Bad Signs

by R.J. Ellory

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  They lay on their backs for a while in the dusty darkness. Side by side, pressed against each other, and Clay Luckman could feel the warmth of her body against his, the touch of her hand against his leg, and he was aware of little else but her—this Bailey Redman—and he felt the need to hold her, to close his arms around her, to draw her even tighter toward him, but he didn’t dare move.

  He tried to think of her as his kid sister, but he could not. There was barely anything between them in years, and though he wanted to feel fraternal and protective, he nevertheless felt a great deal more. He felt things for which he did not know the name, and those things made him feel alive.

  The light from the movie screen cast shadows that fell behind the cars. It was within these shadows that they then crouched and hunkered and waited. A little after 8:35 they moved. She went first. She smiled at him, and in the darkness he saw the white of her teeth and the whites of her eyes, and he couldn’t help but smile back. She crawled from the back fender to the side of the door, and with her slim hand she reached up and felt along the tray with her fingertips. She found something, came crawling back, held out her hand, and showed him as if to prove she had been telling the truth. A dime and three cents. Clay nodded. He reached out and touched her shoulder, pulled her close, whispered in her ear. That way. He pointed to the right. I’ll go that way, you go the other way, meet you over there. And again he pointed, far out across the field to the right-hand side. Behind the diner. She nodded, smiled again, and off she went. He watched her, the way she flattened herself to the ground and inched forward on her elbows and knees. Like a soldier going under the wire. He watched her until she disappeared into the shadows and then he made his own way from the back of the first car and started along the rows.

  Every once in a while the screen lit up with some brightly illuminated scene. The movie was loud enough to obscure any noise that he and Bailey might have made, and the vast majority of the occupants were far too involved in what they were doing to be distracted by the slightest noises from outside, but still there was something fearful about what they were doing. They were stealing. There was no other way to describe or define it. It was theft, larceny, an offense punishable by a trip back to Hesperia—perhaps somewhere else, somewhere worse. And for her? The orphan. Christ only knew what would become of her. But he could not let her starve. They had to have money, and they were too young to work, and what choice did they have? Devil and the deep blue sea. Stealing money from teenagers. Is this what his life would now be like?

  Clay crawled on, reaching up his hand to touch-search the small shelves with his fingertips, finding coins here and there, stuffing them in his pants pocket without looking to see what he’d found. It seemed to go on forever. Car after car after car. The ground was hard and dusty, his hands dry with the dirt, his knees and elbows chafed and sore as he went on to the next one, and the next one, and the next one.

  Somewhere along the line he knocked over a cup of soda. It dropped suddenly, half-full, and spattered across his legs. He rolled sideways, and pressed himself into the pitch darkness beneath the car. His heart thudding, his palms sweating, the stickiness of the soda on his ankles, soaking through his pants, the smell of it, the feeling of the car above him moving, shifting, and his certainty that whoever was inside had heard the cup go over, was even now opening the door, stepping out, was ready to crouch down and look beneath the vehicle. And then there would be a cry, a shout, and headlights would go on, and kids all over would straighten their clothes and look up, and then their lights would go on too, and whoever was running the show would switch off the movie, and for a moment there would be silence, and then Clay Luckman and Bailey Redman would be dragged out from wherever they were hiding and turned over to the authorities …

  Something like that. And maybe he’d get a kicking. Not her, not the girl, but him. Some thug with a buzz cut would give him a pounding for stealing the change. Prove himself a man. Show his girl that he was bigger and stronger than this rat-faced, dirty, skinny teenager who had sunk so low as to steal burger change from a drive-in.

  Even though his heart thudded, even though no door opened, no feet appeared, no lights were switched on, Clay Luckman felt a heaviness in his chest that he had never felt before. He waited a minute more, and then he edged to the side of the chassis and looked out from beneath the car. He could see the night sky. Clear of cloud, the deepest blue, each star and asteroid and meteorite and planet bright and white and beautiful. But somewhere amongst them was his dark star, the one that was following him, the one that had been there the night of his mother’s death, the one that had watched him as he lay with her in the apartment bedroom waiting for the father that never returned. Where was his dark star?

