Bad Signs

by R.J. Ellory

  Digger left the motel and drove in a straight line. It was a good half hour before he realized that he’d missed the I-10 connection somewhere a couple of miles back. Vexed, he did a U-turn, and it was en route the way he’d come that he saw a diner set back from the road a way. He was hungry, famished actually, and he pulled up ahead of the place in Walt Milford’s Galaxie and wasted no time getting inside.

  Maurice Eckhart hailed from Gunnison, Colorado. Fifty-one years old, carrying a dozen or so pounds too much for his height, yet healthy and hardworking, a churchgoer, a good man. His wife, Margot, should have been a showgirl. At twenty-one she was five eight with a thirty-six-inch bust, a twenty-five-inch waist, and thirty-four-inch hips. The whole package was balanced gracefully on thirty-nine-inch legs. She’d studied ballet since she was five, supported and encouraged by both her parents, but when it came to career choices it was her father, Hendrik Kristalovich—a lapsed Presbyterian, a one-time Calvinist—who drew a line in the sand. Margot possessed neither the nerve nor the determination to cross that line, and out of spite she married Maurice Eckhart, a man nine years her senior, a man she met while waiting for an interview for a secretarial position in an elementary school in Plainview. Maurice happened to be there for a similar reason. He worked for a firm that manufactured and sold school supplies—textbooks, journals, pencils and the like. They had captured a good percentage of the market in Colorado and were looking to branch out into Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, and Utah. The deputy principal, supposed to be seeing them one after the other, was running a good hour late, and Maurice and Margot got to talking. Maurice was not successful in securing an account for his provisions, but he did secure a date with Margot. He would have been a good catch for any normal girl, but Margot was no normal girl. Her looks apart, she was smart. Not just book smart, but wise beyond her years. She had read voraciously as a child, and perhaps it was this extracurricular education that had given her the sympathy and compassion that others found so magnetic. Perhaps it was a quality with which she had arrived, and it was her mission to share it with the world. Her mother, a timid little woman of no great consequence, insufficiently strong to carry another child once Margot had been born, merely provided a somewhat weak shoulder for Margot to cry on. Margot’s mother, Joan, would never have taken her daughter’s side in a familial conflict. That was not what a good wife did. A good wife bent to her husband’s will, and—once bent—she stayed out of shape.

  In later years, their two children entering their teens, Margot Eckhart would have time to reflect on her life choices. They had been wrong for the most part, but she was a woman of character and substance. She did not make a bed and then presume not to lie in it. Maurice was honest, faithful, loyal, decent, a good provider, and then there were the children. At twenty-three she had Dennis, at twenty-five she had Linda. They had her looks and Maurice’s steadfast character. They were the best of both of them combined. They were children of whom any parent would have been proud, and that was something that was never regretted, never up for trade, never something to wish back so one could start over. Now Margot was forty-two, still great-looking, still balancing everything gracefully on her thirty-nine-inch legs, and possessive of the philosophically resigned attitude that life was lived forward. It could have been better. It could have been worse. Maybe some things turned out the way they did because that’s the way they were supposed to.

  Late morning on Wednesday, November 25, the Eckhart family was heading out of Lubbock, Texas, Margot’s hometown. Maurice, always in charge when it came to maps and directions and routes, had insisted they avoid the northbound Interstate 27 this time. I-27 had been a nightmare a couple of times before, and he didn’t want to repeat it. I-27 would take them only so far as Amarillo, and then it would be a mess of state highways before they could join the I-25 at Springer or Raton. No, he’d said, and said it with some degree of definitiveness. It may seem like a longer way around, but I plan on driving the two-hundred-and-fifty-odd miles to El Paso, and there we can go north into Colorado, all the way to Pueblo, where we can simply join the 50 west to home. Once we reach Pueblo it’s no more than a hundred miles and we’re there. Whatever time we might lose driving to El Paso we’ll gain by taking the interstate all the way north. Trust me, it’ll be quicker in the long run, and besides, the kids’ll get to see some of Texas and New Mexico.

