Bad Signs

by R.J. Ellory

  “Well, those thoughts are just the variety you should never think. You just put up a sign someplace in your head and you never let them in, okay?” He said it with certainty, and he said it with some degree of conviction in his voice, but all three of them knew that it was not always how you wanted it to be. Sometimes those things just found a way right on in, and once they were in you were done.

  “Clay? Clay?”

  Clay turned, and in the same moment he realized Bailey was talking to him he also realized that she had used his real name.

  Smithy said nothing, but it didn’t pass by him unnoticed.

  Clay looked at her for a moment and then shook his head.

  “You okay?” she said.

  He nodded. He mumbled something, and then he added, “Just hungry … I think I’m just hungry …” to which Smithy replied, “Good enough for me. Next place we see we stop.”

  He didn’t speak for a moment, and then he said, “Hey, hey, what do we have here?”

  Bailey looked up.

  She saw a line of three or four cars up ahead a couple of hundred yards. By the side of the highway there was a police vehicle—unmistakable—and Smithy was quick to ask her if the police might be looking for them.

  “No,” she said. “Why would they be looking for us? We haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “Give me your word now, girl … tell me straight you ain’t done nothin’ I should be concerned about.”

  She looked at him dead-square. She was as honest and open as the day was long. She gave her word.

  “Good enough for me,” Smithy said. “Well, they’s sure as hell lookin’ for someone, and if they find you in here—”

  “Then they’ll separate us and send us to juvie and we’ll get beaten to hell and back again and we might even die,” Bailey interjected.

  Smithy smiled ruefully. “Well, sweetheart, I don’t know about that, but I seen them places and I sure as hell wouldn’t wish for you to be in one of them. Get down on the floor. Get yourselves as far back under the seat as you can.”

  Smithy reached into the back and tugged up a dirty, damp-smelling blanket. He managed to shuffle it over them as best he could, and then he was slowing up, coming to a stop, waiting at the end of the short line of cars for his turn to be questioned.

  Bailey didn’t dare breathe. Clay could hear his heart thumping like a drum in his chest.

  Smithy wound down the window, smiled at the young officer at the side of the road, and asked what was up.

  “We’re looking for an escaped convict,” he said.

  Smithy laughed. “Well, it ain’t me, Officer, and that’s for sure.”

  “Yes, that’s fine, sir. I want you to take a look at this picture and see if you recognize this young man.”

  Even as the officer brought the picture up, Smithy saw the men back at the side of the road. Armed they were, bearing both rifles and shotguns. Whoever they were looking for must have been one dangerous son of a bitch. This drama sure wasn’t happening because of a couple of runaways.

  Clay felt Bailey’s hand around his, and she was squeezing it tight enough to hurt, and though he could see almost nothing beneath the blanket he was aware that her breathing had quickened. He could feel sweat along his hairline. He felt nauseous. He knew they were looking for him. He knew they had found him. He knew they were both done for and he would be on his way back to Hesperia before the day was out.

  And Smithy—eyesight like a bat—squinted at the vague blur of something or other that was held in front of his face, and he said, “No, Officer, can’t say I have …”, and that picture could have been Jimmy Cagney or Mickey Mouse, it wouldn’t have mattered, because no way in the world was Emanuel Smith going to tell the officer that he’d left his reading glasses back at home and couldn’t see shit from Shinola.

  “Very good, sir,” the officer said. “Well, you watch how you go now, and if you do see this young man then you need to call the nearest sheriff’s department or federal office. For your own safety we have to advise you that this man is armed and dangerous, and that you should not approach him or communicate with him under any circumstances.”

  “Well, that’s as clear as it gets,” Smithy said. “I’ll be on my way, then.”

  “Thank you for your cooperation, sir, and drive safely now.”

  Smithy gunned the engine into life, shifted gear, and started to pull away.

  “Sir?” the officer said.

  Smithy frowned, depressed the brake and slowed to a halt.