  He moved off again, edging on his back from one car to another, rolling over as he moved between the rows of vehicles, gathering speed as he went, until finally—nearing the end of the last row—he had gained confidence. Thirty, forty, fifty cars he had passed, and not once had he been seen. The coins jangled in his pockets. He could feel the weight of them. He felt stupid and shallow and light-headed and brave and intoxicated with nervousness, all of these things simultaneously, and he was only ten yards from the front of the diner when he saw Bailey burst out from the shadows beneath the movie screen and run like a scared jackrabbit across the last expanse of scrubbed earth. She disappeared behind the diner. She had gone unseen. She was safe.

  The last two cars there was nothing but a single coin between them. From the size of it he reckoned it was a quarter. He dropped it in his pocket, crouched and waited as a sequence of images on the screen suddenly illuminated the darkness, and then the sequence was over and Clay hurried to the side of the field and pressed himself against the chain-link fence. He hunkered there for a just a moment, and then he ran to the end of the fence, head down, shoulders hunched, knees bent. He came to the far end and slipped down the side of the diner.

  And then the door opened. He hadn’t seen it. A couple of steps, a railing, a rear door to the diner, and he was there—standing upright, as clear as day as the light streamed out of the building and a man stood there with a cigarette in one hand, a lighter in the other. For a second neither moved nor spoke. Clay saw every line on his face. He saw the sweat on his brow, his stubble, the open-necked shirt, the hairs on his chest that poked through the aperture, the grease stains on his apron, the way the cord was looped around the back and tied in front …

  “Who the—” he started, and then he frowned, and then he figured the kid for a stowaway, a kid too young to drive a car, too young to get a girl, a kid who wanted to watch the movie for free.

  Clay Luckman—frozen for a second—decided to move, and when he did he went like a rocket.

  He took off, rounded the corner of the diner, shouted for Bailey, and she was right there beside him.

  The sound of the man followed them as they flew away from the back of the building and across the short expanse of ground to the street.

  “Hey! Hey, you kids! What the hell d’ya think you’re doing? Get the hell outta here!”

  He walked a few steps, but he was too heavy and too old to run. His name was George Buchanan, and he was the diner’s short-order cook, and he worked full-time in another diner that sat on the I-19 between the outskirts of Tucson and the town of Green Valley, and he did the drive-in movie shift for a few extra bucks, cash in hand. He saw those two kids fly away from there, and he didn’t know whether the second one was a girl or another teenage boy. Younger for sure, because whoever it was was smaller and faster.

  He walked back to the rear door of the diner and lit his cigarette. He inhaled deeply, exhaled again and watched the smoke break up and disappear into nothing. Hell, he thought, and smiled nostalgically. That age he would have done the same damned thing himself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Men were different. Digger was aware of that, had been since he’d tried to have sex with that girl from the ba
nk. The guy in the bank, the one with the wiseass face, the one Earl shot in the head … well, seeing that had been terrifying, but it had been a rush as well. A real kick of a thing. The girl in the apartment, the one he stabbed, well, that was a different playground altogether. With the girls there was the sex thing. With the guys there was now just the impulse to hurt them, to show them that he—Digger Danziger—was in charge, that he was the one with the power and the say-so. With the pickup guy that he locked in the basement and the old man he’d restrained himself. He could have killed them, but he didn’t. Had he been scared? Had he known that once he crossed that line it was all downhill from there? He didn’t know. But now it didn’t matter.

  This guy, the one from the diner, with his jeans and his denim jacket, the red-and-black-checked shirt, the damn fool kerchief tied around his neck and knotted in back, and the hat he wore, the one he’d parked on the stool back in the diner, and his eyes all wide and surprised like he didn’t know this was coming, like he thought he could get away with disrespecting Digger ’cause he figured Digger wasn’t going to be man enough to do anything about it … this guy was an asshole of the first order.

