Bad Signs

by R.J. Ellory

  Clay was stunned, in shock. He was breathless, immobile. He stood with his breath like a hot fist in his chest for minutes until she started hyperventilating, gasping, choking for breath herself, and then he took one step toward her. He went to his knees in slow-motion. She was looking at him, but Clay didn’t even know if she could see him. He shuffled forward, trying his utmost to avoid the flow of blood that was making its way out across the foot-worn linoleum toward the door.

  “W-We h-have to g-go,” he stuttered. He thought of Digger. He thought of his brother, now lost to some other mad and insensate world of violence and unconditional hatred. His brother, who had been engaged in the human devastation that was now before him on the floor of the mercantile.

  Clay tried to make his voice gentle.

  There was no question in his mind about staying here. Two dead men, a young girl, a great deal of blood, and he was on the run from a juvenile facility. True, he had been taken hostage, but he had encountered authorities well enough to understand the railroad they’d put him on if he hung around. And there was also the possibility that Earl and Digger would come back. Earl was just about crazy enough to figure he needed beer and smokes, and he might just turn that Oldsmobile around and come hightailing it back here. Lord only knew when the next customer would come by, and even if they did they’d be unlikely to stop, more unlikely to lend a hand once they saw what had happened. Folks weren’t naturally brave or calm in such circumstances, and Clay didn’t plan on securing his future against the next stranger that just happened to drive through.

  He steeled himself. He gritted his teeth and clenched his fists. He could handle this. He could deal with this. He could survive this ordeal as well as he had all previous ordeals.

  “You—you need to get up,” he told the girl. He sounded defiant and certain. He sounded like someone in charge. “You have to get up. You cannot stay here.”

  She looked back at him, said nothing, and shook her head.

  “They might come back,” Clay said, and as he voiced the words it became even more real as a possibility. Earl, wanting to ensure that there was no walking wounded; Digger wearing a hard-on for more blood and mayhem; the pair of them like a wide tornado in a narrow town.

  Her eyes widened.

  “Serious,” he said. “I know who they are and they’re fucking crazy.”

  The girl looked down at the dead man. She released his head and eased herself back on her knees.

  “We need to get you cleaned up some,” Clay said, and he reached out his hand toward her.

  She took it. It surprised him that she did so. Perhaps in such a predicament it was better to trust someone than no one at all.

  “Let’s go in back,” Clay said. “You have to get washed up, and I’ll see if I can find something for you to wear.”

  He helped her up. They went out back together, found a small washroom with a sink and some towels. Clay hunted around, found little else but a man’s undershirt. She took off her blood-soaked T-shirt, pulled the undershirt over her head. She tucked the hem into her jeans, rolled up the sleeves, but still there was room for a couple more brothers and sisters inside the thing.

  “It’ll have to do,” Clay said. “Stay here for just a minute.”

  He went on back to the front door and scouted the road both ways. There was nothing and no one.

  Clay checked the register, but all the money had been taken. He checked the jacket pockets of the dead man on the floor, but his wallet was also empty. He doubted Earl Sheridan would have left a dime behind. Clay found a canvas sack and started filling it with provisions. No cans, just bags of peanuts and chips, some cheese, some crackers and cartons of juice. He found a box of strike-anywhere matches, some smoked ham and beef jerky and a bag of pork rinds. Into the sack they went, always one eye on the front door, another on the exit into the back through which he’d taken the girl.

  Everything was running on automatic. He knew he was in shock, but it was all on delay. He knew that later, sometime, he would see what was happening—really see it—and he would shake, he would vomit and curse and hurt inside. He knew that moment would come, but not now, not while true self-control was needed. Something took over. As if someone else was running his body. He did what he needed to do. He made decisions and carried them out.

  This was a bad, bad thing. A truly terrible thing. What he was going to do he had no idea. He figured that Earl and Digger would take a new slant now. The authorities would maybe tie in the waitress from the diner, the old guy in Pinal County, and now this. They would find the pickup, connect it with Hesperia, and realize that they’d all been headed southeast toward Texas. Earl would realize this himself, and go someplace else. Not back north, for that’s the way trouble would come looking for him. Maybe west? Three hundred some-odd miles and they’d reach the sea.

