy.”

  Bailey smiled back, and in that smile was something that said she knew things others didn’t. “Rather be crazy and cool than sane and sweaty.”

  Frank laughed.

  Bailey turned up the music.

  Mist still hung on the open country, and somewhere—out there—was the sound of beasts, of creatures, of things with numerous legs laboring ceaselessly beneath a rug of leaves, the murmur of things unnamed and unseen in the long grass and furrows. Here was all of life, a life that had existed a good ways before people, and would exist a good ways after. They passed through towns that were not so much towns but a seeming random scattering of dwellings adjoined to the land. Unforgiving land. Land that would break a man’s heart and hands in trying to farm it. Frank Jacobs had been traveling these roads for as long as he could remember. He knew them like the sound of his own voice. Whole generations were started and finished in these narrow places, places that were merely the widest parts in the road. The graves of all past generations were marked with nothing more than a shambles of hand-ferried rocks, in some special case a couple of two-bys banged together with cooper’s nails. Either way such memorials were swallowed by time and weather within two or three turns of the calendar. Men and women born out of anonymity and gone back the same way. Children too, and sometimes in less years than it took to fallow a field after a good few years of crop.

  It was a bleak and desolate place, at least it felt that way, but perhaps for no other reason than the way familiarity bred selective blindness to those things of interest or importance.

  “You sell shoes, right?” Bailey asked.

  He had told her before. Told her twice. Perhaps she was just figuring on a simple way to start a conversation.

  “Yes, I sell shoes.”

  “For a long time?”

  “Long as I can remember.”

  “You like it?”

  “It’s a job. It pays the way. Puts food on the table.”

  “What did you want to do?”

  “Want to do?”

  “When you were young?”

  “I ain’t so old now.”

  “When you were my age.”

  He thought for a moment, and said, “I wanted to play the piano. Wanted to play jazz piano in bars and clubs and maybe go to Hollywood and play piano in the movies.”

  “What happened?”

  “Life happened.”

  “You could still learn.”

  “I’m all of forty-one years old, Bailey … I couldn’t just up and start something like that at my age.”

  “I like the way you say that.”

  “What?”

  “My name. Bailey.”

  “Reckon there’s only one way to say it. Been sayin’ it the same way since the day we met.”

  “I reckon you have,” Bailey said, and eased back in her seat.

  She wanted to stop in Marana.

  “Thirsty,” she said. “Is that okay?”

  “Okay to be thirsty?”

  “Okay to stop.”

  “Sure,” he said. “We can stop.”

  He looked for someplace—a gas station, a convenience store, found one of each side by side and pulled over.

  They sat for a minute. He lit two cigarettes and handed one to her.

  “Your mother let you smoke?”

  “Ain’t never smoked before today.”

  “You do it pretty good for someone ain’t never done it before.”

  “Well, I figure it can’t be that hard, right? Everyone so busy tellin’ everyone else that it’s stupid to smoke cigarettes, well, I reckoned I’d better give it a go and find out for myself.”


  “And?”

  “Could get to like it, I think.”

  She opened the door, stepped out onto the highway. She walked ahead of the car and stood there in her three-quarter-length blue jeans, her flat-soled canvas shoes, her T-shirt, her fair hair tied back behind her head, and then she turned and smiled a smile of such warmth that Frank Jacobs felt the wind knocked out of his sails.

  “Come on,” she said. “I ain’t got no money.”

  He got out and followed his daughter.

  Inside it was all bright lights and shelving and things hanging on the walls and big-ass refrigerators in back stocked with juice and milk and butter and eggs and other provisions. They had homemade hand-crank ice cream in four flavors, and a sign that said you could mix them together if you wanted and make up your own tastes.

  Bailey stood with her nose pressed against a cracker jar, as if the dry discs within were edible gold, as if you could eat just one and be blessed with good luck and eternal youth.

  A man appeared through a curtained doorway. He had the kind of face for convenience store work—interested in everyone’s business, ready to sell you whatever you looked at whether you needed it or not.

  “Well, howdy there, good folks,” he said.