  Maurice had logic on his side. They had travelled on the smaller state highways and it had taken them all of four days. He couldn’t bear the idea of another four days home, and he figured the 25-route would shave a day off the return. This mammoth one-and-a-half-thousand-mile journey was another matter entirely. This mammoth one-and-a-half-thousand-mile journey had been to bury Margot’s father.

  To make sure the bastard’s fully and completely dead, was Maurice’s sentiment, and he said it once and once only. Maurice Eckhart and Hendrik Kristalovich had never seen eye to eye. Margot was too good for any man. That was Hendrik’s resolve. Margot appreciated her husband’s resentment. Nigh on twenty years married, a good home, two wonderful grandchildren, stability, respectability, everything that a father could wish for his daughter, and the best Maurice got of it was a brisk and businesslike handshake on the rare occasions he and Hendrik crossed paths, a comment about how it was too long between visits and the children were growing so fast. Joan Kristalovich had been dead a good five years. Dead from emotional boredom, Maurice said, and Margot smiled and said nothing despite the fact that she knew Maurice was more than likely right. If a life has no purpose then it finds a way to stop living. The cancer that took her mother was diagnosed and done within a month. She had it, and then she was dead. Margot went down to Lubbock to be with her, and the speed with which she deteriorated made it impossible for her to leave. After the funeral Margot stayed behind with her father for another week. A week was sufficient to establish some sort of routine for him, for he was a man who had never attended to any domestic matters. A week was also brief enough for her to maintain her tongue and her temper.

  Margot had to be honest, though it pained her to admit it. When she heard of her father’s death—sudden, unexpected, a fatal stroke while waiting to cash a check at the Lubbock Savings & Loan—she experienced a combination of sadness and relief. The journeys they made back home—once by train, once by air (which made Linda awful sick and they vowed never to do it again), most times by road—were exhaustingly long. Christmas and the tail end of summer. December and August. Twice a year they went, often for a week, but the two or three days’ traveling at each end made it the better part of a fortnight. Now they wouldn’t have to do it again. They were all going, and going for the last time. Linda was seventeen, Dennis was nineteen, and they were plenty old enough to take a responsible part in what needed to be done. The house would need emptying, cleaning, perhaps a lick of paint here and there, and then they would get it on the market and sold as soon as possible. Hendrik Kristalovich’s personal business affairs could be managed by Maurice and the Lubbock family lawyer. The Eckharts hoped to be there no more than a week, but Maurice had been given compassionate leave from the same school supplies firm he had once sold for, the firm he now co-managed, and they had some leeway. It was November, a better time than the high summer, and it was far enough away from Christmas not to spoil it. So they would spend Thanksgiving in Texas; there could be worse things.

  That prescient and unknowing thought, nonchalantly considered as Maurice decided to pull over for a brief stop at a diner before they reached El Paso, could not have been more right. They were many worse things, and the Eckharts were soon to meet one of the very worst of them.

  Maurice had been driving for a little more than three and a half hours. Linda and Dennis had been asking for bottles of Coke and bathrooms for an hour, Margot wanted to freshen her makeup and stretch her legs. State highways notwithstanding, they had made good time—Lubbock to the outskirts of El Paso before lunch.

  “Quarter of an hour,” Maurice said as he drew to a stop outside
the diner.

  “Half,” Margot said. “Half an hour.”

  Maurice conceded by raising no objection.

  The kids took off with a dollar apiece, Margot walked around the car a couple of times and then asked Maurice if he wanted to go inside for a cup of coffee.

  “We should probably get a bite to eat as well,” she said. “Once we’re on the other side of El Paso we’ll be on the interstate and you won’t want to stop.”

  Maurice nodded in agreement. “Yes, okay,” he said. “Makes sense. Go shout to the kids. Tell them we’re having an early lunch.”