  “Now, look here, son … I am real sorry about what happened back there at the diner—”

  “Shut your fucking mouth,” Digger said, and he said it with an edge, and there was that Elvis lip thing going, and he half-closed his eyes and squinted at the man, and the man fell silent. He really did feel Earl around him. Inside him even. Like someone possessed.

  “Son … I didn’t mean any disrespect—”

  “Yes, you fucking well did.”

  “I’m sorry … lookee here, I really am sorry … I got a lot on my mind right now—”

  “I said for you to shut the fuck up,” Digger said.

  “Son …”

  Digger closed his eyes for just a second, and then he took a step forward and leveled the gun at Marlon’s face.

  “Don’t. Call. Me. Son,” he stated emphatically.

  Marlon closed his eyes too, but he kept them closed.

  Do it.

  Just fucking do it.

  Digger took a deep breath. He could hear Earl’s voice goading him. Earl was smiling. He could hear it in the tone of every word. Oh, son of a bitch, he could feel the rush! Earl would have gotten such a kick out of this.

  “What’s your name?” Digger asked.

  “Marlon,” the man said. “Marlon Juneau.”

  Digger heard the quake and quiver in his voice. He was trying to be a tough guy, but he was already coming apart.

  “Marlon Juneau,” Digger repeated. He took another step forward. There was now no more than ten feet of dirt separating them. Digger held his gun steady. He thought of Earl, what a great guy he was, and how the cops outside that bank had shot him down like a defenseless animal. Bastards.

  “Marlon fucking Juneau. Like Marlon Brando, right?”

  Marlon nodded. His throat was dry and his hands sweated, and his eyes felt like powdered glass had been sprinkled in them, and the pressure in his bladder was sufficient to inflate a car tire.

  “How old are you, Marlon?”

  “For-forty-two.”

  “And where are you from?”

  “C-Canada.”

  “ ’S a big fuckin’ place. Anywheres particular in Canada?”

  “Wynyard near Quill Lakes in Saskatchewan.”

  “Is that so? Near Quill Lakes in Saskatchewan.”

  “Yes—yes,” Marlon replied, and he knew—as he’d known within the first minute—that whatever was going to happen now wasn’t going to be good. This wasn’t a straightforward robbery. This wasn’t a roadside rollover for the car and the cash. This was a performance. This was some crazy motherfucking kid with a gun and a dark light in his eyes. Oh, how he wished he’d moved his hat. Oh, how he wished he’d just been pleasant. But he’d had things on his mind, and he wasn’t thinking straight, and usually he was so polite …

  Marlon looked up at Digger. “Look, if it’s money you need …”

  Digger smiled. “You have no fucking idea how much money I got. You ain’t never seen that much money, you dumb motherfucker.”

  Marlon opened his mouth to say something else.

  “Anyways, I thought I told you to shut the fuck up.”

  Marlon closed his mouth.

  Digger weighed the odds. He had four bullets left, was aware that they weren’t going to last forever. If he ran at the man—suddenly, forcefully—he could knock him down, beat him in the head with the butt of the revolver, maybe knock him out. But the man wasn’t some skinny-ass son of a bitch. He had some girth and substance to him. Whatever happened, Digger knew one thing. The time had come. The time had really come. Two girls, two men, all of them had lived. He’d let them live. They had disrespected him, but he’d let them live. That was true mercy. That was true strength. But now … now it was time to show Earl that Digger was a man. Elliott Danziger was a real man. He wasn’t no scared little boy. If he had the power of life and death, well, every once in a while someone had to die, otherwise it wasn’t real power, was it?

  “Get on your knees,” Digger said. “Down on your knees and put your hands on your head.”

  Marlon hesitated for a moment. He was wondering if the kid had the nerve to shoot him, if the gun was even loaded, if the speed he could muster from a standing start would carry him across ten feet of dirt before the kid had time to react. That was what it came down to. Could he get to the kid before the kid pulled the trigger? Intentionally, involuntarily, it didn’t matter—could he reach the kid before the gun went off?

