by Dale Bailey
“Slowly,” Nick said, his gun wedged tightly against the cage, “dump the gun. Now.”
Pomeroy stared at him, his eyes like steel marbles. Slowly, very slowly, he returned his good hand to the butt of his gun and brought it out.
“Good, toss it down on the floorboard, over there.” The urge to glance at Finney’s watch was like an ache. “The other one too, Evans’s gun, the one you called a cannon.”
His eyes never flickering, Pomeroy reached behind him, pulled out Evans’s .45, and tossed it beside the first one. He pressed his good hand over the ragged hole in Finney’s blood-sodden sweater.
“Now what, smart boy?” Nick thought the detective tried to smirk, but his face was too swollen to tell. Nick wasn’t sure of his next move. Time is everything. He reached for his door handle—and remembered that there was none, only the infuriating emptiness. Another second hurtled past him.
“Get out,” he said, gesturing toward Pomeroy’s door with the barrel of the gun. The detective’s eyebrows rose inquisitively. “Get out, come around, and open my door. Don’t try anything funny—I’ll blow your fuckin head off.” Pomeroy did grin this time, his lips splitting in a thin grimace. Groaning, he pulled the door handle and pushed open the door. The cold bulled its way into the car, taking Nick’s breath.
“Move!”
Pomeroy backed out of his seat, putting his feet carefully on the ground and pushing off the steering wheel with the heel of his broken hand. Three of his fingers jutted out at impossible angles. He gasped, closing his eyes as he stood and sought his balance. He looked at Nick and shook his head as though he was greatly disappointed. Then he turned around and started to stagger up the embankment toward the road, his broken hand held awkwardly away from his body.
Nick watched him, horror climbing his throat. The sour taste of acid filled his mouth. “Hey,” he said, softly. Then he shouted, “Hey! Where’re you going? Get back here, get your ass back here!” Nick heard a car pass on the road above.
Pomeroy stopped, seemed to think for a minute, and then turned around to face Nick. “Where’m I going? I’m going to fuckin Disney World.” He unclutched the sodden sweater and slowly, as though it took great concentration, raised his middle finger. Then he turned and began to stumble back up the hillside.
“Hey!” Nick screamed at his back, the waves suddenly on him like the tide of a hurricane. “You can’t do that, get back here—” He snapped his mouth shut, on the verge of shouting, It’s not fair! He scooted over to the door and scrabbled desperately at the siding, hoping against hope that there was some sort of release lever, a magic button to make everything better. Pomeroy had reached the stand of saplings, their naked branches reaching for the sky like fleshless fingers.
Nick threw himself down on the seat and slammed both feet against the door. It was like kicking a cinder block wall. He switched Pomeroy’s gun to his left hand so he could brace against the back of the front seat. He kicked the door again and a shock of pain shot up his legs. He scooted around, crablike, and kicked at the cage. It rattled—reminding him of the blind bear cub’s cage—but remained where it was. He kicked at it again, releasing the same pain through his legs.
Nick threw his head back and screamed at the ceiling, a primitive, feral cry. Tears rolled down his cheeks. He sat up and saw that Pomeroy had reached the road, heading in the direction of the highway.
“Motherfucker!” he screamed at Pomeroy’s back. Pomeroy stumbled out of sight. Everything is time. In frustration he banged the butt of the gun against the window, realized what he was doing, and banged harder. The gun simply bounced back, sending tiny ripples vibrating across the glass and up Nick’s arm. Nick screamed again—and saw the gun.
“Fuck me,” he shouted, pushing his back against the door and leveling the pistol at the window. Without thinking what he might hit or who might hear—without allowing himself to think—Nick emptied the gun at the window, three quick, explosive rounds and a rapid series of dry clicks, the clicks like the sound of time vanishing. The glass shattered, seemed to hang like crystals in the air, and then disappeared in a cataract of sparkles. Nick reached out and opened the door.
He hit the ground running.
With the mid-afternoon sun slanting through the bare branches and forming tiny crosses beneath his feet, Nick sprinted through the stand of trees and up the hill. He paused once, tucking the gun under one arm and leaning against a sapling long enough to pull the box of bullets from his pocket. Blood roared in his ears and a stitch stabbed into his side. He opened the box with trembling fingers, spilling bullets across the carpet of dead leaves. He broke open the gun, shoved six rounds into the cylinder, and snapped it closed. He dropped the empty box and began to run.