  And what would be the smartest thing to do, him and the girl? Hell, it had to be to carry on the way they were going. And where would that take them? He had no idea, and he had no ability to resolve that question.

  And it was then—as if fate conspired to best advise him—that Clay saw the paper there on the floor by the door.

  He knew what it was before he reached it, and as he leaned down to pick it up the shock seemed to come over him like a quiet and gentle wave.

  The effect it had was anything but gentle, and he dropped to his knees, the folded page in his hands, and he opened it carefully, tears running down his face, his breath catching and hitching in his chest. His hands shook, his vision blurred, but there was no mistaking the advertisement that had fallen from Digger’s pocket. Eldorado, Texas. The Sierra Valley Estate.

  Clay cried. For himself, his brother, his mother, even his crazy father. He cried for the future, and he cried because of the past. It lasted no more than three or four minutes, and then he managed to gather himself together. He took up the advertisement, folded it carefully and tucked it into his pocket. He collected up the bag, his provisions, his wits.

  It was an omen, a portent. He would carry on to Eldorado. He had to. There had to be something out there worth all this pain.

  And that’s the way they’d stop looking. Maybe. Earl was not stupid. He’d put two and two together and understand that the authorities would have predicted his route, and now he’d go some other way entirely. That would be the smartest thing to do, no question about it.

  Maybe Earl would double-blind everyone and carry on the same way, assuming that the police and the federal people would now be looking for him everywhere else but the way he’d first gone, but Clay believed that would have been too great a risk. No, Earl and Digger would be headed elsewhere, and that meant the safest thing to do would be to find the road to Texas.

  Clay needed a map. He went back to the register, started hunting for anything that would help. There was a bundle of them, but they all seemed to be for other places—New Mexico, Louisiana and even Mississippi. He didn’t find what he needed. He did find a small can full of coins, however, and tipped them out into his hand. Mostly quarters, some dimes, a few cents. Had to be all of seven or eight dollars in change. He stuffed the coins in his pocket.

  It was then that he saw the gun. It was a small thing—a .32, maybe a .38 snub-nosed, but it sat like a sleeping thing just waiting to be woken. Next to it was a box of shells. He picked them up. Yes, a .32. Small, snug, little more than fist-sized, and the temptation to take it came too strong to resist. The shells went in one pocket, the revolver in the other, and he went in back to get the girl.

  It took a while to drag her away from the dead guy in front.

  She didn’t say a word. She just stared, any emotion she might have been feeling absent from her face. Evidently her day was not working out as planned. Not for neither of them.

  “We have to go,” Clay urged, and he meant it, he really meant it, for now he believed that with his own dark star overhead, with whatever bad sign he carried showing no signs of abatement, then things could only deepen if he stayed. It was th
e devil and the deep blue sea—arrested and charged as accomplice to a double robbery-homicide … after all, hadn’t he been in the pickup with Earl Sheridan and Elliott Danziger? Yes indeedy. Hadn’t he come on in here with the intent to cause mayhem and murder? Yes, he sure as hell had. And what had happened for his accomplices and compadres to leave him behind? Hell knows, there was no predicting these people. They were crazy. All of them. They were neither loyal nor reliable nor predictable nor sane. They would not be there to say he had no part in it, and even if they had been that’s not what they would say. Earl was definitely the kind of guy to take as many people down with him as possible.

  And the other option? That he and the girl were still there when Earl and Digger came back. They’d been gone no more than twenty minutes. Earl could have stopped five minutes away and be right now considering the odds. Had he missed anything? Had the storeowner kept a safe? More realistically, did he need to come on back and kill Clay Luckman just to make sure that there was no evidence and eyewitness potential left behind? Clay could put Earl in the diner with Bethany Olson. Could put him in the Pinal County Mercantile. Clay could stick him with a double homicide right where they were now. And he was still hanging around and trying to convince this girl that they needed to leave? He had to get out of there.