  “Howdy,” Bailey said, and she crossed the floor to the counter and leaned against it.

  “Just comin’ through?” the man asked.

  “Sure are,” she replied.

  “Well, I’m Harvey, and it’d be my pleasure to serve you with whatever you all need today.”

  Bailey held out her hand. “I’m Bailey,” she said, “and that there is my dad, Frank.”

  They shook hands.

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Harvey said. “So you folks got a ways to go?”

  “To get where?”

  “Wherever you’re going.”

  “I couldn’t say,” Bailey replied. “I don’t know where we’re going. Maybe my dad’s home, maybe not.” She glanced sideways at Frank, who was still somewhere amidst the shelves. “I’m not the one who decides.”

  Harvey frowned. “Your dad’s home isn’t your home too?”

  “Kind of,” Bailey said. “I did live with my ma, but then my ma just died and I gotta go live with my pa, and this is pretty much the first day we’ve spent together where there hasn’t been a bus ride at either end of it.”

  “Well, I hear some things here, Bailey, but that’s just about as interesting as it comes.”

  “Yeah, I reckon so. Ain’t nothin’ so different as change, right?”

  “Right.” Harvey smiled. “So what can I get you?”

  “You have chocolate cake?”

  “I sure do. My wife made it herself. How many pieces you want?”

  Bailey turned. “Dad? You want some chocolate cake?”

  Frank walked up to the counter. “Chocolate cake? Well, sure, why the hell not?”

  Bailey smiled at Harvey. “Four pieces, Harvey. One each for now, one each for when we get wherever we’re going.”

  “Scottsdale,” Frank said. “We’re going home to Scottsdale.”

  “Figure you’ll be wanting some buttermilk with that there cake,” Harvey said. “Can get you a quart of buttermilk, fresh this morning, chilled as ice.”

  “Sure,” Frank said. “And give me a carton of Luckies, a couple bags of potato chips, a half dozen of them cupcakes back there with the marzipan icing on, and a fifth of rye.”

  “Sure can,” Harvey said, and then he looked out through the window as a car pulled up outside.

  “Hell,” he said. “See no one all day and then they all come at once.”

  Bailey walked to the window, and peering through the spaces between the signs and stickers and advertisements for Red Parrot Diesel and Burma-Shave she saw two men getting out of the car. One of them was older than the other, and the older one had blood all over the front of his shirt.

  “Looks like trouble,” she said, almost to herself, and couldn’t have been more right.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Had Earl Sheridan arrived five, maybe ten minutes later, there would have been no Oldsmobile in the forecourt of the Marana Convenience Store & Gas Station. Frank Jacobs and Bailey Redman would have been long gone, would have heard nothing of Earl Sheridan, of Elliott Danziger or Clarence Luckman, except perhaps on the radio. But that was not to be.

  Earl pulled over, saying, “The Oldsmobile. We’re taking that motherfucker,” and before the engine had stopped he was out of the pickup and running toward the store.

  Digger went with him. Maybe Earl was going to shoot someone else, and he wouldn’t want to miss that for the world. He was excited, all worked up inside like a bottle of soda that had been shaken and shaken and was ready to explode. Terrified too, his palms sweaty, his head feeling like there was some pressure inside it, like his brain was just too damned big for his skull. The rush was indescribable, and he loved it.

  Clay watched them go, heart racing like a wayward locomotive, his mind overloaded, but somewhere beneath it the sense of resolution that now was the time. If he didn’t go now, then he wouldn’t be going. He knew Digger was lost. Digger would not be coming with him. If he was going to Eldorado, then he was going alone.

  It was then that he saw the girl. His stomach was taut with fear. She was right at the back of the store, there on the right-hand side of the window. Instinctively Clay ducked down, and then he wondered who he was hiding from. He reached for the lever, opened the door, slipped out sideways, and dropped to the ground. He went to the left a few yards, cut back to the right, and hurried down the back of the store to an outhouse. It was then that the shouting started up.

  *

  “Give me the fucking keys!” Earl was shouting. He had the shotgun pointed directly at Frank Jacobs. There were just the two of them in the store. The guy in the suit and the guy behind the counter.