Nick topped the hill, gasping for breath, his battered body singing a threnody of pain. Pomeroy was thirty or forty yards ahead, staggering toward the highway exit ramp. In the armpit where the exit joined the highway, Nick knew there was a small store, a Gas ’N’ Go that had popped up overnight like some post-modern toadstool, all neon glitter and slick Formica counters, half an acre of self-service pumps, pickled eggs, and ice-cold beer—a nineties version of the Smokin Mountain. There would be people there.
Pomeroy stumbled, discovered his balance, lurched on. Running toward him, the gun clutched awkwardly at his side, Nick glanced behind him.
No cars. Not yet, anyway.
It took him only seconds to catch Pomeroy. He grabbed a fistful of Finney’s sweater and hauled the detective around, almost lifting him off his feet. Pomeroy screamed and came at him in a roundhouse swing with his good hand—but the blow was only halfhearted, more desperation than calculation. Even as he sidestepped the loosely clenched fist, Nick heard the crash and click of passing seconds, his head echoing with the measured voice of the Pachyderm: “One finger for every hour you are late.” The sleeve of Finney’s sweater had unrolled over Pomeroy’s hand, the frayed end flapping like a broken wing.
Nick let him see the gun and wrapped his arm around Pomeroy’s shoulders, half-dragging, half-carrying him back down the road. The detective made no move to resist, his feet shuffling through the shoulder’s dust and gravel, his hand again clutched to the hole in his shoulder. Once he mumbled, “I’m gonna fuckin kill you,” then he coughed deeply and spat out a mixture of blood and phlegm.
Just as they stepped off the road, a painfully long Lincoln Continental, a bright red dragon of a car, roared by. It never slowed and Nick had only a glimpse of a shrunken woman with an enormous bouffant looking neither left nor right. The thrum of the Continental’s whitewalls over the macadam sounded like the ache in Nick’s head—a sound that, if he listened closely enough, transformed itself into Vergil Gutman’s words: “Promptness is a virtue. Understand?”
Nick dragged Pomeroy down the hill. Once, shrieking, Pomeroy smashed his broken fingers against a tree trunk, but Nick never slowed. At the bottom he pushed the detective against Evans’s car where he slid to the ground in a heap. Nick leaned over the roof, catching his breath. The cruiser had slammed up against a boulder the size of a La-Z-Boy recliner.
Nick opened the driver’s door and climbed into the car. In the glove compartment he found a pair of handcuffs. On the front seat was a plastic bag. He looked inside and found Tucker’s whiskey and the glass, the bundle of Pomeroy’s wet clothes, his Stetson stained greenish-yellow by the quarry waters. Half under the bag lay the tape. The two guns were on the floorboard.
Nick backed out of the car and caught Pomeroy by the collar. Wordlessly, he dragged him to the nearest sapling, a tall, thin beech, its bark the color of ashy snow, and shoved him to the ground. Moaning, the detective sprawled against the trunk. Nick snapped one ring of the cuffs around the wrist of Pomeroy’s broken hand—leaving the good one free to stanch the flow of blood from his chest—and the other end to the beech.
“You just gonna leave me here?” Pomeroy’s voice sounded tired but surprisingly strong.
“Someone’ll find you.” Nick t
urned toward the car.
“Damn right they will.” Nick heard him shuffle in the dead leaves. When he turned back to look, Pomeroy had propped himself against the tree, half-squatting like some venomous toad. Then he drew in a deep breath and bellowed: “Hallloooo! Somebody helllllp!”
“Hey!” Nick said, stepping toward him. “Shut up!”
Pomeroy eyed him coldly, shifted on his haunches and drew in another lungful of air. Nick thought he could hear the sound of bubbles in those deep breaths. Pomeroy shouted again. “Halllooo! Anybody!”
Nick leaned over Pomeroy and pressed the gun into his nose, leaving a small ringworm of bruise. “Shut up! Shut up!” Nick shouted into his face, flecks of spittle dotting the detective’s cheeks and brow. “You want me to kill you, is that it? You want me to fucking kill you?”