  Maurice headed on into the diner. Alone he did not draw Elliott Danziger’s attention, but when the wife followed on, the two kids in tow, Elliott looked up and watched them as they made their way to a table in the corner. The daughter looked a little like the girl back in Tucson, the one with the shopping bags, the one he stabbed with the kitchen knife. She had her hair tied up, two tails like horses, a bright yellow band around each. He thought how good it would be to hold on to those tails while he fucked her in the ass. The mom was sweet-looking as well. She had legs—long, long legs—and she had on those skin-tight pants that women wore, the ones that came down just below the knee. And then there was the dad and the son.

  Something happened in Elliott’s mind. He ceased to see four, and he saw one: a family.

  What it was that happened he did not know, could not comprehend, but he knew he felt different. There was sadness, something nostalgic, some strange emptiness that ran right through the middle of his heart and out the other side. Aside from that there was resentment, spite, anger, hostility, a dry mouth, sweaty palms, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood to attention like convicts at muster.

  A family.

  He thought of Clay, hateful little bastard son of a bitch that he was, and for some reason he wished he were there, eating with him, smiling perhaps, the two of them making some wiseass joke about something or other the way they once did.

  Son of a bitch traitor bastard Clay.

  A family.

  Mom, dad, son, and daughter.

  Mom laughed about something as she stood at the counter, and she reached out and touched her husband’s arm. There was affection in that gesture. Digger wanted to stand beside her and understand why they were laughing together. At the same time he wanted to grab her by the hair and smash her face repeatedly into the cold glass of the chilled unit.

  A family.

  He closed his eyes, gritted his teeth. He took a moment to lean sideways and look out the window. The only new arrival in the lot out front was a dark brown station wagon, evidently theirs.

  He put his arm around his plate and put his head down. He ate his eggs and hamburger while he considered what to do.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  It was at some point along the road to Las Cruces that Clay Luckman decided to get rid of the gun. He’d been carrying it since Marana, all of two days now, and the weight of the gun itself, the box of shells, felt like trouble and nothing else. He was of the viewpoint that if he kept it, well, it might end up being used, and that would be the cause of nothing but heartache. He was also thinking of Bailey. There was something practical and real about the girl, despite her age, but there was also something wild. He sensed it, perceived it. He believed that she might convince him to keep the thing, believing that they might need it to defend themselves. Against what, she wouldn’t be able to say, but he imagined her persuasive, using wiles and flirtatious aspects to get her own way. Girls did that. It was in their nature. It was an instinctual sense of self-preservation that dictated his intention. If you didn’t carry a gun you couldn’t shoot anyone. Shoot someone, and you were more than likely going to get shot right back.

  They had walked a good three miles from the Hatch turnoff. They were still a hell of a way from Las Cruces, and it was Bailey who commented on the marks on the road.

  “Look,” she said, and pointed to the wide streaks of black that appeared to veer suddenly right and away into the landscape. Beyond thirty yards the landscape dipped and hollowed and they could see the tops of trees. The tracks headed that way but there was nothing visible but more landscape.

  “You think there was maybe an accident?”

  Clay shook his head. He didn’t want to go looking for anything but lunch.

  “Maybe there’s a car down there,” she said. “Maybe someone’s in trouble.”

  It was that sentiment that got him. Would never have thought so, but he was the sort of person who’d come back and help out even if it meant hardship for himself. He was innocent, and yet wound up blamed for things. He shrugged it off like snow, but some of the damp and cold got through. Irritation clouded his features.

  “You misery,” she said. “What if there’s people down there and they’re hurt? What if someone’s come off the road and they need help and people have been driving back and forth all morning and no one’s seen them?”

  “Let’s go,” Clay said, and thought that if nothing else he could dump the gun and the shells en route and she’d never be any the wiser.

  From the point the rubber tread marks left the highway they went at a direct thirty- or forty-degree angle. Clay knew nothing of cars, Bailey even less, but from what he could glean with common sense it appeared the car had come away at speed and continued in the same vein.