  The policeman was still there, had walked the two or three yards that the car had traveled, and was once again at the window.

  “Sir, we need you to hold up just a moment longer.”

  Smithy glanced to his left. There was something going on. A couple of the officers were talking, a third joined them. Perhaps some word on the radio?

  Beneath the damp and filthy blanket Clay was beginning to feel sick. Bailey’s shoulder pressed against his side. Was she shaking? What was going on? Why had they been stopped again? Beneath his line of sight there was a small hole in the floor of the truck. Through it Clay could see daylight, the surface of the road, and then there was the sound of an engine revving.

  “Sir?” Smithy hollered as the young officer started back toward his colleagues.

  The officer raised his hand. “You just wait there a moment,” he replied.

  “What the hell is this?” Smithy said under his breath.

  Clay felt for the edge of the blanket.

  “Stay still for God’s sake!” Smithy hissed. “Jesus Christ, boy, stay still!”

  The car that was revving fell silent.

  Bailey’s hand was still holding Clay’s. She was gripping it so tight that Clay’s fingers started to throb with the pressure.

  Footsteps. Heading back toward the vehicle.

  “So am I outta here,” Smithy asked, “or is there some problem?”

  “I need to see your license and registration, sir,” the officer said.

  “You what?”

  “As I said, sir, your license and registration.”

  “Jesus, what the hell is this all about?”

  The officer didn’t reply.

  Smithy reached out to the glove compartment. He flipped the catch and it opened. He tugged out a fistful of papers—envelopes, unpaid bills, receipts from the garage, all manner of things. He started through them, couldn’t see a damned thing clearly. He had his license. Got that. That was easy. Now his registration documents. Jesus, it could be any of them. He started to feel anxious. He went through the papers faster. Where was it, where was it? He dropped a couple of pieces, and then he had his hand down around his ankles trying to retrieve them.

  Bailey saw what he was looking for. She snatched it, held it up with just the tips of her fingers.

  The officer took a step closer to the window.

  “You okay there, sir?” he asked.

  Smithy snatched the paper from Bailey’s fingertips and thrust it out of the window at the officer.

  “Here we are,” Smithy said.

  Clay’s heart was ready to burst. Now, whatever happened, whoever they were actually looking for, if he and Bailey were found hiding in the foot well …

  And then it hit him.

  Digger? Earl? Was that who they were looking for? Was that the reason for the roadblock? Were they covering every direction possible?

  No. It couldn’t be.

  The officer had his notebook out. He was writing something down. A line, a couple of lines, and then he closed it again.

  He stepped back to the side of the vehicle. He returned Smithy’s documents.

  “That seems all fine, sir,” the officer said. “You have a good journey now.”

  “Thank you,” Smithy said. He stuffed the papers back in the glove compartment, turned the key, and restarted the engine. He let the car roll ten feet or so, and then he floored it and took off.

  Clay came out from under the blanket feeling the m
ost intense sense of relief.

  “Jesus in a jelly jar,” Smithy said. “That was something, wouldn’t you say? Damned near scared the wits out of me.”

  Bailey appeared from under the blanket, her face red, sweat sticking her bangs to her forehead.

  “Good you got that paper for me there, girl,” Smithy said. “Couldn’t tell one damned thing from the other. He’d have got me for that, you know? He’d have figured that out, and then he’d have realized I couldn’t have seen that picture he was showing me.”

  “You don’t know who they were looking for?” Clay asked.

  “Ain’t a clue,” Smithy said. “Sure as hell wouldn’t be looking for you pair though, right?”

  “Right,” Clay said, and he wanted to believe that, wanted to be sure of that, but if they weren’t looking for him and Bailey, who were they looking for? Earl Sheridan and Elliott maybe? Surely not. Surely they’d appreciate that even Earl and Digger weren’t dumb enough to just keep heading the same way.

  Clay and Bailey stayed on the floor for a good two or three minutes before they struggled out from under the blanket.