Pomeroy fell quiet, studying Nick with his frost-colored eyes. Nick could see no life there, no will to survive. From somewhere far away, he heard Sue scream, a hideous piercing shriek. He jerked around, certain that he’d see her standing just below the trooper’s car. He saw nothing but the cruiser and, beyond that, the wintered sprawl of dead vegetation, a wasteland of stark trees and tangles of brown kudzu—the negative image of the Barrett estate.
Then Pomeroy’s voice, cold: “You ain’t got the balls, boy.” Pomeroy breathed deeply, the air rattling inside him. “It takes balls the size of cantaloupes to do what you’re gonna have to do.” He spat. “And I just can’t believe you got em.”
Nick stepped quietly away and aimed the gun. The hammer pulled back easily, making a soft snick—
—like Gutman’s cigar clipper—
—as it locked into place. He sighted loosely and pulled the trigger. The recoil jarred through his arm and into his shoulder, like the thrum of electricity.
Pomeroy’s mouth dropped open; his eyes gaped and his head jerked back into the beech. Together they looked down at the slow flow of bright-red blood welling from the center of Pomeroy’s boot. A thin tendril of smoke curled from the hole.
“You shot my foot, you son of a bitch.”
Nick said nothing. He turned and walked back to Evans’s car, tucking Pomeroy’s gun—the barrel warm—into the back of his jeans. At the door, he hesitated. He glanced back at the trunk, abruptly stricken with that image of Finney, his hand closing loosely around the bullet. No way he could be alive. Nick glanced at the Rolex, the big hand edging toward the twelve, the little hand sitting square on the three, time running out on Sue, he didn’t have the time—
No way he could have survived that fall, Nick thought. The hand closing—that had been reflex, nothing more. If he hadn’t imagined it.
Nick climbed into the car and shut the door. He turned the key. The engine rolled over sluggishly. Panic began to hum her aria in the back of his head. Sue’s imagined scream played maddeningly through the car, chasing any final doubts out of his head. He had to move.
He twisted the key again. This time the engine caught. He revved it, the car lifting as if ready to pounce.
Nick shifted into reverse. The tires strained against the damp earth but the car refused to move. He gave it more gas, trying to rock the car loose. Then something caught and the cruiser surged backward, throwing a spume of damp earth and debris into the air.
Nick fought the wheel, whipping the car around and angling it into the tracks it had made coming down. He paused beside Pomeroy—still sitting against the beech, his free hand now wrapped around his foot—and cranked down his window. He tossed Pomeroy the bag of wet clothes; it landed beside him, spilling the whiskey bottle. The private eye never looked up; he just squatted there, staring at his foot and shaking his head.
Nick shifted the car into low and plowed slowly uphill. The back tires spun and caught, spun and caught. The cruiser slid almost completely sideways once before finding purchase and again surging forward. When he reached the pavement, he paused for a moment, half-aware of Pomeroy beginning to shout again.
The digital clock embedded in the car’s dash read 3:04, Finney’s Rolex 2:59. Either way, if the Pachyderm was a man of his word—and Nick had no doubt that he was—Sue had lost two more fingers. By the time he reached her, she would lose another. He spun the wheel toward the mountains, toward Knoxville, almost an hour away—and then a new thought struck him. A way out, a way to save Sue.
The Senator. The distinguished gentleman of the State of Tennessee.
It’s time to call the Senator. That’s what he’d said to Finney, maybe three or four times since this began. It’s time to call the Senator.
And maybe it was—not to give him the news about Finney, not yet anyway. But for Sue. Senator Durant could have a man on the scene while Nick was still burning up the mountain roads. A single phone call would do it.
“Goddamn,” he whispered.
Wrenching the wheel back the other way, he pointed the nose of the cruiser toward the Gas ’N’ Go on the other side of the hill.