  They walked two hundred, maybe two hundred and fifty yards, and then Clay smelled the gasoline.

  He moved more rapidly, his thought for the disposal of the gun falling away from priority. Maybe Bailey was right. Maybe someone had come off the road. Maybe people were hurt.

  The ground dipped suddenly, and it was this incline that had hidden the scene from view.

  “There it is!” she said even as he saw it. A car, nose down, back end angled up toward them. The car had been stopped by a tree, and there was a static unnaturalness to the scene that seemed so very wrong. Clay expected to see smoke, but there was none. The entire scene was nothing but a photograph.

  How long the car had been there he had no way of knowing. By the time Clay caught up with Bailey she was already retching. She leaned against a nearby outcrop of rock and dry-heaved painfully. Clay came up alongside the car. He could see the bowed shoulders and back of one man. The other man he did not see until he was two or three feet from the passenger door, and it wasn’t long before he started to get some inkling of what might have occurred.

  The driver’s head had met the windscreen, and then he had fallen back against the seat. His face was caked with dark, dry blood. One eye seemed to have burst, the other was closed. Blood had run down from many lacerations in his face and neck. His shirt was soaked, the tops of his pants too, and it was there that Clay appreciated what had taken the driver’s attention off of the road. His penis was out, but it seemed to have been severed halfway up. Blood soaked his thighs, his legs, all the way down to his knees. The passenger, another younger man, was sideways on his seat, his shoulder against the dash, his hands and face and arms also drenched in blood. The passenger, leaning sideways, had been doing something that really shouldn’t have been entertained while in a car. Maybe they went over a bump, maybe the driver lost concentration and left the road, but it looked like he’d gotten his dick bitten in half. That was the assumption Clay Luckman made, and that was the way he reckoned it had gone. Panicking, hysterical, blood gushing all over the place, the driver just took the car away into the scrubland on the side of the highway and met a tree. In a war between a car and a tree there was only one winner. The driver’s head had met the windshield, the passenger’s the dash, and that was that. Even had the driver survived the impact, he would have bled out very quickly. This was a loser whichever way it had happened.

  Clay surveyed the scene once more and then directed his attention to Bailey. She had staggered away a good ten feet, was down on her haunches, back to the scene, her complexion pale, a thin film of sweat on her face.

  “You gonna be okay?” he asked.
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  “M-maybe n-next week,” she stuttered. She retched again. Nothing came up.

  “Pretty bad, huh?”

  “Yeah, I’d say so. What the hell—” She didn’t finish the question. She was going to ask him what he believed had happened, but she was possibly embarrassed. She wasn’t dumb. She’d already figured it out. It must have been one hell of a way to die.

  Clay walked back to the car. The hood was cold. There was no engine clicking. There was no smoke. Nothing. The vehicle was as dead as the occupants. From the look of the blood—stiff and black and dry—he reckoned they’d been dead a good few hours. Why the scene wasn’t haunted by buzzards he didn’t know. Maybe it was the smell of gasoline. He walked around to the other side and took the gun and the shells out of his pants pockets. Leaning down he pushed them as far beneath the car as he could.

  Carefully, fingertips only, he reached in and started searching the passenger’s jacket. He found a pocketbook and a comb. The comb he dropped in the well, the pocketbook he went through. He found no ID, no driver’s license, but there was nine dollars—a five and four ones. He stuffed them in his pocket and dropped the pocketbook in the man’s lap.

  He did the same with the driver, carefully lifting the lapel of his jacket until he could reach inside. That burst eye stared back at him. It was grotesque, sickening, but necessity alone enabled Clay to do what had to be done. He too had a pocketbook, but he was evidently doing a lot better for himself than his passenger. Thirty-eight dollars, forty-seven all told, and with the few dollars that still remained they now had fifty and change. One man’s loss was another man’s gain. Things were on the up.