  Clay tried to recall faces—his mother’s, his father’s, anyone at all before Hesperia, before Barstow. It was as if those early years had been boxed away somewhere. Perhaps they would come back to him when he was old and dying and had no use for them.

  Bailey was stunned, silent, overwhelmed, confused, lost. She was little more than a child, in one moment losing her mother to some terrible illness, in another her father to a moment of random, inexplicable violence.

  “We need to go now,” Clay said, and he started toward the highway.

  She hesitated for a moment, perhaps to look back one more time through the window and see her father dead on the floor, and then she followed on.

  Within hours the Marana Convenience Store & Gas Station was swarming with officials from numerous departments. Marana extended along the I-10 from the line between Pima and Pinal counties all the way to the Tucson City line. They had a small departmental office, an annex to the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. The department representative, Officer Nolan Sharpe, whose mental state by that time—ironically—was as blunt as a worn-out hammer, walked around and around the building with no certain direction or purpose. No one and everyone wanted the case. Once they identified the pickup it became federal, and they all breathed a sigh of relief.

  Federal Agents Garth Nixon and Ronald Koenig were dispatched as the preassigned and active investigative officers, and they started to put two and two together. Lester Cabot at the Pinal County Mercantile, now Harvey Warren and some unknown guy at the store. The pickup made it Earl Sheridan for sure. Earl and his two hostages, and that’s if the hostages were still alive. They had not headed for Mexico, but southeast for Texas. Why Texas? Who the hell knew? Maybe Earl had a sweetheart down there. Bethany Olson still didn’t figure in the math. They had yet to make the connection because she’d been all the way back on 62 outside of Twentynine Palms, California, and appeared to have no link to what was happening in Arizona. Back in Twentynine Palms itself Sheriff Vince Hackley, Ludlow’s Ed Chandler, and Yucca Valley’s Ethan Soper were still scratching their heads and trying to make sense of something that made no sense at all.

  Earl Sheridan and Elliott Danziger were heading west along the I-8 in Frank Jacobs’s Oldsmobile, whereas Clay Luckman and Bailey Redman were ten or twelve miles away en route to Tucson.

  Bailey didn’t say a word. Twice they stopped, and she drank juice and ate a handful of pork rinds, but still she did not speak. Clay wondered if she was just dumb, or maybe mute or deaf, or if the witnessing of these events had sent something awry in her mind. Wires got loosed somewhere along the way and never reconnected. Hell, you had to credit her with the ability to still walk a straight line after what had happened. Who the guy in the store was he did not know, but he guessed it might have been her pa.

  Every time she heard a car, which was rare, she stopped dead in her tracks. Standing on one foot at the edge of the highway, her thumb outstretched, she remained expressionless as the meanest drivers in the world flew by in a hail of pebbles and a cloud of dust. Give such drivers an empty bus and they’d leave the twelve disciples standing at the edge of the highway.

  And then she kept on walking, right there beside him, silent as ever, never looking at him, not even in his vague direction, just straight ahead. The sun came up high and his shadow stretched long, and she walked inside it as if the coolness suited her. She matched him step for step, and even though he was almost a man, and she was nothing but a slip of a girl, she made it a point of pride to never slow him down. If nothing else, he would always be able to say she kept up.

  He talked to her on the way. He talked to her just so he could hear something other than dust and wind. He told her the names of plants that he saw, and though he knew that he was wrong with some of them she did not correct him. Perhaps because she did not know herself, perhaps because she did not care. Checkerbloom, buttonbush, partridgeberry, sumac, cattails, arrowheads, nightshade, jimson, bullbriers, balsams. He made some up for fun. Just to see if she would react. “That one there is called rat-pellet. They call it that because you can use the seeds to poison rats. But humans can eat them no problem. If you eat them they taste like cotton candy. Slightly burned maybe, but cotton candy all the same.”

  Nothing from her. Nothing at all.