  “I don’t want any trouble, mister,” Frank Jacobs said, and he went for the keys.

  “Hold it right fucking there!” Earl screamed. “What the fuck you doing?”

  “The keys,” Frank said. “You want the keys, right?”

  “Slowly, motherfucker, slowly does it.”

  Frank went slow. He took out the keys, held them out toward Earl.

  Earl grabbed them, turned and tossed them to Digger.

  “Go start the car,” he said, and as soon as Digger had left Earl turned back to Frank and Harvey.

  “Money,” he said matter-of-factly. “You,” he added, pointing the shotgun at Frank. “You give me whatever you’ve got, and you,” he said, turning to Harvey, “can just empty the register and whatever else you got and hand it the fuck over.”

  Frank Jacobs gave Earl Sheridan twenty-four dollars. Earl looked at it like Frank had crapped in his hand.

  Harvey emptied the till—notes, coins as well—and pushed the pile of money toward Earl. All told he gave up eighteen dollars and change.

  “What the fuck is it with you people?” Earl said. “Do none of you people have any fucking money around here?”

  Earl grabbed the dollars. The coins scattered across the floor. He turned just as Digger came back to the door.

  “He’s gone!” he said. “Clay has gone!”

  “Fucker!” Earl replied, and then turned back toward Frank and Harvey with a wry smile on his face.

  “Give my regards to whoever,” he said, and emptied both shotgun barrels directly into Frank Jacobs’s chest. Frank was sent careening back into the counter. Harvey was covered in his blood. Earl raised the revolver and pointed it at Harvey. He took a step forward. “You know what they say about a thirty-eight?”

  Harvey shook his head, his eyes wide, his mouth open.

  “That a thirty-eight is nothing more than an opinion with six reasons to back it up.”

  He fired it once, twice, three times. Harvey stood motionless for four, five seconds, the fists of scarlet growing across his chest and stomach, and then he folded to the ground as if the strings suspend
ing him had been cut.

  Earl turned to Digger. “Now where the fuck is that kid?”

  Clay heard the sound of the car before he heard the voices of Earl and Digger as they came out of the store. He’d heard one shotgun blast, three other shots, and then the sound of another car.

  The voices of Earl and Digger were drowned out as Earl started the Oldsmobile. Someone was coming. Some other car was headed this way. They weren’t going to hang around looking for him. He crouched there in the outhouse, squatted down, arms around his knees, head bowed, and he prayed.

  The Oldsmobile took off. The other car seemed to slow, and then it sped away too. Perhaps the second driver saw trouble and thought it better to get the hell out of there. That’s what Clay would have done.

  He reckoned he knew what had happened. Earl had killed the car owner, the store owner—he could pretty much bank on that. But the girl? Who the hell knew? Only one way to find out.

  Clay got up slowly. He hesitated for a good two minutes before he opened the outhouse door and stepped into the sunlight. It had been dark in there and his eyes strained against the brightness.

  The pickup—wounded, now lower on one corner—sat like a patient dog awaiting the return of its owner. The Oldsmobile was gone. The road to the store was deserted, as was the road away. Clay Luckman stood there for some time with his heart beating fast, his mouth dry, his eyes squinting against the sun, and he wondered if this was where it now got better, or where it now got worse.

  He found her crouched on the floor in the middle of the store. She held the dead man’s head, cradled it against her stomach. She looked up at Clay Luckman when he entered; her hands and her T-shirt were covered in blood. She said nothing with her mouth, but her eyes looked back at him with such a sense of pleading and desperation that Clay found it hard to be silent. But what was there to say?

  And then she broke. It was as if she just snapped somewhere deep inside. The sound that came from her mouth was surreal, almost inhuman. That sound pierced whatever sense of strength and determination Clay had mustered, and he was rooted to the spot, beyond thought, beyond movement, and his heart broke like a clay pitcher.

  Bailey Redman sounded like a girl dying, like every nerve and sinew and muscle and bone was being stretched and ground and pulverized by the weight of loss and grief.