  “It’s all fine,” Smithy told them. “They’re looking for some crazy with a gun, not a couple of runaway kids.” He smiled, went for another cigarette. Clay couldn’t help hear the nerves in the man’s voice. Not only had he been shaken up by the incident, he also sounded like he was trying to convince himself that he’d done nothing wrong.

  “Now,” Smithy said, “let’s get some chow.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  It nagged at Cassidy’s thoughts as he drove. He even had to pull over and write down as much as he could remember from what he’d been told in the hotel room. Marlon Juneau. Clark Regan in Deming. Rita McGovern. The Eckhart family. And then there was the gun beneath the car. A gun that came from the store in Marana. That scenario versus the one that found Clarence Luckman in a diner over a hundred miles away as the Eckharts came to eat. It gnawed at John Cassidy and it wouldn’t leave him alone. Someone could not be in two places at once. Didn’t matter who they were, they could not be in two places at once. Back along the I-10 to El Paso, three hundred miles or thereabouts, and though he had agreed with Agents Koenig and Nixon that he would lay down and go to sleep, he had no intention of doing any such thing. Behind him he left the Sweet Dreams and the Travelers’ Rest, behind him he left the Eckharts’ crime scene, but most of all he left behind Elliott Danziger, a young man who’d woken in a motel room not five miles from where he himself had shared words with Koenig and Nixon. But that could not have been, because Elliott Danziger was dead and the person they really needed to find was Clarence Stanley Luckman.

  The I-10 ran a line out of the Rio Grande and followed it some fifty miles before dog-legging back toward Sierra Blanca. As if it couldn’t keep pace with nature and wanted to cut out and rest. The Rio Grande separated Texas from Chihuahua, ran a further nine hundred miles along the borders of Coahuila and Tamaulipas to the Gulf of Mexico just south of Port Isabel and South Padre Island. Smartest thing Elliott Danziger could have done was to get in Rita McGovern’s station wagon and follow that river as far as the land would let him. But no, Elliott had never been one for the best thing, and thus he rose in the Sweet Dreams Motel, stretched and yawned and washed his face, and wondered what excitements this new day would bring him. Whatever sense of responsibility and conscience he might have possessed had slipped its moorings and drifted unobserved toward the horizon of his mind. Soon—again unobserved—it would fall off the edge of the world and be gone forever. Such was the way of things.

  Elliott ate well—bacon and scrapple and eggs and coffee, and then he went back to his room to collect his few things together. He needed new clothes and he needed another gun. Now all he had was Marlon Juneau’s .45 and three bullets. A party with three bullets would be no kind of party at all. It was nine thirty by the time he left—following the same route as Clay Luckman and Bailey Redman, passing the highway-side diner where they shared breakfast with Emanuel Smith. Elliott went in the opposite direction to John Cassidy, Cassidy driving as fast as he could, imagining the questions Mike Rousseau would fire at him regarding where he’d been, why he’d been gone at all. Events transpired, but they did not conspire. For a brief while all concerned parties had been within a handful of miles of one another, the police, the FBI, the runaways, and yet fate—or dark stars or luck or simply chance—colluded to prevent coincidence. This—it seemed—was also to be the way of things.

  Elliott made good time, passing through Fort Hancock just after ten, Sierra Blanca a little more than twenty minutes later, and it was on the road to Van Horn that he eventually saw the signposts indicating a fork in the highway. If he continued on 10 he would be aiming for San Antonio, thence to Houston. If he took 20, well, that would take him through Odessa and Big Spring to Fort Worth and Dallas. He pulled over for a while—just to think, just to figure the odds, and it was then that he saw a small house in the far distance and became curious. It was a house out of nowhere. Such a sight lit a slow and inextinguishable fuse in his mind, and he sat there for a while longer appreciating the simple and uncomplicated isolation of the building. From the highway you would see nothing. From such a house the highway might as well have been a million miles away—a different country, a different continent—and whatever happened out there would be unknown to the world. He hesitated a moment longer—not from indecision or uncertainty, but simply to savor the sense of anticipation—and then he pulled left and took the dirt road away from the highway toward the isolated house. Had he known that he was right in the heart of the Diablo Plateau he would have smiled.