  He realized after a while that he was actually talking to himself. He was trying to hang it all together for his own sake. He’d seen what he’d seen for sure, and there would never be a living day when he wouldn’t remember what he had seen. But more than that, cutting right through to the heart and quick of everything, was the fact that Digger had gone. His brother. His defender, his protector, his mentor in so many ways. Gone. Disappeared into the wilderness like some kind of mad animal. And all because of Earl Sheridan. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it was just that bad luck was following them everywhere, and separating them was as good a way as any to weaken their collective defense. Perhaps everything until now had been merely an indication of the true horrors to come.

  At one point the girl stopped to inspect a tree bole, a hole burrowed into it as if a nest for something long gone. And then they walked on, veering away from the highway a little into the adjacent fields, their footsteps flattening the ridges of newly turned fallows.

  Clay Luckman had been alone like this before. At Barstow, at Hesperia, surrounded by people but nevertheless alone. It was times like this when everything in the world felt alive. Not only the grass and the trees, but the rocks and the dirt and the stones, and the air itself felt suffused with some age-old energy that carried all the history of the earth in its fickle shifts of direction. The earth remembered everyone who had walked upon it—their names, their faces, their footfalls—and if you listened carefully you could hear the wind speak of these things with a voice as old as God. Clay knew such ideas were fanciful, but he wished to believe them. Imbuing life with some element of magic gave him hope. Hope that there was a reason for all things. Hope that the future was even now learning from the mistakes of the past.

  They went on walking, Bailey—whose name he did not know—right there beside him, and yet nothing for company save his own dark and fearful thoughts.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “We should go back and get him,” Digger said. “He’s my brother …”

  “Only reason to go back would be to kill him,” Earl replied. “Hell, I should have killed him yesterday. We ain’t goin’ back now, that’s for sure. We’re gonna find ourselves the first place on the road that’s got a bank and we’re gonna get ourselves some running-away money, and then we’re going to Mexico.”

  “But—”

  Earl rounded on Digger suddenly. His face was enraged, his eyes wide with hate. �
�He was nothin’ but a punk-ass kid, you see? He ain’t nothin’ to you. You got a new brother now. You got me. Way this is goin’, we’ll he home free and rich before the week is out. We gotta get ourselves on a road to Mexico. Get to Mexico and we’re gonna be just fine.”

  “Ain’t never been to Mexico,” Digger said, not knowing what else he could say in that moment.

  “Well, you’re goin’ now, son, you’re goin’ now.”

  Wellton was where they would end up somewhere after noon that Monday. One hundred and ninety miles from Marana give or take, but they had Frank Jacobs’s Oldsmobile, and the Oldsmobile lived up to her name—old, but mobile—and she puttered along like a heavy thing and didn’t give them the urgency they were after.

  “That man sure had a surprise on his face when you shot him,” Digger said. Had Clay been there he would have heard two things in Digger’s tone. The first was fear, a sense of awestruck horror regarding where he was, the situation he had gotten himself into. But above that, drowning out the lesser emotion, was a need to be acknowledged, a need to be accepted by Earl on Earl’s terms, the need to be seen as a contemporary, an equal. Perhaps some deep-seated insecurity, perhaps the simple fact that he had never before belonged to anyone or anything, but Digger wanted to be recognized, he wanted to be heard, he wanted to be wanted.

  “Hell, everyone has a surprise on their face when you kill ’em. They never expect it. Even when you stick a gun right up their nose.”

  “How does it feel? To kill someone?”

  Earl smiled. “Damned if I know. Just a matter of business as far as I’m concerned. Something that needs to be done, and you do it the best you can.”

  “Wonder what it feels like to die.”

  “Only the dead know that,” Earl replied. “Sad, huh? Don’t matter what they say before they’re dead. Don’t matter what they feel. Fear, terror, how they plead with you, whatever they confess to, whatever promises they make, well, it don’t matter worth a bucket of shit ’cause they’s still alive, see? I think I am still trying to find out the answer to that question, and until I find it I’m going to keep on looking. It’s like searching in a dark room for a shadow that wants to stay hidden.”