Tuesday, 3:03 to 3:41 PM
Nick crowned the hill at sixty-five miles an hour and there in the crook of the access ramp stood the Gas ’N’ Go, a glistening complex of steel and glass—the station and a couple of service islands and an automatic car-wash—with the highway in the valley beyond. A Ford Explorer was barreling up the road toward him, but Nick didn’t think twice. He gunned the cruiser across the intervening lane and into the lot without even bothering to signal, a vision out of some lost past floating to the surface of his mind: Finney, smashed out of his mind on Michelob Light and tequila shooters, wedging the Acura into a gap in traffic the size of a politician’s heart. Fuck it, Finney had said of the looming Chevy they had cut off. That truck has brakes.
Nick skidded the cruiser to a halt by the car wash without incident, so he guessed the Explorer had brakes, too. And a horn from the sound of it, but he didn’t spare the reprimand a glance as he sprinted for the phone, nested inside a blue and white hood. Halfway across the lot, he realized he didn’t have change. Cursing, he spun back toward the store.
He had a bad moment in the shadow of the fuel canopy. When he flipped open his wallet, Sue’s face stared up at him from a carefully trimmed snapshot, fuzzy beyond the milky cataract of its plastic sleeve. For a moment, gazing down at it, Nick felt choking despair rise in his throat. He glanced at the Rolex, the second hand inexorably eating time, and he almost turned back to the cruiser—half-prepared to wrench the wheel toward Ransom and the mountains beyond. Toward Knoxville. But that was the kind of cloudy thinking that had gotten them into this mess in the first place, he thought, digging in his wallet for cash, a ten and two crumpled ones.
The Senator could help.
He caught a glimpse of himself in the store’s glass exterior as he approached the door—his hair matted, his face ravaged. Then, thankfully, he was inside, squinting against the glare of fluorescent lights off scuffed tile, displays of chips and beer, polished counter space, the whole place as bereft of personality as Styrofoam. Ignore the rack of Ransom College T-shirts and the tinny wail of Garth Brooks lamenting his affair with a long-necked bottle over the sound system, and you could be anywhere in the country, in any one of the thousands of quicky marts lining the endless American highways. The stink of Pine-Sol and old coffee grounds was the same, the SHOPLIFTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED! sign was the same, even the customers were the same: a fat guy in a leather jacket at the beer cooler, an old lady clutching a steaming coffee at the register.
Waiting, Nick studied the rack of stroke books behind the counter, copies of Juggs and Hustler and half a dozen others sealed in opaque plastic. A curtain twitched aside in his mind, a glimpse of himself wrenching Sue’s arms toward her shoulder blades as he drove himself into her from behind. What had Pomeroy said? You’re gonna have to have balls the size of cantaloupes to do what you’re gonna have to do. I just can’t believe you got em—
Nick hoped he wouldn’t have to find out, hoped he could make the call and go collapse in the cruiser while he waited for the local cops to come c
ollect him. But he had a feeling that Pomeroy was wrong: that if it came to a harder place than this, the new Nick—the Nick that felt the pull of the tape like a new-born star, the Nick behind the bondage mask—would rise to the challenge. That he was capable of anything—anything—if it could buy him absolution, or maybe only silence, the fine and private silence of the grave.
If there was time—
Nick glanced at the old woman ahead of him, digging arthritically through a purse the size of a Thanksgiving turkey.
Choking back that rising sense of panic, time fleeing into the maw of the past, he cleared his throat, crowded her a little, trying to hurry her up. Finally, the old woman surrendered a handful of change and turned away, cradling the coffee against her fallen breasts.
Nick dumped his cash on the counter. He glanced at the cashier, a thin guy, mid-twenties, his face pocked with a rash of acne scars the same shade as his blazing Gas ’N’ Go smock.
“I need change.” He took a deep breath, his voice calmer than he felt.
The cashier punched a button, scooped up a buck, dumped four quarters on the counter.
“No—I—” Nick cleared his throat. “For the ten. In quarters.”
“Can’t do it, man. I’m short on quarters.”
“Please, you don’t understand, I need—I need—” He felt himself coming apart, begging.
As in a dream, he saw himself drag a pistol out of his jacket, one of Pomeroy’s old-timey six-shooters, saw himself level it at the guy behind the counter—
He blinked down at his hands, palsied atop a laminated notice taped to the Formica: a pack of Marlboros in a black circle with a line drawn through it. WE I.D.!
He swallowed, looked up. The clerk had taken a step back.