  He looked at the kid’s eyes. Damn it, he couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen, and here he was pulling strangers over at the side of the highway and threatening them with a handgun. What the hell was happening to the world? What was happening to the America he knew? He’d sure as hell have some story to tell his sister when he got to Alamogordo.

  When the kid took one more step forward and stared him down with a look of such unadulterated viciousness, he knew that there would be no involuntary reflex pulling that trigger. This was a wild one, a crazy one. If he pulled the trigger he was going to do it because that’s precisely what he wanted to do, and for no other reason. Maybe if he complied …

  Marlon Juneau stepped back, and then went down on his knees, raising his hands as he did so and placing them on his head.

  Digger smiled. He went left, walked around Marlon and reached the car. Keeping his eyes on the kneeling man he looked in through the open door, saw nothing but a flask, a paper bag with spots of grease showing through, a pair of sunglasses, an enamel mug.

  He switched the gun to his left and reached for the glove compartment.

  “Holy Mary Mother of God,” he said. He reached in and took out the .45.

  Marlon closed his eyes and said his first prayer for three decades. He didn’t know the words to anything formal. As an adult he’d never stepped foot in a church. He just said whatever he could think of in the heat of the moment. Oh God, please don’t let me die. Not here. Not now. I’ve been as good a man as I knew how to be. I’ve got a sister who’s in trouble … well, you know that, Lord, and I wanna do everything I can to help her, otherwise—

  “Son of a bitch,” Digger said. He had the revolver tucked in his pants waistband. The .45 was heavier, and there was a solid feeling to it, and he pushed the button beside the trigger and the clip slid out and it was full of bullets.

  “Does this work?” he asked Marlon. He walked around until he was looking down at him. He held out the .45 so Marlon could see it.

  “Far as I know,” Marlon said.

  Digger frowned. “Far as you know? What the hell does that mean?”

  “Never had reason to use it,” Marlon said.

  “It’s all loaded up and everything,” Digger said. “Looks fine to me. Don’t see any reason it shouldn’t work. Do you?”

  Marlon shook his head. He didn’t want to know, didn’t want to fi
nd out. Last thing in the world he wanted was proof that the .45 was fully functional. He’d had it for two years, bought it off a man in a saloon in Fort Qu’Appelle for twenty dollars and a bottle of Slackjaw. The guy was ex-army, had brought it back from the war, had half a dozen of the things and was damned near giving them away. Marlon had never owned a handgun. A rifle sure, but not a handgun. Had done a little hunting, had a shotgun, a Remington, but not a pistol. Bringing it had seemed like a good idea. Keep it nearby just in case. Just in case of what? In case he and Tate Bradford had an old-style showdown in Helen’s backyard? Now how foolish did he feel? Hauling that damn gun along was the stupidest thing he’d ever done.

  The kid was standing over him. He had the .45 in one hand, the revolver in the other. He had a smile on his face like a drunken clown.

  Marlon was scared, more than he’d ever been, and his bladder went. He felt the warmth escaping down his inner thighs and he felt like a child woken from a nightmare, afraid of the dark, struggling to understand what he’d seen, whether it was real or imagination, whether there really was something in the wardrobe, something hungry, something homicidal …

  Digger saw the man’s pants as the dark shadow spread across the front.

  In that moment he saw himself, remembered how he too had pissed himself like a little kid. Oh, how he hated the fact that Earl had seen that. And Clay? Clay, wherever the hell he was, he would remember that too, how Digger had pissed himself out of sheer terror. God, that was just so shameful!

  Well, not now. Now he wasn’t scared. Now he was here and he had his guns and he was in charge.

  Digger raised the guns simultaneously. He pressed the revolver against Marlon’s left temple, the .45 against the right.

  “Motherfucker,” he said, and it wasn’t a derogatory term directed at Marlon, but simply an exclamation of how damned good he felt.