  Elliott drove the three or four hundred yards to the front of the property, and then circled around the back so the station wagon was invisible from the highway. The owner of the house, a tall man in his late forties, was already at the back porch when Elliott got out of the car and started walking toward him.

  “Help you?” the man said.

  Elliott produced the gun from behind his back. He held it out at shoulder-height, unerring, unwavering, aimed directly for the man’s head, and the man lowered his eyes for a moment.

  “Seems to be the problem, son?” he said when he again looked up.

  “No problem here,” Elliott said.

  “You in some trouble?”

  “No trouble here.”

  “You wantin’ for somethin’?”

  “Ain’t we all,” Elliott replied.

  They were now no more than twelve feet apart. The man had a towel in his hands. He’d been drying dishes perhaps, maybe fixing something and had cleaned his hands afterward.

  “You alone here, mister?” Elliott asked.

  “Sure am … ’sides from the dog, but he’s out someplace runnin’ around after his own damned tail or somethin’.”

  “You got some guns in there?”

  “Sure have.”

  “What you got?”

  “Got a shot, couple of handguns, a Remington.”

  “You got shells?”

  “More shells than you’d know what to do with.”

  Elliott smiled wryly. “Oh, I don’t know about that, sir, I really don’t.”

  “Whatever you say, son.”

  “You a farmer?”

  “No,” the man said. “I do some work around here and elsewhere. Fences, handle the stock in season, run a tractor for those who ain’t keeping one theirselves.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Randall. Morton Randall.”

  “You believe in God, Morton?”

  “Sure do.”

  “I don’t.”

  Morton nodded. “Figured that’d be the case.”

  “You think if I kill you I’m gonna go to hell?”

  “The look of you … well, I figure you’re pretty much there already …”

  “No one’s good,” Elliott said. “All bad. Most folks is all bad. I figure hell is overcrowded already.”

  “Believe me, son, howev
er crowded hell gets I believe they’re gonna be savin’ a special hot place for you.”

  “Soon as I get to hell I’m gonna tell ’em you made me do it.”

  Morton smiled. “You gotta get straight with the Lord. ’S the only way you’re gonna get yourself out of this mess.”

  “Get myself out of it?” Elliott said. “Hell, man, I’ve spent too long gettin’ into it to wanna get out of it.”

  Morton Randall—perhaps aware that his death was now due—paused for a moment. He glanced down at his shoes, and then he half-smiled. He tucked the towel in his back pocket and looked at Elliott Danziger with no expression at all.

  Elliott glanced away toward the horizon, and then he turned back. “I think it’s time we did this thing, Morton … I really do.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  The place was half-beat to death, not so much a house as a ramshackle collection of walls with a roof above. The roof slanted drunkenly. Behind it was a barn of sorts, one side angled awkwardly against gravity, the other walls coping with the pressure with a nonchalant degree of concern.

  “Hell of a mess,” Smithy said as he pulled up ahead of it. “If I hadn’t lost my wife … hell, if I didn’t have the boy to deal with I would have taken more care of the place. But what the hell, eh? I’ll stay here until it falls on me, and then I’ll probably be dead so I won’t need to fix it.”

  Clay and Bailey had agreed to come—just for a little while, just for an hour or so—and then they were going to be on their way. Clay had a mind to try and make it to Fort Stockton by the end of the day. At least Fort Stockton. Find the right ride and they could get to Eldorado itself by nightfall. Hell, it was only three hundred or so miles from Sierra Blanca. For some reason Eldorado now seemed analogous to something—something better, a change for the good, a little piece of hope. Maybe nothing would be different. Maybe Eldorado would be just one more kind of disappointment, but it was a purpose and it was a goal and it was a destination. It was a reason to keep moving.